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NEWSLETTER #4 ON CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF WARS, September 8, 2013. Compiled
by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace.
(#1 Feb. 1, 2011; #2 March 26, 2011#3 Oct. 15, 2012).
My blog:
War Department/Peace Department
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
Index:
Sen J. William Fulbright
IF
YOU WANT PEACE, PREPARE FOR PEACE, NOT FOR WAR, AND NOT FOR COUNTLESS, EXPENSIVE DISTRATIONS. 50 YEARS AGO May 5, 1963 NEW YORK - Sen J. William Fulbright, of Arkansas,
said last night that landing a man on the moon may be a “glamorous scientific
feat” but that it would have little appeal to the uncommitted peoples of the
world who bear the burdens of hunger, disease and poverty. Fulbright, chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said,“It is strange to me that
in a world which bears an intolerable burden of hunger, disease, poverty and
animosity among its peoples, we should devote the best minds of both the
western and Communist world to achieve a landing on the moon where, to my
knowledge, no solutions to our problems await us.”
“To be
hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is
a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage,
kindness...
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history
will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to
do something. If we remember those times
and places ”and there are so many” where people have behaved magnificently,
this gives us the energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this
spinning top of a world in a different direction...And if we do act, in however
small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of
presents and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of
all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." -- Howard Zinn [Dick]
These
newsletters are divided only very generally into Causes and Prevention because
most authors examine the two subjects together. See War Prevention and
Other Newsletters.
Nos. 1 and 2 at end
Contents of #3 October 15, 2012
CAUSES
Resources Wars: Water
Michael Klare, Oil
Religion, Bible: Jenkins’ Laying Down the Sword
Nationalism: Self-Sacrifice for
Nation
Rev. of Strenski’s Contesting Sacrifice
Pathological Leaders:
Sociopathic, Psychopathic
Lister: Males
Myths: Exceptionalism
Economics: US and Libya
War Contractors/Profiteers
Tom Dispatch, Michael Klare:
Economics, Oil
Poor Reasoning andCritical
Thinking
PREVENTION
Pinker, Violence Decreasing
Horgan, Wars Being Cultural Can
Be Ended
Prosecute Heads of State
Resist War Industry
Pacifism
Essays on Libyan and Afghan Wars
Dennis Kucinich vs. US in Libya
McNeely, 2 Principles Will End
US Wars
Dick, Stopping Rivalries
Contents of #4
NATIONAL DYSFUNCTION
Violence a US Pathology
Militarism: Google Search
Vonnegut: Preparing for War the
Worst Addiction
Fear-Mongering: Cyber-Warfare
Dick: Killing Innocents,
Creating Enemies
Tomgram, Bacevich: US Volunteer
Military of 1%
WARS OVER RESOURCES (2)
Klare: Conflict Over Resources
CANT CAUSES WARS
Rationalizations for War,
Justifications, Lip-Service
ACTION FOR PEACE
Dick: Global/Local, Realizing
the Human Potential for Peace
VIOLENCE USA
Subject: Protecting freedom
Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2012, 7:15 PM
Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2012, 7:15 PM
David D: yes, Dick, we have a serious, complicated
problem here in the US
I have a good friend in CA who is a movement attorney, he recently sent me the following message
I appreciate a discussion of gun control, and also a discussion of mental illness. But, as Michael Moore and others point out, the American pathology of violence and gun-deaths is where the problem lies. Canadians and Swiss have more guns per capita than theUS
This is an angry and frustrated population that manifests that anger because most people are totally powerless in this country. Violence and guns are the default setting in the movies, on TV, in video games, everywhere, all the time.
For example, Tarantino is a popular director, but his shit is based entirely on violence. Americans love it. Hockey fights, WWF, Fight Club, ultimate fighting (or whatever they call it), the promo's for TV shows -----murder, murder, more murder.
Teenagers in juvenile hall refer to guns as "problem solvers".
America
So, yes, I agree that it's good to deal with gun control and mental illness issues. But it's way bigger than that.
Bob
I have a good friend in CA who is a movement attorney, he recently sent me the following message
I appreciate a discussion of gun control, and also a discussion of mental illness. But, as Michael Moore and others point out, the American pathology of violence and gun-deaths is where the problem lies. Canadians and Swiss have more guns per capita than the
This is an angry and frustrated population that manifests that anger because most people are totally powerless in this country. Violence and guns are the default setting in the movies, on TV, in video games, everywhere, all the time.
For example, Tarantino is a popular director, but his shit is based entirely on violence. Americans love it. Hockey fights, WWF, Fight Club, ultimate fighting (or whatever they call it), the promo's for TV shows -----murder, murder, more murder.
Teenagers in juvenile hall refer to guns as "problem solvers".
So, yes, I agree that it's good to deal with gun control and mental illness issues. But it's way bigger than that.
Bob
GOOGLE SEARCH, MILITARISM USA
U.S. Militarism - Mennonite Central Committee - Washington Office
washington.mcc.org/system/files/guide_militarism.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
MCCU.S. Washington U.S.
MCC
1.
Addicted
to War -- Why the U.S. Can't
Kick Militarism,
an illustrated ...
www.naderlibrary.com/addictwarupd.82.htm
ADDICTED TO WAR -- WHY THE U.S.
2.
Addicted toWar -- Why the U.S. Can't
Kick Militarism,
an illustrated ...
www.american-buddha.com/addict.war.71.htm
ADDICTED TO WAR -- WHY THE U.S. U.S.
3.
Women
and Militarism | Feminist Collections | Barnard Center for ...
bcrw.barnard.edu/archive/militarism.htm
The Center for Defense
Information, founded in 1972, is a non-profit and nonpartisan organization
and "provides expert analysis on various components of U.S.
4.
Full Article - COMD: Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft
www.comdsd.org/article_archive/twowar_article.htm
The Center for Defense
Information points out that the vast U.S.
5.
Texans for Peace Issues Militarism
www.texansforpeace.org/IssuesMilitarism.htm
Strong on defense and fearless in the
face of militarism - Texans have a proud ...Center for Defense
Information · Gulf War Studies Documents - US Army Center
6.
[PDF]
World Military Spending - Decade to Overcome Violence
www.overcomingviolence.org/.../MilitarySpendingReport.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
tragedies of both the Tsunami in Asia and Katrina in the US it became more clear that ...the issue of militarism is not even mentioned in the context of shifting means in order to attend to ..... For instance, the Center for Defense Information ...
tragedies of both the Tsunami in Asia and Katrina in the US it became more clear that ...the issue of militarism is not even mentioned in the context of shifting means in order to attend to ..... For instance, the Center for Defense Information ...
7.
Tools for Researching Militarism | Fellowship of Reconciliation
forusa.org/tools-for-researching-militarism
End U.S. Military Aid to Colombia
· Stopping U.S. Militarism in Latin America ... Ten Short Essays to Get
You Through It - Center for Defense
Information (2011) ...
8.
[PDF]
Militarism:
A Way of Life - The Humanist
www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/Fitzgerald.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
by M Fitzgerald - Cited by 4 - Related articles
there is a substantial militarist class in the United States—people who make their living ..... Source: Center for Defense Information Military Almanac, 2001–2002 ...
by M Fitzgerald - Cited by 4 - Related articles
there is a substantial militarist class in the United States—people who make their living ..... Source: Center for Defense Information Military Almanac, 2001–2002 ...
9.
Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't
 |
||||||||||||||||
--
The Great Cyber-Warfare Scam by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013, 12:37 PM
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/02/19/the-great-cyber-warfare-scam/
The War Party never sleeps: there are always new variations of war
propaganda coming ’round the bend. With the coming of the internet,
the latest manufactured "threat" to rear its head is "cyber-warfare,"
which is now being touted by the Obama administration and its media
fan club as the Next Big Scary Thing – but what are the facts?
The first fact we need to integrate into our analysis is that
"cyber-security" isn’t a science, it’s an industry: that is, the
entities issuing alarming reports of this lurking threat are for
profit companies mainly if not exclusively concerned with selling a
product. And while the "threat landscape," as the jargon phrases it,
is potentially very diverse, with a number of countries and non-state
actors potential combatants, our cyber-warriors have targetedChina
the main danger to our cybernetic security – the Yellow Peril of the
Internet Age. They’re stealing our technology, our secrets, and
infiltrating our very homes! This is largely baloney, as Jeffrey Carr,
founder of Project Grey Goose and Taia Global, a cyber-security firm,
and author of Inside Cyber Warfare, points out:
"[I]t’s good business today to blame China. I know from experience
that many corporations, government and DOD organizations are more
eager to buy cyber threat data that claims to focus on the PRC than
any other nation state. When the cyber security industry issues
PRC-centric reports like this one without performing any alternative
analysis of the collected data, and when the readership of these
reports are government and corporate officials without the depth of
knowledge to critically analyze what they’re reading (i.e., when they
trust the report’s authors to do the thinking for them), we wind up
being in the position that we’re in today – easily fooled into looking
in one direction when we have an entire threat landscape left
unattended. We got into that position because InfoSec vendors have
been left alone to define the threat landscape based upon their
product offerings. In other words, vendors only tell customers to
worry about the threats that their products can protect them from and
they only tell them to worry about the actors that they can identify
(or think that they can identify). This has resulted in a security
awareness clusterfuck of epic proportions."
The "cyber-threat" fromChina
has been much in the news lately, and
any number of self-proclaimed "experts" with a financial stake in
hyping this latest bogeyman have been pointing an accusing finger at
Beijing
cyber-vandals in its domain. The latest is a report issued by a
private cyber-security firm, Mandiant, which claims these attacks are
occurring under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It
is, of course, just a coincidence that this accusation limns a recent
National Intelligence Estimate, which – according to the New York
Times, itself supposedly victimized by Chinese hackers – "makes a
strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army
officers or are contractors working for commands like [PLA] Unit
61398."
Yet, as Carr discusses here, the Mandiant report has several analytic
flaws. To begin with, the "mission area," i.e. the nature and alleged
goal of these intrusions, is supposed to identifyChina
as the culprit
because the latest APT (cyber-security jargon for "advanced persistent
threat") "steals intellectual property from English-speaking
organizations," and that these thefts coincide with the technical
requirements ofChina
This kind of "logic" ought to make your BS-detector go haywire,
recalling Carr’s warning that there’s a bad case of perception bias at
work here: that’s because other nations, and non-state actors such as
criminal gangs, also launch cyber-attacks on English-speaking
organizations, which in many instances parallel the interests
contained inChina Russia , France , Israel
number of other countries have advanced cyber-warfare capabilities,
and haven’t hesitated to use them for purposes of industrial
espionage, among other reasons: Eastern European gangsters are also
players in this game. Yet there is no mention of these alternatives in
the Mandiant report: according to them, it’s all aboutChina
Mandiant claims that because the rash of recent intrusions have
involved operations requiring hundreds of operators, that only a
nation-state with "military-grade operations" could possibly have
carried them out. Yet more than 30 nations are currently running
"military-grade" operations, as Carr informs us: why pick onChina
Well, says Mandiant, because the intrusions they analyzed used a
Shanghai
proves exactly nothing. Okay then, what about the fact that "two of
four network ‘home’Shanghai
Area," where the PLA’s Unit 61398 is located? This also proves exactly
nothing: the Pudong New Area has over 5 million inhabitants. It is
smack dab in the center ofChina
metropolis. Ask yourself how many IP addresses originate from this
area. Oh, but one of the "PLA" hackers’ "self-identified location is
the Pudong New Area." Really? So what? Aside from the demographic
information supplied above, one has to wonder if these people really
believe everything they see on the Internet is true. C’mon, guys!
The New York Times has been pushing the Yellow Cyber-Peril theme ever
since their computer system was hacked, but the question of who
exactly was responsible for that intrusion is by no means proved. In a
Times piece on the subject – with the rather whiney headline "Hackers
in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months" – we again come across
Mandiant pointing to the Chinese military as the culprit, but their
case against the PLA falls apart under the most cursory inspection.
For example, Mandiant’s "analysis" is based in part on the observation
that these alleged Chinese
"Hacker teams regularly began work, for the most part, at 8 a.m.
Beijing
sometimes the hacking persisted until midnight. Occasionally, the
attacks stopped for two-week periods, Mandiant said, though the reason
was not clear."
Bull hockey. There are a number of other countries in the same time
zone that have active hacker communities. The idea that the timing of
these attacks somehow pinpoints "Chinese hackers" associated with the
PLA is laughable. As Carr puts it:
"The hackers could have been from anywhere in the world. The time zone
that Mandiant imagines as aBeijing workday
could easily apply to a
workday inBangkok , Singapore ,
Taiwan , Tibet , Seoul , and
even Tallinn
–
Mandiant – hired by the Times to investigate the intrusion, and
currently in negotiations with the New York Times Company over a
possible ongoing business relationship – cites the fact that the
intrusions supposed originated at some of the “same universities used
by the Chinese military to attackU.S.
past.” Yet there are many universities located in theJinan
Mandiant homes in on, and geolocation in this instance, as Carr says,
"means absolutely nothing." He also raises an important point: if the
Chinese military was behind the Times hack, then why would they launch
these attacks from a location previously identified with the PLA?
That’s seems rather too obvious, especially in view of the lengths to
which hackers go to cover their tracks. Wouldn’tChina
State Security, their official intelligence agency, be assigned that
task? Yet their facilities are located inBeijing ,
over 200 miles away
fromJinan
Most people are ignorant of the technical details utilized by
commercial enterprises like Mandiant to gin up an alleged "threat."
One supposedly scary tool used by the "Chinese" hackers is a Remote
Access Tool, and we are told that the specific methods used in the
past by alleged Chinese hackers are matched to the Times intrusion.
This is just plain wrong, however, as Carr explains:
"The article mentioned the hackers use of a Remote Access Tool (RAT).
One such widely used tool is called GhostRAT. The fact that it was
used in an attack against the Dalai Lama in 2008 (GhostNet) doesn’t
mean that all of the later attacks which used this tool originated
with the same group. In fact, even the GhostNet researchers refrained
from attributing this attack toChina
"Another tool whose use is often blamed on Chinese hackers is the
‘xKungFoo script.’ Like GhostRAT, the xKungFoo script is widely
available for anyone to use so even if it was originally created by a
Chinese hacker, it doesn’t mean that it is used by Chinese hackers in
all instances. I personally know Russian, English, and Indian hackers
who write and speak Chinese."
This is simple logic: you don’t have to be a cyberwarfare "expert" to
realize there are many possibilities when it comes to identifying the
people behind the methods. If you’ve already decided who is the
perpetrator, however, then Mandiant’s accusations directed atBeijing
fit neatly into the available "evidence." That’s how confirmation bias
works.
The major piece of "evidence" supposedly pointing to the Chinese
government is the timing of the intrusion: just as research for a
Times story on the financial dealings of a top Chinese government
official, Wen JaiBo, was "nearing completion." According to the Times,
the hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to Shanghai
bureau chief David Barboza, author of the Wen expose, as well as Jim
Yardley, bureau chief covering South Asia. Yet the Wen connection is
contradicted in the very next paragraph of the Times‘s own account,
which says:
"’Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails
or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were
accessed, downloaded or copied,’ said Jill Abramson, executive editor
of The Times."
So what’s the connection to the Wen story? In addition, Yardley had
nothing to do with the Wen story, and yet his email was also breached,
along with the passwords of 53 employees who are not in the Times
newsroom. So what does this add up to? A big fat zero, as far as
evidence ofChina China
go-to cyber-villain of the moment, and this is certainly true where
Mandiant is concerned.
The same kind of dicey "evidence" is being used to accuseIran
saw this coming, didn’t you? Again, the tech-ignorant New York Times
is in the lead, with a story echoing the claims of US officials that
Tehran
American banks. You can almost hear the spooky music in the first two
paragraphs of the piece, by Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy, which
gives an account of how the hackers slowed down and disabled banking
sites, and then goes on to say:
"There was something disturbingly different about the wave of online
attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say
that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers
engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the
online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of
fire-breathing Godzillas."
Godzilla’s on the loose! And it’s an Iranian Godzilla! Yikes!
"The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced
United States government
officials and security researchers that they
are the work ofIran , most
likely in retaliation for economic
sanctions and online attacks by theUnited States
"’There is no doubt within theU.S.
government that Iran is
behind
these attacks,’ said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State
and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies inWashington
The skill required to carry out these attacks was minimal. As Roel
Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Labs, put it:
"We can confirm that the attacks being reported are happening;
however, the malware being used, known as ItsOKNoProblemBro, is far
from sophisticated. It’s really rather simple. It’s also only one part
of the puzzle but it seems to be effective, which is all that matters
to the attackers. Going strictly by the publicly known technical
details, we don’t see enough evidence that would categorize this
operation as something only a nation-state sponsored actor could pull
off."
More "evidence" offered in support of the "Iran-did-it" theory is that
these attacks did not garner any information: no data systems were
breached. It was, in short, pure cyber-malice directed at American
banks. If this is supposed to somehow prove the Iranians are the
culprits, then it is weak tea indeed: because there are any number of
groups who hate American bankers, including, I would venture, the vast
majority of the American people. These DDOS attacks seem more like the
sort of thing we might expect from a group like "Anonymous" than from
a state actor such asIran
Of course, the paucity of evidence didn’t stop Sen. Joe Lieberman from
declaring:
"I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to
cause disruption of the websites. I think this was done byIran … and
I believe it was a response to the increasingly strong economic
sanctions that theUnited
States
Iranian financial institutions."
As is the case withIran
own spooks have said does not presently exist, the technical details
are obscure to most of us, and therefore this realm is given over to
"experts," both real and imagined. To Sen. Lieberman and all too many
in the media, it’s just a matter of picking and choosing your
"experts," and making the "facts" fit your preconceived notions.
Aside from ginning up conflict with the War Party’s chosen targets,
the whole cyber-war scare-mongering campaign, whether the alleged
"threat" is said to be emanating from China, Iran, or wherever, is
also very convenient for proponents of Internet regulation who want to
install back doors on every web site, and every software system, so
the feds can "trace" these alleged "cyber-terrorists." It is, in
short, a scam, part and parcel of a political campaign to rein in the
wild and wooly – and largely unregulated – Internet, and make it more
amenable to the interests of our wise rulers.
The mystification of science, and the culture of "expertise," has
greatly aided the War Party in their propaganda efforts. Instead of
making up stories about babies being bayoneted in their cribs –
although there is still some of that – we are given mind-numbingly
technical explanations that point to purported acts of
"cyber-terrorism" carried out by China, Iran, or the
villain-of-the-moment. Except that the supposed "evidence" turns out
to based on non-credible assumptions and faulty technical analysis.
Remember, we’ve been through this sort of thing before: all the
"intelligence" supposedly pointed to the irrefutable "fact" thatIraq
possessed "weapons of mass destruction," which it was about to launch
against its neighbors. That turned out to be a lie. Much of this
baloney came wrapped up in impressive-sounding technical jargon, and
was validated by the media’s chosen "experts."
Has anybody learned anything from that experience? I’m thinking in
particular of the members of the Fourth Estate, otherwise known as
"journalists." The answer, unfortunately, seems to be no.
The War Party never sleeps: there are always new variations of war
propaganda coming ’round the bend. With the coming of the internet,
the latest manufactured "threat" to rear its head is "cyber-warfare,"
which is now being touted by the Obama administration and its media
fan club as the Next Big Scary Thing – but what are the facts?
The first fact we need to integrate into our analysis is that
"cyber-security" isn’t a science, it’s an industry: that is, the
entities issuing alarming reports of this lurking threat are for
profit companies mainly if not exclusively concerned with selling a
product. And while the "threat landscape," as the jargon phrases it,
is potentially very diverse, with a number of countries and non-state
actors potential combatants, our cyber-warriors have targeted
the main danger to our cybernetic security – the Yellow Peril of the
Internet Age. They’re stealing our technology, our secrets, and
infiltrating our very homes! This is largely baloney, as Jeffrey Carr,
founder of Project Grey Goose and Taia Global, a cyber-security firm,
and author of Inside Cyber Warfare, points out:
"[I]t’s good business today to blame China. I know from experience
that many corporations, government and DOD organizations are more
eager to buy cyber threat data that claims to focus on the PRC than
any other nation state. When the cyber security industry issues
PRC-centric reports like this one without performing any alternative
analysis of the collected data, and when the readership of these
reports are government and corporate officials without the depth of
knowledge to critically analyze what they’re reading (i.e., when they
trust the report’s authors to do the thinking for them), we wind up
being in the position that we’re in today – easily fooled into looking
in one direction when we have an entire threat landscape left
unattended. We got into that position because InfoSec vendors have
been left alone to define the threat landscape based upon their
product offerings. In other words, vendors only tell customers to
worry about the threats that their products can protect them from and
they only tell them to worry about the actors that they can identify
(or think that they can identify). This has resulted in a security
awareness clusterfuck of epic proportions."
The "cyber-threat" from
any number of self-proclaimed "experts" with a financial stake in
hyping this latest bogeyman have been pointing an accusing finger at
cyber-vandals in its domain. The latest is a report issued by a
private cyber-security firm, Mandiant, which claims these attacks are
occurring under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It
is, of course, just a coincidence that this accusation limns a recent
National Intelligence Estimate, which – according to the New York
Times, itself supposedly victimized by Chinese hackers – "makes a
strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army
officers or are contractors working for commands like [PLA] Unit
61398."
Yet, as Carr discusses here, the Mandiant report has several analytic
flaws. To begin with, the "mission area," i.e. the nature and alleged
goal of these intrusions, is supposed to identify
because the latest APT (cyber-security jargon for "advanced persistent
threat") "steals intellectual property from English-speaking
organizations," and that these thefts coincide with the technical
requirements of
This kind of "logic" ought to make your BS-detector go haywire,
recalling Carr’s warning that there’s a bad case of perception bias at
work here: that’s because other nations, and non-state actors such as
criminal gangs, also launch cyber-attacks on English-speaking
organizations, which in many instances parallel the interests
contained in
number of other countries have advanced cyber-warfare capabilities,
and haven’t hesitated to use them for purposes of industrial
espionage, among other reasons: Eastern European gangsters are also
players in this game. Yet there is no mention of these alternatives in
the Mandiant report: according to them, it’s all about
Mandiant claims that because the rash of recent intrusions have
involved operations requiring hundreds of operators, that only a
nation-state with "military-grade operations" could possibly have
carried them out. Yet more than 30 nations are currently running
"military-grade" operations, as Carr informs us: why pick on
Well, says Mandiant, because the intrusions they analyzed used a
proves exactly nothing. Okay then, what about the fact that "two of
four network ‘home’
Area," where the PLA’s Unit 61398 is located? This also proves exactly
nothing: the Pudong New Area has over 5 million inhabitants. It is
smack dab in the center of
metropolis. Ask yourself how many IP addresses originate from this
area. Oh, but one of the "PLA" hackers’ "self-identified location is
the Pudong New Area." Really? So what? Aside from the demographic
information supplied above, one has to wonder if these people really
believe everything they see on the Internet is true. C’mon, guys!
The New York Times has been pushing the Yellow Cyber-Peril theme ever
since their computer system was hacked, but the question of who
exactly was responsible for that intrusion is by no means proved. In a
Times piece on the subject – with the rather whiney headline "Hackers
in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months" – we again come across
Mandiant pointing to the Chinese military as the culprit, but their
case against the PLA falls apart under the most cursory inspection.
For example, Mandiant’s "analysis" is based in part on the observation
that these alleged Chinese
"Hacker teams regularly began work, for the most part, at 8 a.m.
sometimes the hacking persisted until midnight. Occasionally, the
attacks stopped for two-week periods, Mandiant said, though the reason
was not clear."
Bull hockey. There are a number of other countries in the same time
zone that have active hacker communities. The idea that the timing of
these attacks somehow pinpoints "Chinese hackers" associated with the
PLA is laughable. As Carr puts it:
"The hackers could have been from anywhere in the world. The time zone
that Mandiant imagines as a
workday in
–
Mandiant – hired by the Times to investigate the intrusion, and
currently in negotiations with the New York Times Company over a
possible ongoing business relationship – cites the fact that the
intrusions supposed originated at some of the “same universities used
by the Chinese military to attack
past.” Yet there are many universities located in the
Mandiant homes in on, and geolocation in this instance, as Carr says,
"means absolutely nothing." He also raises an important point: if the
Chinese military was behind the Times hack, then why would they launch
these attacks from a location previously identified with the PLA?
That’s seems rather too obvious, especially in view of the lengths to
which hackers go to cover their tracks. Wouldn’t
State Security, their official intelligence agency, be assigned that
task? Yet their facilities are located in
from
Most people are ignorant of the technical details utilized by
commercial enterprises like Mandiant to gin up an alleged "threat."
One supposedly scary tool used by the "Chinese" hackers is a Remote
Access Tool, and we are told that the specific methods used in the
past by alleged Chinese hackers are matched to the Times intrusion.
This is just plain wrong, however, as Carr explains:
"The article mentioned the hackers use of a Remote Access Tool (RAT).
One such widely used tool is called GhostRAT. The fact that it was
used in an attack against the Dalai Lama in 2008 (GhostNet) doesn’t
mean that all of the later attacks which used this tool originated
with the same group. In fact, even the GhostNet researchers refrained
from attributing this attack to
"Another tool whose use is often blamed on Chinese hackers is the
‘xKungFoo script.’ Like GhostRAT, the xKungFoo script is widely
available for anyone to use so even if it was originally created by a
Chinese hacker, it doesn’t mean that it is used by Chinese hackers in
all instances. I personally know Russian, English, and Indian hackers
who write and speak Chinese."
This is simple logic: you don’t have to be a cyberwarfare "expert" to
realize there are many possibilities when it comes to identifying the
people behind the methods. If you’ve already decided who is the
perpetrator, however, then Mandiant’s accusations directed at
fit neatly into the available "evidence." That’s how confirmation bias
works.
The major piece of "evidence" supposedly pointing to the Chinese
government is the timing of the intrusion: just as research for a
Times story on the financial dealings of a top Chinese government
official, Wen JaiBo, was "nearing completion." According to the Times,
the hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to Shanghai
bureau chief David Barboza, author of the Wen expose, as well as Jim
Yardley, bureau chief covering South Asia. Yet the Wen connection is
contradicted in the very next paragraph of the Times‘s own account,
which says:
"’Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails
or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were
accessed, downloaded or copied,’ said Jill Abramson, executive editor
of The Times."
So what’s the connection to the Wen story? In addition, Yardley had
nothing to do with the Wen story, and yet his email was also breached,
along with the passwords of 53 employees who are not in the Times
newsroom. So what does this add up to? A big fat zero, as far as
evidence of
go-to cyber-villain of the moment, and this is certainly true where
Mandiant is concerned.
The same kind of dicey "evidence" is being used to accuse
saw this coming, didn’t you? Again, the tech-ignorant New York Times
is in the lead, with a story echoing the claims of US officials that
American banks. You can almost hear the spooky music in the first two
paragraphs of the piece, by Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy, which
gives an account of how the hackers slowed down and disabled banking
sites, and then goes on to say:
"There was something disturbingly different about the wave of online
attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say
that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers
engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the
online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of
fire-breathing Godzillas."
Godzilla’s on the loose! And it’s an Iranian Godzilla! Yikes!
"The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced
are the work of
sanctions and online attacks by the
"’There is no doubt within the
these attacks,’ said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State
and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in
The skill required to carry out these attacks was minimal. As Roel
Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Labs, put it:
"We can confirm that the attacks being reported are happening;
however, the malware being used, known as ItsOKNoProblemBro, is far
from sophisticated. It’s really rather simple. It’s also only one part
of the puzzle but it seems to be effective, which is all that matters
to the attackers. Going strictly by the publicly known technical
details, we don’t see enough evidence that would categorize this
operation as something only a nation-state sponsored actor could pull
off."
More "evidence" offered in support of the "Iran-did-it" theory is that
these attacks did not garner any information: no data systems were
breached. It was, in short, pure cyber-malice directed at American
banks. If this is supposed to somehow prove the Iranians are the
culprits, then it is weak tea indeed: because there are any number of
groups who hate American bankers, including, I would venture, the vast
majority of the American people. These DDOS attacks seem more like the
sort of thing we might expect from a group like "Anonymous" than from
a state actor such as
Of course, the paucity of evidence didn’t stop Sen. Joe Lieberman from
declaring:
"I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to
cause disruption of the websites. I think this was done by
I believe it was a response to the increasingly strong economic
sanctions that the
Iranian financial institutions."
As is the case with
own spooks have said does not presently exist, the technical details
are obscure to most of us, and therefore this realm is given over to
"experts," both real and imagined. To Sen. Lieberman and all too many
in the media, it’s just a matter of picking and choosing your
"experts," and making the "facts" fit your preconceived notions.
Aside from ginning up conflict with the War Party’s chosen targets,
the whole cyber-war scare-mongering campaign, whether the alleged
"threat" is said to be emanating from China, Iran, or wherever, is
also very convenient for proponents of Internet regulation who want to
install back doors on every web site, and every software system, so
the feds can "trace" these alleged "cyber-terrorists." It is, in
short, a scam, part and parcel of a political campaign to rein in the
wild and wooly – and largely unregulated – Internet, and make it more
amenable to the interests of our wise rulers.
The mystification of science, and the culture of "expertise," has
greatly aided the War Party in their propaganda efforts. Instead of
making up stories about babies being bayoneted in their cribs –
although there is still some of that – we are given mind-numbingly
technical explanations that point to purported acts of
"cyber-terrorism" carried out by China, Iran, or the
villain-of-the-moment. Except that the supposed "evidence" turns out
to based on non-credible assumptions and faulty technical analysis.
Remember, we’ve been through this sort of thing before: all the
"intelligence" supposedly pointed to the irrefutable "fact" that
possessed "weapons of mass destruction," which it was about to launch
against its neighbors. That turned out to be a lie. Much of this
baloney came wrapped up in impressive-sounding technical jargon, and
was validated by the media’s chosen "experts."
Has anybody learned anything from that experience? I’m thinking in
particular of the members of the Fourth Estate, otherwise known as
"journalists." The answer, unfortunately, seems to be no.
RETALIATION
Bull’s
Eye: Riff on Lines by Neruda
By
Dick Bennett
From every mother and child of
Islam,
Islam emerges.
From every killed child, killed
mother,
an MK-47.
From every crime,
Bullets,
To find the bull’s eye of our
hearts.
Dedicated to poems protesting
war, Cry Out, itself dedicated “To
all the young people sent forth as gladiators, and to all the men, women, and
children who are trivialized as the ‘collateral damage’ of war.”
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Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Eternal War?
Posted by Andrew Bacevich at 8:26am, May 28, 2013.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: TD's
version of must-see TV: last week, Andrew Bacevich argued Stephen Colbert
(or at least the character he plays) to a draw in a telling and
funny episode of "the Colbert Report" which takes
up the issue of the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force
resolution Congress passed days after 9/11 that started us on our present
path. Tom]
Twelve and
a half years after Congress didn’t declare war on an organization of hundreds
or, at most, thousands of jihadis scattered mainly across
the backlands of the planet, and instead let President George W. Bush and his
cohort loose to do
whatever they wanted; twelve and a half years after the president, his top
officials, his neocon supporters, assembled pundits, and others swore we were
nonetheless “at war” and the country in “wartime,” after our media beat the
drums for “war” and assured us that “war” was our fate, after followers of the
president insisted we were entering a monumental, multigenerational struggle,
or even World War IV; twelve and
a half years after the war that hadn’t been declared was launched and the
bombing of Afghanistan began, after the CIA and Washington targeted up to 80
countries in a “worldwide attack matrix”
-- later given the leave-no-location-out name the Global War on Terror -- and
after top Washington officials swore we would soon “drain the [global] swamp,”
another president has now assured us that someday, in a distant future, in a
way that we might not even notice (“Our victory against terrorism won’t be
measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship...”), we might possibly find
ourselves approaching the sort-of-end of what will have been a 20- or 30-year
conflict.
At the
National Defense University (NDU) last Thursday, President Obama, so media
reports and editorials assured
us, gave a speech in which
he promised to dial back the war on terror as a “global” operation, curtail
U.S. drone operations abroad, and launch another effort to whittle down, if not
close, Guantanamo. But a careful look at the text of his speech indicates
that he still accepts the most basic premises of the previous administration:
that we are “at war”; that the country, despite visible evidence to the
contrary, is in “wartime”; and that, when a president decides it’s necessary,
this planet will remain a global free-fire zone for
drones, special operations forces, or whatever else he choses to throw at
it. He may even, reports Jonathan
Landay of McClatchy News, have quietly expanded the categories of human beings
that U.S.
In those
twelve and a half years between 9/11 and the recent speech, it’s been a bumpy
ride through a minefield of unexpected IEDs. Two invasions of the
Eurasian mainland have led to two defeats that passed for better here and are
bringing U.S. combat troops home with, as this president said, their “heads held high,” but
also with massive numbers of PTSD cases, suicides, and other
debilitating issues. In the meantime, America U.S. invasion of Iraq Washington
And yet,
the ability of the U.S. to
“project force” everywhere from the Mali-Niger border
to the Philippines remains
impressive. Even its capacity to engage in a series of disasters over
such an expanse of the planet for twelve and a half years and still be talking
about “pivoting” militarily to Asia, while maintaining a massive build-up of
U.S. forces around Iran, should give anyone pause. It's a reminder that
the now-seldom-heard term "sole superpower” continues to mean something.
But what?
Somehow, like our empire of bases (and
the private contractors that
go with it), it’s been hard to absorb the continual use of such power
projection and the vast web of military-to-military relationships and weapons
sales that go with it, or the increasing ability of the White House alone to
determine what makes sense and what doesn’t abroad, even as both the Greater
Middle East and what’s left of American democracy and liberties are further
destabilized.
Much of
this has not yet been taken in here in a meaningful way, though you can feel it
lurking, half-expressed, half-grasped, in the president’s NDU speech. To
begin to understand what’s actually been going on, it would help to define the
“war” that we’ve been fighting all these years from North Africa to China
For well
over a decade now the United
States
It did at
the outset. After 9/11, George W. Bush's administration wasted no time in
announcing that the U.S.
Upon
succeeding to the presidency in 2009, however, Barack Obama without fanfare
junked Bush’s formulation (as he did again in a speech at the National Defense
University
Does it
matter that ours has become and remains a nameless war? Very much so.
Names
bestow meaning. When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape
our understanding of what the conflict was all about. To specify when a
war began and when it ended is to privilege certain explanations of its
significance while discrediting others. Let me provide a few illustrations.
With rare
exceptions, Americans today characterize the horrendous fraternal bloodletting
of 1861-1865 as the Civil War.
Yet not many decades ago, diehard supporters of the Lost Cause insisted on
referring to that conflict as the War
Between the States or the War for Southern Independence (or even the War of Northern Aggression).
The South may have gone down in defeat, but the purposes for which Southerners
had fought -- preserving a distinctive way of life and the principle of states’
rights -- had been worthy, even noble. So at least they professed to
believe, with their preferred names for the war reflecting that belief.
Schoolbooks
tell us that the Spanish-American
War began in April 1898 and
ended in August of that same year. The name and dates fit nicely with a
widespread inclination from President William McKinley’s day to our own to
frame U.S. intervention in Cuba
Yet the
Cubans were not exactly bystanders in that drama. By 1898, they had been
fighting for years to oust their colonial overlords. And although
hostilities in Cuba itself
ended on August 12th, they dragged on in the Philippines ,
another Spanish colony that the United
States U.S.
troops occupying the Philippines
waged a brutal war not against Spaniards but against Filipino nationalists no
more inclined to accept colonial rule by Washington
than by Madrid
Strange as
it may seem, Europeans once referred to the calamitous events of 1914-1918 as
the Great War.
When Woodrow Wilson decided in 1917 to send an army of doughboys to fight alongside
the Allies, he went beyond Great. According to the president, the Great War was going to be the War To End All Wars.
Alas, things did not pan out as he expected. Perhaps anticipating the
demise of his vision of permanent peace, War Department General Order 115,
issued on October 7, 1919, formally declared that, at least as far as the United States
In
September 1939 -- presto
chango! -- the World War suddenly became theFirst
World War, the Nazi
invasion of Poland having inaugurated a Second
World War, also known
as World War II or more cryptically WWII. To be sure, Soviet dictator
Josef Stalin preferred the Great
Patriotic War. Although
this found instant -- almost unanimous -- favor among Soviet citizens, it did
not catch on elsewhere.
Does World War II accurately capture the events it
purports to encompass? With the crusade against the Axis now ranking
alongside the crusade against slavery as a myth-enshrouded chapter in U.S. history to which all must pay homage,
Americans are no more inclined to consider that question than to consider why a
playoff to determine the professional baseball championship of North America constitutes a “World Series.”
In fact,
however convenient and familiar, World
War II is misleading
and not especially useful. The period in question saw at least two wars,
each only tenuously connected to the other, each having distinctive origins,
each yielding a different outcome. To separate them is to transform the
historical landscape.
On the one
hand, there was the Pacific
War, pitting the United States
against Japan Japan
embarked upon a policy of armed conquest in Manchuria .
At stake was the question of who would dominate East Asia .
Japan ’s crushing defeat at
the hands of the United
States
Then there
was the European War,
pitting Nazi Germany first against Great Britain
and France , but ultimately
against a grand alliance led by the United States ,
the Soviet Union, and a fast fading British Empire .
At stake was the question of who would dominate Europe .
Germany Europe ,
two outside powers divided it.
This
division served as the basis for the ensuing Cold
War, which wasn’t
actually cold, but also (thankfully) wasn’t World
War III, the
retrospective insistence of bellicose neoconservatives notwithstanding.
But when did the Cold War begin? Was it in early 1947,
when President Harry Truman decided that Stalin’s Russia
posed a looming threat and committed the United States
Separating
the war against Nazi Germany from the war against Imperial Japan opens up
another interpretive possibility. If you incorporate the European
conflict of 1914-1918 and the European conflict of 1939-1945 into a single
narrative, you get a Second
Thirty Years War (the first
having occurred from 1618-1648) -- not so much a contest of good against evil,
as a mindless exercise in self-destruction that represented the ultimate expression
of European folly.
So, yes,
it matters what we choose to call the military enterprise we’ve been waging not
only in Iraq and Afghanistan
Although Washington
The
Long War: Coined
not long after 9/11 by senior officers in the Pentagon, this formulation never
gained traction with either civilian officials or the general public. Yet
the Long War deserves consideration, even
though -- or perhaps because -- it has lost its luster with the passage of
time.
At the outset, it connoted grand ambitions buoyed
by extreme confidence in the efficacy of American military might. This
was going to be one for the ages, a multi-generational conflict yielding
sweeping results.
The Long War did begin on a hopeful
note. The initial entry into Afghanistan
and then into Iraq Washington
With the
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan Iraq and Afghanistan
For Long War combatants, the object of the
exercise has become to persist. As for winning, it’s not in the cards.
The Long War just might conclude by the end
of 2014 if President Obama keeps his pledge to end the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan
and if he avoids getting sucked into Syria
The
War Against Al-Qaeda: It began
in August 1996 when Osama bin Laden issued a "Declaration of War against
the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” i.e., Saudi Arabia
Although
President Bill Clinton took notice, the U.S. Washington Iraq
(where, in Saddam Hussein’s day, al-Qaeda did not exist), U.S. attention has been focused on Afghanistan , where U.S.
troops have waged the longest war in American history, and on Pakistan U.S.
Could the United States Yemen ,
Somalia , Nigeria , and -- wouldn’t you know it --
post-Saddam Iraq
Americans
should not expect this war to end anytime soon. Indeed, the Pentagon’s
impresario of special operations recently speculated -- by no means unhappily
-- that it would continue globally for “at least 10 to 20 years.”
Freely translated, his statement undoubtedly means: “No one really
knows, but we’re planning to keep at it for one helluva long time.”
The
War For/Against/About Israel Israel Palestine
Recounting
the ensuing struggle without appearing to take sides is almost
impossible. Yet one thing seems clear: in terms of military involvement,
the United States U.S.
became Israel
In the
decades that followed, the two countries forged a multifaceted “strategic
relationship.” A compliant Congress provided Israel
with weapons and other assistance worth many billions of dollars, testifying to
what has become an unambiguous and irrevocable U.S. Israel
had disregarded U.S.
concerns when it came to developing nuclear weapons, it ignored persistent U.S.
When it
comes to identifying the minimal essential requirements of Israeli security and
the terms that will define any Palestinian-Israeli peace deal, the United States defers to Israel Palestine United States
The
War for the Greater Middle East: I confess that this is the name I would choose for Washington
This war
is about to hit the century mark, its opening chapter coinciding with the onset
of World War I. Not long after the
fighting on the Western Front in Europe had settled into a stalemate, the
British government, looking for ways to gain the upper hand, set out to
dismantle the Ottoman Empire whose rulers had
foolishly thrown in their lot with the German Reich against the Allies.
By the
time the war ended with Germany
and the Turks on the losing side, Great Britain Egypt to India Middle
East and a total mess.
Unfortunately,
the Americans enjoyed no more success in promoting long-term, pro-Western
stability than had the British. In some respects, they only made things
worse, with the joint CIA-MI6 overthrow of a democratically elected government
in Iran
Only after
1980 did things get really interesting, however. The Carter Doctrine
promulgated that year designated the Persian Gulf a vital national security
interest and opened the door to greatly increased U.S. military activity not
just in the Gulf, but also throughout the Greater Middle East (GME).
Between 1945 and 1980, considerable numbers of American soldiers lost
their lives fighting in Asia and
elsewhere. During that period, virtually none were killed fighting in the
GME. Since 1990, in contrast, virtually none have been killed fighting
anywhere except in the
GME.
What does
the United States
The
War Against Islam: This war
began nearly 1,000 years ago and continued for centuries, a storied collision
between Christendom and the Muslim ummah.
For a couple of hundred years, periodic eruptions of large-scale violence
occurred until the conflict finally petered out with the last crusade sometime
in the fourteenth century.
In those
days, many people had deemed religion something worth fighting for, a
proposition to which the more sophisticated present-day inhabitants of
Christendom no longer subscribe. Yet could that religious war have
resumed in our own day? Professor Samuel Huntington thought so, although
he styled the conflict a “clash of civilizations.” Some militant radical
Islamists agree with Professor Huntington, citing as evidence the unwelcome
meddling of “infidels,” mostly wearing American uniforms, in various parts of
the Muslim world. Some militant evangelical Christians endorse this
proposition, even if they take a more favorable view of U.S.
In
explaining the position of the United
States
Still,
remember back in 2001 when, in an unscripted moment, President Bush described
the war barely begun as a “crusade”? That was just a slip of the tongue,
right? If not, we just might end up calling this one the Eternal War.
Andrew
J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston
University and a TomDispatch regular.
His next book, Breach of Trust: How Americans
Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, will appear in September.
Follow
TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr.
Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire:
Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright
2013 Andrew J. Bace
Here is the link to all
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http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and
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WARS
OVER RESOURCES
Running Out of Everything
Review By Amitabh Pal of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last
Resources by Michael T. Klare. Metropolitan Books, 2012.
Michael
Klare’s new book is
ripped from the headlines—
a good and a bad
thing. Any avid news junkie will
know about a considerable portion
of what he depicts. At the same
time, he provides background and
context that is missing in much of
the coverage.
Klare, a professor at Hampshire
College and The
Nation’s defense
correspondent, has done yeoman’s
service over many years in analyzing
issues such as “rogue states,” small
arms, and American defense planning.
In the recent past, he has
focused on resource conflict, and this
is his fourth book in that series.
(Full
disclosure: Klare has contributed
pieces to The
Progressive and the Progressive
Media Project.)
Klare’s thesis is that the world is
running out of easily obtainable
resources for operating the global
economy. The future, he says, portends
environmental disasters,
increasing conflict, and a desperate
scramble for what remains. Klare
includes in his survey everything
from oil and natural gas to food
and rare minerals. This readable
account deals with an extremely
important issue.
“The era of readily accessible oil
tionals view the Canadian oil tar
sands as such an opportunity (they
don’t have to deal with unreliable governments
in the developing world).
The extraction process is “expensive,
burns up tremendous amounts
of energy, and involves multiple environmental
risks,” he writes. “Yet even
so, many of the major energy firms
are flocking to Alberta
search for new hydrocarbon
resources.”
Similarly, he offers invaluable
details on the scary ways that waste -
water from fracking is stored—and
the potential health hazards this represents.
Klare also has a chapter on the
land grab in Africa . And
while others
have covered this (such as In
These
Times
last September), Klare adds
depth by explaining the reasons that
realm in a big way.
The involvement of China ,
India
and other rising nations in the hunt
for scarce resources brings with it an
ever-increasing chance of war, he
says. China
its neighbors over small islands in the
surrounding seas have heated up in
recent months. But will these disputes
break out into large-scale conflict?
Unlike Klare, who sees a distinct
possibility, I seriously doubt it.
The Chinese regime, while touchily
nationalistic, is also quite pragmatic
and is a master at making calibrated
threats.
Klare also scrutinizes the checkered
record of the Obama Administration
on resource exploitation. He points
out that it has permitted oil exploration
off the Alaskan coast and has
been enthusiastic about fracking.
Ashortcoming of Klare’s book is
that it is based largely on secondary
news sources. A few
firsthand accounts would have added
more perspective. And he lays out his
points multiple times—sometimes in
the introduction, middle, and conclusion.
The predictions Klare makes are
alarming in their intensity, and we
are already seeing some of that come
to pass. (The BP oil spill is very
prominently featured here, and Klare
provides useful details that go beyond
the media coverage.) The question
here is how likely is Klare’s overall
scenario? I am reminded here of a
famous bet that environmentalist
Paul Erlich made with the libertarian
economist Julian Simon in 1980 that
the prices of copper, chromium,
nickel, tin, and tungsten would go up
in the next decade. Erlich lost, since
he didn’t take into account technological
innovation.
Related to this is the “peak oil”
hypothesis, which postulates that the
production of oil has reached a peak
and will be in a decline from now on.
Though Klare’s musings on this subject
occupy only a small portion of
the book, he is on the side of the
declinists. But this is a contentious
issue, with even environmentalists
like George Monbiot of the opinion
that the thesis is overstated.
To his credit, Klare does discuss
the possibility that substitute materials
could mitigate the resource shortage,
but he is skeptical of the idea
that acceptable substitutes could be
found soon. Plus, he says these alternative
materials may create shortages
of their own, even if he strongly urges
going that route.
“The race to adapt,” he says, “will
cause a grand reshuffling of the global
power hierarchy. But it is not likely to
end in war, widespread starvation, or a
massive environmental catastrophe—
the probable results of persisting with
the race for what’s left.”
Klare is wagering on what is yet to
come. The question is whether he will
win or lose the bet. On the answer
depends
our collective future.
Amitabh
Pal, the managing editor of
The
Progressive and co-editor of the
Progressive
Media Project, is the author
of
the recent book “ ‘Islam’ Means Peace:
Understanding
the Muslim Principle of
Nonviolence
Today” (Praeger).
The Nile, Egypt
Poor African capitals are increasingly challenging Cairo for the river's water, without which Egypt
o
·
Egyptians
sit near the Nile River at sunset in Cairo
Mubarak long neglected the
security danger posed by other nations' claims to the timeless pulse that
provides 95% of this desert country's water, without which its delta farmlands
would wither and its economy die. As poor African capitals increasingly
challenge Cairo , however, the struggle has
become one of the most pressing foreign policy tests for Egypt
African countries at the river's source,
notably Ethiopia
It is a skirmish involving diplomats,
engineers and veiled threats of war over geography's blessings and slights and
how nations in a new century will divvy up a river on whose banks civilizations
have risen and tumbled.
"All of Egyptian life is based on the Nile . Without it there is nothing," said Moujahed
Achouri, the representative for the United Nations' Food and Agricultural
Organization in Egypt
Morsi's acknowledgment of
the water crisis and his desire to reach a compromise to protect his country's
strategic and historical claim is evident: The Islamist leader has visited key Nile countries twice since his inauguration in June, and
his prime minister, Hesham Kandil, is a former water and irrigation minister
with connections to officials in African governments. An Egyptian delegation
recently toured the region, listening to how Cairo
An advisor to the president quoted in Al Ahram
Weekly said this of Morsi: "The man was shocked when he received a review
about the state of ties we have with Nile
basin countries. The previous regime should be tried for overlooking such a
strategic interest."
For decades, Egypt
had concentrated on problems closer to home, including keeping the Arab-Israeli
peace and tending to wars from Lebanon
to Iraq Addis Ababa , had paid little
attention to East Africa . But his regime was
adamant — at one point hinting at military action — in preserving the existing Nile treaties.
That echoed a warning from his predecessor,
President Anwar Sadat, in 1979: "The only matter that could take Egypt
In a 1929 treaty and through other pacts, Egypt and its southern neighbor, Sudan , were granted the bulk of the Nile 's flow. The logic — filtered through decades of
politics and power struggles — was that Egypt Ethiopia ,
Uganda , Kenya and Tanzania
But economic pressure and increasing demand
for energy and development have turned African countries' attention to the Nile . Since 2010, Ethiopia, which now gets only 3% of its
water from the Nile, and five other upstream countries have indicated they
would divert more water and no longer honor Egypt's veto power over building
projects on the river.
The biggest challenge to Cairo Egypt
"Egypt has entered a stage where its resources
are depleting and population is rapidly increasing," said Hani
Raslan, an expert on the Nile basin for Al Ahram Center for Political and
Strategic Studies in Cairo Ethiopia
will turn into an enemy for Egypt
He added, "Egypt
CAUSE OF WAR:
RATIONALIZATION; CURE: EXPOSURE:
War Is Horrible, but . .
.
Anyone who has done even a little reading about the theory and
practice of war, whether in political theory, international relations,
theology, history, or common journalistic commentary, has encountered a
sentence of the form “war is horrible, but . . . .” In this construction, the
phrase that follows the conjunction explains why a certain war was (or now is
or someday will be) an action that ought to have been (or ought to be)
undertaken notwithstanding its admitted horrors. The frequent, virtually
formulaic use of this expression attests that nobody cares to argue, say, that
war is a beautiful, humane, uplifting, or altogether splendid course of action
and therefore the more often people fight, the better.
Some time ago—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
for example—one might encounter a writer, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who forthrightly affirmed that war is manly and
invigorating for the nation and the soldiers that engage in it: war keeps a
nation from “getting soft.” Although this opinion is no longer expressed openly
with great frequency, something akin to it may yet survive, as Chris Hedges
argues in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). Nowadays, however, even those
who find meaning for their lives by involvement in war, perhaps only marginal
or symbolic involvement, do not often extol war as such.
Instead, they are apt to justify a nation’s engagement in war by
calling attention to alternative, even more horrible outcomes that,
retrospectively, would have occurred if the nation had not gone to war or,
prospectively, will occur if it does not go to war. This seemingly reasonable
“balancing” form of argument often sounds stronger than it really is,
especially when it is made more or less in passing. People may easily be swayed
by a weak argument, however, if they fail to appreciate the defects of the
typically expressed “horrible, but” apology for war.
Rather than plow through various sources on my bookshelves to
compile examples, I have availed myself of modern technology. A Google search
for the exact term “war is horrible but” on September 11, 2006, identified
1,450 instances. Rest assured that this sample is smaller than the entire
universe of such usage—some texts have yet to be captured electronically. Among
the examples I drew from the World Wide Web are the following fourteen
statements. I identify the person who made the statement only when he is
well-known.
(1) “War is horrible. But no one wants to see a world in
which a regime with no regard whatsoever for international law—for the welfare
of its own people—or for the will of the United Nations—has weapons of mass
destruction.” [U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage]
This statement was part of a speech Armitage gave on January 21,
2003, shortly before the U.S. government unleashed its armed forces to wreak
“shock and awe” on the nearly defenseless people of Iraq. The speech repeated
the Bush administration’s standard prewar litany of accusations, including
several claims later revealed to be false, and so it cannot be viewed as
anything but bellicose propaganda. Yet it does not differ much from what many
others were saying at the time.
On its own terms, the statement scarcely serves to justify a war.
A regime’s disregard of international law, its own people’s wellbeing, and the
will of the United Nations, combined with possession of weapons of mass
destruction—these conditions apply to several nations. They no more justify a
military attack on Iraq than
they justify an attack on Pakistan ,
France , India , Russia ,
China , the United Kingdom , Israel
or, for that matter, the United
States
(2) “War is terrible, war is horrible, but war is also at
times necessary and the only means of stopping evil.”
The only means of stopping evil? How can such
an exclusivity exist? Has evil conduct never been stopped except by war? For
example, has shunning―exclusion from commerce, financial systems,
communications, transportation systems, and other means of international
cooperation―never served to discipline an evil nation-state? Might it do so if
seriously tried? Why must we leap to the conclusion that only war will serve,
when other measures have scarcely even been considered, much less been
seriously attempted? If war is really as horrible as everyone says, then it
would seem that we have a moral obligation to try very hard to achieve the
desired suppression of evil-doing by means other than resort to warfare, which
is itself always a manifest evil, even when it is the lesser one.
(3) “No news shows [during World War II] were showing German
civilians getting fried and saying how sad it was. It was war against butchers
and war is horrible, but it’s war, and to defend human decency, sometimes war
is necessary.” [Ben Stein]
Stein is a knowledgeable man. He surely knows that the U.S. U.S. Germany
Stein appears to lump all Germans into the class of “butchers”
against whom he claims the war was being waged. He certainly must understand,
however, that many persons in Germany U.S.
To say, as Stein and many others have said, that “war is war” gets
us nowhere; in a moral sense, this tautology warrants nothing. Evidently,
however, many people consider all moral questions about the conduct of war to
have been settled simply by their having labeled or by their having accepted
someone else’s labeling of certain actions as a “war.” Having uttered this
exculpatory incantation over the state’s organized violence, they believe that
all transgressions associated with it are automatically absolved—as they say,
“all’s fair in love and war.” It does not help matters that regimes treat some
of the most egregious transgressors as heroes.
Finally, Stein’s claim that “to defend human decency, sometimes
war is necessary” is, at best, paradoxical, because it says in effect that
sometimes human indecency, which war itself surely exemplifies, is necessary to
defend human decency. Perhaps he had in mind the backfires that fire fighters
sometimes set to help them extinguish fires. This metaphor, however, seems
farfetched in connection with war. It is difficult to think of anything that
consists of so many different forms of indecency as war does. Not only is its
essence the large-scale wreaking of death and destruction, but its side effects
and its consequences in the aftermath run a wide range of evils as well.
Whatever else war may be, it surely qualifies as the most indecent type of
action people can take: it reduces them to the level of the most ferocious
beasts and often accomplishes little more than setting the stage for the next,
reactive round of savagery. In any event, considered strictly as a way of
sustaining human decency, it gets a failing grade every time, because it
invariably magnifies the malignity that it purports to resist.
(4) “War is horrible, but slavery is worse.” [Winston
Churchill]
Maybe slavery is worse, but maybe it’s not; it depends on the
conditions of the war and the conditions of the slavery. Moreover, if one seeks
to justify a war on the strength of this statement, he had best be completely
certain that but for war, slavery will be the outcome. In many wars, however,
slavery was never a possibility, because neither side sought to enslave its
enemy. Many wars have been fought for limited objectives, if only because more
ambitious objectives appeared unattainable or not worth the cost. No war in U.S.
(5) “You may think that the Iraq
Perhaps war can be justified at “some times,” but that
statement itself in no way shows that the Iraq war can be justified, and it
seems all too obvious that it cannot be. If it could have been justified, the
government that launched it would not have had to resort to a succession of
lame excuses for waging it, each such excuse being manifestly inadequate or
simply false. The obvious insufficiency of any of the grounds put forward
explains why so many of us have been struggling to divine exactly what did impel the Bush administration’s rush
to war.
(6) “War is horrible, but sometimes we need to fight.”
Need to fight for what? The objective dictates whether war is a
necessary means for its attainment. Certainly, if the objective was to preserve
Americans’ freedoms and “way of life,” the U.S. United States did not go to war against that enemy directly,
although it did fight (unnecessarily) the enemy’s less-menacing allies, North Korea , China ,
and North Vietnam United States
might well have remained at peace had U.S.
(7) “Of course war is horrible, but it will always exist,
and I’m sick of these pacifist [expletive deleted] ruining any shred of
political decency that they can manage.”
Many people have observed that wars have recurred for thousands of
years and therefore will probably continue to occur from time to time. The
unstated insinuation seems to be that in view of war’s long-running recurrence,
nothing can be done about it, so we should all grow up and admit that war is as
natural, and hence as unobjectionable, as the sun’s rising in the east each
morning. It’s “how the world works.”
This outlook contains at least two difficulties. First, many other
conditions also have had long-running histories: for example, reliance on
astrologers as experts in foretelling the future; affliction with cancers;
submission to rulers who claim to dominate their subjects by virtue of divine
descent or appointment; and many others. Eventually, people overcame each of
these long-established conditions. Science revealed that astrology is nothing
more than an elaborate body of superstition; scientists and doctors discovered
how to control or cure certain forms of cancer; and citizens learned to laugh
at the pretensions of rulers who claim divine descent or appointment (at least,
they had learned until George W. Bush
successfully revived the doctrine among the benighted rubes who form the
Republican base). Because wars spring in large part from people’s stupidity,
ignorance, and gullibility, it is conceivable that alleviation of these
conditions might have the effect of diminishing warfare, if not of eliminating
it altogether.
Second, even if nothing can be done about the periodic outbreak of
war, it does not follow that we ought to shut up and accept it without
complaint. No serious person expects, say, that evil can be eliminated from the
human condition, yet we condemn it and struggle against its expression in human
affairs. We strive to divert potential evildoers from their malevolent course
of action. Scientists and doctors continue to seek cures for cancers that have
afflicted humanity for millennia. Even conditions that cannot be wholly
eliminated can sometimes be mitigated, but only if someone tries to mitigate
them.
Finally, whatever else one might say about the pacifists, one may
surely say that if everyone were a pacifist, no wars would occur. Pacifism may
be criticized on various grounds, as it always has been and still is, but to
say that pacifists “lack any shred of political decency” seems itself to be
indecent. Remember: war is horrible, as everybody now concedes but many
immediately put out of mind.
(8) “Every war is horrible, but freedom and justice cannot
be allowed to be defeated by tyranny and injustice. As hideous as war is it is
not as hideous as the things it can stop and prevent.”
This statement assumes that war amounts to a contest between
freedom and justice on one side and tyranny and injustice on the other. One
scarcely commits the dreaded sin of moral equivalence, however, by observing
that few wars present such a stark contrast, in which only the children of God
fight on one side and only the children of Satan fight on the other. One reason
why war is so horrible is that it invariably drags into its charnel house
many—again, the children are the most undeniable examples—who must be held
blameless for any actions or threats that might have incited the war.
Even if we set aside such clear-cut innocents and consider only
persons in the upper echelons of the conflicting sides, it is rare to find all
angels on one side and all demons on the other. In World War II, for example,
the Allied states were led by such angels as Winston Churchill, who relished
the horrific terror bombing of German cities; Josef Stalin, one of the greatest
mass murderers of all time; Franklin D. Roosevelt, of whose moral uprightness
the less said the better; and Harry S Truman, who took pleasure in annihilating
hundreds of thousands of defenseless Japanese noncombatants first with
incendiary bombs and ultimately with nuclear weapons. Yes, the other side had
Adolf Hitler, whose fiendishness I have no desire to deny, but the overall
character of the leadership on both sides sufficiently attests that there was
enough evil to go around. As for the ordinary soldiers, of course, everyone who
knows anything about actual combat appreciates that once engaged, the men on
both sides quickly become brutalized and routinely commit atrocities of every
imaginable size and shape.
So, it is far from clear that war is always or even typically “not
as hideous as the things it can stop and prevent.” On many occasions, refusal
to resort to war, even in the face of undeniable evils, may still be the better
course. When World War II ended, leaving more than 62 million dead, most of
them civilians, and hundreds of millions displaced, homeless, wounded, sick, or
impoverished, the survivors might well have doubted whether conditions would
have been even more terrible had the war not taken place. (The dead were
unavailable for comment.) To make matters worse, owing to the war, the monster
Stalin had gained control of an enormous area stretching from Czechoslovakia to
Korea; and soon, because of the defeat of the Japanese Empire, the monster Mao
Zedong would take complete control of China and impose a murderous reign of
terror on the world’s most populous country that cost the lives of perhaps
another 60 million persons (as many as 77 million, according to one plausible
estimate). It is difficult to believe that the situation in China
(9) “I grant you the war is horrible, but it is a war, after
all. You have to compare apples to apples, and when I do that, I see this war
is going well.”
This statement about the current war in Iraq
(10) “[Certain writers] all agreed that war is horrible but
said the Bible gives government the authority to wage war to save innocent
lives.”
Biblical scholars have been disputing what Christians may and may
not do with regard to war for almost two thousand years. The dispute continues
today, so the matter is certainly not resolved among devout Christians. Even if
Christians may go to war to save innocent lives, however, a big question
remains: is the government going to war for this purpose or for one of the
countless other purposes that lead governments to make war? Saving the innocent
makes an appealing excuse, but often, if not always, it is only a pretext.
“Just war” writers from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Grotius to the latest
contributors have agonized over the ready availability of such pretexts and
warned against the wickedness of advancing them when the real motives are less
justifiable or even plainly immoral.
For centuries, European combatants on all sides invoked God’s
blessing for their wars against one another. As recently as World War II, the
Germans had “Gott Mit Uns,” a declaration that adorned the belt buckles of
Wehrmacht soldiers in both world wars. Strange to say, in 1917
and 1918, Christian ministers of the gospel in pulpits across the United States
were assuring the congregations that their nation-state was engaged in a “war for
righteousness” (the title of Richard M. Gamble’s splendid book about this
repellent episode). So invoking Biblical authority really doesn’t get us very
far: the enemy may be invoking the same authority.
Nowadays, of course, one side invokes the Jewish and Christian
God, whereas the other calls upon the blessing of Allah. Whether this
bifurcated manner of gaining divine sanction for the commission of mass murder
and mayhem represents progress or not, I leave to the learned theologians.
(11) “War is horrible but thank God we have men and women
who are willing and able to protect our people and our freedom.”
These men and women may be willing and able to supply such
protection, but do they? Our leaders constantly proclaim that their wars are
aimed at protecting us and our freedoms—“we go forward,” declares George W.
Bush, “to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world”—but one
has to wonder, considering that in the entire history of warfare in the United
States, each war (with the possible exception of the War for Independence) has
left the general run of the American people with fewer freedoms after the war
than they enjoyed before the war. Every time the rulers set out to protect the
village, they decide that the best way to do so is to destroy it in the
process. Call me a cynic, but I can’t help wondering whether protection of the
people and their freedoms was really the state’s objective, and after
forty-five years of thinking about the matter, I’ve come up with some pretty
attractive alternative hypotheses. One of them, as Marine General Smedley Butler
famously expressed it, is that war is a racket, but I have others, too.
(12) “War is horrible but some economic good came out of
World War II. It brought the United
States
This venerable broken-window fallacy refuses to die, no matter how
many times a stake is driven through its heart. Most Americans believe it.
Worse, because less excusable, nearly all historians and even a large majority
of economists do so as well. I’ve been whacking this nonsense for several
decades, but so far as I can tell, I’ve scarcely made a dent in it. Should
anyone care to see a complete counterargument, I recommend the first five
chapters of my book Depression,
War, and Cold War (2006).
(13) “War is horrible, but whining about it is worse. Either
put up or shut up.”
Some people always reject the denunciation of any familiar social
institution or conduct unless the denouncer offers a “constructive criticism,”
that is, unless he puts forward a promising plan to eliminate the evil he
denounces. I admit at once that I have discovered no cure for the human
tendency to resort to war when much more intelligent and humane alternatives
are available. I’m trying to convince people that on nearly all occasions, they
are allowing their rulers to bamboozle them and to turn them into cannon fodder
for purposes that serve the rulers’ interests, not the people’s. I’m getting
nowhere in this effort, but I’m going to keep trying. I’m also going to
continue to denounce stupidity, ignorance, ugliness, bullying, bad breath, and
rap music, even though I don’t expect to succeed in those quests, either.
(14) “Of course, war is horrible, but at present, it’s still
the only guarantee to maintain peace.”
The statement as it stands is self-contradictory because it
affirms that the only way to make sure that we will have peace is to go to war.
Perhaps, if we are feeling generous, we may interpret the statement as the
time-honored exhortation that to maintain the peace, we should prepare for war, hoping that by dissuading any
aggressor from moving against us, our preparation will preserve the peace.
Although this policy is not self-contradictory, it is dangerous, because the
preparation we make for war may itself move us toward actually going to war.
For example, preparation for war may entail increasing the number of military
officers and allowing the top brass to exert greater influence in policy
making. Those officers may see that without war, their careers will go nowhere,
and hence they may tilt their advice to civilian authorities toward risking or
actually making war, even when peace might easily be preserved. Likewise,
military suppliers may use their political influence to foster international
suspicions and fears that otherwise might be allayed. Wars are not good for
business in general, but they are good for the munitions contractors. Certain
legislators may develop an interest in militarism; perhaps it helps them to
attract campaign contributions from arms contractors, veterans’ groups, and
members of the national guard and military reserve organizations. Pretty soon
we may find ourselves dealing, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower did, with a
military-industrial-congressional complex, and we may find that it packs a
great deal of political punch and acts in a way that, all things considered,
diminishes the chances of keeping the country at peace.
From the foregoing commentary, a recurrent theme may be extracted:
those who argue that “war is horrible, but . . .” nearly always use this
rhetorical construction not to frame a genuinely serious and honest balancing
of reasons for and against war, but only to acknowledge what cannot be
hidden—that war is horrible—and then to pass on immediately to an affirmation
that notwithstanding the horrors, whose actual forms and dimensions they
neither specify nor examine in detail, a certain war ought to be fought.
The reasons given to justify its being fought, however, generally
amount to claims that cannot support a strong case. Often they are not even
bona fide reasons, but mere propaganda, especially when they emanate from
official sources. Sometimes they rest on historical errors, such as the claim
that the armed forces in past wars have somehow kept foreigners from depriving
us of our liberties. Often the case for war rests on ill-founded speculation
about what will happen if we do not go to war.
People need to recognize, however, that government officials and
their running dogs in the media, among others, are not soothsayers. None of us
knows the future, but these interested parties lack a disinterested motive for
making a careful, well-informed forecast. They have, as the saying goes, an
agenda of their own. “The best and the brightest” of our leaders and their kept
experts generally amount to little more than what C. Wright Mills called
“crackpot realists,” and on occasion, such as the present one, they don’t meet
even that standard. Hence, lately, these geniuses, equipped with all that
secret information they constantly emphasize their critics don’t possess, have
put forward forecasts of a “cake walk” through Iraq, a “slam dunk” on finding
lots of weapons of mass destruction there, and liberal-democratic dominoes
falling across the Middle East—forecasts that fit more comfortably in a lunatic
asylum than in a discussion among rational, well-informed people.
The government generally relies on marshalling patriotic emotion
and reflexive loyalty rather than on making a sensible case for going to war.
Much of the discussion that does take place is a sham, because the government
officials who pretend to listen to other opinions, as U.S.
If someone demands that the skeptic about war offer constructive
criticism, here is my proposal: always insist that the burden of proof rest heavily on the warmonger. This
protocol, which is now anything but standard operating procedure, is eminently
judicious because, as we all recognize, war is horrible. Given its horrors,
which in reality are much greater than most people appreciate, it only makes
sense that those who propose to enter into those horrors make a very, very
strong case for doing so. If they cannot―and I submit that they almost never
can―then people will serve their interests best by declining an invitation to
war. As a rule, the most rational, humane, and auspicious course of action is
indeed to give peace a chance.
RATIONALIZING WARS, GIVING EXCUSES, LIP-SERVICE
 Robert HiggsRobert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Full Biography and Recent Publications |
THINK
GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY
PREVENTING
WARS, WORKING FOR PEACE by Dick Bennett
The phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally”
needs constant examination. We cannot respond
to all global problems (or local for that matter), but we can think clearly
about what matters most. Let us ask:
What is most urgent? Until recently,
perhaps most people in the world would reply: nuclear weapons. Since 1945 humans have possessed the power to
destroy itself (and other species).
That was the deepest fear underlying the Soviet Union/United States
(US/SU) conflict. Now the scientific
consensus and a growing public awareness add global warming. Already many people perceive warming as the
greater of the two threats. Climate
change and the proliferation of ever more deadly weapons now threaten human
survival. We can say that as we begin
the 21st century humans must learn to cope effectively with these
two global threats, or expect the earth’s population to be reduced from 9
billion to one.
We are making progress. Realizing what we are up against is a major
achievement. Not averting our eyes from
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and from rising seas and weather
extremes is the foundation for coping.
Believing in our ability to cope is equally important and equally
credible. No leap of faith is required. We now know, for example, that war is not
immutably fixed in “human nature.”
Numerous anthropological studies have provided this additional
foundation for hope. Douglas Fry’s The Human Potential for Peace offers one
survey and summation. War is a changing,
changeable social institution, which has been created by humans and can be
prevented by them, as history shows in hundreds of cases. Humans have shown themselves to be flexible,
resilient, and imaginative enough to make the transition from war and the
adaptation to warming conceivable.
And now do we possess the necessary basic
knowledge, we are already asking the question:
How might we prepare? And we
are already significantly at work around the world. People understand that we must mobilize on
two familiar fronts—locally and globally--, both necessary to facing the
reality essential to effectiveness. If
we work only locally without thorough knowledge of global contexts, we will be
undermined by our own ignorance and naivete regarding the need of individuals
to push their governments; if we work only globally we will be undermined by
our ignorance of how the problems affect real persons and how individuals’
ingenuity is already solving problems, and by the absence of the invigoration
of people cooperating to end wars and adapt to warming.
We must foster goodwill in every way we can, and the grassroots human
achievement in creating caring societies is so immense as to be justifiably
described as evolutionary. But our
local work is not enough. We must also create structures and institutions of
effective global governance if we are to change wars and warming into behaviors
that will sustain us. Cities, states,
regions, nations have created conflict resolution customs and legal systems to
prevent violence to humans and to the land.
Self-regarding behavior--self-redress in conflicts and self-destruction
of air, land, and water—is constrained by other-regarding laws and
customs. Because we have in the past,
we know we can meet the challenge of the future by bringing the sheriff and the
judge to the warriors and polluters.
Contents of #1 Feb. I, 2011
CAUSES
Old Men in Power
Profit$
General Smedley Butler
Merchants of Death
Resources
Enjoyment
Climate Change: Refugees
PREVENTION
Empathy, Forgiveness
Refuting Lies, Myths, Illusions
Graphic Truth of Combat
Contents of #2 March 26, 2011
Preventing Wars:
Kucinich: Opposition to Another
US War
Causes and Prevention of Wars
Books: Corporate-Pentagon-Congressional-White
House-Corp. Media Complex:
Lockheed
Martin by Bill Hartung and Eisenhower
by James Ledbetter
Climate Change: Global Warring By Cleo Paskal,
William Blum, Anti-Empire Report,
Deception by Leaders
Lessons Learned from War by a
Japanese
END
CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF WARS NEWSLETTER #4
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