Random News & Views Roundup

- The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story

At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching, radioactive fireball. The persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving center of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero.

And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in 9 seconds. The entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out.

Take a moment to remember all of the victims.

- Musharraf has called off declaring a state of emergency after getting his hand slapped by Bush and Condi.

- As the British prepare to leave Basra:

"Basra's residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly withdrawal but rather as an ignominious defeat," according to a report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) on Basra published in June. "Today, the city is controlled by militias, seemingly more powerful and unconstrained than before."
[...]
The outlook for the two million people in Basra, Iraq's second largest city, is not good. According to the ICG report, violence in the city has little to do with sectarianism or anti-occupation resistance but involves "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighbourhood vigilantism... together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors."

- Bush...press conference...Iran...blah blah blah...yawn. This was the highlight:

Bush downplayed reports from Tehran that al-Maliki and Ahmadinejad appeared warm and friendly, including pictures of the two men smiling and holding hands as they appeared at a news conference.

"You want to be cordial with the person you're with. You don't want to be duking it out," said Bush, who jokingly posed in a boxing stance at his podium. "I'm not surprised there's a picture showing people smiling."

Just call him Boxer Guy

- Meanwhile, Darth Cheney has reportedly been pushing for "airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force...according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy." Another handy WH leak to put more pressure on Iran, no doubt.

- How's that "spreading democracy" thing going for you, Bush?

The paradox of American policy in the Middle East — promoting democracy on the assumption it will bring countries closer to the West — is that almost everywhere there are free elections, the American-backed side tends to lose.

Lebanon’s voters in the Metn district, in other words, appeared to have joined the Palestinians, who voted for Hamas; the Iraqis, who voted for a government sympathetic to Iran; and the Egyptians, who have voted in growing numbers in recent elections for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. “No politician can afford to identify with the West because poll after poll shows people don’t believe in the U.S. agenda,” said Mustafa Hamarneh, until recently the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. Mr. Hamarneh is running for a seat in Jordan’s Parliament in November, but he says he has made a point of keeping his campaign focused locally, and on bread-and-butter issues. “If somebody goes after you as pro-American he can hurt you,” he said.

- Simon Jenkins in The Guardian:

It takes inane optimism to see victory in Afghanistan

This war against the Taliban is part of a post-imperial spasm. The longer it is waged, the graver the consequences
[...]
Iraq is post-imperialism for fast learners, Afghanistan for slow ones.
[...]
In the provinces, the Americans are running a guerrilla army out of Bagram, trying to kill as many "Taliban" or "al-Qaida" as possible, while the British heroically re-enact the Zulu wars down in Helmand. Neither takes any notice of President Hamid Karzai, whose deals with warlords, druglords, Iranians and Taliban collaborators are probably the best hope of stabilising Afghanistan when the foreign occupation is over. But since that is claimed by Britain to be virtually never, the only certainty is a rising tempo of insurgency.

read the rest...

Two Very Disturbing War Stories

One from Afghanistan. The other from Iraq.

Afghanistan:

Thousands of angry demonstrators took to the streets in Afghanistan yesterday after US forces were involved in a panicked shooting which left 16 civilians dead and 23 injured.

Local people as well as a number of Afghan officials accused the American marines of opening fire indiscriminately following a suicide bomb attack on their convoy in Nangarhar province.

With protests continuing to grow, and the police coming under attack from stone- throwing crowds, the US military maintained that the casualties were the victims of a "complex ambush" in which gunmen had carried out a synchronised attack following the blast in which a marine was injured.

But Mohammad Khan Katawazi, the district chief of Shinwar district, where the deaths took place, insisted that they "treated every car and person along the highway as a potential attacker" as they attempted to speed away from the scene of the explosion.

Abdul Ghafour and Noor Agha Zwak, speaking on behalf of the Nangarhar police and government, and Zemeri Bashary, the Interior Ministry spokesman in Kabul, also claimed the deaths and injuries were due to American fire.

Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Monday, March 5 — Iraqi special forces and British troops stormed the offices of an Iraqi government intelligence agency in the southern city of Basra on Sunday, and British officials said they discovered about 30 prisoners, some showing signs of torture.
[...]
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a conservative Shiite, condemned the raid in Basra. He publicly said nothing about the evidence of torture.

“The prime minister has ordered an immediate investigation into the incident of breaking into the security compound in Basra and stressed the need to punish those who have carried out this illegal and irresponsible act,” said the full text of a statement issued late Sunday by his office.

It remained unclear why he sought to pursue the raiding force aggressively rather than the accusations of prisoner abuse. Efforts to reach officials in his office were unsuccessful.

The civilian deaths in Afghanistan will obviously be the subject of an investigation resulting in the usual conflicting reports.

The raid in Basra and al-Maliki's response to it however ought to be raising some serious red flags for those who have gushed about how cooperative and compliant he's been. This situation, coupled with his terse dismissal of an alleged rape perpetrated by Iraqi security officials in February, shows a man who is far too devoted to sectarian interests to be an effective leader of a country in grave turmoil at a time when bridges need to be built between the warring religious factions.

The discovery of prisoners in the Basra offices, which the British described as the headquarters of Iraq’s government intelligence agency, echoed other recent cases in which American or British forces stumbled onto a government-run detention center that held people showing signs of torture.

As recently as December, a combined force of British and Iraqi troops assaulted a police station in Basra and rescued 127 prisoners from fetid conditions. Some of the prisoners had been tortured.

The most significant recent case involved a secret Baghdad prison run by the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry, known as Site 4 and discovered by American and Iraqi troops last year, where more than 1,400 prisoners were discovered and where some had been subjected to systematic abuse.

al-Maliki has promised a cabinet shuffle within the next couple of weeks in an attempt, he says, to root out corruption. That certainly remains to be seen, especially if he continues to come to the defence of forces that are torturing and raping people. I have a feeling he won't be around much longer - nor should he be - unless the US decides to continue to prop him up so they can get their oil deals sealed.

Related: Media Censorship by the US Military in Afghanistan following the suicide bombing.