What did you do today? What are your plans for tomorrow? Normal stuff? Go
to work? Pick up the kids? Preparing dinner? Maybe a drink in the bar with
some friends, or stay at home with the latest blockbuster movie? If so, then
you are doing pretty much the same thing as billions of other people around
the world, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Life goes
on after all. Or does it? I mean, will normal life go on indefinitely?
You see, I was checking the news today and…well, “oh boy” is
the best way I can describe it.
Let me make it clear, I didn’t go looking
for bad news. I have no masochistic tendencies that lead me to seek out and
play up the uglier side of life on earth, far from it. All I did was peruse
the headlines from various news sources.
Take a gander for yourself.
Prepare
yourself for the unthinkable: war against Iran may be a necessity
27 Jan 06
The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to
have to get ready for war with Iran. Being of a free-speaking, free-thinking
disposition, we generally find in the West that hand-wringing, finger-pointing
and second-guessing come more easily to us than cold, strategic thinking.
Confronted with nightmarish perils we instinctively choose to seize the opportunity
to blame each other, cursing our domestic opponents for the situation they’ve
put us in.
This one came from the right wing London Times. The Times editors seem eager
that the world should just accept the 'fact' that Iran is toast,
and we all need to just deal with that 'fact'. I suppose part of reconciling
ourselves to this "truth" is that that we should ignore those other
Truths that: Iran has never claimed that it wanted a nuclear bomb. Iran has
never invaded another country or even threatened to do so. The obvious real reason
for a US or Israeli-lead attack on Iran is that Israel wants to maintain its
dominant position as the only nuclear nation in the Middle East. That Iran
as "rogue state" is being subjected to the very same process of
demonisation that Iraq suffered and which lead us all to support the illegal
and wholly unnecessary invasion of Iraq. Of course, we didn’t know we
were being lied to about Iraq, but now that the same people are saying the
same things about Iran, should be believe them? But maybe you are thinking that at least we still have Democracy, that there is still some accountability. That in the case that Bush and his advisors
really do pose a danger to all our futures, the Democratic system would safeguard the interests of the people over those of the elected representatives. After all, we have Congress and the Senate, the judicial system.
Swinging by the UK independent we read:
Blair and Bush 'conspired to go to war regardless of United Nations'
29 January 2006
Tony Blair knew that George Bush was only "going through the motions" of
offering support for a second UN resolution in the run-up to the Iraq war,
it was claimed last night.
According to reports in The Mail on Sunday, the Prime Minister and the US
President decided to go to war regardless of whether they obtained UN backing.
The allegations will undermine claims that the final decision to go to war
was not made until MPs voted in the Commons a day before military action.
It will also bolster claims that the President and Mr Blair decided to go
to war months before military action began.
What we are being told in the above is that a decision to wage a needless
and illegal war on Iraq (leading to the deaths of several thousand American
soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians) was made by the American
and British governments in very much the same way as it would be made under
a dictatorship. Is the average American or British citizen aware of this?
But still, our normal lives remain intact, there is no obvious sign of a dictatorship
in the American or British heartland. Not yet, perhaps. But over at the
UK Guardian we read:
Iran
crisis 'could drive oil over $90'
So incase any of us were thinking that we could just ignore an attack on
Iran as yet one more 'something' happening 'over there' and get on with our normal
lives; oil at over $90 a barrel will mean skyrocketing gasoline and other
fuel prices and the inevitable shortages. How will you pick up the kids when
all the gas stations have run out? Take the bus? There may be no gas to run
the buses either. How long will it take to walk to your kids school? You might
have to skip that drink at the bar or the movie for the foreseeable future.
What other effects on the faltering American economy would a massive increase
in the cost of American industry's life-blood entail? Ford just laid off 36,000 workers,
and this was just the latest in a series of such redundancies in what were
once secure American job sectors. The mainstream news papers are telling us
that this scenario is coming, and coming soon, and that it is only the beginning.
But then, maybe this is all just media rhetoric, maybe there will be no attack
on Iran, no oil price explosion. Sadly, browsing over to United Press International
we read:
BMD
Watch: Trident Subs Will Fight Terror
Jan 25, 2006
The U.S. Navy is converting some of its prized nuclear strategic submarines
to launch precision, conventional munitions strikes against terrorist bases
and similar targets.
Four ultra-stealth Ohio-class SSBNs are having their 24 Trident II D-5 nuclear
ballistic missiles removed and replaced with up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles,
Defense Industry Daily reported Jan. 18.
It doesn’t exactly sound like the U.S. military is planning
to reduce world tensions, now does it? Note that these subs and Tomahawks will
be used in the "war on terror", that is to say, against an undefined
enemy who, it is claimed, exists in bases in countries all over the globe.
Which means that we can expect many more unprovoked violations of national
sovereignty by the US government, but this time it will be with Submarines
and Tomahawks rather than unmanned drones and smaller missiles. What might
that do for world peace do you think? But the U.S. military doesn't
even need to stir things up directly, because as the Washington Post informs
us:
Pentagon
Can Now Fund Foreign Militaries
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Congress has granted unusual authority for the Pentagon to spend as much as
$200 million of its own budget to aid foreign militaries, a break with the
traditional practice of channeling foreign military assistance through the
State Department.
The move, included in a little-noticed provision of the 2006 National Defense
Authorization Act passed last month, marks a legislative victory for Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who pushed hard for the new powers to deal with
emergency situations.
But it has drawn warnings from foreign policy specialists inside and outside
the government, who say it could lead to growth of a separate military assistance
effort not subject to the same constraints applied to foreign aid programs
that are administered by the State Department. Such constraints are meant to
ensure that aid recipients meet certain standards, including respect for human
rights and protection of legitimate civilian authorities.
Which means that the very same U.S government department that gave us the cooked up evidence
that lead to the Iraq invasion, now has the authority to funnel millions of
dollars to arm any group it wants, in any country it wants. Not only that, but
the previous restrictions that prevented such funding ending up in
the coffers of armies that opposed the established civilian government
will no longer apply. In essence, the American Congress has given Donald Rumsfeld
the authority to send money to terrorist groups, if Rumsfeld thinks it is
in the 'national interest' to do so.
Meanwhile, as if the threats to attack Iran were not enough to push the world closer to the brink of destruction, things in
the Israel/Palestine conflict have taken a new turn for the worse:
Hamas rejects donor 'blackmail'
A senior Hamas leader has rejected demands that the Islamic militant group
must renounce violence to prevent aid cuts for the Palestinian Authority.
President George W Bush warned US aid, worth $400m (£225m), could be
cut following Hamas' surprise poll win.
The Palestinian elections could not have turned out a worse result for the
Palestinians, or a better result for Israel. For the past 50 years, successive Israeli
governments have been attempting to cast the Palestinians as 'terrorists' with
varying degrees of success. Now, with the election of Hamas, the Israeli establishment
has achieved that goal. Things could not have gone better if the Israelis themselves
had been directing Palestinian policy. Of course, there is evidence to suggest
that, via Hamas, Israel has been directing Palestinian policy for
many years, which certainly helps us to understand how the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict has reached its current impasse and how Israel seems to have realised its long-held
goals. For example, what better gift could there be to Israeli hardliners in
their dealings with the new Palestinian government than to be permitted to
assassinate it's leaders?
Ex-Israeli
spy chief: Hamas ministers may be hunted
The architect of Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian militants said
on Sunday Israel should hunt down wanted Hamas leaders even if they become
ministers in a newly elected Palestinian government.
So what to do? How do we stop the Middle East conflict from boiling over into a massive bloodbath? Can we rely on the U.S. to
mediate? The Norwegian Daily Aftenposten dispels such an idea with the story:
USA
threats after boycott support
Aftenposten
30 Jan 2006
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened Norway with "serious
political consequences" after Finance Minister and Socialist Left Party
leader Kristin Halvorsen admitted to supporting a boycott of Israeli goods.
So we see that, far from acting as a calming force, the U.S.
government is determined to ensure that Israel will be allowed to do as it
pleases in the Middle East, and it will not tolerate any attempts by any other
nation to interfere with the process of auto-destruct upon which Israel seems
to have embarked.
Some Americans are indeed noticing that all is not well. A recent poll informs
us:
Zogby
People's Poll; 100% of Blacks Oppose Alito and Think Iraq War Unjustified
Yet hot on the heels of that little snippet, from Yahoo News we discover:
New
Orleans May Lose 80 Percent of Blacks
The city of New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population
if people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to damaged
neighborhoods, according to an analysis by a Brown University sociologist.
Meanwhile if the idea of manipulated inevitable war and death does not make you sit
up and take notice, realise that mother earth can hardly be said to be at peace either:
Hurricanes
Shape New Natural Order
Stark
warning over climate change
And thanks again to the U.S. government, we may never know the real extent
of the threat to our normal lives from our once benevolent environment, at
least not until it is too late:
Climate
Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him
What I am trying to show here is that the time when we were protected from,
and could ignore, what was going on in the world around us and just let our
leaders get on with taking care of us has long since passed. The facts
that prove the truth of this are screaming at us
from the front pages of our mainstream newspapers. While we were all busy
getting on with normal life over the past few decades, it seems that our
leaders were quietly creating a new reality for us. The 9/11 attacks constituted
the first peek behind the curtain on that new reality, and if the intimations
in the daily newspapers are anything to go by, the full unveiling is yet to
come.
As suggested by the above-mentioned Times of London article, today
as we go about our normal daily lives, the truth of that new reality is
unimaginable to most of us, but the plans have been very carefully
laid to ensure that, as the Times also suggests, none of us will
be able to escape it. The only thing left that is within our power to decide
is how traumatised we will be by the 'sudden' unveiling of this new reality.
Will we be so overwhelmed that we will be unable to function and forced to
blindly follow the dictates of those leaders that subtly manipulated us into
this position in the first place? Or will we take the time and effort to prepare
now, to sit up and take notice, to accept the fact that to continue to live
our normal lives to the exclusion of the broader reality is to hand control of
our future to people who have made it very clear that their vision
is one of global death and destruction. The choice is yours. Take your time.
But do not take too long. The writing is on the wall and all over the papers.
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