Just Foreign Policy News
May 6, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
*Action: Urge your Rep. to co-sponsor the McGovern-Jones bill
Reps. McGovern and Jones have introduced a bill – HR 1735, the "Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act" – requiring the President to: present Congress with a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan; report quarterly on the implementation of the plan for military withdrawal and the costs of continuing the war; report on the savings to taxpayers of ending the war in 6 months vs. continuing it for 5 years.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/hr1735
Republicans Cheer Calls for Afghanistan Withdrawal at Fox Debate
Audience goes wild when Ron Paul and Gary Johnson call for ending the war.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/05/ron-paul-afghanistan-withdrawal-gop-presidential-debate_n_858381.html
Glenn Greenwald: The Osama bin Laden exception
It matters if Osama bin Laden was "killed while resisting" or "killed after capture," because if there is an "Osama bin Laden exception" to the rule of law, it’s not likely that the exception can be confined to Osama bin Laden.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/06/bin_laden/index.html
Stephen Weissman: A call for Congress to explain the Libya mission
The goal of US forces in Libya is almost exactly the opposite of what President Obama and his administration say it is. By cloaking its endgame, the administration has been obscuring difficult policy choices that are coming up. It is time for Congress to participate more fully in determining what the US will do in Libya.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/159657-a-call-for-congress-to-explain-the-libya-mission
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced new legislation in the House of Representatives to require the Obama administration to present an exit strategy for all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, ABC News reports. "We must use this opportunity to re-examine our policy and to require the administration to tell us exactly how and when we will end our massive troop presence in Afghanistan," Rep. Jim McGovern said. "Our bill requires the president to give Congress a concrete strategy and timeframe for bringing our servicemen and women home to their families and communities where they belong."
The bill would require President Obama to transmit to Congress a plan with a timeframe and completion date on the transition of U.S. military and security operations in Afghanistan to the Karzai government, establish a quarterly report from the president on the status of the transition and the cost of remaining in Afghanistan, including increased deficit and public debt, and would oblige the administration to disclose to Congress savings should the U.S. accelerate redeployment to conclude the transition of operations within six months.
The current plan from the White House would begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan this July, and transition security to the Afghan government in 2014, but the lawmakers are pressing the president for an extensive decrease and a plan to eventually bring all troops home, not just a token withdrawal of a few thousand troops this summer.
2) When news of Osama bin Laden’s demise ricocheted around the world, there was conspicuous silence from Afghanistan’s Taliban, the Wall Street Journal reports. Tuesday night, after nearly two days of unusual silence, the Taliban’s well-oiled media machine finally issued a short statement saying there was no credible evidence from those close to bin Laden to prove he was dead. Conspicuously absent was praise for the Saudi fugitive and condemnation of the U.S. "One of the biggest problems we had with the Taliban was: What are [they] going to do with bin Laden? They are not reacting because they are relieved," said Gilles Dorronsoro, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Bin Laden was a big problem for the Taliban." Taliban field commanders said they have been instructed by the Taliban high command not to make any statements about bin Laden’s demise.
3) A group of former US military interrogators are pushing back against the notion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" led to the intelligence that helped US officials locate Osama bin Laden, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Four former intelligence officials released a statement Wednesday countering recent Bush administration officials claiming credit for the intelligence gains that led to bin Laden’s death. "We are concerned about the suggestion by some that the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques led US forces to Osama bin Laden’s compound," reads the statement, signed by former military and FBI interrogators. The interrogators assert that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others "did not divulge the nom de guerre of a courier during torture, but rather several months later, when they were questioned by interrogators who did not use abusive techniques."
4) Even if Iran obtains nuclear weapons it will not use them against Israel or other countries in the Middle East, Israeli Defense Minister Barak told Haaretz, AFP reports. Israeli politicians including Netanyahu have repeatedly raised the spectre of a nuclear attack by Iran. Barak also criticized statements, including by Netanyahu, comparing the threat Iran poses to Israel with the situation that faced German Jews in 1938.
5) President Obama’s proposal to reduce the projected defense budget by $400 billion over the next 12 years is only the opening bid on how far down defense budgets could go, writes former military budget official Gordon Adams in the Washington Post. The defense budget could actually be cut by $1 trillion, or 15 percent below current projections over the next decade, and there is a wealth of proposals for how to do it, starting with those from the [co-chairs of] president’s own fiscal responsibility commission, the Rivlin-Domenici debt task force and the report by Reps. Barney Frank and Ron Paul.
Israel/Palestine
6) Secretary of State Clinton refused to slam the door on negotiations that could include Hamas as part of a larger Palestinian authority, even as Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, said he was fully committed to working for a two-state solution, the New York Times reports. The Obama administration has reacted warily to the reconciliation pact, but pointedly officials have not rejected it outright. A senior administration official said the US, unlike in the past, did not want to preclude a genuine shift by Hamas, or force the Palestinians into a corner by denouncing any alliance that would include Hamas. "There are many steps that have yet to be undertaken in order to implement the agreement," Clinton said. "And we are going to be carefully assessing what this actually means, because there are a number of different potential meanings to it, both on paper and in practice."
Differences between France and Germany seemed to be widening over the question of whether the UN should endorse a declaration of Palestinian independence in September, the Times says. President Sarkozy implied he would support the idea of recognition if Middle East peace efforts remained stalemated through the summer.
Iraq
7) House Speaker Boehner said he would support keeping a contingent of troops in Iraq beyond the end of the year, the New York Times reports. He would be likely to meet resistance from members of both parties who believe the occupation has gone on too long and is too costly given the current fight over budget deficits, the Times says.
Honduras
8) The level of repression in Honduras, after a nationwide wave of attacks on the opposition in March and early April, now exceeds that of the weeks immediately following the June 2009 military coup, writes Dana Frank in The Nation. Through all of this, the Obama administration’s response has been to blame the victim. The State Department is obsessed with getting Honduras readmitted to the OAS, she writes. The sticking point is Zelaya’s safe return to the country. Although the Honduran courts just dropped the last of their trumped-up charges against Zelaya, it’s unclear whether it will ever be safe for Lobo’s illegitimate government to have Zelaya, an immensely popular symbol of the resistance, speaking freely within Honduras–or whether Zelaya could safely step on Honduran soil without being killed by paramilitaries.
Mexico
9) This weekend, Mexicans in at least 25 of the country’s 31 states will protest to stop the drug war, writes Kristin Bricker for Upside Down World. This weekend’s mobilizations are expected to be Mexico’s largest anti-drug war protests to-date. Moreover, nearly every sector of Mexican society has confirmed its participation in the protests.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Lawmakers to President Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan
John R. Parkinson, ABC News, May 05, 2011 1:06 PM
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/05/lawmakers-to-president-obama-get-out-of-afghanistan.html
With the corpse of Public Enemy No. 1 now submerged on the floor of the Arabian Sea, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced new legislation in the House of Representatives today to require the Obama administration to present an exit strategy for all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden Sunday and with just an estimated 100 members of al Qaeda remaining in Afghanistan, Rep. James McGovern, the chief architect of the legislation, asked rhetorically whether "it really make sense to keep using over 100,000 U.S. troops to occupy Afghanistan and prop up a corrupt government?"
"We must use this opportunity to re-examine our policy and to require the administration to tell us exactly how and when we will end our massive troop presence in Afghanistan," McGovern, D-Mass., said. "Our bill requires the president to give Congress a concrete strategy and timeframe for bringing our servicemen and women home to their families and communities where they belong."
The bill would require President Obama to transmit to Congress a plan with a timeframe and completion date on the transition of U.S. military and security operations in Afghanistan to the Karzai government, establish a quarterly report from the president on the status of the transition and the cost of remaining in Afghanistan, including increased deficit and public debt, and would oblige the administration to disclose to Congress any savings should the U.S. accelerate redeployment to conclude the transition of operations within six months.
The current plan from the White House would begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan this July, and transition security to the Afghan government in 2014, but the lawmakers are pressing the president for an extensive decrease and a plan to eventually bring all troops home, not just a token withdrawal of a few thousand troops this summer.
"The president told us that we will see a substantial drawdown of troops in July. He needs to keep that promise, and he needs to tell us when all of our troops will be coming home, and how much it will keep costing the American people – in sacrificed lives, wounded bodies and minds, and U.S. tax dollars – until this war is finally over," McGovern said. "For too long, Congress has ducked its proper oversight responsibilities when it comes to the war in Afghanistan. We’ve avoided meaningful debate and discussion and have chosen to simply ‘go along to get along.’ Today we – in a bipartisan way – plan to force an end to that pattern. We will utilize every opportunity available to us to end that inexcusable indifference."
Rep. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, touched on a similar question asked by John Kerry when he testified before Congress decades ago on the Vietnam War by quoting a retired Marine general’s email.
"What do we say to the mother and father, the wife of the last Marine killed to support a corrupt government and a corrupt leader?" Jones quoted from the general’s letter.
"It is time for the American people to demand from the United States Congress that we get behind Mr. McGovern’s bill and we start a process to bring our troops home from Afghanistan," Jones said.
McGovern and Jones say they are lining up bipartisan support for the measure, including the backing of seven House Republicans including Reps. Jason Chaffetz, Jimmy Duncan, Ron Paul, Tim Johnson, Justin Amash, and Roscoe Bartlett. Nine Democrats have signed on as original cosponsors as well.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she was unsure about the details that McGovern’s bill specifically called for, but signaled the commitment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan should not be open-ended – a message she took to the Afghan president when she visited the region in March.
"I do know that the American people want us to draw [troop levels] down. I don’t know that — how much of an impact the death of Osama bin Laden has. He’s a person; he’s a symbol," Pelosi said. "It isn’t an end to the threat to our national security, and that’s how we have to make the judgment. But again, my message to the president of Afghanistan and to others that I met was: This is — this has to come to an end."
2) Taliban’s Muted Response Draws Attention
Dion Nissenbaum and Habib Khan Totakhil, Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704740604576301243028187716.html
Kabul – When news of Osama bin Laden’s demise ricocheted around the world, there was conspicuous silence from a crucial voice: Afghanistan’s Taliban, his erstwhile host and protector.
While Islamist groups in Gaza and Egypt quickly came out to praise al Qaeda’s founder and condemn his killing, the Taliban’s top leadership kept quiet, summoning key commanders to their sanctuaries in Pakistan for urgent consultations.
Tuesday night, after nearly two days of unusual silence, the Taliban’s well-oiled media machine finally issued a short statement saying there was no credible evidence from those close to bin Laden to prove he was dead. Conspicuously absent was praise for the Saudi fugitive and condemnation of the U.S.
[…] "One of the biggest problems we had with the Taliban was: What are [they] going to do with bin Laden? They are not reacting because they are relieved," said Gilles Dorronsoro, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Bin Laden was a big problem for the Taliban."
[…] In recent years, as the Taliban mounted a nationwide insurgency against U.S.-led forces and President Hamid Karzai’s administration, they have tried to play down their links to al Qaeda and bin Laden. The Taliban high command, which calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, has repeatedly said that its only goal is to drive out foreign "colonizers," and that it would maintain good relations with all of Afghanistan’s neighbors once it returns to power.
[…] The surprisingly cautious response of the Taliban high command to bin Laden’s death has already generated frustration among some Taliban commanders inside Afghanistan, who say they expected their leaders to use the occasion as a rallying cry to intensify the war.
Taliban leaders, analysts say, run the risk of alienating their foot soldiers-and the Arab financiers who still support the Afghan insurgency-by not praising bin Laden as the Islamic world’s most celebrated modern warrior.
"We are wondering why our leadership is not condemning…Osama’s death. We had a gathering this morning and everybody was saying that the Taliban should take revenge," one Taliban fighter in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province said in a phone interview Tuesday. "He was the hero."
Taliban field commanders said they have been instructed by the Taliban high command not to make any statements about bin Laden’s demise. Some of the most senior commanders went to Pakistan for consultations immediately after President Barack Obama’s announcement Sunday, they said.
The Taliban’s high command "might be playing a political game," said a commander in northern Kunduz province. "But I know for sure that every fighter is willing to avenge [bin Laden’s] killing."
No matter how the Taliban leadership reacts in coming days, there was broad consensus that bin Laden’s death wouldn’t have a large impact on the high level of violence expected this year as insurgents launch their annual spring offensive against the U.S.-led coalition.
Knocking out senior militant leaders-let alone someone like bin Laden, who had little or no operational involvement in the Afghan war-rarely has a major impact on the battlefield, said one senior coalition official with experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
[…]
3) Military Interrogators: Waterboarding Didn’t Yield Tips That Led To Bin Laden
Several former military interrogators refute assertions that waterboarding and other ‘enhanced’ methods provided intelligence that led the US to bin Laden. Some lament lost opportunity to grill Al Qaeda’s leader.
Anna Mulrine, Christian Science Monitor, May 5, 2011
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2011/0505/Military-interrogators-Waterboarding-didn-t-yield-tips-that-led-to-bin-Laden
Washington – A group of former US military interrogators are pushing back against the notion that Bush administration "enhanced interrogation techniques" – which many consider to be torture – led to the intelligence that helped US officials locate Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Some US military intelligence officials also lament that bin Laden was not taken alive – and privately wonder whether concerns about the political "headaches" involved in trying detainees may have led the Obama administration to favor killing rather than capturing the architect of 9/11.
The opportunity to glean valuable intelligence from the leader of a powerful terrorist organization was lost, says retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who interrogated generals under the command of Saddam Hussein and evaluated US detention operations at Guantánamo.
It is a misconception that ideologues don’t talk, he says. "The opinion that, ‘Oh, he’s such a fanatic, he won’t tell us anything’ – that’s uninformed blathering by people who don’t understand the business," Herrington adds. "The experience with those who worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of the other most senior terrorists is that they are narcissists and that they do want to talk – and talk and talk."
The key, Herrington says, is to "channel those long talking sessions where they begin to – inadvertently at first – reveal things that are useful. All the while he’s talking, he’s telling us things that he doesn’t think are important, but they are."
That requires building relationships – a process that is hampered, not helped, by practices such as "slapping someone in the face and stripping them naked," he adds.
A handful of former intelligence officials concurs, releasing a statement Wednesday countering recent Bush administration officials claiming credit for the intelligence gains that led to bin Laden’s death.
"We are concerned about the suggestion by some that the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques led US forces to Osama bin Laden’s compound," reads the statement, signed by four former military and FBI interrogators, including Herrington.
[…] One hotly debated piece of information was the alias of the courier – Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti – that intelligence officials gained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding 183 times.
The interrogators assert that Mr. Mohammed and others "did not divulge the nom de guerre of a courier during torture, but rather several months later, when they were questioned by interrogators who did not use abusive techniques."
[…]
4) Iran won’t use nuclear bomb against Israel: Barak
AFP, May 5, 2011
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hok9O7h60VNJgS_fJrGKmOmJBffA
Jerusalem – Even if Iran obtains nuclear weapons it will not use them against Israel or other countries in the Middle East, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday.
The views expressed in the interview with the Israeli daily appear to put the defence minister at odds with many in the Israeli military and political establishment, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Iran will not drop a nuclear bomb on Israel, "not on us, not on any other neighbour," Barak told Haaretz. "I don’t think in terms of panic," he added.
Israeli politicians including Netanyahu have repeatedly raised the spectre of a nuclear attack by Iran to call for international pressure to halt the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme.
[…] Barak criticised statements, including by Netanyahu, comparing the threat Iran poses to Israel with the situation that faced German Jews in 1938, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II.
"I don’t like the comparison with what happened in 1938. I don’t think this is the same, because what is the conclusion of what happened? What should a Jew who found himself in 1938 Germany have done? In retrospect, he would have fled. I think it’s the opposite here. I will not flee anywhere," he said.
5) Panetta’s challenge: Slimming down the Pentagon
Gordon Adams, Washington Post, May 5
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/panettas-challenge-slimming-down-the-pentagon/2011/04/29/AFUSG31F_story.html
[Adams is a professor at AU. From 1993-1997 he was the principal White House policy official for national security budgets.]
Leon Panetta may still be savoring the successful operation against Osama bin Laden in a month or two. But as the incoming defense secretary, he will have a major challenge of a different order: presiding over a defense build-down.
President Obama’s proposal to reduce the projected defense budget by $400 billion over the next 12 years underlines a reality that is driven by concern over deficits, debt and a declining interest in having the United States act as global cop. And his proposal is only the opening bid on how far down defense budgets could go.
While outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates reacted to Obama’s decision as though it had created a crisis in defense planning, the reductions that Panetta must carry out are inevitable, even necessary. As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, put it in January: "The budget has basically doubled in the last decade. And my own experience here is that in doubling, we’ve lost our ability to prioritize, to make hard decisions, to do tough analysis, to make trades."
Panetta has a chance to bring much-needed discipline to a Pentagon budget that has spun out of control. And the cuts could be an incentive to design a military force that is globally superior, more focused, leaner, less bureaucratic and tailored to the missions it will face.
The defense budget could actually be cut by $1 trillion, or 15 percent below current projections over the next decade, and there is a wealth of proposals for how to do it, starting with those from the president’s own fiscal responsibility commission, the Rivlin-Domenici debt task force and the report by Reps. Barney Frank and Ron Paul.
The first step is to set priorities for military missions, something the 2010 defense review did not do. That review gave every mission equal priority and sought to reduce risk to zero for all of them. It was an open door for endless budget growth, but it’s not a strategic plan.
Given the approaching exit from Iraq and the coming decline in our deployment in Afghanistan, the counterinsurgency/nation-building mission for which the Army is being tailored today needs to be de-emphasized. We do not do that job well, particularly when we invade to topple a regime and stay around while insurgencies begin, and we are unlikely to repeat the Iraq and Afghan experiences anytime soon. We can slenderize this mission and reduce the size of the ground forces needed to carry it out, while retaining the niche capabilities that helped get bin Laden.
Hardware programs also need tough love. We should buy things that are needed for priority missions and that are meeting performance and budget targets. But do we need to buy three versions of the F-35 fighter (one capable of carrying nuclear weapons), a large supply of attack submarines and yet another next-generation armored vehicle? The defense research and development budget, larger than the entire defense budget of any other country, also could be reduced. We need to take a critical look at a growing research budget for nuclear forces – warheads, nuclear facilities, a new bomber – at a time we are reducing our nuclear arsenal.
[…] This is the fourth scaling back of defense spending since the 1950s. It is predictable, normal and, like the others, driven by fiscal concerns and the end of wars. Contrary to Gates’s oft-repeated view, we have gotten it right in the past. President George H.W. Bush, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell took 500,000 people out of the military and cut the defense budget 25 percent but left in place a force that treated Saddam Hussein’s military as a speed bump in 2003.
The build-down provides the new Pentagon leadership with an opportunity to rethink U.S. military strategy and missions, bring discipline to Pentagon planning and budgeting, and put in place a leaner but significantly more efficient military to serve America’s purposes.
Israel/Palestine
6) Accord Brings New Sense of Urgency to Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Ethan Bronner and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, May 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html
Cairo – A day after Palestinian leaders signed what many called a landmark reconciliation accord, the antagonists in the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their international mediators in Europe staked out positions in a rapidly shifting political and diplomatic landscape on Thursday.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, travelling to Rome for a meeting focused on Libya, refused to slam the door on negotiations that could include Hamas as part of a larger Palestinian authority, even as Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, said he was fully committed to working for a two-state solution.
But Mr. Meshal was in no mood for concessions. In an interview in his Cairo hotel suite, he declined to swear off violence or to agree that a Palestinian state would produce an end to the conflict – key demands of Israel, the United States and Europe. He defined his goal as "a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines with Jerusalem as its capital, without any settlements or settlers, not an inch of land swaps and respecting the right of return" of Palestinian refugees to Israel itself.
Asked if a deal honoring those principles would produce an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, Mr. Meshal declined to elaborate. "I don’t want to talk about that," he said.
He added: "When Israel made agreements with Egypt and Jordan, no one conditioned it on how Israel should think. The Arabs and the West didn’t ask Israel what it was thinking deep inside. All Palestinians know that 60 years ago they were living on historic Palestine from the river to the sea. It is no secret."
None of Thursday’s statements suggested an imminent breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian situation; on the contrary. But the subtle shifts in tone – if not substance – underscored the degree to which the newest Palestinian attempt at reconciling embittered rivals in Gaza and the West Bank has changed the dynamic of a conflict that has been at an impasse for years.
Plans for President Obama to lay out broad proposals for a peace process this week – the subject of debate within his administration – were scuttled after the Hamas-Fatah accord was announced last week, according to two people briefed on the plans. (The raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan early Monday cemented the decision to postpone the speech, one senior administration official said.)
The administration has reacted warily to the reconciliation pact, with many expressing doubt it would survive even as long as a week, but pointedly officials have not rejected it outright, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has. The senior administration official said that the United States, unlike in the past, did not want to preclude a genuine shift by Hamas, or force the Palestinians into a corner by denouncing any alliance that would include a group the United States and others designate as terrorists. "There is a calculated element to this," the official said.
When asked if the reconciliation would close the door to any possible negotiations with the Israelis or force a suspension in security assistance the United States has funneled to the Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005, Mrs. Clinton declined to answer directly.
"There are many steps that have yet to be undertaken in order to implement the agreement," she said. "And we are going to be carefully assessing what this actually means, because there are a number of different potential meanings to it, both on paper and in practice."
[…] As those meetings unfolded, differences between France and Germany seemed to be widening, particularly over the question of whether the United Nations should endorse a declaration of Palestinian independence in September, as Palestinian leaders are urging.
In an interview published on Thursday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France implied that he would support the idea of recognition if Middle East peace efforts remained stalemated through the summer.
Mr. Abbas, who has largely given up on peace negotiations with Israel under Mr. Netanyahu, concluded that the best way forward was national unity and an appeal to the international community to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
[…] "The whole world knows what Hamas thinks and what our principles are," Mr. Meshal said on Thursday. "But we are talking now about a common national agenda. The world should deal with what we are working toward now, the national political program."
Asked whether in his pact, he had agreed to end violent resistance, he replied: "Where there is occupation and settlement, there is a right to resistance. Israel is the aggressor. But resistance is a means, not an end."
He added that over the coming months that, as Hamas and Fatah worked out their differences, "we are ready to reach an agreement on how to manage resistance."
He said that Hamas had entered into cease-fires with Israel in the past and that it was ready to do so in the future. There is one in effect right now. "If occupation ends," he said, "resistance ends. If Israel stops firing, we stop firing."
Iraq
7) Some Troops Should Stay In Iraq, Speaker Says
Carl Hulse, New York Times, May 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/us/politics/04boehner.html
Washington – After a high-level trip to Iraq, House Speaker John A. Boehner said on Tuesday that he would support keeping a contingent of troops in Iraq beyond the end of the year, when all American forces are scheduled to be withdrawn.
Mr. Boehner, in an interview with news organizations, said he reached that decision after meetings with American military and diplomatic officials in Iraq as well as conversations with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that convinced him of looming gaps in Iraqi security arrangements.
"I think Iraq is critical to our immediate and long-term national security interests," said Mr. Boehner, who also visited Pakistan and Afghanistan over the spring Congressional recess. He added that too much had been invested "to simply just walk away."
"I think a small residual force should remain and the sooner the administration engages the Iraqi government, I think the better off we are going to be," he said.
As the top Republican and chief official of the House, Mr. Boehner’s position carries enormous weight in Congress and his view would be crucial in shaping the Republican majority’s military and fiscal position on Iraq. He would be likely to meet resistance from members of both parties who believe the occupation has gone on too long and is too costly given the current fight over budget deficits.
Under the current framework, all American soldiers are to be out of Iraq before the beginning of 2012, a departure specified in a security agreement between the two countries. But there have been indications that the Iraqi government is willing to ask that some troops stay longer. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has suggested that some American military forces could remain.
Even as he supported the idea, Mr. Boehner noted the situation was politically delicate in Iraq and in the United States, where President Obama has pledged to withdraw American forces.
Mr. Boehner said he had no recommendation on the size of the contingent that might remain or how long the troops should stay, but the military has been exploring the idea of a force of about 10,000, people briefed on the plan said. At the end of April, there were 47,000 American troops in Iraq.
[…]
Honduras
8) Open Season on Teachers in Honduras
Dana Frank, The Nation, May 5, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/160472/honduras-teargassed-open-business
In Honduras, it’s come to this: when 90 percent of the city’s 68,000 public schoolteachers went out on strike in March to protest the privatization of the entire public school system, the government teargassed their demonstrations for almost three solid weeks, then suspended 305 teachers for two to six months as punishment for demonstrating, and then, when negotiations broke down, threatened to suspend another five thousand public schoolteachers. The level of repression in Honduras, after a nationwide wave of attacks on the opposition in March and early April, now exceeds that of the weeks immediately following the June 28, 2009 military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya, as current President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa wages war on entire swaths of the Honduran population.
Ilse Ivania Velásquez Rodríguez was one of those striking teachers. A 59-year old elementary school teacher and former principal in Tegucigalpa, she rushed to the Presidential Palace to defend Zelaya the morning of the coup. She was one of hundreds of thousands of Hondurans who took to the streets for weeks to protest the new coup government of de facto President Roberto Micheletti–who Honduras’ oligarchs hoped would roll back Zelaya’s mild leftward moves and resistance to further neoliberal privatization. Last summer she was one of thousands in the Honduran opposition who circulated petitions–eventually signed by 1.25 million people, roughly one in three adults–demanding a Constitutional Convention to re-found the country from below. "My sister wanted to retire this year," her sister, Zenaida, who lives in San José, California, told me. "But they told her she needed to be on a waiting list," behind two thousand others, because the teachers’ government-managed retirement fund was bankrupt–looted by Micheletti’s post-coup government.
The morning of March 18, 2011, the second day of the strike, Ilse joined other teachers at a demonstration in front of the Tegucigalpa office of their state-run retirement agency, to demand her pension and protest the privatization plan. As police and soldiers stormed down the streets and aimed tear gas at the demonstrators, the teachers, to signal their nonviolence, raised their hands up high. The police started rapidly launching tear gas anyway. At 10:44 a.m., as Ilse tried to run away, one of them deliberately shot a tear gas canister directly in her face at close range. She fell to the ground, unconscious, into an asphyxiating cloud of gas. The driver of a passing television truck, himself affected by the fumes, ran over her right side. She lay face down in a pool of blood seeping out from her body. Three hours later, she died in a hospital.
Teachers like Ilse have been the shock troops of resistance to the coup. During the 1990s and 2000s, teachers deployed regular mass mobilizations to increase their salaries and pensions under legislation that granted them special labor protections at a national level. With the military coup, they were the first to take to the streets. "From the beginning, we felt obliged to defend democracy against a government imposed by force," emphasizes Jaime Rodriguez, president of COPEMH (Colegio de Profesores de Educación Media de Honduras), the Honduran middle-school teachers’ association. "That united almost all the teachers, apart from what the government did to the teachers themselves."
By this past March the teachers’ grievances had become enormous. Not only was their pension fund gone, but they are also owed six months’ back pay. At least twelve teachers in the opposition have been killed or disappeared since the coup. Last August, the government of Pepe Lobo–himself placed in office during Micheletti’s reign, in a fraudulent November 2009 election boycotted by international observers and most of the opposition–promised to pay them back. But the money is still nowhere to be seen.
On March 31, despite the protests, the Honduran congress approved a law opening the door for privatization of the entire country’s public school system. The legislation passes control of education to municipalities, who are free to organize for-profit enterprises or work with nonprofits modeled on a pilot program developed during the presidency of neoliberal Ricardo Maduro (2002-2006). Maduro will now head a new nationwide program in which teachers, instead of being hired through their professional associations, will work on yearly ten-month contracts with no job security, be paid as much as one-third their current salaries (placing them below the minimum wage), and receive no pensions.
The day before the bill passed, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP, or the National Front of Popular Resistance), in solidarity unleashed a nationwide paro civico or "civic strike" to oppose the law, protest the repression, and demand a new minimum wage, lower prices of food, fuel, and public utilities, and, above all, a constitutional convention to re-found the nation from below. The FNRP unites the broad national coalition that came together right after the coup, embracing the labor, campesino, women’s, gay, indigenous, and Afro-indigenous movements.
By this point the Honduran resistance has hardened into a steely wall of defiance. It continues to oppose what it considers the "ongoing coup regime" of Pepe Lobo. It has no official avenues for political input at this point: Congress, chosen in the same bogus election as Lobo, is in the pocket of the oligarchs and ignores popular sentiment; since Lobo dismissed five judges and magistrates who oppose the coup government, the judiciary almost entirely supports it. The judicial system is largely nonfunctional. To this day no one has been prosecuted or convicted for any of the politically-motivated killings of 34 members of the opposition and 10 journalists since Lobo took office, let alone for the over 300 killings by state security forces since the coup, according to COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras), the leading independent human rights group.
The FNRP knows if it chooses to run candidates in the 2014 elections–a topic of fierce internal debate–the electoral process will be controlled by the very same military that is occupying the country. Thinking long term, the Frente has spent much of the last year carefully constructing a system of national representation, community by community, building to a national assembly with 1,500 delegates this past February in Tegucigalpa that is laying the foundation for a new constitution, that it hopes to force Lobo and the oligarchs to accept.
Meanwhile, Hondurans in the opposition are using one of the few remaining weapons they have: their own unarmed bodies, placing themselves in the path of the regime, quite literally. In response, the regime is now using lethal force over and over and over again, all over the country, hoping to tear gas its own citizens into submission.
[…] Through all of this, the Obama administration’s response has been to blame the victim. In response to queries from U.S. human rights activists when Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda was seized, Jeremy Spector, the U.S. Embassy’s Human Rights and Labor Attaché in Tegucigalpa, wrote back with an extended attack on the teachers for being violent, called on them to return to the classroom, and insisted that Ilse Velásquez was merely "run over by a press vehicle." And the State Department enthusiastically backs not only Lobo but the neoliberal economic agenda behind the coup, which the Honduran congress is swiftly trying to enact. "Since the first day President Lobo took office he has focused on…the creation of investment to generate employment with the support of the national congress by establishing the legal framework to gain the confidence of domestic and international investors," Eduardo Atala, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Honduras, summarized coyly on April 14. The privatization of education and simultaneous destruction of the teachers’ unions are just one piece of that agenda, which also includes a proposed labor law reform that would convert full-time jobs to part time, making workers ineligible for unionization; astonishingly, it would allow many employers to pay 30% of their employees’ paychecks in company-issue scrip, rather than real money. The oligarchs also plan rapid privatization of the country’s ports and publicly-owned water, telephone, and electrical systems.
[…] The State Department is obsessed with getting Honduras readmitted to the Organization of American States, so that Lobo’s regime can regain international legitimacy. The sticking point, though, is Zelaya’s safe return to the country. Although the Honduran courts just dropped the last of their trumped-up charges against Zelaya, it’s unclear whether it will ever be safe for Lobo’s illegitimate government to have Zelaya, an immensely popular symbol of the resistance, speaking freely within Honduras–or whether Zelaya could safely step on Honduran soil without being killed by paramilitaries.
In the face of ongoing assaults from both their own government and the U.S., Hondurans in the opposition have two choices: either continue to resist the oligarchs’ agenda with the clear knowledge they could be killed, or watch as their country is rapidly turned into a model extractive zone for global capital. They themselves have a quite different vision of the Honduran future, based on democracy, ordinary people’s rights, and social justice. To support their vision, Latin American solidarity activists demand an immediate stop to all U.S. funding for the Honduran military and police, and a halt to US pressure on the Organization of American States to admit Honduras.
Mexico
9) Anti-Drug War Movement Emerges in Mexico
Kristin Bricker, Upside Down World, Wednesday, 04 May 2011 16:46
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3024-anti-drug-war-movement-emerges-in-mexico
After four years of war that has left nearly 40,000 people dead, countless more disappeared, and soldiers on the streets of every state in the country, many Mexicans are finally "fed up" with President Felipe Calderón’s drug policy. This weekend, Mexicans in at least 25 of the country’s 31 states will protest to "stop the war, for a just and peaceful Mexico." Protests are also planned in solidarity in at least twelve cities in Europe, Canada, the United States, and Brazil.
The largest protest will begin on May 5 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where protesters will march 100 km to Mexico City for a rally on Sunday, May 8. Marchers will follow the Mexico City-Cuernavaca freeway, which could bring traffic on one of the country’s largest freeways to a standstill over the Cinco de Mayo holiday weekend.
Mexico’s beloved journalist and poet Javier Sicilia convoked the protests after his son, Juan Francisco, was found murdered along with six other people in his home state of Morelos on March 28. Sicilia declared that he was "hasta la madre" ("fed up" or had "had it up to here") with politicians and criminals. He vowed to abandon poetry ("The world is no longer worthy of words," he wrote in his last poem) and to dedicate himself to stopping the drug war. "I’m going to march," he said in a video message, "because I don’t want any other family to suffer the loss of a son as we are suffering due to a poorly planned, poorly executed, and poorly led war."
After nearly 40,000 drug war murders, it was Juan Francisco’s execution that brought Mexico to the tipping point. This weekend’s mobilizations are expected to be Mexico’s largest anti-drug war protests to-date. Moreover, nearly every sector of Mexican society has confirmed its participation in the protests: labor, indigenous peoples, students, journalists, intellectuals, opposition politicians, feminists, artists, drug war victims and their family members, former political prisoners, Mormons, sex workers, autonomists, peasants, communists, marijuana legalization advocates, migrants in Mexico, Mexican immigrants living abroad, Catholic church leaders…even the commanders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) have ordered Zapatistas to take to the streets to "end Calderón’s war."
Sicilia coined the protests, "We’ve had it up to here. Stop the war. For a just and peaceful Mexico." However, he insists, "I’m just one more voice." He believes that the movement’s proposals must come from the grassroots. The Network for Peace and Justice, which is helping Sicilia coordinate the protests, is encouraging citizens to hold assemblies and develop proposals for a "re-founding of Mexico." Those proposals will be taken into account in a document that Sicilia will read at the end of the march on May 8.
Some organizations and individuals have already published their demands and proposals.
Students and young people gathered at the National Forum of Young People in National Emergency in Cuernavaca on April 28-29 to coordinate for the May 8 protests and develop a set of demands. Young people suffer the highest murder rates in the drug war, leading Forum participant Raúl Romero to lament, "Young people are no longer this country’s future; we’re this country’s dead." The Forum published six demands: immediate demilitarization, an end to violence and impunity, decriminalization of drug consumption, a dignified life (which would include job opportunities), art and culture for everyone (including a proposal to nationalize the corporate media), and a guaranteed college education for everyone.
The Collective for an Integral Drug Policy (Cupihd), an organization of drug policy experts, will hold a march for marijuana legalization on May 7, and on May 8 it will join the national protests in downtown Mexico City.
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