Pentagon chief condemns European “pacifism”

By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org,  Feb 26, 2010

Amid growing fears in Washington that European powers may withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, just as the US escalates the war there, Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a speech blasting Europe for insufficient militarization and warning of a deepening crisis in the NATO alliance.

Gates gave the speech February 23 at Washington’s National Defense University, a training center for mid-level and senior US officers. His audience was a forum on the reworking of the “strategic concept”—essentially the mission statement—of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The revision of the statement is being conducted by a panel led by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and a draft is to be presented to a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal in November.

Gates’ remarks came just three days after the Dutch government was brought down over opposition to continuing the deployment of some 2,000 Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The Labor Party, one of the government’s coalition partners, refused to support the extension of the deployment for another year, setting the stage for their withdrawal by the end of 2010.

There is strong popular opposition to the Afghanistan war in the Netherlands, as there is throughout Europe. The concern within US ruling circles is that a Dutch withdrawal could set a precedent for a number of other NATO members pulling out their troops as well.

With the total number of US troops killed in “Operation Enduring Freedom”, centered in Afghanistan, having topped the 1,000 mark, and US generals predicting far bloodier months ahead, Washington is anxious to dampen opposition to the war at home by employing more European soldiers as cannon fodder.

Gates insisted that to achieve this aim, European powers would have to confront underlying “cultural and political” trends.

“One of the triumphs of the last century was the pacification of Europe after ages of ruinous warfare” he said. “But, as I’ve said before, I believe we have reached an inflection point, where much of the continent has gone too far in the other direction.”

Gates continued: “The demilitarization of Europe—where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it—has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.

“Not only can real or perceived weakness be a temptation to miscalculation and aggression, but, on a more basic level, the resulting funding and capability shortfalls make it difficult to operate and fight together to confront shared threats.”

The conception that “lasting peace” in the present century can be achieved only by confronting popular aversion to war and building up the armed forces of the continent’s nation states will no doubt be seen as perverse in Europe itself. European militarization in the first half of the last century preceded two world wars and the deaths of tens of millions.

Underlying Gates’ remarks are deepening tensions between Europe and America that threaten to undermine the 60-year-old trans-Atlantic alliance.

In the “post-Cold War, post-9/11 world,” Gates argued, NATO is compelled to shift “from a static, defensive force to an expeditionary force—from a defensive alliance to a security alliance.”

In reality, this supposed transition from defense to “expeditionary” interventions has been driven by an explosive growth of US militarism and the waging of two aggressive wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—over the course of the last decade.

Washington is attempting to pressure NATO’s European members to bear more of the costs of America’s wars, both in terms of money and the lives of their troops.

Gates complained that the Europeans are not pulling their weight. He pointed out that while the Obama administration has proposed a record military budget of over $700 billion for 2011—5 percent of US GDP—only four of NATO’s 26 European members had budgeted more than 2 percent of their GDP for military spending.

As a result, said Gates, NATO “faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.” He pointed in particular to the failure of European NATO states to carry through on proposals to build more cargo planes and helicopters, warning that “their absence is directly impacting operations in Afghanistan.”

In what appeared to be a sharp rebuke of unnamed NATO members, the US defense secretary invoked the conditions facing troops in Afghanistan “living in austere conditions, and…facing enemy fire on a daily basis.”

“That is a stark reminder that NATO is not now, nor should it ever be, a talk-shop or a Renaissance weekend on steroids,” he continued. “It is a military alliance with real-world obligations that have life-or-death consequences.”

Divisions within NATO have emerged over a host of issues. In relation to Afghanistan, the Obama administration had requested other NATO countries to join in its “surge” by deploying an additional 10,000 troops. Only 7,000 have been promised, and even this lower figure reportedly includes soldiers already deployed in the country. Moreover, some of NATO’s European members have placed restrictions on the mission of their contingents that limit their role in combat.

The European powers have backed the US war in Afghanistan in part out of concern that to withhold support could tear apart the NATO alliance under conditions in which they have no structure to replace it. Moreover, European ruling circles hope to reap some of the spoils of the predatory war, in terms of access to the energy-rich Caspian Basin and the pipeline routes for extracting its oil and gas reserves.

With the election of Barack Obama, European governments had hoped that the unilateralist character of US policy would be changed and that they would be dealt with as Washington’s partners. Despite cosmetic and tactical shifts, however, the US continues to pursue its interests unilaterally, demanding that Europe accept its decisions and line up accordingly.

In ordering the escalation of the Afghanistan war and the deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops, for example, the Obama administration acted without any consultation with the European states, despite the fact that the war and occupation are ostensibly being carried out under NATO’s banner.

Sharp divisions have also emerged over NATO expansion, with Germany and France reluctant to bring Washington’s client states in Eastern Europe into the alliance and wary of provoking Moscow by pushing NATO to Russia’s borders.

Der Speigel, meanwhile, reports that Germany is demanding that “the US remove its nuclear weapons from German soil.” It has allied itself with Norway and the Benelux countries in seeking a discussion of the issue at a NATO conference set for April in Tallinn, Estonia.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton preceded Gates’ remarks with her own speech on Monday, ratcheting up intra-NATO tensions and speaking directly to Germany’s position on nuclear arms, insisting that they should stay put.

“This dangerous world still requires deterrence and we know there’s a debate going on in Europe and even among some of our leading member nations about, well, what does that mean,” she said. “We would hope that there is no precipitous move made that would undermine the deterrence capability.”

[Via http://sudhan.wordpress.com]

"The Cultural Cleansing in Iraq"

“Do not read this book, if you are an American or British citizen conscious of the obligations of democracy, who wants to believe that Judeo-Christian morality played some part in your government’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq to impose ‘democracy and freedom’. For if you do, you may be crushed by its revelations of deliberate state-ending destruction and a policy of cultural cleansing; by your shared responsibility for this human and national calamity; and, despite the near irreparability of what has been accomplished, by the massive reparations needed now and for the next fifty years to begin to counter the consequences of genocide. The case for cultural genocide is powerfully made in this extraordinary and frightening book.” [link added] – Denis Halliday

[Via http://filasteen.wordpress.com]

Chinese rights advocates ask US for funds to break China 'firewall'

AFP, Feb. 23, 2010-

WASHINGTON — A coalition of human rights campaigners on Tuesday urged the US government to fund efforts led by the Falungong spiritual movement to circumvent Internet censorship in China and other nations.

Congress approved 30 million dollars in the 2010 budget to combat cyber censorship in China, Iran and elsewhere. But lawmakers have voiced concern that the funding since 2008 has been used ineffectively.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rights advocates — most from China — urged that money go to the Global Internet Freedom (GIF) Consortium, originally set up to evade China’s Internet “firewall.”

“By taking the right steps, the United States can make a historic contribution to its own security and to the advancement of democracy by rapidly tearing down the information firewalls of the world’s closed societies,” it said.

The letter was signed by exiled leaders of the 1989 democracy uprising in Tiananmen Square including Chai Ling, Wu’er Kaixi and Xiong Yan, along with figures behind the landmark Charter 08 petition for greater freedoms in China.

Other signatories included Rebiya Kadeer, the leader of exiles from China’s Uighur minority, along with activists campaigning for greater openness in Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea and Syria.

GIF software was designed by the Falungong, which was banned by China in 1999 and branded an “evil cult” following a silent mass gathering in Beijing by its members.

But the technology was also put to use last year by Iranians who circumvented censorship to organize protests against clerical hardliners via Twitter and other websites.

The letter said that GIF servers, which nearly crashed after the Iranian elections, could be upgraded to allow 50 million unique users a day, up from 1.5 million now.

Five senators — Democrats Robert Casey, Edward Kaufman and Arlen Specter, along with Republicans Sam Brownback and Jon Kyl — wrote a letter to Clinton last month voicing concern that the grant money was going to waste.

They faulted the State Department for restricting grants to groups working inside a country, countering that “the most successful censorship circumvention tools are operated remotely.”

Clinton, who testifies before Congress on Wednesday and Thursday, last month urged China to conduct a thorough probe into cyberattacks on Google and pressed technology firms to resist censorship.

- AFP

[Via http://chinaview.wordpress.com]

National Identity 2

It doesn’t matter who wins – it only matter how the US does.  Just listen to the commentators.

Of course, if the US won, it’d be a different situation.  It’s funny to me though that the strong sense of National Identity and mind.  I’m watching the Olympics – Norway just won and the US got silver – and basically the commentator says – Norway has been here before – but then spends more time talking about how no American has ever stood on the podium and got a medal.  You are your country.  It is a part of your identity; a valuable part of your essential self.  Or is it?

[Via http://identityspecialist.wordpress.com]

Fascinating brand stories | Marlboro [2 of 2]

By Dian Hasan | February 20, 2010

Marlboro is one of America’s most quintessential brands, and the early days of global advertising saw Marlboro project the image of the Marlboro Man, a fictitious cowboy of the Wild West. Attempting to capture the traits of ruggedness, macho, freedom, casual, in touch with nature and male-bonding, through the famous tagline “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country”

Changing times, changing needs!
The original image of Marlboro Country replete with intrepid cowboys have now been replaced with a very different breed: speed, excitement, sexy ladies in tight-fitting red outfits. Gender equality or exploitation? The jury’s out.

What is clear is that Marlboro continues as the world’s leading cigarette brand. And it’s still growing, amid increased notion of smoking as “uncool”!

[Via http://dianhasan.wordpress.com]

My earliest ambigrams

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been in the habit of writing my name, William, in its abbreviated form, Wm, and my first ambigrams were stylized versions of that abbreviation, exaggerating its natural symmetry. This one, with the two letters sharing a leg, was the one I used the most.

I soon realized that this same glyph encoded both my own name and that of my native country, making it both a rotational ambigram and an oscillation. (Of course I wasn’t using those terms at the time. Ambigrams and I would be formally introduced much, much later, through the books of Douglas Hofstadter.)

Some time later I decided to try to expand my Wm into a full William. Filling in the four spaces with illi, I found that an A appeared naturally in the negative space around the second i.

(I think this one also qualifies as a very simple example of what Nagfa would call a romanized kufic. I think I’ll call it kufesque – a technical term which I, Humpty Dumpty, hereby hijack and redefine as “script in any language which completely fills an area (often square) with bands of positive and negative space, all of the same fixed width.”)

My first “real” ambigram — the first one that I consciously thought of as an ambigram, and the first one that could be read left-to-right in an ordinary, linear fashion, was also of my name:

It doesn’t look like much now, and I’m sure plenty of other people have come up with the same basic design and pulled it off in a more aesthetically appealing manner — but it’s what got me started on what has so far turned out to be a rather persistent hobby.

[Via http://wmjasambigrams.wordpress.com]

A Cut Out And Keep Collection Of Anti-American Diatribes

Oh yes – we have some prime cuts for you today. Boris Johnson has decided to have a USA Day to coincide with the NFL visit in October (this year it clashes with Halloween – American culture I can do without etc.) and is spending money on the group of people most likely to visit London from overseas. I’m not sure I agree with the logic, or spending any of my cash on it, but as he’s cut funding to other events that could, if they tried hard enough, find funding themselves, and if they didn’t, then why should we foot the bill, we can’t be too snippy. Of course, these events celebrate diversity and other cultures, so to oppose the funding is probably racist and homophobic in some eyes… but of course you can’t slag “these kind of people off” but the Americans? Fair game…. as witnessed by these quotes in that paragon of liberal intelligence – The Guardian…

“There is no need for subsidizing American culture. It is already celebrated every day through Mc Donalds, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Hollywood rubbish and all those overweight people one can see in the streets. Not even Americans themselves know what is their real culture because they have been fed with the rubbish culture which is only goal to make more money and make the populace more stupid.”

“Why are we funding all this nonsense when the US Embassy won’t pay the congestion charge? If I want to experience American culture I’ll by the New York Review of Books and read it in McDonalds.”

(Note – the congestion charge is a tax, for which all states’ embassies and staff are not liable under the Geneva Convention. The last time we tried that taxation wheeze on the Americans, they gave us an “ass-kicking”. And a good deal more countries don’t pay the charge either, but let’s single out the USA, eh?)

“Broadly speaking, the Americans don’t travel well. If they are reassured they can obtain fatty, salty, sweet fast food – and watch their own low cultural events – they are far more likely to visit London. And then spend money here.”

“Which aspects of American culture will we be subsidising? Obesity and tooth decay (thanks to the Mayor taking Coca Cola’s dollar and pasting enormous posters of a Coke bottle and the Coca Cola Santa, bearing the slogan “open happiness, enjoy the music” behind the buskers’ pitches on the Underground) and Disney Enterprises, Inc (the Regent/Oxford Street Christmas lights were lit weeks earlier than usual and were adverts for Disney’s A Christmas Carol) maybe?”

“Is this a way of softening up the capital in preparation for an application to become the 51st state of the Union? We have quite enough US culture as it is, so why give us more?” (Barack Obama, that hero, believes there are more than 51 states…. don’t believe me – look here).

“We fight their wars for them, so why not appease the master further?” (The Second World War and the defeat of fascism never really happened in some history books, did it?)

“American Culture, such a brilliant oxymoron”

“I thought every day in London was already USA day. Or at least CIA day. I’d like to see Boris sing the Fug’s CIA Man (“Who can kill a general in his bed? Overthrow dictators if they’re red?”) at his proposed festival.”

“So we’re holding a party for the country that has plunged us into the worst recession in decades and decades…”

“Every day is USA day in McBKFC. Why bother setting another one aside?”

“Seriously? Britain already celebrates American culture, except for the bbc, all we are able to watch is CSI.” (Pay for the sport channels then, or if not, the adult ones…)

“The most honest way for Boris to celebrate American culture would be for a Hellfire missile fired from a Reaper rpv to slam into a restaurant Boris had visited the previous night, following which we could have a “NATO” briefing telling us that Boris was in fact killed in the attack and the other people killed were certainly fellow extremists (especially the very small corpses).

Welcome to the American Way, London!”

“We should only have a party when the American finally take their planes and soldiers and piss off back to America. WW2 ended 65 years ago when will you take the hint and remove your occupying forces from Europe!”

Yep…there’s more in there for those who want to read up. When those of us not doing impressions of Dave Spart or some comic book hippy pipe up that it is a little bit hypocritical to bash Americans while big-upping “diversity” and fighting mindless stereotypes, they almost perceptibly put their hands over their mouths, look at their fellow Yank Bashers, while communicating by ESP along the lines of “when they go away, we can start again.”

Of course, a country with a written constitution, protected fairly well from the meddling hands of politicians has nothing to teach the UK. All they are good for are Big Macs and CSI…..

I’ll finish off with something from the “I would like to have written that” file…referring to this article.

“Yet another idiotic anti American bash by a silly little person who while deriding American culture as typified by Big Macs, beamers and Britney.
Has no problem watching Sex in the City,Lost on her I-Pod while drinking a can of Coke.

Yes lets all lament the loss of multi-cultural festivals such as rise by mentioning that its funding could easily be borne by the monies owed by the US embassy, while omitting the fact that Third world Embassies owe even more. (Out of £23 million owed in congestion charges by foreign embassies the US owes £2.7M) or that foreign registered vehicles aren’t chased either (£8M as of 2006)

And lets be serious while it may be trendy to attack the Yanks, the fact remains they come to the Uk with money, which is what this country needs. The people who flock to third world festivals on the other hand come to the UK for money.

But hey when it comes to a liberal and other peoples money they are soon parted.”

[Via http://sevenandseven.wordpress.com]