McChrystal's Afghan Confrontation

The author is clearly an apologist for pacifism and makes the appropriate arguments while also attacking the reputations of the soldiers engaged in this war. We read these items to observe how these positions are pieced together and argued even though they try one’s patience.

War requires two parties. At one time, the acquisition of national territory was a tenuous claim to legitimacy. That is long since removed from the global equation, particularly with the success of effective city states with massive populations and the existence of global enterprises commanding massive resources.

Today’s wars are tribalism gussied up with a religious veneer. Economic rationales are nonexistent except as a minor sideshow. The Pathans and Baluchis occupy some of the worst terrain on earth yet they desire a greater whateverstan. That is the price of ignorance.

Surely we have learned that war has almost no rules. Torture is abhorred, and can be avoided by skilled interrogators who know the ground. Yet events in time and place will obviate very aggressive and usually unsuccessful methods because of tactical necessity. So accept the inevitable and establish tactical protocols so the lower pay scales can make the right decision and have their actions reviewed and condoned after the fact. The military is good at doing that.

We like to forget that a large number of true believer Nazis failed to survive the war. And even the allies got into the concentration camp business with unacceptable losses after the war ended. Since everyone was very much on the same page, no one squawked. Since my own limited sampling of world war two combatants gave me almost universal confirmation, the real numbers had to be atrocious. That is just the way it is. Get over it.

Conflict with radical Islam was actively avoided by Bill Clinton for the good reason of not picking a fight. His reward was to watch 3,000 Americans die. This is a fight that is enjoined and we will end it on our terms just as often as radical Islam wants to dance. Will it be over soon? Not likely, but tasking our best anti insurgency expert is certainly the way to go.

It will be ended when a modern educated Islamic world with modern freedoms for all emerges and stifles the ignorant fools who want to kill.


Obama's Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice

By Prof James Petras

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13644

May 17, 2009

“The Deltas are psychos...You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force...”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980's. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal's rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations' teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT's ‘counter-terrorism' is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal's SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects. McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the ‘direct action' forces of the ‘Special Missions Units. ‘Direct Action' operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in ‘propaganda of the dead', assassinating local leaders to ‘teach' the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama's appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country.

The deteriorating position of the US is manifest in the tightening circle around all the roads leading in and out of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul as well as the expansion of Taliban control and influence throughout the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Obama's inability to recruit new NATO reinforcements means that the White House's only chance to advance its military driven empire is to escalate the number of US troops and to increase the kill ratio among any and all suspected civilians in territories controlled by the Afghan armed resistance.

The White House and the Pentagon claim that the appointment of McChrystal was due to the ‘complexities' of the situation on the ground and the need for a ‘change in strategy'. ‘Complexity' is a euphemism for the increased mass opposition to the US, complicating traditional carpet ‘bombing and military sweep' operations. The new strategy practiced by McChrystal involves large scale, long term ‘special operations' to devastate and kill the local social networks and community leaders, which provide the support system for the armed resistance.

Obama's decision to prevent the release of scores of photographs documenting the torture of prisoners by US troops and ‘interrogators' (especially under command of the ‘Special Forces'), is directly related to his appointment of McChrystal whose ‘SOT' forces were highly implicated in widespread torture in Iraq. Equally important, under McChrystal's command the DELTA, SEAL and Special Operations Teams will have a bigger role in the new ‘counter-insurgency strategy'. Obama's claim that the publication of these photographs will adversely affect the ‘troops' has a particular meaning: The graphic exposure of McChrystal's modus operendi for the past 5 years under President Bush will undermine his effectiveness in carrying out the same operations under Obama. Obama's decision to re-start the secret ‘military tribunals' of foreign political prisoners, held at the Guantanamo prison camp, is not merely a replay of the Bush-Cheney policies, which Obama had condemned and vowed to eliminate during his presidential campaign, but part of his larger policy of militarization and coincides with his approval of the major secret police surveillance operations conducted against US citizens.

Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism – the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy – at the center of US foreign policy. Obama's quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities. All of this will be committed by the Obama Administraton in the quest to ‘empty the lake (displace entire populations) to catch the fish (armed insurgents and activists)'.\

Obama's restoration of all of the most notorious Bush Era policies and the appointment of Bush's most brutal commander is based on his total embrace of the ideology of military-driven empire building. Once one believes (as Obama does) that US power and expansion are based on military conquests and counter-insurgency, all other ideological, diplomatic, moral and economic considerations will be subordinated to militarism. By focusing all resources on successful military conquest, scant attention is paid to the costs borne by the people targeted for conquest or to the US treasury and domestic American economy. This has been clear from the start: In the midst of a major recession/depression with millions of Americans losing their employment and homes, President Obama increased the military budget by 4% - taking it beyond $800 billion dollars.

Obama's embrace of militarism is obvious from his decision to expand the Afghan war despite NATO's refusal to commit any more combat troops. It is obvious in his appointment of the most hard-line and notorious Special Forces General from the Bush-Cheney era to head the military command in subduing Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan.

It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace. Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as ‘Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice'.

Thera 1500 BC

This article is a bit to wade through so I will save you the trouble. They are sorting out the Bronze Age chronology of the Mediterranean. That really means getting it all to agree with ultimately every site. It is likely a good time to attempt it. Carbon dating has had one revolution a generation ago and this effort is able to take advantage of the huge increase in available data while recognizing that other factors can really throw any one method.

The important fact that emerges is that Thera must be properly dated to 1500 BC. This makes me strangely happy, although I am unable to recall why, except to recall that a long ago research had made that date most probable. I suppose I need to recheck chronologies although perhaps we should wait for these folks to get it all right and integrated with Egypt.

That makes a three hundred and fifty year gap between the memory of Thera and 1159BC, which was perhaps two hundred years before Homer and Solomon’s Temple. Three hundred more years, we are upon Classical Greece and the Judaic Temple culture. The gaps are close enough for languages to remain intelligible and for some of the event information to be transmitted.

This makes rereading the old texts fruitful because we have a sense of the problems facing translators who would be describing events through the language of a five hundred year old document.

Open doors to sunny shores

Archaeologists working around the Mediterranean met two weeks ago in Cairo to discuss intercultural relations between the countries of the region, reports Nevine El-Aref

Far from being a modern concept that came to pass only with the formation of the European Union and the Barcelona process, the dialogue between the different cultures of the Mediterranean region has been in place since time immemorial. This is becoming increasingly clear as more and more archaeological finds are discovered. Indeed, considering the Mediterranean as an entity deserving research in its own right has recently become a topic of discussion.

In the light of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) organised a conference to look into intercultural contacts in the region. This was the first international convention to address this topic in a southern Mediterranean country.

The conference focussed on theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of intercultural contacts in archaeology on the one hand, and on actual case studies of intercultural contact on the other.
Papers presented at the meeting dealt with a wide variety of topics, including the methods and theory of the study of contacts in archaeology, immigration patterns in different countries including Egypt, trade and exchange, the import and local imitation of foreign objects, the adoption of foreign religious ideas, influences in artistic and architectural styles and seafaring. Although ancient Egypt is often seen by the wider public as a unique, united and rather isolated culture, the presentations made clear that Egypt had many and far- reaching contacts all over the Mediterranean. Not only did Egyptian objects and ideas reach the furthest corners of the region, but Mediterranean people, ideas and objects were also welcomed in Egypt itself.

Seven internationally renowned speakers presented keynote addresses, including Manfred Bietak, the director of the Austrian Institute for Archaeology in Cairo and the director of the excavations at Tell Al-Dabaa in the Nile Delta.

Bietak explained that over the last nine years the Austrian Academy of Sciences had carried out a large research programme in order to synchronise the divergent regional chronologies of the second millennium BC. Sciences and humanities were combined for this programme to include dendro- chronology, Egyptian and Mesopotamian historical chronologies, and archaeological branches of most of the eastern Mediterranean, especially ceramic research. Very helpful were index markers such as Levantine painted ware, different groups of Eell Al-Yahudiay ware, Kamares ware, Middle and Late Cypriot pottery varieties and Mycenaen ware, which mark specific datum lines with their first appearance in the local markets of the Eastern Mediterranean. With their help and with a control of combinations of ceramic types and other artefacts, it was possible to create a dense network of data for a common chronology. For the time being, Bietak continued, this was based on historical Egyptian chronology. A datum line was also created with a first appearance of pumice of the Minoan Thera eruption not before the late Bronze Age in the Levant and not before the beginning of the Tuthmoside period in Egypt.

"The evidence makes it highly likely that the Thera eruption did not happen in the second half of the 17th century BC, as radio carbon dates suggest, but around 1500 BC," Bietak said.

Dendro-chronology with Lebanese cedar wood will still need many years of study to fill the gaps for an absolute standard chronology, and scientists are working on other independent dating methods. The historical chronology with its datum lines of first appearances of artefacts and pumices and with "stratigraphie compare" have, on the other hand, provided a consistent umbrella-chronology which suggests linking the Egyptian with a quite low Mesopotamian chronology. "While the main outlines of this chronology seem to be satisfactory, detailed research has still to be undertaken to establish a well founded chronological structure," Bietak said.

Marie-Henriette Gates from Bilkent University in Ankara presented a keynote speech on the maritime business in the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean, saying that archaeological analysis of imported and exported finds had shifted over the past century from description to explanation, in line with other developments in the discipline's research enquiry. The appeal of exotica remains constant, however. Their very presence opens an immediate window onto maritime cross-cultural contacts.

"Although Bronze Age sites in this region provide a rich illustration of such transactions, neutrally attributed to trade and exchange, it has also proved a more difficult challenge to reconstruct the economic, cultural and social mechanisms behind these exchanges," she said.

Gates explained that contemporary written documents gave precise evidence that was both invaluable and one-sided. The predominance in explanatory models for Mediterranean and Aegean maritime affairs, particularly for the second millennium BC, had magnified administrative constraints and emphasised classification of goods.

Few discussions address the eastern Mediterranean's dense distribution of Bronze Age ports, ranking, like settlements on land, from large and well-connected to modest and remote. These ports reflect economic circumstances of differing scales and intensities, but they were all equally dependent on shipping networks and maritime business.

Linda Hulin from Oxford University took the audience to another segment of the Mediterranean, that of the Libyan community during the Bronze Age. Hulin said models of Libyan society in the pre-classical period came from a variety of sources that were rarely contemporary or indigenous.

"We rely primarily upon epigraphic and art historical material from Egypt, particularly the Third Intermediate Period and from the classical world, to model Libyan society in the Bronze Age," she said. "The small amount of archaeological material, including rock art, is difficult to date."

Diamantis Panagioopoulos from Heidelberg University said that after some decades of intensive scholarly research, the study of cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean of the second millennium BC had reached a critical stage. In the vast and fragmented terrain of relevant literature scientific approaches go in quite different directions, while the gap between empirical historical knowledge and theoretical visions is still growing. Within this climate, he said, it had become increasingly difficult to establish a common ground of scholarly research in which the interrelationships between new spectacular finds and new theoretical models could fruitfully be interrogated. Facing these difficulties, Panagioopoulos suggested it was important to reframe the current state of affairs and identify some collective concerns for future studies. "Taking the concept of transculturality as an overarching of theoretical umbrella under which one can explore the most salient aspects of cross-cultural interaction in a systemic manner is an attempt to contribute to this aim," he claimed. Within this broad semantic concept, he continued, the focus would be on the cultural dynamics of maritime activity which constituted a core element of transnational exchange during the late second millennium BC.

"The key questions will be to what extent the expanding arteries of maritime contacts and trade fostered cultural mobility and change in the eastern Med." He foresees that a brief overview of geographical, social and political structures, channels and agents of exchange and materiality would help to comprehend this historical phenomenon as a complex interaction of multiple dynamic parameters.

Leila Badre from the American University in Beirut spoke of the cultural interconnections in the eastern Mediterranean during the late Bronze and Iron Ages. This relationship was highlighted through pottery found in the Tell Kazel area in Summur in Beirut, which was excavated by the American University of Beirut museum team in 1985.

"This site has produced an interesting amount of important pottery which sheds some light on trade relations between Beirut, Cyprus and the Aegean in the late Bronze and Iron Ages," Badre pointed out.
Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, head of the Central Administration of Ancient Egyptian Monuments, presented his paper on the remains of what is up to now the largest fortified city of the New Kingdom. Tell Habua I and II, three kilometres northeast of Qantara East in North Sinai, measures 400 by 200 metres and is reinforced by 24 towers. Archaeological evidence has revealed gates on the north and south sides and two complexes of large storerooms dating from the beginning of the 19th Dynasty, notably the reign of Pharaoh Seti I. The team has also found a temple from the reign of Ramses II. "This discovery confirms the identification of Tell Habua with Tharw, as mentioned in the inscriptions of Pharaoh Seti I at Karnak, describing the Way of Horus," Abdel-Maqsoud said. The Way of Horus or Horus Road was the main trade and military route from Egypt to Palestine.

Suaan Sherratt from Sheffield University said investigation into intercultural contact in the Mediterranean area during the second and first millennia BC was often a matter of reconciling various types of textual information with archaeological data. "We should not feel that we can afford to neglect either but attempts to integrate them frequently run up against issues of theory and methodology," she said, adding that methodology was arguably less of a problem as long as it was borne in mind that all types of information needed their own contextual source criticisms and that the devising of methodologies to address particular questions had to be approached on a strictly ad hoc basis.

"All that we need to think about lies in the shadows, susceptible more to informed imagination than to direct information, whether textual or archaeological, or to theory derived from anthropology or the social sciences," Sheratt said.

Gert Jan Van Wijngaarden from Amsterdam University stressed in his paper that the relationship between Egypt and Mycenae covered a long period of time, as finds of Mycenaean pottery at several areas around the Mediterranean testify. Only in Egypt, however, is ample additional epigraphic and pictorial evidence found. A number of faience plaques from Mycenae have even been interpreted as royal gifts from Egypt.

"The cultural contexts of the Mycenaean finds in Egypt and the Egyptian finds in Greece will assess the significance of Egyptian-Mycenaean relations in their Mediterranean context," he said.

Ancient Egypt was often viewed as a unique and isolated culture, but on the contrary, owing to archaeological discoveries and research, it is now seen that ancient Egyptians were in contact with their neighbours from prehistoric times and not, as is often believed, only since the Open Door policy opened up trade with the European Union. To illustrate these connections, on the fringe of the conference the Netherlands- Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) has mounted a panel exhibition on intercultural contact between ancient Egypt and other countries of the Mediterranean. The exhibition, entitled "Ancient Egypt in the Mediterranean" and held in the garden of the Egyptian Museum, was opened by Zahi Hawass, secretary- general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and will last until the end of December. It highlights the friendly relationship between ancient Egypt and its neighbouring countries around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as telling the story of foreign groups who lived in Egypt in ancient times. The exhibition displays the far-reaching influences Egypt had on its neighbours and its involvement with regard to the trade routes of the ancient Mediterranean, together with how ancient Egyptians adopted foreign technologies and ideas.

The panels, which were written by young scholars from around the Mediterranean and other parts of the world, highlight such topics as trade, war, seafaring, art and specific archaeological sites from predynastic times right through the late Pharaonic era.

"I am very happy to have this exhibition at the Egyptian Museum, where people from all over the world come to enjoy and learn about ancient Egypt", Hawass said at the opening.

Klaus Ebermann, the EU Ambassador in Egypt, said that it was wonderful that visitors could learn how people from a variety of ancient cultures met and influenced each other, with Egypt as a key point of contact. Head of the NVIC Kim Duistermaat pointed out that the intercultural contacts and dialogue had been part of the lives of people in the Mediterranean region for thousands of years, and it was fascinating to see that ancient Egyptian objects and ideas reached even the furthest corners of the Mediterranean, such as Spain. "As archaeologists, we are interested in understanding how these contacts functioned, how people exchanged objects and ideas and why."

The exhibition has been organised by the NVIC in cooperation with the SCA, and is funded by the Delegation of the European Commission in Egypt and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Cairo.