In Today’s Christian Science Monitor, December 29th, 2009

THE GIZA STRIP, CAIRO

On Sunday, more than 1,000 international activists from 42 countries around the world descended on Cairo to kick off the Gaza Freedom March, a humanitarian convoy and media spectacle organized by US activist group Code Pink.

(The Code Pink Group is peaceful and non-violent)

The plan was to take buses from Cairo to the Egypt-Gaza border post at Rafah, where they would cross in to Gaza to mark the one-year anniversary of the devastating 22-day Israeli campaign against Hamas, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers.

Organizers say they knew getting into Gaza would be the hard part, so they made sure to check and double check their arrangements with Egyptian authorities. That didn’t stop Egypt from closing the border post and forbidding the activists from driving across the Sinai Peninsula, keeping them from even getting near it.

Much like the humanitarian supplies they were intent on delivering, Gaza Freedom Marchers say they too have been caught in the siege on Gaza. Unable to protest the blockade from within the territory, they have protested it from here. The result has been a tense confrontation between American and European left-wing activism and a repressive police state engaged in a rigorous four-year-long crackdown on critics of the regime of Hosni Mubarak.

Medea Benjamin, an American citizen, cofounder of the antiwar group Code  Pink, and one of the march organizers, says she and 50 other US nationals were “beaten up” by Egyptian police when they went to the US Embassy in Cairo to attend a previously scheduled meeting with embassy staff on Tuesday morning.

They went to deliver a letter of support from Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts, says Ms. Benjamin, but instead were “dragged, pulled, and manhandled” on the pavement by Egyptian police. The group was then detained inside a pen made of metal fences. Benjamin got away and ultimately met with US diplomats, but other protesters were held for six hours.

“The use of force was unbelievable,” she says.

On Sunday, 300 French nationals met at the French Embassy, where they were scheduled to board a chartered bus to drive to the Rafah border post. When they learned that there were no buses, and that Egyptian authorities were barring them from driving past the Sinai town of Al Arish, “we immediately decided to block the street,” says Kauff Alain, a protester from Strasbourg, France.

That street is Sharia Mourad, a major eight-lane thoroughfare in the Cairo district of Giza that is home to the Cairo Zoo, Cairo University, the French and Saudi embassies, and the Four Seasons Hotel, among dozens of other landmarks.

Between 250 and 300 French protesters blocked traffic there for an estimated three hours, turning Giza’s gridlock into an even bigger grind and provoking the wrath of Egyptian police. The protesters were corralled onto the sidewalk in front of their embassy and surrounded by two rows of several hundred baton-wielding riot police who held them there for two days.

“They told us, either you go to the sidewalk in front of your embassy, or we are going to do something to you,” says Loubna Amar, a demonstrator from Lyons, France, who was let out of the makeshift pen on Tuesday morning.

Protesters slept on the sidewalk next to the busy eight-lane road for two days, and say few were allowed to leave to get food or use the toilet. Left with few options, they say all 300 had to use a single bucket on the curb as a bathroom.

“What Egypt has done to us here, this is collective punishment,” says Amar. “We started to call this the Giza Strip.”

So what is next for the Gaza Freedom Marchers? Benjamin says they will march, of course. Or more accurately, walk: “We’re organizing a walk. We’ll go all the way to Rafah.”

This post is published with a sense of sadness and despair

The coming western defeat in Afghanistan is the result of hubris, arrogance and a disregard for other cultures and other viewpoints. We thought we could just march in and impose a brand new ideology, philosophy and attitude on the part of a people we have never understood fully and probably never will.

Our cavalier attitude toward torture, our embrace of violence as a method of solving problems and our desire to get things done quickly, undercut all the efforts at improving Afghan society.

(The same applies to the overall “War on Terror”, by the way.)

Disorganization, lack of a coherent strategy and cynical motives cost us the support of the Afghan population.

Canada’s General Hillier delighted in calling the Taliban “scumbags”. By doing that, he showed his ignorance and lack of understanding of matters that were outside his sphere of knowledge.

He received no rebuke from his political masters, who were and remain equally misguided.

NATO leaders relied on a military solution, which was sure to fail, as it has almost always failed in the past.

The United Nations Security Council went along with the nonsensical approach and its reputation has been blackened along with the reputation of Canada and the rest of the western world.

Now a highly respected analyst and historian, who teaches at an American Military School, has laid it out in blunt terms.

His assessment is a confirmation that those of us who have for many years opposed the American-U.N.-NATO approach have been right and the warmongers have been wrong.

The following article is condensed from today’s Miami Herald.

No reason for optimism about war in Afghanistan

He goes even further to say that Obama knows this war is unwinnable, and that the surge is meant to provide political cover in advance of a full U.S. withdrawal before the 2012 election.

Johnson sees it as the same “cynical exit strategy” devised by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to get American forces out of Vietnam.

Obama wouldn’t be the first U.S. president to let domestic political concerns affect his military moves abroad, but he certainly campaigned as a different kind of leader.

According to Professor Johnson, the cost of the surge in American lives and dollars will be high, even if we stay only 18 months. And the mission of banishing al Qaeda forever from that region seems far-fetched, relying as heavily as it does on cooperation from Pakistan and competence from Afghanistan’s armed forces.

___________________________________________________________

Considering the loss of life, the vast expenditures and the further destruction of Afghan society…being right is very very cold comfort.

On Tuesday, the House of Commons voted in favour of holding a judicial inquiry into how Afghan detainees were treated. The NDP motion, supported by the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois, passed by a vote of 146 to 129.

But it is expected the Conservatives will ignore the non-binding parliamentary motion.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay was said

to be amused.

Peter’s Contact Info:

The U.N. faces an interesting conundrum…

A Memory of Nuremberg. The General Assembly calls upon the world body to adopt a resolution that would require both Hamas and Israel to do independent investigations into whether war crimes were committed  in Gaza.

¶ The resolution would:

• condemn all “targeting of civilians.”
• propose a 3-month deadline for the investigations to be started.
• require the Secretary General to work with the Security Council on enforcement action.

The point here is that both Hamas and Israel can shrug this off because *there is zero chance that the Security Council will take any enforcement steps whatever.

*The reasons for that are that:

1) the U.S. would veto the resolution, in keeping with its history of support for any and all Israeli actions.

2.) China would also veto it because of its brutal occupation of Tibet. and

3) Russia would veto it because of its actions in Chechnya and in other places.

So – the serious in-depth investigation of war crimes is really off the table - because so many governments, including the United States of America, have committed them.

We have indeed come a long from from Nuremberg.

Lawrence Wilkerson Speaks

Larry Wilkerson was a prominent strategic thinker and planner in the U.S. Armed Forces.

He’s a Republican and He issues a dire warning, based on cold hard analysis.

Lawrence Wilkerson