The concept of “a year in Israel, a love for a lifetime,” as the MASA slogan says, is misleading. Isn’t there a single tourist, either Jewish or non-Jewish, who after visiting here swore never to set foot in this place again? The violence, the crudeness, the materialism, the nationalism, the militarism, the aggressiveness and the occupation don’t suit everyone.
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Okinawa is currently home to approximately 25,000 U.S. service members and their dependents. These soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are a key component of the United States’ and Japan’s defense strategy. We greatly appreciate the generosity of the people of Okinawa and their role as host to U.S. forces in Japan. (more…)

What he fails to mention is the massive local opposition to the presence 25,000 American soldiers on Okinawa — an island with a population of 1.2 million people — which gained huge momentum after the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three U.S. servicemen in the mid-1990s.

The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time.

One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an unpleasant experience. Everyone knows the horror stories from Guantanamo: how the prisoners were chained on the flight to Cuba, and how they arrived at the camp half-frozen, their eyes blindfolded and completely disoriented. They didn’t know where they were at the time, and many of them are still there today, in the prison where the United States keeps its terror suspects.

A special group recently embarked on a trip to Guantanamo that would prove to be significantly more comfortable. The group met at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in the early morning hours, where a North American Airlines charter flight was already waiting. The destination, with the airport code NBW, well removed from the rule of US constitutional law, is known simply as GTMO in military slang. The boarding pass was first of many amusing souvenirs of the trip. (more…)

Recent winners have included Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the American soldier and the online public. (more…)

Do I really need to comment on this? Putin and the American solidier…?

Assaf Kfoury: The economic crisis is felt acutely in the US, but has now spread to the entire world, even to countries (in South America, for example) that initially thought they would be spared. And the American presidential campaign and elections cannot but concern people everywhere, given the dominant role of the US globally. The simultaneous unfolding of the two — the crisis and the presidential campaign — has naturally elicited considerable discussion outside the US. In the Middle East, in particular, there has been a kind of speculation, perhaps wishful thinking, be it from the left or from the right. Some Arab commentators have speculated that an Obama administration will follow less aggressive policies. Some other Arab commentators want to see the economic crisis as the sign of an imminent American global decline, and warn pro-American governments and parties to stop doing the bidding of a doomed North American hegemon. What is your response to this kind of thinking? More generally, in relation to the Middle East, what direction is US policy likely to take with the coming Obama administration in the wake of the economic crisis?

Noam Chomsky: I think that US hegemony will continue to decline as the world becomes more diverse. That process has been underway for a long time. US power peaked at the end of World War II, when it had literally half the world’s wealth and incomparable military power and security. By 1970, its share of global wealth had declined by about half, and it has remained fairly stable since then. In some important respects, US domination has weakened. One important illustration is Latin America, Washington’s traditional “backyard.” For the first time since European colonization 500 years ago, South America is making significant progress towards integration and independence, and is also establishing South-South relations independent of the US, specifically with China, but elsewhere as well. That is a serious matter for US planners. As it was discussing the transcendent importance of destroying Chilean democracy in 1971, Nixon’s National Security Council warned that if the US cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world” — that is, to control the rest of the world. Controlling Latin America has become far more difficult in recent years. (more…)

Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and Bill Clinton’s network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between Obama’s staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.

When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: “I didn’t go around checking their voter registration.” That is a bit hard to believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth is that he liked what he saw.

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush’s time in office to the present. (more…)

There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history’s trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: “American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan).” It is the word “uninhabited” that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defence in London produced this epic lie: “There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation.” (more…)