Fall Of The Wall U.S. Sends Regrets

Posted 11/04/2009 06:53 PM ET

Ronald Reagan issues his "Tear down this wall!" demand to Mikhail Gorbachev, June 12, 1987. Twenty years ago this Monday, the wall came down. NewscomViewEnlargedImage

Cold War: The White House has announced our absence at ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, Russia has been practicing a nuclear invasion of an abandoned Poland.

The Berlin Wall has been a famous backdrop for American presidents sounding the battle cry of liberty in the struggle against tyranny. It was there that John F. Kennedy expressed our solidarity with the encircled residents of that outpost of freedom with his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner."

And it was there that Ronald Reagan, with a defiant "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," voiced our determination not to merely contain or get along with Soviet Communism, but to defeat it.

On Nov. 9, 1989, the people of Berlin did just that, secure in the knowledge that an economically and militarily revived America had their back. But that was then and this is now.

Today, American leaders travel the world expressing their regrets for our alleged past transgressions, and American exceptionalism is no longer part of our vocabulary. We're just another one of the gang, sandwiched alphabetically between Uganda and Upper Volta, whose votes cancel ours in an international community to which we pledge our fealty.

On the 20th anniversary of this triumph of freedom, it appears than no American president will be there to celebrate, much less remember, the day that the "evil empire" was consigned to the ash heap of history.

Words have consequences and dates have significance. It did not escape the notice of the Poles and indeed the rest of Europe when we chose the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, to tell the Polish government in a midnight phone call that we were pulling the plug on our commitment to place ground-based missile interceptors in Poland.

Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, reveal that at that same time the Russians were conducting war games in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practiced amphibious landings on the coast of a "potential aggressor." In the exercises, the potential aggressor was Poland.

As the London Telegraph reports, the Russian air force practiced using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland on the northeast, forces stormed a "Polish" beach and attacked a gas pipeline. "It's an attempt to put us in our place," said Marek Opiola, a member of Poland's parliament. "Don't forget all this happened on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland."

Before we reneged on our commitment to place ground-based interceptors in Poland, Soviet President Medvedev threatened to deploy SS-26 Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, right between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania.

In the 1980s, when the Soviet Union targeted Europe with its SS-20s, a first-strike weapon of unmatched power, President Reagan responded quite differently, upping the ante by deploying Pershing missiles in West Germany.

In July, leading European freedom fighters, including Poland's Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic's Vaclav Havel, wrote an open letter to President Obama warning that the Russia of Medvedev and Putin "is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods."

In March, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red "reset button" to symbolize improved ties, but the gift drew smiles as the word "reset" was mistranslated into the Russian word for "overcharge."

Something else was apparently lost in the translation. We need to press the reset button again, back to the days when American presidents stood in Berlin and echoed the cry of Scottish patriot William Wallace: "Freedom!"

Source: investors.com

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Canada in Afghanistan

Last Updated: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 | 4:27 PM ET

Since the Taliban regime fell in late 2001, Canada has steadily increased its military involvement in Afghanistan. By 2006, Canada had taken on a major role in the more dangerous southern part of the country as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). A battle group of more than 2,000 Canadian soldiers called Operation Athena was based around Kandahar.

For six months ending Nov. 1, 2006, Canada also held the command of one of the main military forces in the area, called Multinational Brigade for Command South. During this time, Operation Medusa, a major offensive against insurgents in Kandahar province, was launched.

The fighting grew fiercer, and the casualty count rose. By February 2009, 108 Canadian military personnel had died in the country. One Canadian diplomat and two Canadian aid workers have also been killed.

A heated debate arose within Parliament, and among Canadians, on the future of the Afghanistan mission. Should troops be pulled out in February 2009 as had been committed? If the mission were to continue, what should be its focus?

In October 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper called for an independent panel to study the questions and recommend a way forward. Former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley led the group.

Manley's recommendations

The Manley panel's report, released Jan. 22, 2008, recommended that Canada's military should remain in Afghanistan beyond February 2009 on two conditions:

The non-binding report also said Canada's role must place greater emphasis on diplomacy and reconstruction, and the Canadian military focus must shift gradually from combat to training Afghan national security forces.

"In sum," the report's final draft read, "an immediate military withdrawal from Afghanistan would cause more harm than good."

More than combat

As the Manley report explained, there is more to Canada's commitment in southern Afghanistan. It is what Foreign Affairs calls a "whole-of-government" approach.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay, right, shakes Prime Minister Stephen Harper's hand after they vote in the House of Commons on March 13, 2008, in favour of extending the Canadian mission in Afghanistan to 2011. (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)

While the mission is largely military, the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) also has personnel from Foreign Affairs, the Canadian International Development Agency and the RCMP. The mandate of the PRT is twofold: providing military security while at the same time working with local leaders on reconstruction efforts.

Canada had provided some limited humanitarian aid, usually about $10 million a year, to Afghanistan even prior to 2001. Canada re-established formal diplomatic relations with the new Afghan government on Jan. 25, 2002, and reopened the embassy in Kabul in September 2003.

At a conference on Afghanistan in Tokyo in January 2002, Canada made a major commitment to assist in the reconstruction of the war-torn country. Foreign Affairs said Afghanistan is now "the single largest recipient of Canadian bilateral aid."

As of 2007, according to the Manley report, Canada had allocated a total of $741 million to Afghanistan, over the fiscal years 2001-02 to 2006-07.

History of the mission

Canada's military mission to Afghanistan began soon after the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. A naval task force was deployed to the Persian Gulf in October of that year.

Pallbearers carry the casket of Cpl. Matthew McCully during a repatriation ceremony in Trenton, Ont., on May 28, 2007. McCully is one of more than 100 Canadian soldiers killed since the Afghan mission began in 2002. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

In February 2002, a battle group from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry was sent to Kandahar for six months. It assisted the United States and other forces in an offensive against elements of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the rugged southern regions of the country as part of the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom.

From August 2003 to December 2005, Canada's military commitment was largely Operation Athena, based in the capital, Kabul, as part of the International Assistance Force. ISAF had the aim of providing intelligence and security to allow rebuilding of "the democratic process," which eventually led to elections in the fall of 2005.

On July 31, 2006, NATO troops assumed command of all military operations in southern Afghanistan. ISAF already had troops elsewhere in Afghanistan, including the capital Kabul and in the north and the west of the country.

Lt.-Gen. David Richards, a British general, was put in charge of the NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. He announced the deployment of 8,000 NATO soldiers — including 2,200 Canadians —and Afghan units to six southern provinces by mid-September 2006. That deployment was increased to 2,500 in early September.

Other Canadian missions

According to the Manley report, the Afghan National Army is growing in strength. It had about 47,000 troops in 2007 and a plan to reach at least 70,000 three years later. The Department of National Defence has also admitted that Canada's secret special forces, Joint Task Force Two, have been operating alongside the American and other special forces units in Afghanistan, but no details about their activities have ever been released.

Seven weeks after the Manley report was released, a confidence motion to keep Canadian soldiers in Kandahar until 2011 passed easily in the House of Commons.

The Conservative motion, which was revised after consultation with the Liberals, called for the mission to be renewed beyond 2009 but with a focus on reconstruction and training of Afghan troops and a firm pullout date that calls for Canadian troops to leave Afghanistan by December 2011.

The extension was contingent on whether NATO allies provide 1,000 extra troops and Ottawa secures access to unmanned surveillance drones and large helicopters.

During the fall 2008 federal election campaign, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper emphasized the "end date" for the Afghanistan mission would be 2011, with the bulk of the Canadian military forces withdrawn by that time.

A Canadian soldier meets with village elders in the Panjwaii district on Dec. 9, 2006. While the Canadian military provides security in Afghanistan, soldiers also work with local leaders on reconstruction efforts. (Bill Graveland/Canadian Press)

About a month after that statement from Harper, a government report found that the military mission in Afghanistan could cost up to $1.8 billion, or $1,500 per household, by 2011.

The report tabled by parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page also found, however, that a lack of government consistency and transparency make the figures difficult to estimate and said that they likely underestimate the full costs of the mission.

Early in 2009, word emerged of a new NATO order that would see Canadian soldiers targeting opium traffickers and drug facilities when there is proof of direct links to the Taliban.

U.S. President Barack Obama has called on NATO allies to renew their commitment to fight the resurgent Taliban, but extending Canada's mission in Afghanistan beyond 2011 was not discussed when U.S. and Canadian military leaders met in Ottawa in February 2009.

However, Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated the U.S. was counting on Canada's military support in Afghanistan over the next couple of years.

Source: cbc.ca

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The American Civil War: the second US revolution

Men of Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln, District of Columbia, circa 1864

 

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 09:58

Written by Neil Faulkner

 

When the guns opened fire on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861, most Americans thought the war would be over before the summer was out. President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to serve for 90 days. That, he reckoned, would be enough to crush the domestic rebellion in the Southern states against the elected federal government in Washington.

By the time it ended, four years later, 620,000 Americans were dead – more than in all the other wars in US history combined. What pushed the cost so high were the issues at stake.

 

For the American Civil War, which started 150 years ago this month, was the pivotal event in the history of the United States – a revolutionary war to complete the work of the War of Independence and to decide which of two incompatible social systems was to dominate the North American continent.

Charleston, South Carolina, recently hosted a hundred-dollar-a-ticket ball to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the state’s secession from the Union. Commenting on the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ ‘Secession Ball’, one of the organisers explained that it was a celebration of the South’s ‘just and honourable cause’.

 

A slaveholders’ rebellion

 

Jefferson Davis

That cause, it is claimed, was ‘states’ rights’ and ‘self-government’. This is purest hokum. The eleven states that seceded to form the rebel Confederacy took their legal stand on a supposed constitutional right to withdraw from the federal union formed during the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). But they did it now for a reason: they had lost the 1860 presidential election to a ‘black’ Republican.

The Southern leaders had no doubts about the reasons for secession and war. ‘The undying opposition to slavery in the United States means war upon it,’ explained Confederate President Jefferson Davis, ‘and the time is at hand when the great battle is to be fought between the defenders of constitutional government and the votaries of mob rule, fanaticism, and anarchy.’

Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens defined the new nation’s raison d’être as follows: ‘Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.’

Slavery was the issue on which men fought and died through four bloody years of ferociously contested civil war. There are military reasons for the war’s intensity and duration – the vastness of the spaces, the dense wilderness across so much of it, the primitive communications, the killing-power of modern weaponry, and the ability of mass-production industry to equip and supply huge armies. But the biggest reason of all is that it was a revolutionary war to decide what sort of society the United States was going to be.

 

Free soil, free land, free labour

 

The 1860 election had been one of the most polarised in US history. The Republican programme expressed the aspirations of the fast-growing capitalist economy of the North and the fast-expanding pioneer communities of the West. Central planks were higher tariffs to protect US industry, free farms for new settlers, and government subsidies for railroad construction.

The slogan was ‘Free soil, free land, free labour’. ‘The free labour system,’ explained Lincoln, ‘opens the way for all – gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.’ This was the rhetoric of a young, confident, forward-looking bourgeoisie – and, if needs be, a revolutionary one. 

The South, by contrast, was a conservative agricultural society whose prosperity was largely dependent on export earning from a single commodity: cotton. Yet the South, like the North, was booming. As the textile industry expanded in New England, Britain, France, and elsewhere, the demand for, and price of, cotton soared.

In 1800, cotton exports had been worth $5 million and represented 7% of total US exports. By 1860, it was $191 million and 57% of US exports. While mill-owners, mine-bosses, and railroad operators grew rich in the North, the traditional planter-aristocracy also grew rich in the South.

The differences were many. Tariffs meant protection for Northern industry, but higher prices for Southern consumers. Westward expansion was fed mainly by Northern pioneers. Railroad subsidies enriched Northern capitalists, not Southern planters.

 

Slavery: the prism of conflict

 

Here were two economic systems, two social orders, two types of ruling class with different needs and rival demands, strapped together in a single polity. And one issue became the prism that concentrated the growing antagonism and turned it into a mighty conflagration: human slavery.

The wealth of the Southern plantations depended on the labour of four million black slaves. The Republican Party contained a radical wing that was abolitionist. But it was Lincoln, a relative moderate, who said, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave, half free.’

Lincoln won only 40% of the national popular vote in the 1860 presidential election, but he carried almost every county in the Upper North, and won a clear majority of 54% across the North as a whole. Throughout the South, by contrast, his vote was minimal, and largely restricted to Unionist enclaves like West Virginia and East Tennessee.

Northern abolitionists had no doubt about the significance of what had happened: ‘The great revolution has actually taken place,’ wrote Charles Francis Adams. ‘The country has once and for all thrown off the domination of the slaveholders.’

The struggle that resulted was a long and bloody one because it was a revolutionary war fought between rival systems and opposing political ideologies; no compromise, no negotiated settlement, no happy half-way house was open to Americans as they embarked upon their violent feud in the spring of 1861.

 

The logic of revolution

 

The stakes were irreducibly high for both sides: for the North, the survival of the Union, a unified national economy, and policy geared to industrial growth; for the Southern elite, the defence of slavery, the foundation-block of their social order.

The logic of the struggle soon drove Lincoln and the moderate Republicans towards emancipation. Slave labour freed white men for service in the Confederate cause, whereas escaped slaves could be turned into Union soldiers. A war against slavery, moreover, would make the struggle for the Union morally unimpeachable, wrecking any chance of European backing for the South, and enlisting the passion of abolitionists and the slaves themselves in the nation’s ‘fiery trial’.

Lincoln came to the conclusion that ‘we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued’. Implicit in the Emancipation Proclamation issued in September 1862 was a redefinition of US democracy. ‘As I would not be a slave,’ said Lincoln, ‘so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

4th US Artillery at Gettysburg

 

Fighting for ‘a new birth of freedom’

 

Very many of the men and women who won the American Civil War for the Union were inspired by this vision of ‘a new birth of freedom’. On 2 July 1863, the second day of Gettysburg, the war’s greatest battle, the end of the Union line was held by a single regiment of about 250 men.

 

For two hours, it fought off attacks by three or four times its own numbers and saved the Union army from defeat. The commander of the 20th Maine that day was an abolitionist college professor called Joshua Chamberlain.

Just over two weeks later, on 18 July 1863, hundreds of miles away at the entrance to Charleston Harbour, a Union regiment hurled itself at the formidable defences of Fort Wagner. The attack was pressed with consummate courage, but was defeated. The colonel of the regiment was shot down on top of the enemy rampart.

The regiment was the 54th Massachusetts. Carrying the war to the heart of the slaveholders’ rebellion, it was the very embodiment of abolitionist revolution, for the 54th Massachusetts was a black regiment. The 25-year-old white colonel slain at its head was abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw.

Shaw’s bereaved father at first sought the return of his son’s body. A Confederate officer wrote back ‘we have buried him with his niggers’. Shaw’s father immediately quelled any further efforts to recover his son’s body: ‘We hold that a soldier’s most appropriate burial-place is on the field where he has fallen.’ Racist reaction had been answered by a voice of revolution.

 

The struggle continues

 

Racism still poisons American life. Again and again, in the 150 years since the Civil War, mass struggle has been necessary to drive back the boundaries of bigotry, police brutality, and racial injustice.

The American Civil War was one giant revolutionary step in that struggle. Two-thirds of a million Americans did not die for nothing: their sacrifice ended the abomination of human slavery in the United States forever.

But racism endures, because capitalism is a class society in which the rich, to secure their rule, must foster division and discord among the exploited.

And when the third American revolution takes place – the revolution against capitalism, class exploitation, and racial oppression – the descendants of slaves will fight as equals alongside the descendants of Mexican, Irish, Jewish, and many other nationalities of immigrants who make up the melting-pot people of the United States.

 

That is, they will fight as part of a single united working class, and with the aim of universal human emancipation. When they do so, they can take inspiration from the men of the 20th Maine and the 54th Massachusetts in 1863.

 

Source: counterfire.org

 

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