Global

A former Governor of Virginia is expected to be sentenced to a long stay in prison. The same fate has befallen governors in states across the United States, including in nearby Maryland, Tennessee, and West Virginia. A former governor of Illinois is in prison. Governors have been convicted of corruption in Rhode Island, Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Connecticut, and (in a trumped-up partisan scam) in Alabama. The statewide trauma suffered by the people of states that have locked up their governors has been . . . well, nonexistent and unimaginable.

“The only good Talib is a dead Talib.”

These words, uttered half a decade ago by the head of intelligence for the NATO coalition force in Afghanistan, summon a far earlier American savagery. As the American empire affects to close the door on its war with Afghanistan, the words also serve as a sort of doorstop propping open our further intervention in this broken country.

The war isn’t really ending. Some 18,000 foreign troops will stay in Afghanistan, almost 11,000 of them American, under a new mission called “Resolute Support.” U.S. forces will also have “a limited combat role as part of a separate counterterrorism mission,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Incredibly, we’re not letting go. We’re just disappearing the combat mission into global background noise.

What to do about the political mess in the Middle East and the rise of the Islamic State and related political movements?

Shortly after the end of World War II, the Western powers and the whole world began to recognize that the age of explicit colonial domination was over, and dozens of colonies were let go of and took political independence.

It is now past time for the United States and other world powers to recognize that the age of neo-colonial military, political and economic domination, especially in the Islamic Middle East, is decisively coming to a close.

Attempts to maintain it by military force have been disastrous for ordinary people trying to survive in the affected countries. There are powerful cultural currents and political forces in motion in the Middle East that simply will not tolerate military and political domination. There are thousands of people prepared to die rather than accept it.

U.S. policy will find no military fix for this reality.

“We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'. – Harold Pinter

British playwright Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. His powerful acceptance speech exposed the United States for its fascist, imperialist policies since World War II. His speech (delivered three years before he died in 2008) was an important glimpse into – and a reasonable summary of -- the innumerable documentable US imperialistic crimes that have been secretly facilitated by our multinational corporations, our national security apparatus, our military leaders, our wealthy elites and the craven politicians who are beholden to those four realities that have shaped American foreign policy over the past 60 years.

Back in September I wrote about cleaning up your phone settings to keep your photos and personal information safe. (And if you got a new phone, tablet, or even laptop over the holidays, you might want to give that article another look!)  But with cloud storage becoming more and more popular as we juggle an assortment of connected devices, it’s important to be mindful of where you’re putting not just your naked selfies but also your credit card and banking information, your passwords, and the 12,000-word Captain America/Iron Man slashfic you don’t want anyone to see. 

In terms of losses in human lives, 2014 has been a horrific year for Palestinians, surpassing the horrors of both 2008 and 2009, when an Israeli war against the Gaza Strip killed and wounded thousands.  

While some aspects of the conflict are stagnating between a corrupt, ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA), and the criminality of Israeli wars and occupation, it would also be fair to argue that 2014 was also a game changer to some degree - and it is not all bad news. 

To an extent, 2014 has been a year of clarity for those keen to understand the reality of the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ but were sincerely confused by the contrasting narratives. 

Here are some reasons that support the argument that things are changing.  

1. A Different Kind of Palestinian Unity 

Once again we come to the end of our time in Middle-earth. Like the Lord of the Rings movies before it, the Hobbit trilogy—adapted from the predecessor to the Lord of the Rings novels—is, with the release of The Battle of the Five Armies, now complete. But is the finale worth five and a half hours of lead-up? 

The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies have all been long, ridiculously so when the “extended” versions are taken into account, so it’s no surprise that The Battle of the Five Armies clocks in at two and a half hours. But in this case it doesn’t feel drawn out or overlong—for a change. The only part that feels at all extraneous is the several minutes at the beginning spent wrapping up the cliffhanger from the end of The Desolation of Smaug. It’s an exciting, stand-out scene, full of suspense and property damage, but it feels like it should have been the climax of the previous movie instead of the beginning of this one. 

“This is not who we are. This is not how we operate,” were the words of President Barack Obama commenting on the grisly findings of a long-awaited congressional report on the use of torture by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  

But what if this is exactly who we are?