Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes, based on Anthony Swofford's memoir of his life as a private in the US Marines, takes us back to the Gulf War.

That brief affair is now further away from us than was All Quiet on the Western Front from the Great War when it first appeared or The Bridge on the River Kwai was from the Second World War.

All Quiet was an out-and-out pacifist movie bent on rubbing our noses in the horror and inhumanity of trench warfare. River Kwai recognised the madness of war but couldn't throw off the shackles of popular entertainment.

Jarhead (a somewhat derogatory nickname for a marine that originated in the 18th century), while set in the first Gulf War, clearly invites us to see it as a movie about more recent events in the Middle East, just as M.A.S.H, which takes place during the Korean War, was about the war then raging in Vietnam.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swofford, a second-generation marine conceived in 1969 when his father was on leave from Vietnam, who enlisted in 1988 at the age of 19 to escape his messy circumstances at home and find a role in life.

Reading Camus and acquiring a working knowledge of Arabic sets him aside from his crude, foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed comrades, but his goofy smile suggests he's proud of being a marine and enjoys the daily routine.   more »

The US occupation is heavily dependent on the de facto support of the Shia political parties, especially Sciri (the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq), Tehran's instrument in Iraq.

Ayatollah Sistani, who, soon after the fall of Baghdad, told Iraqis of every hue that he favoured an independent and united Iraq, may have meant it at the time, but events have moved on.

When Sistani prevented Shia groups from waging their own struggle and persuaded Moqtada al-Sadr to cease resistance, he also dented the unity of the country.

A unified resistance fighting on two fronts could have led to a unified government later. Unsurprisingly, Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times, has demanded that Sistani be awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Had the Shia parties decided to resist the occupation, it would have been over a long time ago, if indeed it had taken place at all. The clerics in power in Iran made clear to Washington that they would not oppose the overthrow of the Taliban or of Saddam Hussein.

They did so for their own motives and in their own interests, but theirs was a dangerous game.   more »

The political left in America has been infiltrated by pro-Israel zealots. As soon as we criticize them for their stance towards the Palestinians, accusations of anti-Semitism are hurled our way.

This is a new form of McCarthyism, tainted by association with the Palestinian cause. Just as the Radical Left were hounded for being 'communists' in the early fifties.

It is impossible for the political left to question US policy in the Middle East without thinking about Zionism and Palestine.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are hopeless hacks, claims Lenni Brenner here on the CounterPunch site a couple of days ago.

They should be avoided by any pure and peace-loving activist, but then Brenner argues that Louis Farrakhan, who believes white people were created by an evil spaceman, who is profoundly sexist and anti-Semitic, who was involved in the murder of Malcolm X and thinks up-from-the-bootstraps bean-pie businesses is the economic panacea--this guy should be embraced and invited to antiwar rallies.

Why? Because he hates Israel and lots of black people listen to him. Really? He's a charlatan, a crank, his MMM was a bust, but he can bring them out? People listen to him? He'll bring out the black masses?   more »

If President George W. Bush shows no qualms about violating the 217-year-old U.S. Constitution or the 791-year-old Magna Carta, why should we be surprised to find that he is now violating the 2,400-year-old Hippocratic Oath?

And yet this week's revelation of how U.S. doctors are force-feeding captives on hunger strike in Bush's concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay still has the power to shock and sicken -- not just from the savage act itself, but also for the wider moral defeat it represents: another open embrace of raw brutality, another step in America's accelerating plunge into vicious despotism.

News of the hunger strike has been trickling out from the ever-incurious U.S. media for months.

Indeed, Pentagon warlord Donald Rumsfeld even joked about prisoners "going on a diet." But the full scope of the strike -- and the unethical methods being used to quash it -- only emerged this week in The Observer, which obtained legal affidavits from the Army doctors involved in this "torture lite."

The strike, which began last August with a handful of captives, has now spread to 81 prisoners trying to starve themselves to death.

Men driven to such desperation make bad PR for their captors -- especially a blustering pipsqueak who likes to pass himself off as a God-blessed beacon of goodness and freedom.   more »

JEWISH HOLOCAUST; EXAGGERATED FOR PROPAGANDA PURPOSES?

Iran said Sunday it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, an apparent next step in radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's campaign against Israel and a move likely to deepen Tehran's international isolation.

Ahmadinejad already had called the Nazis' World War II slaughter of 6 million European Jews a myth and said the Jewish state should be wiped off the map or moved to Germany or the United States.

Those remarks prompted a global outpouring of condemnation, and Tehran further raised international concern last week when it resumed what it called "research" at its uranium enrichment facility.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. organization that monitors nuclear proliferation, said Iran was resuming small-scale nuclear enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for atomic bombs.

That, in turn, prompted Washington and its allies to renew their push to take Iran before the U.N. Security Council for the possible imposition of sanctions.   more »

Censored story number one at the moment has to be the ongoing and escalating air war in Iraq.

There have been a few reports from Dahr Jamail, but comparatively little in the embedded media, except for the odd aside and now the occasional report that it may escalate further as troops are withdrawn from combat centres.

Only Seymour Hersh has drawn attention to this aspect of the occupation in any mainstream media outlet.

Now Michael Schwartz has written a brilliant piece summarising the key information. The air war is, he says, a "formula for slaughter", and accounts in large measure for the extraoardinarily high level of civilian casualties.

For instance, take one story from Baiji, in which a pilotless drone 'detected' three men which the US claims was planting a bomb by the roadside - the plane tracked the men to what is neutrally described as a 'building', which they strafed with 100 cannon rounds before dropping a bomb which - predictably - destroyed the building and damaged six others around it.

The building turned out to be a house. Three women and three boys aged younger than ten were killed in their nightclothes and blankets.

There was no report of whether a bomb was in fact discovered by the roadside, but the 'coalition' press information centre said: "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."   more »

15 JANUARY

The Pro-Israel Zealots Condemn Spielberg for "Munich" Movie

Maureen Dowd: The Lioness Mauls Bush

The Radical Left Must Show Solidarity with Iran

Iraq: Terrorism, Insurgency or Resistance?

Western Imperialism: Using "Human Rights" to Justify Acts of Aggression

The Corporate Media & Inbuilt Censorship

Frank Rich on Jack Abramoff: "Fiddler on the Hoof"

Pakistan Increasingly Under US Occupation