Iran’s provocative missile tests ten days ago again fueled the debate on the likelihood of aerial strikes against Iran. Since last week’s thaw, however, an attack on Iran by the end of President Bush’s tenure no longer appears in the offing. Moreover, the narrow, exclusively military focus of the debate misses the broader picture. The overall U.S. strategy of containing Iran has failed in principle. And the attempt to impose a sanctions regime on Iran has led to an erosion of U.S. strategic influence in Asia and the Middle East. Over the long term, Washington’s shortsighted containment policy will only hurt Western business in the region. It will also play into the hands of China, drive crucial allies away, and render Iran untouchable.
At the eleventh hour, even the Bush administration seems to have realized, albeit in a limited way, the inherent failure of the containment approach. In an important about-face, the White House not only agreed to direct talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in Geneva this weekend but also held out the prospect of soon opening an American interest section in Tehran. This sea change suggests that the realists around Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates having finally gained the upper hand over the faction around Vice President Dick Cheney in the intra-administration feud. The reversal also acknowledges that the dual approach of sanctions and military threats have produced nothing but America’s own isolation. The far-reaching repercussions of these counterproductive sanctions against Iran and America’s increasing isolation in Asia are best illustrated by this month’s breakthrough on the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline.
It’s the Gas, Stupid
The Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline (IPI) is a $7.5 billion project designed to supply Indian mega-cities with natural gas from Iran’s Persian Gulf fields via a 1,700 miles long pipeline across Pakistan. The project has been repudiated and boycotted by one project partner or the other uncounted times since its conceptualization. But on July 3, Indian Oil Minister Murli Deora affirmed on the sidelines of the World Petroleum Congress in Madrid that India expects to finally sign the deal next month. This long-time-in-coming breakthrough constitutes a crucial step toward energy security for India.
For the United States, on the other hand, it deals a resounding blow to the fragile international sanctions front the Bush administration has crafted to contain Iran. What is more, with China keen on joining the project, a new geo-strategic axis - Tehran-Islamabad-New Delhi-Beijing - is about to emerge. This axis will radically reshuffle the power structure in Asia and, with it, the global balance of power.
Despite the Cheney faction’s saber-rattling, the Bush administration has banked on economic sanctions strangling investment and beating a technology-dependant Tehran into submission. This strategy of tightening the economic corset choking Iran and thus forcing it to renounce its nuclear ambitions, however, has isolated the United States and its allies more than Iran. For the time being, Washington has succeeded in cajoling French Total SA, Anglo-Dutch Shell, and Spanish Repsol to withdraw their bids to exploit the Iranian South Pars field, the world’s largest gas field, and the EU approved freezing the assets of a major state-owned Iranian retail bank, Bank Melli, last month.
But Iran’s countermeasures have been in the works for quite a while. After all, the country has long suffered from the effects of sanctions and the reluctance of Western companies to invest in its energy sector. So it has increasingly looked eastward for new financiers and partners. The most striking example is Iran’s March 24 bid for membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Central Asian security group dominated by Russia and China.
This new “looking east” — negahe be shargh — policy concept is the brainchild of Bangalore-educated, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. While an Iranian SCO membership is still in the future, Asian dominance over the Iranian market is a current reality. China already ranks as the number one foreign investor in Iran. Malaysian Petronas and LG Korea feature prominently in the exploitation of South Pars. The new IPI would be a final nail in the coffin of the sanctions regime.
The Empire Strikes Back
The United States has fought hard against the new pipeline linking Iran, India, and Pakistan. As recently as July 15, Senators Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) threatened to strengthen the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 that allows for the litigation of foreign firms investing in sanctionable business in Iran - a clear warning signal to India. Meanwhile, since the three countries could not bear the projected costs of $7.5 billion on their own, Washington has also used its considerable influence at the World Bank in the person of former president Paul Wolfowitz. He bluntly informed Pakistan that the bank would not allow any international institution to finance the project.
In its attempts to destabilize Iran and disrupt the possible route of the pipeline, the United States is allegedly supporting Jundallah. This militant insurgency in the Iranian Sistan and Baluchistan Province, has suspected links to the Taliban and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), which has been fighting a guerilla war against the Pakistani army since 2000. This clandestine Baloch connection - recently exposed by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker - undermines America’s fragile, always-on-the-brink-of-a-coup ally, Pakistan. Washington is also pushing for the alternative of a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI), the construction bids for which, as a side benefit, would go to U.S. companies. This alternative scheme is strikingly similar to the pipeline deal Unocal struck with the Taliban in 1996.
U.S. obstruction is not the only problem facing the IPI project. Iran is asking for a lot of money; India and Pakistan have notorious difficulties cooperating. But this cluster of American threats and coercions proved until recently to be pivotal in preventing the project from getting off the ground. Former Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns cited preventing IPI as one of his greatest accomplishments at a conference at Harvard University in March.
Push Factors
India, however, desperately needs energy for its growing economy. And it will risk its relationship with the United States to get this energy. Moreover, its heavily subsidized low gas prices are no longer sustainable, especially now before an election year. After all, with oil around $140 per barrel and a global recession looming on the horizon, the United States no longer has the ability to pressure countries to sever energy ties with Iran, as it did when a fire-breathing John Bolton forced Japan to withdraw its bid to exploit the Iranian Azadegan oil field. It is now every country for itself in the new energy environment.
Despite U.S. opposition, then, the IPI pipeline is back on line. The last commercial difficulties between Pakistan and India concerning transit fees have been cleared away, and only minor technical details remain for a trilateral meeting in Tehran scheduled for the coming weeks. If an agreement is reached this summer, construction could commence in 2009 and be completed by 2012. Pakistan is eager to expand its new role as the energy corridor of the future. It expects an annual $600 million in transportation fees from IPI and is vigorously politicking for China to join the project in order to increase those revenues. Until Indian consent was secured, Pakistan used the Chinese wild card as a bargaining tool to force a wavering India’s hand. But now it seems that Islamabad and Tehran can have it both ways. If World Bank financing is off the table, China can step in to foot the bill.
Finalization of IPI in the coming weeks would be more than a slap in the face for President Bush. After all, in 2006 he personally fought for a nuclear cooperation pact with India designed to meet India’s energy needs while tying it closer to the United States as a counterweight against a rising China. Now however, not only has the Indian government so far failed to get the pact ratified in the Indian parliament, but India is about to collaborate with China in undermining America’s sanctions on Iran. Pakistan, beefed up with more than $10 billion in military aid by the Bush administration, is also giving the cold shoulder to Washington. And Iran, soon to be the number one energy supplier for East Asia, becomes more untouchable by the day.
The Bush administration’s lofty design to keep Iran in the box and use the Indian tiger to tame the Chinese dragon runs the risk of collapsing in the last months of his presidency. In fact, the American sanctions regime is driving Iran into China’s arms and facilitating a Sino-Indian rapprochement. Even worse, America is facing the rise of a new strategic axis in Asia that stretches from Tehran to New Delhi to Beijing, with Islamabad as a central hub, and financed by petrodollars. Then again, the Bush policy, by giving a lift to this new strategic energy alliance, may ultimately strengthen support in Washington for a military strike against Iran: to accomplish what containment failed to do.
Hannes Artens is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) and the author of The Writing on the Wall, a political novel cautioning against war with Iran. He has worked with the Carter Center as well a think tank advising the German parliament on U.S. foreign policy. He is a contributing editor of TheAgonist and can be reached at hannes@hannesartens.com
There is a move underway in Hollywood to attack American film stereotypes of Muslims—and the effort is not being mounted by Muslims. The campaign has been launched by the Writers Guild in Hollywood, in conjunction with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, and television producer and political fund-raiser Haim Saban, who happens to be Jewish.
They recently hosted a panel of writers, producers and filmmakers to discuss ways of breaking the media cycle of negatively stereotyping Muslims.
The forum, which was called, “Rewriting the Divide: Hollywood and the Muslim World,” addressed ways in which Hollywood could break its cycle of stereotyping. As described recently in The National, the brand new English language daily published in Abu Dhabi, the consensus at the forum was clear: Hollywood has been promoting stereotypes for too long, just as previous generations of filmmakers stereotyped Italians as gangsters and blacks as criminals. Many in the entertainment industry believe it is their responsibility to rip apart these negative labels.
Howard Gordon, the creator and executive producer of the television terrorist drama “24,” recently changed his mind on the issue after meeting with representatives from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Gordon, a recent convert on the issue, now speaks up against media typecasting of Muslims. “Fear sells. It does,” he acknowledged. “We need to be mindful of it.”
Shohreh Aghdashloo
Gordon became aware of the problem during the second season of “24,” in 2002. The plot line focused on a suburban and Americanized Middle Eastern family, all of whom just happened to be terrorists—including the mom played by Iranian-American Shohreh Aghdashloo.
Fox’s marketing department arranged for a giant billboard to be erected above Los Angeles’s San Diego Freeway with an image of the family accompanied by the slogan: “They could be next door.”
CAIR was so shocked it sought an immediate meeting with Gordon and the other producers. When Gordon listened to CAIR’s concerns that the billboard—and the show—could incite violence and racial hatred, he realized he agreed with the group. “We were acting as handmaids to fear. The billboard came down that afternoon,” Gordon said.
Maz Jobrani
That same season, Maz Jobrani—of the “Axis of Exil” comedy group—was hired to play a character called Marko, the last terrorist part he has played. Marko was part of a crew delivering a truck bomb, only to have a change of heart when they see children playing at the site where they intend to detonate their load. “They decide they don’t want to do it, which is kind of cool,” Jobrani said.
Gordon’s change of heart was partially due to the fact that Arab-American actors began turning down roles in his and other shows; he realized the pool of Middle Eastern actors was not so large in Los Angeles that he could afford to ignore the ones who didn’t want to play the role of the typical terrorist who at some point would be required to say the too familiar line: “In the name of Allah, I will kill you all.”
Gordon said he began listening to the Middle Eastern actors he had hired and began incorporating some of their suggestions to make their characters less stereotypical. Gordon said he also realized it was important to cast Middle Eastern Americans in parts where their ethnicity was not the main factor of their role—as doctors or telephone operators or teachers.
The executive director, along with the politically conscious film production company Participant Media, which made “Syriana” and “The Kite Runner,” have now joined together in an effort to persuade writers, directors and other producers in Hollywood to stop feeding stereotypes about Middle Easterners and Muslims.
The idea of the forum was to promote a series of dialogues with writers at which experts on various aspects of Middle Eastern culture could explain Islam and how day-to-day life evolves in Egypt or Syria. Several participants, however, took issue with the fact that the problem was identified as being about Islam rather than a broader East-West divide. Nicole Pano, a Palestinian-American actress, pointed out that many Arabs like her are Christian. Others, on the other hand, commented that many light-skinned Americans—including one of the panelists—are Muslims and don’t necessarily suffer from the stereotyping.
Everyone at the forum agreed, however, that the ignorance of American audiences about Middle Eastern culture was both disturbing. Dalia Mogahed, a researcher with the Gallup polling organization who wrote the book entitled, “Who Speaks for Islam?” said that when she asked Muslims around the world what they most admired about the United States, they generally pointed to the country’s political freedoms and its technological savvy—two things they would like more of for themselves. But when she asked Americans what they most admired about the Muslim world, their two most common answers were “nothing” and “I don’t know.”
Many analysts say the stereotyping is not the fault of Hollywood and instead point to the American news media for propagating stereotypes. But others say the average American film or television viewer is exposed to relentless labeling and negative images of Middle Eastern or Muslim people.
The plot of the 2006 film “American Dreamz,” for example, which recently aired on HBO, centers on a television talent show and on two members of the same Arab family who end up competing to participate. One of them “naturally” turns out to be a terrorist who only wants to get on the show so he can kill a fictional U.S. president who has decided the best way to increase his declining popularity ratings is to appear as a guest judge.
According to Jack Shaheen, a Lebanese-American university professor who has made a career of cataloging Middle Eastern stereotypes in books like “Reel Bad Arabs” and his latest, “Guilty,” told The National that “American Dreamz” was actually pretty tame compared with some of other films.
A striking point about the casting of “American Dreamz” was that only one member of the Arab family at the heart of the plot was played by an actual Arab, the Lebanese-American Tony Yalda. The other Arabs were mostly played by Iranians.
Shaheen saw several possible reasons for this sort of casting; either Arab-Americans didn’t want to play these roles, the producers weren’t interested in casting Arabs—someone with brown skin was good enough—or, said Shaheen, “Producers and directors may want to avoid Arab-American actors to avoid alerting the community that the film contains damaging stereotypes.”
Those stereotypes have now become so pronounced that some Arab-American performers are now being told they don’t look Arab enough. “They want ugly. They want us to play terrorists, and terrorists are ugly,” said Pano, the Palestinian-American actress
About Iran Times: The Iran Times is an independent newspaper with no affiliation with any political party or faction The Iran Times corporation was founded in Washington D.C. in 1970, in accordance with U.S. federal and local regulations: www.iran-times.com
Filed under: Iran — Farhad Abdolian @ 8:24 pm
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It is funny to see American government trying to promote “persian” folk songs. The bastards who are the main source of cultural destruction worldwide, are now trying to promote Iranian folk songs?
Give me a brake. I am not against the NoorSaaz group, but the fact that the US government is sponsoring it is making me both suspicious and angry.
You can find their videos at the end of the article.
U.S. Musicians Put Their Own Twist on Popular Persian Songs
American band NoorSaaz delights audiences in Washington area
NoorSaaz members Nathan Dillon, Mavrothis T. Kontanis, Monika Jalili, Timothy Quigley and Megan Weeder pose for the camera.
Washington — An operatic voice sings of love lost and love found in a language unfamiliar to many in the audience and even to some members of the band.
Monika Jalili and her group NoorSaaz are Americans who sing their own interpretations of Persian folk songs and popular music from the 1940s through the 1970s.
The NoorSaaz fan base is mostly Persian, and many concertgoers initially are surprised by Jalili’s soaring voice and her ability to sing — and correctly interpret — Persian songs.
“She has a wonderful voice. A tinge of accent gives it a quality that’s very interesting,” said one audience member following a June 7 concert at American University’s Kay Spiritual Life Center in Washington.
Jalili, a native New Yorker, is a classically trained vocalist who studied at the Manhattan School of Music.
She began singing in Persian after meeting an Iranian music instructor through a friend. He invited her to perform at a festival in Long Island, New York, to celebrate the Persian New Year, known as Nowrouz.
“I just fell in love with the music and the poetry, and I try to make it my own,” said Jalili in a recent interview with America.gov. “My [husband’s] family loved it, and they began suggesting other songs.” Her husband, Reza Jalili, is Iranian.
After singing for family and friends, she realized she wanted to sing in Persian as a full-time job, so she advertised on Craigslist for a band — and it worked. Craigslist is a Web site used by Americans to find almost anything — apartments, used furniture and band mates.
Violinist Megan Weeder had played Persian music with a group in Indiana before moving to New York City. She answered Jalili’s ad, and the band NoorSaaz was formed in 2004. In addition to Weeder and Jalili, the band includes drummer Timothy Quigley, guitarist Nathan Dillon and oud player Mavrothis T. Kontanis. (An oud is the Middle Eastern version of a lute). NoorSaaz is the Persian term for “light creator,” and the word “saaz” also can mean “musical instrument.”
The show at American University was attended mostly by Iranians or by those of Persian descent. For the young, it reminded them of their families and songs they heard as children. For their elders, it reminded them of home.
After Jalili sang “My Sweet Beloved Mariam,” the crowd exploded into thunderous applause.
“The songs were like old Chinese songs. It reconfirmed to me that music is international,” said one Chinese American who attended the concert with Persian friends.
“I loved her translations,” said an audience member of Iranian background. “If non-Persians understand, that’s a plus.”
The occasional translation into English or French makes the Persian love ballads accessible to a wider audience, but the band’s love for Persia’s culture and music shines through in each performance.
“We try to bring the music to non-Persians. We’re Americans and we put our own spin on it, but we still respect the music,” said Weeder. The response from non-Persians has been very rewarding, she added.
“It’s been a great journey,” said Jalili, commenting on the success of NoorSaaz.
The concert was sponsored by the Foundation for Iranian Studies, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “preserve, study and transmit Iran’s cultural heritage, and to conduct and support research in the field of Iranian studies,” according to its brochure.
NoorSaaz performed again at a festival in Fairfax, Virginia, on June 24, and will return to Washington at a later date to perform at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
About America.gov: U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) engages international audiences on issues of foreign policy, society and values to help create an environment receptive to U.S. national interest
and here is the original song by Fereidoon Nouri:
And here is the same song modified for Piano:
And here is another newer version of the same song (much older Mr. Nouri):
MEMBERS of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hezbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel’s Channel 10 television reported today, citing diplomatic sources.
It said the Iranians were identified by papers found on their bodies, but gave no further details on how many were discovered or when.
Neither the Israeli military nor Hezbollah representatives in Beirut had immediate comment on the report.
Iran, like fellow Hezbollah patron Syria, insists its support for the Shiite guerrilla group is purely moral.
Israel said many of the rockets being fired against its civilian and military targets are Iranian made, and that Hezbollah fighters taking on its forces trained in Iran.
Washington also accuses Tehran of actively funding Hezbollah.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are traditionally very close to fellow Shiite Muslims in Hezbollah and were deployed in south Lebanon in the 1980s.
By now the structure of the U.S. game with Iran is clear. In the first move, the United States and Iran make some small progress toward improved relations. In the counter move, hardliners in the United States and Israel launch attacks against Iran in order to sabotage these improving relations.
In the latest iteration of this game, the U.S. State Department has made an interesting gambit. It announced that Undersecretary of State William Burns would sit at the table on July 20 as members of the European Union entered into talks with Iran over its nuclear program. At the same time, the United States has been reported to be considering opening a formal American interests section in Tehran. These two actions will be the first serious public diplomatic activities between the two nations in nearly three decades. (Three earlier meetings in Baghdad between U.S. Iraqi Envoy Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi-Qomi focused on security in Iraq).
The counter moves came fast and furious. First, former UN ambassador and prominent neoconservative John Bolton launched a jeremiad against the U.S. government on July 15 in the Wall Street Journal. Criticizing the administration for failing to act militarily against Iran, Bolton placed his hopes on Israel to carry out the military attack that he fervently desires. “Instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during, and after a strike on Iran,” he wrote.
Following closely on Bolton’s editorial, the New York Times printed another attack against Iran on Friday, July 18, just one day before the opening of the European talks, by Benny Morris, an historian at Ben-Gurion University. Like Bolton, Morris presents an Iranian nuclear weapons program as an established fact, implies that Iran would make a first-strike attack on Israel, and thus justifies preemptive military action on Israel’s part.
Both Bolton and Morris base their attacks on false premises. Diplomatic dealings with Iran have, in fact, succeeded on the few occasions they have been tried. There is no proof anywhere that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program at present, a fact underscored by the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007. In fact, Iran’s nuclear experiments are still at a primitive level, far from any possibility of manufacturing weapons. Iran has never directly threatened Israel and is not likely considering a first strike against Israel.
Such attacks have followed every minuscule improvement in U.S-Iranian relations during the Bush administration. Every first move in a warming trend – such as Iranian support for the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, U.S. aid to Iran during the Bam earthquake in 2003, and Iran’s formal offer to enter into comprehensive negotiations with the United States in 2003 – has been followed by sharp criticism from both inside and outside of the Brush administration. Detractors have countered these advances with accusations of Iranian support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and support for “special groups” attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. True to form, the U.S. military announced the launching of a new crackdown on weapons smuggling from Iran to coincide with the Saturday talks.
None of these accusations, along with the Iranian weapons program and plot to launch a first-strike against Israel, has ever been proven. The most memorable of these attacks was the labeling of Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” in President George Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, just as Iran’s military aid to the United States was beginning to create a climate of trust between the two nations.
Bolton, Morris, and their ilk may represent the last, weak gasp of the hawks who would embroil the United States and Israel in a disastrous confrontation with Iran. Indeed, for the time being, it seems that cooler heads are prevailing. Though Western commentators described the talks at the one-shot Saturday meeting negatively as a “deadlock,” William Burns’ official presence at the table was an important benchmark. Iran did not accept the Western proposals on the spot, but was given two weeks to respond. The Iranians appeared pleased. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator, called the negotiating process a “very beautiful endeavor.”
Despite this progress, the power of the American and Israeli extremists should not be underestimated. They still have the ear of Vice President Dick Cheney and a dwindling coterie of his supporters in the Department of Defense. A group of Israeli politicians, including Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, has arrived in Washington, according to Mother Jones magazine, presumably to convince the Bush administration to allow them to carry out their attack.
Hostile rhetoric against Iran also plays into the U.S. electoral process. For American politicians, Iran is a universal bogeyman, useful in an election year as a device to show elected officials as tough on foreign miscreants. Indeed, since the Iranian Revolution, U.S.-Iranian relations have been a centerpiece in election debates. Conspiracy theorists believe fervently that the Republican Party engineered an “October Surprise” in 1980 with Iranian officials – delaying the release of the American hostages until after the U.S. presidential election – and thus denied Jimmy Carter a second term. The purported event – true or not – has supplied a permanent political term for American elections.
In every presidential election since, U.S.-Iranian relations have been featured in presidential debates and campaign ads, with universal negativity toward Iran. This year is no exception with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain all expressing hostile attitudes toward Iran. And this year’s October Surprise is the rumor that the Bush administration will bomb Iran just before the election to give a boost to John McCain. Unless the Israeli hawks get there first.
War is hell, anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a liar.
No one wins a war, except those who sit in their comfortable multi million dollar homes and enjoy their money reach the sky when they profit from it. But for those ordinary citizens, the”heroes” who do the dirty work, and those who are on the receiving end of this “heroic” act, they either loose their lives or they loose themselves.
I have been in that situation. While you are in it, you don’t see it, the nightmares and troubles come long after, when you are in the comfort of your home, in a quiet neighborhood and living a “normal life”. That is when the you hear voices, you see flash backs and you see your friends and your “enemies”.
I was a lucky one, I never participated in any military action, but I was surrounded by those who were.
The worse job in a war is not the sniper or the artillery or the pilot, those are the easy jobs, you do your deed and you go home, you cut it off and forget about it, the mission accomplished, enemy terminated, the video game shot was successful. You never see the “enemy”, or those collateral damages, the innocent children blown up by your “mistake” or by those you want to kill.
But paramedics, emergency personel and those who’s main job is to help other see the worse of a war.
They see the victims, soldiers and civilians, they see fresh blood, the smell of burnt flesh and a room covered with blood is something that is impossible to take out of your mind.
Once you have been there the damage is done, no matter how strong you are, it gets to you. It did to me. But I had the luck of knowing that what I did was wrong, and re-directed my anger and energy toward fighting war, fighting ANY war, and that helped me.
I could have been just like him if I was that young and innocent and just realized that the beautiful house of mirror built around me by my government was nothing but a cover to hide the misery and sadness I helped to create.
Joseph Dwyer’s walls fell on HIM, being one of those poor guys who chose to fight after 9/11, in order to revenge the terrorists attacks to his home town (even thought he was from Long Island, he was a Ne Yorker after all).
He chose the military, and was sent to Iraq. A country that did not have anything to do with 9/11, where this picture of him was taken and he became ‘famous’. But he could not live a normal life after coming back home.
He could not stop the nightmares, they stopped him.
I usually don’t write about any soldier, specially those in the volunteer armies like in the US, I believe they knew what they were going into and choose the path they took, but I am strong enough to admit I have been wrong. Kids like Joseph Dwyer where as innocent as any Iraqi kid who dies in their country after the occupation They are the victims of the crime committed by their leaders.
He was one of those with conscience, something a man can not have when you go to fight an unjust and illegal war, 7000 kilometer from your home, and for that, he took his life.
My condolences to his family, hope they realize that the one who killed their loved one was not the kid himself, but the bastards in charge of their government.
By ALLEN G. BREED and KEVIN MAURER, Associated Press Writers Sun Jul 20, 5:34 PM ET
PINEHURST, N.C. - Officers had been to the white ranch house at 560 W. Longleaf many times before over the past year to respond to a “barricade situation.” Each had ended uneventfully, with Joseph Dwyer coming out or telling police in a calm voice through the window that he was OK.
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But this time was different.
The Iraq War veteran had called a taxi service to take him to the emergency room. But when the driver arrived, Dwyer shouted that he was too weak to get up and open the door.
The officers asked Dwyer for permission to kick it in.
“Go ahead!” he yelled.
They found Dwyer lying on his back, his clothes soiled with urine and feces. Scattered on the floor around him were dozens of spent cans of Dust-Off, a refrigerant-based aerosol normally used to clean electrical equipment.
Dwyer told police Lt. Mike Wilson he’d been “huffing” the aerosol.
“Help me, please!” the former Army medic begged Wilson. “I’m dying. Help me. I can’t breathe.”
Unable to stand or even sit up, Dwyer was hoisted onto a stretcher. As paramedics prepared to load him into an ambulance, an officer noticed Dwyer’s eyes had glassed over and were fixed.
A half hour later, he was dead.
When Dionne Knapp learned of her friend’s June 28 death, her first reaction was to be angry at Dwyer. How could he leave his wife and daughter like this? Didn’t he know he had friends who cared about him, who wanted to help?
But as time passed, Knapp’s anger turned toward the Army.
A photograph taken in the first days of the war had made the medic from New York’s Long Island a symbol of the United States’ good intentions in the Middle East. When he returned home, he was hailed as a hero.
But for most of the past five years, the 31-year-old soldier had writhed in a private hell, shooting at imaginary enemies and dodging nonexistent roadside bombs, sleeping in a closet bunker and trying desperately to huff away the “demons” in his head. When his personal problems became public, efforts were made to help him, but nothing seemed to work.
This broken, frightened man had once been the embodiment of American might and compassion. If the military couldn’t save him, Knapp thought, what hope was there for the thousands suffering in anonymity?
___
Like many, Dwyer joined the military in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
His father and three brothers are all cops. One brother, who worked in Lower Manhattan, happened to miss his train that morning and so hadn’t been there when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
Joseph, the second-youngest of six, decided that he wanted to get the people who’d “knocked my towers down.”
And he wanted to be a medic. (Dwyer’s first real job was as a transporter for a hospital in the golf resort town of Pinehurst, where his parents had moved after retirement.)
In 2002, Dwyer was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas. The jokester immediately fell in with three colleagues — Angela Minor, Sgt. Jose Salazar, and Knapp. They spent so much time together after work that comrades referred to them as “The Four Musketeers.”
Knapp had two young children and was going through a messy divorce. Dwyer stepped in as a surrogate dad, showing up in uniform at her son Justin’s kindergarten and coming by the house to assemble toys that Knapp couldn’t figure out.
When it became clear that the U.S. would invade Iraq, Knapp became distraught, confiding to Dwyer that she would rather disobey her deployment orders than leave her kids.
Dwyer asked to go in her place. When she protested, he insisted: “Trust me, this is what I want to do. I want to go.” After a week of nagging, his superiors relented.
Dwyer assured his parents, Maureen and Patrick — and his new wife, Matina, whom he’d married in August 2002 — that he was being sent to Kuwait and would likely stay in the rear, far from the action.
But it wasn’t true. Unbeknownst to his family, Dwyer had been attached to the 3rd Infantry’s 7th Cavalry Regiment. He was at “the tip of the tip of the spear,” in one officer’s phrase.
During the push into Baghdad, Dwyer’s unit came under heavy fire. An airstrike called in to suppress ambush fire rocked the convoy.
As the sun rose along the Euphrates River on March 25, 2003, Army Times photographer Warren Zinn watched as a man ran toward the soldiers carrying a white flag and his injured 4-year-old son. Zinn clicked away as Dwyer darted out to meet the man, then returned, cradling the boy in his arms.
The photo — of a half-naked boy, a kaffiyeh scarf tied around his shrapnel-injured leg and his mouth set in a grimace of pain, and of a bespectacled Dwyer dressed in full battle gear, his M-16 rifle dangling by his side — appeared on front pages and magazine covers around the world.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to interview the soldier in “the photo.” Dwyer was given a “Hometown Hero” award by child-safety advocate John Walsh; the Army awarded him the Combat Medical Badge for service under enemy fire.
The attention embarrassed him.
“Really, I was just one of a group of guys,” he told a military publication. “I wasn’t standing out more than anyone else.”
___
Returning to the U.S. in June 2003, after 91 days in Iraq, Dwyer seemed a shell to friends.
When he deployed, he was pudgy at 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds. Now he weighed around 165, and the other Musketeers immediately thought of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Dwyer attributed his skeletal appearance to long days and a diet of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). He showed signs of his jolly old self, so his friends accepted his explanation.
But they soon noticed changes that were more than cosmetic.
At restaurants, Dwyer insisted on sitting with his back to the wall so no one could sneak up on him. He turned down invitations to the movies, saying the theaters were too crowded. He said the desert landscape around El Paso, and the dark-skinned Hispanic population, reminded him of Iraq.
Dwyer, raised Roman Catholic but never particularly religious before, now would spend lunchtime by himself, poring over his Bible.
When people would teasingly call him “war hero” and ask him to tell about his experiences, or about the famous photo, he would steer the conversation toward the others he’d served with. But Dwyer once confided that another image, also involving a child, disturbed him.
He was standing next to a soldier during a firefight when a boy rode up on a bicycle and stopped beside a weapon lying in the dirt. Under his breath, the soldier beside Dwyer whispered, “Don’t pick it up, kid. Don’t pick it up.”
The boy reached for the weapon and was blasted off his bike.
In late 2004, Dwyer sent e-mails to Zinn, wondering if the photographer had “heard anything else about the kid” from the photo, and claiming he was “doing fine out here in Fort Bliss, Texas.”
But Dwyer wasn’t doing fine. Earlier that year, he’d been prescribed antidepressants and referred for counseling by a doctor. Still, his behavior went from merely odd to dangerous.
One day, he swerved to avoid what he thought was a roadside bomb and crashed into a convenience store sign. He began answering his apartment door with a pistol in his hand and would call friends from his car in the middle of the night, babbling and disoriented from sniffing inhalants.
Matina told friends that he was seeing imaginary Iraqis all around him. Despite all this, the Army had not taken his weapons.
In the summer of 2005, he was removed to the barracks for 72 hours after trashing the apartment looking for an enemy infiltrator. He was admitted to Bliss’ William Beaumont Army Medical Center for treatment of his inhalant addiction.
But things continued to worsen. That October, the Musketeers decided it was time for an “intervention.”
Minor, who had moved to New York, overdrew her bank account and flew down. She, Knapp and Salazar went to the apartment and pleaded with Dwyer to give up his guns, or at least his ammunition.
“I’m sorry, guys,” he told them. “But there’s no way I’m giving up my weapons.”
After talking for about an hour and a half, Dwyer agreed to let Matina lock the weapons up. The group went for a walk in a nearby park, and Dwyer seemed happier than he’d been in months.
But Dwyer’s paranoia soon returned — and worsened.
On Oct. 6, 2005, when superiors went to the couple’s off-base apartment to persuade Dwyer to return to the hospital, Dwyer barricaded himself in. Imagining Iraqis swarming up the sides and across the roof, he fired his pistol through the door, windows and ceiling.
After a three-hour standoff, Dwyer’s eldest brother, Brian, also a police officer, managed to talk him down over the phone. Dwyer was admitted for psychiatric treatment.
In a telephone interview later that month from what he called the “nut hut” at Beaumont, Dwyer told Newsday that he’d lied on a post-deployment questionnaire that asked whether he’d been disturbed by what he’d seen and done in Iraq. The reason: A PTSD diagnosis could interfere with his plans to seek a police job. Besides, he’d been conditioned to see it as a sign of weakness.
“I’m a soldier,” he said. “I suck it up. That’s our job.”
Dwyer told the newspaper that he’d blown off counseling before but was committed to embracing his treatment this time. He said he hoped to become an envoy to others who avoided treatment for fear of damaging their careers.
“There’s a lot of soldiers suffering in silence,” he said.
In January 2006, Joseph and Matina Dwyer moved back to North Carolina, away from the place that reminded him so much of the battlefield. But his shadow enemy followed him here.
___
Dwyer was discharged from the Army in March 2006 and living off disability. That May, Matina Dwyer gave birth to a daughter, Meagan Kaleigh.
He seemed to be getting by, but setbacks would occur without warning.
On the Fourth of July, he and family were fishing off the back deck when the fireworks display began. Dwyer bolted inside and hid under a bed.
In June 2007, police responded to a call that Dwyer was “having some mental problems related to PTSD.” A captain talked him into going to the emergency room.
Later that month, Matina Dwyer moved in with her parents and obtained a protective order. In the complaint, she said Dwyer had purchased an AR-15 assault rifle and become angry when she refused to return it.
“He said that he was coming to my residence to get his gun back,” she wrote in the June 25, 2007, complaint. “He was coming packed with guns and someone was going to die tonight.” She declined to be interviewed for this story.
In July 2007, Dwyer checked into an inpatient program at New York’s Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He stayed for six months.
He came home in March with more than a dozen prescriptions. He was so medicated that his feet flopped when he walked, as if he were wearing oversized clown shoes.
The VA’s solution was a “pharmaceutical lobotomy,” his father thought.
But within five days of his discharge, Dwyer’s symptoms had returned with such ferocity that the family decided it was time to get Matina and 2-year-old Meagan out. While Dwyer was off buying inhalants, his parents helped spirit them away.
On April 10, weary and fearful, Matina Dwyer filed for custody and division of property.
Without his wife and daughter to anchor him, Dwyer’s grip on reality loosened further. He reverted to Iraq time, sleeping during the day and “patrolling” all night. Unable to possess a handgun, he placed knives around the house for protection.
In those last months, Dwyer opened up a little to his parents.
What bothered him most, he said, was the sheer volume of the gunfire. He talked about the grisly wounds he’d treated and dwelled on the people he was unable to save. His nasal membranes seemed indelibly stained with the scents of the battlefield — the sickeningly sweet odor of rotting flesh and the metallic smell of blood.
Yet despite all that, Dwyer continued to talk about going back to Iraq. He told his parents that if he could just get back with his comrades and do his job, things would right themselves.
When Maureen Dwyer first saw Zinn’s famous photo, she’d had a premonition that it might be the last picture she’d ever see of Joseph.
“I just didn’t think he was going to come home,” she said. “And he never did.”
___
An autopsy is pending, but police are treating Dwyer’s death as an accidental overdose.
His friends and family see it differently.
The day of the 2005 standoff, Knapp spent hours on the telephone trying to get help for Dwyer. She was frustrated by a military bureaucracy that would not act unless his petrified wife complained, and with a civilian system that insisted Dwyer was the military’s problem.
In a letter to post commander Maj. Gen. Robert Lennox, Knapp expressed anger that Army officials who were “proud to display him as a hero … now had turned their back on him…”
“Joseph Dwyer who had left to Iraq one of the nicest, kindest, caring, self-sacrificing and patriotic people I have ever known,” she wrote, “was forced to witness and commit acts completely contrary to his nature and returned a tormented, confused disillusioned shadow of his former self that was not being given the help he needed.”
While Dwyer was in the service, Minor said, the Army controlled every aspect of his life.
“So someone should have taken him by the hand and said, `We’re putting you in the hospital, and you’re staying there until you get fixed — until you’re back to normal.”
But Dr. Antonette Zeiss, deputy chief of the VA’s Office of Mental Health, said it’s not that simple.
“Veterans are civilians, and VA is guided by state law about involuntary commitment,” she told the AP. “There are civil liberties, and VA respects that those civil liberties are important.”
The family would not authorize the VA to release Dwyer’s medical records. But it appears that Dwyer was sometimes unwilling — or unable — to make the best use of the programs available. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Lennox, the former Bliss post commander, wrote that Dwyer “had a great (in my opinion) care giver.”
Zeiss said the best treatment for PTSD is exposure-based psychotherapy, in which the patient is made “to engage in thoughts, feelings and conversations about the trauma.” While caregivers must be 100 percent committed to creating an environment in which the veteran feels comfortable confronting those demons, she said the patient must be equally committed to following through.
“And so it’s a dance between the clinicians and the patient.”
Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, feels the VA is a lousy dance partner.
Rieckhoff said the VA’s is a “passive system” whose arcane rules and regulations make it hard for veterans to find help. And when they do get help, he said, it is often inadequate.
“I consider (Dwyer) a battlefield casualty,” he said, “because he was still fighting the war in his head.”
___
The Sunday after the Fourth of July, Knapp attended services at Scotsdale Baptist, the El Paso church where she and Dwyer had been baptized together in 2004.
On the way out of the sanctuary, Knapp checked her phone and noticed an e-mail.
“I didn’t know if you had heard or not,” a friend wrote, “but I got an email from Matina this morning saying that Joseph had died on Saturday and that the funeral was today.”
Knapp maintained her composure long enough to get herself and the children to the car. Then she lost it.
The children asked what was wrong.
“Joseph is dead,” she told them.
“You said he wasn’t sick any more,” Justin said.
“I know, Justin,” his mother replied. “But I guess maybe the help wasn’t working like we thought it was.”
The kids were too young to understand acronyms like PTSD or to hear a lecture about how Knapp thought the system had failed Dwyer. So she told them that, just as they sometimes have nightmares, “sometimes people get those nightmares in their head and they just can’t get them out, no matter what.”
Despite the efforts she made to get help for Dwyer, Knapp is trying to cope with a deep-seated guilt. She knows that Dwyer shielded her from the images that had haunted him.
“I think about all the torture that he went through when he came back, and I think that all of that stuff could have happened to me,” she said, stifling a sob. “I just owe him so much for that.”
Since Dwyer’s death, Justin, now 9, has taken to carrying a newspaper clipping of the Zinn photo around with him. Occasionally, Knapp will catch him huddled with a playmate, showing the photo and telling him about the soldier who used to come to his school and assemble his toys.
Justin wants them to know all about Spc. Joseph Dwyer. His hero.
Telling the truth is like performing a strip tease. It is because of this that many people are offended. Nudity offends people who believe that their body, the visible and the more esoteric portions, is something to hide. Another reason that some people find the truth to be offensive is because they make personal profit from lies. It stands to reason that many people believe that the truth is ugly, or inconvenient. Why go to such lengths to conceal it otherwise? It can also be said that the truth is hidden because it stands in contradiction to the thing that conceals it.
We are constantly told that some product is ‘new and improved’. If it is new then how can it be an improvement on itself? It does not have a precursor. We have been told that it is “the same thing only different.” That’s not possible either. When someone looks at a lie, they are able to identify it as a lie by comparing it to the truth.
Another interesting thing is how we can say something over and over and the sense of what we are saying escapes the understanding of the person it is being said to. Many times here, I have said that I do not like having to come to the conclusions that I come to. I do not like where my inquiries leave me. This explains why there is reluctance among the general public to recognize who the authors of 9/11 are. This is why people accept what the media has to say when it is apparent they are lying. This is why they do not question in public because such questioning leaves them exposed and being exposed is like being naked. Conversely, exposing the lies of powerful interests can cause problems when it interferes with their profits and agendas.
In the criminal world it is quite common for people to place the blame for their actions on others; to give false evidence and testimony, to engineer events for no other reason than to blame a rival and take him out of the game, or to draw the attention of the authorites away from themselves and on to their rivals. It is common in the political world to label your enemies and your rivals in such a way as to sway public opinion and have them defined in a negative light. Lies are the currency of the political and business world.
It is because Israel wants to remain the predominant power in the Middle East that they were engaged with western security forces to orchestrate and blame the 9/11 attacks on the Muslim world. There is so much information available now that only a fool or those criminally involved would pursue this bankrupt scenario. It is also to justify Israel’s hegemonic intentions that those fighting for their own freedom and survival would be labeled terrorists.
We now know that there is no Al Qaeda as an organized entity. We know that it is a construct of certain governments and their intelligence services, created as a boogeyman to generate fear in the common mind. We know that the only Al Qaeda cell that was ever uncovered proved to be a Mossad operation. We know that Bin Laden sightings and videotapes are all lies. We know who is telling these lies and we know why they are telling them.
I am a recording artist and a writer. It is not a good career move for me to say things that put me in an oppositional relationship with those who exert a majority control over the fields I work in. It is not a career benefit for me to say that they exert a majority control over these industries. You get ahead in this world by accepting and defending lies so that those who manufacture the lies will not feel threatened by your propensity to take your clothes off in public. Even when everyone involved knows that lies are being substituted for the truth, just about everyone plays the game.
Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization. Iraq had no WMD’s or ties to a non-existent Al Qaeda. Hundreds of thousands have died because of this lie and millions have been displaced. Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11. Two things are major features of Afghanistan today; oil pipelines and record opium production. Iran is not constructing nuclear weapons but no one could blame them if they were. We are told that all the major players on the UN Security Council are in favor of punishing sanctions and possible military action against Iran. This is also a lie. These lies come to us through the media. The media is controlled by certain people and everything they report paints a picture that supports their motives and interests.
The lies being told are obvious and blatant. The evidence that follows the events of the last decade clearly shows that lies have been told. By now, a majority of the world knows that these were lies, yet the lies continue and continue. If it were not for the internet, the bloggers and alternative news sources on the internet, there would be nothing but lies.
We who undress the lies are made to appear as pornographers. We are indecent. We reveal things that people do not want to see. We have told you that many of Israel’s regional wars were instigated by Israel for control of other people’s land and water. We have told you that Israeli settlers living on occupied land, stolen from displaced residents, go every day into the lands where these displaced residents now dwell and beat and harass them; use them for target practice. We have told you how women and children die every day in their ghettos because they are refused medical treatment. We have shown you video tapes and we have the testimony of aid workers.
We have shown you how the banks print money out of thin air and then loan it at interest to create debt. We have shown you how America has become a fascist police state by fabricating an enemy against whom they must protect you by removing your freedoms of movement, assembly and speech. We have shown you how bankers, corporations and governments create wars in order to profit from both sides of the conflict. Across the internet is a small minority of groups and individuals who reveal the truth and are excoriated for it by the lie machinery. They are strip teasing in a world where the naked body is against the laws created by those who use their lies to manufacture conflict, suffering and want so that they can line their pockets at the expense of us all.
Disinfo sites with racist intent, reprint the works of truth tellers so that the truth tellers will appear to be racist. Truth tellers find that they are ostracized. Truth tellers are the object of hacking attacks, slander and economic injury because the truth is not good for business. Truth tellers have no benefit to their efforts except for the satisfaction of doing the right thing.
I’m going to go right on undressing the manikins and monsters. They may be able to cosmeticize their faces but they cannot hide the lack of human features below the costumes that conceal their alien forms as the move among us. Others will do this same work. One day more and more people will take off their clothes until only the agents of lies and criminal behavior will remain covered and concealing their true forms.
The world is a lie and what the world conceals cannot be seen by lying eyes. They only see the world and fear what lies behind the world. Beneath the costumery of this world is hidden our humanity and our secret heart. Beneath the camouflage and masquerade lie our common brotherhood and our true self. My gratitude and congratulations to those of you who know that you are naked underneath your clothes… that are not afraid to show yourselves as you are because there is no shame in the truth. When the truth takes off her clothes then the world disappears.
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There is a move underway in 
MEMBERS of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hezbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel’s Channel 10 television reported today, citing diplomatic sources.
