Whiplash for Bush
President Bush has got to be suffering from whiplash. First he gave Iraqi’s leader Nouri al-Maliki “lukewarm” support, then, the next day, he strongly supported him as a “good guy, man.” But the strongest U-turn has to be his comparison of the Iraq war to the Viet Nam war, something he has vehemently denied for the course of his presidency. There are parallels between the wars, but experts on Asian history take strong exception to Bush’s analogy. No stranger to bending truth and logic, Bush has still brought up an important fact: both wars were totally unnecessary, the loss of life a tragedy unimaginable to those who experienced it. Bush got out of going to Viet Nam, and certainly no one in his family or Cheney’s is going to Iraq. Impeach the warmongers!
Neil Fahey
Chicopee
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Starving in Gaza
Since the 2006 democratic Palestinian election which brought Hamas to power, the U.S., its Western allies and Israel have boycotted, sealed off, and starved Gaza. Along with military assaults by Israeli occupation forces (which included the well-publicized incineration of a family on a Gaza beach), the U.S. and Israel have been funding, arming, and training Fatah to destroy the Hamas government. According to sources inside Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, President Abbas’ head of security, received millions for the creation of 100 five-man death squads that virtually ruled Gaza.
Why is it so important that the Western powers continue, through their proxy Israel, to control Gaza and Palestine? Could the answer be a Palestinian natural gas field off the coast of Gaza that contains at a minimum 37 billion cubic meters of known reserves and is suspected to contain oil? According to Qatar’s Gulf Times, Hamas claims it is unreasonable that the owner of the gas, Palestine, gets only 10 percent of the profits. Recently deposed Prime Minister Ismail Haniya intends “to ask for changes in the agreement with BG Group (British Gas), giving it a bigger slice of the proceeds from a pending natural-gas deal with Israel.”
Following the election of Hamas, it was Fatah who carried on rocket attacks against Sderot, an Israel border town, yet Israeli and U.S. media blamed Hamas, who maintained a truce it had agreed to with Israel despite Israel’s assaults. This occurred as President Mahmoud Abbas and his advisors conspired with Israel, the U.S. and intelligence services of several Arab states to overthrow and weaken a Hamas government intent on upholding Palestinian rights. Currently Congress and the Bush administration back the corrupt Fatah party, while the rest of Palestine starves despite its vast wealth in natural gas and possibly oil! What is being pulled in Palestine is exactly what the U.S. is trying to impose in Iraq: if the Iraqi government does not sign over the rights to their resources for a pittance of the proceeds, there will be unending war.
Genevieve Cora Fraser
Orange
