Pentagon report underscores rising US-China tensions ~ link
Pentagon’s annual report on the Chinese military was presented to the US Congress last month. Entitled “Military and Security Development Involving the People’s Republic of China”, it purports to be an objective assessment. In reality, the paper is a part of the Obama administration’s increasingly aggressive campaign to undercut Chinese influence, particularly in Asia.

The 74-page Pentagon paper is aimed at fueling suspicion about China’s strategic intentions. Beijing’s “lack of transparency”, it declared, has increased the danger of “misunderstanding and miscalculation”. Reinforcing these fears, it noted: “Current trends in China’s military capabilities are a major factor in changing East Asian military balances and could provide China with a force capable of conducting a range of military operations in Asia well beyond Taiwan.”

The report came as the Obama administration is seeking to strengthen strategic ties throughout Asia. At an Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) forum in July, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly sided with Vietnam and other South East Asian countries against China’s claims in the South China Sea. Over the past two months, the Pentagon has held joint naval exercises with Vietnam and South Korea, and is planning another US-South Korean naval operation in the Yellow Sea despite China’s protests.

The Pentagon report deliberately inflated the “China threat” and, deliberately played down the fact that the US military retains undisputed military supremacy including in Asia. According to Pentagon estimates, China’s military spending last year was $150 billion—double Beijing’s official figure. Whether accurate or not, China’s defence budget is dwarfed by that of the US which was $660 billion in 2009.

Obama's Iraq speech: An exercise in Cowardice and deceit ~ link ~

President Barack Obama’s nationally televised speech from the White House Oval Office Tuesday night was an exercise in cowardice and deceit. It was deceitful to the people of the United States and the entire world in its characterization of the criminal war against Iraq. And it was cowardly in its groveling before the American military.

The address could inspire only disgust and contempt among those who viewed it. Obama, who owed his presidency in large measure to the mass antiwar sentiment of the American people, used the speech to glorify the war that he had mistakenly been seen to oppose.

The most chilling passage came at the end of the 19-minute speech, when Obama declared, “Our troops are the steel in our ship of state,” adding, “And though our nation may be traveling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true.”

It is for this statement, rather than all the double-talk about troop withdrawals, that Obama’s miserable speech deserves to be remembered. It was rhetoric befitting a military-ruled banana republic or a fascist state. The military—not the Constitution, not the will of the people or the country’s ostensibly democratic institutions—constitutes the “steel” in the “ship of state.” Presumably, the democratic rights of the people are so much ballast to be cast overboard as needed.

The occasion for the speech was the artificial deadline fixed by the Obama administration for what the president termed the “end of our combat mission in Iraq.” This is only one of the innumerable lies packed into his brief remarks.

Some 50,000 combat troops remain deployed in Iraq. While they have been rebranded as “transitional” forces, supposedly dedicated to “training” and “advising” Iraqi security forces, their mission remains unchanged.

Indeed, barely a week after the media turned the redeployment out of Iraq of a single Stryker battalion into a “milestone” signaling the withdrawal of the last combat troops, 5,000 members of the 3^rd Armored Calvary Regiment, a combat unit, were sent back into the occupied country from Ft. Hood, Texas.

Washington has no intention of ending its military presence in Iraq. It continues to build permanent bases and is determined to continue pursuing the original agenda behind the war launched by the Bush administration in March of 2003—the imposition of US hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

Obama’s speech was both incoherent and groveling. The president sought, dishonestly, to take credit for fulfilling his campaign promise on Iraq. As a candidate he had pledged to withdraw all US combat troops from the country within 16 months of taking office. In the end, he merely adopted the time table and plan crafted by the Pentagon and the Bush administration for a partial withdrawal, leaving 50,000 combat troops in place.

The Democratic president felt obliged, under the mantle of paying tribute to “our troops,” to fundamentally distort and whitewash the entire character of the war they were sent to fight, painting one of the blackest chapters in US history as some kind of heroic endeavor.

“Much has changed” since Bush launched the war seven-and-a-half years ago, Obama stated. “A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency” in which American troops battled “block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future.”

The speech was crafted as if the president were addressing a nation of amnesiacs. Do they really think that no one remembers it was a war launched on the basis of lies? The American people were told that an invasion of Iraq was necessary because the government of Saddam Hussein had developed “weapons of mass destruction” and was preparing to place them in the hands of Al Qaeda to set off “mushroom clouds” over American cities.

There were no “weapons of mass destruction,” nor were there any ties between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda. These were inventions of a government that was determined to carry out a war of aggression to advance US imperialist interests.

These lies were thoroughly exposed and contributed to the growth of overwhelming hostility to the war among the American people. All of this is to be forgotten, dismissed as meaningless details.