united colours of vruz

Dear Mr. Obama,

by Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect

A clever person succeeds in climbing out of the hole that a wise one avoids falling into. So says a Hebrew adage often applied to national leaders. To my great sorrow, you have already missed the chance to respond wisely to the upcoming Palestinian bid for U.N. recognition. You still have a few days left to be clever. I desperately hope you use them.

You strode into a foreign-policy hole during your Middle East speech last May when you dismissed Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas’s plan to ask for U.N. membership an attempt “to isolate Israel at the United Nations.” If anyone missed your implied threat, a State Department spokesperson made it explicit last week, explaining that if “something comes to a vote in the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. will veto.”

This is a mistake several times over. Despite the habitually panicked tones from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian statehood is a gain for Israel. By promising a Security Council veto, you’ve tied your own hands in shaping a resolution that looks certain to pass in the General Assembly, and have harmed America’s ability to broker Israeli-Arab diplomacy.

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vruz: do right wingers still really think obama is a leftist?

vruz:  this is horrible. no apology in the world can absolve us from this shame. the military seems to always have a knack for the national stain. this is what happens when you recruit brutalised ignorant people with guns joining the army in a high-risk environment only because it’s marginally better than starving doing nothing.  ethical, sensible people need not apply.

—via jalwhite:

Uruguayan President Jose Mujica apologized to Haitian President Michel Martelly over the alleged rape of an 18-year-old Haitian man by Uruguayan U.N. peacekeeping troops in the poor Caribbean state, Uruguay’s government said on Tuesday.

Public outrage in earthquake-ravaged Haiti has surged over a video shot by a cellphone camera and circulating on the Internet that shows laughing Uruguayan marines pinning the young Haitian face down on a mattress and apparently assaulting him sexually.

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Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

It has been widely documented that many of the worst atrocities on behalf of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi have been committed by foreign mercenaries from countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia.  Despite that, the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions Resolution aimed at Libya, which was just enacted last week, includes a strange clause that specifically forbids international war crimes prosecutions against mercenaries from nations which are not signatories to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which protects many of the mercenaries Gadaffi is using.  Section 6 of the Resolution states that the Security Council:

Decides that nationals, current or former officials or personnel from a State outside the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya which is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of that State for all alleged acts or omissions arising out of or related to operations in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya established or authorized by the Council, unless such exclusive jurisdiction has been expressly waived by the State;

Why would a clause be inserted to expressly protect war crimes-committing mercenaries on Gadaffi’s payroll from prosecutions?  Because, as The Telegraph’s John Swaine reports, the Obama administration insisted on its inclusion — as an absolutely non-negotiable demand — due to a fear that its exclusion might render Bush officials subject to war crimes prosecutions at the ICC on the same theory that would be used to hold Libya’s mercenaries accountable

vruz: what’s a war crime… or two.