Toban Black

Steven Freeland (in this article) -

“[Throughout human history there have been] many deliberate acts to destroy or exploit the natural environment to achieve military goals. In the 5th century BC the retreating Scythians poisoned the water wells in an effort to slow the advancing Persian army. Roman troops razed the city of Carthage in 146 BC and poisoned the surrounding soil with salt to prevent its future cultivation. The American Civil War saw the widespread implementation of ’scorched earth’ policies.

In August 1945 the United States detonated atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in massive loss of life and environmental destruction. During the Vietnam War, the US implemented Operation Ranch Hand, to devastating effect, to destroy vegetation used by its enemy for cover and sustenance, using chemicals such as Agent Orange.

More recently still, who can forget the haunting images of more than 700 burning Kuwaiti oil well-heads which had been deliberately ignited by retreating Iraqi forces during the Gulf War in 1991 a scene that was likened to Dante’s Inferno. Over the following 10 years the Saddam regime built barriers and levees to drain the al-Hawizeh and al-Hammar marshes in southern Iraq.” “This effectively destroyed the livelihood of the 500,000 Marsh Arabs who had inhabited this unique ecosystem.

Acts of significant and deliberate environmental destruction, exploitation and contamination during armed conflict have continued in more recent times, including the use of cluster bombs and weapons containing depleted uranium by US and British forces in Iraq.

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(Here in London, Ontario, Canada)

“FREE GAZA”

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Who Profits from the Occupation?

“Israeli and international corporations are directly involved in the occupation: in the construction of Israeli colonies and infrastructure in the occupied territories, in the settlements’ economy, in building walls and checkpoints, in the supply of specific equipment used in the control and repression of the civilian population under occupation.”

“Currently, we focus our attention on three main areas of corporate involvement in the occupation: The Settlement Industry, Economic Exploitation and Control of Population. At this stage in our project, we are not investigating the vast industry of military production and arms trade. The information we provide on the exploitation of Palestinian labor and production is also very limited.”

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Those images are small thumbnails from a set of photos from Israel that Alex Segre has posted on Flickr.

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(Photo by “fotdmike“)

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“SocProf” at the Global Sociology Blog -
“Colonial Dumping”
“Nice New International Division of Labor we got here: we produce garbage and we send it to poor countries” …

John “Ahni” Schertow at the Intercontinental Cry blog -
“Threatening the Land and People of Chiapas” (December, 2008)

WorldFish -
“Climate change means ‘unprecedented hardship’ for 33 fish-dependent nations”

Miriam Mannak for the Inter Press Service -
“Africa: Why The Richest Continent Is Also The Poorest” (September, 2008)

A poster about
rainforest extraction equipment

Kimberley D. Mok on the TreeHugger blog -
“Logging, Palm Oil and Human Rights in Borneo: Malaysian Government Pushes Ahead By Ousting Indigenous Leaders” (September, 2008)

Michel Chossudovsky on the Global Research web site -
“War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields” (January, 2009)

Press TV -
“Iraq: US war caused environmental disaster” (October, 2008)

Andy Rowell at the Oil Change blog -
“NATO’s New Frontier” (January, 2009)
There is a “new military and resource conflict of the Arctic.” …

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A couple of related posts on this blog -
- “Iraqi oil”
- “Canadian oil supplies; American priorities“

Tom Engelhardt on fossil fuel interests and the occupation of Iraq -

“An administration of former energy execs — with a National Security Advisor who once sat on the board of Chevron and had a double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named after her (until she took office), and a Vice President who was especially aware of the globe’s potentially limited energy supplies — certainly had oil reserves and energy flows on the brain. They knew, in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt phrase, that Iraq was afloat on ‘a sea of oil’ and that it sat strategically in the midst of the oil heartlands of the planet.

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Ezra Winton on how cigarette companies have been pursuing new customers in the Third ‘World’

Derek Wall on “people around the globe defending the forests from logging and enclosure”–”people for whom ecology is about personal survival for themselves and for the rest of nature”

Paul’s collection of “examples of U.S. presidents meeting, shaking hands or dining with some of the most brutal human beings to rule nations since the end of the Second World War”

Peter W. Fulham in USA Today - “When Will Young Americans Get Angry About the War?” (April 22nd)
“Students, the usual anti-war activists, have been largely silent. We don’t support the conflict, as polls show. Even so, we have done little to make our government uncomfortable, little to demonstrate our disapproval”

Gareth Porter in The Huffington Post - “The Pentagon’s Corrupt Sock Puppet ‘Military Analysts’ Exposed” (April 21st)
An investigate reporter has exposed Iraq war propagandists who “consciously peddle the Bush administration’s talking points on Iraq while hiding their own vested economic interest in selling the public on the Bush administration’s happy talk about the war.”

Agence France Presse - “China Hits Back at US On Human Rights, says Iraq War A Disaster” (March 13th)
A Chinese government “annual report, entitled ‘The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2007,’ presented a wide-ranging attack on the Western superpower’s human rights problems, and singled out the US-led war in Iraq that began in 2003.”

A leaflet from Hands Off Iraqi Oil (where there’s also a poster and another leaflet)

On Sunday I spoke about these and other fossil fuel interests in a local peace rally speech.

This is a speech from a local peace rally on Sunday local peace rally on Sunday.

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Hi everyone,
I’m Toban.

Today I’ll be speaking about causes of war—specifically, about oil and natural gas interests in and around the so-called war on ‘terror.’

It’s clear that efforts to gain further control over fossil fuel reserves in—and also near— the Middle East are one of the important factors at the root of this war. The main targets of this war on ‘terror’ are in the Persian Gulf, where about two-thirds of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves are located—in Iraq, in Iran, and in surrounding nations.

But before I say more about all of this, I’m going to stress that this U.S.-led war definitely is not just a matter of “blood for oil” & gas:

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A protest photo from Hands Off Iraqi Oil

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Related posts here -
- Global warming and other energy & carbon -related crises — as well as associated interests
- Canadian oil supplies; American priorities
- Oil supply shortages
- American protestors; Canadian oil and tar sands?
- U.S. oil dependencies

From StudioBendib

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A previous blog post about depleted uranium weapons:
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?p=52

A video compilation of stereotypical ‘Western’ perspectives of ‘Arabs’ and of the ‘West’:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-600397827976179049

The Google video summary -
“A trailer-esque montage spectacle of Hollywood’s relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims. Inspired by the book Reel Bad Arabs by Dr. Jack Shaheen”

[Originally e-mailed out]