Dr Sawraj Singh

I have been saying for some time that the racial divisions are becoming deeper in America and unless we reverse this trend, America is heading toward a race war. The Arizona Immigration law has almost divided the country on the racial lines, with a vast majority of the whites supporting the law and almost all the minorities opposing the law. However, it is the tragedy in Manchester Connecticut which shows that the first shots of the coming race war might already been fired.

Unfortunately, we have witnessed many such tragedies before, a frustrated gunman shooting many people to vent his anger. However, never before there has been an incidence where racism was directly and openly linked with such tragedy.

The family of Omar Thornton is blaming racism for him to snap. He called his mother after the shooting and said “I killed the five racists that were there that was bothering me”. He killed eight people and injured two people, before turning the gun on himself. He felt harassed at work. He found a picture of a noose and a racial epithet written on a bathroom wall.

Many white people do not believe the minorities when they claim that they are being discriminated against. They feel that they are making it up and are using the race card. However, many minorities feel harassed and subjected to gross double standards when their performance is being evaluated. This is not the first time that a person, such as Omar Thornton, shot his co workers. Such incidents have occurred many times before, the only difference is that racism was not openly associated with them.

It does not take much effort to show that America is a racially divided country. You can see the number of tickets issued by the police for traffic violations and a trend clearly emerges that the minorities are much more likely to get a ticket than a white person. One can see the prison population, the blacks whose population is about 13% of the total population sometimes make close to 70% of the prison population.

Some actors pretended to be the patients and found out that they were treated very differently based upon their race. However, it is not just the patients but the doctors also get a very different treatment based upon their race. Even a very superficial analysis will show that the minority doctors are subjected to much more scrutiny than the white doctors and they are more likely to face adverse actions compared to their white colleagues. I have herd from many minority physicians that as soon as the white doctors find out that they are minorities, they are not kind to them, when they evaluate their performance.

I have lived in America for about forty years. I have always seen and experienced double standards applied to the whites and the minorities. However, for last couple of years, particularly after a black man became president of the country, the racial situation has become worse. Never before, have I seen the racists going on the offensive to such a degree as they are doing now. Whether they are in the Tea Party or Republican right, they want to undo all the progress made in the last century as far as race relations are concerned.

They want to make new immigration laws which are more discriminatory to the minorities. They even want to change the constitution so that the children born of the immigrants do not automatically become citizens of the country. Never before, in the recent history of the country, have we seen such an organized and offensive racist movement. My personal situation is running parallel to the overall situation in the country. Being a minority in an over whelming white community, I have always had to struggle but in the last couple of years it has become much harder to survive, particularly if you have progressive or leftist views.

I feel that a tragedy such as Manchester Connecticut, should make us aware that unless we reverse the racist trend, we may be on the verge of a race war. It is not only the minorities who will suffer from such an eventuality, but the white population may have to suffer also. Nobody will be able to escape the adverse consequences. The distribution of population makes that scenario very likely. In almost all major metropolitan areas, there is a concentration of the minority population.

The only sane option for America is to tolerate and accept diversity and multiculturalism. These are not liabilities but are assets for America. Racial tolerance and harmony are not ideal concepts but are needed for the very survival of America today. We have to reverse the present trend and promote tolerance and acceptance of a new multicultural America. This is the only way to prevent the oncoming race war.

[The writer is physician by profession and is Chairman Washington State Network for Human Rights]

BACK

Indian origin Americans vie for public positions

A record number of Indian Americans are running for public office this year. Nikki 'Randhawa' Haley is Republican gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina. Haley had brushed aside allegations of marital infidelity and an ethnic slur to become the Republican nominee for governor. Other Indian Americans are running in congressional, state and city races in Pennsylvania, Kansas, California, New York and Ohio.

More than a dozen others serve in senior positions in the Obama administration, including USAID chief Rajiv Shah and US Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the first Indian American governor, made the Republican short list for vice president in 2008.

Like Haley, most of the politicians in races this year are second-generation immigrants who volunteered for local political campaigns, served in state legislatures or worked on Capitol Hill.

Manan Trivedi, a doctor and Iraq war veteran, recently won the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania's 6th Congressional District. Before running for Congress, he served as a healthcare adviser to the Obama campaign.

Raj Goyle, who has served in the Kansas legislature for three years, has won the Democratic primary in the 4th Congressional District, which includes his home town of Wichita.

Reshma Saujani, a Democratic fundraiser in the South Asian community, says she is the first Indian American woman to run for Congress.

The increased political involvement is an indication of 'successful assimilation into mainstream American society. The estimated three million Indian Americans rank among the highly educated ethnic groups in the US, according to census figures. They have the highest per-capita income.

BACK

Obama drops 2009 pledge to withdraw combat troops from Iraq

Gareth Porter

SEVENTEEN months after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw all combat brigades from Iraq by Sep. 1, 2010, he quietly abandoned that pledge Monday, admitting implicitly that such combat brigades would remain until the end of 2011.

Obama declared in a speech to disabled U.S. veterans in Atlanta that "America's combat mission in Iraq" would end by the end of August, to be replaced by a mission of "supporting and training Iraqi security forces".

That statement was in line with the pledge he had made on Feb. 27, 2009, when he said, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by Aug. 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."

In the sentence preceding that pledge, however, he had said, "I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months." Obama said nothing in his speech Monday about withdrawing "combat brigades" or "combat troops" from Iraq until the end of 2011.

Even the concept of "ending the U.S. combat mission" may be highly misleading, much like the concept of "withdrawing U.S. combat brigades" was in 2009.

Under the administration's definition of the concept, combat operations will continue after August 2010, but will be defined as the secondary role of U.S. forces in Iraq. The primary role will be to "advise and assist" Iraqi forces.

An official who spoke with IPS on condition that his statements would be attributed to a "senior administration official" acknowledged that the 50,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq beyond the deadline will have the same combat capabilities as the combat brigades that have been withdrawn.

The official also acknowledged that the troops will engage in some combat but suggested that the combat would be "mostly" for defensive purposes.

That language implied that there might be circumstances in which U.S. forces would carry out offensive operations as well.

IPS has learned, in fact, that the question of what kind of combat U.S. troops might become involved in depends in part on the Iraqi government, which will still be able to request offensive military actions by U.S. troops if it feels it necessary.

Obama's jettisoning of one of his key campaign promises and of a high-profile pledge early in his administration without explicit acknowledgement highlights the way in which language on national security policy can be manipulated for political benefit with the acquiescence of the news media.

Obama's apparent pledge of withdrawal of combat troops by the Sep. 1 deadline in his Feb. 27, 2009 speech generated headlines across the commercial news media. That allowed the administration to satisfy its anti-war Democratic Party base on a pivotal national security policy issue.

At the same time, however, it allowed Obama to back away from his campaign promise on Iraq withdrawal, and to signal to those political and bureaucratic forces backing a long- term military presence in Iraq that he had no intention of pulling out all combat troops at least until the end of 2011.

He could do so because the news media were inclined to let the apparent Obama withdrawal pledge stand as the dominant narrative line, even though the evidence indicated it was a falsehood.

Only a few days after the Obama speech, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was more forthright about the policy. In an appearance on Meet the Press Mar. 1, 2009, Gates said the "transition force" remaining after Aug. 31, 2010 would have "a very different kind of mission", and that the units remaining in Iraq "will be characterised differently".

"They will be called advisory and assistance brigades," said Gates. "They won't be called combat brigades."

But "advisory and assistance brigades" were configured with the same combat capabilities as the "combat brigade teams" which had been the basic U.S. military unit of combat organisation for six years, as IPS reported in March 20009.

Gates was thus signaling that the military solution to the problem of Obama's combat troop withdrawal pledge had been accepted by the White House.

That plan had been developed in late 2008 by Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM chief, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, who were determined to get Obama to abandon his pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

They came up with the idea of "remissioning" – sticking a non-combat label on the combat brigade teams -- as a way for Obama to appear to be delivering on his campaign pledge while actually abandoning it.

The "remissioning" scheme was then presented to Obama by Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, in Chicago on Dec. 15, 2008, according a report in the New York Times three days later.

It was hardly a secret that the Obama administration was using the "remissioning" ploy to get around the political problem created by his acceding to military demands to maintain combat troops in Iraq for nearly three more years.

Despite the fact that the disparity between Obama's public declaration and the reality of the policy was an obvious and major political story, however, the news media – including the New York Times, which had carried multiple stories about the military's "remissioning" scheme – failed to report on it.

The "senior administration official" told IPS that Obama is still "committed to withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the end of 2011". That is the withdrawal deadline in the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement of November 2008.

But the same military and Pentagon officials who prevailed on Obama to back down on his withdrawal pledge also have pressed in the past for continued U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond 2011, regardless of the U.S. withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government.

In November 2008, after Obama's election, Gen. Odierno was asked by Washington Post correspondent Tom Ricks "what the U.S. military presence would look like around 2014 or 2015". Odierno said he "would like to see a …force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000", which would still be carrying out combat operations.

Last February, Odierno requested that a combat brigade be stationed in Kirkuk to avoid an outbreak of war involving Kurdish and Iraqi forces vying for the region's oil resources – and that it be openly labeled as such – according to Ricks.

In light of the fact that Obama had already agreed to Odierno's "remissioning" dodge, the only reason for such a request would be to lay the groundwork for keeping a brigade there beyond the 2011 withdrawal deadline.

Obama brushed off the proposal, according to Ricks, but it was unclear whether the reason was that Iraqi political negotiations over a new government were still ongoing.

In July, Odierno suggested that a U.N. peacekeeping force might be needed in Kirkuk after 2011, along with a hint that a continued U.S. presence there might be requested by the Iraqi government. [Courtesy IPS]

[Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.]

BACK