This page includes materials on US relations with the world, with a special focus on Northeast Asia and, inevitably, the Middle East. And so Britain is brought into it. And sometimes I stray further afield, when something catches my eye. Prior to 2005 it was called 'US and the world'

• Urgent: The Obama New World Order Threat?
  "The Evidence Provided Below on Obama's Frightening Involvement with the New World Order Agenda is Under a threat of Being Taken Offline. You Must Act Now to Receive it...Fast" WARNING: This Report is under threat of being taken offline due to its content. It is important that you read below to know how to access the rest of the information before the Report is taken offline. Chaos In A Major Christian Denomination Regarding Obama! My name is Mel Sanger, an international political researcher. I and my group of political research analysts were asked by members of a Major American Christian Church (can't name it for obvious reasons) to investigate whether Barack Obama had any involvement with the implementation of the new world order. The Christian organization had received numerous calls and emails from its congregational members asking whether Barack Obama was the Biblical Antichrist. It would seem that there were a number of members who were being influenced by what they were seeing on the internet which was conflicting with the organization's overall general major public support for Obama. [Obama] [Bizarre]
• C.I.A. Confirms 7 of Its Employees Were Killed in Afghanistan
  By ALISSA J. RUBIN and MARK MAZZETTI Published: December 31, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — The suicide bomber who killed at least eight Americans, seven of them C.I.A. officers, at a remote base in southeastern Afghanistan on Wednesday wore an Afghan National Army uniform, according to NATO officials. The attack at the C.I.A. base, Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost Province appeared to be the single deadliest episode for the spy agency in the eight years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
• U.S. Intelligence Found Iran Nuke Document Was Forged
  Gareth Porter* WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however. The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.
  "The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government," Giraldi said. The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant. [Disinformation] [Media] [Softwar]
• Putin Sounds Warning on Arms Talks
  December 30, 2009 By ELLEN BARRY MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said on Tuesday that the main obstacle to replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, is Washington’s plan to build a missile defense system, which he said threatens the Cold-War-era balance of power. “If we don’t develop a missile defense system, a danger arises for us that with an umbrella protecting our partners from offensive weapons, they will feel completely safe,” Mr. Putin told journalists during a working visit to Vladivostok. “The balance will be disrupted and then they will do whatever they want, and aggressiveness will immediately arise both in real politics and economics(sic).” [Missile defense]
• Nobel Speech: Exceptional or Exceptionalism?
  John Feffer Posted: December 15, 2009 03:34 PM Back in 2003, when I put together the collection of essays Power Trip on the emerging foreign policy of the Bush administration, the big debate was over continuity versus change. Was the aggressive unilateralism of George W. Bush and his cohort a wholly new creation? Or was it simply business as usual for the most powerful for the most powerful country in the world? [Continuity] [Exceptionalism]
• Obama’s first steps in Asia
  December 27th, 2009 Author: Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress, Washington President Obama’s first steps in 2009 reveal a U.S. committed to reenergizing the role of the U.S. in Asia and set U.S.-Asian relations on a promising path.
  North Korea’s nuclear program continues to vex. Efforts to roll it back are still following a predictable ‘one step forward two (or more) steps back’ pattern. That said, the bilateral engagement that the Administration was recently willing to have seems to have moved the ball forward modestly in terms of getting Pyongyang back to the Six Party table. China’s willingness to enforce United Nations sanctions against its neighbour and ally were another important development of 2009 [US NK policy] [Continuity] [Cliche]
• Making the Case for War
  By Jeremy Egner December 1, 2009, 5:44 pm This evening, President Obama is expected to announce in a nationally televised speech from West Point that he is ordering another 30,000 troops to deploy to Afghanistan over the next six months. For many, the order will likely be unpopular — many Times readers are already making their displeasure known — but Mr. Obama is far from the first president to face the tricky task of renewing the nation’s commitment to a controversial conflict.
  In a 1951 radio address, Harry S. Truman discusses the conflict in Korea (transcript). [Imperialism] [Military option]
• Henry A. Kissinger
  Website giving articles
• The Default Power
  By JOSEF JOFFE Published: August 20, 2009 Every 10 years, it is decline time in the United States. In the late 1950s, it was the Sputnik shock, followed by the “missile gap” trumpeted by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign. A decade later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger predicted a world of five, rather than two, global powers. At the end of the 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech invoked “a crisis of confidence” that struck “at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” A decade later, academics such as the Yale historian Paul Kennedy predicted the ruin of the United States, driven by overextension abroad and profligacy at home. Declinism took a break in the 1990s, but by the end of the Bush administration, it had returned with a vengeance [Decline] [China rising]
• Some predictions for 2010
  Editorial David Goodhart 16th December 2009 — Issue 166 Twenty ten has an odd ring to it, and it’s shaping up to be a curious year. Here are a few Prospect predictions. In 2010, the west will discover just how much the financial crash has weakened it­—in particular, the Chinese will wave away pleas to allow its currency to appreciate, and call the west’s bluff over a threatened trade war. Both Russia and China will decline to force Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons plans; that task will instead be undertaken by Israeli pilots, thereby derailing some surprisingly promising new Israel-Palestine peace talks. But, on a more positive note, the government of North Korea will fall, and after a short period of chaos a more benign regime will emerge. And Osama bin Laden will finally be caught. By the Chinese. [Collapse] [Takeover] [Prediction] [Media]
• America's New Crusade: Imperial U.S. vs Political Islam
  By Rodrigue Tremblay Global Research, December 25, 2009 In the political movie “Charlie Wilson's War” about the Soviet-Afghanistan war, the hero states “America does not fight religious wars.” Is this possibly wrong, dead wrong? In fact, is it not possible that since September 11, 2001, a new type of “holy war” may have begun? This time, the new crusade with strong religious overtones pits fundamentalist Christian America and its allies, against political Islam and the Islamist al Qaeda terrorist organization. On September 16, 2001, then President George W. Bush set the tone when he said: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take awhile.” [Imperialism] [Religion] [Global insurgency] [Islamist]
• U.S. moves to isolate Iran from banks
  By LAURA ROZEN | 12/17/09 4:45 AM EST Text Size-+reset. Attorney General Eric Holder speaks during a news conference on Wednesday. He announced a deferred prosecution agreement with Credit Suisse AG for violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers As Congress presses the Obama administration to adopt a more aggressive posture toward Iran, the U.S. government is stepping up its efforts to isolate Iran from the international banking system. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder and Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey announced a half-billion-dollar settlement with Credit Suisse, which admitted to criminal violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Its scheme, Holder said, was “decades-long.”
  But along with this effort to further isolate Iran, the Obama administration announced another measure designed to open up communications there. That seemed the intent of the State Department’s notification of Congress this week that it was authorizing the Treasury Department to relax restrictions prohibiting Iranians from downloading free American software such as Twitter and Google shown to be in prominent use in the run-up and aftermath of Iran’s disputed June 12 elections. [Sanctions] [Softwar] [Media]
• Weaponizing Treasury’s Financial Enforcement: Credit Suisse Rolls Over on Tehran
  Friday, December 18, 2009 …While Poker Players Fight Back From her perch at Politico, the estimable Laura Rozen reports that the U.S. government has slapped Swiss bank Credit Suisse with a “half billion dollar” settlement punishing the bank for helping Iran evade U.S. financial sanctions. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision, flanked by the head of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Bush administration holdover, and China Matters bete noire Stuart Levey. China Matters’ response: Grrrrrrrrr. During the North Korean disarmament debacle in the last years of the Bush administration, China Matters tirelessly documented Levey’s efforts to sabotage the State Department's negotiated arrangement with Pyongyang by throwing up countless regulatory and extra-regulatory roadblocks to the key trigger for the deal: release of $24 million in North Korea-related funds frozen at Banco Delta Asia in Macau. I hear echoes of that fiasco in the Credit Suisse deal.
  Levey going rogue on North Korea policy, perhaps at the behest of the Office of the Vice President or some other hardline coven inside the Bush administration was one thing. However, my strongest objection was the use of Treasury’s ability to exploit America’s central position in the world financial system to intimidate our insufficiently aggressive friends into disrupting the international financial dealings of North Korea and Iran and who knows who else. I realize that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are much enamored of “soft power” and feel that working the financial levers is preferable to shooting a cruise missile down someone’s throat. And keeping on a Bush appointee to run the show makes for continuity, even if Levey runs an independent and refractory bureaucratic bastion. But my main gripe about “financial enforcement” is that it’s unilateral, utterly untransparent, and targets our allies. Most importantly, weaponizing financial enforcement undercuts America’s stance as indispensable honest broker in the world financial system. [Softwar] [Sanctions] [Dissension] [unintended consequences] [Reserve] [Extraterritoriality]
• 'These subpoenas and arrests are sheer hypocrisy'
  Published: 12:01AM GMT 28 Jan 2007 The US crackdown on online gaming may not be so much about morals as hard cash, Mark Choueke discovers. The Americans, suggest the cynics, want to drive foreigners out to establish their own Vegas gambling brands The long arm of the American legal machine reached further into the British business establishment last week. News that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) is pursuing London-based banks for information relating to online gambling companies has sparked fears that an American campaign to shut down these sites will lead to further arrests and charges.
  Chess describes the DoJ's actions as "nothing more than economic and imperialist bullying" and says the two-faced approach of the American authorities towards gambling shows there is a need to stand up to the DoJ. "There are US politicians preaching that gambling is a destroyer of families while a quarter of the population spends its vacations putting coins in slot machines in Vegas casinos," he says. "For me this is more about driving foreign traders out of action so Nevada and Vegas don't lose out on business in the future. The moves being made now give the US time to sort out the legalisation of online gaming and give the Vegas brands time to establish their own brands online." [Imperialism] [Double standards] [Extraterritoriality]
• The Worldwide Gambling Storm
  Thursday, February 08, 2007 As American gamblers tote up the wins and losses from the almost $8 billion that was bet illegally on the Super Bowl (vs. $93 million in legal wagers through Nevada sports books), the world gambling industry is undergoing a fundamental realignment... ...and is counting the unexpected cost of a modest exercise in political opportunism that occurred on the floor of the U.S. Senate on September 29, 2006. [Globalisation] [Extraterritoriality]
• The Long Decline of the American Economy
  by John Kozy Global Research, December 21, 2009 The official position on the cause of the current financial downturn is that it was caused by the reckless practices of financial institutions and the failure of regulatory bodies, and it is likely that these were the proximate causes, but they were not the ultimate cause. Americans, unfortunately, are rarely willing to search for ultimate causes or do anything about them when they are found.
  There was much talk and writing at the time about how the Japanese seemed to be on the verge of buying America and how the quality of products and services delivered by American companies had been outstripped by foreign competitors, especially the Japanese. TQM (Total Quality Management) programs, made up of approaches to management that originated in Japanese industry in the 1950s, were highly touted.
  Today TQM talk has almost entirely disappeared from popular literature. [Decline] [Offshoring]
• End Of The Year: U.S. Recruits Worldwide For Afghan War
  By Rick Rozoff Global Research, December 24, 2009 The first of 33,000 more U.S. troops have arrived in Afghanistan for a Christmas surge and they will soon be joined by as many as 10,000 additional non-American troops serving under NATO in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Washington will have over 100,000 uniformed personnel and tens of thousands of new military contractors in the South Asian war zone, and with more than 50,000 other NATO and NATO partner forces present total troop strength will exceed 150,000. Except for a modest amount of troops assigned to the NATO Training Mission - Iraq in Baghdad, the U.S. with its 120,000 troops is now largely alone in that country. NATO, especially new NATO, member and candidate states were ordered to transfer their forces from Iraq to Afghanistan starting approximately a year ago and are now redeploying soldiers from missions in Kosovo, Lebanon and Chad to the same destination. The Afghan battlefront, then, currently has the largest amount of military forces stationed in any war zone in the world. [1] [Imperialism]
• Can Migrants Save the Global Economy?
  By Debayani Kar, December 18, 2009 The global economic crisis has devastated workers around the world, none more than migrants whose daily wages are dependent on the whims of global financiers. Witness Dubai. Even before the meltdown of Dubai World, migrants whose labor literally built Dubai from the ground up suffered serious job losses with the onset of the global recession in 2008. [Migration]
• Obama's Bioweapons Program
  By Tom Burghardt Global Research, December 20, 2009 The Obama administration's recent declaration on bioweapons would simply be another run-of-the-mill example of our "change" president's duplicity were it not such an unmitigated disaster. Recapitulating sinister Cold War practices that informed American ruling class consensus when it came to secretly toying with nature's most deadly pathogens, (a) because they could, (b) because it was, and is, highly profitable and (c) because they got with it, the profound failure by the administration to rein-in out-of-control corporate grifters, militarists and scientists thirsting after an endless flow of taxpayer dollars, have put us all on a potential glide path towards the abyss. Since the roll-out of the Obama product-line January 21, on issues ranging from war and peace to economic justice and from civil liberties to healthcare, the "change" team exhibit the same callous disregard for disarmament proposals that characterized their Bushist predecessors in the Oval Office. Nowhere is this reality so transparently delineated than by the administration's continuing efforts to derail plans to revitalize the moribund Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), rejecting binding verification protocols that would finally give the 1972 treaty teeth. From her perch as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Ellen Tauscher, a former Democratic congresswoman from the San Francisco Bay Area (in other words, a feckless "liberal" who spent her career paying lip-service to the antiwar sentiments of her constituents--and then voting in favor of every blood-soaked imperialist adventure undertaken by the Bush regime) rejected international monitoring of military and pharmaceutical sites that might employ research for illicit purposes, e.g., the fabrication of banned biological weapons. [cbw] [verification]
• Pentagon's Role in Global Catastrophe: Add Climate Havoc to War Crimes
  By Sara Flounders Global Research, December 19, 2009 In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen -- with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets -- it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions? By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements. The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count. [Pentagon] [Militarisation]
• Obama as a Black President
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 271, Dec. 15, 2009 The Congressional Black Caucus has been growing impatient with President Obama, and this political strain is now leaking out to the press. The Caucus members feel that Obama hasn't paid enough attention to the fact that the current economic difficulties have had greater impact on African-American and other minority groups than on the rest of the population, and that therefore something extra needs to be done for them.
  The lesson for Obama was clear. He can under no circumstances afford politically to be seen as a "Black president." But this means that he is constrained from doing and saying things that a White president of the same political views might be willing to do. In the American context today, being an African-American president turns out to be a political handicap at the same time that it is a symbolic achievement. Obama realizes that. The Congressional Black Caucus recognizes that. The question is what, if anything, either Obama or the Caucus is going to do about it, or can do about it. [Obama] [Continuity]
• China and U.S. Hit Strident Impasse at Climate Talks
  By JOHN M. BRODER and JAMES KANTER Published: December 14, 2009 COPENHAGEN — China and the United States were at an impasse on Monday at the United Nations climate change conference here over how compliance with any treaty could be monitored and verified. China, which last month for the first time publicly announced a target for reducing the rate of growth of its greenhouse gas emissions, is refusing to accept any kind of international monitoring of its emissions levels, according to negotiators and observers here. The United States is insisting that without stringent verification of China’s actions, it cannot support any deal. The stalemate came on a day of public and private brinkmanship as the talks moved into their second and final week. Earlier Monday, a group of poor nations staged a brief walkout from the bargaining table, and a chaotic registration system left thousands of attendees freezing outside the conference hall and forced the temporary closing of the subway stop near the Bella Center, where the meetings are being held. [Climate change] [China confrontation]
• Putting Obama on Hold, in a Hint of Who’s Boss
  By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN Published: December 14, 2009 President Obama didn’t exactly look thrilled as he stared at the Polycom speakerphone in front of him. “Well, I appreciate you guys calling in,” he began the meeting at the White House with Wall Street’s top brass on Monday. He was, of course, referring to the three conspicuously absent attendees who were being piped in by telephone: Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John J. Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley; and Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup. Their excuse? “Inclement weather,” according to the White House. More precisely, fog delayed flights into Reagan National Airport. (In the “no good deed goes unpunished” category, the absent bankers were at least self-aware enough to try to fly commercial.) That awkward moment on speakerphone in the White House, for better or worse, spoke volumes about how the balance of power between Wall Street and Washington has shifted again, back in Wall Street’s favor. Now that Citigroup has given back its bailout money — and Wells Fargo announced late on Monday that it would, too — whatever leverage Washington had over the financial services industry seems to be quickly eroding. [Continuity]
• School cancels Taliban debate
  By Michael Alison Chandler Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 15, 2009 A principal in Arlington County announced Monday that she will call off an assignment that asked students to represent the views of the Taliban during a mock United Nations after some parents called it inappropriate. This Story School cancels Taliban debate The Answer Sheet: Taliban debate canceled An e-mail sent to parents of eighth-graders at Swanson Middle School from Principal Chrystal Forrester and two teachers said the assignment was "clearly a bad choice for a debate topic." "Recognizing the pain that has touched many of our families and neighbors due to the terrorist attacks on the United States and acknowledging the sensitive nature of the conflict in Afghanistan involving many of our dedicated members of the U.S. armed forces, we have eliminated this topic as part of the U.N. unit of study effective immediately," the e-mail said. [Myopia]
• US froze 2bn held for Iran by Citigroup
  ROBERTA RAMPTON Published: 2009/12/14 06:57:31 AM A US court last year secretly froze more than 2bn allegedly held for Iran in Citigroup accounts, a report said on Saturday, in possibly the biggest seizure of Iranian assets abroad since 1979. [Sanctions] [Legality]
• Paul A. Samuelson, Economist, Dies at 94
  Article Tools Sponsored By By MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN Published: December 13, 2009 Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.
  The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
  Mr. Samuelson provided a mathematical structure to study the impact of trade on different groups of consumers and workers. In a famous theorem, known as Stolper-Samuelson, he and a co-author showed that competition from imports of clothes and similar goods from underdeveloped countries, where producers rely on unskilled workers, could drive down the wages of low-paid workers in industrialized countries. The theorem provided the intellectual scaffold for opponents of free trade. And late in his career, Mr. Samuelson set off an intellectual commotion by pointing out that the economy of a country like the United States could be hurt if productivity rose among the economies with which it traded. Yet Mr. Samuelson, like most academic economists, remained an advocate of open trade
  He also helped develop linear programming, a mathematical tool used by corporations and central planners in socialist countries to calculate how to produce pre-set levels of various goods and services at the least cost.
  The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman. But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned. “The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”
  Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. Mr. Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”
• Afghan promises to insurgents often empty
  Incentives to fighters to switch sides are key to U.S. plan (U.S., allies plan big investments to persuade insurgent loyalists to join the Afghan cause.(sic)) By Griff Witte Monday, December 14, 2009 JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN -- His path marked by moonlight, with a Kalashnikov strapped to his back, Feda Mohammed hiked the well-worn trail through the mountains of Pakistan and into Afghanistan. He had traveled the route dozens of times before to attack U.S. soldiers. But this time, Mohammed was on a secret mission to surrender.
  "We have nothing to offer these people," said Haji Jan Mohammed, director of the government's reconciliation program for Nangarhar and Laghman provinces, in Afghanistan's volatile east. "We don't get any kind of assistance from the central government, so we promise them jobs but there are no jobs, and we promise them land but there is no land." [Myopia] [Agency] [AfPak]
• U.S. holds huge lead in global weapons sales
  Thom Shanker, New York Times Monday, September 7, 2009 Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world's leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new study. The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before. Italy was a distant second, with $3.7 billion in worldwide weapons sales in 2008, while Russia was third with $3.5 billion in arms sales last year - down considerably from the $10.8 billion in weapons deals signed by Moscow in 2007. The growth in weapons sales by the United States last year was particularly noticeable against worldwide trends. The value of global arms sales in 2008 was $55.2 billion, a drop of 7.6 percent from 2007 and the lowest total for international weapons agreements since 2005. The annual report was produced by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress. It is regarded as the most detailed collection of unclassified global arms sales data available to the general public. The overall decline in weapons sales worldwide in 2008 can be explained by the reluctance of many nations to place new arms orders "in the face of the severe international recession," wrote Richard Grimmett, a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service and author of the study. The United States was the leader not only in arms sales worldwide, but also in sales to nations in the developing world, signing $29.6 billion in weapons agreements with these nations, or 70.1 percent of all such deals. [Arms sales]
• Congressional Research Service Reports on Conventional Weapons Systems
  Various reports [Arms sales]
• Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2001-2008
  Richard F. Grimmett Specialist in International Security September 4, 2009 [Arms sales]
• U.S. Accuses Pakistan of Altering Missiles
  August 30, 2009 By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON — The United States has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, according to senior administration and Congressional officials. [Arms sales] [Imperialism] [Tribute]
• The Road to Re-Election Runs Through Kabul?
  By Christian Parenti December 7, 2009 Christian Parenti: The real purpose of sending 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan is to make Obama look tough as he heads toward the next US presidential election
  The real goals of the Afghanistan escalation are domestic and electoral. Like Lyndon Johnson, who escalated in Vietnam, Obama lives in mortal fear of being called a wimp by Republicans. To cover his flank and look tough in the next US election, Obama is expanding the war in Afghanistan. To look strong in front of swing voters, he will sacrifice the lives of hundreds of US soldiers, allow many more to be horribly maimed, waste a minimum of $30 billion in public money and in the process kill many thousands of Afghan civilians. It is political theater, nothing else. What are the other possible explanations for Obama's escalation? And why has he pledged to start drawing down the new deployment after only a year of fighting?
  The real purpose of these 30,000 soldiers is to make Obama look tough as he heads toward the next US presidential election. [Imperialism] [AfPak] [Domestic]
• Obama's Nine Surges By Tom Engelhardt
  December 11, 2009 In his Afghan "surge" speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new "way forward in Afghanistan." He spoke of the "additional 30,000 US troops" he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the "roughly $30 billion" it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don't faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become. [AfPak]
• Defense Secretary’s Trip Encounters Snags in Two Theaters
  By ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: December 12, 2009 ERBIL, Iraq — It is an axiom of war that no battle plan ever survives the first encounter with the enemy, but the travel plans of the defense secretary last week barely survived encounters with his own troops and allies. Skip to next paragraph At War Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. Go to the Blog » Related Times Topics: Robert M. Gates | Iraq | Afghanistan No one in the entourage of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was calling the trip a metaphor for the mire ahead in Afghanistan, but no one was calling it a previctory lap either. As Mr. Gates told troops in Iraq, previewing the infusion of 30,000 new American troops to Afghanistan: “I think it will look a lot like the surge here in the first six or eight months of 2007. The first six to eight months were pretty tough here.” The trip’s snags played out through the week and across both theaters of war.
  Mr. Gates did meet with Mr. Maliki early on Friday, the same day he finally managed to talk to some troops. That was in Kirkuk, where in a town hall-style session he was asked unusually pointed questions. Why, one wanted to know, is the United States still at war after eight years? “I think it’s a mistake to look at Afghanistan as sort of one eight-year war,” Mr. Gates responded in the same even tone he had used all week. “We had a war in 2001, 2002, which we essentially won (sic). And the Taliban was kicked out of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was kicked out of Afghanistan, many of them killed. And then things were very quiet in Afghanistan.” Without blaming President George W. Bush’s administration, which he once served, for sidelining the conflict in favor of Iraq, Mr. Gates said the second war in Afghanistan started in late 2005 and early 2006. “But the United States really has gotten its head into this conflict in Afghanistan, as far as I’m concerned, really only in the last year,” he said.  [AfPak]  
• In Shift, U.S. Talks to Russia on Internet Security
  By JOHN MARKOFF and ANDREW E. KRAMER Published: December 12, 2009 The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace. Skip to next paragraph Related Cyberwar: The Times's series on the growing use of computer power as a weapon. RSS Feed     * Get Science News From The New York Times » American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. [Cyberwar]
• Legislator Sees Echoes of Vietnam in Afghan War
  By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG Published: December 12, 2009 WASHINGTON — David R. Obey has served in Congress since Barack Obama was in grade school. He does not waste time with pleasantries, and he does not mince words. So when President Obama called Representative Obey recently to talk about Afghanistan, the congressman raised a topic sure to make the young commander in chief uncomfortable: Vietnam.
  Mr. Obey came away from the speech unconvinced that Mr. Obama’s strategy could succeed — not because he doubts the president, he said, but because he has little faith in the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. [Victim] [Inversion] [Agency]
• The "Obama Doctrine": Eternal War For Imperfect Mankind
  "For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world." By Rick Rozoff   Global Research, December 11, 2009 Stop NATO - 2009-12-10 President and commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States Barack Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address in Oslo on December 10, which has immediately led to media discussion of an Obama Doctrine. With obligatory references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi (the second referred to only by his surname) but to no other American presidents than Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy - fellow peace prize recipients Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter weren't mentioned - the U.S. head of state spoke with the self-assurance of the leader of the world's first uncontested superpower and at times with the self-righteousness of a would-be prophet and clairvoyant. And, in the words of German philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel, a prophet looking backward.  
• US headache over Afghan deserters
  By Gareth Porter WASHINGTON - One in every four combat soldiers quit the Afghan National Army (ANA) during the year ending in September, published data by the US Defense Department and the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan reveals. That high rate of turnover in the ANA, driven by extremely high rates of desertion, spells trouble for the strategy that US President Barack Obama has reportedly decided on, which is said to include the dispatch of thousands of additional US military trainers to rapidly increase the size of the ANA. US officials have for years touted the ANA as a success story. General Stanley A McChrystal, the top US soldier in Afghanistan, called in his August 2009 strategy paper for increasing the ANA to 134,000 troops by October 2010 and eventually to 240,000. But an administration source, who insisted on speaking without attribution because of the sensitivity of the subject, confirmed to Inter Press Service (IPS) that 25% has been used as the turnover rate for the ANA in internal discussions, and that it is regarded by some officials as a serious problem. [AfPak]
• Neoliberalism and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development in Latin America
  By Prof. James Petras and Prof. Henry Veltmeyer URL of this article: Global Research, November 19, 2009 An analysis of the dynamics of capitalist development over the last two decades has been overshadowed by an all too prevalent “globalization” discourse. It appears that much of the Left has bought into this discourse, tacitly accepting globalization as an irresistible fact and that in many ways it is progressive, needing only for the corporate agenda to be derailed and an abandonment of neoliberalism. This is certainly the case in Latin America where the Left has focused its concern almost exclusively on the bankruptcy of “neoliberalism”, with reference to the agenda pursued and package of policy reforms implemented by virtually every government in the region by the dint of ideology if not the demands of the global capital or political opportunism. In this concern, imperialism and capitalism per se, as opposed to neoliberalism, have been pushed off the agenda, and as a result, excepting Chavéz's Bolivarian Revolution, the project of building socialism has virtually disappeared as an object of theory and practice. [Crisis]
• Some nations successful in global hunger fight: FAO
  (AFP) – 6 hours ago ROME — Some countries have already been successful in the fight against hunger which affects more than one billion people worldwide, the UN food agency said Tuesday. But despite the progress, analysts said countries trying to combat the scourge still faced numerous hurdles and their efforts could bring them into conflict with global trade regulations. Sixteen countries have already reached the goal of reducing hunger levels by 50 percent by 2015, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published at a world hunger summit organised by the agency. Among those to have hit the target are China, Brazil, Nigeria, Thailand, Armenia, Georgia, Vietnam, and Peru.
• Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids
  By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI Published: December 10, 2009 WASHINGTON — Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials. [Privatisation]
• The Post-Imperial Presidency
  Even as Obama increases troop levels, he is scaling back American foreign policy.
  By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK Published Dec 5, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Dec 14, 2009 If you take just one sentence out, Barack Obama's speech on Afghanistan last week was all about focusing and limiting the scope of America's mission in that country. His goal, he said, was "narrowly defined." The objectives he detailed were exclusively military—to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven, reverse the Taliban's momentum, and strengthen the Kabul government's security forces. He said almost nothing about broader goals like spreading democracy, protecting human rights, or assisting in women's education. The nation that he was interested in building, he explained, was America. And then there was that one line: "I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan." Here lies the tension in Barack Obama's policy. He wants a clearer, more discriminating foreign policy, one that pares down the vast commitments and open-ended interventions of the Bush era, perhaps one that is more disciplined even than Bill Clinton's approach to the world. (On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly invoked George H.W. Bush as the president whose foreign policy he admired most.) But America is in the midst of a war that is not going well, and scaling back now would look like cutting and running. Obama is searching for a post-imperial policy in the midst of an imperial crisis. [Imperialism][Spin] [US global strategy] [Continuity] [Spin]
• New Cases Test Optimism on Extremism by U.S. Muslims
  The Americans arrested Wednesday in Pakistan were, from left, Waqar Khan, Ramy Zamzam, Umer Farooq, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, and Aman Hassan Yemer. By Scott Shane Published: December 11, 2009 WASHINGTON — As the years passed after Sept. 11, 2001, without another major attack on American soil and with no sign of hidden terrorist cells, many counterterrorism specialists reached a comforting conclusion: Muslims in the United States were not very vulnerable to radicalization. American Muslims, the reasoning went, were well assimilated in diverse communities with room for advancement. They showed little of the alienation often on display among their European counterparts, let alone attraction to extremist violence. But with a rash of recent cases in which Americans have been accused of being drawn into terrorist scheming, the rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., last month and now the alarming account of five young Virginia men who went to Pakistan and are suspected of seeking jihad, the notion that the United States has some immunity against homegrown terrorists is coming under new scrutiny. [Global insurgency]
• The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009
  The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons. Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population. For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges." Oslo, October 9, 2009 [Obama_Nobel]
• Full text of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech
  Remarks of the U.S. president in Oslo updated 9:15 a.m. ET Dec. 10, 2009 OSLO, Norway - Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world: I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations - that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice. [Imperialism] [Spin] [Obama_Nobel]
• Analysis: Obama's case for war in support of peace
  By STEVEN R. HURST (AP) – 1 hour ago WASHINGTON — Barack Obama split the difference in his Nobel speech, laying down a doctrine that will likely define his presidency: a steadfast defense of warfare against evil mixed with praise of nonviolence and exhortations for mankind to affirm the "spark of the divine" in everyone. As he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, the world's highest honor for peacemaking, Obama voiced his starkest rejection yet of the pre-emptive war doctrine and unilateralism articulated by his predecessor. At the same time, the young president carefully set forth and sought to explain what might appear to be contradictory principles that have guided his foreign policy decisions during his first year in the White House: [Obama_Nobel] [Spin] [Double standards]
• Military optimistic on US arms sales to Taiwan
  Publication Date?12/11/2009 Source? China Times Washington is likely to agree to the sale of submarines to Taiwan as a gesture of good faith, according to a high-ranking ROC military official Dec. 10. The comment was made in response to the latest Reuters report that the Barack Obama administration is moving toward possible new arms sales to Taiwan, including Black Hawk helicopters and design work on diesel-electric submarines. Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC -3) missiles and military equipment included in the Po Sheng command and control program are still under discussion, the report said. [Arms sales] [China confrontation]
• In the Eye of the Storm: Updating the Economics of Global Turbulence, an Introduction to Robert Brenner's Update
  R. Taggart Murphy Introduction Out in the academic cemetery to which avatars of market fundamentalism thought they had consigned their intellectual and political opponents, one can hear today the unmistakable scrape of coffin lids opening. And climbing out of their graves are the bodies of those who contend that the reductionist assumptions of neo-classical/ rational choice orthodoxy are not simply inadequate but flawed in the most fundamental sense. The reason may seem obvious: the financial catastrophe of last year and the failure of so many established thinkers to see it coming. But there is more dogging the luminaries of mainstream finance and economics than the simple inability to have read the tea leaves properly – to their blindness, for example, in the face of the rise in U.S. housing prices to the point they no longer bore any relation to the earnings streams of much of the American population or to the fantastic assumptions about default rates built into the business models of too many Wall Street houses. To be sure, a few non-mainstream analysts did get these things right before the fact -- Nouriel Roubini, for example, or Michael Lewis. But it was in the way the crisis took the entire policy establishment by surprise that we see signs of broader, systemic conceptual failure. [Crisis]
• China alerts students on dodgy Australian colleges
  * Guy Healy * From: The Australian * December 07, 2009 12:00AM CHINA is directing its booming student trade away from "unstable and risky" private colleges in Australia, warning that those who intend to study here should enrol only in accredited universities and TAFE colleges. An alert published by the Chinese Education Ministry and disseminated throughout China contains an explicit warning against Chinese students enrolling in private Australian colleges. Thousands of such colleges have sprung up to attract students from China and India especially. [Services] [Education]
• Obama treads Soviet road out of Kabul
  The new Afghan strategy announced by United States President Barack Obama last Tuesday is a game-changer in regional politics across a broad swathe of the international system. The reactions in capitals as far removed as Beijing, Tehran, New Delhi and Moscow amply bear this out. Broadly speaking, just about everyone understands that the US surge of 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan is a passing necessity. It merely provides the gateway to an end-game strategy aimed at ensuring American power doesn't get bogged down in a pointless quagmire in the Hindu Kush.
  To be sure, setting aside pride and prejudice, Moscow would realize that Obama has good chance of still succeeding where the Kremlin failed for a variety of reasons. The Taliban doesn't enjoy the anywhere near the level of international support that the mujahideen had. Two, unlike in 1992, the Afghan government is relatively stable and can draw on international support in terms of aid and political recognition. (Actually, the communist government in Kabul showed staying power despite the Kremlin pulling out troops.) Three, the Soviets lacked any reach to the mujahideen sanctuaries inside Pakistan, whereas America's Predator drones possess precisely the capability to peer deep into Pakistani territory. The Obama administration has just revealed that it will not hesitate to deploy these aircraft over the Balochistan skies and take out the so-called Quetta shura (council) - the Taliban's ruling council based in Pakistan - should the need arise. Pakistani leader General Zia ul-Haq got away with a lot of nonsense in the Soviet era but the present powers in Islamabad lack the leverage that the Cold War provided.
• Beijing broods over its arc of anxiety
  By Peter Lee Beijing will find little cause for joy in United States President Barack Obama's decision to dispatch 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, as outlined in a major policy speech on Tuesday. Geopolitical logic (and China's interests) would dictate that the West disengage from Afghanistan and the Pashtun brief be placed in the eager if not particularly capable hands of Pakistan. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) would see to it that more tractable assets, such as the Haqqanis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, would battle the unruly Taliban to a bloody stalemate in Afghanistan's Pashtun regions, decouple the Pakistan Taliban from their Afghan patrons, and restore a semblance of stability to Pakistan's west [US global strategy]
• Pakistan at odds with Obama's vision
  By Syed Saleem Shahzad ISLAMABAD - While United States President Barack Obama, after months of deliberation, has finally laid out his strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Washington's most important ally in the region, is charting a new course that will place it at odds with the United States.
• Berlusconi accused by Mafia hitman
  By Guy Dinmore in Rome Published: December 4 2009 15:10 | Last updated: December 4 2009 22:14 Italy’s centre-right government on Friday was rocked by accusations made in court by a Mafia hitman that Silvio Berlusconi had made commitments to Sicily’s Cosa Nostra as he was about to enter politics 15 years ago. Testifying behind a screen in a high security court in Turin, Gaspare Spatuzza, a Mafia turncoat, claimed he had been told by a top Sicilian mobster in January 2004 that Mr Berlusconi and his long-time business associate, Marcello Dell’Utri, had given “everything” the Mafia had wanted. EDITOR’S CHOICE Anti-Mafia laws will enrich mob, say critics - Dec-04.State TV discloses Berlusconi bank deposits - Nov-16.Berlusconi clears path for judicial reform - Nov-11.Global Insight: Berlusconi’s peekaboo politics pays off - Nov-04.Berlusconi escapes censure on media - Oct-21.Berlusconi paper seeks constitutional change - Oct-13..“Thanks to the seriousness of these people, they have practically put the country in our hands,” Mr Spatuzza quoted Giuseppe Graviano as saying
  Adding to the image of a prime minister under siege, the court proceedings were broadcast live by Sky Italia, a satellite network owned by Rupert Murdoch, who Mr Berlusconi – a 73-year-old billionaire with his own media empire – has accused of joining the battle against him for commercial reasons [Corruption]
• How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan 
  By PETER BAKER Published: December 5, 2009 WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.
  Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come. “I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words , the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner. When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war. By moving the bell curve to the left, Mr. Obama decided to send 30,000 troops mostly in the next six months and then begin pulling them out a year after that, betting that a quick jolt of extra forces could knock the enemy back on its heels enough for the Afghans to take over the fight. The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House — intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved [US global strategy] [Spin]
• Obama's push for 'surge' shaped Afghan strategy  
  By Anne E. Kornblut, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, December 5, 2009; 3:22 PM President Obama, seated at a long table in the White House Situation Room, stared at slides showing various options for sending additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan.
  For Obama, the immersion in the conflict, and in defining how the United States will fight it, makes a long and unpopular war his own.
• Dutch approach to climate change: Adapt
    By Anthony Faiola and Juliet Eilperin Saturday, December 5, 2009; 4:03 PM AMSTERDAM -- With the Copenhagen summit starting Monday, chances remain uncertain for a historic breakthrough in the fight to prevent climate change, but the Netherlands is leading a fight of a different kind: How to live with global warming. [Climate change]
•   Obama's War: Why is the Largest Military Machine on the Planet Unable to Defeat the Resistance in Afghanistan
  By Sara Flounders    Global Research, December 2, 2009 Just how powerful is the U.S. military today?   Why is the largest military machine on the planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan , in a war that has lasted longer than World War II or Vietnam ?   Afghanistan ranks among the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world today. It has one of the shortest life expectancy rates, highest infant mortality rates and lowest rates of literacy.   The total U.S. military budget has more than doubled from the beginning of this war in 2001 to the $680 billion budget signed by President Barack Obama Oct. 28. The U.S. military budget today is larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. The U.S. arsenal has the most advanced high-tech weapons.   The funds and troop commitment to Afghanistan have grown with every year of occupation. Last January another 20,000 troops were sent; now there is intense pressure on President Obama to add an additional 40,000 troops. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. More than three times as many forces are currently in Afghanistan when NATO forces and military contractors are counted.   [Imperialism] [Privatisation]  
• Pakistanis voice concerns about Obama's new Afghanistan plan
  Obama: New approach to cost $30 billion The president speaks to the current economic climate and commits to addressing the costs of the new approach "openly and honestly."  By Pamela Constable and Joshua Partlow Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, December 3, 2009 ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- President Obama's new strategy for combating Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan fell on skeptical ears Wednesday in next-door Pakistan, a much larger, nuclear-armed state that Obama said was "at the core" of the plan and had even more at stake than Afghanistan. Analysts and residents on both sides of the 1,600-mile border expressed concerns about Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan in an effort to quickly train local security forces and allow U.S. troops to begin leaving by July 2011. [Global insurgency]
• US troop plan set to impact China
  By Chen Weihua in New York, Li Xiaokun and Ai Yang in Beijing (China Daily) Updated: 2009-12-03 07:11 Comments(12) PrintMail  Washington's plan to send a huge new contingent of troops to Afghanistan may have a positive impact within China, domestic and foreign experts said on Wednesday. They were reacting to the announcement by US President Barack Obama from the West Point Military Academy that he was ordering 30,000 more troops to the war-torn nation. Experts said the deployment could have a knock-on effect in China, where it might help stifle separatist activity within the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
  "The new US Afghan strategy is not only aimed at seizing Bin Laden and combating the Taliban, it is also a deliberate action targeted at China, Russia and Iran", Qi said. [Global insurgency] US China relations]
• Western Europe and Russia - Coming Together"  
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 270, Dec. 1, 2009 The slow process of creating a lasting geopolitical alliance of western Europe and Russia has a long history, which is slowly maturing. It may be traced to the visit of President Charles De Gaulle to the Soviet Union in 1944, where he signed the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance. It was a way to reassert France's centrality in European politics and to take his distance from his somewhat reluctant allies, the United States and Great Britain. For De Gaulle, geopolitical interests overrode ideological differences.
  What was common to all four moments was that they were all seen by the United States as at least dubious propositions and at worst initiatives that potentially undermined the global interests of the United States.
  But geopolitical reality is that the United States can do very little now to slow down the approaching grand alliance.
• A paradox of plenty - hunger in America
  –  Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. – Call it a paradox of plenty. In the world’s wealthiest country, home to more obese people than anywhere else on earth, almost 50 million Americans struggled to feed themselves and their children in 2008. That’s one in six of the population. Millions went hungry, at least some of the time. Things are bound to get worse. This the bleak picture drawn from an annual survey on “household food security” compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and released in mid-November. It showed the highest level of food insecurity since the government started the survey, in 1995, and provided a graphic illustration of the effect of sharply rising unemployment. This year’s picture will be even bleaker - the unemployment rate more than doubled from the beginning of 2008 to now, at 10.2 percent the highest in a quarter century. It is still climbing, and for many the distance between losing a job and lack of food security is very short. In keeping with the American predilection for euphemisms, the word “hunger” does not appear in the report which classes food security into several categories, from “marginal” and “low” to “very low.” [Spin] [Capitalism] [Human rights]
• SHADOW ELITE: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market
  (Basic Books; December 1, 2009) Janine R. Wedel Governments and administrations come and go, but not so a new breed of power brokers, who always seem to pop up just where the action is. Wearing different hats, they press their agendas in venue after venue. According to award-winning public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine Wedel, these are the "shadow elite," the prime movers in a vexing new system of power and influence. Wedel charts how these players make public decisions without public input—in realms from domestic to foreign and financial policy.
• Can the TPP Resolve the ‘Noodle Bowl’ Problem?
  November 26th, 2009 Author: John Ravenhill, ANU The proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTA) in the Asia-Pacific region in the last decade has been primarily a top-down affair, driven by governments acting as much for political-strategic as for economic considerations.   The consequence has been a succession of poor quality, ‘trade-lite’, agreements, towards which the business community, the supposed beneficiary of such arrangements, has been largely indifferent. Usage rates of Asia’s PTAs are low, both in absolute terms and in comparison to those for such agreements in other parts of the world. Moreover, if business were to become more interested in utilizing these arrangements, it would run up against the ‘noodle bowl’ effect: the need to comply with multiple variants of rules of origin. In these circumstances, any agreement that has the potential to multilateralise the existing PTAs in the region, to bring a semblance of order to the ‘noodle bowl’, must surely be welcomed. The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (P4), on which the TPP will build, is a rarity among Asian PTAs in that its membership has been expanded (to include Brunei); it explicitly allows for further expansion. [FTA]
• The Afghanistan Decision
  Paul Rogers, October 2009 During October the Obama administration moved towards a decision on strengthening of US troop deployments in Afghanistan. Most sources in Washington indicated an expansion of around 40,000 troops, but some suggested up to 60,000. Even the former figure would take the US troop totals to well over 100,000 and NATO’s overall numbers in the country to around 140,000.
•  US firm 'runs covert Pakistan ops'   
  Peshawar has borne the brunt of recent Taliban attacks in retaliation for a military offensive [AFP]   A new report has accused the US private security firm formerly known as Blackwater of operating a covert assassination and kidnapping programme against suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda members in northwest Pakistan. In an article published on Monday, The Nation magazine alleged that the firm, now known as Xe, is also involved in running a US military drone bombing campaign out of Pakistan. Jeremy Scahill, the investigative journalist who broke the story, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that the programme was so secretive that senior officials in the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, were likely unaware of it.   [Privatisation]
• Would Our Government Really Start a War to Try to Stimulate the Economy?
  By Washington's Blog Global Research, November 16, 2009 Washington's Blog - 2009-11-14 I've written two essays attempting to disprove "military Keynesianism" - the idea that military spending is the best stimulus. See this and this. In response, a reader challenged me to prove that anyone would advocate military spending or war as a fiscal stimulus. In fact, the concept of military Keynesianism is so widespread that there are some half million web pages discussing the topic. And many leading economists and political pundits sing its praises. [Military industrial complex]
• U.S.-Japan collaboration on high-speed rail
  November 13th, 2009 Guest Author: Daniel Kliman Traveling at up to 300 kph and boasting an impeccable safety record, the Shinkansen exemplifies Japan’s technological prowess. It could also become a new frontier in the U.S. Japan partnership. With the Obama administration committed to developing high speed rail, and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) looking to achieve a more equal relationship with the United States, the time is ripe for bilateral cooperation on an American shinkansen. Japan has unparalleled experience developing and operating bullet trains. The first Shinkansen began carrying passengers between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964. Since then, the Shinkansen has expanded to connect most of Japan’s major cities while maintaining an admirable record of zero fatal accidents. By comparison, the U.S. lags far behind. It has yet to lay a single foot of track dedicated to high-speed rail. [Railways]
• The Fifty-Year War
  By Jonathan Schell This article appeared in the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation. November 11, 2009 I was about to write that there can be no military solution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. But I almost fainted with boredom and had to stop. Who, as President Obama lengthily ponders his decisions regarding the war, wants to repeat a point that's been made 11,000 times before?
  In Bird's book and in a more recent one--Lessons in Disaster by Gordon Goldstein, who helped McGeorge Bundy to prepare a book reconsidering the war--another factor moves into the foreground. Bundy's death prevented completion of that book, but Goldstein makes use of Bundy's notes in his own book. Seeking to understand the origins of the war, Bundy was impressed with the salience of domestic politics. [Continuity] [Global insurgency]

• On trip to seal ties with Asia, trade policy threatens rift
  Issue poses sticking point as Obama promotes greater U.S. economic influence By Andrew Higgins and Anne E. Kornblut Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, November 15, 2009 SINGAPORE -- Hours after declaring that China's growing economic muscle doesn't pose a threat, President Obama traveled Saturday night to this usually pro-American city-state to wrestle with another tricky issue: Is the United States itself the troublemaker? In Asia on an eight-day tour to reassert U.S. influence in the world's most economically buoyant region, Obama came to Singapore from Tokyo for a gathering of 21 Pacific Rim nations, an annual event that this year has put some of America's own policies in the line of fire. A chorus of complaints about U.S. trade policies largely drowned out grumbling over China's turbocharged export machine and threatened to put Obama on the defensive at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. China has ramped up its criticism in recent weeks of U.S. restrictions on imports. And in the hours before the president's arrival, leaders of Mexico, China and Russia broadly condemned protectionism.
  Hard economic facts, however, also have made Obama something of a Pacific supplicant. China is the United States' biggest creditor, holding more than $1 trillion of U.S. debt. And while the U.S. economy clambers slowly out of a deep slump triggered by last year's financial crisis, Asia has rebounded with vigor. Asian economies will grow by nearly 6 percent next year, compared with 1.5 percent for the United States, according to the International Monetary Fund. The United States remains by far the world's biggest economy. Its gross domestic product is five times as large as China's. But momentum is clearly moving Asia's way. China's economy, surging this year by more than 8 percent, is expected to expand by 9 percent in 2010.
• Timeline: US China relations
  
• Obama travels to Asia
  
• Welcome home, war
  By Alfred W McCoy
  In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Barack Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations", warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the "war on terror" has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties. Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent counter-insurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Fallujah and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood.
  Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state - with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland". [Surveillance] [Imperialism]
• Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja
  Iraqi former battle zone sees abnormal clusters of infant tumours and deformities Buzz up! Digg it Martin Chulov in Falluja guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 November 2009 19.24 GMT Article history The children of Falluja Link to this video Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting. The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja's over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born. [War crimes]
• Alleged Sept. 11 planner will be tried in New York
  A shift to civilian court Four co-conspirators also will be transferred By Peter Finn and Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, November 14, 2009 Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and four co-conspirators will be tried in Manhattan federal courthouse less than a mile from Ground Zero, the Justice Department announced Friday, the most concrete demonstration yet of the Obama administration's desire to reassert the primacy of the criminal justice system in responding to terrorist acts.
  In planning to transfer Mohammed and his co-defendants from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to civilian court, the administration takes a significant step toward reversing the Bush administration's practice of declaring suspected members of al-Qaeda and related groups to be unlawful enemy combatants subject to extra-judicial or military detention. The decision also adds some momentum to the administration's lagging effort to close the military prison camp on the southeastern tip of Cuba. [Torture]
• Deal with it Trade is big in Asia. Too bad America lacks a trade policy.
  Friday, November 13, 2009 PRESIDENT OBAMA has a busy week ahead in Asia. His meetings in Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing and Seoul will touch on repression in Burma, U.S. military bases in Japan and the pursuit of nuclear weapons in North Korea. But as the leader of a nation struggling with 10.2 percent unemployment, Mr. Obama must also focus on the U.S. economic relationship with the world's most dynamic region. The most delicate problem is rebalancing trade and investment flows between the United States and China. To boost its exports, China continues to peg its currency to the declining dollar. This makes it more difficult for the United States and other Asian countries to claim their share of regional trade. The latest danger sign was heavy government dollar-buying by Russia, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines in a damage-control effort that is probably doomed in practical terms but significant as a measure of these countries' concerns. The Obama administration has correctly called on China and other Asian countries to increase domestic consumption; equally justifiably, the region is demanding convincing signs of fiscal discipline from the United States. U.S. trade policy, or the lack thereof, is the other major threat to American economic competitiveness in Asia. In 2007, Congress, controlled by Democrats, allowed presidential fast-track authority for future trade deals to expire. Not that Mr. Obama necessarily would use it. The most significant trade action of his administration so far has been to slap a tariff on Chinese tire imports, as requested by the steelworkers union. A U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement negotiated by the Bush administration has gone unratified for more than two years. Under the Korea trade deal, 95 percent of consumer and industrial products would become duty-free in three years, boosting American exports to South Korea by $10 billion annually, according to government estimates. The vast majority of American businesses supported it. But the United Auto Workers -- along with Ford and Chrysler, but not General Motors -- opposed the deal, insisting on linkage between future U.S. tariff reductions and increased sales of U.S. cars in South Korea. [FTA]
• Dollar weakens as China hints at stronger Renminbi
  By Geoff Dyer in Beijing Published: November 11 2009 03:36 | Last updated: November 12 2009 04:05 The US dollar continued to decline on Thursday while gold reached a new record high after China’s central bank acknowledged the case for a stronger renminbi, days ahead of the arrival in Beijing of US president Barack Obama for talks expected to highlight mounting international concern over Chinese currency policy. Mr Obama’s visit, as part of an Asian tour, also comes as the US dollar hits a 15-month low on a trade-weighted basis, raising questions about its future as the global reserve currency [Reserve]
• Decline but no fall
  By John Plender Published: November 11 2009 19:55 | Last updated: November 11 2009 19:55 As US president Barack Obama begins a tour of Asian capitals, the standard assumption in the west is that his meetings will be with leaders of nations that rank as America’s junior partners. Yet the reality is more complex. Amid the rubble of the financial crisis, the US position as singular superpower and global economic top dog looks increasingly under threat. Those who take pleasure in America’s discomfort point out that this global economic colossus has become shackled to the world’s largest pile of international debt and pulled down by a sinking currency. By common consent China is the chief beneficiary of the financial debacle and a serious challenger to US hegemony.
  At which point, it is important to remember that we have been here before. [Decline]
• In Kabul's 'Obama Market,' U.S. military rations on sale
  By Jay Price | McClatchy Newspapers KABUL, Afghanistan — First came the Brezhnev Market. Then the Bush Market. Now Afghans are beginning to call their notorious bazaar full of chow and supplies bought or stolen from the vast U.S. military bases by the name of the current American president, a modest counterweight to his Nobel Peace Prize. "It is Obama Market now," pronounced Haji Tor, a rotund shopkeeper who acts as kind of an unofficial chamber of commerce president for the market in the Afghan capital. "Bush is finished." Well, maybe not quite yet. Most of the shopkeepers and customers still call it the Bush Market, but several said that the new name is gradually gaining traction. The small market, tucked behind a commercial building in the northwest side of the city, is a U.S. taxpayer's nightmare.
• American Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits
  By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS Published: November 11, 2009 OSLO — Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth. Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract. In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory. Mr. Galbraith, widely viewed in Washington as a smart and bold foreign policy expert, has always described himself as an unpaid adviser to the Kurds, although he has spoken in general terms about having business interests in Kurdistan, as the north of Iraq is known.
  As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say. [Corruption] [Fragmentation]  
• Is Obama's Iran policy doomed?
  By Dilip Hiro While the tone of the Barack Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W Bush, both administrations subscribe at their core to the same doctrine: whatever the White House perceives as a threat - whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles - must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing. In addition, by the evidence available, Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor's failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic. Here, a lesson is readily available, if only the Obama White House were willing to consider Iran's recent history. It is unrealistic to expect that a regime which fought Saddam Hussein's Iraq (then backed by the United States) to a standstill in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s, unaided by any foreign power, and has for 30 years withstood the consequences of US-imposed economic sanctions will be alarmed by Washington's fresh threats of "crippling sanctions". Most important, the Obama administration is ignoring the altered international order that has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis triggered by Wall Street's excesses. While its stimulus package, funded by taxpayers and foreign borrowing, has arrested the decline in the nation's gross domestic product, Washington has done little to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. That task - performed by the US in recent recessions - has fallen willy-nilly to China. History repeatedly shows that such economic clout sooner or later translates into diplomatic power.
  In the North Korean case, once the country had tested its first atomic bomb in October 2006, the Bush administration softened its stance towards it. In the bargaining that followed, North Korea got its name removed from the State Department's list of nations that support international terrorism. In the on-again-off-again bilateral negotiations that followed, the Pyongyang regime as an official nuclear state has been seeking a guarantee against attack or subversion by the United States. Without saying so publicly, Iran's leaders want a similar guarantee from the US. [US global strategy]
• Choppers, the Achilles’ heel in the Afghan war
  Posted by: Sanjeev Miglani Back in 2002 during a reporting assignment in Afghanistan, a U.S. helicopter pilot told me that it was important to send a message early on that “we own the skies, night or day”. So at any given point of time if you were at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul, you could see aircraft, mostly choppers taking off, landing or simply idling in the skies above in what became the region’s busiest airfield.
  At another time it was the former Soviet Union’s helicopter fleet which played a pivotal role in its war in Afghanistan and which the U.S. zeroed in on, famously equipping the mujahideen with the Stinger missiles. That drove up the cost of operating and contributed to the eventual defeat of the Red Army. America isn’t facing Stinger missiles, yet, but the enemy on the ground seems just as hardened.
• Obama tour to Asia sets stage for bilateral talks
  Analysts are looking to Stephen Bosworth’s visit to North Korea in late Nov. or early Dec. as a launch pad for dialogue Headway has yet to be made in proceeding with negotiations over the North Korean nuclear program. Core figures in the U.S. administration have made statements about the country’s basic position on the North Korean nuclear issue over the weekend, just prior to a tour of Asia by U.S. President Barack Obama scheduled for Nov. 13 to Nov. 19 with visits to South Korea, China and Japan. Analysts suggest the remarks convey the position that the North Korea visit by U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy Stephen Bosworth scheduled for late Nov. or early Dec. is for the purpose of “dialogue” rather than “negotiations.” [Bilateral]
• In Anbar, U.S.-Allied Tribal Chiefs Feel Deep Sense of Abandonment
  By Anthony Shadid Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, October 3, 2009 RAMADI, Iraq -- There was once a swagger to the scotch-swilling, insurgent-fighting Raed Sabah. He was known as Sheik Raed to his sycophants. Tribesmen who relied on his largess called him the same. So did his fighters, who joined the Americans and helped crush the insurgency in Anbar province. Sabah still likes his scotch -- Johnnie Walker Black, with Red Bull on the rocks -- but these days, as the Americans withdraw from western Iraq, he has lost his swagger. His neighbors now deride him as an American stooge; they have nicknamed his alley "The Street of the Lackeys." "The Americans left without even saying goodbye. Not one of them," Sabah said in his villa in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, once the cradle of Iraq's insurgency. "Even when we called them, we got a message that the line had been disconnected."
  His Marines train their Army successors in the etiquette of brewing Turkish coffee, or as one soldier put it, "espresso times 10." Well-sugared tea should be served as soon as the sheiks sit down in Lopez's diwan. "You want to be Johnny on the spot every time," Cpl. Jared Jones insisted. In serving meals, put lamb in the middle, he said, chicken to the side. Take plastic silverware out of the wrapper; doing otherwise is considered tacky.(sic) [Imperialism] [Incompetence]
• Breaking The Australian Silence
  Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.” There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name. The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country.
  It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.
  But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies -- socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor -- and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food. How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. [Imperialism] [Media]
• Does APEC matter?
  Authors: Peter Drysdale and Shiro Armstrong November 8th, 2009 This week Singapore hosts APEC and leaders from the 21 member economies. This year is APEC’s 20th anniversary, 20 years which have seen a remarkable transformation and growth of its East Asian member economies. Did APEC have anything to do with East Asia becoming the most dynamic region in the global economy? Does APEC matter for its members? Does being a member of APEC, and associated with the growth of trade and investment in the most dynamic part of the world economy, make a difference? [APEC] [FTA]
• Squaring the Japanese and Australia proposals for an East Asian and Asia Pacific Community: is America in or out?
  November 4th, 2009 Author: Joel Rathus, Adelaide University and Meiji University At the fourth East Asian Summit, held on 25 October in Thailand, the leaders of Japan and Australia had the opportunity to air their ideas about the future form and function of East Asian regionalism. As Acharya notes Australian PM Rudd and Japanese PM Hatoyama appear to have competing visions about how to re-order the region. But, at this stage, if only because both proposals share a level of deliberately in-built vagueness, it’s not easy to tell. Hatoyama, for example, seems ambivalent – or at least unsure – on what role the US ought to play in the region.
• Broader Measure of U.S. Unemployment Stands at 17.5%
  By DAVID LEONHARDT For all the pain caused by the Great Recession, the job market still was not in as bad shape as it had been during the depths of the early 1980s recession — until now. With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression. In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982. [Labour] [Crisis]
• Ex-Math Professor Is America's Highest Earner
  James Simons Who was the best paid person in the U.S. last year? Not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs but the lesser known James Simons, CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. According to research firm Alpha Survey, Simons earned some US$2.5 billion last year. But Simons did not study economics or business at college. He is a mathematics professor-turned hedge fund manager and has been posting miraculous profits since quitting a teaching job at Harvard University. Simons last year earned tens of times more than Goldman Sachs Group CEO Lloyd Craig Blankfein, who made US$54.8 million. Simons made investments with math-based predictions for developments in the financial mechanism. [Finance] [Crisis]
• Business Schools Try New Asia Strategies
  Haas, Manchester, and Iowa are among the B-schools striving to build Asia ties through EMBA and alternative degree programs By Bruce Einhorn Like many professors at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Dean Rich Lyons takes pride in the university's close ties with Asia. More than 40% of Berkeley's undergraduate students are Asian or Asian American, and the university's schools have strong research ties across the Pacific. Berkeley, says Lyons, "is the most Asia-leaning of all Western universities. You can't but walk around the campus and see how extraordinarily Asian the place is." The post-Lehman credit crunch, though, has hurt some of the business school's Asian connections. [Services] [Education]
• Army Doctor Held in Fort Hood Rampage
  By ROBERT D. McFADDEN Published: November 5, 2009 An Army psychiatrist facing deployment to one of America’s war zones killed 12 people and wounded 31 others on Thursday in a shooting rampage with two handguns at the sprawling Fort Hood Army post in central Texas, military officials said. It was one of the worst mass shootings ever at a military base in the United States. The gunman, who was still alive after being shot four times, was identified by law enforcement authorities as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, who had been in the service since 1995. Major Hasan was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.
  General Cone said that terrorism was not being ruled out, but that preliminary evidence did not suggest that the rampage had been an act of terrorism. Fox Newsquoted a retired Army colonel, Terry Lee, as saying that Major Hasan, with whom he worked, had voiced hope that President Obama would pull American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, had argued with military colleagues who supported the wars and had tried to prevent his own deployment. [Continuity] [Islam]
• Israel says weapons shipment a war crime, Iran and Syria cry foul
  Israel's Netanyahu said Thursday a large arms shipment seized this week was sent by Iran to Syria and Hezbollah, and charged this was a 'war crime.' (sic) By Dan Murphy | Staff writer 11.05.09 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that a large Iranian weapons shipment that Israel seized on Wednesday – and alleges was destined for Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon – constituted a “war crime.” He said the United Nations Security Council should convene a special session to discuss the issue. “The bulk of the shipment included rockets whose aim is to hurt our citizens and kill as many civilians as possible,” Prime Minister Netanyahu charged in a press conference. Iran and Syria said there was no weapons shipment, and Hezbollah said whatever the cargo, it was not intended for them. Israel seized the German-owned freighter Francorp in international waters near Cyprus after it had departed Iran, transited the Suez Canal, and made a brief stop in Egypt. The Israeli navy said it found 500 tons of Katyusha rockets, mortars, bullets, and grenades in containers belonging to an Iranian shipping line, and said the ship’s manifest indicated the cargo was destined for Syria. Both Iran and Syria have supplied arms to Hezbollah in the past. UN Security Council Resolution 1747 does forbid Iran from selling arms: “Iran shall not supply, sell, or transfer directly or indirectly from its territory or by its nationals or using its flag vessels or aircraft any arms or related materiel, and that all States shall prohibit the procurement of such items from Iran by their nationals.” [UNUS] [Arms sales] [Double standards]
• East Asia Rising
  Seventy percent of the 130 global economic experts who attended the World Economic Forum in Dalian, China in September said Asia will wield the greatest influence in the global economy before 2020, according to a survey. And Asian economies have been growing at a rapid pace to take center stage. The combined GDPs of Korea, China, Japan and the 10-members of ASEAN were forecast at US$12.67 trillion this year, accounting for 21.1 percent of the global economy and the first time Asian economies have accounted for more than a 20 percent stake since the International Monetary Fund began tracking such data in 1980. Analysis of IMF data by the Hyundai Economic Research Institute commissioned by the Chosun Ilbo suggests that Korea's GDP will total $800.3 billion this year, while China's will amount to $4.76 trillion and Japan's to $5.49 trillion, further boosting Asia's stake. [China rising]
• End to Blockade against Cuba Called for
  Pyongyang, November 4 (KCNA) -- A DPRK delegate, addressing the plenary meeting of the 64th UN General Assembly on Oct. 28, said that the U.S. unilateral economic, trade and financial blockade against Cuba has lasted for half a century, adding that this blockade imposed by the U.S. under the pretext of "accelerating the democratic transition" of Cuba is aimed to bring down the social system chosen by the Cuban government and people. Noting that this is a wanton violation of the principles of respect for sovereignty of states, territorial integrity and non-interference in other's internal affairs stipulated in the UN Charter and international laws, he continued: The U.S. blockade against Cuba is a silent economic war against the Cuban people as well as an illegal and inhuman criminal act which has no validity from the political, legal and moral points of view [Sanctions]
• In unified Germany, split over the past
  20 years after Wall's fall, many residents in east reveal nostalgia for communist regime
  By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, November 5, 2009 EISENHUETTENSTADT, GERMANY -- In this fading factory town, built more than a half-century ago to honor Stalin, the former East German dictatorship still generates fond memories.
  As Germans prepare to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall -- a spontaneous burst of freedom that led to the collapse of communism in Europe -- the country remains divided in its memories of the old days. Many residents of the former East Germany resent what they say is an unfair characterization of their country as a "criminal state" by their counterparts in the west. Instead, they say, the German Democratic Republic was a well-intentioned, if flawed, experiment in socialism that denounced the evils of the Nazis. In a survey commissioned by the federal government to assess how Germans feel today about the events of 1989, 57 percent of those in the eastern half of the country said life under communist rule was, on balance, more positive than negative. [Socialism]
• Italy Convicts 23 Americans for C.I.A. Renditions
  November 5, 2009 By RACHEL DONADIO MILAN — In a landmark ruling on Wednesday, an Italian judge convicted a C.I.A. station chief and 22 other Americans accused of being C.I.A. agents of kidnapping in the 2003 abduction of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan. An enormous symbolic victory for Italian prosecutors, the case was the first ever to contest the United States practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, presumably one more open to coercive interrogation techniques. The case was widely seen as an implicit indictment of the measures the Bush administration relied on to fight terrorism. [Abductees]
• Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust
  By Nouriel Roubini
  Published: November 1 2009 18:44 | Last updated: November 1 2009 18:44 Since March there has been a massive rally in all sorts of risky assets – equities, oil, energy and commodity prices – a narrowing of high-yield and high-grade credit spreads, and an even bigger rally in emerging market asset classes (their stocks, bonds and currencies). At the same time, the dollar has weakened sharply , while government bond yields have gently increased but stayed low and stable. This recovery in risky assets is in part driven by better economic fundamentals. We avoided a near depression and financial sector meltdown with a massive monetary, fiscal stimulus and bank bail-outs. Whether the recovery is V-shaped, as consensus believes, or U-shaped and anaemic as I have argued, asset prices should be moving gradually higher. But while the US and global economy have begun a modest recovery, asset prices have gone through the roof since March in a major and synchronised rally. While asset prices were falling sharply in 2008, when the dollar was rallying, they have recovered sharply since March while the dollar is tanking. Risky asset prices have risen too much, too soon and too fast compared with macroeconomic fundamentals. So what is behind this massive rally? Certainly it has been helped by a wave of liquidity from near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing. But a more important factor fuelling this asset bubble is the weakness of the US dollar, driven by the mother of all carry trades. The US dollar has become the major funding currency of carry trades as the Fed has kept interest rates on hold and is expected to do so for a long time. Investors who are shorting the US dollar to buy on a highly leveraged basis higher-yielding assets and other global assets are not just borrowing at zero interest rates in dollar terms; they are borrowing at very negative interest rates – as low as negative 10 or 20 per cent annualised – as the fall in the US dollar leads to massive capital gains on short dollar positions. [Reserve] [Crisis]
• Pakistan creates its own enemy
  by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad On the day I arrived in Peshawar last month, the evening stillness was broken by nine loud explosions, each preceded by the sucking sound of a projectile as it arced into Hayatabad, the suburban sprawl west of the city. Their target was a Frontier Constabulary post guarding the fence that separates the city from the tribal region of Khyber. When I lived here seven years ago, Hayatabad hosted many Afghan refugees; those with fewer resources lived in the slums of Kacha Garhi, along the Jamrud Road to the Khyber Pass. Many established businesses here, and dominated commerce and transport in parts of the city. Some temporarily migrated in summer to Afghanistan, where it was cooler. But Peshawar was a sanctuary, as Afghanistan was perpetually at war. Now, many Afghans are leaving because Afghanistan feels safer. There are checkpoints all over the city, many kidnappings, and in the past month, there have been at least three suicide bombings and four rocket attacks, most targeting Hayatabad. [AfPak]
• Vegemite Contest Draws Protests
  By MERAIAH FOLEY Published: November 2, 2009 SYDNEY — What do you get when you take an iconic food product, change its ingredients and release it under a kitschy new name, prompting cries of outrage and a storm of media coverage: A marketing failure or a publicity coup? Kraft originally chose the name iSnack2.0 from almost 50,000 entries in a competition to name its new Vegemite product, but then bowed to public anger and agreed to call the product Cheesybite. The executives at Kraft Foods Australia, the company that makes Vegemite — the salty, gooey yeast paste beloved by millions of Australians — are still awaiting the answer to that question after a recent experiment with the country’s most recognized food product went awry. It all began in July when jars of caramel-brown Vegemite mixed with cream cheese began appearing on supermarket shelves with brightly colored labels inviting consumers to “Name Me.” After weeks of secrecy, during which the company sold more than 3 million jars of the new product to a population of just 22 million people, Kraft took an expensive advertising slot during a nationally televised Australian-rules football final Sept. 26 to announce its winner: Vegemite iSnack 2.0. The reaction was fierce. Vegemite-loving consumers took to the Internet to voice their collective indignation about the name. Thousands of Twitter posts, at least a dozen Facebook groups and a Web site dedicated to “Names that are better than iSnack 2.0” blasted American-owned Kraft for tampering with an Australian icon. One online commentator suggested that the 27-year-old designer who had submitted the winning name be tarred with Vegemite and forced to run naked through the streets of Sydney “as retribution for his cultural crime.” Others called the name “uStupid 1.0” and “un-Australian.” After four days, Kraft announced that it would put the name back to a vote
• China Starts Work on Burma's Pipeline
  China's state-owned National Petroleum Corporation said Tuesday it has begun construction of a pipeline in Burma for transfer of Middle East oil. Officials say construction work started Monday on Burma's Maday Island in the Indian Ocean. The oil and gas pipeline will run through central Burma to China's southwestern Yunnan province. It will transfer oil from the Middle East and Africa as well as natural gas from Burma's Shwe fields. Chinese officials did not say when the oil pipeline would be ready for use. But they said it will be capable of carrying 84 million barrels of oil per year. Rights groups have criticized the project, saying it will harm local people and bring in huge revenues to Burma's ruling military. [Media][Double standards] [China confrontation]
• Hyundai Heavy Wins Deal to Build Burma Pipeline
  Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries on Monday said it won a US$1.4 billion construction contract for a gas pipeline in Burma. The company has been chosen to build a pipeline that will transport gas produced in the fields to China starting in May 2013. Around 11,000 tons of gas are expected to be produced per day over the next 25 to 30 years. The Burmese gas deposits are the Shwe, Shwe Phyu and Mya fields in Blocks A-1 and A-3 where at least 90 million tons of gas reserves are believed to be buried. Korea's Ministry of Knowledge Economy says development projects are set to start with Korea's Daewoo International and Korea Gas Corporation taking part in the operation. Two Indian state-run corporations are also part of the consortium, with Burma's national Myanma Oil & Gas Enterprise expected to jump in as well, which is projected to decrease Daewoo International's stake in the project from the current 60 percent to 51 percent as Myanma Oil & Gas has the right to up to 15 percent of the total share. The official signing of Hyundai's contract is to take place in December, and the company plans to finish building the facilities by March 2013. [media] [Double standards]
• Half of US kids will get food stamps, study says
  By LINDSEY TANNER The Associated Press Monday, November 2, 2009; 9:32 PM CHICAGO -- Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say. The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. [Human rights]
• Obama and the U.S. Strategy of Buying Time
  November 2, 2009 | 2003 GMT By George Friedman
  Making sense of U.S. President Barack Obama's strategy at this moment is difficult. Not only is it a work in progress, but the pending decisions he has to make -- on Iran, Afghanistan and Russia -- tend to obscure underlying strategy. It is easy to confuse inaction with a lack of strategy. Of course, there may well be a lack of strategic thinking, but that does not mean there is a lack of strategy. Related Link Special Series: Obama's Foreign Policy Landscape Strategy, as we have argued, is less a matter of choice than a matter of reality imposing itself on presidents. Former U.S. President George W. Bush, for example, rarely had a chance to make strategy. He was caught in a whirlwind after only nine months in office and spent the rest of his presidency responding to events, making choices from a menu of very bad options. Similarly, Obama came into office with a preset menu of limited choices. He seems to be fighting to create new choices, not liking what is on the menu. He may succeed. But it is important to understand the overwhelming forces that shape his choices and to understand the degree to which whatever he chooses is embedded in U.S. grand strategy, a strategy imposed by geopolitical reality. Empires and Grand Strategy American grand strategy, as we have argued, is essentially that of the British Empire, save at a global rather than a regional level. The British sought to protect their national security by encouraging Continental powers to engage in land-based conflict, thereby reducing resources available for building a navy. That guaranteed that Britain's core interest, the security of the homeland and sea-lane control, remained intact. Achieving this made the United Kingdom an economic power in the 19th century by sparing it the destruction of war and allowing it to control the patterns of international maritime trade. On occasion, when the balance of power in Europe tilted toward one side or another, Britain intervened on the Continent with political influence where possible, direct aid when necessary or -- when all else failed -- the smallest possible direct military intervention. The United Kingdom's preferred strategy consisted of imposing a blockade -- e.g., economic sanctions -- allowing it to cause pain without incurring costs
  On the whole, the United States has no interest in empire, and indeed is averse to imperial adventures.
  The interesting point from where we sit is not only how deeply embedded Obama is in U.S. grand strategy, but how deeply drawn he is into the unintended imperial enterprise that has dominated American foreign policy since the 1930s -- an enterprise neither welcomed nor acknowledged by most Americans. [US Global strategy] [Sanctions] [Imperialism] [Continuity]
• Dangerous People Needed "The Most Dangerous Man in America"
  By David Swanson Global Research, October 31, 2009 After Downing Street - 2009-10-30 "Glaubt es mir - das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heisst: gefährlich leben." - Friedrich Nietzsche On Thursday night I had the privilege of viewing a premier of a film together with its star. The theater was in the U.S. Capitol, and the film was "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers" ( http://www.mostdangerousman.org ). This is a powerfully and engagingly constructed film about one of the most effective instances of whistle-blowing in our nation's history. Ellsberg risked life in prison to expose the lies that had taken this nation into war in Vietnam, lies from Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. And Nixon believed that Ellsberg had incriminating documents on his own lies, which led Henry Kissinger to call Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America." Like most whistle-blowers, Ellsberg was not an outside reformer. He had promoted and advanced the war from inside the Pentagon. He had tried to be a force for moderation. But peace activists reached his conscience and persuaded him that he could and must do more. Those close to him supported his decision. Colleagues took similar risks to assist him. Major media outlets risked their futures to publish what Ellsberg gave them and to interview him while he was in hiding from the law. A member of Congress (former senator Mike Gravel, who was present on Thursday) risked his future to read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record. The Supreme Court ruled against the president of the United States. And Ellsberg became a brilliant spokesman for his cause. A lot of factors combined to create an incredible impact from the leaking of one 7,000-page pile of documents. This exposure helped end the war in Vietnam, and helped put some spine into our media outlets, our Congress, and our courts' treatment of the First Amendment. [Media]
• Goldman takes on new role: taking away people's homes
  By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers SAN JOSE, Calif. — When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages. The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy. The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn't the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.
• Europe Still Likes Obama, but Doubts Creep In
  By STEVEN ERLANGER Published: November 1, 2009 MARRAKESH, Morocco — The election of Barack Obama as president seemed to most Europeans to be unadulterated good news, marking an end to the perceived unilateralism and indifference to allied views of former President George W. Bush. President Nicolas Sarkozy, center, before chiding President Obama on Iran in a speech at the United Nations in September. France wants no deal that would let Iran keep enriching uranium. But nine months into Mr. Obama’s presidency, trans-Atlantic relations are again clouded by doubts. Europe and the United States remain at least partly out of sync on Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iran and climate change. Many Europeans argue that Mr. Obama has not broken clearly enough with Bush administration policies that they dislike, while some Americans argue that the Europeans are too passive, watching Mr. Obama struggle with difficult issues, like Afghanistan and the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, without providing much substantive help. [Continuity]
• Could America go broke?
  By Robert J. Samuelson Monday, November 2, 2009 The idea that the government of a major advanced country would default on its debt -- that is, tell lenders that it won't repay them all they're owed -- was, until recently, a preposterous proposition. Argentina and Russia have stiffed their creditors, but surely the likes of the United States, Japan or Britain wouldn't. Well, it's still a very, very long shot, but it's no longer entirely unimaginable. Governments of rich countries are borrowing so much that it's conceivable that one day the twin assumptions underlying their burgeoning debt (that lenders will continue to lend and that governments will continue to pay) might collapse. What happens then? [Decline] [Reserve]
• Rejecting Chinese requests, U.S. sends 6 Uighur detainees to Palau
  By Jeremy Pelofsky and James Vicini Sunday, November 1, 2009 The Obama administration has sent six Uighur Chinese detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the Pacific island nation of Palau, an administration official and a rights group said Saturday. The transfer leaves 215 detainees at the detention camp that President Obama has pledged to close by Jan. 22, although political and legal hurdles are making it difficult for his administration to meet that goal. Palau has agreed to take up to a dozen Uighurs, who come from China's largely Muslim far-west region of Xinjiang and were captured by the U.S. government during the Afghanistan war. They have been deemed not to be "enemy combatants" but have remained at Guantanamo because of difficulty relocating them. [Terrorism] [Double standards][China confrontation] [Separatism]
• Waking Spain's dead
  A policy of forgetfulness has long hidden Spain's mass graves. Now the bodies, Lorca among them, are being disinterred
  Miguel-Anxo Murado When, in August 1936, the poet Federico García Lorca was taken to a gully near Granada to be killed, he was accompanied to his death by three other men: two Anarchist banderilleros (sort of bullfighting assistants) and a harmless schoolteacher who was lame in one leg. Add the enlightened poet and there you have a sad and moving picture of much of what was the Spanish Republic, soon to be buried as they were. Their bones remained there for 70 years, unidentified. But as their unearthing has finally begun this week, they seem again to embody something else: maybe Spain's uneasiness at dealing with its Francoist past, maybe the complexities of memorialisation. [War crimes]
• Pakistanis to Clinton: War on terror is not our war
  By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- After three days of encounters with America-bashing Pakistanis -- who rejected her contention that the U.S. and Pakistan face a common enemy -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that "we're not getting through." Prominent women and tribesmen from the North West Frontier Province delivered the same hostile message that she'd heard the two preceding days from students and journalists: Pakistanis aren't ready to endorse American friendship despite an eight-year-old anti-terrorism alliance between the countries and a multi-billion-dollar new U.S. aid package. Clinton put her case directly to the public Friday in televised appearances in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, fielding angry questions about the alleged activities of U.S. contractor Blackwater in Pakistan, the tough conditions that came with a $1.5 billion-a-year American aid package and alleged U.S. favoritism toward Pakistan's archenemy, India. [AfPak]
• French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
  By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME Published: October 30, 2009 PARIS — Just as Le Corbusier’s white cruciform towers once excited visions of the industrial-age city of the future, so Vélib’, Paris’s bicycle rental system, inspired a new urban ethos for the era of climate change. Residents here can rent a sturdy bicycle from hundreds of public stations and pedal to their destinations, an inexpensive, healthy and low-carbon alternative to hopping in a car or bus. But this latest French utopia has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped. With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche. “The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.” The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say. [Green]
• Ayn Rand’s Revenge
  By ADAM KIRSCH Published: October 29, 2009 A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

• U.S., NATO Forces Rely on Afghan Warlords for Security
  Gareth Porter WASHINGTON, Oct 29 (IPS) - The revelation by the New York Times Wednesday that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has long been on the payroll of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg of heavy dependence by U.S. and NATO counterinsurgency forces on Afghan warlords for security, according to a recently published report and investigations by Australian and Canadian journalists. U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of Afghanistan's predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases and other bases and to guard convoys. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide. [AfPak]
• Satellites: The Pentagon's Big Blind Spot
  Military officials increasingly worry that U.S. satellites are vulnerable to airborne assault, or even mere accident, in the Southern Hemisphere By Joel Schectman In January 2007, the Chinese military launched a missile 500 miles into space, shattering an orbiting satellite. The assault was only a test that took out one of China's own weather satellites. But it sparked an international outcry over the country's willingness to use weapons in space. A spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council called the test "inconsistent" with efforts for international cooperation. Military experts have since become concerned that space could become the next battleground for global conflicts. Of particular concern is the lack of visibility with some missile strikes, such as China's in 2007. Some experts say that if an enemy were to launch a similar attack against an American satellite over the Southern Hemisphere, the U.S. military might not know about it. The southern half of the world is something of a blind spot for military space tracking systems, say both senior defense officials involved in space policy and private satellite operators. "If a collision happens down there, you don't see it," says Paul Graziani, president of Analytical Graphics, which makes systems used by the military to operate and guide satellites. "It takes 45 minutes for the satellite to come back into the Northern Hemisphere. We would be expecting to see a satellite coming around whole but instead just see a bunch of pieces." The U.S. military uses land-based radar to track its satellites, but it has no such radar installations in the Southern Hemisphere. The gap is a legacy of the Cold War, when the U.S. was focused on missile threats from the Soviet Union, and there were no nuclear-armed adversaries in the Southern Hemisphere (sic). [US global strategy] [China confrontation] [Inversion]
• Clinton Ends Visit as the Focus of Pakistani Barbs
  By MARK LANDLER and JACK HEALY Published: October 30, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrapped up a three-day visit here, she faced yet another round of skepticism and sharpened questions as Pakistani audiences vented their anger over American policies in the region. An interview with several women who are prominent Pakistani television anchors, broadcast live, turned into a pointed, sometimes raucous back-and-forth, as her questioners cut each other off and shouted to be heard as they parried with Mrs. Clinton. They criticized American drone strikes in Pakistan, said the military presence was stirring unrest and expressed their doubts about whether the United States had a long-term commitment to Pakistan. [AfPak]
• Somali man aged 112 marries girl of 17
  * David Smith in Johannesburg * guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 October 2009 19.05 GMT He is old enough to be her great-great-grandfather. But Ahmed Muhamed Dhore, a Somalian who claims he is 112 years old, said he had realised a "dream" by marrying a 17-year-old bride. Dhore – who says he was born in 1897, the year that Queen Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee – already has 13 children by five wives, but said he would like more with his newest, Safiya Abdulle. Hundreds of people attended the extraordinary ceremony this week in Guriceel, in the region of Galguduud. "Today God helped me realise my dream," Dore said. He and his new wife, who is almost a century his junior, are from the same village in Somalia, he said, adding that he had waited for her to grow up to propose. He says his children and two other wives agreed to the marriage, as did Abdulle's parents. "I didn't force her, but used my experience to convince her of my love, and then we agreed to marry," the groom said. The bride's family said she was "happy with her new husband". Somali adolescent girls are often married off to older men. Dhore has 114 children and grandchildren. His oldest son is 80 and three of his wives have died. This was his first marriage for three quarters of a century. [Human rights]
• Devastating "Free Market" Reforms Imposed on Serbia
  By Gregory Elich Global Research, October 28, 2009 A dozen years ago, neoliberal political forces took power in Serbia, promising a radical transformation of the economy. Today, deep into that transformation, Serbia is foundering from its effects exacerbated by the worldwide economic downturn. Industrial production has fallen 15 percent compared to the average of last year, (1) while unemployment remains high. A delegation from the IMF is in Belgrade, negotiating over Serbia's 2010 national budget and how best to deal with the economic crisis. The two sides are not far apart, in that both parties envision more of the usual neoliberal prescriptions as the way out of an economic crisis brought about in large part by those very same measures. The probable outcome of the talks is the further enthrallment of Serbia to Western dictate. Already the economy has been essentially placed at the service of U.S. and Western European corporate interests, and the centerpiece of that transformation is the privatization drive. The economy of Serbia was at one time predominantly based on two forms of public enterprises: socially-owned firms that were worker managed, and larger state-owned companies. The last remaining firms in the former category are scheduled to be completely eliminated by the end of this year, while the latter category will take longer to tackle. The outcome for those who work at enterprises that undergo privatization has been all too predictable. Companies privatized in accordance with the 2001 privatization law have shown a decrease of 45 percent in employment over the first two years of private ownership. Those companies that are privatized based on the 2003 law dropped just 15 percent by the end of the first year, but this apparent difference was only because of the extensive downsizing that these firms must undergo prior to sale, in order to make them more attractive to investors. The textile industry has been particularly hard hit, with steep job losses and falling performance. As the Privatization Agency reveals, "the performance of privatized companies is worse than the performance of the sector as a whole," an interesting admission. (2)
• U.S. Blasted for Sustaining Embargo on Cuba
  Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS, Oct 28 (IPS) - The administration of President Barack Obama, which has vowed to improve relations with sanctions-hit Cuba, refused to break away from the traditional stand taken by successive U.S. governments and voted against a U.N. resolution calling for an end to the 47-year-old U.S. economic, commercial and financial embargo against the Caribbean island nation. Of the 192 member states, an overwhelming 187 voted Wednesday in favour of the resolution (as against 185 last year), with only three against (the United States, Israel and Palau), and two abstentions (Marshall Islands and Micronesia). This was the 18th consecutive year the United States remained largely isolated in a General Assembly vote on one of "the most enduring trade embargoes in history" imposed on Cuba back in 1962. The annual vote is routinely viewed as a political and moral victory for Cuba because diplomatic support for the United States has progressively declined over the last 18 years. The widespread reaction, both inside and outside the United Nations, was directed against the United States - and this year, specifically against the Obama administration. [Sanctions] [Continuity]
• U.S. Quietly Aids Pakistani Drives on Taliban
  By ERIC SCHMITT October 29, 2009 WASHINGTON — Even as the Pakistani government plays down the American role in its military operations in Taliban-controlled areas along the border with Afghanistan, the United States has quietly rushed hundreds of millions of dollars in arms, equipment and sophisticated sensors to Pakistani forces in recent months, said senior American and Pakistani officials.
• Boeing picks South Carolina for Dreamliner assembly line
  By John Gille | The News Tribune The irresistible attraction of lower wages, a big state incentive and a non-union environment lured The Boeing Co. to announce this afternoon that it will build a second 787 Dreamliner production line in South Carolina. [Labour]
• A Resignation in Afghanistan Reverberates
  By James Dao To the get-out-of-Afghanistan crowd, he is a hero. To the fight-on camp, he is a goat. And to the anguished in-betweeners, he is a conundrum. News about Matthew Hoh, a State Department employee in Afghanistan who resigned out of frustration with American policies, has stirred passionate comment on the Internet that mirrors the debate over whether President Obama should send more troops to Afghanistan.
• Blast eclipses Clinton's Pakistan visit
  Attack kills at least 100, draws focus away from secretary's mission By Karen DeYoung and Haq Nawaz Khan Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 29, 2009 ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- The deadliest bombing in Pakistan in two years quickly overshadowed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's first official visit here Wednesday, drawing attention away from her goal of promoting a broad U.S.-Pakistan relationship based on more than the shared fight against terrorism.
• AFRICOM and America's Global Military Agenda: Taking The Helm Of The Entire World
  By Rick Rozoff Global Research, October 27, 2009 “The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa...[A]nalysts caution that similar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan, the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq, where the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of the US intervention.” “AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe.” ————————— October 1st marked the one-year anniversary of the activation of the first U.S. overseas military command in a quarter of a century, Africa Command (AFRICOM). [US global strategy]
• Making this ruthless liar EU president is a crazy plan. But I'll be backing Blair
  If the man who waged an unprovoked war in Iraq gets this job, it could be the chance to hold him to account for his crimes
  o George Monbiot o guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 October 2009 20.30 GMT Tony Blair's bid to become president of the European Union has united the left in revulsion. His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement; he is contemptuous of democracy (surely a qualification?); greases up to wealth and power and lets the poor go to hell; he is ruthless, mendacious, slippery and shameless. But never mind all that. I'm backing Blair.
  Blair has the distinction, which is a source of national pride in some quarters, of being one of the two greatest living mass murderers on earth. That he commissioned a crime of aggression – waging an unprovoked war, described by the Nuremberg tribunal as "the supreme international crime" – looks incontestable. I will explain the case in a moment. This crime has caused the death – depending on whose estimate you believe – of between 100,000 and one million people. As there was no legal justification, these people were murdered. But no one has been brought to justice. [War crimes]
• Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll
  By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN Published: October 27, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House. The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
• Clinton, in Pakistan, Confronts Rising Hostility
  By MARK LANDLER Published: October 28, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton landed here Wednesday, saying she was determined to broaden America’s relationship with Pakistan beyond the security and anti-terrorism concerns that have dominated ties and sowed mutual suspicion. Mrs. Clinton’s three-day mission, conducted under an extraordinary security blanket, may be the greatest test yet of her skills as a messenger of American good will to an often-suspicious world (sic). It comes at a tense moment in Pakistani-American relations, in the wake of a furor over an American aid package that many Pakistanis say intrudes on their country’s sovereignty, and in the heat of a military offensive in South Waziristan, which the United States encouraged, but that has set off terrorist attacks across the country. [AfPak] [US global strategy] [Sovereignty]
• Asian Economies Face Double Whammy
  Export-dependent Asian economies are suffering from a double problem. One part is the continuing weakness of the U.S. dollar and accompanying depreciation of the Chinese yuan, which is hurting the price competitiveness of products exported by Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. The other is that they are being pressured by the international community to reform their economic structures to become more focused on domestic consumption as a way of relieving a perceived imbalance in international trade. China unpegged the yuan from the U.S. dollar in July 2005 and adopted a currency basket system, a more flexible exchange rate. Over the following three years, China allowed the yuan to appreciate 16 percent against the dollar. But in July of last year, the yuan was re-pegged at around 6.82 to the dollar. As the dollar weakens, so does the yuan. [Currency]
• German Limits on War Facing Afghan Reality
  By NICHOLAS KULISH Published: October 26, 2009 KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II. Soldiers near the northern city of Kunduz have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce campaign by Taliban insurgents, while carrying the burden of being among the first units to break the German taboo against military combat abroad that arose after the Nazi era. At issue are how long opposition in Germany will allow its troops to stay and fight, and whether they will be given leeway from their strict rules of engagement to pursue the kind of counterinsurgency being advocated by American generals. The question now is whether the Americans will ultimately fight one kind of war and their allies another. [Militarisation]
• Britain Resolves, U.S. Wavers
  By ROGER COHEN Published: October 26, 2009 LONDON — In Afghanistan there’s the United States, Britain and then the rest. Britain has lost 85 soldiers this year, more than all other European NATO allies combined. For both countries the annual death toll has been rising steadily since 2006, and with it the drumbeat of public opposition to the war. In all, more than 1,100 U.S. and British troops have died. Special relationships are forged in blood; the U.S.-British bond is no exception. So, as President Obama hesitates, his decision on American troop levels ever “weeks away” as the weeks pass, the British view of the war offers as good an indication as any of what Obama will do. An hour-long conversation with David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, suggests reinforcements are on the way. When I asked if the mission needed substantially more troops, Miliband said, “What I think that you can see from the prime minister’s strategy is that we believe in serious counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is a counterterrorist strategy.” He continued: “The Taliban has shown what it means to provide safe space for Al Qaeda.” Describing the fights against the Taliban and Al Qaeda as “distinctive but related missions,” Miliband said “the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan are the incubator of choice for international terrorism,” adding that, “Ceding ground happened in the ’90s and then we all know what happened.” [Global insurgency]
• Pressure From U.S. Strains Ties With Pakistan
  By JANE PERLEZ Published: October 26, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Obama administration is putting pressure on Pakistan to eliminate Taliban and Qaeda militants from the country’s tribal areas, but the push is straining the delicate relations between the allies, Pakistani and Western officials say. Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. Go to the Blog » Related Militants Kill 11 Pakistani Soldiers in Attacks (October 27, 2009) The Pakistani military’s recent heavy offensive in South Waziristan has pleased the Americans, but it left large parts of Pakistan under siege, as militants once sequestered in the country’s tribal areas take their war to Pakistan’s cities. Many Pakistanis blame the United States for the country’s rising instability. [Global insurgency]
• U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
  Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, October 27, 2009 When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan. A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed. But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency. [Global insurgency]
• Castro's sister says she collaborated with CIA
  By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ The Associated Press Monday, October 26, 2009; 9:34 PM MIAMI -- One of Fidel Castro's sisters says in a memoir released Monday that she collaborated with the CIA against her brother, starting shortly after the United States' failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Juanita Castro, 76, initially supported her brother's 1959 overthrow of the Batista dictatorship but quickly grew disillusioned. In a Spanish-language memoir published by Santillana USA and co-written by journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, she says the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Cuba persuaded her to meet a CIA officer during a trip to Mexico in 1961. By then, her house had already become a sanctuary for anti-communists, and Fidel Castro had warned her about getting involved with the "gusanos," or worms, as those who opposed the revolution were called.
• Man who threw feces in CA courtroom gets 31 years
  The Associated Press Tuesday, October 27, 2009; 12:48 AM SAN DIEGO -- A man who sneaked a bag of his feces into a San Diego courtroom during his home-invasion robbery trial, smeared it on his lawyer and threw it at jurors has been sentenced to 31 years in prison. Superior Court Judge Frank Brown on Monday sentenced Weusi McGowan for robbery, burglary and two assault charges stemming from the feces-flinging incident during his January trial. McGowan, who attorneys say suffers from mental illness, had asked for a mistrial because he believed jurors had seen him in restraints when he entered the courtroom. Several days after his request was denied, McGowan pulled out a bag of excrement he had hidden in his clothing, rubbed it on his lawyer and tossed it at the jury, hitting one juror's computer case. [Human rights]
• The United States and East Asia: The decline of long-distance leadership?
  Mark Beeson The election of Barrack Obama was a remarkable event in many ways. Not only was the election of a black, Democratic president a domestic milestone, but it was a potentially transformative moment for foreign policy, too. The administration of George W. Bush was responsible for some of the most divisive and counter-productive foreign policies of recent times. The standing and authority of the US had been steadily undermined as a consequence. It is clear that the election of Obama has already seen a dramatic improvement in sentiment toward the US around the world, something that bodes well for the US’s ‘soft power’ and influence. One might expect, therefore, that US policymakers will once again be able to assert themselves in East Asia, a region in which the US has had a powerful presence and influence since the Second World War. While the region is not unique in this regard—the US as the world’s sole remaining superpower has been a major factor in the development of every other region, too—East Asia’s post-war trajectory, both as the epicentre of international wars between 1945 and 1975, and as a rapidly advancing economic region throughout the era, has been especially marked by American influence.2 Indeed, East Asia’s recent development history, its intra-regional relations and its place in the overall international system might have been profoundly different were it not for its engagement with the United States. But will the US continue to exert such a powerful influence in the future? [Decline] [US global strategy]
• Turkish PM exposes nuclear rift in Nato
  The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has exposed divisions in Nato by accusing the west of treating Iran unfairly over its nuclear programme and describing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, its vehemently anti-western president, as a friend. In a Guardian interview, Erdogan down-played western fears that Iran wants to build an atomic bomb as "gossip" and said a military strike against Iranian nuclear installations would be "crazy". He also strongly implied that those countries which were pressuring Iran to clarify its goals were guilty of hypocrisy because they all had nuclear weapons themselves. "There is a style of approach which is not very fair because those [who accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons] have very strong nuclear infrastructures and they don't deny that," Erdogan said. "The permanent members of the UN security council all have nuclear arsenals and then there are countries which are not members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which also have nuclear weapons. So although Iran doesn't have a weapon, those who say Iran shouldn't have them are those countries which do." [Double standards]
• Dollar Collapse Update: "Obama Demands Pay in Euros!"
  By Mike Whitney Global Research, October 25, 2009 Information Clearinghouse - 2009-10-23 The "dollar debate" on the Internet has been ferocious and emotionally-charged, but sadly lacking in logic. To oppose the "dollar will crash" theorists is like arguing a woman's right to choose with the fist-waving throng assembled outside an abortion clinic. The results are equally disappointing. To say that "minds are already made up and the issue is settled", is an understatement. For many, the dollar's transition from the world's reserve currency to a Wiemar era Deutschemark is not a question "if" but only of "when".
  No one can deny that the dollar COULD crash or that it faces stiff headwinds in the years ahead as the fiscal deficits continue to pile up. But let's not overreact. [Reserve]
• Islamic finance gives universities a bonus
  One area of banking is still booming despite the recession, and business schools are cashing in
  * Harriet Swain * The Guardian, Tuesday 28 July 2009 With global finance on its knees, this summer's business graduates face an even trickier jobs market than most. But there is one area of banking still experiencing boom time – Islamic finance – and universities have been quick to grasp its possibilities. [Islam]
• Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public
  By SARAH LYALL Published: October 24, 2009 POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives. A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore. But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car). It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was admitted to the school. But she has not let the matter rest. Her case, now scheduled to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become emblematic of the struggle between personal privacy and the ever more powerful state here. [Surveillance]
• Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt
  By JAMES GLANZ Published: October 24, 2009 MAISONCELLE, France — The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one. No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.
  Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts, the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population, regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be. [Global insurgency]
• Saudi female journalist gets lashes for sex show
  By DONNA ABU-NASR The Associated Press Saturday, October 24, 2009; 5:24 PM RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- A Saudi court on Saturday sentenced a female journalist to 60 lashes after she had been charged with involvement in a TV show in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex. Rozanna al-Yami, 22, is believed to be the first Saudi woman journalist to be given such a punishment, but there were conflicting accounts about how the court issued its verdict. Al-Yami, who worked as a coordinator for the program but has denied working on the sex-show episode, told The Associated Press it was her understanding that the judge at the court in the western city of Jiddah dropped the charges against her. They included involvement in the preparation of the show and advertising the segment on the Internet. But she said he still handed down the lashing sentence "as a deterrence." "I am too frustrated and upset to appeal the sentence," said al-Yami. [Human rights]
• The Loin in Winter: Hefner Reflects, and Grins
  By Brooks Barnes Published: October 23, 2009 LOS ANGELES — Hugh Hefner leaned back on a red loveseat, the saggy one in the study of his infamous mansion here, and interlocked his fingers behind his head. A visitor had asked — more like shouted, since he has trouble hearing — a question about mortality. Despite Playboy Enterprises' struggles, a reflective Hugh Hefner says life at 83 is “even better, richer than people know.” At 83, does he think about it? In a word, no. Mr. Hefner, the legendarily libidinous founder of Playboy, the prophet of hedonism, does not believe that his denouement is at hand. He doesn’t act like it, either. He still works full days on his magazine, flies to Europe and Las Vegas, pops Viagra, visits nightclubs with his three live-in girlfriends — each young enough to be his great-granddaughter — and is working with the producer Brian Grazer on a film.
  Love him or loathe him, no one doubts Mr. Hefner’s influence in American cultural history. As a magazine publisher, he essentially did for sex what Ray Kroc did for roadside food: clean it up for a rising middle class.
• Electric Cars: A Wide-Open Race
  Warren Buffett has invested in China's BYD, but columnists Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang caution against putting too much faith in its early-mover advantage By Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang
  The electric car is likely to emerge as one of the most transformational products of the current era, as important, perhaps, as the personal computer and the Internet. Given the effect of the auto industry on the rest of the economy, mass commercialization of the electric car will fundamentally transform not just that industry but others such as petroleum, electricity generation and distribution, steel, nonferrous materials, and chemicals. By reducing the world's dependence on crude oil, the electric car will reshape the structure of global trade. Importantly too, because electric cars have zero emissions, they also could dramatically reset the debate on global warming. It's no wonder, then, that observers and analysts are caught up in frenzied discussions about who will win the great green-car race. What makes the contest particularly interesting is the fact that an all-electric car will be the first major new product in which, right from the start, the contestants include companies from not just the developed but also the developing economies. PCs, mobile telecommunications, and Internet services were invented and launched in the West. It was only later that Asian companies such as Lenovo, Bharti Airtel, and Alibaba jumped into these markets. But this time, Asian companies are among the leaders in the electric-car race. The Chinese company BYD, for instance, is determined to roll out its all-electric E3 and E6 models this year and has announced plans to bring the E6 to the U.S. in 2010 [Auto] [Green] [China rising]
• The US as Failed State
  By Paul Craig Roberts
  The US has every characteristic of a failed state. The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation. Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression. Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens [Decline]
• Rivals China, India in escalating war of words
  China offered to help India's archrival, Pakistan, develop a territory claimed by India. India invited the Dalai Lama, a top irritant to China, to visit a state claimed by China.
  By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the October 20, 2009 edition Beijing - China and India have taken a vituperative war of words and diplomatic barbs to an unusual level of tension in recent days, prompting fears that the traditional rivalry between the two Asian giants could spin out of control. "The most urgent present job for both sides is crisis management," says Han Hua, an expert on South Asia at Peking University. "I don't think either government wants the situation to go further downhill." The recent angry exchanges were prompted by a decades-old border dispute over which the two countries went to war in 1962, and which has proved impervious to 13 rounds of negotiations since. But deeper resentments lie behind the spat, says Shen Dingli, deputy head of China's South Asia Research Institute. "The structural problem is leadership," he argues. "The question is who leads in Asia?" [Border war] [China India]
• Torture songs spur a protest most vocal
  Musicians call for release of records on Guantanamo detainee treatment By Joe Heim Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 22, 2009 Was the theme to "Sesame Street" really played to torture prisoners held at Guantanamo and other detention camps? What about Don McLean's "American Pie"? Or the Meow Mix jingle? Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."? A high-profile coalition of artists -- including the members of Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and the Roots -- demanded Thursday that the government release the names of all the songs that were blasted since 2002 at prisoners for hours, even days, on end, to try to coerce cooperation or as a method of punishment. Dozens of musicians endorsed a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based independent research institute, seeking the declassification of all records related to the use of music in interrogation practices. The artists also launched a formal protest of the use of music in conjunction with torture. "I think every musician should be involved," said Rosanne Cash in a telephone interview Wednesday. "It seems so obvious. Music should never be used as torture." The singer-songwriter (and daughter of Johnny Cash) said she reacted with "absolute disgust" when she heard of the practice. "It's beyond the pale. It's hard to even think about." [Torture] [War crimes]
• Lessons From the Long War and a Blowback World
  By Tom Engelhardt October 19, 2009 Is it too early--or already too late--to begin drawing lessons from "the Long War"? That phrase, coined in 2002 and, by 2005, being championed by Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, was meant to be a catchier name for George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." That was back in the days when inside-the-Beltway types were still dreaming about a global Pax Americana and its domestic partner, a Pax Republicana, and imagining that both, once firmly established, might last forever.
  An even more reasonable date, however, might be July 3, 1979, when, at the behest of national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter signed "the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul." In other words, six months before the actual Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began, the US threw its support to the mujahedeen, the Afghan anti-Soviet fundamentalist jihadists.
  In other words, thirty years after we launched our jihad against the Soviets by arming the Afghans, we are now fighting almost all the people we once armed and arming a whole new crew. All sides in the debate in Washington find this perfectly sensible.
  We now tend to think of blowback as something in our past, something that ended with the attacks of 9/11. But in the Greater Middle East, one lesson seems clear enough: for thirty years we've been deeply involved in creating, financing, and sometimes arming a blowback world. There's no reason to believe that, with the arrival of Barack Obama, history has somehow been suspended, that now, finally, it's all going to work out. [US global strategy] [Global insurgency]
• The JFK Assassination: New York Times Acknowledges CIA Deceptions
  By Peter Dale Scott October 21, 2009 The New York Times, on October 17, published a page-one story by Scott Shane about the CIA’s defiance of a court order to release documents pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination, in its so-called Joannides file. George Joannides was the CIA case officer for a Cuban exile group that made headlines in 1963 by its public engagements with Lee Harvey Oswald, just a few weeks before Oswald allegedly killed Kennedy. For over six years a former Washington Post reporter, Jefferson Morley, has been suing the CIA for the release of these documents. [1] Sometimes the way that a news item is reported can be more newsworthy than the item itself. A notorious example was the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (documents far too detailed for most people to read) on the front page of the New York Times. The October 17 Times story was another such example. It revealed, perhaps for the first time in any major U.S. newspaper, that the CIA has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK assassination.
  One can assume that the Times decision to run the story was a momentous one not made casually. The same can probably be said of another recent remarkable editorial decision, to publish Tom Friedman’s op-ed on September 29 about the “very dangerous” climate now in America, “the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.” Friedman did not mention JFK at all, and his most specific reference was to a recent poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” [3] Four days later the Wall Street Journal expressed similar concern, adding to the “poll on Facebook asking whether the president should be assassinated, a column on a conservative Web site suggesting a military coup is in the works.” [4] Friedman’s column broke a code of silence about the threats to Obama that had been in place ever since two redneck white supremacists (Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell) were arrested in August 2008 for a plot to assassinate Obama with scoped bolt-action rifles. Andrew Gumbel’s story about them ran in the London Independent on November 16, 2008; of the fifteen related news stories in Lexis Nexis, only one, a brief one, is from a U.S. paper. It is possible to take at face value the concern expressed by Friedman in his column. The Boston Globe, a New York Times affiliate, reported on October 18 that “The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service.” [Continuity]
• C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery
  By SCOTT SHANE Published: October 16, 2009 WASHINGTON — Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
  Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.
• Politics of Kerry-Lugar Bill
  —Ijaz Hussain
  Vice President Joe Biden has proposed the idea of “Pakistan First”, according to which the road to victory in Afghanistan lies through the targeting of the Taliban in Pakistan rather than those in Afghanistan Pakistan is in the eye of storm because of the Kerry-Lugar Bill. Initially, the government took the view that the aid bill was the best thing that ever happened to Pakistan and the Interior Minister reportedly tried to get the federal cabinet adopt a resolution lauding it. The opponents of the bill, especially the army, took a different view. The army believed that some of its clauses posed a threat to Pakistan’s security and expressed its reservations through the media. The government not only utterly disagreed with the assessment but was also not pleased with the army’s use of a public forum to express it. President Zardari was so convinced of his viewpoint that he asked his ministers to go out and defend the bill with full force. At one point, the controversy became so intense that rumours emerged that he was thinking of sacking the army chief, and political pundits feared a replay of the October 1999 episode. What is the politics behind the Kerry-Lugar controversy? Is this just an honest difference of opinion or is there more to it than meets the eye? [AfPak]
• Almost 40 years late, unit honored for bloody Vietnam battle
  By Barbara Barrett | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Pfc. Paul Evans was rocking and rolling on his M-16 on a long-ago afternoon in Vietnam, spraying fire toward an unseen enemy hidden deep within the jungle. He was a terrified 18-year-old who knew, as other men fell around him, that he was about to die. Then out of nowhere, American tanks thundered out of the jungle, Evans later recalled. Alpha Troop had arrived. Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama gave about 100 veterans of Alpha Troop the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest award for valor that a military unit can earn. Nearly 40 years after the battle, men with graying mustaches, growing paunches and weakening eyes were honored for that day of hell in March 1970. Old soldiers in dark suits or dress uniforms — some wearing old medals pinned to their chests, some lean and ramrod straight, others leaning on canes — listened in the White House Rose Garden as birds chirped under a bright sky and the commander in chief praised their valor. "Some may wonder: After all these years, why honor this heroism now?" Obama asked in his remarks to the soldiers Tuesday. "The answer is simple. Because we must. Because we have a sacred obligation." [Continuity]
• Spying on Americans: The Bipartisan National Security State Telecoms Lobby US Congress
  By Tom Burghardt Global Research, October 20, 2009 The bipartisan consensus that encourages unaccountable secret state agencies to illegally spy on the American people under color of a limitless, and highly profitable, "war on terror" was dealt a (minor) blow October 13. Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey White denied a motion by the Obama administration that the court issue a 30-day stay to "release records relating to telecom lobbying over last year's debate over immunity for corporate participation in government spying," the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported. The Justice Department had argued that the Bush, and now, the Obama administration's Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and Congress were exempt from releasing lobbying records under the Freedom of Information Act, since consultations amongst said grifters were protected as "intra-agency" records. [Surveillance]
• UN foresees quarter of a million IDPs from Pakistan offensive
  20 Oct 2009 15:25:00 GMT Written by: James Kilner Girls fleeing a military offensive in South Waziristan wait for their families at an IDP registration point in Dera Ismail Khan, October 2009. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood. LONDON (AlertNet) - Up to 250,000 people may eventually flee an area in Pakistan where the military has launched an air and ground offensive against Taliban militants, the United Nations has said. A report by the U.N.'s disaster response office said that over 106,000 people had already fled from South Waziristan, a remote and mountainous region bordering Afghanistan. Most of the people have moved into the two neighbouring regions of Tank and Dera Ismail Khan where the army has given access to some local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who are handing out emergency supplies. "Humanitarian access remains very restricted," the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) wrote in its latest report. "For security reasons access will be denied for U.N. agencies and international NGOs." OCHA said the displaced people needed food, water, sanitation facilities and shelter. [war crimes]
• A Prize Worth Having?
  Paul Rogers, September 2009 When the Nobel Peace Prize was announced there was surprise if not astonishment in many circles. This year’s prize had been considered to be very open, but several potential recipients had been identified, including Pieda Cordoba of Colombia, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan and Dr Sima Sanar of Afghanistan. These and others were people involved in long-term human rights activism or specific campaigns on issues such as inter-faith dialogue. The awarding of the prize to President Barack Obama was far from being the first time that it had gone to a head of state or other leading political figure, but on most previous occasions it had been for defined achievements over some years. In the case of President Obama, the award was “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, but critics pointed to the very short space of time involved, with the nominating process actually having been completed within days of his taking office last January [Obama_Nobel]
• Geo-Strategic Chessboard: War Between India and China?
  By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya Global Research, October 17, 2009 Since 1947, India has not fully pledged itself to any camp or global pole during the Cold War and as a result was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (N.A.M.). Since the post-Cold War era that position has eroded. New Delhi has been gradually moving away from its traditional position, relationships, and policies in the international arena for over a decade. India has been vied for as an ally in the “Great Game” that is underway, once again. This round of the “Great Game” is, however, being played under a far broader spectrum than the one played between Britain and Czarist Russia. In question is the Indian power relationship with two geo-political entities: the first is the “Periphery” and the second is “Eurasia.” [China confrontation] [[US India China] [US global strategy]
• Fed Chief Cites Trade Imbalances’ Role in Crisis
  By Edmund L. Andrews Published: October 19, 2009 SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on Monday that global trade imbalances played a central role in the global economic crisis and warned that the both the United States and fast-growing Asian nations needed to do more to prevent them from recurring. “We were smug,” Mr. Bernanke said of the United States, saying the American financial regulatory system was “inadequate” at managing the immense inflows of cheap money from China and other countries that had huge trade surpluses. Though the Fed chairman acknowledged that trade imbalances have declined sharply as a result of the crisis, mainly because trade itself plunged, he warned that American foreign indebtedness will aggravate the imbalances once again unless the United States reduces its soaring federal budget deficit. “The United States must increase its national saving rate,” he said. “The most effective way to accomplish this goal is by establishing a sustainable fiscal trajectory, anchored by a clear commitment to substantially reduce federal deficits over time.” The federal deficit for the 2009 fiscal year soared to $1.4 trillion, almost triple the deficit in 2008, and budget analysts predict that budget deficits will average almost $1 trillion a year over the next decade. By the same token, he said, Asian countries needed to rely less on exports and more on their consumption at home for their economic growth. One way to increase Asian household consumption, he said, would be for countries like China to increase social insurance programs and reduced the uncertainty that currently hangs over many consumers. [Crisis] [Domestic demand]
• The Road to Copenhagen
  Gavan McCormack In September, after its warmest August on record, Australia’s East coast was shrouded in thick red dust. Visibility was reduced to metres, forcing cancelation of flights and driving people indoors as some five million tonnes of soil blew in from the country’s vast interior where the drought is in its ninth year. Early in the same month, Koreans were told that in future snow was likely to disappear in their country save for a few mountain peaks, and that their climate would become sub-tropical. Elsewhere, the Arctic sea-ice crumbles, opening navigation and exploration routes into the polar regions, glaciers retreat, half the world’s tropical and temperate forests, wetlands, and coral have gone or are threatened; storms, floods, and other natural disasters ripple around the world. Scientists warn of approaching global catastrophe. [Climate change]
• Forex Reserves Swell in Asia on Aggressive Dollar Buying
  Asia's major exporting economies are amassing record foreign currency reserves as they buy up U.S. dollars to keep their own currencies from strengthening too much and slowing exports. [Reserve]
• The Dragon spews fire at the Elephant
  By M K Bhadrakumar  
  The surprise element was almost completely lacking. The expectation in Delhi for a while has been that sooner or later Beijing would hit out. Verbal affronts from India were becoming a daily occurrence and a nuisance for Being. Not a single day has passed for the past several months when either influential sections of the Indian strategic community or the English-language media, tied by the umbilical cord of financial patronage to the Indian establishment, failed to indulge in some vituperative attack on Chinese policies and conduct towards India.
  The striking thing about the Chinese commentary was that it echoed a widespread criticism that is quite often voiced by India's neighbors. The commentary sought to establish a commonality of concerns between China and India's neighbors over the rising tide of Indian nationalism in the past decade or so with its disagreeable manifestations for regional cooperation. "To everyone's disappointment, India pursues a foreign policy of 'befriend the far and attack the near' ... India, which vows to be a superpower, needs to have its eyes on relations with neighbors and abandon its recklessness and arrogance as the world is undergoing earthshaking changes," the commentary claimed. Beijing surely factored in that almost without exception, India's neighbors voice similar concerns and are currently seeking friendly and close ties with China to balance India's perceived overbearing attitude towards them. In effect, the Chinese commentary tapped into the near-total isolation that India faces today in the South Asian region.
  Two, the commentary alleged that Delhi was getting "disoriented when making decisions" because it harbored a notion that the US was viewing India as a counterweight to China. Delhi was also becoming susceptible to the US stratagem to "woo India away from Russia and China and, in the meantime, feeding India's ambition to match China force by force by its ever burgeoning arms sales to India". Most important, the commentary concluded that although China and India "will never pose a mortal foe to each other", if the Indian establishment and a "handful of irresponsible media institutions" didn't restrain themselves, "an accidental slip or go-off at the border would erode into a war", which neither side wanted. It is very obvious that Beijing sees the Indian establishment's hand behind the vituperative media campaign against China in recent months.
  Simply put, India is estimated to be the biggest arms buyer in the world and a market estimated to be worth US$100 billion is presenting itself to exploitation by American arms manufacturers - provided Obama has his wits about him and realizes on which side his South Asian bread is buttered. Delhi hopes to incrementally pose an existential choice to Obama through an idiom that the US political establishment understands perfectly well: the business interests of its military-industrial complex. One thing is clear. Powerful Indian lobbyists have been at work in whipping up a war hysteria and xenophobia over China. The Washington Post recently featured a Delhi-datelined report on the shenanigans of these Indian fat cats who mainly comprise retired Indian defense officials and senior bureaucrats who act as commission agents for big American arms manufacturers. [China India US] [Border war] [Military industrial complex] [Arms sales] [Corruption]
• Latin American Trade Bloc Turns Back on Dollar
  The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), an association of the Latin American trade bloc, agreed to stop using U.S. dollars for regional commerce from next year, AP reported Saturday. [Reserve]
• How Moody's sold its ratings -- and sold out investors
  By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON -- As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody's Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings. [Crisis] [Corruption]
• Remembering Afghanistan’s Golden Age
  By ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: October 17, 2009 WASHINGTON — From presidential confidants in the White House Situation Room to anchors on cable television to ruminators at the city’s think tanks, the view has settled in: Afghanistan is an ungovernable collection of tribes that has confounded every conqueror since Alexander the Great. Like a lot of received wisdom, it may well be correct.
  Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American and the former American ambassador to Afghanistan who grew up in Kabul and the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, said that calling a country ungovernable was a standard reaction when Americans do not want to engage in a conflict, like Iraq or the Balkans. The response, he said, is articulated as, “We were wrong to have the objectives that we had because this place is unhelpable, they’ve been at war for a thousand years, who the hell do we think we are that we can solve this problem?” Mr. Khalilzad would be the first to acknowledge that Afghanistan was always fractious politically, and that there were assassinations and coups even during the era of relative peace. But the current downward spiral did not begin until 1978, when the president, Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan, was killed in a Communist coup, setting off three decades of conflict. In 1979, the Soviets invaded, occupied Afghanistan for the next decade and were finally driven out by American-backed mujahedeen fighters, some of whom went on to form the Taliban, an Islamic student militia, which took control in Kabul in 1996. The Taliban in turn were toppled by the Americans in 2001, but fighting continued. [Inversion] [Spin]
• Flow of terrorist recruits increasing
  Westerners attending camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan despite successful U.S. strikes
  By Craig Whitlock Monday, October 19, 2009 BERLIN -- Midway through a propaganda video released last month by a group calling itself the German Taliban, a surprise guest made an appearance: a cleanshaven, muscular gunman sporting the alias Abu Ibrahim the American. The gunman did not speak but wore military fatigues and waved his rifle as subtitles identified him as an American. The video contained a stream of threats against Germany if it did not withdraw its troops from the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. Although the American's part in the film lasted only a few seconds, it has alarmed German and U.S. intelligence officials, who are still puzzling over his background, his real identity and how he became involved with the terrorist group. U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits -- including Americans -- are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks. [Global insurgency]
• 7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity
  By DAVID ROHDE Published: October 17, 2009 THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage. [Media]
• Global Services Summit 2009: Services Drive the Global Economy and Create Jobs
  held in Washington, DC on October 13-14, 2009.
  United States Trade Representative Ronald Kirk delivered the keynote address at the event, which considered the role of international trade and investment in services in generating innovation and renewed economic growth, and strategies to obtain those benefits through a variety of initiatives. The list of participants included leading global policy-makers such as: * United States Trade Representative Ronald Kirk; * Congressman Charles Rangel,Chairman, House Committee on Ways and Means; * European Commissioner for Trade Catherine Ashton; * World Trade Organization Director-General Pascal Lamy; * Australian Minister Simon Crean; * Colombian Minister Luis G. Plata; * Indian Minister Anand Sharma; * Panamanian Minister Roberto Henriquez; * Former USTR Charlene Barshefsky; * Former USTR Mickey Kantor and * Senior trade officials from Japan, Canada, China and other countries.
• Government anti-terrorism strategy 'spies' on innocent
  Data on politics, sexual activity and religion gathered by government * Vikram Dodd * guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 October 2009 20.15 BST Ed Husain of the anti-extremism group Quilliam and Shami Chakrabati of Liberty on how the community engagement scheme is being used to gather personal information Link to this video The government programme aimed at preventing Muslims from being lured into violent extremism is being used to gather intelligence about innocent people who are not suspected of involvement in terrorism, the Guardian has learned. The information the authorities are trying to find out includes political and religious views, information on mental health, sexual activity and associates, and other sensitive information, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Other documents reveal that the intelligence and information can be stored until the people concerned reach the age of 100.
  The government and police have repeatedly denied that the £140m programme is a cover for spying on Muslims in Britain. But sources directly involved in running Prevent schemes say it involves gathering intelligence about the thoughts and beliefs of Muslims who are not involved in criminal activity. [Surveillance] [Islam]
• $1.4 Trillion Deficit Complicates Stimulus Plans
  By JACKIE CALMES Published: October 16, 2009 WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945. The number, while lower than forecast a few months ago, underscored the challenges ahead in shrinking the deficit even as the White House and Congress are considering more steps to stimulate an economy that is making a slow recovery. The political hurdles to finding a solution were evident on Friday as each political party immediately blamed the other for the growth of the deficit. The shortfall for the fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, translates to 10 percent of the economy, according to a joint statement from the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter R. Orszag. For the 2008 fiscal year, the deficit of $459 billion was 3.2 percent of the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product. Economists generally agree that annual deficits should not exceed 3 percent of the G.D.P., and that is the level President Obama had vowed to reach by the end of his first term in 2013. [Crisis]
• America the Hegemon
  By Eric Etheridge October 14, 2009 , 5:34 pm Charles Krauthammer has got a cure for what ails America. Americans need to “accept our role as hegemon,” he writes in the current issue of the Weekly Standard. “And reject those who deny its essential benignity.” [Imperialism] [US global strategy]
• What was communism?
  Fred Halliday, 16 - 10 - 2009
  The twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism - as system, ideology and strategic challenger to capitalism - is an appropriate moment to assess its legacy. But this, says Fred Halliday, must discard triumphalism, and be rooted in a grounded awareness of communism's history, its myths, and its relation to capitalist modernity. 16 - 10 - 2009 Few occasions are more propitious for forgetting the past than moments of historical commemoration. Amidst fond recollections of the fall of the Berlin wall, and in a time of, at least temporary, improvement in relations between Russia and the west, few may spare a thought for what it was that ended two decades ago. On two issues history has given its ultimate verdict: the cold war, the third and longest of the three chapters that made up the great global civil war of 1914-91, will not return; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as a multinational state and as a global ideological and strategic challenge to the west, is indeed dead. However, on a third component of this story - the worldwide communist movement - the verdict is, as yet, less clear.
• Wal-Mart's Painful Lessons
  Having grown in fits and starts, Wal-Mart's international unit has a new game plan. Can it master world markets?
  By Matthew Boyle It's rare that a $100 billion business can be marginalized, but such is the case with the international arm of Wal-Mart Stores (WMT). As a stand-alone company, it would rank among the top five global retailers. Inside the $401 billion retail giant, though, the business has traditionally received short shrift. Its Bentonville (Ark.) headquarters is underwhelming—a drab, largely windowless, one-story structure named after Bill Mitchell, a former Walmart executive whom nobody seems to remember. [Services]
• After Pax Americana: A 'Diversified Global Community'
  As the growing clout of China, Russia, India, and Brazil shifts the crux of economic power away from the U.S., is Asia ready to play a bigger role?
  By Sung Chull Junn Signs are popping up everywhere that the global economy may have hit bottom. If so, how will the world have changed after the crisis? Most notably, the era of Pax Americana that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 will most likely come to an end, replaced by a truly diversified global community. This change has been, for the most part, brought on by the U.S. itself. The eight years of the Bush Administration forfeited the U.S. of much of the moral and political leadership that buttressed the Pax Americana regime. For example, the U.S. invaded Iraq only to find no weapons of mass destruction, the primary justification for the invasion. Washington, with no legitimate excuse, broke off the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, already globally agreed upon, and also went so far as to authorize torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. The loss of economic leadership is ever more apparent with the eruption of the current worldwide economic crisis. Wall Street, which so shamelessly and for so long indulged in the excesses of misguided neoliberalism, undoubtedly triggered this crisis. [Decline] [Realignment] [China rising]
• Goldman Sachs: Your tax dollars, their big bonuses
  Goldman Sachs is having a banner year, and is getting a big boost from government programs.
  By Colin Barr, senior writer Last Updated: October 15, 2009: 5:35 PM ET NEW YORK (Fortune) -- It's probably cold comfort, but Goldman Sachs couldn't have done it without your help. The New York-based investment firm turned another eye-popping profit Thursday, earning $3.2 billion in the third quarter, as revenue from trading rose fourfold from a year ago. [Crisis]
• So what do troops at Guantanamo think of commander's Nobel?
  * Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 By Carol Rosenberg | Miami Herald GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Here in the land of limbo, the news of President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize landed with more of a whimper than wild enthusiasm among those waging their part in the war on terror. Most troops interviewed this week reflected the surprise of their commander in chief on waking up to the news Friday morning.
  With 14 weeks to go and White House officials warning they may miss their own deadline, defense lawyers have reported that it has fed cynicism among the 221 remaining detainees. Most are approaching their eighth year in detention, most without charges. "I would not be surprised if the common reaction is, 'What did he do to earn it?'" said defense attorney David Remes, who represents 17 Yemenis awaiting word on whether the Obama administration can reach a repatriation agreement with their government in Sana. "As far as they're concerned, he's all sizzle and no steak."
  Moreover, the prize is likely to feed the fascination with the new American president among the detainees who learned of his election the very same night in November and taunted their captors with chants of "Obama, Obama, Obama." [Obama_Nobel]
• In Face of Sanctions, China Premier Warms to Iran
  By MARK LANDLER and EDWARD WONG Published: October 15, 2009 WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s effort to marshal global support for new sanctions against Iran hit another snag on Thursday, when China said it was seeking to increase cooperation and high-level exchanges with Iran, suggesting that it would not support additional punitive measures over Tehran’s nuclear program. The comments by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao came a day after Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, said that sanctions were “premature” and two days after its foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said that threatening Iran while talks were under way would be “counterproductive.” [Sanctions]
• U.S. Is Open To Talks on Conventional Weapons
  By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 16, 2009 UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 15 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced late Wednesday that the United States is prepared to begin negotiations on a global treaty regulating trade in conventional weapons but said Washington would sign the accord only if all other states agreed. The move marks a shift in policy from the Bush administration, which staunchly opposed U.N. negotiations to regulate the $55 billion-a-year arms trade. The Obama administration hopes it can use the talks to press other governments to adopt a rigorous system of export controls similar to one put in place to regulate U.S. arms exports. [Arms sales] [Double standards]
• Debacle in Moscow
  By Charles Krauthammer Friday, October 16, 2009 About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.
  To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president's various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration -- excuse me, outreach and understanding -- is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come. Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let's review. What's come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program. What's come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama's shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told)? China hasn't moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed, it's pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world's reserve currency (sic). [Neocon] [Obama_Nobel] [Reserve]
• A Different Regime Change in Iran
  Author: Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations October 13, 2009 Financial Times If we were to wake up tomorrow and learn that Canada or Belgium had secretly developed a nuclear weapon we would not be happy about it, but neither would it ruin our day. The reason is simple: all proliferation is not equal. What matters as much as, or more, than a country's capability is its character. We care about the stability and orientation of the government in question - whether it might use nuclear weapons or give them to a terrorist group. All this has relevance for Iran and how the world chooses to react to its nuclear programme. What should shape the response is not simply what Iran develops in the laboratory, but how it develops politically. [Proliferation] [Double standards]
• Obama Focuses on Civilian Effort in Afghanistan Strategy Review
  By Anne E. Kornblut and Scott Wilson Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, October 15, 2009 President Obama, convening his fifth war council meeting in as many weeks, pressed his senior national security advisers Wednesday on the political situation in Afghanistan and the effort to train the country's security forces, officials said. Allegations of fraud in the Afghan presidential election over the summer have raised questions about the legitimacy of Hamid Karzai's government, complicating U.S. efforts to partner with him. Meanwhile, the country's security forces are seen as ill-equipped to confront an insurgency that is gaining strength. Such factors are figuring prominently in the debate over the Obama administration's strategy in Afghanistan, official say. Although the discussions also include making a decision on whether to deploy tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops, an administration official said the president was "very focused on the complexity of the situation" Wednesday -- looking past the military aspect of the equation and toward the civilian effort. Another official said the focus on the civilian effort grew out of a sense that the United States needs to better cultivate Afghan leaders and institutions. "We've been at war eight years, and we realize now we're starting from scratch because very little work has been done building a credible Afghan partner," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the talks.
• Starsuckers celebrity hoax dupes tabloids
  From 'flamey' Amy Winehouse to Russell Brand the banker, documentary team's fake celebrity stories fooled editors
  The plan to subvert the pages of some of Fleet Street's bestselling newspapers was hatched in a windowless office in east London. For months, a team of documentary makers had sat in the Brick Lane film studio they called "the cell", trawling through tabloid clippings in search of stories they could prove were untrue. They decided to concoct an experiment to test their theory that tabloid editors sometimes publish celebrity stories with scant regard for the truth [Media]
• Korean recovery exaggerated: Paul Krugman
  Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman yesterday cautioned against growing optimism about the Korean economy, saying its export-driven recovery may face a slowdown with a fall in international trade. The U.S. economist also said it is premature for countries to talk about exit strategies because the global economic recovery will be weak and protracted and a double-dip recession is possible. "The decline in the Korean economy in the face of the crisis was exaggerated largely by inventory effects. And the bounce-back is also exaggerated by inventory effects," he said at a news conference held on the sidelines of the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. "I think it is too soon to consider that you have a full recovery." Korea is recovering faster than its advanced peers, helped by its effective stimulus measures and the sharp depreciation of the local currency, which boosted exports. "We are seeing a bounce in world trade, which is what is driving the Korean economy. And that bounce may not be sustained. In fact, my guess is that it will at least slow down quite a lot," he said.
  Krugman also said the world economy faces the risk of a double dip with fiscal stimulus support set to fade out early next year. "It is not implausible that we are going to actually see a double dip next year," he said during the speech. "We stepped back one or two paces from the edge of the abyss. We have avoided the plunge into total catastrophe. But that's a very long way from a full recovery." [Crisis]
• World Hunger Is Worsening, U.N. Says
  October 14, 2009 ROME -- Even before the economic crisis pushed the ranks of the world's hungry to a record 1 billion, declining aid and investment in agriculture had been steadily increasing the number of undernourished people for more than a decade, a U.N. food agency said Wednesday. Unless these trends are reversed, ambitious goals set by the international community to slash the number of hungry people by 2015 will not be met, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned in a report. After gains in the fight against hunger in the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of undernourished people started climbing in 1995, reaching 1.02 billion this year under the combined effect of high food prices and the global financial meltdown, the agency said. The figure topped the 1 billion mark in June, and was 963 million a year ago.
• The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009
  FAO report
• US wants bunker-buster fast, denies Iran is reason
  By ANNE GEARAN (AP) – 23 hours ago WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is speeding up delivery of a colossal bomb designed to destroy hidden weapons bunkers buried underground and shielded by 10,000 pounds of reinforced concrete. Call it Plan B for dealing with Iran, which recently revealed a long-suspected nuclear site deep inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom. The 15-ton behemoth — called the "massive ordnance penetrator," or MOP — will be the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal and will carry 5,300 pounds of explosives. The bomb is about 10 times more powerful than the weapon it is designed to replace. The Pentagon has awarded a nearly $52 million contract to speed up placement of the bomb aboard the B-2 Stealth bomber, and officials say the bomb could be fielded as soon as next summer. Pentagon officials acknowledge that the new bomb is intended to blow up fortified sites like those used by Iran and North Korea for their nuclear programs, but they deny there is a specific target in mind. "I don't think anybody can divine potential targets," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said. "This is just a capability that we think is necessary given the world we live in." [Military balance] [US military]
• Dr Rowan Williams: 'Dig for victory over climate change and grow your own food'
  Ben Webster, Environment Editor and Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent October 13, 2009 The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for “unsustainable” air-freighted food to be replaced gradually by homegrown produce from thousands of new allotments. In an interview with The Times, Dr Rowan Williams said that families needed to respond to the threat of climate change by changing their shopping habits and adjusting their diets to the seasons, eating fruit and vegetables that could be grown in Britain. [Green] [Environment]
• The rumours of the dollar’s death are much exaggerated
  By Martin Wolf Published: October 13 2009 22:17 | Last updated: October 13 2009 22:17 It is the season of dollar panic. These panic-mongers are varied: gold bugs, fiscal hawks and many others agree that the dollar, the dominant currency since the first world war, is on its death bed. Hyperinflationary collapse is in store. Does this make sense? No. All the same, the dollar-based global monetary system is defective. It would be good to start building alternative arrangements. [Reserve]
• War breaks out between Fox News and the Obama administration
  • Obama fires first shot with refusal to give interview • Critics question wisdom of network confrontation War has officially been declared after months of skirmishing. First to the front was Fox News' latest star, Glenn Beck, who laid out the battle plan with a map, a couple of toy tanks and a plastic attack helicopter. "What a bunch of warmongers we have in the White House. America is fighting the war in Iraq, they're fighting in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida, the Taliban. And now these people have taken on another enemy: Fox News," said the anchor who once wept out of patriotic fervour as he introduced Sarah Palin. "I want to show you right where the enemy is located," Beck added as he circled Rupert Murdoch's Fox News headquarters in green ink on a map of New York. "This is the enemy, America!"
  O'Reilly claimed that the criticism he gets from different quarters is evidence that he is even-handed. He then went on to attack the rest of the press for "rhapsodic" coverage of Obama and described the New York Times as "as far left as you can get".
  Similarly, Fox News gave great prominence to opposition to Obama's plans for healthcare reforms, heavily promoting meetings at which the president was characterised as a Nazi and a communist.
  It has some commentators repeating an old adage about newspapers, repeated by Bill Clinton when he was president: "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel." [media]
• Recruited by MI5: the name's Mussolini. Benito Mussolini
  Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5 History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce's CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent. Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5. For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to "persuade'' peace protesters to stay at home. Mussolini's payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5's man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.
• Palestinian faith in Obama 'evaporates'
  Leaked memo from President Mahmoud Abbas accuses White House of buckling under pressure from Israel Palestinian political leaders have expressed acute disappointment in the Obama administration, saying their hopes that it could bring peace to the Middle East have "evaporated" and accusing the White House of giving in to Israeli pressure. The unusually frank comments come in an internal memo from the Fatah party, led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, but reflect a broader frustration among Palestinian politicians that Washington's very public push for peace in the Middle East has yet to produce even a restarting of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. [Continuity]
• Decline Is a Choice The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy.
  by Charles Krauthammer 10/19/2009, Volume 015, Issue 05 The weathervanes of conventional wisdom are registering another round of angst about America in decline. New theories, old slogans: Imperial overstretch. The Asian awakening. The post-American world. Inexorable forces beyond our control bringing the inevitable humbling of the world hegemon. On the other side of this debate are a few--notably Josef Joffe in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs--who resist the current fashion and insist that America remains the indispensable power. They note that declinist predictions are cyclical, that the rise of China (and perhaps India) are just the current version of the Japan panic of the late 1980s or of the earlier pessimism best captured by Jean-François Revel's How Democracies Perish. [Decline] [China rising]
• The virtues of deglobalization and lessons for South Korea
  Walden Bello, Visiting Professor, State University of New York at Binghamton and St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada What lessons can South Korea and other countries derive from the crisis of globalization? South Korea, along with the other so-called “newly industrializing countries” of East Asia, was the poster child of globalization. By adopting the strategy of export-oriented industrialization, it was said that South Korea was one of the top beneficiaries of the accelerated integration of production and markets. Developing countries from Africa to Latin America were all told to look to South Korea and East Asia to gain lessons to get out of underdevelopment. People like me, who were critical of the South Korean model, owing to its negative social and environmental consequences, were ignored or, worse, compared to the Luddites, the people in England who wrecked machines during the Industrial Revolution. This was yesterday. Today’s climate is different.
  “Deglobalization,” a term that the Economist attributes to me, is a development that the magazine, the world’s prime avatar of free market ideology, views as negative. I believe, however, that deglobalization is an opportunity. Indeed, my colleagues and I at Focus on the Global South first forwarded deglobalization as a comprehensive paradigm to replace neoliberal globalization almost a decade ago, when the stresses, strains, and contradictions brought about by the latter had become painfully evident. Elaborated as an alternative mainly for developing countries, the deglobalization paradigm is not without relevance to the central capitalist economies. 12 Pillars of the Alternative There are 12 key prongs of the deglobalization paradigm. [Globalisation]
• Global Trade Information Services
  Global Trade Information Services, Inc. (GTI) is recognized as the leading supplier of international merchandise trade data. Corporations, governments, and associations in more than 50 countries use our trade data systems to develop an enhanced understanding of global trade information. GTI products are the premier market intelligence tools available for viewing international trade statistics. Within one, easy-to-navigate system, you can access trade data from all major world markets. Currently, GTI publishes monthly official government trade statistics for more than 70 countries representing nearly 100 percent of total world trade. Our reputation for reliability, efficiency and service is affirmed by the number of satisfied clients that continue to benefit from our systems year after year. GTI is committed to continue in this tradition and to work constantly to enhance our trade data products to stay on the cutting-edge of technology. [Statistics]
• Limbaugh: "We all agree with the Taliban and Iran" that Obama does not deserve Nobel
  October 09, 2009 1:49 pm ET From the October 9 edition of Premiere Radio Network's The Rush Limbaugh Show:
  LIMBAUGH: I think that everybody is laughing. Our president is a worldwide joke. Folks, do you realize something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn't deserve the award. Now that's hilarious, that I'm on the same side of something with the Taliban, and that we all are on the same side as the Taliban. [Obama_Nobel]
• President Obama Won What?
  Saturday, October 10, 2009 "Mom!" my 12-year-old yelled from the kitchen. "President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize!" I told her she had to be mistaken. This is ridiculous -- embarrassing, even. I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama. But the peace prize? This is supposed to be for doing, not being -- and it's no disrespect to the president to suggest he hasn't done much yet. Certainly not enough to justify this prize. "Extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples?" "Captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future?" Please. This turns the award into something like pee-wee soccer: Everybody wins for trying.
  In a stunning development, Millard Fillmore Senior High School announced today that it had chosen Shawn Rabinowitz, an incoming junior, as next year's valedictorian. The award was made, the valedictorian committee announced from Norway of all places, on the basis of "Mr. Rabinowitz's intention to ace every course and graduate number one in his class." In a prepared statement, young Shawn called the unprecedented award "[expletive]ing awesome." At the same time, and amazingly enough, the Pulitzer Prize for literature went to Sarah Palin for her stated intention "to read a book someday." The former Alaska governor was described as "floored" by the award, announced in Stockholm by nude Swedes beating themselves with birch branches, and insisted that while she was very busy right now, someday she would make good on her vow. "You'll see," she said from her winter home in San Diego.
• Toward a More Perfect Nobel
  by John Feffer | Tuesday, October 13, 2009 Vol. 4, No. 41 When I recently visited Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, a young girl on our tour of the house raised her hand tentatively during the docent's remarks about the enslaved people who worked the plantation. "Did Jefferson treat his slaves better than other slave-owners?" she asked.The docent responded, wisely, that slavery is slavery, however brilliant or benevolent the owner. Yes, Jefferson did try to avoid splitting up families and paid his slaves extra for game they shot and contributed to the household. But the founding father owned slaves and there's no way around that fact. You could hear the hopefulness in the girl's question: Surely the man who penned the words "all men are created equal" would transcend the slave-owning conventions of his time. He didn't, despite the repeated urgings of his Polish friend Tadeusz Kosciuszko. For some, this gap between Jefferson's words and his actions constitute one of America's founding hypocrisies, which continue to tear at the fabric of our society. But another interpretation links Jefferson through Abraham Lincoln to our current president, Barack Obama. Jefferson's famous words, the "self-evident truths" inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, didn't describe real, existing equality in the United States but, rather, a state toward which Americans must strive. As Lincoln would later proclaim on George Washington's birthday, the founding fathers "meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be...constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere." Which brings us to the Nobel Prize committee's decision to award this year's Peace Prize to Barack Obama [Obama_Nobel]
• Barack Obama’s poisoned shirt
  Godfrey Hodgson, 12 - 10 - 2009 The Nobel peace prize is intended to encourage the United States president to consolidate the great intentions of his first year in office. But it may do him more harm than good, says Godfrey Hodgson. 12 - 10 - 2009 A Greek myth preserved in the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses is a tale for the times. Nessus is a centaur - half-man, half-horse - shot by Hercules for his abuse of Deianeira. The centaur revenges himself by giving Deianeira, and through her Hercules, a poisoned shirt. When, years later, the strongman comes to wear it, his flesh is consumed. It takes an Olympian god to restore his superhuman vigour. The Nobel peace prize awarded to Barack Obama on 9 October 2009 could become a shirt of Nessus for the United States president. [Obama_Nobel]
• The Peace (Keepers) Prize
  By Thomas L. Friedman Published: October 10, 2009 The Nobel committee did President Obama no favors by prematurely awarding him its peace prize. As he himself acknowledged, he has not done anything yet on the scale that would normally merit such an award — and it dismays me that the most important prize in the world has been devalued in this way. It is not the president’s fault, though, that the Europeans are so relieved at his style of leadership, in contrast to that of his predecessor, that they want to do all they can to validate and encourage it. I thought the president showed great grace in accepting the prize not for himself but “as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.” [Obama_Nobel] [Imperialism]
• Nobel peace prize: A call to action
  The day that Henry Kissinger picked it up, satire was said to have died. When the Nobel peace prize was awarded to Barack Obama yesterday something different expired – the idea that the accolade is for achievement, as opposed to potential. Mr Obama was sworn in as president on 20 January this year, a mere 11 days before the 1 February deadline which the Nobel Foundation sets for nominations [Obama_Nobel]
• War and peace prizes
  The dismaying gift of the Nobel prize puts Barack Obama on the list of its winners who promised peace but prosecuted war
  o Howard Zinn o guardian.co.uk, Saturday 10 October 2009 08.00 BST I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace. [Obama_Nobel]
• On Return From Cuba, an Arrest in ’68 Hijacking
  By A. G. SULZBERGER and BENJAMIN WEISER Published: October 11, 2009 A fugitive who has been living in Cuba for four decades to avoid prosecution for his role in an airline hijacking surrendered to federal law enforcement authorities in New York on Sunday, ending his distinction of being one of the F.B.I.’s longest-known fugitives. Louis Armando Peña Soltren, 66, was arrested at 1:30 p.m. after debarking his plane from Havana, federal law enforcement officials said. An F.B.I. spokesman said Mr. Soltren had arranged his return to Kennedy International Airport with the F.B.I. and State Department because he wanted to see his family, including his wife, who lived in either Puerto Rico or Florida. The authorities declined to provide additional details about the arrangement. [Separatism]
• Gandhi Wuz Robbed
  By MAUREEN DOWD Published: October 10, 2009 When he heard the Nobel Peace Prize shocker on Friday, Bill Clinton went into one of his purple rages. He picked up the phone and dialed the one person on earth who would be as steamed as he was. CLINTON: Hey, man, it’s me. This thing is plumb crazy. Can you believe it? W: No way, Jose! CLINTON: First that prig Carter. Then that prig Gore. And now President Paris Hilton. The guy’s in office three days and he gets the peace prize? He should have gotten the Nobel in chemistry, because chemistry’s all he’s got. Talk about a fairy tale. This ... is ... just ... wrong! It’s killing me, man. I feel like my head’s explodin’. First I had the vast right-wing conspiracy, and now I have the vast left-wing conspiracy. [Obama_Nobel]
• In the Afghan War, Aim for the Middle  
  By Richard N. Haass Sunday, October 11, 2009 Why does Afghanistan matter? We generally hear four arguments. First, if the Taliban returns to power, Afghanistan will again be a haven for terrorist groups. Second, if the Taliban takes over, Afghanistan will again become a human rights nightmare. Third, a perceived defeat of the United States in Afghanistan would be a blow to U.S. prestige everywhere and would embolden radicals. Fourth, an Afghanistan under Taliban control would be used by extremists as a sanctuary from which to destabilize Pakistan. None of these assumptions is as strong as proponents maintain. Afghanistan certainly matters -- the question is how much.  [US global strategy]
• Billions in aid never reached Pakistan army
  Sources say U.S. funds diverted to domestic economy, fighting India (sic) The Associated Press updated 1:54 a.m. ET Oct. 5, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The United States has long suspected that much of the billions of dollars it has sent Pakistan to battle militants has been diverted to the domestic economy and other causes, such as fighting India. Now the scope and longevity of the misuse is becoming clear: Between 2002 and 2008, while al-Qaida regrouped, only $500 million of the $6.6 billion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two army generals tell The Associated Press. [Spin] [Solipsism]
• After Nobel nod, Obama convenes Afghan war council (sic)
  By Stephen Collinson (AFP) WASHINGTON — Hours after being named a Nobel peace laureate, President Barack Obama Friday shouldered his duties as commander in chief of the US armed forces and convened his war council for crucial talks on Afghan strategy. Obama gathered his top political, military, and security aides in the secure Situation Room of the White House for the fourth in a series of in-depth consultations on rescuing the US mission in the unpopular eight-year war. [Obama_Nobel]
• Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth
  By Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, October 11, 2009 When war becomes peace, When concepts and realities are turned upside down, When fiction becomes truth and truth becomes fiction. When a global military agenda is heralded as a humanitarian endeavor, When the killing of civilians is upheld as "collateral damage", When those who resist the US-NATO led invasion of their homeland are categorized as "insurgents" or "terrorists". When preemptive nuclear war is upheld as self defense. When advanced torture and "interrogation" techniques are routinely used to "protect peacekeeping operations", When tactical nuclear weapons are heralded by the Pentagon as "harmless to the surrounding civilian population" When three quarters of US personal federal income tax revenues are allocated to financing what is euphemistically referred to as "national defense" When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker, When the Lie becomes the Truth. Obama's "War Without Borders" We are the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US in partnership with NATO and Israel has launched a global military adventure which, in a very real sense, threatens the future of humanity. At this critical juncture in our history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama constitutes an unmitigated tool of propaganda and distortion, which unreservedly supports the Pentagon's "Long War": "A War without Borders" in the true sense of the word, characterised by the Worlwide deployment of US military might. [Obama_Nobel]
• Iran reacts to Obama Nobel surprise
  Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:42:47 GMT Font size : US President Barack Obama recieves the Nobel Peace Prize. After a surprise decision to award US President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki says the designation was 'overly premature'. “This decision was clearly made in haste,” said Mottaki on Saturday. “However, we will support and welcome the move if it helps promote peace and harmony in war-wary countries,” he said. Mottaki said the appropriate time for giving this award is when Palestinian rights are respected and occupation forces are fully withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. [Obama_Nobel]
• Scandal: Obama gets the "peace prize"
  Posted by Jan Oberg on October 9, 2009 at 5:00am View Jan Oberg's blog In his will, Alfred Nobel states the criteria for awarding the prize: Two general expressions, for all the five prizes: «during the preceding year» «has conferred the greatest benefit on mankind» and four expressions that apply particularly to the peace prize*: - "brotherhood among nations" - "abolition or reduction of standing armies" - "for the holding and promotion of peace congresses" - "champions of peace" Even with a broad contemporary interpretation of Nobel's words from 1895, President Obama has done none of it - although he has spoken a lot of elegant, visionary words about doing it, about us all ("we") doing it. He has not reduced wignificantly the U.S. military presence in Iraq, he has markedly stepped up the military presence in Afghanistan. His administration has not given up the Ballistic Missile Defence in Europe - so harmful to peace and enabling rather than deterring nuclear war - instead, his defence secretary has told us in so many words that the new one will be much better. The visionary elements of his Prague speech on a nuclear weapons-free world were almost absent in his UN speech recently. Obama has taken no visible steps to reduce his army; instead the budget he took over from Bush has increased. [Obama_Nobel}
• Zakaria: Nobel rewards Obama's 'big, bold gambit'
  Zakaria says prize is reward to America for "rejoining the world" World relieved to have a more engaged, less bullying America, he says Zakaria says Obama trying to show that engagement doesn't make U.S. weak October 9, 2009 -- Updated 1517 GMT (2317 HKT)Next Article in World » NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a stunning decision that comes just eight months into his presidency. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it honored Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." The decision appeared to catch most observers by surprise. The president had not been mentioned as among front-runners for the prize, and the roomful of reporters gasped when Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel committee, uttered Obama's name. Fareed Zakaria, author and host of "Fareed Zakaria:GPS" spoke to CNN about Obama's Nobel Prize.
  CNN: What do you think of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win? Fareed Zakaria: It is great news. But I think it's more an award to America for rejoining the world than recognition of President Obama per se. People here underestimate how relieved the world is to have a more engaged, less bullying America.
  CNN: What has President Obama done specifically to deserve the award? Zakaria: Quite a bit, in fact. He ended many "war on terror" practices that made people (both inside and outside the country) see America as betraying its ideals; he reached out to the Muslim world in a way that hasn't been done before; he made proposals to reduce the world's nuclear arsenals; he re-engaged on the Israeli-Palestinian issue; he started winding down the Iraq war. All this collectively adds up to a changed American profile in the world -- as is evident in President Obama being awarded the prize today. [Obama_Nobel]
• Skyhawk sale to US looms
  By TRACY WATKINS - The Dominion Post Last updated 05:00 08/10/2009 The covers could finally be lifted on New Zealand's mothballed Skyhawk fleet, with a sale imminent more than four years after it was first trumpeted. Defence Minister Wayne Mapp confirmed last night the sale had finally got the green light from the United States Government and it was now a case of concluding a sale and purchase agreement.
  The sale of the Skyhawks to Arizona-based Tactical Air Services was announced in 2005 but has been stalled by the need to get US approval. It has cost $130,000 a month to keep the jets mothballed. They are being sold for $155 million. Mr Mapp said the only thing that stood in the way of a sale now was the buyers getting the money together. "It's now essentially a contractural issue."
  Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told One News the ban was absurd, though New Zealand's isolation had been "self-imposed". [Imperialism] [Inversion] [Joint US military] [Arms sales]
• Stuck in Kabul, with Saigon blues again
  By Pepe Escobar
  Some things never change. It was "only" eight years ago that the George W Bush administration unleashed its mini-shock and awe over Afghanistan to, in theory, smash the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Stuck inside of Kabul with the Saigon blues again, the "overseas contingency operations" of the Barack Obama administration continue to perpetrate a myth; never shall the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" be mentioned in the same sentence.
  As an exercise in obfuscation, the strategy is working wonders. Not a peep all across US corporate media about the real reasons the US, the Pentagon rather, needs to stay in Afghanistan forever; to protect the troubled Trans-Afghanistan pipeline if it ever gets built; and to encircle and spy on neighboring strategic competitors Russia and China. Whatever the industrial-military complex will bend Obama to do, it will look a lot like (a very expensive) Chaos-istan anyway.
• Afghanistan: from insurgency to insurrection
  Paul Rogers, 8 - 10 - 2009 A prospective change in the character of the Afghan war has momentous implications for the United States and its allies. 8 - 10 - 2009 The Afghanistan war moves into its ninth year on 7 October 2009 - the anniversary of the day in 2001 when the United States bombing began, just under a month after the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11. The early weeks of the war appeared to show a rapid advance towards decisive military victory: intense US air-power and use of special forces combined with the significant rearming and financing of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance to secure the collapse of the Taliban regime. Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001 Bradford's peace-studies department now broadcasts regular podcasts on its work, including a regular commentary from Paul Rogers on international-security issues. Listen/watch here Even at that stage, however, the relief and acclaim surrounding the entry into Kabul was shadowed by suspicion that in many cases the Taliban paramilitaries were choosing to disappear from sight rather than being vanquished in a conventional military campaign. There were suggestions that this applied to the al-Qaida network as well
  The second recent development is relevant here. This is the way that an insurgency centred mainly on the Taliban is beginning to be transformed into a more general insurrection directed at foreign occupiers and the Afghan government.
  But by May-June 2010, a clearer understanding of just how entrenched is the opposition in Afghanistan to foreign troops could be possible. If the insurgency does indeed become an insurrection, then whatever happens in Pakistan could be much less relevant than Washington's military planners currently think. Afghanistan's ninth continuous year of war promises to be decisive.
• Oil Not Priced in Dollars by 2018?
  Some oil producing countries and big buyers are hatching a plan to move away from pricing oil in dollars—a potential blow to the greenback's prestige By Robert Fisk
  In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar. Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars. [Reserve] [Decline]
• A Voice Worth Heeding on Afghanistan
  By ALBERT R. HUNT October 5, 2009 Letter From Washington WASHINGTON — Zbigniew Brzezinski says that a central consideration for President Barack Obama, as he faces an agonizing choice over Afghanistan, is what happened to the Russians in the 1980s and after they were driven out in 1989. Mr. Brzezinski’s views deserve attention. Few policy makers have studied Afghanistan as long; he was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser during the Soviet invasion of 1979. He has Mr. Obama’s interests at heart — he was a prominent supporter during the presidential campaign — and is the most respected Democratic geopolitical thinker outside the administration. Thirty years ago, after initial concerns that the Russians would succeed in Afghanistan, it became clear to Mr. Brzezinski that once they were viewed as “occupiers,” they would be thwarted and eventually driven out. He doesn’t want Mr. Obama to make the same mistake with a mindless escalation. Thus, he is skeptical of the request of the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for as many as 40,000 additional combat troops. “General McChrystal’s recommendation makes sense in a narrow military framework; he has been given a particular task, to defeat the counterinsurgency,” Mr. Brzezinski says. “But suppose the counterinsurgency becomes a bigger insurgency,” he goes on. “This is why I’ve been saying let’s not do what the Russians did.” In short, let’s not get into the nation-building business. “We’ve had some sort of a notion that we build a modern society, democracy, with the help of Western-type Afghans.” While President George W. Bush “theologized” that concept, “Obama no longer embraces that theology,” Mr. Brzezinski says. “But let’s face it: Two years ago, what did he know about Afghanistan?” The former top national security aide is no soft-liner and thinks it would be a disaster to withdraw from Afghanistan or set deadlines for getting out. That brings up what the United States did after the Russians had to retreat. “Our biggest mistake was in 1989,” he says. “The Taliban arose not because of what we did in Afghanistan to help defeat the Soviets. They arose because of what we did not do in Afghanistan, which was to continue helping after the Soviets were driven out.” Looking at these Afghanistan bookends, he says Mr. Obama should “draw those two lessons together.” [Chutzpah] [Global insurgency]
• Obama under fire over falling dollar
  By Edward Luce and Krishna Guha in Washington Published: October 7 2009 19:37 | Last updated: October 8 2009 00:30 The falling US dollar is giving ammunition to the critics of the Obama administration and fuelling broader concerns about the potential erosion of America’s reserve currency status. The depreciation of the US dollar is sparking growing jitters among critics of the Obama administration over the potential loss of America’s reserve currency status. Economists point out that a declining dollar could prove a boon to the US economy in the absence of credible anxiety over inflation. Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power.
  Much of today’s debate echoes the traditional political response in the US whenever the currency depreciates. But it is now accompanied by warnings from America’s creditors, many of which are widely rumoured to be eyeing large purchases of US real assets such as property and companies. [Reserve]
• Leader Ousted, Honduras Hires U.S. Lobbyists
  By GINGER THOMPSON and RON NIXON Published: October 7, 2009 WASHINGTON — First, depose a president. Second, hire a lobbyist. In the months since soldiers ousted the Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, the de facto government and its supporters have resisted demands from the United States that he be restored to power. Arguing that the left-leaning Mr. Zelaya posed a threat to their country’s fragile democracy by trying to extend his time in office illegally, they have made their case in Washington in the customary way: by starting a high-profile lobbying campaign. The campaign has had the effect of forcing the administration to send mixed signals about its position to the de facto government, which reads them as signs of encouragement. It also has delayed two key State Department appointments in the region. Costing at least $400,000 so far, according to lobbying registration records, the campaign has involved law firms and public relations agencies with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator John McCain, a leading Republican voice on foreign affairs.
  For his part, Mr. Reich sent his thoughts to members of Congress by e-mail. “We should rejoice,” he wrote to one member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “that one of the self-proclaimed 21st Century socialist (sic) allies of Chávez has been legally deposed (sic) by his own countrymen.” [Imperialism] [Democracy] [Double standards]
• Pakistanis Balk at U.S. Aid Package
  Criticism Threatens To Snarl Obama's Efforts in Region By Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, October 8, 2009 The Obama administration's strategy for bolstering Pakistan's civilian government was shaken Wednesday when political opposition and military leaders there sharply criticized a new U.S. assistance plan as interfering with the country's sovereignty. Although President Obama has praised the $7.5 billion, five-year aid program -- approved by Congress last week -- Pakistani officials have objected to provisions that require U.S. monitoring of everything from how they spend the money to the way the military promotes senior officers. [Imperialism] [Sovereignty]
• No Laughing Matter
  By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 8, 2009; 9:45 AM Call it the Fred Armisen effect. I don't think he does a very good Obama impersonation; a flat affect seems to be the only comedic arrow in his quiver. But "Saturday Night Live" is a good cultural bellwether. So when President Armisen does a zip-zero-nada checklist about how he's accomplished nothing, it means some New York comedy writers, at least, think that's the new Zeitgeist. Now, this wasn't quite the late-night earthquake of Tina Fey saying she can see Russia from her house. But this seems to be the week that the pundits, even on the left, have lost patience with the president.
  And then there are the promises he hasn't gotten around to -- immigration reform, gays in the military -- and the ones that are stalled, such as climate change. Not to mention the Olympics, which fed the symbolism of an ineffective president. In sporting terms, Obama needs to put some points on the board or hear more jibes about the audacity of nope. [Continuity]
• Pakistan: Biting the Hand that Feeds You
  October 7, 2009 | 1708 GMT By Scott Stewart The Islamabad office of the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) was struck by a suicide bomber just after noon local time Oct. 5. The bomber, who wore an improvised explosive device (IED) concealed under his clothing, was wearing the uniform of the Frontier Constabulary, a paramilitary force, and reportedly made his way past perimeter security and into the facility under the ruse of asking to use the restroom. Once inside the facility, he detonated his explosive device, killing five WFP employees — one Iraqi national and four locals — and injuring six others. The attack, claimed by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), would be the first successful TTP attack in Islamabad since June 6, and the first attack against Western interests (sic) in a Pakistani city since the June 9 attack against the Pearl Continental hotel in Peshawar using a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED). [UNUS] [Aid weapon]
• Western powers using the media as a weapon: Iran FM
  TEHRAN, Oct. 5 (MNA) -- Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has said Western countries use the media as an instrument to promote their interests. Mottaki made the remarks at a meeting with directors of media outlets from across the Islamic world held in Tehran on Monday on the sidelines of the 3rd General Assembly of the Islamic Radio and Television Union, ISNA reported. Commenting on the current situation of the United Nations and the efforts to undermine the role of the UN secretary general, the Iranian foreign minister censured the five permanent members of the Security Council for their attempts to weaken the status of the General Assembly. “The media has become a very effective instrument in the hands of some countries for influencing public opinion,” he noted. Media outlets, think tanks, and research centers are the main instruments used by hegemonistic Western countries in their efforts to alter the global system for their own benefit, he added. [Media] [Think tanks] [Soft power]
• Overview: cautious optimism on gradual recovery
  BIS Quarterly Review, September 2009 Despite uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, investors remained cautiously optimistic in the period between end-May and early September 2009. Positive macroeconomic news as well as strong earnings announcements gave market participants hope of a turnaround. Consequently, equity prices rose and credit spreads narrowed. Nevertheless, disappointing data releases at times led investors to doubt their regained optimism, resulting in bouts of volatility. Moreover, bond investors generally appeared somewhat less convinced about the pace of the recovery.
  China, in particular, became a focal point for market participants. Its ability to rekindle growth, which had been stalled by the slump in external demand around the turn of the year, was often ascribed to the early and forceful fiscal response of the Chinese authorities. However, since bank lending, especially that by the four large state-owned commercial banks, was instrumental in financing the stimulus, there was growing concern that the resulting rapid rise in bank credit (new lending in the first half of 2009 tripled year on year to over 7 trillion renminbi ($1 trillion)) would exacerbate the build-up of overcapacity in some sectors and fuel asset price inflation. [Crisis] [China rising]
• The Economic Recovery is an Illusion
  The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Warns of Future Crises
  By Andrew Gavin Marshall Global Research, October 3, 2009 War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and Debt is Recovery In light of the ever-present and unyieldingly persistent exclamations of ‘an end' to the recession, a ‘solution' to the crisis, and a ‘recovery' of the economy; we must remember that we are being told this by the very same people and institutions which told us, in years past, that there was ‘nothing to worry about,' that ‘the fundamentals are fine,' and that there was ‘no danger' of an economic crisis. Why do we continue to believe the same people that have, in both statements and choices, been nothing but wrong? Who should we believe and turn to for more accurate information and analysis? Perhaps a useful source would be those at the epicenter of the crisis, in the heart of the shadowy world of central banking, at the global banking regulator, and the “most prestigious financial institution in the world,” which accurately predicted the crisis thus far: The Bank for International Settlements (BIS). This would be a good place to start. The economic crisis is anything but over, the “solutions” have been akin to putting a band-aid on an amputated arm. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank to the world's central banks, has warned and continues to warn against such misplaced hopes. [Crisis]
• Brazil looks to transform sporting greatness into gold on world stage
  Samba nation ready to build on success in winning right to host 2016 Olympics by becoming a leading economic power * Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro * The Observer, Sunday 4 October 2009 In Lapa, the fashionable centre of Rio de Janeiro nightlife, the partying was long and memorable. On Copacabana beach, the sand was packed with revellers. Pelé cried, and his compatriots celebrated the latest evidence that for one of the world's most glamorous, charismatic countries the good times are starting to roll. So often described as belonging to a "country of the future", Brazilians found themselves living in the present this weekend. Minutes after Rio de Janeiro was announced on Friday as the venue for the 2016 Olympics, the South American city's sprightly 39-year-old mayor, Eduardo Paes, logged on to his Twitter account and summed up the feelings of all of Rio's six million residents. "Our city deserves this present," he trumpeted. "Viva Rio". [BRIC] [Realignment]
• BRIC Demand Bigger Share Of IMF Votes
  By REUTERS Published: October 4, 2009 Filed at 6:24 a.m. ET ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The leading emerging BRIC nations maintain their demand for a 7 percent shift in voting power to developing countries at the International Monetary Fund, Brazil's Finance Minister Guido Mantega said on Saturday. He was speaking a week after the G20 meeting of leading world economies in Pittsburgh where the BRICs had agreed the shift to developing countries should be 5 percent. [Realignment] [G20]
• Does Russia Get It?
  By Fred Hiatt Sunday, October 4, 2009 "I think Russia has begun to see many more indications that Iran is engaging in threatening behavior. Certainly these last incidents seem to confirm that. And, finally, the Russians were very supportive of our sanctions against North Korea. President Medvedev said in this room that sanctions may not be preferable, but they may be inevitable." --Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sept. 27, 2009
  If you heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggest last Sunday that the Russians are beginning to come around to the U.S. way of thinking on Iran, it may have sounded familiar. For more than a decade, U.S. officials have been patiently explaining to the Russians that their interests are the same as ours in preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons. For just as long, U.S. officials have been telling themselves that the Russians are starting to get it. Maybe this time it will turn out to be true. The U.S. logic is, as always, irrefutable: Russia's standing as a nuclear power is diluted every time another country goes nuclear. Iran is particularly, uncomfortably, close. And given Russia's restive Muslim population in the Caucasus region, closer to Iran than to Moscow, Russia's leaders should be especially leery of a revolutionary Islamic regime getting the bomb. So far, however, the actions of Russia's leaders have suggested that they don't see things exactly as Americans believe they should. [US global strategy]
• David Letterman Reveals Extortion Attempt
  By BILL CARTER Published: October 1, 2009 David Letterman said on his show on Thursday that he had been the victim of an extortion attempt over charges of sexual affairs with staff members, claims that he conceded were true.
  According to Mr. Letterman, the letter stated, "I know that you do some terrible, terrible things." "Sure enough, contained in the package was stuff to prove that I do terrible things," Mr. Letterman said to laughter from the audience. Mr. Letterman said the "whole thing has been quite scary." He added at the end of his remarks, "I don’t plan to say much more about this on this particular topic." After disclosing the alleged extortion attempt, Mr. Letterman returned following a commercial and joked with the audience about the matter. [Chutzpah]
• October New York Philharmonic Trip to Cuba Is Off
  By Daniel J. Wakin Update | 3:39 p.m. Violinists, bassoonists and timpanists in Cuba? Fine. A bevy of rich Americans? Sorry. The New York Philharmonic scratched its trip to Cuba at the end of October because the United States Treasury Department said it would deny permission for a group of patrons to go along. Without them and their donations, the orchestra said on Thursday, it cannot afford to go. About 150 board members and other donors had promised to pay $10,000 each to spend Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 in Havana, where the orchestra was to play two concerts, said Zarin Mehta, its president. The money was to have covered the cost of the proposed trip, which came at the Cuban government’s invitation. [Sanctions] [Continuity]
• Are We the Twenty-First Century Martians?
  By Tom Engelhardt October 9, 2009 This article originally appeared on TomDispatch. An unremarkable paragraph in a piece in my hometown paper recently caught my eye. It was headlined "White House Believes Karzai Will Be Re-elected," but in mid-report Helene Cooper and Mark Landler of the New York Times turned to Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's "redeployment option." Here's the humdrum paragraph in question: "The redeployment option calls for moving troops from sparsely populated and lawless areas of the countryside to urban areas, including Kandahar and Kabul. Many rural areas 'would be better left to Predators,' said an administration official, referring to drone aircraft."
  And none of this seems less than reasonable to us, especially given the much publicized " success" of the drone assassination program in taking out Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership figures. What does strike us as strange, though, is that the locals, whether in Pakistan or Afghanistan, find all this upsetting. A recent US poll in Pakistan typically reported "that 76 percent of the respondents were opposed to Pakistan partnering with the United States on missile attacks against extremists by American drone aircraft." Then again, we take it for granted that the people of such backward lands are strange, touchy types. Not like us
  As Packer writes, "In moments when I overheard him talking to Pakistani leaders, he took the solicitous tone of someone reassuring an unstable friend. 'It's like dealing with psychologically abused children,' a member of his staff said. 'You don't focus on the screaming and the violence--you just hug them tighter.'?"
  But here's a question that comes to mind: Why is it that Americans like Holbrooke seem to feel so at home so far away from home? Why, for instance, do US military spokespeople so regularly refer to our indigenous enemies in Iraq as "anti-Iraqi forces," and in Afghanistan as "anti-Afghan forces"? Why does our military in Iraq speak of the neighboring Iranians as "foreign forces" without ever including our own military in that category?
  A US Army major, Guy Parmeter, had it near Samara in Iraq's Salahuddin province in 2004 ("It made me think: how are we perceived, who are we to them?"): Maj. Guy Parmeter: "Seen any foreign fighters?" Iraqi farmer: "Yes, you." [Imperialism] [Tantrum] [Solipsism]
• Obama's Campaign Merits a Peace Prize
  posted by John Nichols on 10/10/2009 @ 3:25pm Readers who have followed this writer's commenaties on the political machinations of the 44th president are by now well aware that I never quite bought into the whole Barack Obama thing. He has been and is a fascinating politician to cover. I've enjoyed the interviews I've done with him. I respect Obama's intellect and discipline. I think he has remarkable political skills. I am more skeptical, however, with regard to his governing skills. And I am downright disappointed with his failure to recognize the purpose and the potential of the mandate he was given by the American electorate a year ago.
  No, the Nobel Peace Prize is and should always be given with the purpose of honoring action not aspiration. The whole point of the award is to recognize bold, presumably courageous, endeavors in pursuit of a more peaceful and functional planet. It is against this standard that the award to Obama should be measured. To my view, he measures up. [Obama_Nobel]
• Iran Again: Is Everyone Bluffing?
  Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 266, Oct. 1, 2009 Iran is back in the forefront of public diplomacy. President Obama, jointly with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, held a press conference in which they seemed to give Iran one more ultimatum: conform to their demands, what they called the demands of the "international community," by December of this year or face new sanctions. Obama said that Iran is "breaking the rule that all nations must follow."
  So, are we on the verge of further sanctions? or even more, of bombing Iran, either by the United States or by Israel with the tacit consent of the United States? Possibly, but I don't really think so. I think that what is happening is a gigantic bluff by all and sundry. Let us start with Iran. I have always agreed with the U.S. right and the Israelis that Iran intends to achieve the status of a nuclear power. My difference with them has simply been that this seems to me normal, inevitable, and not at all a geopolitical disaster. From Iran's point of view, there are three nearby nuclear powers - India, Pakistan, and Israel - who not only have never signed the NPT but actually have nuclear weapons, many nuclear weapons. They are not however being accused of violating the norms of the "international community." So the Iranians say, why pick on Iran? Iran has, unlike these three nearby countries, signed the NPT, and has up to now not violated its specific provisions. Nonetheless, it is being publicly denounced for a far lesser violation of international norms than that of the three other countries. President Lula of Brazil points out that Brazil is also enriching uranium and sees nothing wrong with Iran doing that.
  Why did Obama make his announcement just now if he has known for some time that Iran was building this plant? He claims he just wanted first to be absolutely sure of the quality of his intelligence. But it is also clear that announcing it at this very moment is quite helpful domestically. Obama is under attack from the U.S. right for his health care proposals and for his seeming hesitation to send more troops to Afghanistan. Talking tough to Iran protects his right flank a bit and may strengthen his hand politically for these other questions.
  It leaves the world in a stalemate. Lots of words and very little action. Is that what Ahmadinejad wants? Probably. Will the U.S. right and the Israelis denounce it? Probably. Can Obama do anything to change the situation? I don't see what. This will be noted by future historians as just one more piece of evidence of the declining geopolitical clout of the United States. What future historians might also say is that Iran, in defying resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, is acting just like a large number of other countries have acted in the last fifty years. No more, no less. [US global strategy] [Decline] [Camouflage]
• Country of Constant Sorrow McChrystal's Afghan Desolation
  By Vijay Prashad
  On October 7, the Afghan sector of the Global War on Terror (since renamed) will open its ninth year. This conflict, or war, is now longer in duration than the U. S. presence in both world wars (only five years), and is coming onto the length of the formal Vietnam War (fifteen years if you discount the various operations in the Diem years). The loss of American life is not as great as it was in Vietnam or in the world wars, but the expense is greater (amounting to $4 billion per month, with a National Priorities Project study showing that the total cost by the end of 2009 will be almost $200 billion). Afghan society is on life support, and it is here that there is no comparison with either Europe after its wars or Vietnam after its long bleed. An armistice was welcomed in each of the contests by the people who had the wherewithal and energy to pick up the pieces. Set aside the Afghan masses, whose well-being has not only been ignored but so too has their political development (the official literacy rate stands at 28%, and most areas of the country are outside formal political organization and institutions). It is not clear that the Afghan elites lodged in Kabul would cheer at the departure of the NATO troops; it was thanks to the troops that the elites followed Hamid Karzai from Pakistan and India, as well as Europe and the United States to return to their homes and take charge. Exiled by the Communists (1978-1992), the long civil war amongst the mullahs (1992-1996) and then by the Taliban (1996-2001), the Afghan elite came aboard the NATO-US express, hoping against hope that the force of arms would turn back the tide of history. It has not been so.
• How Washington lobbyists peddle power
  The equivalent of six health-care lobbyists for every member of Congress are registered for this year's biggest political battle. By David T. Cook | Staff writer/ September 28, 2009 edition and Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer If labor lobbyist Robert “Bobby” Juliano didn’t move away from his stakeout just off the Senate floor from time to time, he might be mistaken for a statue. Other lobbyists have moved on to BlackBerrys and instant messaging. (He calls them “the thumb generation.”) But for Mr. Juliano, who has been in the thick of every big labor issue in the past 36 years, there’s no substitute for face-to-face contact with members of Congress. “I’m not going to be sitting in an office when my workbench is the seat of power for the whole world,” he says, standing in the ornate Senate reception room where lobbyists mingle with members before and after floor votes. [Corruption]

• US dollar set to be eclipsed, World Bank president predicts
  United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency, says Zoellick
  The United States must brace itself for the dollar to be usurped as the world's reserve currency as American dominance wanes in the wake of the financial crisis, the World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, warned yesterday. Speaking ahead of the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Istanbul, he said it was time for a "responsible globalisation", in which decision-making was shared between the old powers and developing countries such as China and India. [Reserve]
• Utilities quit group over its opposition to climate change bill
  By Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Exelon, the nation's biggest operator of nuclear power plants, said Monday that it's quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the business group's lobbying against climate and energy legislation. Last week, two other large energy companies, Pacific Gas and Electric and PNM Resources, also quit the Chamber over objections to its stance on climate change. [Climate change]
• E.U. Report to Place Blame on Both Sides in Georgia War
  By Ellen Barry Published: September 28, 2009 MOSCOW — After a lengthy inquiry, investigators commissioned by the European Union are expected to conclude that Georgia ignited last year’s war with Russia by attacking separatists in South Ossetia, rejecting the Georgian government’s explanation that the attack was defensive, according to an official familiar with the investigators’ work. [False balance] [Media]
• Four challenges in Pittsburgh for the G20
  September 24th, 2009 Guest Author: Uri Dadush, Carnegie Endowment The Great Financial Crisis is far from over, but a stimulus-triggered recovery is now taking hold. The contours of the post-crisis economy are already emerging—from the sharply rising public debt levels in most industrial countries to the severely impaired balance sheets of banks and households in countries at the epicenter of the banking disaster, including the United States, the UK, and several smaller European countries. At the same time, China, India, Brazil, and many other emerging markets, which were badly affected at first, demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of the crisis and have confirmed both their attractiveness as long-term investment destinations and their growing economic and political clout.
  It is becoming increasingly evident that the global economy stabilized and then began to recover early in the second quarter of this year. The recovery first took hold in China (where fundamentals and stimulus were the strongest), spread to Japan and the rest of Asia, and, in a relatively autonomous fashion, began a few months later in Germany, France, the rest of Europe, and lastly in the United States (where fundamentals were the weakest and the crisis originated). Data on the production and trade of goods best reflects the remarkable amplitude and global nature of this cycle.
  At first, as panic spread and credit tightened, households around the world deferred any purchases that could be delayed, from houses to cars to TV sets, and firms furiously slashed inventories and capital spending. With crucial support from government measures, the cycle is now reversing, and the speed of the short-term production and trade recovery may be just as surprising as its downturn was. Growing consumer spending, rising housing prices, stabilizing inventories, and the reemergence of capital goods orders provide crucial signs that demand is returning. [Crisis]
• Death Penalty Lessons from Asia
  David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring The comparative study of death penalty policy is a relatively new and unpracticed discipline, and few of the existing studies concentrate on regional rather than global comparisons.1 This article makes the case for a regional approach by summarizing some of the most important findings from our book about capital punishment in Asia.2 That book is based on five major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China (chapters 3-7), and seven shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India (appendices A-F).
• [Editorial] G-20 as democratic global economic coordinator
  The nations meeting at the G-20 summit, which closed last weekend in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh, have agreed to turn the G-20 into the world’s top economic forum and to regularize G-20 summits starting in 2011. This agreement is being interpreted as an acknowledgement that the international community cannot resolve the economic problems of the world with just the leadership of the G-8 alone, which is centered on the advanced countries. In addition, it is being seen as a confirmation that the G-20 summit, which includes newly industrialized developing countries, such as China, will replace the G-8 summits. When one considers that the G-20 accounts for some 85 percent of the global economy and over half of the total economy of developing nations, this signifies an important decision that advances the global economic order towards democracy. [Realignment]
• Uphill Fight for Pope Among Secular Czechs
  By DAN BILEFSKY Published: September 26, 2009 PRAGUE — As Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the Czech Republic on Saturday on a three-day pilgrimage aimed at battling against the forces of secularism, religious leaders warned that he faced a daunting challenge in a nation of mostly natural-born skeptics. When the pope comes to town, a city usually pulls out all the stops. Not so here in the Czech capital, where banners heralding the pope’s visit and large crowds were conspicuously absent. The local newspapers that highlighted the trip seemed more preoccupied with the pope’s penchant for bright red loafers than with the substance of his religious mission. “If the pope wants to create a religious revival in Europe, there is no worse place he could come to than the Czech Republic, where no one believes in anything,” said Jaroslav Plesl, a self-confessed lapsed Catholic who is deputy editor of Lidove Noviny, a leading daily newspaper here. “Add to that the fact that the pope is German and socially conservative and he might as well be an alien here.” Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia, the pope is visiting what many religious observers, unfairly or not, consider the ground zero of religious apathy in Europe. Vatican officials said that he had chosen the Czech Republic for a mission central to his papacy: fomenting a continentwide spiritual revolt against what Benedict labeled Saturday as “atheist ideology,” “hedonistic consumerism” and “a growing drift toward ethical and cultural relativism.”
  The pope touched down in Prague after a send-off from Rome’s Ciampino Airport by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose popularity among Roman Catholics has dropped after a summer of sex scandals.
• When Going Gets Tough, Local Currency Gets Going
  By Karla Adam Special to the Washington Post Sunday, September 27, 2009 LONDON -- Throughout Britain, people are hanging on to their hard-earned pounds, scrimping and saving as they ride out the recession. But in a few communities, people are taking a different tack: printing their own money and spending it. No, the queen's image on the iconic British pound isn't being counterfeited. Instead, some communities are producing their own scrips -- some of the latest have painter Vincent van Gogh's face on them -- which can be used much like cash at participating businesses.
• Open Trade Key to Stimulus
  By Michael R. Czinkota
  9 February 2009 The United States is preparing the largest economic stimulus measure ever invoked by any nation. The House has already passed one version, and the Senate is now deliberating the package. We know that there is no perfection. When more than $850 billion is to be allocated, there is bound to be controversy about who gets what. There may even be some inefficiency and waste in the expenditure. After all, we're only human. But great care needs to be taken not to trigger an avalanche of global protectionism which reduces the effectiveness of economic support. [Crisis] [Protectionism]
• Reconciling US Deficit and China’s Surplus
  By Dale McFeatters Scripps Howard News Service The G20 economic summit in Pittsburgh Thursday and Friday comes at an awkward time for the United States. Next week the federal government's fiscal year comes to an end, and when it does Uncle Sam will have run a budget deficit of $1.58 trillion, more than tripling the previous record deficit of $455 billion. That deficit makes our trading partners nervous, especially China, which holds $800 billion of U.S. debt thanks to its booming trade surplus. It also makes for a weaker dollar, still the international reserve currency. Despite Russia and a few other nations muttering about creating a new reserve currency to replace the dollar, most nations believe the dollar has performed satisfactorily but they would like to see it strengthen and stabilize. President Barack Obama will promise to boost the domestic savings rate, reduce demand for imports and rein in federal spending. He will explain that the eye-popping fiscal 2009 deficit is a one-shot deal because of the vast amounts spent to bail out the banks and reignite the economy. China fears that the others of the 20 leading industrialized nations will gang up on it because of its huge trade surpluses, driven by Beijing's mercantilist policies. China will face demands ? politely put, of course ? that it revalue its currency upward, throw open its markets to foreign competitors and spur domestic demand for consumer goods. [Crisis] [Domestic demand] [Protectionism] [China competition]
• Competing Economic Aspirations
  By Michael R. Czinkota President-elect Obama will set a new pace for the United States and for people around the world. In light of the many expectations tied to the campaign, it helps to think about competing values when it comes to their implementation. The economic problems confronting the global economy will not disappear for the new administration. However, there will be a sense of change. Having a new team in place, with new policies yet to be formulated, is like scratching off the barnacles from the hull of a ship.
  There will be less reliance on market forces. But if one does not use market signals, there needs to be the development of secondary indicators. Accepting new and different non-market criteria will encourage the productivity of think tanks, government offices and universities and provide for greater flexibility. At the same time, there will be an increase in policy errors, performance uncertainty and outcome disputes.
• Crash Course in Global Economics
  By Daniel Ikenson and Alec van Gelder G20 leaders are convening in Pittsburgh this week during a sticky time for global trade relations. Brazilians, Canadians, Mexicans and Chinese are angry with the Americans. The Indians and the Chinese are furious with each other, as are the Europeans and the Americans. Most of this stems from new trade restrictions imposed despite repeated pledges from G20 countries to avoid protectionism. To quell the anger and gain a constructive focus in Pittsburgh, leaders must recognize how outdated it is to view the world in terms of ``us" versus ``them." A crash course on the global economy is in order. The largest ``American" steel producer is the majority-Indian-owned Arcelor-Mittal, which has headquarters in Luxembourg and Hong Kong, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and five European stock exchanges. The largest ``German" producer, Thyssen-Krupp, a conglomerate with 670 companies worldwide, is investing $3.7 billion in a carbon and stainless steel factory in Alabama, which will create 2,700 permanent jobs there. California's steel industry consists almost entirely of rolling mill operations that process imported carbon steel slabs from Brazil, Russia and other countries. The Californian finished products are disqualified from President Obama's Buy American procurement rules for failing to meet the statutory definition of American-made steel. This illustrates the impossibility, futility and harm of attempting to define producers by national characteristics. [Protectionism] [IM]
• U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan's History
  By Rick Rozoff
  Global Research, September 24, 2009 Over the past week U.S. newspapers and television networks have been abuzz with reports that Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year. The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what U.S. and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000. Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of "perhaps as many as 45,000." The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America's obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan's history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced. An additional 45,000 troops would bring the U.S. total to 113,000. There are also 35,000 troops from some 50 other nations serving under NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the nation, which would raise combined troop strength under McChrystal's command to 148,000 if the larger number of rumored increases materializes. As the former Soviet Union withdrew its soldiers from Afghanistan twenty years ago the New York Times reported "At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed." [1] Nearly 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan would represent the largest foreign military presence ever in the land.
• The G20 Pittsburgh Summit Press Room
  Welcome to the 2009 G-20 Pittsburgh Summit Press Room. On September 24th and 25th, the world's financial representatives and leaders will come together to discuss economic policies and address the global financial crisis in Pittsburgh. Journalists from around the world are invited to learn more about Pittsburgh's economic and environmental transformation on this site. A host of press materials, media contacts, resources and key links are available. Look for continual updates between now and the G-20 Pittsburgh Summit.
• G-20 Backs Sustained Crisis Response, Shift in IMF Representation
  September 25, 2009 G-20 says process of crisis recovery, repair is incomplete Backs a shift in IMF representation of at least 5 percent Agrees to launch framework for strong, sustainable, balanced growth Leaders of the Group of Twenty (G-20) industrialized and emerging market economies at a summit in Pittsburgh pledged to sustain the strong policy response to counter the global economic crisis and provided strong political support for a shift in country representation at the IMF of at least 5 percent toward dynamic emerging market and developing countries. [Crisis]
• Leaders' Statement: The Pittsburgh Summit
  September 24 – 25, 2009 PREAMBLE 1. We meet in the midst of a critical transition from crisis to recovery to turn the page on an era of irresponsibility and to adopt a set of policies, regulations and reforms to meet the needs of the 21st century global economy. 2. When we last gathered in April, we confronted the greatest challenge to the world economy in our generation. 3. Global output was contracting at pace not seen since the 1930s. Trade was plummeting. Jobs were disappearing rapidly. Our people worried that the world was on the edge of a depression. 4. At that time, our countries agreed to do everything necessary to ensure recovery, to repair our financial systems and to maintain the global flow of capital. 5. It worked. [Crisis]
• Global trade sees fastest rise for five years
  By Alan Beattie in London Published: September 25 2009 20:04 | Last updated: September 25 2009 20:04 Global trade rose at its fastest rate in more than five years in July, suggesting the economic recovery is feeding through into commerce. An index compiled by the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a Dutch research institute, showed the volume of world trade rising 3.5 per cent in July after a revised increase of 1.6 per cent in June. The rise in volumes was the steepest since December 2003. The numbers suggest the fall in trade over the past year, steeper than during the 1930s, was mainly caused by lack of demand rather than a breakdown in the trading system.
• Four things you must know about the global puzzle
  By Philip Stephens Published: September 24 2009 20:03 | Last updated: September 24 2009 20:03 Ingram Pinn illustration From New York to Pittsburgh you could hear the crunching and grinding of geopolitical plates. The latest jamborees at the United Nations and the Group of 20 leave the new global landscape still very much a work in progress. Some of the contours, though, stand in sharper relief. To my mind, four things stood out from this week’s surfeit of summitry: China’s, albeit reluctant, embrace of multilateralism; the rising challenge from the Middle East to western and, especially, US power; Barack Obama’s effort to frame new rules for the global game; and Europe’s place on the margins of influence. [China rising] [Crisis] [Decline]
• World leaders relaunch G20 as top economic forum
  Developing nations including China and Brazil to have greater influence under model that will relegate G7 and G8 from finance G20 leaders will today agree plans to reshape the world economy and give more say to developing nations such as China, India and Brazil when they conclude their summit in Pittsburgh. The reforms will secure a seat at the top table of global economic policy for emerging nations, with world leaders agreeing that the G20 should become a board of directors on global economic co-operation, shifting the decades-old global balance of power away from Europe. The G20 group, which includes Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, will replace the G7, which for more than three decades has dominated the world financial stage. The deal was thrashed out by Barack Obama, who is hosting his first major summit as US president. [Crisis] [Realignment]
• G20 leaders map out new economic order at Pittsburgh summit
  Bankers' bonuses and excessive national deficits targeted in package of reforms * Patrick Wintour and Andrew Clark * guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 September 2009 21.56 BST G20 leaders, installing themselves as permanent stewards of the world economy for the first time, agreed today on a tighter regime on bankers' bonuses and mapped out a new economic order in which countries will be urged to co-operate to avoid building up excessive trade deficits or surpluses. Gordon Brown hailed the result as a victory for British thinking and persistance, insisting the new economic regime will have an impact in restoring balanced growth but the package fell short of French demands for more sweeping curbs on international banks. Instead, the G20 leaders agreed a new system whereby they will collectively agree broad objectives every year, and then make themselves subject to a form of peer review supervised by the International Monetary Fund. The aim will be to encourage over-consuming countries – such as the US – to scale back their spending, and prompt those countries that are hoarding vast surpluses, such as China and Germany, to boost consumer demand. [Crisis] [Domestic demand]
• Global Economic Forum to Expand Permanently
  By EDMUND L. ANDREWS Published: September 25, 2009 PITTSBURGH — Global leaders announced Friday that the once elite club of rich industrial nations known as the Group of 7 would be permanently replaced as a global forum for economic policy by the much broader Group of 20, which includes China, Brazil, India and other fast-growing developing countries.. Skip to next paragraph Related Iran Is Warned Over Nuclear ‘Deception’ (September 26, 2009) Times Topics: Group of 20 Readers' Comments Share your thoughts. * Post a Comment » * Read All Comments (48) » The move highlights the growing economic importance of Asia and some Latin American countries, particularly since the United States and many European countries have found their banking systems crippled by an economic crisis originating in excesses in the American mortgage market. [Crisis] [Realignment]
• It’s Easy Being Green
  By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: September 24, 2009 So, have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty of reform opponents? If so, you’ll love the next big debate: the fight over climate change.
  Instead, the campaign against saving the planet rests mainly on lies. Thus, last week Glenn Beck — who seems to be challenging Rush Limbaugh for the role of de facto leader of the G.O.P. — informed his audience of a “buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. Needless to say, no such study exists. But we shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Beck. Similar — and similarly false — claims about the cost of Waxman-Markey have been circulated by many supposed experts. A year ago I would have been shocked by this behavior. But as we’ve already seen in the health care debate, the polarization of our political discourse has forced self-proclaimed “centrists” to choose sides — and many of them have apparently decided that partisan opposition to President Obama trumps any concerns about intellectual honesty. So here’s the bottom line: The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth about the economics of climate change is that it’s relatively easy being green. [Green] [Climate change]
• Fact Sheet: creating a 21st century international economic architecture
  THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary _____________________________________________________________ FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 24, 2009 Dramatic changes in the world economy have not always been reflected in the global architecture for economic cooperation. This all started to change today. The G-20 leaders reached a historic agreement to put the G-20 at the center of their efforts to work together to build a durable recovery while avoiding the financial fragilities that led to the crisis. Establishing the G-20 as the Premier Global Economic Forum: Leading up the Pittsburgh Summit, President Obama called on the world's leaders to reform global economic institutions to meet the needs of an interconnected global economy. Today, leaders endorsed the G-20 as the premier forum for their international economic cooperation. This decision brings to the table the countries needed to build a stronger, more balanced global economy, reform the financial system, and lift the lives of the poorest. Stronger and More Effective Institutions: This builds on the decision made in April to expand the Financial Stability Board to include all G-20 countries and to add all the G-20 members to the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information. The Financial Stability Board is central to our efforts to develop and implement sweeping reforms to transform the system of global regulation. The Global Forum is the primary vehicle in the G-20's effort to promote greater tax transparency. [Crisis]
• Saving the World, Without U.S. Consumers
  By The Editors September 24, 2009, 6:32 pm If Americans don’t start buying a lot of stuff again, can the world economy be saved? What’s the global Plan B? These are fundamental questions at the summit of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations in Pittsburgh. In previous global downturns, Americans have come to the rescue, getting out their credit cards and buying up what the rest of the world produces. “Our spending is currently equal to the entire economies of China and India added together and then doubled,” as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out, representing the single biggest chunk of the world economy. But the American consumption option may not be available anymore and may also not be desirable. Is there another model, like the one outlined by the Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen? (At Dot Earth, our Times colleague Andrew C. Revkin has covered this discussion in depth.) But for the time being, why have consumers in other countries — like China and Germany, which produce far more than they spend — failed to step up to the plate? * Juliet Schor, author, “Born to Buy” * Bernard Baumohl, The Economic Outlook Group * Michael Pettis, Peking University * Lawrence Glickman, historian * Desmond Lachman, ex-I.M.F. economist * Regina Lee Blaszczyk, author, “American Consumer Society” [US demand]
• Get Out the Wallets
  The world needs Americans to spend. By Fareed Zakaria
  If I were told by the economic gods that I could have the answer to one question about the fate of the global economy, I know what I would ask. "When will the American consumer start spending again?" I know that doesn't sound as sophisticated as a question about industrial production, interest-rate fluctuations, or the Chinese stimulus plan, but it's the key to understanding when we will get out of this recession—and what the recovery is likely to look like. The rise of emerging powers like China, India, and Brazil is real. But for now, there is still just one 800-pound gorilla. The American consumer is the single largest factor at play in the global economy. Our spending is currently equal to the entire economies of China and India added together and then doubled. [US demand]
• Excerpts from Obama's Address to U.N. General Assembly
  President Obama's speech attempted to forge a new compact with the world's nations while recognizing that old problems -- of war, nuclear proliferation, economic distress and environmental crisis -- still command attention. Below are a few highlights from Obama's speech. Read more for complete coverage.
  If the governments of Iran and North Korea choose to ignore international standards, if they put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability and the security and opportunity of their own people, if they are oblivious to the dangers of escalating nuclear arms races in both East Asia and the Middle East, then they must be held accountable. [Proliferation] [Double standards]
• Petraeus, McChrystal and the Surgettes
  By Tom Engelhardt
  September 24, 2009 This article originally appeared on TomDispatch. Front and center in the debate over the Afghan War these days are General Stanley "Stan" McChrystal, Afghan war commander, whose "classified, pre-decisional" and devastating report--almost eight years and at least $220 billion later, the war is a complete disaster--was conveniently, not to say suspiciously, leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post by we-know-not-who at a particularly embarrassing moment for Barack Obama; Admiral Michael "Mike" Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has been increasingly vocal about a "deteriorating" war and the need for more American boots on the ground; and the president himself, who blitzed every TV show in sight last Sunday and Monday for his health reform program, but spent significant time expressing doubts about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. ("I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan...or sending a message that America is here for the duration.") [US global strategy] [Dissension]
• Why the crisis of business is only beginning
  Mark Lee Hunter, 24 - 09 - 2009 The economic crisis will change the attitude of the middle classes towards government and business long-term. The corporate world needs to rediscover good behaviour for its own good. 24 - 09 - 2009 Crises have long tails, and this one will be no exception, regardless of assurances that the worst is over. Just as the Watergate crisis altered the perception and practice of politics in the U.S. and elsewhere for more than a generation, the current crisis will profoundly affect the image and influence of business in coming decades. Mark Lee Hunter is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the INSEAD Social Innovation Centre. The views in this article are personal, and do not engage INSEAD or the Social Innovation Centre. Trust in business, and more important, in the values advanced by business, is the first casualty. The claim that business exists to create wealth has been gravely weakened. In this crisis, businesses destroyed wealth - the wealth of investors, but also of millions of others who find themselves jobless through no fault of their own. Likewise, the claim that in business, personal reward is proportional to the personal risk assumed appears particularly suspect these days. Cumulatively massive payouts have been taken by people who outsourced their risks to taxpayers. [Crisis]
• Is America Hooked on War?
  By Tom Engelhardt
  September 17, 2009 This article originally appeared on TomDispatch. "War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue, in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some sixty years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.
  Last week, for instance, a New York Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger was headlined "Obama Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue." It offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.
  What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now submitted an even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and two wars' worth of disasters, decides to expand the US Armed Forces rather than shrink the US global mission? [Militarisation] [Spin] [Media]
• 9/11 Truth. An American Enigma A Message to Truth Activists
  By Prof Peter Phillips
  Global Research, September 20, 2009 9/11 has become an American enigma. For many, 9/11 remains a puzzling, inexplicable, phenomenon that defies understanding in its complexities and misinformation. Most people doubt the full truth of the 9/11 Commission's report, but are unable to accept that people inside the government could be so evil as to allow the deaths of 3000 Americans. In a study published in the journal Sociological Inquiry, sociologists from four major research institutions focused on one of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election: the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The study calls such unsubstantiated beliefs "a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice" and considers how and why so many people linked Hussein to 9/11. Co-author Steven Hoffman, Ph.D., from University at Buffalo, says, "Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as 'motivated reasoning,' which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.
• China and India expected to seize initiative at New York climate talks
  Pressure on America increases as China set to take lead on tackling climate change and India plans 'aggressive' cuts
  Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 September 2009 18.29 BST Article history The exterior of the United Nations headquarters in New York where climate talks will take place ahead of the summit in Copenhagen. Photograph: Michael Crabtree China and India appeared poised for bold new action on climate change ahead of a major UN summit tomorrow, in moves that will significantly increase pressure on President Barack Obama to deliver cuts in US emissions. The UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said today that he expects China's president, Hu Jintao, to announce a series of new measures tomorrow that would put the country well ahead of America in dealing with climate change. Meanwhile, India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, told the Guardian his government planned to make "aggressive" cuts in India's emissions. The Chinese and Indian measures — if fully realised — could represent a breakthrough in bringing them into a global climate change deal at a UN summit in Copenhagen in December. Almost all observers say the Copenhagen talks are danderously stalled.. [Climate change] [Green]
• Why haven't any Wall Street tycoons been sent to the slammer?
  By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate. What they haven't seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes. There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank. There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren't among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.
• General Calls for More U.S. Troops to Avoid Afghan Failure
  By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER Published: September 20, 2009 WASHINGTON — The top military commander in Afghanistan warns in a confidential assessment of the war there that he needs additional troops within the next year or else the conflict “will likely result in failure.” The grim assessment is contained in a 66-page report that the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, submitted to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30, and which is now under review by President Obama and his top national security advisers. [AfPak]
• Cleaning Cairo, but Taking a Livelihood
  By MICHAEL SLACKMAN Published: May 24, 2009 CAIRO — The garbage collectors of Cairo live in neighborhoods spilling over with trash. The children play with the trash and in the trash, when they are not helping to sort or collect the trash. The women sit right in the trash, picking out rotten food with their hands and tossing it to their pigs, which live right there in the neighborhood with them.
  Living Among Trash It is a world of shocking odors and off-putting sights. But it is their world, the world of the zabaleen, hundreds of thousands of people who have made lives and a community by collecting Cairo’s trash and transforming it into a commodity.
  It is a family business. In each family, the oldest son gets to go to school. The other boys work, collecting trash while the women and the girls do the sorting.
• Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs
  By MICHAEL SLACKMAN Published: September 19, 2009 CAIRO — It is unlikely anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president. . “The problem is clear in the streets,” said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.” But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.
  Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city. But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to seeing someone collecting it from the door. For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then slaughtered and ate. Killing all the pigs, all at once, “was the stupidest thing they ever did,” Ms. Kamel said, adding, “This is just one more example of poorly informed decision makers.”
  “The state is troubled; as a result the system of decision making is disintegrating,” said Galal Amin, an economist, writer and social critic. “They are ill-considered decisions taken in a bit of a hurry, either because you’re trying to please the president or because you are a weak government that is anxious to please somebody.” Cairo’s streets have always been busy with children and littered with trash. Now, with the pigs gone, and the schools closed, they are even more so. “The Egyptians are really in a mess,” Mr. Amin said.
• Obama's Worldwide Star Power Finds Limits
  Skepticism Abroad Echoes Doubt at Home
  By Michael D. Shear and Howard Schneider Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, September 20, 2009 Eight months into his presidency, Barack Obama has become a global celebrity, far more popular abroad than he is at home and sometimes eclipsing foreign leaders among their own people. He has sought to use his renown to repair America's image in the world, extending an "open hand" in major speeches on trips to more than a dozen countries. Obama has restarted talks to limit nuclear weapons, begun engaging adversaries, helped orchestrate the world's response to economic collapse and reversed Bush-era policies that had angered allies and distanced the United States from the world community. But just as his domestic honeymoon has clearly ended, international events have demonstrated the limits of Obama's personal charm. As he takes the stage to address the United Nations for the first time Wednesday, Obama will face world leaders -- adversaries and allies alike -- whose rebukes of the new American president serve as reminders that the world's differences with the United States transcend who is in the White House. European nations have refused to send significant numbers of new troops to aid the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan. Few countries have agreed to accept detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Scottish officials ignored Obama's plea to keep the Lockerbie bomber in prison, and U.S. efforts to head off a coup in Honduras were ineffective. North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons, Iran may be doing so, and Middle East leaders have rebuffed Obama's efforts at peacemaking.
  "It is not just here that the administration is starting to be mugged by reality," Heller said. "They used nice words and tried to engage . . . In the meantime, the scorecard on North Korea is not much better. On [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez it is not much better. We don't see reforms pushed in Cuba."
  U.S. officials point to their success in getting Russia and China to back stiff new sanctions on North Korea as evidence of their success on the world stage. [Image] [Continuity]
• U.S. Missile Shield Plans: Retreat Or Advance?
  By Rick Rozoff URL of this article: Global Research, September 18, 2009 On September 17 the White House and the Pentagon, Barack Obama and Robert Gates, announced that after a sixty-day review of the project, the U.S. is going to abandon plans to station ten ground-based interceptor missiles in Poland and a forward-based X-band missile radar installation in the Czech Republic. The deployments were negotiated with both prospective host countries by the preceding George W. Bush administration under the guise of protecting the United States from alleged long-range missile attacks by what were described as rogue states: Iran and North Korea. Interceptor missiles in Poland would only be of use in protecting the U.S. if Iran possessed intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of being fired over the Arctic Ocean. No serious person has ever suggested Iran has such a capability or ever will. But Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin remarked last November that U.S. missiles in Poland could hit his nation's capital of Moscow in four minutes, as NATO warplanes that have patrolled the skies over the Baltic Sea since 2004 could reach Russia's second largest city, St. Petersburg, in five minutes. Leading Russian officials, political and military, have unanimously accused Washington of targeting their own nation and its strategic forces rather than Iran with its third position missile shield plans. Surveys have consistently demonstrated that a majority of Poles oppose the stationing of American missiles and the troops that would accompany them in their nation. Polls in the Czech Republic show over two-thirds opposition to the basing of interceptor missile radar in that country. Much of the world, then, was relieved to read the news that the U.S. was reversing course and renouncing designs to base missile shield facilities in Eastern Europe. What Washington has stated, though, is not so straightforward.
  Obama's and Gates' statements should satisfy that preference, one which prefigures a wider and permanent interceptor missile system that takes in most all of Europe and North America. If that scenario continues to materialize the relief and enthusiasm that greeted September 17th's news in many parts of the world may prove to be short-lived. [Missile defense] [Continuity] [Threat]
• Lockerbie bomber disputes conviction with new dossier
  Megrahi's 298-page rejoinder attempts to show judges were wrong to dismiss doubts over evidence
  Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 September 2009 17.42 BST Article history The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has released a dossier of legal papers which he claims are proof he was wrongly convicted of the worst terrorist attack on British soil. The documents, published online today by Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, show that serious doubts about the reliability of the key witness at his trial were raised independently by Scotland's official body, which investigates suspected miscarriages of justice. The dossier demonstrates that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) sent Megrahi's case back to the court of appeal in 2007, after deciding that the judges who convicted him had made a series of errors about the evidence of a Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci – the only witness to link the Libyan to the alleged plot. [Evidence] [Terrorism]
• Irving Kristol, Godfather of Conservatism, Dies
  By BARRY GEWEN Published: September 18, 2009 Irving Kristol, the political commentator who, as much as anyone, defined modern conservatism and helped revitalize the Republican Party in the late 1960s and early ’70s, setting the stage for the Reagan presidency and years of conservative dominance, died Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 89 and lived in Washington. His son, William Kristol, the commentator and editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, said the cause of death was complications of lung cancer. Mr. Kristol exerted an influence across generations, from William F. Buckley to the columnist David Brooks, through a variety of positions he held over a long career: executive vice president of Basic Books, contributor to The Wall Street Journal, professor of social thought at New York University, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was commonly known as the godfather of neoconservatism, even by those who were not entirely sure what the term meant.
  In the late 1930s he attended City College, the highly politicized, overwhelmingly Jewish New York institution where his indignation at the injustices of the Great Depression pushed him to the left, but not the far left. In the large, dingy school cafeteria were a number of alcoves where students could gather with like-minded colleagues. There was an athlete’s alcove, a Catholic alcove, a black alcove, an ROTC alcove. But the alcoves that later became famous were Numbers One and Two. Alcove One held leftists of various stripes; Alcove Two housed the Stalinists, including a young Julius Rosenberg. The Stalinists outnumbered the anti-Stalinists by as much as 10-1, but among the anti-Stalinists were Mr. Bell as well as the future sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and the future literary critic Irving Howe.
  Drafted into the Army with a number of Midwesterners who were street-tough and often anti-Semitic, he found himself shedding his youthful radical optimism. “I can’t build socialism with these people,” he concluded. “They’ll probably take it over and make a racket out of it.” In his opinion, his fellow GI’s were inclined to loot, rape and murder, and only Army discipline held them in check. It was a perception about human nature that would stay with him for the rest of his life, creating a tension with his alternative view that ordinary people were to be trusted more than intellectuals to do the right thing.
  After leaving Commentary, Mr. Kristol spent 10 months as executive director of the anti-Communist organization the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and in 1953 he removed to England to help found Encounter magazine with the poet Stephen Spender. They made an unlikely pair: Mr. Spender, tall, artsy, sophisticated; Mr. Kristol, short, brash, still rough around the edges. Together, they made Encounter one of the foremost highbrow magazines of its time. But another explosive controversy awaited Mr. Kristol. It was later revealed that the magazine had been receiving financial support from the C.I.A. [neocon]
• Our Own Cool Hand Luke
  By Charles Krauthammer Friday, April 29, 2005 Editor's Note (Sept. 18, 2009): We republish this piece today on the occasion of Irving Kristol's death. On Monday, April 25, the Public Interest passed away at the ripe old age -- for a quarterly journal of public policy -- of 40. It was a peaceful death, almost serene. Irving Kristol, co-founder and co-editor throughout its life, presided at the interment, a small dinner of past contributors and friends of the magazine. He presided the same way that he presided over the magazine's life: with self-deprecation, sobriety and no fanfare. Magazines are not meant to live forever, said Kristol. New generations bring new ideas, and besides, the very idea of a quarterly magazine may no longer have a place in a time of such ferociously fast information flow. It had been a good run. Kristol was being characteristically modest. For 40 years the Public Interest has been perhaps the finest scholarly magazine in America and, in relation to its small and exclusive circulation, surely the most influential. Heavy on empirical data, short on polemics and always lively, it challenged conventional wisdom on all the great domestic issues of our time: welfare, crime, dependency, automation, poverty, inequality, pornography and more. It gathered around it a remarkable constellation of writers. The cover of the first issue, reprinted in the current and last issue, features articles by Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert Solow (a future Nobel Prize winner in economics), Jacques Barzun, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer. By the third issue they had added Milton Friedman, James Q. Wilson and Peter Drucker. For 40 years, an all-star team of social thinkers tilted at windmills and, unlike most brainy journals, knocked them down. The magazine's increasingly neoconservative bent over the years quietly shaped, and then came to dominate, political discourse in America. [neocon]  
• Kristol, Irving
  Irving Kristol was a political commentator who, as much as anyone, defined modern conservatism and helped revitalize the Republican Party in the late 1960s and early '70s, setting the stage for the Reagan presidency and years of conservative dominance. He died on Sept. 18, 2009; he was 89.
  (list of links) [neocon]
• Irving Kristol's Intellectual Universe
  By Robert Kagan
  | September 18, 2009; 4:22 PM ET The passing of Irving Kristol is a very sad occasion. He was a truly great man, a great intellectual, and a great, patriotic servant to his country. He was also a unique inspiration, to me personally, and to untold thousands of other young people for whom he provided a model of the intellectual life well-lived. He was a deep and fierce thinker, who nevertheless delivered his thoughts in the most amiable fashion, without animus or bile. He was curious and invited others to be curious, to engage in serious dialogue on the important issues of the day. He was also a creator of communities and institutions. He occupied a unique space between the world of the mind and the world of action. Networks of thinkers, policy-makers, and politicians revolved around him -- and not because he thrust himself into their midst but because his mind and character attracted them to him. To go to work for him, as I did fresh out of college almost 30 years ago, was to enter a rich and exciting intellectual universe, filled with learning and integrity and a commitment to the well-being of society. I fear such a universe may no longer exist. But the memory of what Irving Kristol created is enough to warm the soul for a lifetime. [neocon]
• Bosnia's Lesson  
  By George F. Will Sunday, September 20, 2009 For 11 days in late August and early September in 1995, U.S. and NATO air power defended Bosnian Muslims, who were being attacked by Bosnian Serbs, who were supported by Serbian Serbs. This was merely the overture to something much more ambitious -- a grand concert of nation-building that began when the Dayton agreement reached in December of that year calmed the Balkan furies of revanchism and revenge, for a while. But agreements, like flowers, last while they last, and today's fraying of Bosnia is not the fault of Richard Holbrooke, whose skill and tenacity produced the Dayton peace. Or perhaps the Dayton pause. Holbrooke, whose diplomatic career began in Vietnam, continues in the Obama administration, where his portfolio is Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the president contemplates an ambitious mission in the former, as a prophylactic measure to stabilize the latter, he should read "The Death of Dayton: How to Stop Bosnia From Falling Apart," in Foreign Affairs. Political scientists Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western note that Bosnia was "once the poster child for international reconstruction efforts" and was considered "proof that under the right conditions the international community could successfully rebuild conflict-ridden countries." Now, however, Bosnia "stands on the brink of collapse." Between 1996 and 2007, Bosnia received $14 billion in international aid from 17 foreign governments, 18 U.N. agencies, 27 intergovernmental organizations and approximately 200 nongovernmental organizations, plus the presence of 60,000 troops from 36 countries. It was, McMahon and Western say, "arguably the most extensive and innovative democratization experiment in history." On a per capita basis, reconstruction of Bosnia -- population, fewer than 4 million -- "made the post-World War II rebuilding of Germany and Japan look modest." The $14 billion was $300 per Bosnian per year. Since 2002, international donors have pledged $65 per Afghan per year. Today, the centrifugal forces of the rival ethnic nationalisms of Bosnia's Muslims, Croats and Serbs have, McMahon and Western say, stalled reform and the economy -- unemployment is 27 percent; 25 percent of Bosnians live in poverty; and the public sector, with a ludicrous 160 ministers, swallows almost half the gross domestic product. International organizations, suffering Balkan fatigue and eager to declare "mission accomplished," are withdrawing, leaving Muslims isolated and vulnerable, and, as Bosnia is, McMahon and Western say, "drifting toward chaos." In July, William Hague, shadow foreign secretary for Britain's Conservative Party, which probably will be in power a year from now, endorsed the view that "Bosnia is on the edge again." McMahon and Western warn: "Unless checked, the current trends toward fragmentation will almost certainly lead to a resumption of violence." And history suggests that what happens is Bosnia does not stay in Bosnia. "With factions from all three ethnic groups now challenging the Dayton structure," McMahon and Western are emphatic: "First, a strong U.S. commitment is necessary." But this is not a propitious moment to propose that, with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq -- and North Korea, etc. -- on Washington's mind. So this question is apposite: If Bosnia -- situated in placid and prosperous Europe; recipient of abundant aid and attention from the United States, the European Union, NATO and the United Nations -- is so resistant to nation-building, what are sensible expectations for a similar project in remote, mountainous, tribal Afghanistan?  [US global strategy] [Takeover]    
• Afghanistan's 'Disposable Sons'(sic) NATO is helpless against the country's youth bulge.
  By Gunnar Heinsohn To understand why the U.S. and NATO—after eight years of hard fighting—face mounting losses in Afghanistan, we must look beyond the battlefield. Afghanistan has been at war or civil war since 1979. With a tiny population of 15 million, it fought a bloody struggle against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Treaty allies, which had a combined population of 450 million. While the Russians lost some 15,000 men, Afghanistan suffered more than a million dead. In the years that followed, Afghanistan was never at peace as new combatants, foreign and domestic, battled for control of the country. And yet as the U.S. and other NATO countries approach their ninth year of war in this forbidding land, Afghanistan today has many more men of military age than it did in 1978. How can a politically divided population of today 33 million provide enough fighters to resist the NATO countries, which have a combined population of nearly one billion? How can the Afghans challenge such military behemoths? Or, to put it differently, why do Russia and NATO win easily against mini-powers such as Georgia or Serbia, but find it hard to defeat mini-powers such as Chechnya or Afghanistan? What do the Afghans have that both the other mini-powers and the big powers are lacking? The answer is in the dynamics of a rapidly growing population. Decade after decade, the women of Afghanistan have been averaging three to four sons each. This means even if an Afghan family loses two or more boys on the battlefield—"disposable sons"—it still has one or two male offsprings at home to carry the family into the next generation. Russian soldiers in 1979, however, were likely to be only sons. Statistically, that is also true for American soldiers in 2009, and is true as well for the soldiers of Serbia and Georgia that have quickly shrinking and ageing populations. [Spin] [human rights]
• Die Linke party wins German votes by standing out from crowd
  With little to tell its rivals apart, the far left party is thriving and may transform the political landscape with its populist agenda
  Supporters of Die Linke hold an anti-nuclear protest near the Reichstag. It is the only party in parliament to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Against a backdrop of multicoloured pre-fabricated housing blocks, a tanning salon and a travel agent offering last-minute deals to the Baltic coast, Frank Spieth handed out red balloons, pens and advice in equal measure. The concerns of those who approached his campaign bus in Erfurt, the former communist east of Germany, were primarily local: a woman fighting for compensation from a hospital after contracting MRSA, another seeking a ramp access to her building, a man complaining about the state of windows in the city's schools, which he said needed replacing even before the fall of the wall 20 years ago. But in little more than a week, when Germans vote for a new parliament, Spieth and his allies are hoping to make a national impact. His anti-capitalist, pro-social justice Die Linke is striking a chord with an increasingly disenfranchised electorate, espousing causes – such as inequality, reunification issues and, crucially, the war in Afghanistan – that are finding a receptive audience in both east and west.
• Afghan Blast Raises New Doubts in Europe
  By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and RACHEL DONADIO Published: September 17, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — A powerful suicide bomb that killed six Italian soldiers here on Thursday prompted Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy to declare that his nation had begun planning to “bring our young men home as soon as possible.” Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in Brussels on Thursday, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “We are all anxious and hopeful to bring our boys home as soon as possible.” In Brussels, Mr. Berlusconi, a close American ally but in some political trouble at home, was careful to say that Italy would not unilaterally withdraw its 3,100 troops from Afghanistan, though he said he wanted the withdrawal to happen “as quickly as possible.” But it seemed the strongest expression yet from a European leader of the rising doubts about the Afghanistan mission among America’s allies. “We are all convinced that it would be best for everyone, whoever they are, to remove our conspicuous presence from Afghanistan quickly,” Mr. Berlusconi said. Senior elected officials in Germany and Britain have also expressed weariness with the mission as violence has increased and casualties have mounted. Meantime, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan dismissed complaints that the Aug. 20 presidential election had been marred by widespread fraud and ballot-stuffing, saying he was “surprised and rather shocked” that European Union election monitors had warned that 1.1 million of his 3.1 million votes were suspicious. Western governments, he said, should “respect the people’s vote.”  
• Unnerving Statistics
  By Catherine Rampell September 17, 2009, 4:57 pm    The average life span for African-Americans in Louisiana today (72.2 years) is shorter than that of Colombians, Vietnamese and Venezuelans. The average life span of an African-American in New Orleans is 69.3 years, nearly as low as life expectancy in North Korea.  [Human rights]  
• 'Old friends' Cuba, China strengthen ties
  By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers Why is the world's third-largest economy spending hundreds of millions of dollars in Cuba, an impoverished island with few natural resources and a history of making things difficult for foreign investors?
  Since becoming China's president, Hu Jintao has visited Cuba more times — twice — than any other Latin American country, including oil- and soybean-rich Brazil and Venezuela. It's a very close level of involvement for a country that hasn't been of much strategic importance since the Cold War ended. "We are old friends," said Wang Youming, an analyst at the China Institute of International Studies, a foreign ministry policy institute.
• Stopping WMD Proliferation Remains Key, U.S. Intel Plan Says
  Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009 Preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery technology remains a key objective of the U.S. intelligence community, according to a strategy document issued yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 13). (Sep. 16) - A man wearing protective gear passes through a decontamination shower during a 2005 WMD training exercise in California. Preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will remain a primary focus of the U.S. intelligence community, according to a new strategy paper (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images). The 2009 National Intelligence Strategy is intended to set priorities for the 16 U.S. intelligence services for the coming four years. It "lays out the strategic environment, sets priorities and objectives, and guides current and future decisions on budgets, acquisitions, and operations," according to a press release from the office of National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair. [Proliferation]
• Afghanistan and NATO
  Paul Rogers, August 2009
  The July briefing in this series sought to analyse the war in Afghanistan from a more general perspective of the original response to the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s “war on terror” that followed. It was argued that the predicament in Afghanistan stems from three separate mistakes over the 2001-05 period. · The response to 9/11, though understandable, was fundamentally wrong. Instead of engaging in war, including early regime termination in Afghanistan, the response should have seen 9/11 as an appalling example of mass trans-national criminality. The response should therefore have been to commence a rigorous process of bringing those behind the attacks to justice. By opting for war, a rump movement was elevated into an oppositional entity which could represent itself as defending a wider religious culture. · Regime termination in Iraq was a fundamental political error resulting in a 6+ year war, over 100,000 civilian deaths, 120,000 detentions, four million refugees and the sullying of the human rights reputation of the United States and others. · The diversion of attention from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002-05 enabled paramilitary groups to enhance what was previously a low-level insurgency now entering its ninth year. [US global strategy] [Global insurgency]
• Freed Iraqi shoe thrower tells of torture in jail
  'My flower to the occupier': Defiant journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi stands by protest against visiting George Bush
  Martin Chulov in Baghdad guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 September 2009 12.29 The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush has marked his release from jail by angrily defending his action and claiming he was tortured after his arrest. Muntazer al-Zaidi's supporters and family gave him a rapturous welcome, sacrificing six sheep to mark his release and hanging laurels of flowers around his neck. Wearing an Iraqi flag, Zaidi gave a detailed account of being tortured after his arrest, and vowed to reveal the names of senior officials in the Iraqi government and army who he said had been involved in his mistreatment. Appearing with a missing front tooth, he told of beatings, whippings and electric shocks after his arrest. He said he now feared for his life, and believed US intelligence agents would chase after him.
• DNI's Strategic Plan Outlines New Missions
  Counterintelligence, Cybersecurity Stressed
  By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, September 16, 2009 The top U.S. intelligence official said counterintelligence and cybersecurity would be given new emphasis under a four-year strategic plan he unveiled Tuesday. [Espionage] [Cyberwar]
• For 'Capitalism,' Moore Sells Short Politicians of All Denominations
  By Alec MacGillis Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, September 16, 2009 PITTSBURGH -- Just when it looked as if conservatives might be cornering the market on angry populism, along comes Michael Moore. But that doesn't mean Democrats in Washington should rest easy. "Capitalism: A Love Story," the filmmaker provocateur's latest documentary, which he screened at the AFL-CIO convention here for the film's American premiere Monday night, piles some blame on prominent Dems, too.
  The film also maintains a delicate ambivalence about President Obama, casting him as a change agent and depicting joyous images of his victory last November, but also implying that Wall Street had showered money on Obama's campaign in an effort to buy him. The question of whether Wall Street succeeded in doing so is left more or less unanswered. [Continuity]
• U.N. Panel Accuses Israel, Hamas of War Crimes
  By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, September 16, 2009 NEW YORK, Sept. 15 -- A U.N. human rights panel accused Israel and Palestinian militants on Tuesday of committing war crimes during the three-week war in the Gaza Strip last winter, but it reserved its harshest criticism for the Israeli military, saying that soldiers targeted civilians in an offensive that left as many as 1,400 people dead
  Additionally, the report charged that Hamas and its rival Palestinian faction, Fatah, have carried out political attacks, including torture and assassinations, against each other's members. [False balance] [Double standards] [UNUS]
• U.S. Internal Politics and its Military Interventions
  Immanuel Wallerstein
  Commentary No. 265, Sept. 15, 2009 In the last few weeks, there has been a marked increase of calls, coming from both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, for some kind of early "exit strategy" from Afghanistan. This is coming at the very moment that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are about to recommend formally to President Obama an increase in U.S. troop commitments there. Nothing is certain, but the general expectation is that Obama will agree to this.
  Why is it so difficult for the United States to extricate itself from military interventions it is so patently losing? Some left analysts, in the United States and elsewhere, say it is because the United States is an imperialist power and therefore engages in such military interventions in order to maintain its political and economic power in the world. This explanation is quite insufficient, for the simple reason that the United States has not won a single major military confrontation since 1945. As an imperialist power, it has shown great incompetence in achieving its goals. Consider the five wars in which the United States has committed large numbers of troops since 1945. The biggest - in terms of numbers of troops, economic costs, and political impact - was Vietnam. The United States lost the war. The other four were the Korean War, the first Gulf War, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the second invasion of Iraq. The Korean War and the first Gulf War were politically draws. The wars ended at the exact point that they began. The United States is clearly losing the war in Afghanistan. I believe that history will judge the second invasion of Iraq a draw as well. When the U.S. finally pulls out, it will be no stronger politically than when it went in - probably indeed the opposite. So what drives the United States to engage in such politically self-defeating actions, especially if we think of the United States as a hegemonic power trying to control the entire world to its advantage? To answer that, we have to look at the internal politics of the United States.
  The crucial thing to see is that almost no politician is ready to call for a serious reduction in U.S. military expenditures. This is why so many of them engage in the "bad war, good war" distinction. They justify reducing the use of military in the "bad" wars by suggesting that there are other, better uses for the military.
  The Democrats seem to be stuck with the label of being less macho than the Republicans. So it's very simple. When Obama makes his decisions on these matters, it's not enough for him to analyze whether or not troop escalation in Afghanistan makes any military or political sense. He worries above all that he himself, and more broadly the Democratic Party, may be labeled once again as the "sell-outs," the "doves," the ones who "lost" countries to the enemies - to the Soviet Union in the old days, to the "terrorists" today. [Imperialism] [Continuity]
• Israel eyeing Africa arms exports
  Published: Sept. 10, 2009 at 1:06 PM Nigeria has signed a $25 million deal with Israel Shipyards for the construction and delivery of two Shaldag patrol boats. The deal was revealed by Israeli media in the wake of a controversial nine-nation Africa trip -- including Nigeria -- by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister. [Arms sales]
• DPP seeks second retrial of men accused of airline bomb plot
  * Adian Jones * The Guardian, Saturday 12 September 2009 * Article history Three men found not guilty of the plot to blow up transatlantic airlines could face a retrial, after the director of public prosecutions said last night he was willing to break with convention and press for a conviction, despite two juries clearing the trio. [Human rights] [Legality]
• In Praise of Caution
  By Paul Kennedy
  Published: June 30, 2009 Oh Dear! In the midst of the unfolding crisis in Iran, a country possibly on the brink of a horrible civil war, President Obama is being attacked for being too “timid and passive” in not speaking out against Tehran’s forceful repression of opposition protests. Should not America, the recognized (and often self-proclaimed) leader of the Free World, be the first to castigate what is going on in Iran, where opposition politicians are being arrested, public protests suppressed by violence, and foreign reporters hustled out of the country? Why so cautious? Why the indecision by the Land of the Free, America?
  This belief that the United States should always lead the global cavalry charge into interventions in far-off places is both delusional and a recipe for disaster. It rests upon a constant assumption of worst-case scenarios — Iran nukes Israel, North Korea nukes Japan, the Taliban blow up Yankee Stadium. It is impossible to organize civil society permanently around impending-disaster hypotheses; we are not in the midst of the Battle of Britain, with Nazi barges being assembled on the other side of the English Channel. [US global strategy] [Imperialism] [Threat]
• Their martyrs, our heroes
  Armies and guerrilla movements both deploy suicide missions, and both sides believe in a shared culture of heroic sacrifice. The difference between a ‘just war’ and terrorist targeting of civilians has been blurred for a long time by John Feffer The actor Will Smith is no one’s image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wisecracking, ironic demeanour. And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice. Wait a second: surely that wasn’t a suicide bombing. Will Smith wasn’t reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn’t sporting one of those rising sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their suicide missions. He wasn’t playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he’s one of us, isn’t he? As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. [Double standards]
• Our One-Party Democracy
  By Thomas L. Friedman Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down. Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions. [Democracy] [Decline]
• Crux of Afghan Debate: Will More Troops Curb Terror?
  September 8, 2009 News Analysis By ERIC SCHMITT and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — Does the United States need a large and growing ground force in Afghanistan to prevent another major terrorist attack on American soil? In deploying 68,000 American troops there by year’s end, President Obama has called Afghanistan “a war of necessity” to prevent the Taliban from recreating for Al Qaeda the sanctuary that it had in the 1990s. But nearly eight years after the American invasion drove Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan, the political support for military action that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has faded. A war that started as a swift counterattack against those responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans, a growing number of critics say, is in danger of becoming a quagmire with a muddled mission.
• Time to Get Out of Afghanistan
  By George F. Will Tuesday, September 1, 2009 U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable. So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters. Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen's, is squandered.
• Afghanistan by the Numbers Measuring a War Gone to Hell
  By Tom Engelhardt Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at least three administrations -- Ronald Reagan's, George W. Bush's, and now Barack Obama's -- drew the U.S. "defense" perimeter at the Hindu Kush; that is, in the rugged, mountainous lands of Afghanistan. Put another way, while Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we've been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.
• Rethinking the model for offshoring services
  BPO providers often rely on a limited number of geographic locations, exposing themselves to unnecessary risk. They can mitigate these risks in the same way that financial managers do—by diversifying their holdings. SEPTEMBER 2009 • Matthias Daub, Barnik Maitra, and Tor Mesøy Source: Business Technology Office Our research finds that more that 70 percent of offshore delivery centers, including both wholly owned captive operations as well as vendors, narrow their global operations to just three locations, often situated in only two countries (most frequently India, China or the Philippines). This reliance on a limited number of geographic regions—historically driven by the availability of highly skilled, low-cost labor in these areas—is exposing providers to a variety of location-specific risks. These include abrupt currency and wage fluctuations, intense competition for employees, and regulatory limits. While a narrow geographic concentration may result in lower labor costs at the outset, the overall risks are higher, according to our research. The same is true on a microlevel: our data show that when a delivery center in a large Indian city grows beyond 3,000 employees, costs spiral and performance begins to deteriorate. [Offshoring]
• Revisiting Afghanistan: A Conversation with Najibullah
  Alan Brody Those of us serving with the United Nations in Afghanistan first heard the word “Taliban” around the middle of 1994. The group, headed by a shadowy, one-eyed “Mullah Umar,” appeared mysteriously on the scene in Kandahar, southeast Afghanistan’s major town.
  It will be some years before the archives of the US Government are opened, but my guess is that the CIA and the US State Department were at least informed, if not consulted, regarding Pakistan ISI plans to create this new force called the Taliban.
  Kabul University, the place where a modernizing Afghanistan sought to train its next generation of leadership, became a center of conflict in the 1960s and 70s, between the Islamists and another faction of the faculty and students of that university who turned to Communism as their modernizing ideology. The United States inadvertently stepped into the middle of this conflict in the 1980s, when it naively saw Islamism as an instrument that could be used against the Soviet Union in the international struggle to contain Communism. [imperialism] [Islam]
• What’s Different About the Obama Foreign Policy?
  The continuities with Bush are striking. But what happens when diplomacy fails?
  By Eliot Cohen President Barack Obama has put some miles on Air Force One. He and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have made major foreign policy speeches. The national security team is in place. It’s time to make a preliminary judgment about Mr. Obama and the world. Just how different is this administration’s foreign policy from its predecessor? And will such departures where they exist make much difference? Set aside the administration’s conceit of “smart power,” since only fools (read: Team Obama’s predecessors) would prefer stupid power. Continuity is the dominant note.
  Multinational diplomacy? Continuity there too, judging by the stacks of ineffective U.N. resolutions on North Korea and Iran. [US Global strategy] [Continuity]
• German Lawmakers Question Involvement in Afghan Airstrike
  By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, September 8, 2009; 9:13 AM BERLIN, Sept. 7 -- German lawmakers demanded explanations Monday for how and why their soldiers in Afghanistan, normally restricted to peacekeeping duties, triggered a NATO airstrike that killed approximately 100 people. Political fallout from the attack jolted Germany's election campaign just weeks before the vote and threatened to sour relations with the United States.
  The government approved sending troops to Afghanistan as part of a peacekeeping operation but officially says it is not involved in a war. The German constitution, adopted after the defeat of the Nazis, prohibits the country from going to war unless it or one of its allies is directly attacked by another state. [Legality]
• British Court Convicts Three in Plot to Blow Up Airliners
  By JOHN F. BURNS Published: September 7, 2009 LONDON — After two trials and the largest counterterrorist investigation in Britain’s history, three men were found guilty in a London court on Monday of a plot to bomb at least seven trans-Atlantic airliners on a single day with liquid explosives smuggled aboard in soft-drink bottles and detonated by devices powered with AA batteries.
  Especially after lengthy trial last year had failed to reach verdicts on the airliner-bombing charges laid against the defendants, the stakes in the second trial for the main agencies involved in uncovering the London plot — including Scotland Yard, Britain’s secret intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6, as well as the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I, among American agencies involved — were high.
  The jury in the second trial failed to reach a verdict on the charge of conspiracy to murder in the case of Mr. Savant, Mr. Khan and Mr. Zaman. It acquitted Mr. Stewart-Whyte, a student who was said by defense counsel at the trial to have converted to Islam from Christianity only four months before his arrest. The Crown Prosecution Service, responsible for laying charges in criminal cases, said after the verdicts that it would review the jury’s failure to reach verdicts in the three cases of conspiracy to commit murder, and decide whether to seek a third trial in the case.
• The Afghanistan Abyss
  By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF September 6, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.
  The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center. “We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said. Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.
  Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.
• Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai, Officials Assert
  By CARLOTTA GALL and DEXTER FILKINS September 7, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here. The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan.
• President Chavez arrives in Tehran
  Tehran, Sep 5, IRNA – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in the fourth leg of his tour to six countries arrived in Tehran on Saturday morning. President Chavez, who is accompanied by a high ranking politico-economic delegation, was received at airport by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Industries and Mines Minister Ali Akbar Mehrabian. The Venezuelan president started his tour by visiting Libya, then Algeria and Syria. This is the seventh time that President Chavez visits Iran. He will visit Belarus and Russia at the end of his tour.
• At some Afghan polling places, Karzai got every vote
  By Hal Bernton | McClatchy Newspapers KABUL, Afghanistan — Detailed polling records released by an Afghanistan election commission reveal numerous polling places in Kandahar Province where all the votes were delivered to a single candidate — incumbent President Hamid Karzai. The records bolster the case of ballot-box stuffing during the Aug. 20 election to pick a new president to lead Afghanistan, which is now struggling against an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency. In Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, the results from 66 polling sites have been released. In nine of them, 100 percent of the votes went to Karzai. Also in Kandahar Province, an area that was a target of insurgent attacks to try to suppress the vote, there were six polling places that had more than 100 percent of the estimated registered voters reportedly turn out. At one location, the turn out was nearly a third high than the number of voters registered.
• Disappearance of Arctic ice opens up new era of shipping
  By Elizabeth Bluemink | Anchorage Daily News ANCHORAGE — Two rare episodes last week spotlight the new world -- and its potential and perils -- that is opening up the Arctic seas as global warming slowly erodes the ice cap.
  The second episode reflects the industrial potential of the Arctic. A couple of German cargo ships escorted by a Russian icebreaker steamed through the Bering Strait last weekend on a journey from Japan to Siberia, and then on to Europe. They are carrying power plant equipment needed in a Siberian city. It's the first time in more than a decade that Russia has escorted cargo ships on the trade route. Cargo ships typically travel between Asia and Europe via the Suez Canal in Egypt.
  Either way, some international shippers are finding the Arctic irresistible. By avoiding Suez, the ongoing Arctic voyage by the two German cargo vessels -- the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight -- will save about 3,300 nautical miles and 400 tons of fuel, and cut the trip length from 32 to 23 days, said Niels Stoleberg, president of Beluga Group, which owns the ships. [Climate change] [IM]
• Commentary: Afghanistan isn't worth one more American life
  By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers The debate over our creeping military mission in distant Afghanistan grows ever hotter, and before we march even deeper into trouble, perhaps it’s time to dig out the old Powell Doctrine and answer the eight questions it poses. Gen. Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said these questions all must be answered with a loud YES before the United States takes military action. He listed his questions in the 1990 run-up to the Persian Gulf War, drawing heavily on the Weinberger Doctrine that was laid down by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the debate over America's ends and means in Lebanon.
• U.S. Share of Worldwide Arms Market Grows
  By THOM SHANKER Published: September 6, 2009 WASHINGTON — Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world’s leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study. The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before. [Arms sales]
• Congressional Research Service Reports (CRS) and Issue Briefs
  Newest CRS Reports and Issue Briefs: Updated September 3, 2009
• End these bogus parallels. We are fighting no Nazis now
  Any attempt to equate the war in Afghanistan with the great conflicts of the 20th century is a gross misuse of history
  o Simon Jenkins o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 September 2009 20.30 BST We are awash in history. This week the Poles again climb on stage, as they do each time anniversary journalism returns to the second world war. It is 70 years since German ships bombarded the fort of Gdansk, then known as the free city of Danzig, while Polish lancers turned their horses to face Hitler's Panzers in the most romantic and idiotic act of suicide of modern war. Last month we heard the fell tones of Chamberlain announcing: "We are at war with Germany." Next spring we shall be back in Dunkirk.
  Parallels with the past are always dangerous, whether in the hands of experts or charlatans
  Vietnam is rich in lessons that seem to have been ignored by both US and British governments in Afghanistan, but they are not precise parallels. The Russians in Afghanistan were largely defeated by Taliban armed by the CIA with Stinger missiles. If the Taliban had Stingers today, the American occupation would soon be over.
• Defence firms make plea for more spending
  UK risks losing global influence if future orders are scaled back, industry bosses warn
  * Tim Webb * guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 September 2009 19.22 BST
  Mike Turner, the chairman of support services firm Babcock International and former boss of BAE Systems, said that the "big stick" of military power needed to back up "the soft words" of diplomacy for tBritain to retain its influence around the world. "Without a big stick or military capability I believe you would not be listened to," he told the Guardian.
  As part of the PR offensive, the Defence Industries Council published a report it had commissioned by Oxford Economics outlining the industry's economic value to the UK. The industry employs 300,000 people directly and indirectly and earns £5bn of export sales annually, according to the report. Any defence cuts "will immediately affect" the small and medium-sized businesses that defence firms contract, Godden warned. The report also claimed that every £100m invested in the defence industry would create 1,885 jobs. Defence was a wealth creator, the report argues, which the UK could ill afford to lose. "We would all love to spend more money on schools and hospitals," Turner said. "But where is the wealth creation going to come from to do that? (sic)" [Military-industrial complex] [Spin]
• The economic case for investing in the UK defence industry
  Final Report August 2009 Oxford Economics 121, St Aldates, Oxford, OX1 1HB ?: 01865 268900, ?: 01865 268904 ?: www.oxfordeconomics.com www.geoeconomics.com September 2009 [Military-industrial complex] [Spin] [Militarisation]
• The Afghan dilemma
  The debate in Washington about the Barack Obama administration's future strategy in Afghanistan is intensifying. The imminent publication of General Stanley McChrystal's report on the progress of the war is being signalled by multiple leaks which suggest its key elements: In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here Paul Rogers's books include Why We're Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) - an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 era and why a new security paradigm is needed. A third edition of his Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009) is forthcoming * The war is not going well; increased commitments and changes in strategy are needed to prevent things getting even worse
• AP NewsBreak: Iran says US nuke documents 'forged'
  By WILLIAM J. KOLE (AP) – 56 minutes ago VIENNA — Iran accused the U.S. on Friday of using "forged documents" and relying on subterfuge to build its case that Tehran is trying to build a nuclear weapon, according to a confidential letter obtained by The Associated Press. The eight-page letter — written by Iran's chief envoy to the U.N. nuclear agency in Vienna — denounces Washington's allegations against the Islamic Republic as "fabricated, baseless and false." It also lashes out at Britain and France for "ill will and political motivation" in their dealings on Iran. Iranian envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh sent the letter to Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose 35-nation board will take a hard new look at Iran's nuclear program next week. [Disinformation]
• French winemakers fear climate change
  By Esther Bintliff in Condrieu, France Published: September 4 2009 17:19 | Last updated: September 4 2009 18:36 Christine Vernay was on holiday in Missouri when she got the call. It was August 12 2003 and the French vineyard owner was not due to return home for 10 days; the harvest on her Rhône valley estate would begin in late September. But then a friend from the same village, Condrieu, called her husband’s mobile phone. “The grapes have ripened early. You need to come home now,” he said. France was sweltering in the most extreme heat wave on record. Christine and her husband, Paul Ansellem, caught the first flight back but by the time they reached the vineyards most of the grapes in their 18 hectare estate had shrivelled on the vine. EDITOR’S CHOICE Lex: The wine market - Sep-04 In depth: Climate change - Feb-16 Instead of rows of plump, light golden fruit, the couple found shrunken berries, burnt brown by the sun. [Wine] [IM] [Green] [Climate change]
• How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
  By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: September 2, 2009
  I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making. Last year, everything came apart. [Crisis]
• Think Again: Realism
  BY PAUL WOLFOWITZ
  Amid war and recession, Americans are in a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact mood. But that, says a leading architect of George W. Bush's foreign policy, is no reason to adopt a misguided doctrine. AUGUST 24, 2009 "We're All Realists Now." No. Pragmatists maybe, but not "realists." Barack Obama's election as U.S. president delighted many people, especially the self-described foreign-policy "realists" who accused his predecessor, George W. Bush, of denying reality in favor of dangerous idealism. Obama has praised the realpolitik of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. And a White House official recently told the Wall Street Journal, "[Obama] has really kind of clicked with that old-school, end-of-the-Cold-War wise-men generation." The elder Bush's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, called Obama's election a rejection of the younger Bush "in favor of realism." Is Paul Wolfowitz for Real? Four critics take on his ideas about realism and Barack Obama. Of course foreign policy should be grounded in reality. Americans agree that foreign-policy goals should be achievable -- that the United States should match its ends with its means. What sensible person could argue with that? That is simply pragmatism. But "realism" as a doctrine (I'll spare you the quote marks henceforth) goes much further: In the words of one leading realist, the principal purpose of U.S. foreign policy should be "to manage relations between states" rather than "alter the nature of states." [US global strategy] [Hardliners]
• Growing Poverty and Despair in America
  By Stephen Lendman Global Research, August 26, 2009 In 1962, Michael Harrington's "The Other America" exposed the nation's dark underside enough for John Kennedy to ask his Council of Economic Advisor chairman, Walter Heller, to look into the problem and for Lyndon Johnson to say (on January 8, 1964) that his administration "today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America." In fact, it was little more than a skirmish that fell way short of addressing the real problem in the world's richest nation. Today it's even greater and increasing exponentially under a president who, unlike Johnson, declared war on the poor and disadvantaged to favor privilege over growing needs and essential social change.
• Afghan election negated extremism, improved security: Iran deputy FM
  ISTANBUL, Aug. 24 (MNA) – Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhondzadeh stated on Monday that the Afghan presidential election is very important for the country’s stability. “Holding presidential election in Afghanistan is an important step in safeguarding its stability and security”, he stated during a meeting of the Friends of Democratic Pakistan in Istanbul, Turkey. Congratulating Afghans for successfully holding the presidential election, Akhondzadeh expressed Iran’s readiness to support Afghanistan and cooperate with the new president. The deputy foreign minister said the election negated extremism and improved security situation and economic development of the country. Representatives from 20 countries and 6 international organizations are participating in the Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FODP) meeting in Istanbul. Many countries such as Canada, China, Italy, England and some Asian countries including Saudi Arabia and South Korea have attended the gathering.
• The Afghanistan War: Origins and Consequences
  Paul Rogers, July 2009
  During the course of late June and through much of July, US and British troops engaged in major combat operations in southern Afghanistan, principally in Helmand Province. There was substantial fighting, with British troops taking some of the heaviest casualties of the eight-year war. Although there were still frequent instances of violence in Iraq, including major suicide bomb attacks, it was evident that the focus of western military operations had moved from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• Tehran welcomes ECO train
  TEHRAN, Aug. 23 (MNA) – The first Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) freight train which originated from Pakistan and destined for Turkey, arrived in Tehran on Sunday. The Iranian Roads and Transportation Minister Hamid Behbahani, ECO Secretary General Khurshid Anwar, and ECO member countries’ ambassadors to Tehran attended the welcoming ceremony of the ECO train, Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN) reported. The Islamabad-Tehran-Istanbul train left Islamabad’s Margala Station on August 14 en route to Istanbul’s Haydarpashsa Station via Tehran. According to Press TV, the freight train is supposed to cover a 6,500-kilometer journey in 15 days. It is estimated that 1,924 kilometers of the rail link passes through Pakistan, 2,570 kilometers through Iran and 2,006 kilometers through Turkey.
  The Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) is an intergovernmental regional organization established in 1985 by Iran, Pakistan and Turkey for the purpose of promoting economic, technical and cultural cooperation among the member states. It provides a platform to discuss ways to improve development and promote trade, and investment opportunities.
• Mercantilism Reconsidered
  [Column] Dani Rodrik, Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy Harvard Kennedy School » Dani Rodrik. A businessman walks into a government minister’s office and says he needs help. What should the minister do? Invite him in for a cup of coffee and ask how the government can be of help? Or throw him out, on the principle that government should not be handing out favors to business? This question constitutes a Rorschach test for policymakers and economists. On one side are free-market enthusiasts and neo-classical economists, who believe in a stark separation between state and business. In their view, the government’s role is to establish clear rules and regulations and then let businesses sink or swim on their own. Public officials should hold private interests at arm’s length and never cozy up to them. It is consumers, not producers, who are king. [Protectionism]
• Supreme Leader: Iran-Syria unity, manifestation of regional resistance
  Tehran, Aug 19, IRNA – Supreme Leader of Islamic Revolution said here Wednesday evening in a meeting with visiting Syrian president, “Unity between Iran and Syria is manifestation of regional resistance.” Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei added in his meeting with President Bashar al-Assad and his accompanying delegation that the current conditions in the Middle East are in favor of the resistance force and to the loss of the United States and its allies, emphasizing, “The resistance front should take advantage of this great opportunity and strengthen the foundations of internal cooperation more than ever before.” His eminence further stressed the existence of unity between Tehran and Damascus, adding, “The fruit of this unity and its effects on developments in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, as well as the entire region, are quite evident.”
• Necessity, Choice, and Common Sense
  A Policy for a Bewildering World
  Leslie H. Gelb
  May/June 2009 Summary -- The United States is declining as a nation and a world power. This is a serious yet reversible situation, so long as Americans are clear-eyed about the causes and courageous about implementing the cures, including a return to pragmatic problem solving. LESLIE H. GELB is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted from Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins, 2009). Copyright © by Leslie H. Gelb. Printed by arrangement with the author and the publisher. The United States is declining as a nation and a world power, with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event. Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious. A few say it is serious and hopeless. I count myself among those who think it is most serious yet reversible, if Americans are clear-eyed about the causes and courageous about implementing the cures. The United States is in danger of becoming merely first among major powers and heading to a level somewhere between its current still-exalted position and that of China today. This would be bad news for both the United States and the world [Decline]
• Get smart
  Summary -- Leslie Gelb's skepticism of "smart power" is misguided; it is only by combining the strategies of both hard and soft power that the United States can achieve its ends. JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and the author of The Powers to Lead. In her confirmation hearings, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. . . . We must use what has been called 'smart power,' the full range of tools at our disposal." Since then, editorial pages and blogs have been full of references to "smart power." But what does it mean? "Smart power" is a term I developed in 2003 to counter the misperception that soft power alone can produce effective foreign policy. Power is one's ability to affect the behavior of others to get what one wants. There are three basic ways to do this: coercion, payment, and attraction. Hard power is the use of coercion and payment. Soft power is the ability to obtain preferred outcomes through attraction. If a state can set the agenda for others or shape their preferences, it can save a lot on carrots and sticks. But rarely can it totally replace either. Thus the need for smart strategies that combine the tools of both hard and soft power. [Decline] [Smartpower][US global strategy]
• Afghanistan: where do we go from here?
  Last week, the tally of British troops killed in Afghanistan passed 200. With no end in sight to the conflict, the Government has yet to face up to the enormity of the challenge Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent Published: 7:00AM BST 23 Aug 2009 Private Richard "Hunty" Hunt probably assumed that he was in a safer position than most soldiers fighting in southern Afghanistan.
  it is a grim milestone which, at the very least, provides an opportunity to raise questions over the nature of the conflict – the most obvious of which is: "Why are we there?" This is an area where, within the Government, confusion is rife – never a good basis for any campaign. Military commanders need unambiguous orders: "Go there, do this, and leave." Gordon Brown insists our forces are fighting and dying in Helmand to prevent terrorist attacks on British streets. According to the Prime Minister, there is a "chain of terror" stretching from Britain to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet the only terrorist attack to emerge from Afghanistan was 9/11.
  The Taliban is able to plant bombs with apparent impunity because, in effect, it has freedom of movement – a luxury afforded by the shortage of British troops. [Strategic incoherence]
• The risk of a double-dip recession is rising
  By Nouriel Roubini
  Published: August 23 2009 18:55 | Last updated: August 23 2009 18:55 T? he global economy is starting to bottom out from the worst recession and financial crisis since the Great Depression. In the fourth quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009 the rate at which most advanced economies were contracting was similar to the gross domestic product free-fall in the early stage of the Depression. Then, late last year, policymakers who had been behind the curve finally started to use most of the weapons in their arsenal. That effort worked and the free-fall of economic activity eased. There are three open questions now on the outlook. When will the global recession be over? What will be the shape of the economic recovery? Are there risks of a relapse?
  In summary, the recovery is likely to be anaemic and below trend in advanced economies and there is a big risk of a double-dip recession.
• Afghanistan’s election: a first verdict
  Martine van Bijlert and Alex Strick van Linschoten , 24 - 08 - 2009 The election in a poor, fragmented and war-torn country was never going to be easy. But modest hopes of a turning-point persisted. Two reports from the voting frontline offer a preliminary assessment - and a challenge to the international community. 24 - 08 - 2009
  Martine van Bijlert: How much to believe? The foreign journalists who arrived to report on the Afghan elections are leaving, and the official observers are formulating their agreed conclusions (some irregularities, problems with the voter registration). But the achievement of the network of governors, district governors, police chiefs and local commanders mobilised in the run-up to the elections - which had seemed, some campaigning assistance apart, to play only a minor role in the process - is already becoming plain. Martine van Bijlert is co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. She worked as political adviser to the European Union's special representative for Afghanistan (2004-08) and as an independent adviser with a specific focus on the realities involved in state building efforts in (post-) conflict societies. There are consistent and credible reports from the south and the southeast that tell a clear story: massive and blatant ballot-stuffing; the removal or invalidation of votes for rival candidates; complete overhaul of ballot-boxes; intimidation of witnesses and Independent Election Commission (IEC) staff; systematic removal of the publicly displayed tally-sheets. Local IEC representatives are informally releasing figures that bear no relationship to observations on the ground and that are beyond the absurd. The figures provided by Toryalai Ghaznawi from the Kandahar IEC suggest a voter turnout of 60% in his province (an amazing 480,000 voters), with a particularly high turnout in Spin Boldak. But observations on the ground put voter turnout in Kandahar at an estimated 5%-15%, which is much more plausible. Moreover, everybody who has been following the elections in the south knows what has happened in Spin Boldak and who was involved.
  Alex Strick van Linschoten: A view from Kandahar The rockets, starting at 6.30am local time, were probably responsible for some people deciding not to go out and vote, but I don't think it had an overwhelming effect in this respect. Most people had decided either way a long time ago, and in any case apathy was particularly intense for this election.
• Malaysian State to Cane Woman After Ramadan
  By Razak Ahmad and Royce Cheah Reuters Monday, August 24, 2009; 5:00 AM SUNGAI SIPUT, Malaysia - Religious authorities in Malaysia postponed on Monday the caning of a Muslim woman convicted of drinking alcohol until after the holy month of Ramadan. The planned caning of 32-year-old mother of two Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno has drawn criticism from rights groups concerned by the rise of Islamic laws in this traditionally moderate country, even though Kartika had accepted the punishment.
  Kartika, who has admitted that she drank beer at a hotel in Pahang in December 2007, said that she still accepted the sentence but wanted to be treated fairly. [Islam] [Human rights]
• Outlook: Inside Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy Revolution
  David Rothkopf, author and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was online Monday, Aug. 24, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss his Outlook article titled "Inside Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy Revolution." Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making" and "Running the World: The Inside Story of the NSC and the Architects of American Power."
  New York, N.Y.: What is your reaction to the North Korean government offering to discuss matters with the South Korean government? What role would you advise our State Department to take in this situation? David Rothkopf: I am always skeptical of the North Koreans. In the past couple decades they have had cycles of warming and cooling. In the end, they have an unsustainable situation there economically and gradually they will have to embrace some change. The best conduit for that change is South Korea with gentle nudging from China. We have a role to play...but this is one of those situations where we have to be careful not to bigfoot the process. Others can lead here too...and we can step in when needed. [US NK policy] [Bizarre]
• It's 3 a.m. Do You Know Where Hillary Clinton Is?
  She's not answering those crisis calls at the White House. But she's quietly revolutionizing American foreign policy.
  By David Rothkopf Sunday, August 23, 2009 When it comes to Hillary Rodham Clinton, we're missing the forest for the pantsuits. Clinton is not the first celebrity to become the nation's top diplomat -- that honor goes to her most distant predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, who by the time he took office was one of the most famous and gossiped-about men in America -- but she may be the biggest. And during her first seven months in office, the former first lady, erstwhile presidential candidate and eternal lightning rod has drawn more attention for her moods, looks, outtakes and (of course) relationship with her husband than for, well, her work revamping the nation's foreign policy.
  So far, according to multiple high-level officials at State and the White House, the two seem aligned in their views. In addition, they are gradually defining complementary roles. Obama has assumed the role of principal spokesperson on foreign policy, as international audiences welcome his new and improved American brand. Clinton thus far has echoed his points but has also delivered tougher ones. Whether on a missile shield against Iran or North Korean saber-rattling, the continued imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma or rape and corruption in Congo, the secretary of state has spoken bluntly on the world stage -- even if it triggered snide comments from North Korea. [US global strategy] [US NK policy] [Spin] [Continuity]

• Showdown with Russia and China: U.S. Advances First Strike Global Missile Shield System
  by Rick Rozoff
  . Global Research, August 19, 2009 Disarmament advocates and top Russian officials alike have warned for years that the missile interceptor and related space war programs are not, as claimed by the Pentagon and its military allies in Europe and the Asia Pacific, aimed at so-called rogue states but have a far more dangerous purpose. In June Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao announced that their two nations were drafting a joint treaty to ban the deployment of weapons in outer space and to present it to the United Nations General Assembly. Regarding the true intent of missile interceptor plans both on earth and in space, a recent news item detailed that "The White House says the plan is aimed at countering what it terms as 'threats' from countries such as Iran, which has no existing or planned missiles which can reach the US. The Kremlin, meanwhile, believes that the real aim of the system is to neutralize Russia's nuclear deterrent and therefore sees it as a threat to Russia's national security." [7]
  Deploying short-, medium- and long-range interceptor missile batteries, sophisticated and mobile missile radar stations, long-range super-stealth nuclear bombers, Aegis-class destroyers equipped to sail the world's seas to hunt down and neutralize conventional and nuclear missiles, and surveillance satellites and weapons in space is hardly designed to target non-existent intercontinental ballistic missile threats from Iran or Syria, or even from North Korea, but to blackmail Russia and China and prepare the groundwork for surviving and "triumphing" in a first strike nuclear war.
  In 2008 the U.S. also substantially boosted its interceptor plans for Japan and it was announced that "Japan and the United States are erecting the world's most complex ballistic missile defense shield, a project that is changing the security balance in Asia and has deep implications for Washington's efforts to pursue a similar strategy in Europe...." [27] The Pentagon and the Japanese military are working on an early warning system "of the kind provided by the Joint Tactical Ground Station, or JTAG [which the U.S. also operates in Germany, Qatar and South Korea], and another state-of-the-art X-band radar station recently deployed" to Japan. [28] The preceding month, December of 2007, Japan became the first nation after the U.S. to shoot a missile out of the air with an Aegis-linked Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) in a test off Hawaii.
  A change in the American White House, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the mounting costs in both dollars and lives of the war in Afghanistan have not slowed down the U.S.'s plans for military domination of the planet and in outer space; nor have they lessened the threat of an unprecedented catastrophe resulting from the designs by the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia to establish an impenetrable international missile shield that would leave two of the world's nuclear powers, Russia and China, targets for coercion and first strike conventional and nuclear attacks. [US military] [Threat] [Missile defense] [Continuity]
• Christine Grahame: Al-Megrahi is home. And he is innocent
  The release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber was long overdue, for the case against him was politically driven Sunday, 23 August 2009
  I became involved with Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi quite by accident. Like many people I had been suffering from Lockerbie fatigue. For me, and for you, I suppose, life had moved on from that horrendous crime over 20 years ago and the imprisonment of the Libyan murderer. That was that. At least it was, until I agreed, by chance, to sponsor the showing of a Dutch documentary about the Lockerbie bombing at Parliament. I invited all MSPs and researchers, and indeed the press corps, to see this film. One MSP and one member of the press came, and I really only saw it because I felt obliged to attend. But that film changed my perspective. From that casual moment, and from much that I have learned since, I am convinced not only that Megrahi was not found guilty "beyond reasonable doubt", the test in Scot's law, but that he is an innocent man. [Terrorism] [Evidence][Camouflage]
• The legacy of Lockerbie: A good week for conspiracy theorists
  What really drove the release of 'bomber' Abdelbaset al-Megrahi? Compassion – or politics and trade deals? Was he even guilty? David Randall investigates Sunday, 23 August 2009
  It's a very long time since conspiracy theorists had a week as good as this one. The saga of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was already murky enough, but now, to the doubts about the evidence against him, the alleged multi-million payouts to the prime prosecution witness, and the far-from-told story of US and British intelligence involvement, we can add suggestions of secret talks and trade deals, and the possibility that his release was not done in the name of compassionate justice, but that of oil, financial services and hotel-building.
  The reaction from relatives of US victims was unequivocal. Stan Maslowski of New Jersey, whose daughter Diane died on the flight, said: "This shows a terrorist can get away with murder." British families, meanwhile, were mainly supportive of Mr MacAskill. Martin Cadman, whose son Bill died in the bombing, said: "The trial was a farce. I think he was innocent." Anyone puzzled by this difference need look no further than the coverage of the case against Megrahi down the years. In Britain, doubts about the case against him have been long, and widely, aired. In the US, this has not been so. [Media] [Terrorism] [Evidence][Camouflage]
• Marines Fight Taliban With Little Aid From Afghans
  By Richard A. Oppel Jr. Published: August 22, 2009 KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan — American Marines secured this desolate village in southern Afghanistan nearly two months ago, and last week they were fortifying bases, on duty at checkpoints and patrolling in full body armor in 120-degree heat. Despite those efforts, only a few hundred Afghans were persuaded to come out here and vote for president on Thursday.
• A Brief History of Photo Fakery
  [Media]
• Global War and Dying Democracy: The Revolution of the Elites
  Global Power and Global Government: Part 5 By Andrew Gavin Marshall Global Research, August 19, 2009 This article is the 5th and final part in the series, "Global Power and Global Government," published by Global Research. Part 1: Global Power and Global Government: Evolution and Revolution of the Central Banking System Part 2: Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order Part 3: Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve Part 4: Forging a “New World Order” Under a One World Government
  Transnational Totalitarianism Global trends in political economy suggest that “democracy” as we know it, is a fading concept, where even Western industrialized nations are retreating from the system. Arguably, through party politics and financial-corporate interests, democracy is something of a façade as it is. However, we are entering into an era in which even the institutions and image of democracy are in retreat, and the slide into totalitarianism seems inevitable. [Globalisation] [Democracy]
• Indonesia: How will it adapt counterterrorism strategy?
  from the August 19, 2009 edition - A recent spate of attacks has shown lapses in the nation's ability to prevent terrorism. How it steps up its strategy will have consequences at home and abroad. By David Montero • A daily summary of global reports on security issues. As Indonesia reels in the wake of a spate of terrorist activity and new evidence emerges of a global dimension to the archipelago's terrorist groups, some are questioning how the nation will step up its counterterrorism strategy to face the growing threat. Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, has a remarkable track record of counterterrorism. Its police force has pioneered a model of arresting and then flipping many terrorism suspects, turning them from bomb-makers to informants. And the majority of the country's 235 million people are against violence (sic). [Terrorism] [Double standards]
• Banker who tipped feds to UBS tax scam gets prison time
  By Martha Brannigan | Miami Herald FORT LAUDERDALE — In a surprisingly heavy judgment, Bradley Birkenfeld, the former UBS private banker who blew the whistle on a wide-ranging scheme in which the Swiss bank helped wealthy Americans dodge income taxes through secret accounts, was sentenced to 40 months in prison Friday morning. The sentence was 10 months longer than the prosecution had asked for (sic). The defense had sought probation, pointing to the major impact of Birkenfeld's unprecedented cooperation. The prosecutors said Birkenfeld is still helping the government and will remain free until Jan. 8, 2010. [Bizarre]
• Afghan Election Poses New Tests for Washington
  By HELENE COOPER and CARLOTTA GALL Published: August 21, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — Obama administration officials hoped the Afghan election would demonstrate that eight years after the American invasion, the country was stable enough to justify an expanded commitment of money and troops from an increasingly skeptical American public.
• Karzai and Abdullah both claim victory in Afghan elections
  Candidates ignore Clinton's request to wait for official results, as officials investigate allegations of electoral fraud Despite calls by the US for the leading candidates in Afghanistan's election not to claim victory, both Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah said they won yesterday's vote.
  The country's deputy chief electoral officer, Zekria Barakzai, called on candidates to await the official results. He said turnout was between 40% and 50%, far lower than the 70% of voters who took part in Afghanistan's first presidential election in 2004.
• The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse
  by Krassimir Petrov Published Jan 17 2006 by Energy Bulletin, Archived Jan 17 2006 I. Economics of Empires A nation-state taxes its own citizens, while an empire taxes other nation-states. The history of empires, from Greek and Roman, to Ottoman and British, teaches that the economic foundation of every single empire is the taxation of other nations. The imperial ability to tax has always rested on a better and stronger economy, and as a consequence, a better and stronger military. One part of the subject taxes went to improve the living standards of the empire; the other part went to strengthen the military dominance necessary to enforce the collection of those taxes. Historically, taxing the subject state has been in various forms—usually gold and silver, where those were considered money, but also slaves, soldiers, crops, cattle, or other agricultural and natural resources, whatever economic goods the empire demanded and the subject-state could deliver. Historically, imperial taxation has always been direct: the subject state handed over the economic goods directly to the empire. For the first time in history, in the twentieth century, America was able to tax the world indirectly, through inflation. [Reserve] [Imperialism]
• Ten steps to liquidate US bases
  By Chalmers Johnson
  However ambitious United States President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union. [Imperialism] [Militarisation]
• Fear and apathy keep Afghans at home
  By James Lamont in Kabul Published: August 20 2009 19:39 | Last updated: August 20 2009 19:39 However, a low turnout in Thursday’s election, even in central Kabul, where security was tight, is likely to undermine the legitimacy of the result. The Independent Election Commission predicted a 50 per cent turnout, but a considerably more slight vote threatens to skew the verdict and give the losing candidates grounds to launch challenges. It also plays into the hands of Taliban insurgents, who have urged people not to vote and terrorised the ballot, which they claim is stage-managed by the US. “The number of voters is particularly low. It doesn’t really compare with previous elections,” says Sayed Omar, an election observer and mathematics lecturer at King Fahd University in Saudi Arabia. “I’m very surprised. Some say it’s because of security worries. Others say it’s because people have no interest,” Mr Omar added. “The government has done much bribery and people don’t trust the elections. [There are so few voters that] it’s like the people are dead.”
• Caucasus: The War That Was, The World War That Might Have Been
  Politicizing Ethnicity: US Plan to Repeat Yugoslav Scenario in Caucasus By Rick Rozoff Global Research, August 15, 2009 Matthew Bryza has been one of the U.S.'s main point men in the South Caucasus, the Caspian Sea Basin and Central Asia for the past twelve years.
• Singapore: The Past in the Present
  Geoffrey Gunn Unquestionably, Singapore has economically thrived in the space created by its independent status as an island Republic. The Federation of Malaysia, from which Singapore was expelled in 1965, has also levered itself into the highest ranks of developing countries. Nevertheless, separation has not healed the wounds on either side of the boundary exposed by the failed merger (1963-1965). To be sure, atavisms from the past continue to feed Singapore's siege mentality, just as Singapore's astute political leadership reads lessons from a history of local radicalism, ethnic chauvinism, and international influences including the pull of global Islam and its influence upon local Muslim minorities. No less, in the official narrative, a sense of China-centeredness on the part of the majority population has survived the birth of the Republic and presents the contours of an enduring challenge around identity formation.
• Immanuel Wallerstein website
  Immanuel Wallerstein is currently a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He is the former President of the International Sociological Association (1994-1998) and chair of the international Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1993-1995). He writes in three domains of world-systems analysis: the historical development of the modern world-system; the contemporary crisis of the capitalist world-economy; the structures of knowledge. Books in each of these domains include respectively The Modern World-System (3 vols.); Utopistics, or Historical Choices for the Twenty-first Century; and Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms.
• Tough sanctions won't tame Tehran
  By Shahir Shahidsaless An array of senior United States officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, special Middle East envoy George Mitchell and National Security Advisor General James Jones, have visited Israel in recent days to talk about Iran. While the high-level chats were in progress, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the press on August 9: "The president [Barack Obama] ... said, look, we need to take stock of this in September. If there is a response, it needs to be on a fast track. We're not going to keep the window open forever." These occurrences, and many others, signal that Washington has unexpectedly stepped up its diplomatic and political approach to Iran.
  According to a new report by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Iran will not be capable of producing weapons-grade uranium before 2013. The document also revealed that the US intelligence community "has no evidence that Iran has yet made the decision to produce highly enriched uranium" and that "Iran is unlikely to make such a decision for at least as long as international pressure and scrutiny persists". What drew little attention was that the information about Iran's nuclear capability was disclosed by the director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, during a senate hearing in February. In other words, for the past six months, the US government has been well aware that there was no imminent threat by Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
  The reason for this revolves around the crisis in Tehran. Many right-wing American policymakers and the Israel lobby consider this an opportune time to bring the Iranian regime to its knees and to pressure it to abandon its nuclear program. "Draconian sanctions did not make sense in 2005, but given the new weakness and vulnerability of the government of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, much tougher sanctions make sense now," said Nicholas Burns, a State Department under secretary for political affairs in the Bush administration, in an interview. [Sanctions] [Imperialism] [Camouflage]
• Italy, Germany and Japan: Former World War II Axis Nations Repudiate Bans against "Preparing for War"
  By Rick Rozoff Global Research, August 13, 2009 Stop NATO A press report on August 10 revealed that the government of Italy is planning to modify if not dispense with its post-World War II constitutional limitations on conducting offensive military operations; that is, to reverse a 61-year ban on waging war.
  Much as with Italian and German leaders who cannot pronounce the word war even while prosecuting one, Tokyo called its deployment force the Japanese Iraq Reconstruction and Support Group. The name aside, Japaneses troops were stationed in support of allies who had invaded Iraq in violation of international law and without United Nations sanction and were at the time conducting large-scale combat operations. The nation's soldiers remained there until 2006 when the focus of the U.S. and its NATO allies started shifting back to Afghanistan. In 2006 Japan compensated for its troop withdrawal by providing the occupation forces airlift operations in Iraq, then ended that mission last December when the Afghan War emerged as the uncontested priority of its Western military allies. Japan has supported the latter war from its inception and "Despite its pacifist constitution, Japan has participated in an Indian Ocean naval mission since 2001 that provides fuel and other logistical support to the US-led coalition fighting in Afghanistan." [20] It provided the majority of fuel to U.S. and NATO warships in the Indian Ocean, including those firing Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan. Japan briefly withdrew its naval forces at the end of 2007, but redeployed them a year later where they remain in support of the world's major war. What is remarkably still referred to as pacifist Japan, then, has actively supported the West's last two wars.
  North Korea is the pretext employed to expand the global missile shield system with its threat of nuclear blackmail and threat of a first strike against Russia and China to the East. However, as reported of the Gates' initiative at the time, "The U.S. demand on collective defense reflects its strategy to boost its deterrence toward China and also carries Washington's hope that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will partially allow the use of such a right by revising the Constitution." [30] [Japanese remilitarisation] [Threat]
• Ministers and medics rush to defend NHS
  • Health officials issue dossier for US media • Mandelson accuses Tory of 'slagging off' UK system
  Britain's political and medical establishment have launched a concerted defence of the National Health Service in response to the attacks on the system in the US triggered by Barack Obama's plans for American healthcare reform. After largely keeping out of the internal US debate, British political figures responded to the torrent of criticism the NHS has faced in the US by appealing directly to American voters and urging them to recognise its merits.
• Who's behind the attacks on a health care overhaul
  * Posted on Friday, August 14, 2009 By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Much of the money and strategy behind the so-called grassroots groups organizing opposition to the Democrats' health care plans comes from conservative political consultants, professional organizers and millionaires, some of whom hold financial stakes in the outcome. If President Barack Obama and Congress extend health insurance coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it, and limit insurers' discretion on who they cover and what they charge, that could pinch these opponents.
• Idle Iraqi Date Farms Show Decline of Economy
  By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS Published: August 14, 2009 BAGHDAD — Late July and early August is date harvesting season in Iraq, when within the span of a few weeks the desert sun turns hard green spheres into tender, golden brown fruit prized for its sweetness. Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times In July, an Iraqi worker shook sand off dates not yet ripe for harvesting at an orchard in Baghdad. The war and other factors have depressed date production. But here in Iraq, one of the places where agriculture was developed more than 7,000 years ago, there are increasing doubts about whether it makes much sense to grow dates — or much of anything for that matter. As recently as the 1980s, Iraq was self-sufficient in producing wheat, rice, fruits, vegetables, and sheep and poultry products. Its industrial sector exported textiles and leather goods, including purses and shoes, as well as steel and cement. But wars, sanctions, poor management, international competition and disinvestment have left each industry a shadow of its former self. [Sanctions] [Imperialism]
• Down Under diary: is it time for Social Democracy?
  Tom Nairn
  , 14 - 08 - 2009 The Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd sees a revived social democracy as the only terrain on which the "great financial crisis" can be fought and overcome. In assessing his case and the lively debate it has provoked, Tom Nairn argues that this core idea is more widely relevant to the current international search for a politics beyond neo-liberalism. 14 - 08 - 2009 Lord, it is time. The summer was too long. Lay your shadow on the sundials now, and through the meadows let the winds throng Rainer Maria Rilke, Herbst/'Autumn', 1902 Rilke's elegy was for a range of dying Victorian '-isms', and he found himself longing (with justified nervousness) for the winds of an incoming century. A similar autumnal cloud has recently been gathering in Australia, and the poet is none other than the country's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Back in February, over a year after his Labor Party came to power in the 2007 federal election, its Leader informed readers of Melbourne's Monthly magazine what the vote had really been about: he reckons it's time for 'Social Democracy', after the ‘Great Financial Crisis' (his title).
• Senator Webb Secures Release of U.S. Prisoner in Burma
  By Tim Johnston Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, August 15, 2009; 12:27 PM BANGKOK, Aug. 15 -- Burmese authorities have told Sen. James Webb that they intend to release an American sentenced to seven years in prison for swimming to the house of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, an incident that led to an 18-month extension of her house arrest. Webb (D-Va.), who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Sub-Committee for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, met the country's leader, Gen. Than Shwe, and Suu Kyi on Saturday during a visit to Burma. "It is my hope that we can take advantage of these gestures as a way to begin laying a foundation of goodwill and confidence-building in the future," Webb said in a statement Saturday.
  However, the visit is part of Webb's belief that the previous administration's policy of trying to isolate the Burmese regime has failed. It was a view which was reinforced by a visit he made to Burma in 2001. "It was fairly clear that by ceasing our economic engagement in Burma we were allowing particularly the Chinese presence to solidify -- because they have a very amoral foreign policy (sic) -- and so I have been saying for several years that we need to have a different approach with Burma," Webb told The Washington Post in May. There is an increasing consensus that the sanctions have not isolated the regime but pushed them into the economic and political orbit of nations which have little regard for human rights, such as China and North Korea. [China confrontation] [Double standards] [Clinton0908]
• Strategic Focus: U.S. Military Footprint
  The United States maintains more than 700 bases around the world and is pushing to set up even more. What are these bases doing, how is the Pentagon rethinking their functions, and how can we reduce this military footprint? [US military]
• Outsourcing Benefits U.S. Workers, Too
  Many companies are hiring temporary and contract workers in the U.S. at a faster clip than they're sending jobs to India and other overseas locations By Vivek Wadhwa Outsourcing is a dirty word. In the U.S., outsourcing means firing full-time workers and shipping their jobs to a less developed country where wages are lower and labor laws are more lax. With U.S. unemployment closing in on 10%, and estimates of real unemployment (including part-time workers) climbing to over 15%, the idea of cutting American jobs and shipping them abroad is morally offensive to many. [Offshoring]
• Afghanistan Dispatch: Inside Kabul
  Gilles Dorronsoro Visiting Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Throughout August, Carnegie's Gilles Dorronsoro will be traveling in Afghanistan, providing first-hand insights into the staggering challenges facing the country as it struggles to become a functioning democracy. With presidential elections nearly a week away, Dorronsoro starts his journey in Kabul, where many of the issues affecting the country -- ineffective governance, the Taliban's expanding influence, and a massive foreign presence -- are on stark display. The attack earlier this week on Pul-i-Alam, only 50 kilometers from Kabul, exemplifies the next step in the Taliban's winning strategy in Afghanistan: destabilizing the cities in the country's Pashtun belt. More than 10,000 foreigners live in or around this ancient and contested capital, enjoying a lifestyle as alien to most Afghans as that of a western city. But instead of securing the population, as the United States and its allies have attempted to do in Iraq, the international coalition has opted for providing limited protection to key administrative institutions and embassies--which took rocket fire from the Taliban last week. Around half the city center is off limits to regular citizens, causing frequent traffic jams and frustration among the Afghans. The foreigners earn comparatively huge salaries, often do not pay taxes, and for the most part do not learn a local language. They are generally poorly trained to work in an Afghan context and are heavily reliant on local staff. Naturally, these characteristics exacerbate traditional Afghan suspicions of foreigners' motives, and aid in promulgating rumors and conspiracy theories. Many Afghans are convinced that the international coalition secretly supports the Taliban.
  The Taliban are the dominant political force in numerous regions of Afghanistan, including Pashtun-majority provinces in the east and the south. Their strategy is to destroy the Afghan administration, isolate the international coalition, and build a parallel administration. [Democracy]
• The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War
  By Prof. Peter Dale Scott Global Research, August 11, 2009 The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. [Imperialism] [Privatisation]
• Biological Warfare and the National Security State A Chronology
  By Tom Burghardt Global Research, August 9, 2009 Antifascist Calling... The history of bioweapons research in the United States is a history of illicit--and illegal--human experiments. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, successive American administrations have turned a blind eye on dubious research rightly characterized as having "a little of the Buchenwald touch." While the phrase may have come from the files of the Atomic Energy Commission as Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome revealed in her 1999 book, The Plutonium Files, an investigation into secret American medical experiments at the dawn of the nuclear age, it is as relevant today as the United States pours billions of dollars into work on some of the most dangerous pathogens known to exist in nature. [cbw]
• False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots
  By Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes Published: August 13, 2009 WASHINGTON — The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks. Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality. But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists. Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor) [Disinformation]
• Afghan War: NATO Builds History's First Global Army
  Never before have soldiers from so many states served in the same war theater
  by Rick Rozoff . Global Research, August 9, 2009 Two months before the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of NATO's first-ever ground war the world is witness to a 21st Century armed conflict without end waged by the largest military coalition in history. With recent announcements that troops from such diverse nations as Colombia, Mongolia, Armenia, Japan, South Korea, Ukraine and Montenegro are to or may join those of some 45 other countries serving under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), there will soon be military personnel from fifty nations on five continents and in the Middle East serving under a unified command structure. Never before have soldiers from so many states served in the same war theater, much less the same country.
  Part of the purpose of the war in Afghanistan, which was started four months after the founding of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in June of 2001, is precisely to install U.S. and NATO military forces in Central Asia to sabotage attempts by China and Russia to develop common security, energy, transportation and other projects.
  The Afghan war, then, is no ordinary war, as abhorrent as all wars are. It is only going to expand in width and in the amount of blood shed, but already it is distinguished by several developments: It is the U.S.'s first war in Asia and its longest one anywhere since Vietnam. It is NATO's first ground war and its first military campaign in Asia. The German army has engaged in its first combat operations since the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. Finnish soldiers have engaged in combat for the first time since World War II and Swedish forces in almost 200 years. Canada has lost its first troops in combat, 127, since the Korean War. Australia has registered its first combat deaths since the Vietnam War. More British soldiers have been killed, 191, than at any time since the Falklands/Malvinas war in 1982.
• Thailand Won’t Extradite Suspected Arms Dealer
  By THOMAS FULLER Published: August 11, 2009 BANGKOK — A Thai judge on Tuesday rejected a request by United States authorities for the extradition of Viktor Bout, the Russian businessman and suspected global arms trafficker. Mr. Bout, the inspiration for the 2005 Hollywood film “The Lord of War,” was arrested in March 2008 at a hotel in Bangkok after allegedly agreeing to sell millions of dollars worth of weaponry to undercover U.S. agents posing as rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The U.S. extradition request accused Mr. Bout, 42, of conspiring to kill American citizens, and a federal indictment describes him as an international arms trafficker who has used an network of cargo companies as a cover. [Arms sales][Extraterritoriality] [Double standards]
• U.S. Officials Looking at Karzai Rival for Key New Post
  By Joshua Partlow Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, August 11, 2009 KABUL, Aug. 10 -- Senior American officials are expressing renewed interest in a post-election plan for Afghanistan that would establish a chief executive to serve beneath President Hamid Karzai if he wins a second term next week, Afghan officials said Monday. The latest U.S. overtures have focused on Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister who is challenging Karzai for the presidency. A campaign aide to Ghani said Monday that both Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and regional envoy Richard C. Holbrooke had made recent visits to explore the idea, a sign that the United States might be interested in an Afghan government with a more technocratic bent. American officials have grown increasingly disenchanted with Karzai's leadership over the past five years, amid rising Taliban violence, rampant corruption and an ineffective bureaucracy. The idea of a chief executive for Afghanistan has circulated before in recent months, and speculation at one point arose that former U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American, was in the running. [Democracy] [Imperialism]
• The AfPak Channel
  Starting today, Foreign Policy magazine and the New America Foundation are launching The AfPak Channel, a special project taking readers inside the war for South Asia. The site features daily news reports, original features, blogging, and analysis from prominent journalists and experts from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the world.
• NEW GREAT GAME REVISITED, Part 1
  Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle
  By Pepe Escobar
  HONG KONG - Things get curiouser and curiouser in the Iranian wonderland. Imagine what happened last week during Friday prayers in Tehran, personally conducted by former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, aka "The Shark", Iran's wealthiest man, who made his fortune partly because of Irangate - the 1980s' secret weapons contracts with Israel and the US. As is well known, Rafsanjani is behind the Mir-Hossein Mousavi-Mohammad Khatami pragmatic conservative faction that lost the most recent battle at the top - rather than a presidential election - to the ultra-hardline faction of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-Mahmud Ahmadinejad-Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. During prayers, partisans of the hegemonic faction yelled the usual "Death to America!" - while the pragmatic conservatives came up, for the first time, with "Death to Russia!" and "Death to China!" [Reserve]
• "War Without End",
  Robert Templer in International Herald Tribune 21 July 2009 The guns have fallen silent in Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, but the deep wounds of ethnic animosity have not even begun to heal. An estimated 300,000 Tamil civilians remain essentially prisoners in internment camps run by a Sinhalese-dominated government.
  The final months of combat in the decades-long war between the Sri Lankan Army and the rebel Tamil Tigers were brutal. As government forces tightened a noose around insurgent positions, hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught in the middle. The army was indiscriminately launching artillery shells and air strikes into mixed areas of insurgents and innocents (sic), and the Tigers shot at people who tried to escape. [Human rights] [Media] [False Balance]
• Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order
  Global Power and Global Government: Part 2
  by Andrew Gavin Marshall
  . Global Research, July 28, 2009 This essay is Part 2 of "Global Power and Global Government." Part 1, "The Evolution and Revolution of the Central Banking System" published by Global Research can be viewed here: [Imperialism]
• Landowners Still in Exile From Unstable Pakistan Area
  By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH July 28, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Even as hundreds of thousands of people stream back to the Swat Valley after months of fighting, one important group is conspicuously absent: the wealthy landowners who fled the Taliban in fear and are the economic pillar of the rural society. The reluctance of the landowners to return is a significant blow to the Pakistani military’s campaign to restore Swat as a stable, prosperous part of Pakistan, and it presents a continuing opportunity for the Taliban to reshape the valley to their advantage. About four dozen landlords were singled out over the past two years by the militants in a strategy intended to foment a class struggle. In some areas, the Taliban rewarded the landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords. Some resentful peasants even signed up as the Taliban’s shock troops.
• Afghanistan: Training Ground for War on Russia
  NATO Trains Finland, Sweden For Conflict With Russia By Rick Rozoff
  Global Research, July 26, 2009 A Swedish newspaper reported on July 24 that approximately 50 troops from the country serving under NATO in the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had engaged in a fierce firefight in Northern Afghanistan and had killed three and wounded two attackers. The report detailed that the Swedish troops were traveling in armored vehicles and "later received reinforcements from several soldiers in a Combat Vehicle 90." [1] The world has become so inured to war around the world and seemingly without end that Swedish soldiers engaging in deadly combat as part of a belligerent force for the first time since the early 1800s - and that in another continent thousands of kilometers from their homeland - has passed virtually without notice.
  "[F]rom the point of view of the Finnish Defence Forces, there is still another important reason for the Afghanistan operation: it improves readiness for the defence of Finland." The Finnish source quoted the former commander of the nation's troops in Afghanistan, Ari Mattola, as saying, "This is a unique situation for us, in that we will get to train part of our wartime forces. That part will get to operate as close to wartime conditions as is possible." [6]
• Whistleblower tells of America's hidden nightmare for its sick poor
  When an insurance firm boss saw a field hospital for the poor in Virginia, he knew he had to speak out. Here, he tells Paul Harris of his fears for Obama's bid to bring about radical change Patients without health insurance get dental care at a free clinic in Wise, Virginia, held every July for the past three years. More than 25,000 were treated in a weekend Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images Wendell Potter can remember exactly when he took the first steps on his journey to becoming a whistleblower and turning against one of the most powerful industries in America. It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia. Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements. For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. "It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America," he told the Observer [Human rights]
• The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia
  Kenneth Pomeranz Since we tend to take water for granted, it is almost a bad sign when it is in the news; and lately there have been plenty of water-related stories from South, East, and Southeast Asia. They have ranged from the distressingly familiar -- suicides of North Indian farmers who can no longer get enough water1 – to stories most people find surprising (evidence that pressure from water in the reservoir behind the new Zipingpu dam may have triggered the massive Sichuan earthquake last May).2 Meanwhile, glaciers, which almost never made news, are now generating plenty of worrisome headlines. Conflicts over water are found in every era and region:
• America’s new-old military thinking
  Paul Rogers, 27 - 07 - 2009 From Somalia to Iraq, Afghanistan to Lebanon, an emerging global landscape of variable security threats is provoking United States military analysts into an intense process of reflection. (This article was first published on 23 July 2009) 27 - 07 - 2009 The centre of the wars that the western powers, principally the United States and Britain, are involved in has moved east. Afghanistan, where the "war on terror" was launched in October 2001, has replaced Iraq as the site of their principal military effort. But as the campaign there becomes increasingly mired in difficult local terrain, a larger effort is being made to use this shift in the major theatre of war to think about the fundamental purposes of what these powers are engaged in. Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001 Bradford's peace-studies department now broadcasts regular podcasts on its work, including a regular commentary from Paul Rogers on international-security issues. Listen/watch here What are the wars and local insurgencies the United States and Britain are seeking to win, manage or contain now about? How are the different "small" conflicts around the world related to each other? How do military analysts now understand the current security threats faced by western states? Such questions shadow the increasingly fraught atmospherics of the anti-Taliban effort in Afghanistan. [Imperialism] [Inversion]
• Bankers Reaped Lavish Bonuses During Bailouts
  By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH July 31, 2009 Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis. Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general. At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and bankers, and Morgan Stanley awarded seven-figure bonuses to 428 employees. Even at weaker banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, million-dollar awards were distributed to hundreds of workers. The report is certain to intensify the growing debate over how, and how much, Wall Street bankers should be paid.
• Obama Tells BW He's Not Antibusiness
  In a wide-ranging interview, the President says "to return to some semblance of balance is hardly radical" This Issue August 10, 2009
  In a July 27 interview in the Oval Office, President Barack Obama reflected on his first six months in office and discussed his evolving relationship with business leaders. The President clearly had a lot he wanted to say to the business community, with which he has gotten off to a somewhat shaky start. He addressed the criticisms of some CEOs that his policies are antibusiness, defended his proposed tax increases on the wealthy, and drew management lessons from his executive experience thus far. During the wide-ranging conversation with Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler and Washington Bureau Chief Jane Sasseen, the President was cautious at times but always precise. He looked ahead to growth in a deleveraged economy driven by a more productive health-care system, energy innovation, educational improvements, and a more effective government. He added that many Americans are as cynical about business as business leaders are about government and that his goal is to channel this wave of populism in a constructive direction. (This is an extended transcript of the entire interview.) [Continuity]
• China dips its toe in the Black Sea
  By M K Bhadrakumar Like the star gazers who last week watched the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, diplomatic observers had a field day watching the penumbra of big power politics involving the United States, Russia and China, which constitutes one of the crucial phenomena of 21st-century world politics. It all began with United States Vice President Joseph Biden choosing a tour of Ukraine and Georgia on July 20-23 to rebuke the Kremlin publicly for its "19th-century notions of spheres of influence". Biden's tour of Russia's troubled "near abroad" took place within a fortnight of US President Barack Obama's landmark visit to Moscow to "reset" the US's relations with Russia. Clearly, Biden's jaunt was choreographed as a forceful demonstration of the Barack Obama administration's resolve to keep up the US's strategic engagement of Eurasia - a rolling up of sleeves and gearing up for action after the exchange of customary pleasantries by Obama with his Kremlin counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. Plainly put, Biden's stark message was that the Obama administration intends to robustly challenge Russia's claim as the predominant power in the post-Soviet space.
• Iran, US do a 'war on terror' somersault
  By Sreeram Chaulia The fierce raid this week by Iraqi military and police units on Camp Ashraf, a base for the militant Iranian dissident outfit - Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) or "People's Holy Warriors" - was a game changer in Iran's quest to control the banned organization. The timing of the intense two-day siege of the camp, which left six people dead and dozens injured, is clearly linked to the progressive transfer of security operations from American to Iraqi troops.
  Thus, the million-dollar question is whether the current unrest is a mere distant echo or is tantamount to a replay of the US efforts to fund and equip mujahideen fighters and to promote militant Islam as a geopolitical tool in Soviet Central Asia in the 1980s. [Terrorism] [Double standards]
• UN Address: Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect
  August 06, 2009 By Noam Chomsky
  Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009 The discussions about Responsibility to Protect (R2P), or its cousin "humanitarian intervention," are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have been a few principles of international affairs that apply quite generally. One is the maxim of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish, while the weak suffer as they must. A corollary is what Ian Brownlie calls "the hegemonial approach to law-making": the voice of the powerful sets precedents.
  A third principle is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in terms of R2P, including the worst monsters. Just to illustrate, in his scholarly study of "humanitarian intervention," Sean Murphy cites only three examples between the Kellogg-Briand pact and the UN Charter: Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia, all accompanied by lofty rhetoric about the solemn responsibility to protect the suffering populations, and factual justifications. The basic pattern continues to the present. The historical record is worth recalling when we hear R2P or its cousin described as an "emerging norm" in international affairs. They have been considered a norm as far back as we want to go. [Humanitarian invention] [Camouflage]
• Adm. Mullen decries 'culture of poverty' in Afghanistan
  Top officer sees neglect, military in hole By Sara A. Carter · Originally published 04:45 a.m., August 6, 2009, updated 06:02 a.m., August 6, 2009 The top U.S. uniformed military officer Wednesday offered a bleak assessment of the war in Afghanistan, saying that years of neglect before the Obama administration had starved the U.S.-led effort of funds and diplomatic heft - a condition he called "a culture of poverty." Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times that nearly eight years after the war began, the U.S. military is still digging its way "out of a hole" and has not reached "year zero" in the campaign to turn back Taliban advances and gain the trust of the Afghan people. "What I do see and have seen over the last two or three trips is something that I call a 'culture of poverty' and it isn't just that we've under-resourced it - we've under-resourced it for a significant period of time," Adm. Mullen said. He said a strategy devised since President Obama took office is intended to reverse these negative trends and hinted that another assessment to be completed late this month or in September might assign more military and civilian personnel to the war and to Afghan development. "We now have a strategy which is a civilian-military campaign plan, a civilian-military strategy," he said. [US global strategy] [Softwar]
• Tehran struggles to defend currency
  By Margaret Coker and Roshanak Taghavi DUBAI -- Iranian economists are predicting double-digit currency depreciation by year-end, amid expectations that already high levels of capital flight will increase over fears about Iran's economic direction. The government has managed to keep depreciation mostly under 5% a year since 2001, despite the U.S.-led sanctions that limit trade with and imports to the Islamic Republic. [Sanctions]
• Pakistan Objects to U.S. Expansion in Afghan War
  By Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is objecting to expanded American combat operations in neighboring Afghanistan, creating new fissures in the alliance with Washington at a critical juncture when thousands of new American forces are arriving in the region. Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said. The Pakistani account made clear that even as the United States recommits troops and other resources to take on a growing Taliban threat, Pakistani officials still consider India their top priority and the Taliban militants a problem that can be negotiated. In the long term, the Taliban in Afghanistan may even remain potential allies for Pakistan, as they were in the past, once the United States leaves.
• Trade down 20% on prime container route
  By Robert Wright, Transport Correspondent Published: July 21 2009 19:51 | Last updated: July 21 2009 19:51 Traffic volumes on the world’s busiest container ship route fell by a fifth in May against a backdrop of plummeting prices as the global recession leaves the industry facing its worst crisis in its 53 year history. The figures for westbound Asia-Europe services, which compared volumes with the same month last year, were published on Tuesday by the European Liner Affairs Association a day after Singapore’s Neptune Orient Lines revealed it suffered continued volume falls in June and a still sharper fall in earnings from each container.

• The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think
  The average length of unemployment is higher than it's been since government began tracking the data in 1948. * By MORTIMER ZUCKERMAN The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad. The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion. Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:
• Democracy hangs by a thread in Honduras
  The right-wing coup d'état is faltering, but its supporters have powerful friends in Washington. Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports Sunday, 19 July 2009 The international group of right-wingers who staged the coup d'état against the democratic government of Honduras on 28 June are watching their plot fast unravel. There is stiffening international opposition to their protégé, Roberto Micheletti, who, in his capacity as President of Congress, ordered President Manuel Zelaya to be expelled from the country by plane in his pyjamas.
  As the Acting President's support shrinks at home, the plotters are lobbying to have Mr Micheletti shored up from abroad by means of a declaration of legitimacy from the US Congress. That scheme is not prospering. Enrique Ortez Colindres, the supremely undiplomatic octogenarian appointed foreign minister by Mr Micheletti, has had to resign, but not before he called Barack Obama "a negrito who knows nothing about anything", on Honduran television.
• Rupert Cornwell: The curious case of Hillary Clinton, the missing Secretary of State
  Out of America: While Barack Obama is shining on the foreign stage, his former rival has been conspicuous by her absence Sunday, 19 July 2009 A question fascinates Washington. Where's Hillary Clinton? Not physically, of course – for the Secretary of State, having given what was officially billed as a major foreign policy speech in the capital last week, is at the time of writing on a week-long visit to India and Thailand – but in the metaphorical sense that most obsesses this power-obsessed city: her place in the hierarchy of power by which its ruling caste is defined. Not long ago, the former First Lady, the woman who would now surely be president but for the once-in-a-lifetime obstacle of Barack Obama, was supposed to be the other dazzling star of the new administration. And would not the Clinton name and the Clinton connections reverse the gradual decline of the State Department, long starved of resources, and losing clout to the Pentagon and the White House, a trend most recently exemplified by Colin Powell's endless losing battles with the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld and former vice-president Dick Cheney? [Pentagon] [US global strategy]
• Population of older people set to surpass number of children, report finds
  US census bureau report highlights shift in global population that may bring social and economic changes worldwide
  * Ed Pilkington in New York * The Guardian, Monday 20 July 2009 * Article history The world is about to cross a demographic landmark of huge social and economic importance, with the proportion of the global population 65 and over set to outnumber children under five for the first time. A new report by the US census bureau highlights a huge shift towards not just an ageing but an old population, with formidable consequences for rich and poor nations alike. The transformation carries with it challenges for families and policymakers, ranging from how to care for older people living alone to how to pay for unprecedented numbers of pensioners – more than 1 billion of them by 2040. The report, An Ageing World: 2008, shows that within 10 years older people will outnumber children for the first time. It forecasts that over the next 30 years the number of over-65s is expected to almost double, from 506 million in 2008 to 1.3 billion – a leap from 7% of the world's population to 14%. Already, the number of people in the world 65 and over is increasing at an average of 870,000 each month. [Ageing society] [IM]
• An Aging World: 2008
  U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration U.S. CENSUS BUREAU U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Institutes of Health NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING Issued June 2009 P95/09-1 By Kevin Kinsella and Wan He International Population Reports [Ageing society] [IM]
• Americans won't accept 'long slog' in Afghanistan war, Gates says
  By Julian E. Barnes July 19, 2009 Reporting from Washington — After eight years, U.S.-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next summer to avoid the public perception that the conflict has become unwinnable, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a sharp critique of the war effort. Gates said that victory was a "long-term prospect" under any scenario and that the U.S. would not win the war in a year's time. However, U.S. forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support.
• Empire of Bases
  By Chalmers Johnson July 14, 2009 Op-Ed Contributor The U.S. “Empire of Bases” — at $102 billion a year already the world's costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed — only $4 million less, before cost overruns, than the Vatican City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in the already bloated U.S. military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy — a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country. Instead these so-called embassies are actually walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include roof-top helicopter pads for quick getaways. [US global strategy][Militarisation]
• The Joy of Sachs
  By Paul Krugman July 17, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us? First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America. Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away. Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely. Let’s start by talking about how Goldman makes money. Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.
• Small Arms Survey 2009
  Our flagship publication is an annual review of global small arms issues and themes. The Small Arms Survey is recognized as the principal international source of impartial and reliable information on all aspects of small arms. Its blend of information and analysis makes it an indispensable resource for policy-makers, government officials, and non-governmental organizations. [Arms sales] [Statistics]
• Behind the mind games in the Gulf
  By Richard M Bennett Psywar is the name of the game with Iran and both Israel and the United States appear to be raising the ante significantly with a combination of military exercises and public pronouncements that could be taken to suggest that all options are now firmly back on the table. While the growing psychological pressure being exerted has so far had little clear discernible effect on Tehran's government, the same cannot be said of the mullahs.
  However, this will not be easy as none of the various competing factions led by Grand Ayatollahs Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader; former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; Ali Montazeri or others are particularly warm to the West and outside interference by Washington will certainly not be welcome.
  While US intelligence provides an extremely high level of technological surveillance of Iran with advanced satellite and terrestrial platforms, a number of widely reported HUMINT (human intelligence) setbacks and failures in recent years have left the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with few useful assets within either the Iranian military or the intelligence community. Robert Sale, reporting in the Middle East Times of March 31, 2009, claimed, "The CIA had lost its entire agent network in Iran when a CIA headquarters communications officer was about to send instructions to an agent via its Immarsat transmitter/receivers." Sale explained that the CIA officer had attempted to download data intended for a single operative, but accidentally hit a button that sent it to the entire US spy network in Iran. The information was received by a double agent who quickly passed it on to his case officer in MOIS (Ministry of Intelligence and Security). The Iranian counter-intelligence service was then able to wrap up the entire network within days, reportedly leaving Washington virtually blind. [Intelligence]
• US Strategy of Total Energy Control over the European Union and Eurasia Nabucco Turkey EU and Obama Geopolitics
  By F. William Engdahl Global Research, July 17, 2009 One of his first foreign visits as new President took Barack Obama to Ankara for a high-profile meeting with Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and other leading Turkish officials. Obama engaged in classical “horse trading” wheeling and dealing. “I give you support for Turkey's EU membership; you open the diplomatic door to Armenia,” appears to have been the core of the deal. What other inducements the US President gave in the case of Turkish influence within NATO and such is secondary. Obama's goal was to break a political deadlock in Turkey to construction of a major gas pipeline to Germany and other EU countries in direct opposition to Russian Gazprom's South Stream pipeline. Nabucco is an integral part of a US strategy of total energy control over both the EU and all Eurasia. On July 13 with a Nabucco signing ceremony in Ankara the first fruits of the Obama soft diplomacy appeared to be bearing fruit. The question remains if it will be bitter fruit. [Energy] [US global strategy]
• A fractured front in Afghanistan
  By James Blitz Published: July 17 2009 19:21 | Last updated: July 17 2009 19:21 At 8am last Friday, Gordon Brown was at the Group of Eight rich nations summit in L’Aquila, Italy, preparing for a bilateral meeting with Libyan leader Colonel Muammer Gaddafi. Just as the British prime minister was about to enter the meeting, Tom Fletcher, his private secretary, drew him into a quiet room to relate some grim news. Five British soldiers from 2nd Battalion The Rifles had just been killed in two roadside bomb attacks in Helmand province, Afghanistan. “The prime minister sat for a moment very quietly,” says an official who was present. “He then asked us to go out and bring back the fullest possible detail on what had happened.” Mr Brown would not have been in any doubt about the significance of this news, which was broadcast across Britain 14 hours later after the soldiers’ next of kin had been informed. In its eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, this was the worst psychological setback the British army has faced. The deaths not only meant that 15 solders had died in Helmand within 10 days. It also meant total British fatalities in the country – now at 185 – have surpassed those in Iraq.
• Once world's bread basket, Iraq now a farming basket case
  By Mike Tharp | McClatchy Newspapers. MISHKHAB, Iraq — Once the cradle of agriculture for civilization, the Land Between Two Rivers — the Tigris and Euphrates — has become a basket case for its farmers.
  However, their efforts haven't helped Iraqi agriculture overcome the twin disasters of war and sanctions, which have transformed the country from one of the world's premier sources of aromatic rice and nearly 500 kinds of dates 30 years ago into a net importer of food. Iraq now imports nearly all the food its people eat: California rice, Washington apples, Australian wheat, fruits and vegetables from its neighbors. All are staples in Iraqi groceries and on the dinner table.
  As in any country, agriculture is political. Unlike most nations, however, the present Iraqi government doesn't protect — let alone subsidize — many of its farmers, according to Western experts, the rice farmers in Mishkhab and consumers. "Most farmers have been abandoned by the state," said Qasim Muhaideen, 43, who works in Mosul's central market. [Imperialism]
• Pentagon, Congress Have Showdown Over Fighter Jet Funding
  WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon and Congress all but dared each other Thursday to a showdown over funding for fighter jets in a multimillion-dollar squabble that each side said they were fighting in the interests of U.S. security. The chairman of a key House Appropriations panel said he's confident that plans to add $369 million to the Pentagon's budget for a dozen more F-22 jets will survive a White House veto threat. "We'll work it out," said Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, head of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. "In the end, the bill won't be vetoed." In Chicago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused lawmakers of overspending on military toys instead of focusing on how to defend the U.S. against strategic threats like weapons of mass destruction and cyber attacks. "If the Department of Defense can't figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year, then our problems are much bigger than anything that can be cured by a few more ships and planes," Gates said in a wry and sometimes stinging address to the Economic Club of Chicago. Murtha's panel added the multimillion-dollar down payment for 12 more F-22 fighter jets to the Pentagon's $534 billion spending plan for 2010. Lawmakers also agreed to spend $560 million for an alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. The White House has said it will veto both actions. [Military industrial complex]
• Obama's Rollback Strategy: Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan (and the Boomerang Effect)
  By Prof James Petras
  Global Research, July 9, 2009 The recent events in Honduras and Iran, which pit democratically elected regimes against pro-US military and civilian actors intent on overthrowing them can best be understood as part of a larger White House strategy designed to rollback the gains achieved by opposition government and movements during the Bush years. In a manner reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's New Cold War policies, Obama has vastly increased the military budget, increased the number of combat troops, targeted new regions for military intervention and backed military coups in regions traditionally controlled by the US . However Obama's rollback strategy occurs in a very different international and domestic context [US global strategy] [Continuity]
• Wal-Mart plans to give its products environmental ratings
  By Steve Everly | Kansas City Star Wal-Mart Stores' bid to be greener got more bite Thursday, with the company saying it wants to create environmental ratings for everything it sells. Because Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest retailer, those ratings could transform how most products are made. Wal-Mart is aiming for a comprehensive rating so that all important factors are considered, including the quantity of greenhouse gases and pollution produced, and the amount of water consumed. [Green]
• Why We Must Ration Health Care
  By PETER SINGER Published: July 15, 2009 You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
  
  In Britain, everyone has health insurance. In the U.S., some 45 million do not, and nor are they entitled to any health care at all, unless they can get themselves to an emergency room. Hospitals are prohibited from turning away anyone who will be endangered by being refused treatment. But even in emergency rooms, people without health insurance may receive less health care than those with insurance President Obama has said plainly that America’s health care system is broken. It is, he has said, by far the most significant driver of America’s long-term debt and deficits. It is hard to see how the nation as a whole can remain competitive if in 25 years we are spending nearly a third of what we earn on health care, while other industrialized nations are spending far less but achieving health outcomes as good as, or better than, ours.
• Robert McNamara's Second Vietnam
  Walden Bello | July 13, 2009 The conventional view of Robert McNamara, who passed away a few days ago, is that after serving as the chief engineer of the disastrous U.S. war in Vietnam, he went on in 1968, to serve as president of the World Bank. In this way, he sought to salve his troubled conscience by delivering development assistance to poor countries. The reality is, as usual, more complex. Development from Above? As president of the Bank, the world's premier channel for multilateral aid, McNamara did quadruple the institution's lending portfolio to $12 billion. The key beneficiaries, however, were authoritarian dictatorships. Indeed, the rise to hegemony of authoritarian regimes in the developing world cannot be separated from the massive funding that the World Bank under McNamara provided them. By the late 1970s, five of the top seven recipients of World Bank aid were military, presidential-military, or military-controlled regimes: Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines. [Development strategy]
• New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
  By Rick Rozoff Global Research, July 12, 2009 When the post-World War II German states the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, West and East Germany, respectively, were united in 1990, it was for many in Europe and the world as a whole a heady time, fraught with hopes of a continent at peace and perhaps disarmed. Despite US pledges to the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not move "one inch" eastward, what German reunification achieved was that the former German Democratic Republic joined not only the Federal Republic but NATO and the military bloc moved hundreds of kilometers nearer the Russian border, over the intervening years to be joined by twelve Eastern European nations. Five of those twelve new NATO members were republics of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union itself, neither of which any longer exists. Far from issuing in an era of disarmament and a Europe free of military blocs - or even of war - the merging of the two German states and the simultaneous fragmentation of the Eastern Bloc and, a year later, the USSR was instead followed by a Europe almost entirely dominated by a US-controlled global military alliance.
• Criticism of Afghan War Is on the Rise in Britain
  By JOHN F. BURNS Published: July 11, 2009 LONDON — Just as President Obama’s plan to sharply increase American troop strength in Afghanistan gets into high gear, Britain’s involvement in the war has come under the fiercest criticism yet at home as a result of a steep increase in British casualties, including the deaths of 15 soldiers in the past 10 days. Skip to next paragraph Related 8 British Soldiers Killed in Afghanistan (July 10, 2009) Times Topics: AfghanistanThe latest losses are the heaviest British forces have suffered in any comparable period since the 1982 Falklands war. With the Defense Ministry’s announcement of eight soldiers’ deaths on Friday, Britain’s toll in Afghanistan is now 184 killed, five more than its total losses in Iraq, where Britain’s combat commitment ended this spring.  
• Weapons: Our #1 Export?
  Frida Berrigan | June 30, 2009 The phrase "Obama has a lot on his plate" is the understatement of the year. The president has a to-do list a mile long, and every day a new crisis (like the coup in Honduras) gets added to the list. Can we really fault him if he sneaks the occasional smoke? But before he heads out to the presidential woods, one of the tasks still undone is to update and revise U.S. arms export policy. The last official version of U.S. arms export policy is from the Clinton years. In addition to the usual rhetoric about promoting regional stability, ensuring U.S. military superiority, and promoting "peaceful conflict resolution and arms control, human rights, democratization," Presidential Decision Directive 34 (February 1995) inserted a new consideration: "enhanc[ing] the ability of the U.S. defense industrial base to meet U.S. defense requirements and maintain long term military superiority at lower costs." In other words, a potential arms sale should be judged in part on whether it is good for weapons manufacturers. Not every administration needs a formal export policy. Under the guise of the global war on terror, President George W. Bush fast-tracked weapons sales, released countries from arms embargoes, and pumped more money into foreign military aid. His policy was — in essence —sell, sell, sell, and he did it without issuing a formal policy statement. But now, President Barack Obama needs to decisively break with Bush era practices. Unfortunately, so far the administration is opting for less clarity and more verbiage.
  Loren Thompson, a pro-export pundit with the Lexington Institute — and not so coincidentally, a consultant to Lockheed Martin — takes it a step further, predicting that for the United States, "weapons could be the single biggest export item over the next ten years." [Arms sales] [Militarisation]
• The Cost of the Global U.S. Military Presence
  By Anita Dancs | July 3, 2009 Policy Report The U.S. military’s global presence is vast and costly. More than one-third of U.S. troops are currently based abroad or afloat in international waters, and hundreds of bases and access agreements exist throughout the world. At the beginning of the 21st century, the government pushed to expand this presence through a variety of mechanisms. Yet the Department of Defense’s budget presentations lack enough detail to make it possible to know the precise cost. The budgets don’t break down the numbers, for example, on maintaining bases at home and overseas. [Militarisation] [Pentagon]
• Commentary: Galloway on McNamara: Reading an obit with great pleasure
  By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell. McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing. Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McNamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: "I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process." Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.
• Vietnam War's architect couldn't escape its shadow
  By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Robert S. McNamara, the Kennedy-Johnson-era defense secretary, will be most remembered as a man instrumental in sending hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight in Vietnam, and who was haunted by his decision for the rest of his life. McNamara, who died Monday at his Washington home at age 93, became one of the favorite targets of protesters as the war, launched as part of the nation's ongoing effort to stop communist aggression (sic) , tore apart the United States in the 1960s. [Imperialism]
• In Refugee Aid, Pakistan’s War Has New Front
  By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH July 2, 2009 QASIM PULA, Pakistan — Islamist charities and the United States are competing for the allegiance of the two million people (sic) displaced by the fight against the Taliban in Swat and other parts of Pakistan — and so far, the Islamists are in the lead. Although the United States is the largest contributor to a United Nations relief effort, Pakistani authorities have refused to allow American officials or planes to deliver the aid in the camps for displaced people. The Pakistanis do not want to be associated with their unpopular ally. Meanwhile, in the absence of effective aid from the government, hard-line Islamist charities are using the refugee crisis to push their anti-Western agenda and to sour public opinion against the war and America. Last week, a crowd of men, the heads of households uprooted from Swat, gathered in this village in northwestern Pakistan for handouts for their desperate families. But before they could even get a can of cooking oil, the aid director for a staunchly anti-Western Islamic charity took full advantage of having a captive audience, exhorting the men to jihad. [Imperialism] [Media]
• The Launching of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM).
  Offensive Operations in Cyberspace By Tom Burghardt Global Research, July 1, 2009 U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates signed a memorandum on June 23 that announced the launch of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). A scheme by securocrats in the works for several years, the order specifies that the new office will be a "subordinate unified command" under U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM). According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM "will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010." Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA's headquarters. Gates' memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM "must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners." Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command's offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM's operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to "harden" the "dot-mil" domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism's adversaries. [Cyberwar]
• Time for an Israeli Strike?
  By John R. Bolton
  Thursday, July 2, 2009 With Iran's hard-line mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unmistakably back in control, Israel's decision of whether to use military force against Tehran's nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever. Iran's nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability. Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not. [Bolton]
• U.S. Faces Resentment in Afghan Region
  By Carlotta Gall Published: July 2, 2009 Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan — The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population. A village elder greeted American troops on Thursday in Helmand Province, where the Taliban’s influence is pervasive. Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.
  On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. The Marines are part of a larger deployment of additional troops being ordered by the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, to concentrate not just on killing Taliban fighters but on protecting the population (sic) [Spin]
• In Tactical Shift, Troops Will Stay and Hold Ground in Afghanistan
  By Thom Shanker and Richard A. Oppel Jr. Published: July 2, 2009 WASHINGTON — The first major operation launched with the additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama is devised to clear Taliban havens across a strategic southern province — and then, in a marked departure from past practice, to leave clusters of Marines in small bases close to the villagers they were sent to guard and aid, according to senior military officers.
• Thank You, Gareth Evans
  Brussels, 30 June 2009: On behalf of the Board of the International Crisis Group, Co-chairs Lord Patten of Barnes and Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering warmly thank Gareth Evans for his nine and a half years of outstanding service to the organisation as President and CEO. In recognition of his contribution, the Board has decided to award Gareth Evans the title of President Emeritus of Crisis Group. “Speaking for the Board and staff, we all owe Gareth a tremendous debt of gratitude for his tireless efforts since January 2000”, said Co-Chair Chris Patten. “He took a small organisation analysing some 12 conflicts with 25 staff and a budget of two million dollars, and he transformed it into the pre-eminent international NGO in conflict prevention and resolution, examining some 60 conflicts worldwide with 130 staff and a budget of over 15 million.” [Imperialism] [Thinktank] [Softwar]
• Versailles, 1919-2009: a new world order’s legacy
  David A Andelman, 29 - 06 - 2009 The treaty concluded on 28 June 1918 reverberates today across a huge area from Iran and Iraq to the Balkans and even beyond, says David A Andelman. 29 - 06 - 2009 The real roots of many major recent and current political events - the convulsions surrounding Iran's Islamic regime, the bloody troubles in neighbouring Iraq, the ethnic cleansing and mass murders in the Balkans, even numerous wars and uprisings from Palestine to Indochina - lie in a ceremony that occurred ninety years ago. This was the gathering in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, outside Paris, on 28 June 1919, when the representatives of the victors in the first world war dictated the terms of peace to the quivering representatives of Germany's Kaiser. [Imperialism]
• Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRICs) throw down the gauntlet on monetary system reform
  June 28th, 2009 Guest Author: Brendan Kelly, former Country Director for China Affairs, Office of the Secretary of Defense, United States On June 16, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China met in Yekaterinburg, Russia for the first formal BRIC summit. The issue topping the meeting agenda was reform of the international financial and monetary system. The BRICs offered a counterpoint and challenge to the G7/G8, which has served as the world’s economic ‘steering committee’ for the past few decades and meets next month in Italy. Though light on substance, the BRICs’ message was clear: these growing economies want greater voice and representation in international financial institutions, and to a lesser extent, a greater role for their currencies in the international trade and monetary systems. [Reserve] [Decline]
• International Court Under Unusual Fire
  Africans Defend Sudan's Indicted Leader
  By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, June 30, 2009 UNITED NATIONS -- When Luis Moreno-Ocampo charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with war crimes last year, the International Criminal Court prosecutor was hailed by human rights advocates as the man who could help bring justice to Darfur. Today, Moreno-Ocampo appears to be the one on trial, with even some of his early supporters questioning his prosecutorial strategy, his use of facts and his personal conduct. Bashir and others have used the controversy to rally opposition to the world's first permanent criminal court, a challenge that may jeopardize efforts to determine who is responsible for massive crimes in Darfur.
  The Bush administration initially opposed the court, citing concerns of frivolous (sic) investigations of American soldiers engaged in the fight against terrorism. [Double standards]

• 10 most powerful people in the Barack Obama administration
  American weekly U.S. News and World Report has selected the 10 most powerful people in the Barack Obama administration and is letting an online poll decide the ranking. Clockwise from the top left, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senior Adviser David Axelrod, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Attorney General Eric Holder, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and first lady Michelle Obama Clockwise from the top left, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senior Adviser David Axelrod, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Attorney General Eric Holder, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and first lady Michelle Obama
• U.S. Pursues a New Way To Rebuild in Afghanistan
  By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 19, 2009 The idea to transform a vacant tract near the Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif into a sprawling commercial farm, with miles of strawberry fields and thousands of cashmere goats, began with an entreaty from President George W. Bush to the billionaire chairman of Dole Foods at a 2006 Republican Party fundraiser. Go to Afghanistan, Bush urged David H. Murdock, "to see what you can do to help." After a tour of the country the following April, Murdock told U.S. officials he wanted to build a 25,000-acre plantation modeled after Dole's vast holdings in the Philippines. But a few months later, he concluded that transportation and security challenges made the project unsuitable for the company. That did not dissuade the U.S. Agency for International Development. Mindful of the president's interest in the project -- and convinced that Murdock dropped out because he did not receive a thank-you call from Bush -- USAID decided to go it alone. It allocated $40 million in reconstruction money to the venture, and it directed a contractor to hire workers and purchase equipment. It was not until a year later, after several million dollars had been spent, that agency officials realized why Afghans had not cultivated the land themselves: The water and soil were too salty to grow crops. "It was a total waste of resources," said Frauke de Weijer, a development specialist who worked with USAID contractors building the farm. "It was a diversion of reconstruction money from other more effective and beneficial projects." [Aid weapon] [Incompetence]
• Nowhere Man
  Why Ban Ki-moon is the world's most dangerous Korean. By Jacob Heilbrunn | JUNE 22, 2009
  Ban Ki-moon, a general nonentity as secretary-general
  For such a seemingly crucial position, the secretary-generalship of the United Nations has historically had a rather low bar for success. Kurt Waldheim? In his memoir, A Dangerous Place, Daniel Patrick Moynihan recounted that Waldheim functioned as "a post office, a somewhat antique but reasonably efficient public service run along Austro-Hungarian lines. As one sat down with him, he would be mentally sorting the mail while making small conversation." Boutros Boutros-Ghali? His arrogance and fecklessness as the Serbs laid waste to Bosnia prompted the Clinton administration to veto a second term. Kofi Annan? Brought low by his son Kojo's financial peculation in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal.
  Even in this unimpressive company, though, Ban Ki-moon appears to have set the standard for failure. It's not that Ban has committed any particularly egregious mistakes in his 2½ years on the job. But at a time when global leadership is urgently needed, when climate change and international terrorism and the biggest financial crisis in 60 years might seem to require some—any!—response, the former South Korean foreign minister has instead been trotting the globe collecting honorary degrees, issuing utterly forgettable statements, and generally frittering away any influence he might command. He has become a kind of accidental tourist, a dilettante on the international stage.
  Ban's flaws were obvious dating back to his decades toiling in the South Korean foreign ministry, where he earned a telling nickname, "The Bureaucrat." Luckily for Ban, if not for the rest of the world, The Bureaucrat was exactly what the Bush administration was looking for after years of tussling with the assertively anti-American Annan. When it became Asia's turn to nominate a secretary-general, Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made Ban's election her pet project. [UNUS]
• 'Color' revolution fizzles in Iran
  By M K Bhadrakumar
  Israelis are realists par excellence. This is why it is always gainful to buttonhole an Israeli counterpart over a single-malt on the diplomatic circuit. He will invariably weave into the tapestry of the plain tale a nylon thread until then obscure to the naked eye. Thus, the first warning that the adventurous project to mount a "Twitter revolution" in Iran was doomed to fail had to come from the Israelis. It meshes well with the indications that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's capacity to command the seemingly explosive political situation was never really been in doubt, no matter the hype in the Western media that Tehran was on the 'knife's edge".
• The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test
  June 22, 2009 By George Friedman Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989. Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed. A Question of Support This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution. [Media]
• Mongolia and the International Community
  By Steven Noerper June 18th, 2009 Stephen Noerper, Senior Fellow, Asia, at the EastWest Institute and Senior Associate of the Nautilus Institute, writes, “As a refreshing alternative to tussles with a bellicose North Korea, oft labeled a hermit, the United States should applaud Mongolia, the horseman of North Asia. Mongolia has listened to international requests, embraced its responsibilities and grown itself as one of the region’s more vibrant locales.” [Imperialism]
• Iran's diverse opposition united by rejection of Ahmadinejad
  From the Los Angeles Times NEWS ANALYSIS The government appears to recognize that it cannot quell the protests over Friday's disputed presidential election, but authorities may not understand the depth of the problem they face. By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim June 18, 2009 Reporting from Tehran — Neither side can drown out the other. Both so far are exercising a measure of restraint. But as authorities try to rein in Iran's most serious unrest since the Islamic Revolution, they face a diverse opposition united in its rejection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his policies.
  Whether or not he won a majority of votes in last week's election, a large segment of the population rejects Ahmadinejad's vision and leadership. Critics complain that he is popular only among a limited swath of Iranians of a certain religious and social background, the pious lower-middle class who continue to treasure their rural roots. His modest lifestyle appeals to many who are fed up with official corruption, and he has used the country's oil wealth to finance payments to the poor. But Iran is also suffering from high unemployment and inflation, and the president's opponents fear his foreign policy will lead to isolation, if not open conflict, with the West. It's not just that Ahmadinejad is unpopular among middle-class urbanites, minorities, women and youth who have united against him. Unlike his reformist predecessor Mohammad Khatami, who advocated an "Iran for all Iranians," Ahmadinejad's critics believe he rules as if only his segment of the country's diverse tapestry counts.
• Iran and Russia nip at US global dominance
  At conference in Siberia, leaders of Russia, China, India, and Iran float idea of new 'supranational' currency. China offers $10 billion to neighbors. By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Moscow The "age of empires has ended" and the "international capitalist order is retreating," declared a beaming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday, speaking in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg before an audience that included the top leaders of Russia, China, and India. [SCO] [Reserve] [Imperialism]
• Iraq, AfPak, beyond: the global cost of war
  Paul Rogers, 18 - 06 - 2009 The toxic phrase "war on terror" has fallen out of use, but the destructive effects of the real thing continue and even escalate in a period of economic crisis. 18 - 06 - 2009 A major landmark in the in the United States's military presence in Iraq arrives on 30 June 2009, when the army is scheduled to withdraw its combat-troops from the country's cities. The terms of the "status-of-forces agreement" with the Iraqi government will see most of these (currently 133,000) soldiers relocated to a number of major bases in rural areas, though some will join the 30,000 troops that have left Iraq since the peak of the "surge" in mid-2008. The process is taking place against the background of continuing violence in Iraq, notwithstanding reports of an overall increase in security
  The concentrated investment in these new instruments of combat - in response to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where a few thousand insurgents have been able to tie down over 200,000 western troops - are part of the more general trends in world military spending over the (almost) eight years of the2war on terror" (see Jorn Madslien, Military spending sets new record, BBC News, 8 June 2009). The latest armaments and disarmament yearbook of the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) - Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (June 2009) - highlights a 4% real-term increase in world military spending in 2007 -08, and a 45% real-term increase in the 1998-2008 period. The US's own expenditure increased by 58% over this decade, in great part due to spending on the wars it has been engaged in since 11 September 2001 (see America‘s politics of defence" , 12 March 2009). [Imperialism] [Militarisation]
• An Innovation Hub in Northern England?
  Sheffield, a former steel city, repositions itself just as businesses are looking for alternatives to Europe's pricier big cities By Helen Walters
  A nearly 100-yd.-long stainless steel sculpture located outside the train station nods to Sheffield's industrial heritage creativesheffield There was a time when British manufacturing didn't seem like an oxymoron. In their industrial heyday, northern English cities such as Manchester and Sheffield thrived. Yet by the 1980s, the situation was markedly different. Assaulted by the political brinkmanship of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, then kneecapped by its own radical Labor City Council, Sheffield and much of its famous steel industry sank into a dazed decline from which it seemed unlikely to bounce back. Visit central Sheffield today, however, and you're greeted by a rather more vibrant scene. The imposing but formerly grim train station has been revamped with liberal use of glass. Outside, a nearly 100-yd.-long stainless steel sculpture in a new courtyard signals a city that's proud of its heritage—but not mired in the past. Up the street, the Winter Garden provides an oasis of green, while the refurbished Crucible Theatre and Millennium Galleries offer a flash of art and culture in this city of 530,000 people. It's all part of a long-term strategy intended to reposition Sheffield as a European innovation and design hub.
• 'Dollar faces challenge as reserve currency'
  A leading economist said in Seoul yesterday that the U.S. dollar's supremacy as the world's reserve currency is facing profound challenges as the balance of economic and financial power shifts East amid the current economic crisis. "There is a slow-burning fuse underneath the dollar," Gerard Lyons, chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank, said in the World Economic Forum. Underscoring the strengthening role of Asia, Lyons said that the depth of the global downturn drove key emerging economies, such as China and Russia, to cite the possibility of a new global reserve currency. [Reserve]
• IAEA chief, Israel lock horns over Syria
  By Simon Morgan – 8 hours ago VIENNA (AFP) — UN watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei sparred with an Israeli envoy on Thursday after being accused of bias in the handling of an investigation into Syria's nuclear activities, diplomats said. The United States meanwhile accused Syria of obstructing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) probe into allegations that it was building a secret nuclear reactor at a site that was bombed by Israeli jets in September 2007.
  The IAEA chief was angered by Michaeli's remarks, and according to a transcript of his comments obtained by AFP, described the Israeli envoy's statement as "totally distorted." "We work here in an organisation that is an organisation of international law. We apply international law, not selectively, but across the board," ElBaradei said. "When Israel took it upon itself to destroy a facility, what was claimed to be a nuclear facility, without giving the agency the opportunity to verify that ... this was not only making it almost impossible for us to establish the facts, but it was a clear violation of international law," he said. [UNUS] [Dilemma]
• Mousavi states his case
  By Kaveh L Afrasiabi Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate challenging Iran's authorities on the result of last week's presidential elections, is a masterful tactician who wants to overturn the re-election of his rival, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, with allegations of a massive conspiracy that he claims cheated him and millions of his supporters. These supporters, identifiable by the color green they have adopted, have taken to the streets in the tens of thousands and on Thursday were to stage a "day of mourning" for what they say is a lost election. This follows a "silent" march through the streets of the capital on Wednesday. To date, at least 10 people - some Iranian sources say 32 - have been killed in clashes. Mousavi has lodged an official complaint with the powerful 12-member Guardians Council, which has ordered a partial recount of the vote. The complaint's main flaw is that it passes improper or questionable pre-election conduct as something else, that is, as evidence of voting fraud. The protest, which seeks fresh elections, is short on specifics and long on extraneous, election-unrelated complaints. The first two items relate to the televised debates that were held between the candidates, rather than anything germane to the vote count.
  Given the thin evidence presented by Mousavi, there can be little chance of an annulment of the result.
• BRICs Launch Assault on Dollar's Global Status
  Brazil, Russia, India and China, sometimes lumped together as BRIC to represent fast-growing developing economies, are selling off their U.S. Treasury Bond holdings. Russia announced earlier this month it will sell U.S. Treasury Bonds, while China and Brazil have announced plans to cut the amount of U.S. Treasury Bonds in their foreign currency reserves and buy bonds issued by the International Monetary Fund instead. The BRICs are also soliciting public support for a "super currency" capable of replacing what they see as the ailing U.S. dollar. The four countries account for 22 percent of the global economy, and their defection could deal a severe blow to the greenback. [Reserve]
• Empire of Vice
  By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro This article appeared in the June 29, 2009 edition of The Nation. June 10, 2009 Three days before Christmas in 1946, Havana's Hotel Nacional was closed for a private meeting. Armed guards blocked entry to its lovely grounds atop a seaside bluff in the plush El Vedado district. Inside the stately cream-colored Art Deco hotel, a group of distinguished foreign visitors tucked into a feast of local delicacies. There were crab and queen conch enchiladas from the southern archipelago; swordfish and oysters from the nearby village of Cojímar; roast breast of flamingo and tortoise stew; grilled manatee, washed down with añejo rum. It is unknown whether the attendees--whose number included about twenty of North America's most notorious gangsters--ended their meal with a cake like the one served at their feast's fictional rendering in The Godfather Part II. But as in the film, the purpose of the gathering was clear: to divvy up shares in the empire of vice they were busy establishing in Havana. [Imperialism]
• It's Official--The Era of Cheap Oil Is Over
  By Michael T. Klare June 11, 2009 Every summer, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the US Department of Energy issues its International Energy Outlook (IEO)--a jam-packed compendium of data and analysis on the evolving world energy equation. For those with the background to interpret its key statistical findings, the release of the IEO can provide a unique opportunity to gauge important shifts in global energy trends, much as reports of routine Communist Party functions in the party journal Pravda once provided America's Kremlin watchers with insights into changes in the Soviet Union's top leadership circle.
  As it happens, the recent release of the 2009 IEO has provided energy watchers with a feast of significant revelations. By far the most significant disclosure: the IEO predicts a sharp drop in projected future world oil output (compared to previous expectations) and a corresponding increase in reliance on what are called "unconventional fuels"--oil sands, ultra-deep oil, shale oil and biofuels. So here's the headline for you: For the first time, the well-respected Energy Information Administration appears to be joining with those experts who have long argued that the era of cheap and plentiful oil is drawing to a close. Almost as notable, when it comes to news, the 2009 report highlights Asia's insatiable demand for energy and suggests that China is moving ever closer to the point at which it will overtake the United States as the world's number-one energy consumer. Clearly, a new era of cutthroat energy competition is upon us. [Energy]
• China's copper deal back in the melt
  By Peter Lee The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the People's Republic of China do not make for an easy fit. The most conspicuous clash between the IMF and China is going on today in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with copper the big issue at stake. In 2007, as Congo emerged from civil war, a Chinese consortium concluded a US$9 billion agreement with the government. The Chinese investors would develop mines and infrastructure - including $3 billion in projects over the next four years - and obtain the right to mine 10 million tonnes of copper and 600,000 tonnes of cobalt in return (quantities that are undoubtedly subject to adjustment based on changes in market price for these commodities).
  The IMF is working to obstruct it. Congo's President Joseph Kabila, who was slotted into his office after a less-than-exemplary election and with no little legerdemain by the Western powers, has shown clear signs of pursuing an independent course by playing off the Chinese against the West.
• Lots of Hedging, Little Leading: An Analysis of the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission Report
  Hans M. Kristensen and Ivan Oelrich
  Among the flood of security policy reports issued in recent months, one of the most anticipated has been the one from the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.[1] The panel, which Congress established last year, is a bipartisan, 12-member group of policy veterans, headed by former Secretaries of Defense William Perry, the commission's chairman, and James Schlesinger, the vice chairman. The report, released May 6, is supposed to help guide the Obama administration's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which is scheduled to be completed within the next year.
  The anti-CTBT section of the report asserts that the United States should not ratify the treaty because its formal entry into force depends on getting eight other states, including North Korea and Pakistan, to ratify it. [US global strategy] [Test]
• Palau to Take Chinese Guantánamo Detainees
  By MARK LANDLER Published: June 9, 2009 WASHINGTON — The United States has won an agreement to transfer up to 17 Chinese Muslims from the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Palau, a sparsely populated archipelago in the North Pacific, according to a statement released by Palau to The Associated Press on Wednesday. The president of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, said his government had “agreed to accommodate the United States of America’s request” to “temporarily resettle” the detainees, members of the Uighur ethnic group, “subject to periodic review.” Palau, the president said, would be “honored and proud” to take them in a “humanitarian gesture.” [Separatism] [Terrorism] [Double standards]
• GLOBAL MILITARY EXPENDITURE SET NEW RECORD IN 2008, SAYS SIPRI
  (Stockholm, 8 June 2009). Worldwide military expenditure in 2008 totalled an estimated US$1464 billion, according to new figures released today by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). This represents an increase of 4 per cent in real terms compared to 2007, and an increase of 45 per cent since 1999. SIPRI today launched the 2009 edition of its Yearbook on Armaments, Disarmament and International Security.
• SIPRI Yearbook 2009: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security
  Summary
• China is now world No. 2 arms spender, report says
  By MALIN RISING – 10 hours ago STOCKHOLM (AP) — China has become the world's second biggest military spender behind the United States, a Swedish peace research group said Monday. Global arms spending rose 4 percent last year, but China increased its spending by 10 percent to an estimated $84.9 billion last year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in its annual report on world arms transfers. "China is continuing to acquire both domestic and foreign arms as it seeks to equip its armed forces for conditions of modern 'informationalized' warfare," it said. Such warfare involves the use of precision weapons and high-tech information and communications technology. Sam Perlo-Freeman, a researcher for the peace institute, said China had previously spent relatively little on its military. "They are the second biggest military spender now, that does not mean they are the second strongest military power, because a lot of other countries have been at this game for a lot longer than China," Perlo-Freeman said. "While they are certainly seeking to increase their regional and global influence ... there is very little evidence of any hostile intent in terms of the region," he said. [Military expenditure]
• SPIRI Yearbook 2009: Chapter 7. International arms transfers
  SIEMON T. WEZEMAN, MARK BROMLEY AND PIETER D. WEZEMAN Summary Since 2005 there has been an upward trend in deliveries of major conventional arms. The annual average for 2004–2008 was 21 per cent higher than for 2000–2004. The United States and Russia remained by far the largest exporters, followed by Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Together these five countries accounted for 79 per cent of the volume of exports for 2004–2008. They have been the top five suppliers since the end of the cold war and have accounted for at least three-quarters of all exports annually. East Asia, Europe and the Middle East continued to be the largest recipient regions for 2004–2008, each accounting for about 20 per cent of all imports. China remained the single largest recipient for the period 2004–2008, followed by India, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Korea and Greece. China has been a major recipient of weapons since the early 1990s and has been the largest importer for several years. Most Chinese arms imports originate from Russia. However, Russian deliveries to China dropped significantly in 2007 and 2008. China has used its access to Russian technology to develop indigenous weapons, in some cases using illegally copied Russian components. Both countries agreed in 2008 to abide by intellectual property laws specifically for military equipment. India is seen as probably the most important single country market for weapons in the near future. A large part of Indian arms imports also originates from Russia. Based on current orders Russia will remain India’s most important supplier. However, Russian demands for increased payments for weapons on order and quality problems with delivered weapons have soured relations. Unlike China, India has the option of using other suppliers, such as France, Israel or the UK. Recently, relations with the USA have improved and two large orders for high-tech US weapons were signed in 2008. The war between the Sri Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) demonstrates how even small deliveries of weapons and ammunition can have a major negative impact. Acquisition of a few maritime systems gave the government the ability to stop arms smuggling by the LTTE. Together with imports of stocks of ammunition this changed the military balance in favour of the government to the extent that it could decide to aim for a military solution, leading to one of the bloodiest conflicts of 2008. [Arms sales]
• SPIRI Yearbook 2009: Appendix 7A. The suppliers and recipients of major conventional weapons
  THE SIPRI ARMS TRANSFERS PROGRAMME Appendix 7A provides data on the suppliers and recipients of major conventional weapons and the size of the international arms trade. http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/transfers/researchissues/controlling/arms_embargoes/un_arms_embargoes/north_korea/north_korea_default/?searchterm=north%20korea Arms imports and exports by North Korea On 14 October 2006 Security Council Resolution 1718 (PDF) established a partial embargo on arms exports to and imports from North Korea. The resolution inter alia prohibits states to directly or indirectly supply, or help to supply, North Korea with major conventional weapons as defined by the UN Register of Conventional Weapons - battle tanks, armoured combat vehicles, large calibre artillery, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and missiles and missile launchers - as well as ballistic missiles. More information on the UN Register and its coverage can be found here. The resolution also prohibits the supply of related spare parts along with 'technical training, advice, services or assistance related to the provision, manufacture, maintenance or use of' the listed items. In addition, the resolution prohibits states to procure major conventional weapons and ballistic missiles or materiels and technology related to such weapons from North Korea. Unlike most UNSC arms embargoes, SALW (Small Arms and Light Weapons) and other equipment delivered specifically for military use is not covered by resolution 1718. However, paragraph 12d leaves room to redefine the list of embargoed goods. The SIPRI Arms Transfers Project maintains a database covering all transfers of major conventional weapons using a definition that is generally broader than that used by the UN Register. To view tables of imports to and exports from North Korea of SIPRI-defined major conventional weapons between 1995-2006 click here. These tables provide a picture of the countries that have supplied North Korea with major weapons and those that have received weapons from North Korea during the last decade, as well as detailing what type of weapons and what quantities have been delivered.
• Turf Battles on Intelligence Pose Test for Spy Chiefs
  By MARK MAZZETTI Published: June 8, 2009 WASHINGTON — On May 19, Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, sent a classified memorandum announcing that his office would use its authority to select the top American spy in each country overseas. One day later, Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent a dispatch of his own. Ignore Mr. Blair’s message, Mr. Panetta wrote to agency employees; the C.I.A. was still in charge overseas, a role that C.I.A. station chiefs had jealously guarded for decades. The dispute has posed an early test for both spymasters, with Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, now trying to negotiate a truce. The behind-the-scenes battle shows the intensity of struggles continuing between intelligence agencies whose roles were left ill defined after a structural overhaul in 2004 that was intended to harness greater cooperation and put an end to internecine fights [Intelligence]
• Can Barack Obama's soothing rhetoric douse the Muslim militants' flames?
  The President's plea for a new beginning will face formidable obstacles, says Con Coughlin By Con Coughlin Published: 8:00PM BST 04 Jun 2009 Short of declaring his intention to convert to Islam, it is difficult to imagine what more Barack Obama might have said during his speech yesterday to demonstrate his seriousness about healing the poisonous rift between the West and the Muslim world. [Media]
• Obama in Cairo: High Words, Low Truths
  By Alexander Cockburn Weekend Edition June 5 -7, 2009
  As they drafted his speech to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo on Thursday, President Obama’s speech writers strove to suggest that cordiality towards Islam is soundly embedded in America’s cultural history. The first Muslim congressman, Obama confided to his vast audience across the Muslim world, was sworn into the House of Representatives with his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran. No names were mentioned, but this would have been Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a Democrat elected in 2006. On his victory night rally the local crowd shouted “Allahu Akhbar!”. During the race Ellison understandably downplayed past associations with the Nation of Islam. Obama also reminded the world that Morocco had been the first nation to recognize the infant United States, signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, which declared in its preamble that the United States had no quarrel with the Muslim religion and was in no sense a Christian country. The second US President, John Adams said that America had no quarrel with Islam. It’s a stretch. As my father Claud said, Never believe anything till it is officially denied. Adams and Jefferson both saw it as a vital matter of national security to settle accounts with the Muslim world, as represented by the Barbary states. [Islam]
• A High-Priced Media Campaign That Iraqis Aren't Buying
  Many in Baghdad Dismiss Effort as U.S. Propaganda
  By Ernesto Londoño Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, June 7, 2009 BAGHDAD -- The pages of Baghdad Now, an Arabic-language newspaper, portray a country on the upswing. Iraqi soldiers and policemen are proud, capable civil servants who take weapons off the streets and doggedly pursue criminals. Iraqis of all sectarian backgrounds work in unison. The Iraqi government delivers. The paper's editorials hail democracy. Fashion pages chronicle the latest fads in Beirut and Kuwait. There's little news of the more than 130,000 American troops who remain in the country. That the paper has no publicly known editor, no bylines and no ads is no mistake. It is part of America's huge psychological warfare campaign to influence Iraqis' behavior and attitudes. "The millions spent on this is wasted money," Ziyad al-Aajeely, director of Iraq's nonprofit Journalistic Freedom Observatory, said as he flipped through a recent edition of Baghdad Now. "Nobody reads this." U.S. military officials and contractors have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on billboards, pamphlets and TV and radio airtime in Iraq over the past six years to burnish the U.S. military's image, marginalize extremists, promote democracy and foster reconciliation. [Propaganda]
• Castro questions timing of Cuban spy arrests
  By ANITA SNOW The Associated Press Saturday, June 6, 2009; 10:01 PM HAVANA -- Fidel Castro called the case of two Americans accused of spying for Cuba "strange" Saturday and questioned whether the timing of their arrests was politically motivated. In an essay read by a newscaster on state television, the former Cuban leader noted that the retired Washington couple were taken into custody just 24 hours after the Organization of American States voted to lift a decades-old suspension of Cuba's membership in that group. [Espionage]
• Obama Has 250,000 "Contractors" in Iraq and Afghan Wars, Increases Number of Mercenaries
  Newly released Pentagon statistics show that in both Iraq and Afghanistan the number of armed contractors is rising. The DoD says it sees “similar dependence on contractors in future.” By Jeremy Scahill
  A couple of years ago, Blackwater executive Joseph Schmitz seemed to see a silver lining for mercenary companies with the prospect of US forces being withdrawn or reduced in Iraq. “There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint,” Schmitz said. “And there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.” When it comes to armed contractors, it seems that Schmitz was right. According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build up of forces” in the country [Privatisation]
• The Geography of Recession
  June 2, 2009 | 1844 GMT By Peter Zeihan The global recession is the biggest development in the global system in the year to date. In the United States, it has become almost dogma that the recession is the worst since the Great Depression. But this is only one of a wealth of misperceptions about whom the downturn is hurting most, and why. Let’s begin with some simple numbers. As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world. (Figures for China have not been included, in part because of the unreliability of Chinese statistics, but also because the country’s financial system is so radically different from the rest of the world as to make such comparisons misleading. For more, read the China section below.) But didn’t the recession begin in the United States? That it did, but the American system is far more stable, durable and flexible than most of the other global economies, in large part thanks to the country’s geography. To understand how place shapes economics, we need to take a giant step back from the gloom and doom of the current moment and examine the long-term picture of why different regions follow different economic paths. The United States and the Free Market The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts. Second is the American maritime transport system.
• The shadow war in Balochistan
  By Pepe Escobar Just when Iran and Pakistan had reached a key Pipelineistan breakthrough, regional violence exploded involving, once again, "the greatest prize" Balochistan (Please see Balochistan is the greatest prize, May 9, 2009, Asia Times Online.) The key question to ask is, as usual, cui bono?, or "Who profits?" What's behind this new, bloody intersection of Pipelineistan and the former "global war on terror" - a key theme US President Barack Obama would not dare touch in his Cairo address on Thursday to the "Muslim world"? On May 22 in Tehran, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad finally signed a preliminary agreement, after 14 long years of negotiations, to build the Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipeline, formerly the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI), or "peace pipeline". (The final deal should, in theory, be sealed in less than two weeks.) The decision brazenly defied Washington's diktat. (Please see Pipelineistan goes Iran-Pak, May 29, 2009, Asia Times Online.) On May 28 in Zahedan, in Sistan-Balochistan province in Iran, the Pakistan-based, hardcore Sunni, ultra-anti-Shi'ite outfit Jundallah ("Soldiers of God") claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing inside the Amir al-Momenin mosque that killed 25 people and wounded 125. The timing and the circumstances could not be more suspicious. Tehran simply cannot understand how Islamabad could not contain Jundallah after it has been offered key, on-the-ground intelligence. [Terrorism]
• Hezbollah spices up Israel-Iran mix
  By Kaveh L Afrasiabi Where Iran has Hezbollah, Israel has Jundallah, given Israel's apparent efforts to destabilize Iran by playing an "ethnic card" against it. This, by some reports, it is doing by nurturing the Sunni Islamist group Jundallah to parallel Tehran's support for Lebanon's formidable Shi'ite group, Hezbollah, that is favored to win parliamentary elections on June 7. Should the Hezbollah-led coalition win as anticipated, the result will be even closer military-to-military relations between Iran and Lebanon, reflected in Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrollah's recent statement that he would look to Tehran to modernize Lebanon's army. Rattled by the prospect of an even-stronger Iranian influence in Lebanon in the near future, the Israeli government, which is on the defensive internationally over its stance on the Palestinian issue, has gone on the offensive. It is upping the ante against Iran by focusing on covert activities inside Iran, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, to "disrupt Iran's nuclear program" - so far without much success. [Terrorism]
• Reagan Did It
  By Paul Krugman
  “This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act. He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years. Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence. On the latter point: traditionally, the U.S. government ran significant budget deficits only in times of war or economic emergency. Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us. The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.
• Why'd Obama switch on detainee photos? Maliki went ballistic
  By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama reversed his decision to release detainee abuse photos from Iraq and Afghanistan after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki warned that Iraq would erupt into violence and that Iraqis would demand that U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq a year earlier than planned, two U.S. military officers, a senior defense official and a State Department official have told McClatchy. [Torture]
• Indian Telecoms to Examine Huawei Gear for Trojans
  May 21st, 2009 - by 2point6billion.com May 21 - BSNL, the Indian state-owned telecommunication service provider, has been ordered by the government to “thoroughly test” all equipment supplied to it by the Chinese manufacturer Huawei on fears that “backdoor entries” could have been inserted to enable China if needed to disable Indian telecommunications. Huawei won a US$1.5billion contract to supply BSNL with 25 million lines. The kit must be tested for trapdoors, blackboxes, malware and remote hacking capabilities. BSNL has been restricted from purchasing from Huawei on common political borders it shares with China, with the Huawei kit only to be deployed in the southern Indian states. There are concerns that in politically sensitive areas such as Bangladesh, Burma and Pakistan, Huawei could provide equipment that contains remote diagnostic facilities which could be activated by China at a later stage. Such additions would allow China to conduct surveillance and potentially disable communications networks in India. Huawei’s contract is for the provision of base stations, mobile switching centers, and microwave equipment, and includes a two year maintenance provision, which is worrying aspects of the Indian Communications Ministry. [Cyberwar]
• Obama versus Cheney, Center versus Right
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 258, June 1, 2009 On May 21, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama gave a major speech outlining his administration's views on national security. Minutes after he completed his talk, former Vice-President Richard Cheney gave a major speech that essentially denounced Obama's positions on national security. Both speeches were widely covered by the U.S. press, which termed this pair of speeches as a fundamental conflict of values.
• Territorial Conflicts in the East China Sea – From Missed Opportunities to Negotiation Stalemate (1)
  Reinhard Drifte Abstract This paper analyses the political, legal, military and economic issues involved in the territorial and maritime border issues in the East China Sea (ECS) between mainly Japan and China but also with special reference to the Korean interests in the northern part of the Sea. The issues revolve around the dispute over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands/Diaoyudao, as well as the delimitation of the Japan-China and the China-Korea maritime borders. It concludes that in the 1970s and 1980s some opportunities to achieve joint exploitation of the hydrocarbon resources in the ECS were missed, and Japan later sent misleading signals to China about the commitment to its economic interests in the Sea. A critical evaluation of the 18 June 2008 Japan-China agreement foresees many obstacles to implement it, which also does not augur well for a speedy delimitation of the China-Korea maritime border.
• Boy chosen by Dalai Lama turns back on Buddhist order
  Dale Fuchs in Madris guardian.co.uk, Sunday 31 May 2009 23.11 BST Article history As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped as by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him. Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha. Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. Movies were also forbidden – except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers. "I never felt like that boy," he said. He is now studying film in Madrid and has denounced the Buddhist order that elevated him to guru status. "They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal," said Torres, 24, describing how he was whisked from obscurity in Granada to a monastery in southern India. "It was like living a lie," he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Despite his rebelliousness, he is still known as Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche and revered by the Buddhist community. A prayer for his "long life" still adorns the website of the Foundation to Preserve the Mahayana Tradition, which has 130 centres around the world. The website features a biography of the renegade guru that gushes about his peaceful, meditative countenance as a baby. In Tibetan Buddhism, a lama is one of a lineage of reincarnated spiritual leaders, the most famous of which is the Dalai Lama. According to the foundation biography, another leader suspected Torres was the reincarnation of the recently deceased Lama Yeshe when he was only five months old. In 1986, at 14 months, his parents took him to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The toddler was chosen out of nine other candidates and eventually "enthroned". At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls – though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere's cabin. By 18, he had never seen couples kiss. His first disco experience was a shock. "I was amazed to watch everyone dance. What were all those people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, enclosed in a box full of smoke?" [Bizarre]
• After Many Stumbles, the Fall of an American Giant
  By MICHELINE MAYNARD Published: May 31, 2009 It is a company that helped lift hundreds of thousands of American workers into the middle class. It transformed Detroit into the Silicon Valley of its day, a symbol of America’s talent for innovation. It built celebrated cars, like Cadillacs, that became synonymous with luxury. In 1985, Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, flanked by other government officials, announced the opening of a G.M. Saturn plant in Spring Hill, just outside Nashville. And now it is filing for bankruptcy, something that would have been unfathomable even a few years ago, much less decades ago, when it was a dominant force in the American economy. Rarely has a company fallen so far and so fast as General Motors. And while its bankruptcy appeared increasingly likely in recent weeks, the arrival of the moment is still a staggering blow, particularly for anyone with ties to the company. “I never ever could have believed that one day this thing would go that way,” said Jim Wangers, a retired G.M. executive who was part of the team that developed the Pontiac GTO, and the author of “Glory Days,” about Pontiac’s heyday in the muscle-car era of the 1960s. “We were so successful,” he added. Founded in 1908, G.M. ruled the car industry for more than half a century, with a broad range of vehicles, reflecting the company’s promise to offer “a car for every purse and purpose.” The expression “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country” entered the lexicon, even though it was a slight misquotation of Charles E. Wilson, G.M.’s president in the early 1950s.
• Divided Poland falls out over Solidarity
  Twenty years ago, a democratic revolution led by Lech Walesa's trade-union movement signalled the end of the country's communist regime. But as plans for this week's anniversary festivities are marred by rows, nostalgia is in short supply The Observer, Sunday 31 May 2009 Article historyThe stage is being prepared outside the famous Gdansk shipyards. The temporary terraces are nearly ready in the centre of Krakow and Kylie Minogue is on her way. Poland is getting ready to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the events that set the nation and much of eastern and central Europe on the road to freedom. But Piotr Karwowoski, a recently retired trade union official and factory worker, will not be celebrating. When he travels the 100 miles across the green, flat plains to Warsaw from his home town of Swidnik next week, he will instead be heading to a three-day administrative meeting of his union's industrial wing. Karwowoski played a key role in the years of struggle, strikes and demonstrations that finally culminated in "semi-free" elections on 4 June 1989. But the 65-year-old, despite his impeccable revolutionary credentials, is not in the mood for nostalgia. "Twenty years ago I was euphoric at the prospect of change, especially after all we had done," Karwowoski told the Observer last week. "But the Poland that resulted was different than I expected. I don't really want to celebrate."
• Expats flock to Cuba as US reforms spark a party
  The easing of travel and customs restrictions has led to family reunions and a mini-consumer boom Buzz up! Digg it Andres Schipani in Havana The Observer, Sunday 31 May 2009 Article history A student waves a US flag at Revolution Square in Havana May 1, 2009, during the May Day celebration. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images At a basic apartment in a creaky old building in central Havana, the Ramírez family is enjoying a feast. The women are chatting in the living room, catchy dance music is blaring out of an old cassette recorder and there are fried bananas and plenty of cheap local rum on the table. It is a typical Cuban scene, with one crucial difference. The main attraction is a wide-open suitcase in the middle of the room. It belongs to Esteban, just in from Miami. Inside, bags of M&Ms mingle with some stripy Victoria's Secret G-strings and bras. There are also tubes of Crest toothpaste, Colgate toothbrushes and orange bottles of Tide detergent. "Capitalism à la carte," says Esteban excitedly, putting his right arm around his daughter's shoulders. Change, albeit piecemeal and small-scale, is taking place in Cuba, following the first tentative signs of a thaw in relations with the United States. Cuban-Americans used to be able to visit only once every three years. Last month the Obama administration decided to end that restriction and relatives may now travel as often as they wish. And where they were once restricted in the amount of money they provide, they can now bring meaningful economic assistance to often impoverished relatives. [Sanctions]
• Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for the United States
  By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JOHN MARKOFF Published: May 30, 2009 MELBOURNE, Fla. — The government’s urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts. Computers, indispensable in peace, are becoming ever more important in political conflicts and open warfare. This series examines the growing use of computer power as a weapon. The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning. Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies. [Cyberwar]

• Man who tracked Che for CIA awarded $1 billion in lawsuit
  By Luisa Yanez | Miami Herald In what is considered the largest civil judgment against the Cuban government, a Miami-Dade judge on Friday awarded more than $1 billion to a Miami man who blamed Fidel Castro and his Cuban revolutionary sidekick Che Guevara for his father's suicide in 1959. ''What they did was torture this family and tear it apart,'' Miami-Dade Judge Peter Adrien said in siding with Gustavo Villoldo, a former CIA operative who had tracked down Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia. Said Villoldo: ``You have brought closure to us after 50 years. Justice has prevailed.'' Jeremy Alters, Villoldo's attorney, said he and his client will now attempt to get the money from the frozen assets of the Cuban government. Those assets are in financial institutions throughout the world. [Extraterritoriality]
• Spain’s High-Speed Rail Offers Guideposts for U.S.
  Alberto Estevez/European Pressphoto Agency A high-speed train arriving in Barcelona. Spain's high-speed rail network now stretches from Malaga on the south coast to Barcelona in the northeast. By VICTORIA BURNETT Published: May 29, 2009 LLEIDA, Spain — When President Obama announced in April his $13 billion plan to propel the United States into the age of high-speed rail, he tipped his hat to the trains that zip between the cities of the Old Continent at up to 217 miles an hour. Spain, an enthusiastic latecomer to high-speed rail, on Friday will complete a six-day tour of European transit systems that it presented to the American transportation secretary, Ray H. LaHood. Officials say the Spanish experience could hold lessons in what works and what does not. Spain opened its first Alta Velocidad Española, or AVE, high-speed train route in 1992, between Madrid and Seville. The network has grown to nearly 2,000 kilometers and stretches from Malaga on the south coast to Barcelona, which is north and east. Supporters say the AVE has begun to transform the country, binding remote and sometimes restive regions to Madrid and leading traditionally homebound Spaniards to move around for work or leisure. “Spaniards have rediscovered the train,” said Iñaki Barrón de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris. “The AVE has changed the way people live, the way they do business. Spaniards don’t move around a lot, but the AVE is even changing that.”
• Where Were the Foundations? The Philanthropies and the Economic Crisis
  By JOAN ROELOFS We in the United States have been endowed with enormous philanthropic foundations, which have been fixing up the world for the last 100 years. One might wonder how their activities relate to the current economic crisis. News on this subject is not found in the headlines, or even on page 23. There is more exposure of foundation garments than of the opulent structures overpinning our system. We should remember that these institutions, taking to heart the “robber baron” accusation, were not intended to dispense charity, but to apply resources and “social engineering” to forestall the “evils of capitalism.”
  In addition to the billions donated to non-profit organizations, economic development, and policy-oriented think tanks, foundations have been prime creators of international organizations designed to promote and defend capitalism against any and all threats. After World War I, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations originated the Council on Foreign Relations [Thinktanks]
• Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage Wars in Cyberspace
  By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER May 29, 2009 WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare. The military command would complement a civilian effort to be announced by President Obama on Friday that would overhaul the way the United States safeguards its computer networks. Mr. Obama, officials said, will announce the creation of a White House office — reporting to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council — that will coordinate a multibillion dollar effort to restrict access to government computers and protect systems that run the stock exchanges, clear global banking transactions and manage the air traffic control system. [Cyberwar]
• U.S. Urged to Relax Cuba Policy to Boost Regional Relations
  By Mary Beth Sheridan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 29, 2009 The U.S. government is fighting an effort to allow Cuba to return to the Organization of American States after a 47-year suspension. But the resistance is putting it at odds with much of Latin America as the Obama administration is trying to improve relations in the hemisphere. [Continuity]
• Nuclear Aims By Pakistan, India Prompt U.S. Concern
  By R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday Thursday, May 28, 2009 Sometime next year, at a tightly guarded site south of its capital, Pakistan will be ready to start churning out a new stream of plutonium for its nuclear arsenal, which will eventually include warheads for ballistic missiles and cruise missiles capable of being launched from ships, submarines or aircraft. About 1,000 miles to the southwest, engineers in India are designing cruise missiles to carry nuclear warheads, relying partly on Russian missile-design assistance. India is also trying to equip its Agni ballistic missiles with such warheads and to deploy them on submarines. Its rudimentary missile-defense capability is slated for a major upgrade next year. The apparent detonation of a North Korean nuclear device on Monday has renewed concerns over that country's efforts to build up its atomic arsenal. At the same time, U.S. and allied officials and experts who have tracked developments in South Asia have grown increasingly worried over the rapid growth of the region's more mature nuclear programs, in part because of the risk that weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists. [Nuclear deal] [Proliferation]
• Uyghurs sold out in the US
  By Peter Lee Republican leaders in the United States appear eager to hand President Barack Obama a political defeat and diminish his prestige and domestic and international clout - at the cost of the continued detention of 17 Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo in Cuba. By accident or design, the US Republicans were able to forestall the imminent release of the Uyghurs from Guantanamo to the US and Europe - detainees that the US had long ago determined posed no threat to the US and has been attempting to release for years. [Terrorism] [Separatism] [Double standards]
• State of Paralysis
  By PAUL KRUGMAN May 25, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist California, it has long been claimed, is where the future happens first. But is that still true? If it is, God help America. The recession has hit the Golden State hard. The housing bubble was bigger there than almost anywhere else, and the bust has been bigger too. California’s unemployment rate, at 11 percent, is the fifth-highest in the nation. And the state’s revenues have suffered accordingly. What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion. Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole. [Decline]
• Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan
  Pepe Escobar
  What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game. Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan. All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!) [Imperialism] [Energy] [Continuity]
• In Lebanon’s Patchwork, a Focus on Armenians’ Political Might
  By ROBERT F. WORTH Published: May 25, 2009 BEIRUT, Lebanon — Their political apparatus is a model of discipline. Their vast array of social services is a virtual state within a state. Their enemies accuse them of being pawns of Syria and Iran.
  They are the Armenian Christians of Lebanon, one of the Middle East’s most singular and least-understood communities. And if they sound a bit like Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group based here, that is no accident. Last month, the main Armenian political bloc decided to support Hezbollah’s alliance in the coming parliamentary elections in Lebanon against the pro-American parliamentary majority. Because of their role as a crucial swing vote, the Armenians could end up deciding who wins and who loses in what is often described as a proxy battle between Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, and the West. That fact has brought new attention to the Armenians, a distinct and borderless ethnic group that is spread throughout the region much as the Jews once were. In Lebanon, they have their own schools, hospitals and newspapers. They speak their own language, with its own alphabet. Their main political party, Tashnaq, operates in 35 countries and has a secretive world committee that meets four times a year. Their collective memory of the genocide carried out against them in Turkey from 1915 to 1918 helps maintain their identity in a far-flung diaspora. [Diaspora]
• A neo-con Yankee in Karzai's court
  By M K Bhadrakumar
  The neo-conservatives have all but been vanquished. But the Barack Obama administration in the United States is making a solitary exception in the case of Zalmay Khalilzad. He is back on the Washington circuit, repeating an amazing trapeze act which has few parallels in the chronicles of political opportunism. His life and times have been exciting, on a constant upward graph ever since he migrated from the dusty ancient Silk Road town of Mazar-i-Sharif on the Amu Darya in northern Afghanistan to the United States in search of the American dream.
• Slouching towards balkanization
  By Pepe Escobar
  Happy Days are here again. It's as if the George W Bush years in Afghanistan had never left, with Washington still wallowing in an intelligence-free environment. A surge is coming to town - just like the one General David Petraeus engineered in Iraq. A Bush proconsul (Zalmay Khalilzad) wants to run the show - again. A hardliner (General Stanley McChrystal) is getting ready to terrorize any Pashtun in sight. A new mega-base is sprouting in the "desert of death" in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. And as in Bush time, no one's talking pipeline, or the (invisible) greatest regional prize: Pakistani Balochistan. Bush's "global war on terror" (GWOT) may have been rebranded, under new management, "overseas contingency operation" (OCO). But history in Afghanistan continues to repeat itself as farce - or as an opium bad trip. [Intelligence]
• Why Obama owes Bush an apology
  By Clive Crook Published: May 24 2009 20:16 | Last updated: May 24 2009 20:16 Critics in his own party and Republican opponents are attacking Barack Obama’s emerging stance on national security with equal ferocity. Many Democrats are furious that the president has broken his promise to abandon the Bush administration’s war-powers approach to fighting terrorism. Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, and other conservatives attack him for doing the opposite – for keeping his promise and emasculating the US anti-terror effort. The left’s complaints make far more sense than Mr Cheney’s. Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect. Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been. [Continuity]
• Former Iraqi insurgent contemplates returning to war
  By Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers BAGHDAD — Abu Fatma dresses in suits now. He cuts his hair short and talks like a politician. He looked down at his tie and his clean gray suit. "Don't be fooled by my clothes," he said. Abu Fatma agreed to put his guns aside as part of a deal with the U.S. military last year but the former Sunni Muslim insurgent, once known as a killer with no mercy, is still a fighter. If the Americans don't start keeping the promises they made to his group and him he'll fight again, he said. [Renege]
• Dick Cheney: Washington trembles at the return of 'Darth Vader'
  Dick Cheney was a formidable backroom operator during his eight years as vice-president in the Bush administration. Having abandoned his short-lived retirement in Wyoming, he is now leading the Republican charge against Obama from the front. Ewen MacAskill reports from Washington on the political resurrection of the last true believer of the neo-con years Ewen MacAskill The Observer, Sunday 24 May 2009 Article history Barack Obama, unlike George Bush who wanted to be in bed before 10pm, likes to work late. But even by his standards Wednesday was out of the ordinary, sitting up in a largely empty White House until 2.30am as he edited a speech an adviser later described as one of the most important of his life. He was still nervous about it when he rose to deliver it eight hours later. Normally Mr Cool, he fluffed his opening, referring to the defence secretary, Robert Gates, as Bill, the Microsoft founder. Part of the explanation for the bout of jitters is that Obama is struggling to contain an ever-growing row over the future of Guantánamo Bay and the security apparatus created by the Bush administration as part of its "war on terror". But there is another factor: the return of an opponent the Democrats had thought of as politically dead: Dick Cheney. The sinister, reclusive figure at the heart of the Bush administration, who attracted labels such as Darth Vader and Dr Strangelove, has returned to the heart of Washington and is causing havoc. [Continuity] [Cheney]
• U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases
  By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI Published: May 23, 2009 WASHINGTON — The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials. The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits. [Imperialism] [Global insurgency]
• Spain's Judges Cross Borders In Rights Cases
  High-Ranking U.S. Officials Among Targets of Inquiries
  By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, May 24, 2009 MADRID -- Spanish judges are boldly declaring their authority to prosecute high-ranking government officials in the United States, China and Israel, among other places, delighting human rights activists but enraging officials in the countries they target and triggering a political backlash in a nation uncomfortable acting as the world's conscience.
  Judges at Spain's National Court, acting on complaints filed by human rights groups, are pursuing 16 international investigations into suspected cases of torture, genocide and crimes against humanity, according to prosecutors. Among them are two probes of Bush administration officials for allegedly approving the use of torture on terrorism suspects, including prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The judges have opened the cases by invoking a legal principle known as universal jurisdiction, which under Spanish law gives them the right to investigate serious human rights crimes anywhere in the world, even if there is no Spanish connection. International-law advocates have cheered the developments and called the judges heroes for daring to hold the world's superpowers accountable. But the proliferation of investigations has also prompted a backlash in Spain, where legislators and even some law enforcement officials have criticized the powerful judges for overreaching, as well as souring diplomatic relations with allies. [Human rights] [[Double standards] [Extraterritoriality]
• Opposition to anti-aid campaigner grows
  By William Wallis in London Published: May 22 2009 19:54 | Last updated: May 22 2009 19:54 A swell of opposition is building in the aid world to a new protagonist who has thrown down a strident challenge to the rock stars and liberal economists who have long dominated debate over foreign assistance to developing countries. Galled by the ease with which Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist and former investment banker, has risen to prominence this year, activists are circulating detailed critiques of her ideas and mass mailing African non-government organisations to mobilise support against her. Yet it is proving hard to suppress the hyperactive graduate of Oxford and Harvard, who pops up weekly in a new capital to promote her book Dead Aid – the title itself an affront to rock star Bob Geldof’s Live Aid campaigns. The former Goldman Sachs strategist has become something of a phenomenon. The economist hit the New York Times bestseller list in April, was named this month on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people and has been appointed to the board of brewer SAB Miller (sic)
• Aid opponent spreads theory far and fast
  By William Wallis Published: May 22 2009 17:52 | Last updated: May 22 2009 17:52
  Dambisa Moyo is elegant, articulate and cool-headed – a match for the sharpest TV host. She is hyperactive as well – the air miles she has collected in four months promoting her controversial book Dead Aid would fly her around the world again. She is also black and Zambian and has adopted an uncompromising opposition to foreign aid, the root, she is convinced, of many of Africa’s evils. She is not the first economist to question received wisdom about the need for official development assistance in Africa. But she is the first to popularise such a polemical version of the anti-aid theory and to have spread her message so far so fast. The former Goldman Sachs strategist, who won scholarships to Harvard and Oxford before joining the World Bank, is rapidly becoming a headache for the aid industry. First interviewed in the FT in January, she hit the New York Times bestseller list in April and was listed by Time Magazine this month among the world’s 100 most influential people. The timing of her rise to prominence could not be less convenient. Hit by falling export revenues, declining investment and dwindling remittances even the best-performing African economies are knocking anew at the doors of foreign donors.
• Dambisa Moyo website
  Dambisa Moyo was born and raised in Zambia, Southern Africa. She completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University and holds a Masters from Harvard University. She completed a Bachelors degree in Chemistry and MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington D.C..
• Africa needs both aid and trade
  Dambisa Moyo's argument is based on a false proposition: that the private sector alone can deliver on development ambitions
  Dambisa Moyo's basic argument and the subject of her book, Dead Aid, is clear: aid has hindered development in Africa. The continent would be better off if the flow were stopped and Africa were left to tackle the challenges of development through a liberalised world in which the private sector called the shots. Here in Zambia we are surprised that Moyo appears to make such a blanket critique of aid in Africa. Her insufficiently developed account of aid does not give a just picture of the role that aid plays and can play if improved upon. Africa has many different stories to tell, some good, some bad – so more discrimination would be appreciated.
• Role of British diplomats in Tamil leaders' failed surrender bid
  • British say involvement was indirect at most • Two were killed despite cautious negotiations Buzz up! Digg it Gethin Chamberlain in Colombo and Simon Tisdall guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 May 2009 19.42 BST Article history A picture released by the government said to show troops in the war zone in Sri Lanka. On Monday, the country's 25-year civil war was declared over. Photograph: Reuters British diplomats were involved in last- minute attempts to secure the surrender of two of the Tamil Tigers' most senior political figures as the war in Sri Lanka reached its climax, one of the UN's top officials revealed. The plan backfired spectacularly when the two men were shot dead as they tried to give themselves up to the Sri Lankan army. Balasingham Nadesan, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's political leader, and Seevaratnam Pulidevan, head of its peace secretariat, were killed in the early hours of Monday despite the involvement of British officials and the UN secretary general's chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, in the delicate negotiations.
• The Pentagon's politics of war
  Paul Rogers
  The United States’s military-spending plans are struggling to catch up with the nature of the conflicts it is engaged in. 21 - 05 - 2009 The United States political and military establishment is preparing for a new round of expenditure to meet the extensive commitments of a superpower engaged in two wars as well as involved in a host of lesser situations around the world. How is the debate in Washington shaping up, and are the plans being made appropriate to the challenges of the coming period? [Military-industrial complex] [Global insurgency] [China confrontation]
• Toyota's New Prius: A Hybrid Hotshot
  With governments talking up fuel efficiency, Toyota is confident the third-generation Prius will be a big seller and help the automaker's bottom line By Ian Rowley Toyota Prius Chief Engineer Akihiko Otsuka cut a relaxed figure during a briefing at the carmaker's Tokyo offices on May 19. Toyota (TM), he said, is confident that sales of the new-generation Prius will run between 300,000 to 400,000 between now and the end of the year. Not bad for what was once dismissed as a niche product [Green] [Auto]
• China looks to British experience for African expansion
  Uk firms to consult with private firms and state investors to try and avoid disasters of the continent's colonial past Tania Branigan in Beijing and Julian Borger, diplomatic editor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 May 2009 16.44 BST Article history Link to this video China has embarked on a series of joint projects with Britain in Africa, with the aim of avoiding the abuses and mistakes committed by former colonial powers as it rapidly increases its economic role on the continent. China invested $4.5bn in infrastructure in Africa in 2007, more than the G8 countries combined, and much of the investment has been private. The number of Chinese companies operating in Africa has more than doubled in just two years to 2,000, with about 400 operating in Nigeria alone, according to new research. In contrast to the "one-dimensional" stereotype of state-owned enterprises extracting natural resources, most of the investment is from privately-owned firms and many are involved in manufacturing. However, many of the business practices followed by those companies, such as a preference for using Chinese workers, coupled with Beijing's belief that human rights are the preserve of host country governments, have led to claims that the rapid rise in Chinese influence in Africa has not helped its human rights [Double standards] [Chutzpah]
• Cheney's speech ignored some inconvenient truths
  By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements. In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country." In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." [Torture] [Intelligence]
• An Israeli Prime Minister Comes to Washington Again
  May 18, 2009 | 1918 GMT By George Friedman · Israeli-Palestinian Geopolitics and the Peace Process Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting Washington for his first official visit with U.S. President Barack Obama. A range of issues — including the future of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Israeli-Syrian talks and Iran policy — are on the table. This is one of an endless series of meetings between U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers over the years, many of which concerned these same issues. Yet little has changed. That Israel has a new prime minister and the United States a new president might appear to make this meeting significant. But this is Netanyahu’s second time as prime minister, and his government is as diverse and fractious as most recent Israeli governments. Israeli politics are in gridlock, with deep divisions along multiple fault lines and an electoral system designed to magnify disagreements. Obama is much stronger politically, but he has consistently acted with caution, particularly in the foreign policy arena. Much of his foreign policy follows from the Bush administration. He has made no major breaks in foreign policy beyond rhetoric; his policies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia and Europe are essentially extensions of pre-existing policy. [Continuity]
• US Warns S. Korea of Somali Pirates' 'Stinger' Attacks
  By Jung Sung-ki Staff Reporter Military authorities here have confirmed Tuesday's Korea Times report that classified information on the possibility of Somali pirates' acquisition of U.S. surface-to-air guided missiles was recently reported to the Ministry of National Defense. [Blowback] [Tribute] [Dilemma]
• Obama meets on nuclear weapons
  Posted by Foon Rhee, deputy national political editor May 19, 2009 04:09 PM President Obama brought in some old foreign policy hands -- both Democrats and Republicans -- for some counsel today on how to fulfill his long-term vision of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, and former Defense Secretary William Perry dropped by. "I don't think anybody would accuse these four gentlemen of being dreamers. They're hard-headed, tough defenders of American interests and American security. But what they have come together to help galvanize is a recognition that we do not want a world of continued nuclear proliferation, and that in order for us to meet the security challenges of the future, America has to take leadership in this area," Obama said. "This is particularly true at a time when countries like North Korea and Iran are in the process of developing nuclear weapons capacity, at a time when we see a country like Pakistan with a large nuclear arsenal on the other side of a long-running conflict in the subcontinent with India, at a time when terrorist organizations like al Qaeda are trying to seek fissile material. It is absolutely imperative that America takes leadership, working with not just our Russian counterparts but countries all around the world, to reduce and ultimately eliminate the dangers that are posed by nuclear weapons." [Disarmament] [Imperialism] [Spin]
• Outta Control!
  China Hand
  The World Doesn’t Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem…It Has a David Albright Problem As AFP tells us, the Institute for Science and International Security just published a report on Pakistan’s nuclear program that seems designed to pour gasoline on the “the Pakistani nuclear program is outta control” story. And, when you look at the story, there isn’t a whole lot of there there.
• Cities Can Save the Earth
  Richard Register | May 12, 2009
  The climate crisis won’t be solved by changing light bulbs and inflating your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less. It’s going to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and live in them.
  The key to changing our cities involves the car. Cars dominate cities in the rich countries, and they are increasingly swamping poor countries as well. Big auto companies, are rapidly building car factories and highways in China and India. Many cities, like Berkeley, California where I lived for 30 years, don’t have a single pedestrian street — and their citizens don’t even notice how completely given over to the car their towns are. Only one out of 10 people on the planet actually drives cars, but drivers are causing a vastly disproportionate share of planetary damage through the automobile-sprawl pattern of development. The concepts behind the ecocity are fairly simple. They involve a shift in development toward centers of high diversity: * Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit; * Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture; * Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling. [Environment]
• Mayors say cities must lead climate action
  City leaders across the world yesterday engaged in in-depth talks on how to tackle climate change at a conference in Seoul, in which mayors and delegates from 80 cities in 41 countries participated. During the opening ceremony of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit, Prime Minister Han Seung-soo urged cities of the world, which account for around 75 percent of the global energy consumption and 80 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions, to play a central role in combating climate change. [Environment] [Spin]
• America’s Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State
  Peter Dale Scott For several years, informed observers independent of the national security bureaucracy have called for terminating current specific American policies and tactics in Afghanistan– many reminiscent of the US in Vietnam.
  Why One Should Think of So-Called “Failed States” as “Ravaged States” I have in mind the bureaucratically convenient concept of Afghanistan as a failed or failing state. This epithet has been frequently applied to Afghanistan since 9/11, 2001, and also to other areas where the United States is eager or at least contemplating intervention – such as Somalia, and the Congo. The concept conveniently suggests that the problem is local, and requires outside assistance from other more successful and benevolent states. In this respect, the term “failed state” stands in the place of the now discredited term “undeveloped country,” with its similar implication that there was a defect in any such country to be remedied by the “developed” western nations. Most outside experts would agree that the states commonly looked on as “failed,” -- notably Afghanistan, but also Somalia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo – share a different feature. It is better to think of them not as failed states but as ravaged states, ravaged primarily from the intrusions of outside powers [Agency] [Victim]
• Invasion in the Name of Humanitarian Aid: The US in Afghanistan
  Shirakawa Toru Translation by Zjelko Cipris
  It has been seven years since the US military launched air strikes in revenge for the 9/11 terror attacks. The Taliban have not been suppressed and Afghanistan remains in a state of war. Although overshadowed by the war against Iraq, this too is a war of aggression. A Japanese photo journalist examines the US-Afghan War. The azure skies peculiar to Afghanistan weigh heavily on the land. Rivers that are supposed to flow among the mountains have dried up, exposing the earth’s cracked skin. Snow remains here and there, but it is still too early in the season for it to moisten the soil. Magnificent mountains extend in all directions. I I reached the Spira district among these mountains on a “Chinook,” US army’s giant transport helicopter. I covered the front as a US armed forces war correspondent, accompanying the army’s 1-503 Rifle Infantry Company “Alpha” which is deployed in Spira, in Afghanistan’s eastern Khost province. Spira is adjacent to the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The border region, known as a tribal area, is not governed by the laws of either country. Since the 2001 US invasion, the ousted Taliban have been attacking foreign troops and the Afghan army, while basing themselves in this tribal area. “Alpha’s” mission is to carry out humanitarian aid, as well as to interdict and suppress the Taliban who come across the border. Their stated objective is the provision of medical aid to the population who live in the vicinity of the front-line base. Along with a combat unit numbering about a hundred, there is a humanitarian aid unit of six. Among the latter there are women physicians and even veterinarians. I left the base with the humanitarian aid unit who said they were going to visit nearby houses. A protection unit accompanied us. Though they call themselves doctors and vets, they look no different than combatants. They wear bulletproof vests and sunglasses. M16 rifles hang from their necks. Physicians who are supposed to be saving lives are carrying rifles. It is a strange spectacle. [Aid weapon]
• Ex-U.S. Envoy Considers Key Role in Afghan Government
  Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News Zalmay Khalilzad had considered challenging Hamid Karzai in the presidential elections, but missed the May 8 filing deadline.
  By HELENE COOPER Published: May 18, 2009 WASHINGTON — Zalmay Khalilzad, who was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials. Mr. Khalilzad, an American citizen who was born in Afghanistan, had considered challenging Mr. Karzai for the presidency in elections scheduled for this summer. But Mr. Khalilzad missed the May 8 filing deadline, and the American and Afghan officials say that he has been talking with Mr. Karzai for several weeks about taking on a job that the two have described as the chief executive officer of Afghanistan. [Imperialism]
• Sri Lanka: Distant Voices, Desperate Lives
  John Pilger 14 May, 2009
  In the early 1960s, it was the Irish of Derry who would phone late at night, speaking in a single breath, spilling out stories of discrimination and injustice. Who listened to their truth until the violence began? Bengalis from what was then East Pakistan did much the same. Their urgent whispers described terrible state crimes that the news ignored, and they implored us reporters to "let the world know". Palestinians speaking above the din of crowded rooms in Bethlehem and Beirut asked no more. For me, the most tenacious distant voices have been the Tamils of Sri Lanka, to whom we ought to have listened a very long time ago. It is only now, as they take to the streets of western cities, and the persecution of their compatriots reaches a crescendo, that we listen, though not intently enough to understand and act. The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite wilfully by a Tamil suicide bomber. You then give reporters a ride into the jungle, providing what in the news business is called a dateline, which suggests an eyewitness account, and you encourage the gullible to disseminate only your version and its lies. Gaza is the model. [Media] [Disinformation]
• Sri Lankan Rebels Admit Defeat, Vow to Drop Guns
  By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, May 18, 2009 COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, May 17 -- Cornered into a tiny patch of jungle about the size of a football field, the Tamil Tiger rebels -- who once operated a shadow state complete with a law school, a tax system, a navy and even traffic police -- vowed Sunday to lay down their weapons for good, in a stunning and unprecedented admission of defeat in Asia's longest-running war. "This battle has reached its bitter end. It is our people who are dying now from bombs, shells, illness and hunger. We cannot permit any more harm to befall them," Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers' chief of international relations, said in a statement posted on the TamilNet Web site. "We remain with one last choice -- to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people. We have decided to silence our guns." President Mahinda Rajapaksa scheduled a news conference for Tuesday morning in Parliament. He is expected to make an official declaration of victory over the rebels, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
• Iraq's once-envied health care system lost to war, corruption
  By Corinne Reilly | McClatchy Newspapers
  Stories of missing drugs, of desperately ill-equipped doctors and of patients left to suffer the consequences are everywhere in Iraq's public health care system. Some hospitals are filthy and infested with bugs. Others are practically falling down. More and more, the blame is being placed on Iraq's U.S.-backed government, which by many accounts is infested with corruption and incompetence. There's no doubt that years of economic sanctions, followed by years of war, have taken a heavy toll on all public services in Iraq. However, with violence down and some tentative sense of normalcy returning, improvements in health care should be coming far faster than they are, according to doctors, patients, aid organizations and some public officials. [Corruption] [Imperialism]
• Obama's word breaks ice in Geneva arms talks
  By CHARLES J. HANLEY – 10 hours ago GENEVA (AP) — A single word from Barack Obama has put new life into the stale old disarmament talks in Geneva, where diplomats are hailing a "remarkable shift" by the Americans in favor of a treaty clamping down on production of the stuff of nuclear bombs. The U.S. president's word — "verifiable" — has set the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament on a possible course toward negotiating a treaty after years of deadlock, most recently because the Bush administration argued that a pact couldn't be verified by inspections and monitoring. In his speech April 5 in the Czech Republic, Obama detailed a packed agenda of goals in nuclear arms control, including slashing U.S. and Russian doomsday arsenals, adopting the treaty banning all nuclear tests, and negotiating a "new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons." That call in Prague's Castle Square echoed here in the marble-clad halls of the Palais des Nations, where such a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) has been on the to-do list of the paralyzed disarmament conference since the 1990s, as one tool to stop the spread of atomic arms. Today's fear of nuclear terrorism only heightens such concerns. "The U.S. readiness to negotiate an internationally verifiable FMCT can be considered a turning point," pronounced Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, whose Geneva diplomats coordinate the talks on a fissile-material treaty. At the moment, only India and Pakistan — and possibly Israel and North Korea — are producing plutonium or highly enriched uranium for atomic weapons. Four "traditional" nuclear powers recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — the United States, Russia, Britain and France — have declared moratoriums on production. The fifth, China, indicates unofficially it has stopped, too. The world has a huge surplus of the exotic, manmade heavy metals known as fissile materials, whose chain-reacting atoms have been the core of nuclear bombs since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When mere kilograms (pounds) can make a bomb, as much as 2,500 metric tons of the stuff — up to 2,000 tons of highly enriched uranium and 500 tons of plutonium — sit in deployed or disused warheads and in more surprising places worldwide, says the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a non-governmental network of nuclear experts. Weapons-grade uranium powers Russian icebreakers and U.S. and other missile submarines. Some 14,000 plutonium weapon cores sit in storage outside Amarillo, Texas. Hundreds of tons of bomb-grade uranium are stashed elsewhere in the U.S. and Russia awaiting "blenddown" to less lethal grades. More stuff sits in university research reactors worldwide. Japan's nuclear power establishment holds almost nine tons of plutonium separated from spent fuel.
• Even with Obama in charge, anti-war Democrats powerless
  By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — The anti-war crowd had waited years for this moment, when it could finally use its political muscle to end or at least sharply curtail American involvement in a war that seems endless. Instead, Congress' most vocal anti-war activists were badly outnumbered this week when they tried to define an exit strategy for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. "We need a plan while we are there and a strategy for leaving," said Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., who last year defeated an eight-term incumbent Democrat who backed the Iraq war. "We don't have it." They weren't even allowed a vote on a plan. It was a setback because for years, anti-war lawmakers lacked the votes they needed to impose restrictions on former President George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Now, the president is a Democrat, and the Democrats have a 79-seat majority in the House of Representatives and 59 Senate seats, including two independents, which gives them their biggest margins since the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the anti-war crowd remains as impotent as it was during the Bush years amid widespread support for President Barack Obama and a public that's preoccupied with economic issues and largely unperturbed by the escalating war in Afghanistan.
• Obama Renews U.S. Sanctions on Burma
  U.S. President Barack Obama has extended sanctions on Burma's military government for another year. Mr. Obama informed Congress of the decision Friday, saying Burma is "engaging in large-scale repression of the democratic opposition." He added that Burma's actions and policies are hostile to U.S. interests, and they pose a continuing threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. The existing sanctions on Burma must be renewed annually. They were set to expire next week. [Sanctions] [Continuity]
• Cheney said Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq-al Qaida link
  By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true. [Disinformation]
• Obama After Bush: Leading by Second Thought
  By DAVID E. SANGER Published: May 15, 2009 WASHINGTON — President Obama’s decisions this week to retain important elements of the Bush-era system for trying terrorism suspects and to block the release of pictures showing abuse of American-held prisoners abroad are the most graphic examples yet of how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office. [Continuity]
• The Sinking Dollar
  Immanuel Wallerstein May 15, 2009, Commentary No. 257
  When Premier Wen Jiabao of China said in March of 2009 that he was "a little bit worried" about the state of the U.S. dollar, he echoed the feelings of states, enterprises, and individuals across the world. He called upon the United States "to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China's assets." Even five years ago, this would have seemed a very presumptuous request. Now it seems "understandable" even to Janet Yellen, the President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, although she considers China's proposals concerning the world's reserve currency "far from being a practical alternative." There are only two ways to store wealth: in actual physical structures and in some form of money (currency, bonds, gold). They both entail risks for the holder.
  All the main actors are hoping there can be a soft landing, an orderly transition away from the U.S. dollar. No one wants to precipitate a free fall, because no one is sure to come out ahead if that happened. But if the U.S. stimulus turns out to be the last of the bubbles, the dollar could very suddenly deflate in a most chaotic fashion. The way you say "stampede" in French is "sauve-qui-peut," which translates literally as "let him save himself who can." [Reserve] [Decline]
• Before the stampede
  By W Joseph Stroupe
  Increasingly ominous clouds are gathering in what could soon be the perfect storm against the United States dollar and against the present dollar-centric global financial order. This is not shaping up to be a storm that anyone is trying to initiate, not even those who are actively driving for a new global financial order that is no longer centered on the dollar. Instead, it will result from a correlation of forces arising out of the deepening global financial and economic crises, coupled with recurring and conspicuous miscalculation on the part of some of the world's political, financial and economic leaders. The storm has the potential to cause upheaval on a grand scale, opening the door to swift, and largely uncontrolled, fundamental transformation. As is widely recognized, the present financial order that is inordinately reliant on the US dollar must some day give way to a new order that is more balanced, stable, resilient and reliable, one that is based on multiple currencies and that therefore won't be plagued by the extremely dangerous structural drawback of an increasingly worrisome elemental single point of failure (the dollar). [Reserve]
• Even a blizzard begins with tiny snowflakes
  By Yoel Marcus In May 1961 the first meeting took place between John F. Kennedy and David Ben-Gurion, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. The first question Kennedy asked the prime minister was: Are you developing nuclear weapons? The question did not come as a surprise. For weeks Israel had discussed the issue of how to answer such a question. As agreed, Ben-Gurion replied that it was a project for energy purposes, and so on. A year or two later the expression that Israel would not be the first country in the Middle East to formally introduce nuclear weapons to the region was invented.
• Touching the void
  A teenage encounter with his music changed her life. Thirty years and thousands of miles later, Ute Lemper is still passionate about Kurt Weill. By Ed Pilkington
  Ed Pilkington The Guardian, Friday 15 May 2009 Article historyFor Ute Lemper, the smoky-voiced chanteuse who has turned the German songbook of the 1920s into the core of a global theatrical presence, music is not a passion or a skill or a vocation. It is far more visceral than that. For her, music was a means of escaping the suffocating small-mindedness of her Catholic German upbringing. It was the way she discovered she could unleash her inner demons. "I was able to express in art a lot more than in life, as everything was so tight around me," she says
  The brutal, corrupt world that Brecht and Weill captured in Weimar Germany is alive and well, she insists, and every bit as relevant today as it was then. "Who is Mack the Knife?" she asks with a knowing look. "He's that man who did it so courageously, so gutsily. The one now sipping champagne in prison. Bernie Madoff."
• Trade Wars Launched With Ruses, End Runs
  Outrage in Canada as U.S. Firms Sever Ties To Obey Stimulus Rules
  By Anthony Faiola and Lori Montgomery Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, May 15, 2009 Is this what the first trade war of the global economic crisis looks like? Ordered by Congress to "buy American" when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting sewage pumps made outside of Toronto. After a Navy official spotted Canadian pipe fittings in a construction project at Camp Pendleton, Calif., they were hauled out of the ground and replaced with American versions. In recent weeks, other Canadian manufacturers doing business with U.S. state and local governments say they have been besieged with requests to sign affidavits pledging that they will only supply materials made in the USA. Outrage spread in Canada, with the Toronto Star last week bemoaning "a plague of protectionist measures in the U.S." and Canadian companies openly fretting about having to shift jobs to the United States to meet made-in-the-USA requirements. This week, the Canadians fired back. A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts -- the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects. [Protectionism] [Double standards]
• Smart Power, the U.S., and the World
  By Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
  A Pacific Forum CSIS L.W. “Bill” and Jean Lane Lecture in Diplomacy Honolulu, HI, February 24, 2009 Issues and Insights Vol. 9-No. 3 Honolulu, HI February 2009
  I was going to talk tonight about American power and probably that will get us into the American economy. But what I wanted to say is that as we think about the power of the United States the most important thing to realize is how often we’ve gotten it wrong. Americans are not very good at understanding our position in the world and how we’re doing. If you think that’s an exaggeration let me remind you that after the Soviet Union put up Sputnik at the end of the 1950s there was a widespread view that the Soviets were ahead and we were in decline. In the 1970s when President Nixon closed the gold window and the dollar no longer could be converted into gold, this was regarded as proof of American decline. And then in the mid-1980s there was another view that the United States was in decline. My friend the great British historian Paul Kennedy who teaches at Yale wrote a book called “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” in which he said that the United States was going the way of 1 Philip II’s Spain or Edwardian England; they were imperially overstretched and we were finished. I wrote a book in 1990 called “Bound to Lead,” that argued that no, the United States would be the leading country of the 21st century. I think I got the answer right but Paul Kennedy got all the royalties. [Decline] [Smartpower] [US global strategy]
• Smart Power in Pakistan/Afghanistan?
  posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 05/08/2009 @ 08:03am
  Inside the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill Tuesday, there were two distinctly different hearings on Pakistan. One featured the Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and it was packed with mainstream media--standing room only. At the conclusion of his testimony--just one floor up from that hearing--the Congressional Progressive Caucus held its fifth forum on Afghanistan, this one focusing on the administration's Pakistan strategy and how it impacts both countries.
  Instead, he said, "Afghanistan-Pakistan is not Iraq.... The reason we are in this area is because the people in this area attacked our country on September 11th, 2001 and have stated flatly they intend to do it again."(sic) [US global strategy]
• Plan to Shift Military Spending Faces Skepticism
  By THOM SHANKER Published: May 10, 2009 CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited southern Afghanistan late last week not only to assess the American war effort, but also to showcase the kind of conflict he thinks the military must prepare to fight in the years ahead. Mr. Gates predicted more of these messy, unconventional wars, and he argued that this kind of conflict requires America to shift spending to items like mine-resistant vehicles, surveillance drones and medical-evacuation helicopters, at the expense of tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers. But as Mr. Gates returned to Washington on Saturday for what will mostly likely be a lengthy, detailed and often hostile series of Congressional budget hearings this week, opponents of his risk assessment are attacking the spending plan as rendering America unprepared for traditional war. [Military industrial complex]
• Ex-Hospital CEO Battles Reform Effort
  Ads Cite Long Waits In Canada and Britain
  By Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 11, 2009 The television ads that began airing last week feature horror stories from Canada and the United Kingdom: Patients who allegedly suffered long waits for surgeries, couldn't get the drugs they needed, or had to come to the United States for treatment. This Story Ex-Hospital CEO Battles Reform Effort Well-Funded Group Criticizes Obama's Health Care PlansThis Story Health Groups Vow Cost Control Ex-Hospital CEO Battles Reform Effort Well-Funded Group Criticizes Obama's Health Care Plans "Before government rushes to overhaul health care, listen to those who already have government-run health care," intones Rick Scott, founder of a group called Conservatives for Patients' Rights. "Tell Congress to listen, too." Scott, a multimillionaire investor and controversial former hospital chief executive, has become an unlikely and prominent leader of the opposition to health-care reform plans that Congress is expected to take up later this year. While disorganized Republicans and major health-care companies wait for President Obama and Democratic leaders to reveal the details of their plan before criticizing it, Scott is using $5 million of his own money and up to $15 million more from supporters to try to build resistance to any government-run program. The campaign is being coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the "Swift boat" attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, and is inspired by the "Harry and Louise" ads that helped torpedo health-care reform during the Clinton administration. [Spin]
• Why Chrysler Failed
  Chrysler has been America's automotive problem child for many decades. What's amazing is that the carmaker has lasted this long By Ed Wallace
  Chrysler had a good year in 1939. Sales from the automaker's combined divisions had put it solidly in second place against General Motors (GM), while hard lessons learned from the company's problems marketing its groundbreaking Airflow models were dictating future design. The Airflow—the first of the streamlined American cars—used unibody construction to strengthen a vehicle while lowering its weight. But because the design was widely rejected by consumers, Chrysler would play it safe. Chairman K.T. Keller knew that his company's strength came from its engineering reputation, but he also believed the public would always demand a car with a roofline tall enough that customers could drive in dignity wearing their hats.
  Keller's Chrysler would become a congressional and military favorite during World War II, when its work always earned a clean bill of health. The company didn't indulge in price gouging as it delivered war materiel on time and with few mechanical problems. Late in the war, efforts by Chrysler engineers to develop a new engine for the famed P-47 Thunderbolt fighter gave us the Hemi engine.
  Truman Called Keller to serve in 1950 Keller had made some fast friends in Washington during the war and was respected by many—most notably President Harry S. Truman. On Oct. 25, 1950, the White House made a telephone call that changed U.S. and Chrysler history. At that time the country's guided missile program was in shambles. Competing egos from different military branches were vying for research dollars. The German rocket scientists who had migrated to the U.S. after the war lacked a reliable engineering-and-production group to put their theories into practice. Once the Soviet Union had the bomb, North Korean troops had crossed the 38th Parallel, and the Cold War was fully engaged, Truman badly needed someone to pull competing fiefdoms together and help get the U.S. missile programs on track within a reasonable budget. That day, Keller accepted the President's call. He took with him some of Chrysler's best engineers. This group would change the American aerospace program, perfect the Redstone rocket that first launched our astronauts into space, and be the lead group on the powerful Saturn 5 missile program that in 1969 put men on the moon
  Within two years, with a recession in full swing, Chrysler turned a $170 million profit. The difference came not from building automobiles, but from the sale of its tank division—the one Harry Truman had so respected that he asked K.T. Keller to leave Chrysler and lead the U.S. guided missile program. [Military-industrial complex]
• Thatcher's legacy is in ruins, but Britain is still in its thrall
  The Tory icon's economic reputation is based on a myth, yet even Labour seems unable to break with her inheritance Seumas Milne guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 May 2009 22.00 BST Article historyFor the shrinking band of true believers, the ­anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's 1979 election couldn't have come at a worse time. After years in which the political and media establishment could be relied on to parrot the tale that the former Tory leader did what had to be done – however painful – to put Britain back on track, her reputation is now in ruins. It's barely 18 months since Gordon Brown felt it necessary to have his picture taken with the one-time scourge of Labour Britain and praise her as someone who "saw the need for change". Not a mistake, even in his most self-destructive moments, the prime minister would make today. In the wake of the implosion of the financial free-for-all and corporate engorgement she unleashed, the Thatcherite diehards are struggling to rescue her name from a legacy of greed, entrenched inequality and economic failure. Her "principles of capitalism are under question," wails Maurice Saatchi, the man who gave us the "Labour isn't working" slogan in 1979 – before his heroine tripled unemployment.
• Russia expels Nato envoys as rift over war game (sic) worsens
  Luke Harding in Moscow guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 May 2009 18.25 BST Article historyRussia's continuing row with Nato worsened today when it expelled two diplomats from Moscow and condemned Nato military exercises in Georgia. The foreign ministry said it was expelling Isabelle François, director of Nato's Moscow information office, and her deputy, in effect crippling the work of the alliance's small mission in the capital. Both diplomats are Canadians. Ministry officials said the move was in retaliation for the expulsion from Nato's Brussels headquarters last week of two Russian diplomats accused of spying. "We are not the ones who initiated this," one Russian official said.
  Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to Nato, urged the cancellation of the exercise. "Nato needs to show flexibility and hear our arguments. The worst thing is that this organisation is becoming more and more unpredictable," he said. He added: "Nato's behaviour is not decent, stable or appropriate."
• Pakistan’s American problem
  Anatol Lieven
  A suspicion of the United States in Pakistan outweighs opposition to the Taliban. Understand this and much else becomes clear, says Anatol Lieven. 6 - 05 - 2009 The war that has resumed between the Pakistani army and the Taliban in the northern mountains of Pakistan is not between two clearly defined sides, with clearly defined victory and defeat. It is, instead, a very complicated mixture of war and politics, in which episodes of extreme violence alternate with periods of negotiation.
  There are many reasons why this is so, and why even many Pakistanis who deeply oppose Taliban rule are also opposed to a tough military campaign against them. Three are worth noting. The first is (at least to judge by my interviews on the streets and in the bazaars) that the jihad of the Afghan Taliban against the United States "occupation" of Afghanistan enjoys overwhelming public approval in northern Pakistan; and the Pakistani Taliban gain a great measure of prestige from their alliance with this jihad (see Patrick Cockburn, "Where the Taliban roam", Independent, 6 May 2009) The second is that, with the exception of some of the higher courts, the Pakistani judicial system is such a corrupt, slow, impenetrable shambles that the Taliban's programme of sharia enjoys a great deal of public support, at least in the Pashtun areas that I have visited. The third is that the security establishment is determined to prevent Afghanistan becoming an ally of India, and continues to shelter parts of the Afghan Taliban as a long-term "strategic asset" against this threat.
• In Public and Private, a Diplomatic Approach to Pakistan
  By HELENE COOPER Published: May 7, 2009 WASHINGTON — There was a lot of talk at the White House on Wednesday about all of the ways that the United States is trying to help Afghanistan and Pakistan work together to improve the lot of ordinary people.
  But as Taliban and other insurgents have battled government troops closer and closer to Islamabad, the one thing that no one seemed to be talking about publicly is the one thing that, privately, Obama officials acknowledge is the most important: how to get the Pakistani government and army to move the country’s troops from the east, where they are preoccupied with a war with India that most American officials do not think they will have to fight, to the west, where the Islamist insurgents are taking over one town after another.
• How France Managed to Raise the Birthrate
  France has succeeded in raising the birthrate above two children per woman, but Korea is in danger of getting trapped in a birthrate of just 1 child. Why did France succeed while Korea struggles? ? Child Support First of all, there is a marked difference in the amount of money spent on supporting childbirth and childcare. France spends 88.3 billion euros (around W150 trillion) or approximately 4.7 percent of its GDP to support its citizens in raising their children. In contrast, Korea only spends W3.2 trillion (US$1=W1,275), or just 0.35 percent of GDP by 2007 standard. France spends 47 times more money than Korea. [Ageing society]
• When is War Justifiable?
  By Richard N. Haass president, Council on Foreign Relations Should the United States attack Iran if we learn it has begun to enrich uranium to the level required for a nuclear bomb? What about attacking North Korea if it appears too close to producing a nuclear warhead small enough to place inside a missile? Or sending troops into Pakistan if the government loses what little control it has over its western regions and terrorists take hold? No decision is more fateful than the decision of a government to employ military force. Except in the most clear-cut cases, such decisions are also difficult. As a result, just war theory has for centuries provided useful guidance to policymakers, clergy, citizens, and soldiers alike. But just war theory is too subjective and confining for today's real-world threats. A more useful concept is that of justifiable war.
  But what about the future? The concept of justifiable war is not simply one for history. Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan -all are potential theaters for new or intensified U.S. military action. The question is not whether they would constitute just wars. That is too impractical a standard. The question in the real world is whether they would be justifiable--to Congress, to the American people, to the world. It is a question President Obama will have to answer. [Threat] [US global strategy]
• Asia’s Contributions to World Cuisine
  Sidney W. Mintz Abstract The movement of food ingredients, cooking methods and dishes across the earth’s surface is ancient, and in large measure only poorly recorded. While the West has documented its contributions to global cuisine, those of the rest of the world are less well recognized. This paper takes note of Asia’s role in enriching the world’s foods, both nutritively and in terms of diversity and taste.
• Global Agribusiness, SARS and Swine Flu
  Mike Davis Mike Davis, whose 2006 book The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu warned of the threat of a global bird flu pandemic, explains how globalized agribusiness set the stage for a frightening outbreak of the swine flu in Mexico. The Spring Break hordes returned from Cancún this year with an invisible but sinister souvenir. The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. Initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection rate already traveling at higher velocity than the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu. Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin--the otherwise vigorously mutating H5N1, known as bird flu--this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. Certainly, it seems far less lethal than SARS in 2003, but as an influenza, it may be more durable than SARS and less inclined to return to its secret cave.
• Russia, China on comradely terms
  By M K Bhadrakumar Westernism is giving way to Orientalism in Moscow's outlook, if the past week's happenings are any guide. As Russia's ties with the West deteriorate, an upswing in its strategic partnership with China becomes almost inevitable. [Continuity]
• US hides behind Iran sanctions threat
  By Kaveh L Afrasiabi Whereas United States President Barack Obama promised in his new year message to Iran that he was committed to a new diplomacy that "will not be advanced by threats", a month later this is precisely what is happening. This is in light of new White House-backed legislation in the US Congress that aims to impose "crippling sanctions" on Iran by targeting its energy imports. The Iran Sanctions Enhancement Act, introduced by a bipartisan group of US senators, states in its preamble that its purpose is "to enhance US diplomatic efforts with respect to Iran by expanding economic sanctions against Iran to include refined petroleum, and for other purposes". Before adopting this bill, Congress ought to pause and think more seriously about the likely adverse results lest it gets implemented and, indeed, it causes significant disruption in the Iranian economy. In that case, Iran would retaliate where it could in the region by threatening US interests where they are the weakest, hardly a fulfillment of Obama's current quest to enlist Iran on regional security. [Continuity] [Dissension] [Strategic incoherence]
• Bosnia lurches into a new crisis
  The nationalist passions that brought war to the Balkan state in 1992 are re-emerging. Peter Beaumont travels from Sarajevo to Banja Luka to find embittered communities struggling with corruption
  On the Bosnian Serb side, a strong sense of national identity has long been in place. On the Bosniak side, the struggle for identity - so long repressed during the Tito era and after - is coming to be represented by a steadily encroaching Islamicisation of its society, and by the continuing idea of Bosniak entitlement deriving from a status as main victim during the war. It is visible in the increasing power of the Islamic community, which represents the view of "the mosque" as a political player, and in challenges to Sarajevo's old secular identity, most recently in the construction of a new mall, where alcohol and pork are banned.
• Disarray Ahead of Afghan Presidential Elections
  By Pamela Constable Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, May 2, 2009; 4:29 PM KABUL, May 2 -- With less than a week left before candidates must register for Afghanistan's presidential election, opposition forces remain so divided and appear so confused that the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai, is looking more and more like a winner as he heads to Washington this week for a summit with President Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. Although more than 60 people have formally expressed interest in the August presidential race, not a single candidate has registered with the Independent Election Commission.
  The unseemly political disarray appears to leave Karzai -- the unpopular president of a weak government besieged by a brutal Islamist insurgency -- in a position to easily win reelection.
• The Durban Review Conference: A Palestinian Critique
  Haidar Eid Palestinians are fed up with the International Community. After the Durban Review Conference, only a new worldwide anti-apartheid movement can affect a rescue. 30 - 04 - 2009 "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (Walter Benjamin) The Durban Review Conference, held in Geneva on April 20-24, was supposed to review the implementation of the Programme of Action of the World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Some western countries boycotted the conference altogether, and some walked out in protest against Ahmedinejad's speech in which he dared to reiterate the obvious; namely, the racism inherent in Zionist ideology. These countries are, historically, either racist, or settler-colonialist. The conference itself was actually hijacked by the West. Palestinian voices were almost nonexistent. The major problem for those countries was, then, the equation of Zionism with racism. So, what we have here is a complex issue: one seems to be dealing with a colonist who denies his colonialism and argues to the contrary, and with a victim whose victimisation has been denied for decades. This ought to be scrutinized. Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. Dr. Eid is a founding member of the One Democratic State Group (ODSG) and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The conflict in Palestine is between a colonial party, Israel, and a weaker, colonized one, the Palestinians.
• Cuba and the United States: The Slow Thaw
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 256, May 1, 2009 After nearly 50 years of unremitting hostility to Cuba's revolutionary government, the United States has taken its first steps towards a thaw in relations. The Cuban government has responded cautiously and skeptically, but has kept the door open to this possibility. Some commentators have attributed this new situation to a change in leadership in both countries. The real explanation lies much more in the changed geopolitical situation - in the world-system as a whole and in Latin America in particular. [Decline]
• At former British prison, Somali pirates tell their side
  By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers MANDHERA, Somalia — Their exploits have turned the inky-blue waters of the Indian Ocean into a perilous gantlet for ships and an unlikely security challenge for world leaders. But behind the bare brick walls of a desolate former British colonial prison here, five jailed Somali pirates didn't seem very fearsome at all.
  In a long interview with McClatchy at the jailhouse in Mandhera, an austere desert fortress in the autonomous northern region of Somaliland, where British forces held Italian POWs during World War II, Eid related what amounts to the pirates' creation myth, in which overfishing by European and Asian trawlers drove Somalia's coastal communities to ruin and forced local fishermen to fight for their livelihoods. "Now the international community is shouting about piracy. But long before this, we were shouting to the world about our problems," said Eid, a bony-cheeked former lobsterman with a bushy goatee. "No one listened." Of course, the pirates' journey from vigilante coast guard to firing automatic weapons at cruise ships — as one band did over the weekend — is a reminder that good intentions don't last long in desperate Somalia. In 1991, Eid was scavenging for lobsters along the craggy shores of central Somalia, saving to start a fishing company, when the government and its security forces were swallowed up in a coup. The country's endless coastline — at nearly 2,000 miles, it's longer than the U.S. West Coast — suddenly became an unguarded supermarket of tuna, mackerel and other fish. When huge foreign trawlers suddenly began appearing, the local fishermen who plied their trade with simple nets and small fiberglass boats were wiped out, Eid said.
• Suspects in Hariri’s Death Released
  By ROBERT F. WORTH Published: April 29, 2009 BEIRUT, Lebanon — A judge on Wednesday ordered the release of four high-ranking Lebanese security officers, all being held here in connection with the 2005 killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The decision was seen here as a blow to the political movement led by Mr. Hariri’s son, and it underscored the legal pitfalls of a divisive international trial. The judge, Daniel Fransen of a special international tribunal, said there was not enough evidence to indict the four men, who have been detained without charge since September 2005 and are widely believed to have had some knowledge of the killing or involvement in it. They were the only suspects in the custody of the tribunal, which is based in The Hague and was formed under United Nations auspices after Mr. Hariri’s death in a powerful car bombing on Feb. 14, 2005. The announcement was met with wild volleys of celebratory gunfire from the officers’ supporters in Beirut and in the southern suburb that is the stronghold of Hezbollah, Mr. Hariri’s political adversary.
  They were widely seen as henchmen for Syria, which occupied Lebanon militarily for three decades. Widely believed to have ordered Rafik Hariri’s killing, Syria was forced out of Lebanon under local and international pressure a few months later.

• Panel Warns U.S. on Cyberwar Plans
  By John Markoff and Thom Shanker April 30, 2009 The United States has no clear military policy about how the nation might respond to a cyberattack on its communications, financial or power networks, a panel of scientists and policy advisers warned Wednesday, and the country needs to clarify both its offensive capabilities and how it would respond to such attacks. The report, based on a three-year study by a panel assembled by the National Academy of Sciences, is the first major effort to look at the military use of computer technologies as weapons. The potential use of such technologies offensively has been widely discussed in recent years, and disruptions of communications systems and Web sites have become a standard occurrence in both political and military conflicts since 2000. [Cyberwar]
• Four years, 52 dead, £100m - no convictions• Police say further 7/7 charges unlikely
  • Security officials say little chance of 7/7 bombing charges as three cleared Sandra Laville, Rachel Williams and Richard Norton Taylor The Guardian, Wednesday 29 April 2009 Article historySenior security officials conceded last night that it is likely no one will be brought to justice for the 7 July bombs that killed 52 people in London in 2005, despite their belief that more than 20 people were involved in the attacks. The admission came shortly after the only three men to be charged in connection with the suicide bombings were acquitted yesterday. After a £100m criminal investigation, the biggest police inquiry in modern times, the trio were cleared by a jury at Kingston crown court of helping to plan the attacks by carrying out a reconnaissance mission with two of the bombers.
  Ali and Shakil were convicted of planning to attend a terrorist training camp, charges added at the retrial. They were arrested on their way to Manchester airport to fly to Pakistan in March 2007. [Human rights]
• Polish pianist stops show with anti-US tirade
  • 'Get your hands off my country' audience told
  • Polish player protests over missile defence shield
  Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles The Guardian, Tuesday 28 April 2009 Article historyKrystian Zimerman, the great Polish concert pianist, is usually a man of few words. He doesn't, as a rule, talk to the audience during performances. He says little or nothing in the press between his all-too-rare concert tours - not even about his habit of travelling everywhere with his own Steinway grand piano. He rarely grants them the pleasure of an encore. So he triggered more than the usual rumble of discomfort when he raised his voice in the closing stages of a recital at Los Angeles' Disney Hall on Sunday night and announced he would no longer perform in the United States in protest against Washington's military policies. "Get your hands off my country," Zimerman told the stunned crowd in a denunciation of US plans to install a missile defence shield on Polish soil. Some people cheered, others yelled at him to shut up and keep playing. A few dozen walked out, some of them shouting obscenities. "Yes," Zimerman responded with derision, "some people when they hear the word military start marching." According to Mark Swed, the Los Angeles Times's veteran classical music critic who witnessed the incident, Zimerman hesitated before deciding to speak up. He was about to strike up the first notes of the final piece on his programme, Karol Szymanowski's Variations on a Polish Folk Theme, when he "sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience". Swed said he delivered his tirade "in a quiet but angry voice that did not project well". Zimerman appears to have been upset by Barack Obama's decision, announced this month, to maintain the Bush-era policy of installing a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. [Anti-Americanism] [Missile Defense]
• U.S. Plans Attack and Defense in Cyberspace Warfare
  By DAVID E. SANGER, JOHN MARKOFF and THOM SHANKER Published: April 27, 2009 This article was reported by David E. Sanger, John Markoff and Thom Shanker and written by Mr. Sanger.
  Cyberwar The Digital Arms Race Computers, indispensable in peace, are becoming ever more important in political conflicts and open warfare. This is the first article in a series on the growing use of computing power as a weapon.
  When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights. When President George W. Bush ordered new ways to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb last year, he approved a plan for an experimental covert program — its results still unclear — to bore into their computers and undermine the project. And the Pentagon has commissioned military contractors to develop a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future. The goal is to simulate what it would take for adversaries to shut down the country’s power stations, telecommunications and aviation systems, or freeze the financial markets — in an effort to build better defenses against such attacks, as well as a new generation of online weapons. Just as the invention of the atomic bomb changed warfare and deterrence 64 years ago, a new international race has begun to develop cyberweapons and systems to protect against them. [Cyberwar] [Inversion]
• Study Examines Choice of Religion
  Spiritual Attitudes, Not Church Policy, Cited as Reasons
  By Jacqueline L. Salmon Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, April 28, 2009 More Americans have given up their faith or changed religions because of a gradual spiritual drift than because of disillusionment over their churches' policies, according to a study released yesterday that illustrates how personal spiritual attitudes are taking precedence over denominational traditions. The survey, by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first large-scale study of the reasons Americans switch religious affiliations. Researchers found that more than half of people have done so at least once. Almost three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants who are now unaffiliated with a religion said they had "just gradually drifted away" from their faith. And more than three-quarters of Catholics and half of Protestants currently unassociated with a faith said that over time, they stopped believing in their religion's teachings.
• Rethinking the Lessons for the US and the World of Japan’s 1990s Economic Collapse: Finance Capital and the State
  R. Taggart Murphy
  Any serious observer of the Japanese economy follows the work of Richard Katz. In two closely argued, well-documented books, Japan: The System that Soured (M.E. Sharpe, 1998)and Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (M.E. Sharpe, 2003), Katz set out the view for which he is best known: that Japan once had an economic system that worked brilliantly but no longer does. Katz continues to elaborate this thesis in his writing for The Oriental Economist where he serves as Senior Editor. Katz argues that Japan's failure to overhaul its political economy has led to the emergence of “two Japans” -- a hyper-efficient export sector and an inefficient, backwards set of companies that primarily serve Japan's domestic market. He maintains that it was these companies, protected by rigid, obsolete political arrangements, that pulled the entire country down into a trough of stagnation and keep it from fulfilling its potential.
• The Revenge of Geography
  By Robert D. Kaplan
  Page 1 of 8 May/June 2009 People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it’s time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best. A journalist who has covered the ends of the Earth offers a guide to the relief map—and a primer on the next phase of conflict. When rapturous Germans tore down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago it symbolized far more than the overcoming of an arbitrary boundary. It began an intellectual cycle that saw all divisions, geographic and otherwise, as surmountable; that referred to “realism” and “pragmatism” only as pejoratives; and that invoked the humanism of Isaiah Berlin or the appeasement of Hitler at Munich to launch one international intervention after the next. In this way, the armed liberalism and the democracy-promoting neoconservatism of the 1990s shared the same universalist aspirations. But alas, when a fear of Munich leads to overreach the result is Vietnam—or in the current case, Iraq.
• Thoroughly Modern Marx
  By Leo Panitch
  May/June 2009 Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now. Illustration by Hanoch Piven for FP Related: Confessions of a True Believer, By John Judis The economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of Das Kapital have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and its high priests—in an ideological tailspin. Yet even as faith in neoliberal orthodoxies has imploded, why resurrect Marx? To start, Marx was far ahead of his time in predicting the successful capitalist globalization of recent decades. He accurately foresaw many of the fateful factors that would give rise to today’s global economic crisis: what he called the “contradictions” inherent in a world comprised of competitive markets, commodity production, and financial speculation. Penning his most famous works in an era when the French and American revolutions were less than a hundred years old, Marx had premonitions of AIG and Bear Stearns trembling a century and a half later. He was singularly cognizant of what he called the “most revolutionary part” played in human history by the bourgeoisie—those forerunners of today’s Wall Street bankers and corporate executives. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
• Kaplan's dreary romanticism
  Kanishk Tharoor, 25 - 04 – 2009
  delicious | digg | reddit | newsvine | furl | google | yahoo | technorati | diigolet Robert Kaplan genuinely wants to edify, not provoke. But in his bid to become the American world of letters' chief interpreter of south Asia, he has quite successfully got under my skin Robert Kaplan is not a writer who tries to get your blood boiling. The Atlantic correspondent genuinely wants to edify, not provoke. But in his bid to become the American world of letters' chief interpreter of south Asia, some of his recent pieces have quite successfully got under my skin. His sin is not so much one of substance - though his insight often leaves much to be desired - but one of style. I don't really mind the poetry. American journalists aren't known for lyricism, so it's almost refreshing that Kaplan single-handedly attempts to make up for the austerity of modern US prose
• U.S. Terrorist Watch List Grows to One Million Entries
  The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, says the government's terrorist watch list of known or suspected terrorists has grown to one million entries. The list -- used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to prevent terrorist acts -- has been growing steadily since 2003 when the FBI set up a terrorism screening center to store, analyze and share information about suspected terrorists. While the list is touted by the FBI as an important counterterrorism tool, it has generated controversy and complaints. [Surveillance]
• End the University as We Know It
  By MARK C. TAYLOR Published: April 26, 2009 GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans). Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization.
• Events in Pakistan, Afghanistan overtake Obama's strategy
  By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Events in Pakistan and Afghanistan are already overtaking the Obama administration's month-old strategy for the two countries, and it needs to be modified even before it's been implemented, U.S. officials and experts said this week.
  U.S. officials are frustrated with Zardari and Pakistan's other civilian leaders, who they say remain determined to continue negotiating with the Taliban, are in denial about the threat that the extremists pose. "The $64,000 question," one State Department official said, "is how much cooperation can we expect from the Pakistani government?" Some officials favor reaching out to Zardari's main opponent, Nawaz Sharif, but others have little faith in him, either. Joint Chiefs chairman Mullen and some other top officers argue that working with the Pakistani chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, is America's best option. "There are no other useful alternatives here," said one defense official. Others, however, are skeptical that Kayani would risk the unity of his military by turning away from India to battle fellow Muslims. Shuja Nawaz, the director of South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council of the United States, suggested that the United States encourage India to "cool the temperature" on Pakistan. That, however, will be difficult for Indian politicians to do in the middle of an election campaign and with many Indians still reeling from last year's Mumbai terrorist attacks, which were planned in Pakistan. Moreover, some administration officials worry that any outreach to India would strengthen the Islamic militants by reinforcing Pakistani fears that the U.S. is allied with mostly Hindu India against predominately Muslim Pakistan.
• After an Off Year, Wall Street Pay Is Bouncing Back
  By LOUISE STORY Published: April 25, 2009 The rest of the nation may be getting back to basics, but on Wall Street, paychecks still come with a golden promise. Workers at the largest financial institutions are on track to earn as much money this year as they did before the financial crisis began, because of the strong start of the year for bank profits. Even as the industry’s compensation has been put in the spotlight for being so high at a time when many banks have received taxpayer help, six of the biggest banks set aside over $36 billion in the first quarter to pay their employees, according to a review of financial statements. If that pace continues all year, the money set aside for compensation suggests that workers at many banks will see their pay — much of it in bonuses — recover from the lows of last year.
• Why Iran Is Hungry for Business with the U.S.
  An easing of tensions with Tehran would bring foreign investment, allowing Iranian companies to scale up By Stanley Reed BW Magazine Tehran—Nestled in rocky hills about 40 minutes from Tehran, Pardis Technology Park is supposed to be Iran's answer to Silicon Valley. But these days, Pardis is deserted and forlorn, with many buildings standing unfinished, their exposed girders rusting. Foreign companies are reluctant to invest in the Islamic Republic, and domestic outfits are cash-strapped. [Sanctions] [FDI]
• Pentagon plan won't echo Obama no-nukes pledge
  By Anne Gearan – 1 day ago WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon is starting work on a nuclear mission statement that envisions the U.S. maintaining its atomic weapons stockpile for the next five to 10 years, a far more cautious stance than President Barack Obama's dream of a nuclear-free future. The "nuclear posture review" due early next year will focus on the practical and nearer-term goal of deterring the use and spread of weapons, Pentagon officials said Thursday. It is not likely to echo Obama's pledge to work for "global zero," or total eradication, as an explicit goal. [Pentagon] [Disarmament]
• Government accused of Gurkhas 'treachery' over UK settlement right
  Campaigners accuse ministers of ignoring high court judgment criticising way Gurkha immigration applications handled Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 April 2009 16.32 BST Article history Ministers were accused of "an act of treachery" today after rejecting demands for Gurkhas who retired from the army before 1997 to be given an automatic right to settle in the [Imperialism]
• CIA official: no proof harsh techniques stopped terror attacks
  By Mark Seibel and Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos. That undercuts assertions by former vice president Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials that the use of harsh interrogation tactics including waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, was justified because it headed off terrorist attacks. [Torture] [Intelligence]
• Indonesia’s Voters Retreat From Radical Islam
  By NORIMITSU ONISHI Published: April 24, 2009 JAKARTA, Indonesia — From Pakistan to Gaza and Lebanon, militant Islamic movements have gained ground rapidly in recent years, fanning Western fears of a consolidation of radical Muslim governments. But here in the world’s most populous Muslim nation just the opposite is happening, with Islamic parties suffering a steep drop in popular support.
  In parliamentary elections this month, voters punished Islamic parties that focused narrowly on religious issues, and even the parties’ best efforts to appeal to the country’s mainstream failed to sway the public. The largest Islamic party, the Prosperous Justice Party, ran television commercials of young women without head scarves and distributed pamphlets in the colors of the country’s major secular parties. But the party fell far short of its goal of garnering 15 percent of the vote, squeezing out a gain of less than one percentage point over its 7.2 percent showing in 2004. That was a big letdown for a party and a movement that had grown phenomenally in recent years, even as more radical elements directed terrorist attacks against Western tourists and targets. The party had projected that it would double its share of seats in Parliament even as it stuck to its founding goal of bringing Shariah, or Islamic law, to Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, with 240 million people. Altogether, the major Islamic parties suffered a drop in support from 38 percent in 2004 to less than 26 percent this year, according to the Indonesian Survey Institute, an independent polling firm whose figures are in keeping with partial official results. [Islam]
• Humor or hate? Groups see Israeli cartoon differently
  By Dion Nissenbaum | McClatchy Newspapers JERUSALEM — Ahmed and Salim appear to be typical teenage brothers. They spend hours in front of their computer playing Wii and posting crude updates on Facebook. They jam with Guitar Hero and watch bad American sitcoms. They bicker and call each other names. The animated stars of an incendiary new Internet cartoon series aren't typical, however. They're young Arabs who spend their afternoons trying to bomb Israeli buses, gun down Jewish girls and incinerate crowded cafes, and in the three months since their debut, their caricature of Islamic extremism has attracted a growing cult following in Israel. Its creators and fans see a humorous series that resembles "South Park" — at least visually — and mocks Islamic terrorism. Its critics see a hate-filled cartoon that uses crude stereotypes to dehumanize Muslims, intensify Arab-Israeli divisions and inflame the conflict between Muslims and Jews. [Double standards]
• The Airwar and Rising Civilian Casualties
  U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans By GARETH PORTER President Barack Obama and other top officials in his administration have made it clear that there can be no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the non-military efforts to win over the Afghan population will be central to its chances of success. The reality, however, is that U.S. military and civilian agencies lack the skills and training as well as the institutional framework necessary to carry out culturally and politically sensitive socio-economic programmes at the local level in Afghanistan, or even to avoid further alienation of the population. In fact, the U.S. government does not even have a minimum corps of people capable of speaking Pashto, the language of the 14 million ethnic Pashtuns who represent about 42 per cent of the population of Afghanistan.
• Despite forecasts, cold front lingers over US-Russia relations
  The two nuclear powers continue to bicker over NATO war games, nuclear weapons, and fighter jets in Kyrgyzstan. By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Moscow It's been less than a month since presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev dramatically pressed the "reset button" in US-Russian relations, symbolically calling a halt to several years of chilly ties. But the roadblocks are already proliferating. [Continuity]
• At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?
  By SCOTT SHANE Published: April 22, 2009 WASHINGTON — Even the most exacting truth commission may have a hard time determining for certain whether brutal interrogations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency helped keep the country safe.
  But if a strong case emerges that the Bush administration authorized torture and got nothing but prisoners’ desperate fabrications in return, that will tarnish what Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have claimed as their greatest achievement: preventing new attacks after Sept. 11, 2001. [Torture] [Intelligence]
• Nine Pakistani students arrested during anti-terror raids released without charge
  Sandra Laville and Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Wednesday 22 April 2009 Article historyPolice and counter-terrorism officials were left embarrassed last night after nine Pakistani students suspected of involvement in what Gordon Brown claimed was a "very big plot" against the UK were released without charge. [Intelligence]
• Report: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link
  By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist. Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime. [Torture] [Disinformation]
• Is waterboarding effective? CIA did it 266 times on two prisoners
  The number, much higher than previously reported, comes out as President Obama visits CIA headquarters today. By Liam Stack The ongoing debate over the ethics and usefulness of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding received new fuel on Sunday night, with a New York Times report that two Al Qaeda suspects were subject to the method, which simulates drowning, a combined 266 times. That number is higher than previously reported, and will no doubt cast a long shadow over President Obama's first scheduled visit to CIA headquarters today, where he will publicly address employees. The New York Times reports that, according to a recently released May 2005 interrogation memo, Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding 83 times in August 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who has confessed to planning the September 11, 2001, attacks as well as personally beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was subjected to waterboarding 183 times in March 2003. That version of events is starkly different than the one reported by ABC News in December 2007, when former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was involved in the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah, claimed he had only been waterboarded once for 35 seconds. "The next day, he told his interrogators that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview... "From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." [Torture]
• U.S. Military Seizes on Popular Smartphones
  Apple's iPhones are being put to use by U.S. forces to execute high-tech military operations, Newsweek said Monday. It said U.S. forces are issuing the phones to soldiers in conflict areas including Iraq and Afghanistan. http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/04/21/2009042100398.html S.Korea Has Its Own Point to Make to the NorthThe government was busy Monday deciding an agenda to propose for an official inter-Korean meeting Tuesday. "We're not just going to listen to an announcement from the North," an official said. "Since it's the first official inter-Korean meeting since the current government's inauguration, we'll deliver our own message as well."
• U.S. Senate Clears Way for Confirmation of Hill to Be Ambassador to Iraq
  Christopher Hill (file photo President Barack Obama's nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, is a step closer to assuming the post after the Senate late Monday ended Republican tactics aimed at blocking the nomination. A confirmation vote is expected later this week. The Senate voted 73 to 17 to end Republican delaying tactics, more than the 60 votes needed to move the nomination forward. Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, called Christopher Hill "well-qualified" to be U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. "Christopher Hill is a strong and skilled negotiator who has tackled some of the most complex diplomatic challenges in the world," said Senator Reid.
  In addition, some senators, including Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, have criticized Hill's handling of the North Korean nuclear talks. Brownback argued that Hill was not tough enough with Pyongyang over its human rights record. "It was a failed strategy, and we should not be having him in the middle of designing our diplomatic strategy towards Iraq when it's such a failure," said Senator Brownback.
• The lessons of Ireland
  This riches-to-rags story is an example for Obama - and the world - of how not to run an economy
  Paul Krugman The Guardian, Tuesday 21 April 2009 What," asked my interlocutor, "is the worst-case outlook for the world economy?" It wasn't until the next day that I came up with the right answer: America could turn Irish. What's so bad about that? Well, the Irish government now predicts that this year GDP will fall more than 10% from its peak, crossing the line that is sometimes used to distinguish between a recession and a depression. But there's more to it: to satisfy nervous lenders, Ireland is being forced to raise taxes and slash government spending in the face of an economic slump, policies that will further deepen the slump. And it's that closing off of policy options that I'm afraid might happen to the rest of us. The slogan Erin go bragh, usually translated as "Ireland forever", is traditionally used as a declaration of Irish identity. But it could also, I fear, be read as a prediction for the world economy. How did Ireland get into its current bind? By being just like the US, only more so. Like Iceland, Ireland jumped with both feet into the brave new world of unsupervised global markets. Last year the Heritage Foundation declared Ireland the world's third-freest economy, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore.
• Brand Che: Revolutionary as Marketer’s Dream
  By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: April 20, 2009 “The Warhol Che,” artist and year unknown, an example of the image’s ubiquity. Not just in the hearts of revolutionaries, Marxist insurgents and rebellious teenagers, but on T-shirts, watches, sneakers, key chains, cigarette lighters, coffee mugs, wallets, backpacks, mouse pads, beach towels and condoms. He’s not only been used by politicians like the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, to promote their own agendas, but he’s also been employed by merchants to sell air fresheners in Peru, snowboards in Switzerland and wine in Italy. The supermodel Gisele Bündchen pranced down a runway in a Che bikini. A men’s wear company brought out a Che action figure, complete with fatigues, a beret, a gun and a cigar. And an Australian company produced a “cherry Guevara” ice cream line, describing the eating experience like this: “The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!” As Michael Casey, the Buenos Aires bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires, observes in his fascinating new book, “Che’s Afterlife,” the image of Ernesto Guevara most frequently used by politicians, demonstrators and merchants alike is based on the famous 1960 picture of the guerrilla leader taken by the Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, known as Korda. It’s the familiar, ubiquitous close-up, often rendered in high-contrast blacks and whites, which features the handsome 31-year-old Argentine-born revolutionary looking off into the distance as if he had his eyes on the future, his gaze — described, variously, as pensive, determined, defiant, meditative or implacable — as difficult, in Mr. Casey’s words, “to put a finger on” as the Mona Lisa’s smile.
• The CIA's Questioning Worked
  By Marc A. Thiessen Tuesday, April 21, 2009 In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists "did not make us safer." This is patently false. In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. [Torture] [Spin]
• Bombing Civilians: An American Tradition
  Marilyn B. Young This article examines US bombing of civilians—the logic, the technology, the consequences—from World War II through the Korean War, the Indochinese Wars. Airpower embodies American technology at its most dashing. At regular intervals, the air force and allied technocrats claim that innovations in air technology herald an entirely new age of warfare. Korea and Vietnam were, so to speak, living laboratories for the development of new weapons: the 1,200-pound radio-guided Tarzon bomb (featured in Korean-era Movietone newsreels); white-phosphorous-enhanced napalm; cluster bombs (CBUs) carrying up to 700 bomblets, each bomblet containing 200 to 300 tiny steel balls or fiberglass fléchettes; delayed-fuse cluster bombs; airburst cluster bombs; toxic defoliants; varieties of nerve gas; sets of six B 52s, operating at altitudes too high to be heard on the ground, capable of delivering up to thirty tons of explosives each.
  Unlike Freda Kirchwey, military and civilian policy makers (and, for that matter, the majority of the American public) never, to my knowledge, questioned the morality of either the ends or the means of fighting in Korea. The difficult question that faced administrations, from Kennedy through Nixon, was tactical: how to use military force in Southeast Asia without unduly upsetting the Chinese. President Kennedy’s solution was to concentrate on counterinsurgency, which, as it failed to achieve its end, devolved into a brutal ten-year bombing campaign in South Vietnam. [War crimes] [Statistics]
• U.S. Military Power Could Hinder Nuclear Disarmament Goals, Gorbachev Says
  Friday, April 17, 2009 The overwhelming military power of the United States might force other countries to retain their nuclear deterrents, ultimately frustrating the Obama administration's stated goal of pursuing global nuclear disarmament, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said yesterday (see GSN, April 9). "[U.S.] defense budgets far exceed reasonable security needs," he said. "The United States spends on military purposes almost as much as the rest of the world put together." Washington is currently maintaining an annual defense budget of about $600 billion, the Associated Press reported. "Military superiority would be an insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world of nuclear weapons," Gorbachev said. "Unless we discuss demilitarization of international politics, the reduction of military budgets, preventing militarization of outer space, talking about a nuclear-free world will be just rhetorical." [Disarmament]
• Russia, China stage war games in Central Asia
  Sat Apr 18, 2009 7:33am EDT FAKHRABAD, Tajikistan (Reuters) - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan took part in war games on Saturday in the first such exercise since Kyrgyzstan said in February it would shut the last U.S. air base in Central Asia. The Manas base plays an important role in supplying U.S.-led troops fighting in Afghanistan and its closure poses a challenge to plans by President Barack Obama to send additional troops there to fight the growing Taliban insurgency. Russia sees Central Asia as part of its traditional zone of influence and is concerned by the West's growing presence there. About 1,000 soldiers took part in the exercises, 50 kms (30 miles) south of the Tajik capital Dushanbe under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). [SCO]
• Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects
  By SCOTT SHANE Published: April 19, 2009 C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.
  The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times n(sic) in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative. A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew (sic). [Human rights] [War crimes]
• In the Age of Pirates
  By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: April 14, 2009 I’ve been thinking lately of starting a new school of foreign service to train U.S. diplomats. My school, though, would be very simple. It would consist of a single classroom with a desk and a chair. At the desk would be a teacher, pretending to be a foreign leader. The student would come in and have to persuade the foreign leader to do something — to pull this or that lever. At one point, the foreign leader would nod vigorously in agreement and then reach behind him and pull the lever — and it would come off the wall in his hands. Or, he would nod vigorously and say, “Yes, yes, of course, I will pull that lever,” but then would only pretend to do so. The student would then have to figure out what to do next. ... I’m wondering if President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aren’t those students, trying to deal with the leaders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. I say that not to criticize but to sympathize. “Mama, don’t let your children grow up to be diplomats.” This is not the great age of diplomacy. A secretary of state can broker deals only when other states or parties are ready or able to make them. In the cold war, an age of great powers, grand bargains and reasonably solid client states, there were ample opportunities for that — whether in arms control with the Soviet Union or peacemaking between our respective client states around the globe. But this is increasingly an age of pirates, failed states, nonstate actors and nation-building — the stuff of snipers, drones and generals, not diplomats. Hence the déjà vu all over again quality of U.S. foreign policy right now — the sense that when it comes to our major problems (Afghanistan and Pakistan and North Korea and Iran), we just go around and around, buying the same carpets from the same people, over and over, but nothing changes. “We are dealing with states and leaders who either cannot deliver or will not deliver,” notes the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum. “The issues we have with them look less like problems that can be solved and more like conditions that we have to manage.” The ones who can’t deliver — the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan — are the ones who promise to do all sorts of good things, and pull all sorts of levers, but at the end of the day the levers come off the wall because the governments in these countries have only limited powers. The ones who won’t deliver — Iran and North Korea — time and again tell us: “Yes, we need to talk.” But at the end of the day, their hostile relationships with America or the West are so central to the survival strategy of their regimes, so much at the core of their justifications for remaining in power, that it is not in their interest to deliver real reconciliation, but just to pretend to deliver it. [Inversion]
• Despite Major Plans, Obama Taking Softer Stands
  By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and JACKIE CALMES Published: April 18, 2009 WASHINGTON — President Obama is well known for bold proposals that have raised expectations, but his administration has shown a tendency for compromise and caution, and even a willingness to capitulate on some early initiatives. [Continuity]
• Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Is Back to Old Ways
  By ROD NORDLAND Published: April 18, 2009 BAGHDAD — Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of it. Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones. Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more than 10 of them. Abu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations between young people so inclined. It is not that there are hiding places in the park, where trees are pretty sparse; the couples just pretend they cannot be seen, and passers-by go along with the pretense. It is a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, but perhaps part way back to the old Baghdad. The Baathists who ruled here from the 1960s until the American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful. Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was a pretty lively place, with street cafes open until 2 or 3 a.m., and prostitutes plying their trade even in the bowling alley of Al Rashid Hotel.
• Rising Expectations on Cuba Follow Obama
  By GINGER THOMPSON and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO Published: April 18, 2009 A day after President Obama pledged a new future in Washington’s relations with Cuba, Latin American leaders insisted at a summit meeting in Trinidad that the future is now. That message followed the president throughout the day on Saturday and even upstaged a photo-op with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, when a reporter asked Mr. Obama whether he was taking tips from Canada’s policy of open engagement with Havana. “I take tips from Canada on a lot of things,” he said with a smile, and kept walking. And so it was that Cuba, the only country not invited to the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, was a central focus of the meeting for another day. An exchange of conciliatory overtures between President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba has started a buzz of speculation about more substantive dialogue. And the crack in the door Mr. Obama had opened for new engagement with Cuba felt more like unlocking a floodgate. For the first time, some diplomats said, the question being asked was when — not whether — the next move will be made. The meetings on Saturday made clear, however, that there remains deep disagreement about which country (sic) should make that move, and what it should be. [Sanctions] [Sequencing]
• Clinton Scores Points by Admitting Past U.S. Errors
  By MARK LANDLER Published: April 17, 2009 SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — It has become a recurring theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early travels as the chief diplomat of the United States: she says that American policy on a given issue has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all over themselves in gratitude. On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said here that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked. That, she said, is why President Obama decided earlier this week to lift restrictions on travel and financial transfers for United States residents with relatives in Cuba. “We are continuing to look for productive ways forward, because we view the present policy as having failed,” Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference in this sun-dappled capital, hours before flying to join Mr. Obama at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. The contrition tour goes beyond Latin America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told audiences that the United States must accept its responsibility as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said the American-backed policy of sanctions against Myanmar had not been effective. And in the Middle East, she pointed out that ostracizing the Iranian government had not persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions. Like other leaders around the world, Mrs. Clinton’s host, the president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, responded effusively on Friday, hailing the secretary and her boss, Mr. Obama, for their view on Cuban policy, which he said took “great courage” and could utterly transform the political landscape of Latin America. “President Obama is paving a new road,” he said. “It is recognition of the fact that previous policies have failed. Fifty years of a policy that has not generated the originally sought purposes can be called a failure.” In fact, Mrs. Clinton’s aides clarified, she was not condemning the half-century-old trade embargo against Cuba, which the Obama administration has not yet agreed to lift. Rather, her reference was to the strict travel and financial restrictions imposed by the Bush administration.
  There are holdouts, of course: North Korea has greeted the Obama administration by testing a missile, ratcheting up its language and threatening to pull out of multiparty talks on its nuclear program. Mrs. Clinton, in turn, has had few warm words for North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il. [Continuity]
• Lone Accused Gunman in Mumbai Siege Disavows Confession
  By Rama Lakshmi Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, April 18, 2009 NEW DELHI, April 17 -- The only suspect captured during the deadly attacks in Mumbai in November sought in court Friday to withdraw his confession, which he claimed was taken under duress by Indian police. On the first day of his trial in a special court set up inside a Mumbai prison, Ajmal Amir Kasab told a judge he had not made the statement that was read out in Hindi and Urdu by the prosecution, his attorney said. "Kasab's confessional statement was provided to us in court. It was then shown to Kasab. Immediately, he said, 'I have not made this confession,' " the suspect's newly appointed attorney, Abbas Kazmi, told reporters outside the courtroom. "He said this signature was obtained out of force and coercion. He said, 'When I was in police custody, I was tortured, too.' We have moved for the court to retract the confession statement."
• New Cuba Policy Is No Business Home Run
  Obama's moves toward Cuba may not mean quick benefits to many U.S. businesses, but long-term advantages in telecom could bring a windfall By Steve LeVine and Geri Smith
  Thomas Herzfeld's clients may have been the first to profit from President Barack Obama's decision to ease sanctions on Cuba. In the hours after Washington liberalized rules on visits to Cuba and U.S. telecommunications ventures there, investors flocked to Herzfeld's Caribbean Basin Fund, which invests in companies that could gain from a thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations, and shares jumped by 41%. "There will be a boom in Cuba and throughout the Caribbean" as Havana opens up, Herzfeld says. "The entire country will have to be rebuilt." [Sanctions] [FDI]
• Iraq: the legacy - Ill equipped, poorly trained, and mired in a 'bloody mess'
  In the fourth part of our series, Richard Norton-Taylor explains how the six-year conflict in Iraq tested the capacity and bravery of British troops to the limit - and how they were betrayed by the politicians Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Friday 17 April 2009 Article history A fuel tanker on fire in Basra. Photograph: Essam Al-sudani/AFP/Getty Images It was their first day in Basra. The summer of 2007. A company of British soldiers were engaged in a four-hour gun battle on the city's streets against the Mahdi army, the militia of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Two of the soldiers were killed. The troops were so ill-equipped, so inadequately trained, that there was no way of communicating with them, according to their commander, Colonel Patrick Sanders.
  There was a deeper related issue. "The basic problem was that the military and the political objectives were never properly aligned and the UK had little control over the political sphere, chiefly in Baghdad," says Mike Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute. The result, he adds, was that the military performed very well at a tactical level, adequately at an operational level, but poorly at the political level because the UK's objectives and those of the US were clearly different. "We simply wanted to hold the ring and hand over to Iraqis at the earliest decent opportunity (sic)," Clarke says. [Imperialism]
• Russia ends anti-terrorism operations in Chechnya
  • Move signals formal end to Kremlin's war in the republic • Power of Chechen leader set to be strengthened Luke Harding in Moscow guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 April 2009 14.08 BST Article history Russia today agreed to end its counterterrorist operations in Chechnya, in a move that signals the formal end of the Kremlin's war in the republic and enhances the power of Chechnya's president, Ramzan Kadyrov. Russia's national anti-terrorist committee said military restrictions in force in Chechnya would be abolished from today. Moscow has maintained a strict security regime for a decade in Chechnya, the scene of two wars against separatist rebels. [Global insurgency]
• U.S. experts: Pakistan on course to become Islamist state
  By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing the a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan's terrorist haven did before 9/11. "It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution," said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. [Hype] [Islam] [Imperialism]
• Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan
  By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH Published: April 16, 2009 PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according to government officials and analysts here. The strategy cleared a path to power for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, where the government allowed Islamic law to be imposed this week, and it carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants’ main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province. [Islam]
• On Foreign Policy, Obama Shifts, but Only a Bit
  By PETER BAKER Published: April 16, 2009 WASHINGTON — When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to Mexico last month, she caused a stir by acknowledging the obvious, that the United States bears a share of responsibility for the drug wars ravaging its southern neighbor. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs,” she said, “fuels the drug trade.” The remarks were interpreted as a departure from the previous administration, another sign of a new day in foreign policy under Mr. Obama. Forgotten in the discussion was the fact that President George W. Bush said virtually the same thing in Mexico two years ago. “The United States has a responsibility in the fight against drugs,” he said, because “when there is demand, there is supply.” The episode underscored an intriguing phenomenon about Mr. Obama’s approach to international affairs. For all the perception of a major course correction, Mr. Obama so far appears to be presiding over a foreign policy that may seem more different than it really is. As Mr. Obama heads to Mexico on Thursday for his second foreign trip of the month, he is bringing with him many of the same American interests as his predecessor, even if they are wrapped in a different package. That’s not to say there have been no changes. Most noticeable has been the shift in tone and the promises of engagement. And in certain discrete areas, Mr. Obama is certainly rewriting Mr. Bush’s foreign policy for a new era. But he is carefully choosing his battles, and otherwise keeping intact much of the foreign policy architecture that he inherited, while cloaking it in new language. The new emphasis on diplomacy still advances many of the same goals and national interests. The days leading up to his latest trip, which will also take him to Trinidad and Tobago for a summit meeting with other Western Hemisphere leaders, demonstrated the nuances of Mr. Obama’s international approach. He eased longstanding restrictions on travel and money transmission to Cuba for Americans with relatives there, a departure from the Bush era. But when it came to North Korea’s provocative rocket launch, his response seemed to come from the Bush playbook — a Security Council condemnation and pressure on the regime in Pyongyang to abide by its agreement to give up nuclear weapons. “It was important, what the U.N. Security Council did, while at the same time we have to look forward and figure out ways to continue toward the agreement that ends the nuclear program in North Korea,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said from the briefing room lectern, sounding much like his predecessors. On a variety of issues like North Korea, Mr. Obama has essentially picked up the ball where Mr. Bush left it [US NK policy] [Continuity]
• Labour's £5,000 sweetener to launch electric car revolution
  Ultra-green vehicles at heart of £250m plan to slash UK's carbon emissions
  Alok Jha, green technology correspondent The Guardian, Thursday 16 April 2009 Consumers are to be offered incentives of up to £5,000 to purchase an electric car under government plans to be unveiled today that will also see the creation of electric car cities across the UK and the launch of large-scale experiments with ultra-green vehicles. The proposals are part of a £250m strategy, seen by the Guardian, spelling out a revolution in Britain's road transport network based on ultra-low carbon vehicles. It will be launched today by Geoff Hoon, the transport secretary, and Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, with the aim of kickstarting the market for cleaner road vehicles and slashing the UK's CO2 emisisons [Green]
• What Was the Point of the G-20 Meeting?
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 255, April 15, 2009
  Almost everyone took the meeting of the G-20 in London on April 2 too seriously. Pundits and critics have been analyzing it as if it had been designed to accomplish some change in policies by the states which participated. The fact is that everyone who went knew in advance that nothing of any significance would change as a result of the meeting, and that the few minor changes that were adopted could easily have been arranged without the meeting. The point of the meeting - for the United States, for France and Germany, for China - was to show their internal publics that they were "doing something" about the calamitous world economic situation when in fact they were doing nothing that would in any significant way save the sinking ship. What we can say in summary is that the principal actors strutted on the world scene. Did they ever intend to do something that was more than that? Probably not. The world economic downturn continues to wend its way, as though the G-20 meeting never occurred.
• The US, Kazakhstan and Japan Rethink Iran’s Nuclear Rights
  M K Bhadrakumar
  In bits and pieces, a stray thought has been surfacing in the recent months in the US discourses over the situation surrounding Iran. It sought a rethink of Washington's insistence on Iran jettisoning its pursuit of uranium enrichment as a pre-requisite of commencement of direct talks between the two countries. This was borne out of a growing realization that the US insistence was no longer tenable. A logjam has indeed developed as it became clearer by the day that within the fractious Iranian opinion there is virtual unanimity when it comes to the continuance of the country's nuclear program, and effecting a regime change in Tehran didn't necessarily alter Iran's policies.
  Of course, many people believe that Japan is in fact the global leader in green policies and technologies. This view is reinforced by Tokyo’s relentless greenwash as it seeks to obfuscate its abandonment of Kyoto. From Koizumi on, the Japanese conservative political elite have shamelessly used Kyoto as a brand name while failing to achieve its targets and even seeking to undermine its content through “sector-based” (rather than national) targets. The failure of that strategy is now exacting an enormous human and economic cost. Japan’s exports overall plunged by nearly 50% in February and its economy is contracting at an annualized rate that exceeds 12%. Equally ominous, Japan's hitherto seemingly permanent trade surplus has fallen towards what looks like structural deficits.
• U.S. Army Recruits Immigrants, Rewards Them with Citizenship
  The U.S. Army is stepping up efforts to recruit more skilled soldiers by offering immigrants a fast track to U.S. citizenship if they enlist. The move comes as the Pentagon prepares to send several thousand more troops to Afghanistan and with the war in Iraq in its sixth year. The U.S. Army chief of staff, himself, swears in this group of recruits at a ceremony in New York. Half of these 32 new Army recruits are immigrants from countries such as Pakistan, India, South Korea and Bangladesh. General George Casey welcomes the new soldiers, recruited under a new initiative called MAVNI -- Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest. It's a pilot program that promotes enlistment as a short-cut to U.S. citizenship. Recruits are required to have at least two years of legal U.S. residency. [Decline] [US military] [Migration]
• U.S. May Drop Key Condition for Talks With Iran
  By DAVID E. SANGER Published: April 13, 2009 WASHINGTON — The Obama administration and its European allies are preparing proposals that would shift strategy toward Iran by dropping a longstanding American insistence that Tehran rapidly shut down nuclear facilities during the early phases of negotiations over its atomic program, according to officials involved in the discussions. The proposals, exchanged in confidential strategy sessions with European allies, would press Tehran to open up its nuclear program gradually to wide-ranging inspection. But the proposals would also allow Iran to continue enriching uranium for some period during the talks. That would be a sharp break from the approach taken by the Bush administration, which had demanded that Iran halt its enrichment activities, at least briefly to initiate negotiations. [Negotiating style]
• Realpolitik for Iran
  By Roger Cohen
  April 13, 2009 Globalist VIENNA — For Mohammad ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, “a combination of ignorance and arrogance” under the Bush administration squandered countless diplomatic opportunities with Iran and so allowed it to forge ahead with its nuclear program. Referring twice to former Vice President Dick Cheney as “Darth Vader,” ElBaradei told me in an interview that “U.S. policy consisted of two mantras — Iran should not have the knowledge and should not spin one single centrifuge. They kept saying, wait, Iran is not North Korea, it will buckle. That was absolutely a mistake.” Instead of building on Iran’s Afghan help in 2001, exploring an Iranian “grand bargain” offer in 2003, or backing a 2005 European mediation effort that hinged on U.S. acquiescence to the sale of a French nuclear power reactor, “We got Darth Vader and company saying Iran was in the axis of evil and we have to change this regime.” The result, ElBaradei said, was that instead of containing the program at a few dozen centrifuges, “Iran now has close to 5,500 centrifuges and they have 1,000 kilos of low-enriched uranium and they have the know-how.” Still, he dismissed the notion that the country “could go to a weapon tomorrow” as “hype,” putting the time frame for that at two to five years. [US NK policy] [Cheney]
• Report: Pirates were out of ammo, sought to trade captain
  Report: Pirates were out of ammo, sought to trade captain By Nancy A. Youssef and Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers MALINDI, Kenya — With Somali pirates pointing an automatic rifle at a hostage American ship captain, U.S. Navy sharpshooters opened fire Sunday, killing the pirates and ending an extraordinary five-day standoff that marked the first seizure of a U.S. vessel by pirates on the high seas in at least two centuries. Three pirates were killed, the Pentagon said. The captain, 53-year-old Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vt., was rescued unharmed and taken aboard a U.S. warship. A fourth pirate who'd surrendered earlier also was being detained and could face trial in the United States.
  According to Somalis with knowledge of the discussions, the pirates, who at one time had demanded $2 million for Phillips's release, had grown desperate with their situation — adrift under a searing sun in waters infested with sharks, staring at two massive Navy ships armed with guided missiles, running low on fuel and having spent their ammunition.
  A relative of one of the pirates, who said he spoke with the men by satellite phone at about 3 p.m. — four hours before the Navy opened fire — said they "were getting scared" and trying to persuade the Americans to let them go in return for the captain's release.
• Barack Obama's half-brother refused UK entry visa
  Ben Quinn The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009 Article historyBarack Obama's half-brother was refused entry to the UK after providing false documentation in a visa application, it was reported last night. Immigration officers noticed that one of the documents supplied by Samson Obama with an application for a visitor's visa in February was false, leading them to make further inquiries and connect him with a police investigation into an alleged sex attack. Samson Obama, one of the president's Kenyan half-brothers, had been arrested by police after the alleged attack on a girl in Britain last November but was not charged, according to the News of the World The mobile phone shop manager made a stop-over in the UK in January on the way to his half-brother's inauguration but stayed air-side at East Midlands airport. A Home Office spokesman said immigration officers making use of biometric technology noticed one of the documents supplied with a visa application a month later was false. A spokesman for the UK Border Agency said: "We will oppose the entry of individuals to the UK where we believe their presence is not conducive to the public good."
• How to End a War, Eisenhower’s Way
  By Jean Edward Smith April 11, 2009, 7:00 pm President Obama’s unscheduled visit to Iraq suggests a president determined to see a war zone first hand and draw his own conclusions. Lincoln availed himself of that opportunity during the Civil War, but the most pertinent example may be Dwight D. Eisenhower, who toured the battlefront in Korea shortly before his inauguration. Ike had pledged to go to Korea if elected, and most voters assumed that the supreme commander — who had so effectively defeated the German Wehrmacht — would quickly dispatch the North Koreans and their Chinese allies.
  After Eisenhower made peace in Korea, not one American serviceman was killed in action during the remaining seven and a half years of his presidency. No American president since Ike can make that claim. In bringing peace to Korea — a peace that has endured for over fifty years — Eisenhower asserted his personal authority as commander in chief. Perhaps only a five-star general could ignore his party’s old guard and overrule the country’s national security establishment, almost all of whom believed that military victory in Korea was essential. But Ike was an experienced card player. He could recognize a losing hand when he saw it, and he knew when to fold his cards. Only President Obama knows what he saw in Iraq, and only he can decide whether his hand should be folded.
• Lawsuit Claims Iraq Received Chemical Weapons Materials From U.S. Firms
  Friday, April 10, 2009 A federal lawsuit filed this week in Maryland claims that materials supplied by three U.S. firms helped former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to produce chemical weapons used in strikes against Kurds in his country, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, March 17). Thousands of Kurds continue to suffer long-term health problems resulting from exposure to the chemical warfare materials, according to the lawsuit filed by five Iraqi expatriates and the Kurdish National Congress of North America. It requests unspecified compensation and establishment of a program supported by the companies to monitor the health of Kurds exposed to chemical warfare materials, along with family members and heirs. The defendants are VWR International LLC of Pennsylvania, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. of Massachusetts and Alcolac Inc. of Maryland, along with the Republic of Iraq. Alcolac acknowledged during a federal prosecution in 1989 that it illegally exported the mustard-gas precursor thiodiglycol, which eventually reached Iran. [Arms sales] [Double standards]
• The Nuclear Illusionist Obama's 'moral authority' won't deter Tehran or Pyongyang.
  "Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something." So declared President Obama Sunday in Prague regarding North Korea's missile launch, which America's U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice added was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions. At which point, the Security Council spent hours debating its nonresponse, thus proving to nuclear proliferators everywhere that rules aren't binding, violations won't be punished, and words of warning mean nothing.Treaties never stopped a downpour. Rarely has a Presidential speech been so immediately and transparently divorced from reality as Mr. Obama's in Prague. The President delivered a stirring call to banish nuclear weapons at the very moment that North Korea and Iran are bidding to trigger the greatest proliferation breakout in the nuclear age. Mr. Obama also proposed an elaborate new arms-control regime to reduce nuclear weapons, even as both Pyongyang and Tehran are proving that the world's great powers lack the will to enforce current arms-control treaties. [Nuclear weapons] [Double standards] [Proliferation] [Hype]
• Holbrooke of South Asia America's regional envoy says Pakistan's tribal areas are the problem.
  By MATTHEW KAMINSKI Islamabad, Pakistan His face tense and unsmiling, a young man from a village in Pakistan's western tribal areas tells his story, mixing English, Pashto and Urdu. He is the only male in his clan to get an education, but can't find a job, and blames a corrupt national government. Americans are bombing his neighbors, he says, tempting him to join the Islamist militants in his area. Across the room, another Pakistani turns toward his hosts at the U.S. Embassy and says, "You are hated." Ismael Roldan The comments are addressed to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen and the new American special representative for the region, Richard Holbrooke. Seated alongside the highest-ranking U.S. military officer, Mr. Holbrooke asks a dozen or so men in the room about the presence of the Taliban in their villages. "We are all Taliban," comes a response. The others nod in accord. All are or were "religious students," or Taliban in Pashto. But the expression of solidarity with the various Pakistani and Afghan insurgents who go by the name is lost on no one.
• Asian Summit Postponed Amid Protests
  By THOMAS FULLER Published: April 10, 2009 PATTAYA, Thailand — A summit meeting of East Asian leaders intended to address the economic crisis and regional issues was postponed for the day on Saturday after protesters broke into the convention center where the leaders were gathering. Supporters of ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra clashed with pro-government supporters near the location of the summit in Pattaya, Thailand. "We have postponed the meeting," Panitan Wattanayagorn, the Thai government spokesman, told Reuters. "We have not yet set a new date." Columns of military and police units who had rushed to protect the hotel and convention center on Friday could not contain the thousands of protesters who swarmed the streets of this beach resort, about 90 miles east of Bangkok.
• Terror bomb plot intelligence came from MI6's Pakistan operation•
  Officers believed it was too risky not to act • Searches fail to find evidence of conspiracy Vikram Dodd, Nick Watt and Martin Wainwright The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009 Article history Police stand outside a house in Galsworthy Avenue, Cheetham Hill in Manchester. Photograph: Reuters Key intelligence that led to security officials fearing a terrorist cell was to launch a large-scale bomb attack on British soil came from MI6 operations targeting Pakistan, the Guardian has learned. Sources with knowledge of the investigation say the intelligence gathered first from abroad and then in Britain before Wednesday's raids, left counterterrorism officials believing there was too high a risk of an "imminent" attempt to bomb targets in Britain and cause mass casualties. However, subsequent, intensive searches of at least 10 addresses linked to the suspected al-Qaida plot in northern Britain have so far failed to turn up any clear evidence of a terrorist conspiracy, despite the huge resources devoted. [Hype] [Terrorism]
• Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?
  Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp Comments (147) Eric Hobsbawm The Guardian, Friday 10 April 2009 Article historyThe 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. That should not be as difficult as it seems, because the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter any economies, in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism. We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy. The first broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it. The second is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s. In some ways it is a greater crisis than in the 1930s, because the globalisation of the economy was not then as far advanced as it is today, and the crisis did not affect the planned economy of the Soviet Union. We don't yet know how grave and lasting the consequences of the present world crisis will be, but they certainly mark the end of the sort of free-market capitalism that captured the world and its governments in the years since Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan.
  Eric Hobsbawm's most recent publication is On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy
• Russian Experts Question Role of Conventional "Prompt Global Strike" Weapons
  By Elaine M. Grossman Tuesday, April 7, 2009 Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON -- Two Russian security experts yesterday suggested that U.S. plans to develop fast-flying, long-range conventional weapons might pose a snag for nuclear arms negotiations between Moscow and Washington (see GSN, April 1). Speaking at a conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alexei Arbatov and Vladimir Orlov separately raised the notion that U.S. President Barack Obama might consider a broader disarmament agenda that includes limits on conventional weapons, as well as those that are armed with nuclear warheads. The U.S. Defense Department is exploring technologies for "Prompt Global Strike" weapon systems that might be launched on a moment's notice against faraway targets, such as a nuclear missile being readied for launch by a rogue nation or a terrorist leader located in a safe house (see GSN, Nov. 7, 2008). Pentagon leaders have said such new combat systems could allow them a viable alternative to launching a nuclear weapon. "There are very few countries in the world that are afraid of American nuclear weapons," said Arbatov, a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "But there are many countries which are afraid of American conventional weapons. In particular, nuclear weapons states like China and Russia are primarily concerned about growing American conventional, precision-guided, long-range capability, [or] Prompt Global Strike systems." [US military]
• Israel Cries Wolf
  By Roger Cohen April 9, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist
  ISTANBUL — “Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.” Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004. Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil: “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.” I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there. [Israel]
• Obama's Foreign Policy Is Very Much A Continuation Of The Bush Policies
  By Michael Barone Apr 8, 2009
  (US News) Barack Obama's foreign policy is beginning to take shape. Semantically, it's a sharp repudiation of the policies of the George W. Bush administration. In reality, it's something like a continuation of Bush policies. Or, if you want to distinguish between the allegedly confrontation-minded policies of Bush's first term and the more accommodationist policies of his second term--a distinction that I think is exaggerated but has something to it--then it's something like the second Bush second term. With, of course, some differences. [Continuity]
• Mars goes sweet for ethically sourced cocoa
  By Jenny Wiggins Published: April 8 2009 23:35 | Last updated: April 8 2009 23:35 Mars, which owns the Mars, Snickers and M&M candy brands, is to spend tens of millions of dollars annually certifying that the cocoa used in the $10bn of chocolate products it sells every year is sustainably sourced by 2020. The move by the world’s biggest confectionery company, which claims to be the biggest end-user buyer of cocoa globally, comes as chocolate companies worry over rising cocoa prices and falling supply. Chocolate prices set for further increases - Jan-25Fiona Dawson, managing director of Mars UK, said; “Cocoa is a volatile commodity. We want to secure our long-term sourcing.” She also said consumers and employees expected Mars to “do the right thing” because “nobody has to buy confectionery”. [Green]
• America: a superpower no more
  Decline is occurring more rapidly than we think. It's time to embrace a new agenda.
  By Walter Rodgers from the April 8, 2009 edition
  Oakton, Va. - These events are the latest warnings that our world is changing far more rapidly and profoundly than we – or our politicians – will admit. America's own triple-A rating, its superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy. President Obama's recent acknowledgement that the US is not winning in Afghanistan is but the most obvious recognition of this jarring new reality. What was the president telling Americans? As Milton Bearden, a former top CIA analyst on Afghanistan, recently put it, "If you aren't winning, you're losing." The global landscape is littered with evidence that America's superpower status is fraying. [Decline] [Softpower]
• Chinese, Indian Firms Snap Up Global Auto Parts Makers
  Takeovers of once prominent auto parts suppliers in developed markets by companies from emerging economies are picking up speed. Chinese companies are moving to tap auto parts makers around the world that are facing bankruptcy due to the downfall of the Big 3 in Detroit -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Experts say this will spark a seismic shift in the global parts industry, bringing China as well as India into the top ranks alongside Japan's Denso and Germany's Bosch. [Decline]
• Peru's Fujimori Gets 25 Years
  Former President Is Convicted of 'Crimes Against Humanity' for Death-Squad Role By Joshua Partlow and Lucien Chauvin Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, April 8, 2009; Page A06 Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori was convicted Tuesday of "crimes against humanity" and sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in killings and kidnappings by security forces during his government's battle against leftist guerrillas in the 1990s. The verdict, delivered by a three-judge panel on a police base outside Lima where Fujimori has been held throughout the trial, marked the first time that an elected head of state has been extradited back to his home country, tried and convicted of human rights violations.
• With a rocket, Obama's hope is shot back down to earth
  While the US president's pull may help change the world, North Korea won't be the only state needing a lot of work to convince Comments (…) Michael Tomasky in Washington The Guardian, Monday 6 April 2009 Article historyHistory may one day record it as a stark irony - and let us hope an amusing one rather than the tragic kind - that on the very day that Barack Obama was sketching out to an adoring throng in Prague his vision of a post-nuclear world, North Korea launched a rocket that may one day give it the capacity to fire a nuclear warhead as far as 3,700 miles. This means, to get down to brass tacks, that it could hit Alaska.
  But as the North Korea episode shows, not everyone is so reasonable. To the men of Pyongyang, Obama is just another imperialistic swine. In fact, if they're dialecticians worth their salt, then they surely think of Obama as all the more dangerous than Bush for the precise reason that he gives imperialism a friendlier face. North Korea, like any state, has national interests, carved out by decades of history (fear of unification) or centuries (fear of China). The fact that it's a genocidal and secretive police state only exacerbates matters. The bottom line is, the North Koreans are going to do what they think they need to do. Having obviously never read their Carlyle, they couldn't care less who the American president is. [Satellite] [Bizarre]
• Westminster Bridge closed after Tamil ceasefire protest
  Owen Bowcott The Guardian, Tuesday 7 April 2009 Police closed Westminster Bridge in London and attempted to contain thousands of Tamil protesters who surrounded parliament last night demanding an immediate ceasefire in Sri Lanka. One man was rescued after jumping into the Thames. Four RNLI lifeboats were on standby in the river after reports that demonstrators had threatened to throw themselves off the bridge Scotland Yard estimated that up to 3,000 people occupied streets around the Houses of Parliament. Westminster tube station was closed by police. [Diaspora] [Human rights]
• Obama Seizes on Missile Launch in Seeking Nuclear Cuts
  By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER Published: April 5, 2009 PRAGUE — Hours after North Korea’s missile test, President Obama on Sunday called for new United Nations sanctions and laid out a new approach to American nuclear disarmament policy — one intended to strengthen the United States and its allies in halting proliferation. (sic) [Proliferation] [Disarmament] [Spin]
• Is Obama's non-nuclear drive realistic?
  www.chinaview.cn 2009-04-06 13:31:07 Print by Xinhua writers Wu Liming, Ban Wei PRAGUE, April 5 (Xinhua) -- When U.S. President Barack Obama enthusiastically called on Sunday for "a world without nuclear weapons" in the picturesque Hradcany Square in central Prague, the 30,000 crowds cheered with thunderous applause. But for politicians and analysts, questions may rise: Is it realistic? Does he mean business or just play lip service? Everybody, including Obama himself, knows the road to a non-nuclear world could be bumpy. "I'm not naive, the goal can not be reached quickly, perhaps that's not in my lifetime," Obama told the crowds in Prague. The United States boasts the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world. The country far outnumbers Russia and other major nuclear states, with some 4,000 atomic warheads in stock. Washington has long put its nuclear advantage at a key point in its national security strategy, and Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, had adopted a more aggressive policy in maintaining the country's advantage in this regard. [Nuclear weapons] [Disarmament]
• Four Days in May: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
  Sean L. Malloy Among the myriad controversies surrounding the American use of nuclear weapons against Japanese cities in August 1945 is the seemingly simple question of exactly when President Harry S. Truman decided to use the bomb.
  Piecing together when (and why) American leaders decided to use the bomb requires us to abandon the simplistic notion that Truman confronted a binary choice between use and non-use. There is no evidence that any high-level American authorities ever considered the question of whether to use the atomic bomb. The “A-bomb-or-invasion” binary that has so enraptured some historians was simply not a question that Truman (or Roosevelt for that matter) ever directly addressed. What American leaders did discuss extensively, and sometimes heatedly, were the questions associated with how, where and when to use the bomb. Should it be used against Germany or Japan? What targets within those countries might be appropriate for such a weapon? Should there be a warning or demonstration first? How might the bomb be integrated into American diplomacy with respect to both allies and enemies? What implications might its use have for the postwar period? [Nuclear weapons]
• World Economic and Financial Crisis, Japan and the Asia Pacific
  During the opening act of the financial crisis, Japan stood offstage. What did Japan have to do with a crisis whose origins seemed to lie in a U.S. real estate bubble and lax American regulation? But as the crisis threatens to engulf the entire planet in a second Great Depression, eyes have turned to East Asia and the Pacific. Not simply because, contrary to earlier hopes, Japan and its neighbors cannot avoid damage to their own economies. But because of three other issues. [Decline] [Development]
• The American Brain Drain and Asia
  Vivek Wadhwa, Gary Gereffi, and Alex Salkever
  The United States has long served as a magnet for talented scientists, engineers and mathematicians from China and India. This attraction has proven controversial, both in Asia and in the United States. Economic nationalists in China and India have long complained that the "brain drain" damaged their countries’ ability to compete and slowed economic development by skimming off the best talent. For their part, critics in the United States claimed that foreign workers arriving on H-1B visas displaced U.S. knowledge workers and pushed down wages for this class of employment. [Remigration]
• Gates Budget Plan Reshapes Pentagon’s Priorities
  By Elisabeth Bumiller and Christopher Drew April 7, 2009 WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Monday announced a broad reshaping of the Pentagon budget, with deep cuts in many traditional weapons systems but billions of dollars for new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decisions represent the first sweeping overhaul of American military strategy under the Obama administration, which wants to spend more money on counterterrorism and less on preparations for conventional warfare against large nations like China and Russia. [Global insurgency] [US military] [Imperialism]
• Short '06 Lebanon War Stokes Pentagon Debate
  Leaders Divided on Whether to Focus On Conventional or Irregular Combat By Greg Jaffe Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 6, 2009; Page A01 A war that ended three years ago and involved not a single U.S. soldier has become the subject of an increasingly heated debate inside the Pentagon, one that could alter how the U.S. military fights in the future. When Israel and Hezbollah battled for more than a month in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the result was widely seen as a disaster for the Israeli military. Soon after the fighting ended, some military officers began to warn that the short, bloody and relatively conventional battle foreshadowed how future enemies of the United States might fight. Since then, the Defense Department has dispatched as many as a dozen teams to interview Israeli officers who fought against Hezbollah. [Imperialism] [Global insurgency] [US Military]
• Women Erased in Israel, Flogged in Pakistan and Restricted in Afghanistan
  By Robert Mackey AND Sharon Otterman Yated Neeman/Menahem Kahana, via Associated Press  April 3, 2009, 2:07 pm Two versions of a photograph of members of the new Israeli government, posing with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres (both seated) on Wednesday, April 1 in Jerusalem. The image at top is the original, the one below was the digitally altered version that appeared in the Israeli ultra-orthodox newspaper Yated Neeman. Updated | 7:42 p.m. The news this week has been bad for supporters of women’s rights in at least three parts of the world. On Friday, The Associated Press reported that Israeli newspapers “aimed at ultra-Orthodox Jewish readers” digitally manipulated a photograph of the new Israeli government, to remove two female cabinet ministers, Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver. The photograph was taken at an official ceremony welcoming the new Israeli leadership on Wednesday at the residence of the president of Israel, Shimon Peres.
• Global Fiscal Crisis Brings Renewed Role for IMF
  By Annys Shin and Thomas Heath Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, April 4, 2009; Page A10 A year ago, the International Monetary Fund was in a funk. Its handling of past financial crises had made it deeply unpopular. Its finances were shaky. A fifth of the staff was looking to leave. Without new crises to address, doubts about its relevance grew even among insiders. , "It was a period of introspection." The second-guessing ended in September as the global economic crisis took hold and countries again turned to the fund for advice and financial support. Its comeback became official this week when world leaders meeting in London pledged to quadruple its resources and strengthen its mandate. "The IMF has suffered a slow deterioration in morale," said Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist. "The Asian crisis was traumatic . . . they lost a lot of confidence." Staff reductions last year added to the humiliation and embarrassment, he said. "Now it's night and day." The mood in the hallways "is one of invigoration," said a senior-level IMF official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak. "People are pretty busy and they are happy to be helping . . . so they feel validated."
• A New Look at The Peter Principle
  BusinessWeek's exclusive sneak peek at Bob Sutton's new foreword to Dr. Peter's useful, hilarious classic By Bob Sutton
  The Peter Principle came as a revelation to my father, Lewis Sutton. He ran a little company in San Francisco called Oceanic Marine that sold furniture and related equipment, which he installed on United States Navy ships. His livelihood depended on U.S. government bureaucrats and shipyard managers, who often made him miserable. I grew up listening to his tirades about how these "overpaid idiots" insisted that he produce and procure poorly designed furnishings, how they could barely do their jobs, and how pathetically lazy they were. To make matters worse, senior government officials produced an onslaught of absurd procedures that required him to jump through an ever-expanding maze of administrative hoops—which wasted his time, drove up his costs, and made him crazy. He concluded: "The morons at the top must be paid to waste as much taxpayer money as possible." My father loved The Peter Principle because it explained why life could be so maddening—and why everyone around you seems, or is doomed to become, incompetent. The people who ran the U.S. Navy and the shipyards didn't intend to do such lousy work. They were simply victims of Dr. Peter's immutable principle. They had been promoted inevitably, maddeningly, absurdly to their "level of incompetence." Dr. Peter also taught my father not to expect the few competent bureaucrats and managers he encountered to stick around for long, as they would soon be promoted to a job that they were unable to perform properly.
• Too big to save: the end of financial capitalism
  Saskia Sassen The financial logic of neo-liberal capitalism has devoured the world and exhausted itself in the process. A new model beyond "financialisation" is needed, says Saskia Sassen. (This article was first published on 1 April 2009) 2 - 04 - 2009 The misnamed "Group of Twenty" (G20) meets in London on 2 April 2009 to discuss how to save the global financial system. It is too late. The evidence is in: we don't have the resources to save this system - even if we wanted to. It has become too big to save: the value of global financial assets is several times the size of global gross national product (GDP). The real challenge is not to save this system but to definancialise our economies, as a prelude to move beyond the current model of capitalism. Why should the value of financial assets stay at almost four times the overall GDP of the European Union, and even more of the United States. What do everyday citizens - or the planet - gain from such excess?
• US-Iran thaw could bolster Afghanistan rebuilding efforts
  from the April 03, 2009 edition - In The Hague this week, Iranian officials offered to cooperate with the US. Iran has pursued an ambitious redevelopment effort in Afghanistan since 2001. By Anand Gopal | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Kabul, Afghanistan In a crowded section near the western edge of the capital sits a sprawling new university compound, a structure of ornate white stone and blue-tiled domes. As hundreds of students here file in for morning classes, many say they have one country to thank for helping to improve higher learning in this education-starved country: Iran. The $100 million university is one of Iran's many development projects across Afghanistan – and just the type of contribution Washington wants to bring positive change to this troubled country. At an international conference on Afghanistan in The Hague this week, Iranian officials offered to cooperate with the United States on developing and reconstructing Afghanistan. Though deep mistrust remains between the two countries, the move marked a thaw in relations and could facilitate Washington's efforts to turn the situation around here.
• Obama’s Star Turn at Summit Gets Mixed Results
  By HELENE COOPER Published: April 2, 2009 LONDON — In his debut on the international stage, President Obama presented himself as the leader of an America that can no longer go it alone, and as abiding by the protocol of a global new deal. Skip to next paragraph Related World Leaders Pledge $1.1 Trillion to Tackle Crisis (April 3, 2009) Room for Debate: The Art of Persuasion at the G-20 Summit (April 1, 2009) Enlarge This Image Todd Heisler/The New York Times After the meeting Mr. Obama held a news conference, inviting questions from Indian and Chinese journalists. Many reporters stood up and cheered afterward. It was a performance that ranged from mediating behind closed doors — Mr. Obama personally intervened in a spat between the French and Chinese leaders — to a carefully calculated news conference in which he reached deep into history, showed contrition for the failings of Wall Street, and forecast a road the world could no longer travel. Gone are the days, from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana, when Britain and the United States made the rules that others followed. “If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy, that’s an easier negotiation,” Mr. Obama said during his hourlong meeting with the international news media, during which he called on reporters from India and China to ask him questions. “But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.”
• Obama's Ultimate Agenda
  By Charles Krauthammer Friday, April 3, 2009; Page A19 Five minutes of explanation to James Madison, and he'll have a pretty good idea what a motorcar is (basically a steamboat on wheels; the internal combustion engine might take a few minutes more). Then try to explain to Madison how the Constitution he fathered allows the president to unilaterally guarantee the repair or replacement of every component of millions of such contraptions sold in the several states, and you will leave him slack-jawed. In fact, we are now so deep into government intervention that constitutional objections are summarily swept aside. The last Treasury secretary brought the nine largest banks into his office and informed them that henceforth he was their partner. His successor is seeking the power to seize any financial institution at his own discretion. Despite these astonishments, I remain more amused than alarmed. First, the notion of presidential car warranties strikes me as simply too bizarre, too comical, to mark the beginning of Yankee Peronism. Second, there is every political incentive to make these interventions in the banks and autos temporary and circumscribed. For President Obama, autos and banks are sideshows. Enormous sideshows, to be sure, but had the financial meltdown and the looming auto bankruptcies not been handed to him, he would hardly have gone seeking to be the nation's credit and car czar. Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation's income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax. Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.
• Russian scholar says US will fall – in 2010
  05/03/2009 | Moscow News ?08 2009 By Mike Eckel If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then U.S. President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the United States will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order. Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership. "There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats on Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy - a lecture the ministry pointedly invited foreign media to attend. [Decline]
• Women buy wine - eight out of ten bottles, survey finds
  • Women buy 80% of bottles drunk at home, study says • But only one fifth heed health warnings on alcohol Rebecca Smithers, consumer affairs correspondent The Guardian, Thursday 2 April 2009
  Women choose and buy eight out of every 10 bottles of wine that are drunk at home, according to figures out today. But as well as taking the lead when it comes to buying their favourite drop, women also have strong views about how they like to drink it. A third of British women who enjoy wine as a treat at the end of the day admit that they prefer to drink it alone - in the bath.
• Af-Pak: Obama's War
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 254, April 1, 2009
  Af-Pak is the new acronym the U.S. government has invented for Afghanistan-Pakistan. Its meaning is that there is a geopolitical concern of the United States in which the strategy that the United States wishes to pursue involves both countries simultaneously and they cannot be considered separately. The United States has emphasized this policy by appointing a single Special Representative to the two countries, Richard Holbrooke. It was George W. Bush who sent U.S. troops into Afghanistan. And it was George W. Bush who initiated the policy of using U.S. drones to bomb sites in Paklstan. But, now that Barack Obama, after a "careful policy review," has embraced both policies, it has become Barack Obama's war. This comes as no enormous surprise since, during the presidential campaign, Obama indicated that he would do these things. Still, now he has done it. This decision is likely to be seen in retrospect as Obama's single biggest decision concerning U.S. foreign policy, one that will be noticed by future historians as imprinting its stamp on his reputation. And it is likely to be seen as well as his single biggest mistake [Continuity]
• Empire Roundtable
  FPIF Senior Analysts | March 26, 2009 We asked our senior analysts at Foreign Policy In Focus to weigh in on the future course of American foreign policy. This is the question they responded to: "The enormous challenges facing us — economic crisis, climate crisis, nuclear proliferation — require unprecedented global cooperation. Will President Barack Obama draw down the American empire in order to meet these challenges? Or will he do what he can to maintain empire in a different form?" [Imperialism] [Continuity]
• Big Brother is watching: surveillance box to track drivers is backed
  • Privacy row brewing over surveillance on the road • Box could reduce accidents, pollution and congestion Paul Lewis in Brussels The Guardian, Tuesday 31 March 2009 The government is backing a project to install a "communication box" in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe, the Guardian can reveal. Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant "heartbeat" revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU officials behind the plan believe it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. A consortium of manufacturers has indicated that the router device could be installed in all new cars as early as 2013. However, privacy campaigners warned last night that a European-wide car tracking system would create a system of almost total road surveillance. [Surveillance]
• Often Split, Arab Leaders Unite for Sudan’s Chief
  By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and ROBERT F. WORTH Published: March 30, 2009 CAIRO — Arab leaders may be divided over which Palestinian faction to support and what to do about Iran’s rising influence, but they have found one cause to rally around: protecting the president of Sudan from charges that he orchestrated the rape, killing and widespread pillaging in Darfur. Arab leaders gathered for their annual summit meeting in Doha, Qatar, on Monday, hoping to patch over their many differences. But they had little trouble agreeing to an effusive embrace of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court this month for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court also issued a warrant for his arrest.
  They have argued that the International Criminal Court compromised Sudan’s sovereignty. Their supporters said the court’s action revealed the West’s double standard in dealing with Arabs by indicting Mr. Bashir while taking no action against what they saw as war crimes committed by Israel during its offensive in Gaza. They added that the indictment undermined efforts at bringing about a negotiated settlement by inflaming the situation. They have argued that the International Criminal Court compromised Sudan’s sovereignty. Their supporters said the court’s action revealed the West’s double standard in dealing with Arabs by indicting Mr. Bashir while taking no action against what they saw as war crimes committed by Israel during its offensive in Gaza. They added that the indictment undermined efforts at bringing about a negotiated settlement by inflaming the situation. [Separatism] [Double standards]
• America the Tarnished
  By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: March 29, 2009 Ten years ago the cover of Time magazine featured Robert Rubin, then Treasury secretary, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary. Time dubbed the three “the committee to save the world,” crediting them with leading the global financial system through a crisis that seemed terrifying at the time, although it was a small blip compared with what we’re going through now. All the men on that cover were Americans, but nobody considered that odd. After all, in 1999 the United States was the unquestioned leader of the global crisis response. That leadership role was only partly based on American wealth; it also, to an important degree, reflected America’s stature as a role model. The United States, everyone thought, was the country that knew how to do finance right.
  How times have changed. [Decline]
• R2P: Disciplining the Mice, Freeing the Lions
  Steven Fake and Kevin Funk | March 23, 2009
  "The mice would be disciplined and the lions would be free," said a Mexican delegate to the proceedings that created the UN charter in 1945. He astutely predicted the double standards that would govern the application of international law. The decades since have provided no shortage of examples. In fact, this year began in the midst of a large-scale attack on a civilian population by one of the current lions of the international order — Israel. Notably, Israel's recent military assault on the Gaza Strip prompted no shortage of criminally vapid reactions from Washington. "Israel has obviously decided to protect herself and her people," then-President George W. Bush solemnly declared, rejecting widespread calls for a ceasefire. As U.S.-armed Israeli soldiers poured into the densely populated territory, and U.S.-made planes rained death from above, the House of Representatives voted by a staggering 390-to-5 margin to recognize "Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza." [Camouflage] [Manipulation] [Imperialism] [Double standards]

• Afghanistan: soldiers' reports tell of undue optimism, chaos, and policy made on the hoof
  • British military chief says aims in south were naive • Account in book tells of crude tactics and old kit Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2009 Britain's top diplomat in Afghanistan has admitted to "misplaced optimism", and a senior commander has said that military policy is being made up as they go along, according to an account by UK soldiers fighting the Taliban, which will be published this week. Operaton Snakebite, by Stephen Grey, a journalist, describes behind-the-scenes tension between British troops and officials in Afghanistan and London, the poor state of the army's equipment, and the political and military chaos that occurred in 2007 as British and US troops retook from the Taliban the district of Musa Qala, a place regarded as a key objective in the province of Helmand.
• Barack Obama: end of the beginning
  Godfrey Hodgson The United States treasury's plan to deal with "toxic assets" relies on the very financial institutions that created the economic whirlwind. The young presidency is already in a vice, says Godfrey Hodgson. 30 - 03 - 2009 President Barack Obama joked in his press conference on 24 March 2009 that the euphoria of his inauguration two months earlier had lasted only a single day. The hope he had the audacity to proclaim is not yet dead. But - even as he prepares to leave for a trip to Europe that will encompass the G20 summit in London (2 April), the Nato anniversary summit jointly hosted by France and Germany (3-4 April), and visits to the Czech Republic (4-5 April) and Turkey (6-7 April) - the future prospects of his presidency are already in the balance. [Continuity]
• Hillary’s Indonesia: In Praise of ‘Moderate Islam’
  Andre Vltchek Hillary Clinton had nothing but praise for Indonesia on her Feb 18-19 visit. She came to Indonesia as the new Secretary of State and she came, she said, as a friend. Hilary Clinton met Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and later told the press that she “wanted Jakarta's advice and counsel about how to reach out not only to the Muslim world but to Asia and beyond." Indonesia was an obvious stop on Clinton’s four-country tour of Asia. Less obvious were her comments, praising “the democratization process in Indonesia, which is a model for Islam,” referring to 10 years of reform since the 1998 ouster of dictator Suharto. Clinton then added this statement at a dinner with local activists, "As I travel around the world over the next years, I will be saying to people: if you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity and women's rights can co-exist, go to Indonesia." That is, of course, music to the ears of the Indonesian political establishment, religious leaders, and the majority of Indonesians. It couldn’t be further from the truth. [Islam]
• Fox News’s Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful Rising Star
  Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times Glenn Beck, after two months, has 2.3 million viewers. By BRIAN STELTER and BILL CARTER Published: March 29, 2009 “You are not alone,” Glenn Beck likes to say. For the disaffected and aggrieved Americans of the Obama era, he could not have picked a better rallying cry. Critics of Glenn Beck say he engages in incendiary rhetoric, but he says, “I’m a rodeo clown.” Mr. Beck, an early-evening host on the Fox News Channel, is suddenly one of the most powerful media voices for the nation’s conservative populist anger. Barely two months into his job at Fox, his program is a phenomenon: it typically draws about 2.3 million viewers, more than any other cable news host except Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, despite being on at 5 p.m., a slow shift for cable news. With a mix of moral lessons, outrage and an apocalyptic view of the future, Mr. Beck, a longtime radio host who jumped to Fox from CNN’s Headline News channel this year, is capturing the feelings of an alienated class of Americans. [Media] [Decline]
• Momentum Grows for Relaxing Cuba Policy
  Senate Measure Would Eliminate Travel Ban By Shailagh Murray and Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writers Monday, March 30, 2009; Page A01 Roughly a year after Fidel Castro stepped aside and handed much of the responsibility for leading Cuba to his brother Raúl, there is new momentum in Washington for eliminating the ban on most U.S. travel to the island nation and for reexamining the severe limitations on U.S.-Cuban economic exchanges. At a Capitol Hill news conference scheduled for tomorrow, a wide array of senators and interest groups -- including Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.); Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.); Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and Human Rights Watch -- will rally around a potentially historic bill to lift the travel ban. President Obama called repeatedly during the campaign last year for a "new strategy" toward Cuba, and this month he lifted severe Bush-era restrictions on travel and remittances to the island by Cuban Americans with relatives there, after the 2009 spending measure banned using taxpayer money to enforce them. The Treasury Department also said it would ease licensing requirements for trade-related travel by U.S. citizens. [Sanctions]
• Jewish writer raises a storm in America with his report from a 'tolerant' Iran
  Paul Harris in New York The Observer, Sunday 29 March 2009 Article historyA row has broken out over allegations of antisemitism at the New York Times, America's most vaunted name in journalism and a newspaper with a large Jewish readership. The storm centres on a column about Jews in Iran written by New York Times journalist Roger Cohen and a cartoon attacking the recent war in Gaza. The newspaper, and Cohen in particular, has been accused of being too critical of Israel and an apologist for Iran and its leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Cohen's column was written from Iran about the country's small Jewish minority. His piece acknowledged the difficulties the group experienced and portrayed them as part of an Iranian society that he said was more tolerant, democratic and sophisticated than many American critics allowed. Such sentiments might seem uncontroversial, but in America no one touching on issues around Israel or antisemitism escapes close scrutiny.
• Obama Will Face a Defiant World on Foreign Visit
  By HELENE COOPER Published: March 28, 2009 WASHINGTON — President Obama is facing challenges to American power on multiple fronts as he prepares for his first trip overseas since taking office, with the nation’s economic woes emboldening allies and adversaries alike.
  Anglo-American Capitalism on Trial (March 29, 2009) Despite his immense popularity around the world, Mr. Obama will confront resentment over American-style capitalism and resistance to his economic prescriptions when he lands in London on Tuesday for the Group of 20 summit meeting of industrial and emerging market nations plus the European Union. [Decline]  
• Where Are the Leaders?  
  By David Rothkopf Sunday, March 29, 2009; Page B01 You wake up in the morning and once again the financial weather report calls for the Apocalypse followed by brief showers of despair. Seeking a ray of hope, you turn on the television and settle in to watch a Capitol Hill hearing. There in the hot seat is the man who holds the entire U.S. economy in his hands. And he looks like Harry Potter. [Decline]  
• Say what?!
  Time was when entertainers knew their place. Today they run riot, adopting orphans by the pramload, extolling oddball religions and even brokering peace deals. What's going on, asks Marina Hyde Marina Hyde The Guardian, Saturday 28 March 2009 On the eve of the last Palestinian presidential elections, a televised message was broadcast to voters. "Hi, I'm Richard Gere," smiled its star, "and I'm speaking for the entire world ..." Did you miss the meeting at which this got decided?
• A Telescope to the Past as Galileo Visits U.S.
  By DENNIS OVERBYE Published: March 27, 2009 PHILADELPHIA — It looked like the kind of toy telescope a child might have made with scissors and tape — a lumpy, mottled tube about as long as a golf club and barely wider in girth, the color of 400-year-old cardboard, burning with age. The spyglass, one of two surviving, has left Florence for the first time to be the highlight of a Galileo exhibition at the Franklin. But near one knobby end was a bit of writing that sent Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer of the Franklin Institute here, into rapture. The tube’s focal length is “piedi 3,” the inscription said, three feet. It was in the hand of Galileo Galilei. “Absolutely amazing,” Dr. Pitts said. Thus did Galileo, one of history’s great troublemakers, come to America.
• US-Born ex-Guyanese President Dies at 88
  By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: March 28, 2009 Filed at 3:12 a.m. ET GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) -- Janet Jagan, a Chicago native who became Guyana's first white and first female president, died Saturday, a government official said. She was 88. Jagan died at a state-run hospital of an abdominal aneurism, Health Minister Leslie Ramsammy said. Jagan, a Jewish woman and a naturalized Guyanese, was elected president of the English-speaking South American country in December 1997, succeeding her husband, Cheddi Jagan, who died earlier that year. At 77, she was the first white president of a country whose politics are polarized between its majority Guyanese of Indian descent -- the backbone of her ruling party -- and Afro-Guyanese, supporters of the opposition People's National Congress.
  After they moved to his native Guyana, both hard-line communists became active in politics. British and American administrations blocked Cheddi Jagan from power for decades, alarmed by his ties to Cuba and Moscow. She endured three years of house arrest and five months in jail with her husband in the 1950s, when he first won an election. Cheddi Jagan got to rule Guyana in 1992, but he died before serving a full term. [Democracy] [Imperialism]
• A state of blindness
  Paul Rogers
  The British government's new counter-terrorism strategy fails to address the responsibility of its own military policies in Iraq and Afghanistan for the radicalisation it warns against. 26 - 03 - 2009 The British government published a new version of its national counter-terrorism strategy on 24 March 2009. The 176-page document - Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare: The United Kingdom's Strategy for Countering International Terrorism - declares that the threat from violent extremism is growing. It also says that there is an increasing risk of attacks involving biological, chemical or nuclear material (see "Terror risk for Britons is growing, U.K. warns", International Herald Tribune, 25 March 2009). This is the situation after six years of the war in Iraq and more than seven years of fighting in Afghanistan. Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001. The report details a substantial upgrading of the previous (2003) strategy, including the investment of greater resources (at an annual cost of $3.5 billion by 2010) into counter-terrorism preparedness. The security service (MI5) has been doubled in size, and 60,000 people have been trained to deal with incidents and spot potential attackers. There is a particular emphasis on developments in western Pakistan, and a belief that elements of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain have been radicalised. The strategy is candid in its assessment of these trends:
  The strategy shows evidence of copious analysis, planning and activity. But it is unable to acknowledge in any direct manner the linkages between British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and radical responses in country itself. In failing to do this, it follows a well-worn path that was particularly evident at the time of the London bombings on 7 July 2005. [Global insurgency]
• Pakistani and Afghan Taliban Unify in Face of U.S. Influx
  Pakistanis attended a funeral for a victim of a United States missile attack just outside the North Waziristan region. By CARLOTTA GALL Published: March 26, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After agreeing to bury their differences and unite forces, Taliban leaders based in Pakistan have closed ranks with their Afghan comrades to ready a new offensive in Afghanistan as the United States prepares to send 17,000 more troops there this year. In New Afghan Strategy, Obama Will Add Troops (March 27, 2009) The Lede: Mullah Omar Calls for a Taliban Surge (March 6, 2009) 9 Police Officers Are Killed by Taliban in Afghanistan (March 27, 2009) Times Topics: TalibanIn interviews, several Taliban fighters based in the border region said preparations for the anticipated influx of American troops were already being made. A number of new, younger commanders have been preparing to step up a campaign of roadside bombings and suicide attacks to greet the Americans, the fighters said.
• Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis?
  A Future of Inflation, High Interest Rates and a Hollow Dollar? By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS March 26, 2009
  At his March 24 press conference President Obama demonstrated that he is capable of understanding issues as presented to him by his advisers and able to pass on the explanations to the press. The question is whether Obama’s advisers understand the issues. Obama’s advisers are focused on rescuing banks and the insurance company, AIG. They perceive the problems as solvency and paralyzing uncertainly or fear. Financial institutions, unsure of their own and other institutions solvency, hoard cash and refuse to lend. Credit is needed to get the economy moving, and the Federal Reserve and Treasury are doing their best to inject liquidity and to remove troubled assets from the banks’ books. This perception of the problem and the “remedies” being applied, might be causing a greater problem for which there is no solution. Obama’s approach, and that of the previous administration, requires massive monetization of debt by the Federal Reserve and massive new debt issues by the Treasury. The unaddressed question remains: Is the US dollar’s status as world reserve currency threatened by the debt monetization and multi-year, multi-trillion dollar issuance of new Treasuries?
  Clearly, the Obama administration needs to broaden its perception of the predicament to which financial deregulation and offshoring have brought the US economy [Reserve] [Offshoring]
• The Debate Zone: Will globalization be derailed by the world financial crisis?
  Yes. Globalization comes and goes. Right now, it’s going. By Harold James
  Every upswing in globalization is spurred by a technical advance—structured finance, for example—that ultimately outruns our ability to manage. When the end comes, it’s followed by financial instability, protectionism and xenophobia.
  No. There’s a lot more than finance and trade binding the world together. By Moisés Naím
  Despite the current collapse in trade and financial flows, the Internet will continue to make us all next door neighbors. Even problems like climate change and terrorism tie us together since they’re beyond the ability of any nation to solve alone. [Globalisation]
• In Afghan War, U.S. Dominance Increasing
  With More American Troops and Civilians On the Way, NATO Is Likely to Lose Clout By Karen DeYoung and Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, March 26, 2009; Page A16 After years of often testy cooperation with NATO and resentment over unequal burden-sharing, the United States is taking unabashed ownership of the Afghan war. President Obama's decision to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan this year will bring the number of foreign troops there to nearly 90,000, more than two-thirds of them Americans. Although many will technically report to NATO commanders, the U.S. force will increasingly be in charge. Even as the U.S. military expands its control over the battlefield, the number of American civilian officials will also grow by at least 50 percent -- to more than 900 -- under the new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy Obama will announce as early as tomorrow, according to administration officials.
• Hazel Blears' standoff with Muslim Council overshadows new anti-terror launch
  Blears presses MCB deputy to clarify position over alleged endorsement of Hamas threats Alan Travis, home affairs editor The Guardian, Wednesday 25 March 2009 Article historyA standoff between the communities secretary, Hazel Blears, and the Muslim Council of Britain was said last night to "cut to the heart" of the government's revised counter-terror strategy to challenge those who defend terrorism and violent extremism. Blears has suspended official links with the MCB over allegations that its deputy general secretary endorsed a Hamas call for attacks on foreign troops, including possibly British troops, if they try to intercept arms smuggled into Gaza. [Global insurgency] [Double standards]
• Serving 22 years: the environmentalist who fell victim to US anti-terror laws
  'The government is trying to send a message,' Marie Mason tells the Guardian in her first interview since she was sentenced Digg it Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 March 2009 22.00 GMT Article history Marie Mason, an environmental activist from Cincinnati, Ohio, is serving 22 years after admitting 13 counts of arson and property damage. Photograph: freemarie.org She is, in the eyes of the law, America's most dangerous eco-terrorist: a self-confessed serial arsonist who resorted to fire and destruction to register her opposition to the fur industry and genetically modified crops. But to those who know her and to some legal experts, the 22-year jail term handed to Marie Mason, 47, is a consequence of America's preoccupation with terrorism in the post-9/11 world. She is serving the longest sentence of any convicted animal rights or environmental militant, including several activists responsible for greater destruction. "It is obvious the government is trying to send a message – to have a chilling effect, not only on my action, which of course transgressed the laws, but also on 30 years of above-ground actions in the environmental rights spheres," Mason told the Guardian in her first interview since she was sentenced last month. [Human rights] [Double standards]
• Tunisian pilot who prayed as his plane went down jailed in Italy
  John Hooper in Rome The Guardian, Wednesday 25 March 2009 Article historyA pilot accused of praying when he should have been taking emergency measures to avoid a crash in which 16 people died has been sentenced to 10 years in jail by an Italian court. Captain Chafik Gharby was at the controls of a plane belonging to the Tunisian charter airline Tuninter that crashed in the sea off the coast of Sicily four years ago. The 23 survivors were left swimming for their lives, some clinging to a piece of the fuselage that stayed afloat after the turbo-prop aircraft broke up on impact. Gharby was at first hailed as a hero for having saved the lives of most of the passengers. But after an investigation, he, his co-pilot, and several Tuninter executives and technicians were charged with a range of offences including manslaughter. The court in Palermo agreed with prosecutors that the chain of events that led to the crash began when a wrong part was installed in the ill-fated plane, a Franco-Italian ATR 72. A mechanic accidentally fitted an outwardly identical fuel gauge intended for the smaller ATR 42. The plane took off from Bari, bound for the Tunisian island of Djerba, on 6 August 2005. As it flew over Sicily, its engines slowed to a halt, even though the instrument panel showed the aircraft had enough fuel left for the flight. The judges accepted the prosecution case that the pilots, instead of making a crash landing on the sea, should have been able to glide the plane to Palermo airport. Instead, Gharby was said to have panicked. In cockpit recordings entered as evidence he was heard calling for the help of "Allah and Muhammad his prophet". His lawyer, Francesca Coppi, said: "Faced with danger, he invoked his god as would any one of us."
  Of the passengers who died, two were Tunisians. The other 14 were Italians [Human rights][Double standards] [Islam]
• Next Foreign Crisis Could Be Next Door
  By MARC LACEY and GINGER THOMPSON Published: March 24, 2009 MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s economy is being dragged down by the recession to the north. American addicts have turned Mexico into a drug superhighway, and its police and soldiers are under assault from American guns. Nafta promised 15 years ago that Mexican trucks would be allowed on American roads, but Congress said they were unsafe. United States-Mexican relations are in the midst of what can be described as a neighborly feud, one that stretches along a lengthy shared fence. That border fence, which has become a wall in some places, is another irritant.
• U.S. Weighs Sharif as Partner in Pakistan
  By JANE PERLEZ Published: March 24, 2009 LAHORE, Pakistan — The opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, sealed his place as the most popular politician in Pakistan this month when he defied his house detention and led a triumphant protest that forced the government to restore the country’s chief justice. Now, as the Obama administration completes its review of strategy toward the region this week, his sudden ascent has raised an urgent question: Can Mr. Sharif, 59, a populist politician close to Islamic parties, be a reliable partner? Or will he use his popular support to blunt the military’s already fitful campaign against the insurgency of the Taliban and Al Qaeda?
• 'Global War On Terror' Is Given New Name
  Bush's Phrase Is Out, Pentagon Says
  By Scott Wilson and Al Kamen Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, March 25, 2009; Page A04 The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor. In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' " [Global insurgency] [Spin]
• Deflation returns to UK after nearly 50 years
  Deflation raises fears for pay deals as falling interest rates and house prices, plus lower energy costs, push retail prices index below zero Ashley Seager The Guardian, Tuesday 24 March 2009 Article history Deflation will officially return to Britain today after an absence of nearly 50 years, when government data is expected to show that the retail prices index – the country's broadest measure of inflation – has turned negative.
• U.S. troops confront disciplined, wily, mobile Afghan insurgents
  By Philip Smucker | McClatchy Newspapers ASMAR, Afghanistan — When the young American lieutenant and his 14 soldiers glanced up at the rock face, they thought that the major who'd planned the mission must have been kidding. Elijah Carlson, a strapping, blue-eyed Southern Californian and a self-proclaimed "gun nut," gripped the crumbling rock, tugged backward by 90-pounds of ammunition and gear. "If we fall back, we are dead!" he whispered to Lt. Jake Kerr, the platoon leader. In seconds, a rock shot loose beneath one soldier's boot and dropped 20 feet onto another soldier below, sending him tumbling 15 feet to the base and cracking his bulletproof side plate. What transpired over the next 16 hours was the kind of clash that's led Kerr's commanders in the Army's 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, N.Y., to conclude that there's no "victory" waiting around the next bend in Afghanistan, only a relentless struggle with a fleet-footed, clever enemy. [Global insurgency] [Incompetence]
• Scandals Cloud Succession in Newly Unsure Malaysia
  By THOMAS FULLER Published: March 23, 2009 KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A slew of political scandals gripping Malaysia and a transfer of power fraught with uncertainty have shaken the elite here, with exquisitely poor timing. As a major trading nation, Malaysia has been slammed by the global downturn. Its exports have collapsed by nearly one-third, and current projections show that its economy will shrink by as much as 5 percent this year. Yet the main preoccupation of the government and opposition parties appears to be what analysts say is an increasingly dysfunctional political system. The man in line to become prime minister has been linked to the murder of a Mongolian woman whose body was obliterated with military-grade explosives.
  “Malaysian democracy hasn’t fully matured, in the sense that those who lost the elections are unwilling to accept the results,” he said. The United Malays National Organization has governed the country since independence but nearly lost power in elections last March, a watershed that put into question Malaysia’s ethnic-based party system. Mr. Zaid, the former law minister, traces Malaysia’s current troubles to the privileges given to the country’s dominant ethnic group, the Malays.  
• 9 in Opposition Party Arrested in Georgia
  Bloc Plans Protest Against President April 9 By Sarah Marcus Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, March 24, 2009; Page A08 TBILISI, Georgia, March 23 -- The Georgian government arrested nine members of a leading opposition party on gun charges Monday as tensions mounted ahead of widely anticipated protests next month demanding the resignation of President Mikheil Saakashvili. Nino Burjanadze, leader of the opposition Democratic Movement-United Georgia party and a former ally of Saakashvili, said the charges were fabricated and part of a "campaign of terror" by the U.S.-backed government to discredit its critics.
  The arrests, some of which took place at the offices of Burjanadze's party, come just over two weeks before Georgia's main opposition parties plan mass demonstrations calling on Saakashvili to resign. The opposition has accused Saakashvili of monopolizing power and betraying the democratic ideals of the Rose Revolution, the 2003 street protests that swept him into office. A favorite of the Bush administration, the U.S.-educated lawyer has come under increased pressure since Georgia's defeat in a war with Russia in August over two breakaway territories. The arrests, some of which took place at the offices of Burjanadze's party, come just over two weeks before Georgia's main opposition parties plan mass demonstrations calling on Saakashvili to resign. The opposition has accused Saakashvili of monopolizing power and betraying the democratic ideals of the Rose Revolution, the 2003 street protests that swept him into office. A favorite of the Bush administration, the U.S.-educated lawyer has come under increased pressure since Georgia's defeat in a war with Russia in August over two breakaway territories. [Democracy]
• Churchill takes stand in lawsuit to reclaim job
  By IVAN MORENO The Associated Press Monday, March 23, 2009; 7:12 PM DENVER -- A former University of Colorado professor, assailed for likening Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi leader and fired for alleged plagiarism, testified in court Monday that the 2001 terrorist attacks were "perfectly predictable." Ward Churchill took the stand in his lawsuit seeking to get his job back at the university, where he was a tenured professor of ethnic studies. "I'm not in favor of terror," he said while explaining the essay that thrust him into the national spotlight. Public outrage over the essay erupted just before the university launched a research-misconduct investigation into his other work. Churchill said that when he compared the victims in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, he was arguing that "if you make it a practice of killing other people's babies for personal gain ... eventually they're going to give you a taste of the same thing."   [Human rights] [Global insurgency]
• Roger Cohen: From Tehran to Tel Aviv
  By Roger Cohen
  Sunday, March 22, 2009 NEW YORK: With his bold message to Iran's leaders, President Obama achieved four things essential to any rapprochement. He abandoned regime change as an American goal. He shelved the so-called military option. He buried a carrot-and-stick approach viewed with contempt by Iranians as fit only for donkeys. And he placed Iran's nuclear program within "the full range of issues before us." By doing so, Obama made it almost inevitable that one of the defining strategic issues of his presidency will be a painful but necessary redefinition of America's relations with Israel as differences over Iran sharpen. [Continuity]
• US Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific
  Catherine Lutz
  Much about our current world is unparalleled: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible but equally unprecedented is the global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world. These bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. Their presence is meant to signal, and at times demonstrate, that the US is able and willing to attempt to control events in other regions militarily. The start of a new administration in Washington, and the possibility that world economic depression will give rise to new tensions and challenges, provides an important occasion to review the global structures of American power.
  Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories.[1] There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion. These official numbers are quite misleading as to the scale of US overseas military basing, however, excluding as they do the massive buildup of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. $2 billion in military construction money has been expended in only three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Just one facility in Iraq, Balad Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12 square mile “security perimeter.” [Imperialism] [Militarisation]
• Chinese stockpiling spurs copper price rally
  By Chris Flood Published: March 22 2009 19:41 | Last updated: March 22 2009 19:41 Copper stockpiling by a secretive Chinese state organisation has helped trigger an impressive rally of 28 per cent in the price of the metal this year. Copper’s fortunes are closely tied to the industrial cycle so the price jump, bigger than that of gold, has grabbed attention outside the commodities market, with some questioning whether it could signal a turning point for economic growth. However, developments in China, which accounted for almost a third of global copper consumption last year, remain central to the market’s prospects. Industry reports point to buying by the Beijing’s State Reserves Bureau, which manages the country’s strategic stockpiles.
• US will appoint Afghan 'prime minister' to bypass Hamid Karzai
  White House plans new executive role to challenge corrupt government in Kabul Julian Borger in Brussels and Ewen MacAskill in Washington guardian.co.uk, Sunday 22 March 2009 20.15 GMT Article historyThe US and its European allies are preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the Guardian has learned.
  The risk for the US is that the imposition of a technocrat alongside Karzai would be viewed as colonialism, even though that figure would be an Afghan. [Imperialism] [Spin] [Bizarre] [Democracy]
• Trade Barriers Rise as the Recession’s Grip Tightens
  By MARK LANDLER Published: March 22, 2009 WASHINGTON — After repeated pledges by world leaders to avoid erecting trade barriers, protectionism is on the march, provoking nasty trade disputes and undermining efforts to plot a coordinated response to the deepest global economic downturn since World War II. From a looming battle with China over tariffs on carbon-intensive goods to a spat over Mexican trucks using American roads, barriers are going up around the world. As the recession’s grip tightens, these pressures are likely to intensify, several experts said. [Protectionism]
• American Muslim's Case Poses a Test
  U.S. Role Alleged in Detention in UAE By Karl Vick Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 23, 2009; Page A02 One day last July, Naji Hamdan was summoned to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. He drove two hours through the desert heat from Dubai to answer questions from FBI agents who had arrived from Los Angeles, where Hamdan had gone to school, started a family, built a successful auto-parts business and become a U.S. citizen. At his apartment six weeks later, he was awakened from a nap by men who bundled him into a black Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows. Hamdan was told he was a prisoner of the UAE and was held in a cell painted glossy white to reflect the lights that burned round the clock, according to a note he wrote from prison. Between interrogations, he wrote, he was confined in a frigid room overnight, strapped into "an electric chair" and punched in the head until he lost consciousness. In one session, the blindfolded prisoner recalled hearing a voice that sounded American. The voice said, "Do what they want or these people will [expletive] you up," Hamdan wrote. The prisoner obliged, signing a confession that he later said meant only that he would do anything to make the pain stop. The case might have ended there but for Hamdan's U.S. citizenship and his American attorney's assertion that he was tortured "at the behest" of his own government.
  Though the events detailed by Hamdan's attorney occurred before President Obama was sworn in, human rights groups and others said they will monitor his response. Obama has declared that "the United States will not torture," and CIA Director Leon Panetta said in his confirmation hearings that the United States will not turn over suspects to governments that will abuse them [Human rights] [Global insurgency] [Continuity]
• Study Backs Bosnian Serb’s Claim of Immunity
  By MARLISE SIMONS Published: March 21, 2009 PARIS — Every time Radovan Karadzic, the onetime Bosnian Serb leader, appears in court on war crimes charges, he has hammered on one recurring claim: a senior American official pledged that he would never be standing there. The official, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration, has repeatedly denied promising Mr. Karadzic immunity from prosecution in exchange for abandoning power after the Bosnian war. But the rumor persists, and different versions have recently emerged that line up with Mr. Karadzic’s assertion, including a new historical study of the Yugoslav wars published by Purdue University in Indiana. Charles W. Ingrao, the study’s co-editor, said that three senior State Department officials, one of them retired, and several other people with knowledge of Mr. Holbrooke’s activities told him that Mr. Holbrooke assured Mr. Karadzic in July 1996 that he would not be pursued by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague if he left politics.
  The Purdue University study, “Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars’ Initiative,” says that Mr. Holbrooke “instructed his principal assistant, Christopher Hill, to draft the memorandum to be signed by Karadzic,” committing him to give up power.
  Holbrooke was angry; he was ranting,” the American recalled. He quoted Mr. Holbrooke as saying: “That son of a bitch Karadzic. I made a deal with him that if he’d pull out of politics, we wouldn’t go after him. He’s broken that deal and now we’re going to get him.” Mr. Karadzic’s party won those elections in the Bosnian Serb republic. Shortly afterward, he disappeared from public view. [Renege] [Democracy]
• French Workers Return to Streets in Protest
  By Edward Cody Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, March 20, 2009; A12 PARIS, March 19 -- More than a million French workers staged a general strike and marched in demonstrations across the country Thursday in a second round of protests against the government's response to the world economic crisis. The protests, which drew substantially more people into the streets than a similar outpouring Jan. 29, were depicted by union leaders as part of a sustained campaign to pressure President Nicolas Sarkozy to do more to defend French people against the economic upheaval that has unfurled across the planet since the fall. In particular, they called on him to raise low-end wages and unemployment benefits and to make it harder for business leaders to fire employees when profits sink. "I cannot believe the government will stay immobile in the face of a phenomenon of this size," Bernard Thibault of the General Labor Confederation said on the government's France 2 television. More than 90,000 French workers joined the ranks of the unemployed in January, pushing the total to 2.2 million and leading economists to estimate the unemployment rate at 8 percent. In addition, an increasing number of factories have put workers on part-time schedules, drastically reducing their pay and increasing fears of more layoffs.
• A slaughter waiting to happen
  By Lakhdar Brahimi Published: March 19, 2009
  The already severe humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka is on the brink of catastrophe. It will take the quick arrival of humanitarian relief and high-level international political muscle to bring the nightmarish situation to an end and prevent a slaughter. An estimated 150,000 civilians are now trapped in a tiny pocket of land between Sri Lankan military forces, whose artillery shells regularly fall among them, and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who shoot at them if they try to escape. Food, clean water and medical assistance are all increasingly scarce. According to U.N. figures, 2,300 civilians have already died and at least 6,500 have been injured since January. Some 500 children have been killed and over 1,400 injured. What happens to the rest of those caught in the middle of the government’s onslaught and the Tigers’ fight to the death depends not only on the two parties but on the international response as well. The crisis is born of acts by both sides that most probably amount to serious violations of humanitarian law and perhaps to war crimes or crimes against humanity. As it has withdrawn before the government forces, the LTTE has sought refuge in the civilian population. It has been holding men, women and children as hostages, forcibly recruiting them and using them as human shields. [Victim] [Spin]
• US-Iran rapprochement prospects dimming
  03/19/2009 06:27 PM | Gulf News Event: Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week that the administration of US President Barack Obama was not trying to "make up for the mistakes" of its predecessor.
  Conclusion: The prospects for a breakthrough in US-Iran relations are dimming, as Obama backs away from abandoning the "carrot and stick" approach of his predecessors. The chance for detente, created by Obama's election, is slipping away as policy inertia prevents a breakthrough in US policy towards Iran. [Continuity]
• U.S. Is Urged to Lift Ban on Foreign Scholars
  By JOHN SCHWARTZ Published: March 17, 2009 Tariq Ramadan, a respected Swiss academic and Muslim scholar, had a job all lined up at the University of Notre Dame in 2004, but the Bush administration prevented him from entering the country. Government officials said he had contributed to a charity believed to have connections to terrorism.
  Barring entry to the United States in similar cases is not new: during the cold war, the writers Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Doris Lessing, among others, were kept out. Congress largely repealed a law allowing ideological exclusion in 1990, but the USA Patriot Act, adopted in 2001 and reauthorized in 2006, permits the government to block entry on antiterrorism grounds [Human rights] [Global insurgency]
• Trade Barriers Could Threaten Global Economy World Bank Finds Protectionist Trend
  By Anthony Faiola Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, March 18, 2009; Page D01 At least 17 of the 20 major nations that vowed at a November summit to avoid protectionist steps that could spark a global trade war have violated that promise, with countries from Russia to the United States to China enacting measures aimed at limiting the flow of imported goods, according to a World Bank report unveiled yesterday. The report underscores a "worrying" trend toward protectionism as countries rush to shield their ailing domestic industries during the global economic crisis. It comes one day after Mexico vowed to slap new restrictions on 90 U.S. products. That action is being taken in retaliation against Washington for canceling a program that allowed Mexican truck drivers the right to transport goods across the United States, illustrating the tit-for-tat responses that experts fear could grow in coming months. [Protectionism]
• Mission Accomplished: A look back at the media's fawning coverage of Bush's premature declaration of victory in Iraq
  On May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln aboard an S-3B Viking jet, emerged from the aircraft in full flight gear, and proceeded to "press[] flesh," as The Washington Post put it, as he shook hands and hugged crew members in front of the cameras. Later that day, Bush delivered a nationally televised speech from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln in which he declared that "[m]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended," all the while standing under a banner reading: "Mission Accomplished." Despite lingering questions over the continued violence in Iraq, the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction, and the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, as well as evidence that Bush may have shirked his responsibilities in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG) during the Vietnam War, the print and televised media fawned over Bush's "grand entrance" and the image of Bush as the "jet pilot" and the "Fighter Dog." [Media]
• Hill Faces Hardline Opposition to Iraq Nomination
  Christopher Hill, the former chief U.S. negotiator at six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, is facing a crisis in his 32-year foreign service career. Hawkish senior officials in the former Bush administration and leaders of the Republican Party oppose his nomination as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, citing what they say are his unsatisfactory achievements in talks with the North. In an interview with CNN on Sunday, former vice president Dick Cheney, said, "He's not the man I would have picked for that post." He added Hill does not have any experience in the region. "I did not support the work that Chris Hill did with respect to North Korea," he claimed. Cheney and others believe that Hill gave too many concessions to the North without achieving any tangible results in talks on North Korea’s nuclear disablement and verification protocol. In a joint statement with Senator Lindsey Graham, failed presidential candidate John McCain also opposed Hill’s nomination, saying Hill has no experience in the Middle East. They urged President Barack Obama to reconsider his nomination, saying that he had no experience in working closely with the U.S. military's counterterrorism activities. They added Hill’s achievements in his negotiations with the North were controversial. Sam Brownback, another Republican senator, also reportedly opposed his nomination. The U.S. Senate traditionally values unanimity in the process of approving ambassadorial nominations. And amid the growing crisis caused by the North's threat to test-launch a long-range missile, there are signs that more senators will oppose Hill's nomination. [Dissension] US NK policy]
• CNN Interview with Dick Cheney: 'Obama's decisions are putting country at risk'
  March 16, 2009, 14:58 Former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke with CNN about a wide-range of subjects including the ailing U.S. economy, President Obama’s first days in office, the Bush administration’s "success" in Iraq, tension with President Bush in their final days in the White House and the perks of transitioning out of government.
  We were, I think, very successful in some of the things we did. First term, for example, we went in and took down the Iraqi regime, which had been a prime proliferator and sponsor of terror. We shut down the A.Q. Khan black-market network that had provided nuclear technology to Libya, to Iran and to North Korea, and we cleaned out the Libyan program. When they say what we did in Iran (sic), they surrendered all of their nuclear materials and designs for weapons and so forth. Those were all major successes. We still had on the table when we left the unresolved issues of North Korea and Iran. KING: Before we get to another break, let me follow up on that point. You disagree with the overreliance, I think is a good term, a fair term, tell me if I'm wrong, on the diplomacy with the Europeans when it came to Iran. You also disagreed with the approach in the end to North Korea and taking them off the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for, I believe your view is, for nothing, or for just false promises. The man who led that effort, Chris Hill, the diplomat in charge then is now President Obama's choice to be the ambassador in Iraq. That's a tough job. Do you think Chris Hill is up to that job based on what he did in North Korea?
  So I think it's a choice that -- a choice I wouldn't have made. I did not support the work that Chris Hill did with respect to North Korea. KING: Why didn't the president listen to you? CHENEY: Well, he gets to listen to whoever he wants to listen to, and I had my say. I got my chance to voice my views and my objections. I didn't the North Koreans were going to keep their end of the bargain in terms of what they agreed to, and they didn't. [Cheney] [Dissension]
• Pakistan is being shaped by popular will as never before
  The decision to reinstate the chief justice is a fillip for democracy - and bad news for those waging war in Afghanistan Comments (9) Mohsin Hamid The Guardian, Tuesday 17 March 2009 Article historyYesterday's announcement of the restoration of the chief justice of the Pakistani supreme court is a victory for those who desire a more representative state in Pakistan. But it is a blow for Barack Obama, who appears intent on escalating American military involvement in Afghanistan. The reason is simple: the US needs a Pakistani state that is significantly unrepresentative of the Pakistani people, because most Pakistanis are opposed to America's war in Afghanistan, and the US cannot hope to succeed there without Pakistan's support.
• Don't Blame Jim Cramer
  By Richard Cohen Tuesday, March 17, 2009; Page A15 What Jon Stewart needs is Jon Stewart. He could use a droll comedian to temper his ferocity and correct him when he's wrong, as he was about the financial media, particularly CNBC and its excitable analyst Jim Cramer. They didn't cover up the story of financial shenanigans. They didn't even know it existed.
• Ending Our Imperial Foreign Policy
  As George W. Bush's term ended, he had few defenders left in the world of foreign policy. Mainstream commentators almost unanimously agreed the Bush years had been marked by arrogance and incompetence. "Mr. Bush's characteristic failing was to apply a black-and-white mind-set to too many gray areas of national security and foreign affairs," The Post editorialized. Even Richard Perle, the neoconservative guru, acknowledged recently that "Bush mostly failed to implement an effective foreign and defense policy." There was hope that President Obama would abandon some of his predecessor's rigid ideological stances.
  In its first 50 days, the Obama administration has naturally been consumed by the economic crisis, but it has nevertheless made some striking shifts in foreign policy. Obama announced the closure of Guantanamo and the end of any official sanction for torture. He gave his first interview as president to an Arab network and spoke of the importance of respect when dealing with the Muslim world -- a gesture that won him rave reviews from normally hostile Arab journalists and politicians. [Imperialism] [Obama]
• Tales From Torture’s Dark World
  By Mark Danner March 15, 2009 Op-Ed Contributor ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists. “In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
  The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites. A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity. [Human rights] [Global Insurgency]
• Civil War in the United States?
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Mar. 15, 2009, Commentary No. 253
  We are getting accustomed to all sorts of breakdowns of taboos. The world press is full of discussion about whether it would be a good idea to "nationalize" banks. None other than Alan Greenspan, disciple of the superlibertarian prophet of pure market capitalism, Ayn Rand, has recently said that we have to nationalize banks once every hundred years, and this may be that moment. Conservative Republican Senator Lindsay Graham agreed with him. Left Keynesian Alan Blinder discussed the pros and cons of this idea. And while he thinks the cons are a bit bigger than the pros, he was willing to spend public intellectual energy writing about this in the New York Times. Well, after hearing nationalization proposals by arch-conservative notables, we are now hearing serious discussions about the possibilities of civil war in the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski, apostle of anti-Communist ideology and President Carter's National Security Advisor, appeared on a morning television talk show on February 17, and was asked to discuss his previous mention of the possibility of class conflict in the United States in the wake of the worldwide economic collapse.  
• The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: Engaging Imagined Communities
  Radhika Desai Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism London: Verso, 2006, second revised edition (first published 1983, revised edition, 1991). xv + 240 pp. ISBN 9781844670864 Like celebrities who ‘need no introduction’, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (hereinafter IC) should need no review. After all, it is one of the most widely cited works in its field and such academic ubiquity is surely review enough. Indeed, no single phrase occurs as widely and frequently in the literature on nationalism as ‘imagined communities’. That it is not always attributed to its original creator is testimony to its pervasive acceptance and adoption. However, I am probably not alone in having long felt a certain unease with IC: not on individual points, though many of these have been criticized (see Özkirimli, 2000, for a convenient summary of the principal criticisms of IC), but with slippages between its stated aims and arguments and their real logic. [Globalisation] [Nationalism]  
• U.S. military outreach to Mexico likely to upset . . . Mexicans
  By Marisa Taylor and Nancy Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — As the Pentagon eyes a bigger role in Mexico's drug war, the military's efforts to open the door to a new relationship with its southern neighbor risks alienating the Mexican military, which has long had a strained relationship with its counterpart, experts said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called for improved relations with the Mexican military in response to escalating drug violence along the Mexican border and in Mexico. On Meet the Press earlier this month, the secretary said: "I think we are beginning to be in a position to help the Mexicans more than we have in the past. Some of the old biases against cooperation between our militaries and so on I think are being set aside." Most experts, however, say any military role should be limited to sharing intelligence or training Mexican troops and even defense officials privately concede their effort to increase their role in Mexico is confusing Mexicans and even other U.S. agencies. "It's a mistake to say that the United States is going to address this problem of security in Mexico by increasing the Pentagon's role," said Armand B. Peschard-Sverdrup, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It only would perpetuate the dysfunctional relationship between the two countries."
• Leftist Salvadoran Party Wins Vote
  By REUTERS Published: March 16, 2009 Filed at 2:08 a.m. ET Skip to next paragraph SAN SALVADOR, March 15 (Reuters) - A former TV journalist won El Salvador's presidential election on Sunday, bringing a party of former Marxist guerrillas to power for the first time after 20 years of rule by their right-wing civil war foes. Mauricio Funes, running for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, won 51.3 percent of the vote against 48.7 percent for the ruling conservative ARENA party. It was a momentous victory for the left in a nation where memories of the 1980-92 civil war that killed 75,000 people, many by right-wing death squads, hang heavy over politics
• Stewart Asks Cramer: "Where's the D'Oh!"
  posted by Leslie Savan on 03/13/2009 @ 1:14pm Whew! Stewart vs. Cramer--which might as well have been called journalism vs. the kind of bullroar that got us into this mess--was the most riveting TV since the Inauguration. Here's Part I; you can click through to see Part II and III:
• America cheers as satirist delivers knockout blow to TV finance gurus
  For the past 10 days the US has been gripped. Even President Obama tuned in as the country's foremost TV comic, Jon Stewart, unleashed an extraordinary broadside against TV's top financial commentators for their part in the unfolding economic crisis. Dave Smith The Observer, Sunday 15 March 2009 Article history Jon Stewart recording an episode of The Daily Show. Photograph: Evan Agostini/AP First came the imperial marching music and a fiery explosion. "You've watched snippets of them for days, or meant to after your friends sent you the link," a voice boomed with mock gravity. "Tonight, the week-long feud of the century comes to a head." It was a comically absurd drumroll for what, on the surface, was merely a squabble between TV presenters. In one corner, Jim Cramer, the closest thing to a celebrity in American financial journalism. In the opposite corner, Jon Stewart, the satirist and host of the fake news programme The Daily Show on Comedy Central. But unlike many a big fight, this one more than surpassed the hype. Nothing less than financial reporting itself was put on trial – and found severely wanting. Cramer, who dispenses raucous advice to investors on the Mad Money show on the business channel CNBC, was eviscerated by a serious and genuinely angry Stewart. Meek and contrite, Cramer was pummelled like a rope-a-dope over his profession's failure to be an effective watchdog of Wall Street. There was no cornerman to throw in the towel.
• Russia Is Weighing 2 Latin Bases, General Says
  By ELLEN BARRY Published: March 14, 2009 MOSCOW — A top Russian Air Force official said that the government was weighing whether to base strategic bombers out of Cuban territory or on a Venezuelan island that has been offered by President Hugo Chávez, according to the Interfax news service. In comments made at an awards ceremony on Friday night, Maj. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev, chief of staff for Russia’s long-distance aviation division, told reporters that either option would be practical. “There are four or five airfields in Cuba with 4,000-meter-long runways, which absolutely suit us,” he said. “If the two chiefs of state display such a political will, we are ready to fly there.” He confirmed that Mr. Chávez had offered the use of a military airfield on La Orchila island. “If a relevant political decision is made, this is possible,” he said.
• Pentagon Rethinking Old Doctrine on 2 Wars
  By THOM SHANKER Published: March 14, 2009 WASHINGTON — The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.
  . For more than six years now, the United States has in fact been fighting two wars, with more than 170,000 troops now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The military has openly acknowledged that the wars have left troops and equipment severely strained, and has said that it would be difficult to carry out any kind of significant operation elsewhere. To some extent, fears have faded that the United States may actually have to fight, say, Russia and North Korea, or China and Iran, at the same time. But if Iraq and Afghanistan were never formidable foes in conventional terms, they have already tied up the American military for a period longer than World War II. A senior Defense Department official involved in a strategy review now under way said the Pentagon was absorbing the lesson that the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns likely to be part of some future wars would require more staying power than in past conflicts, like the first Iraq war in 1991 or the invasions of Grenada and Panama. [Global insurgency] [Imperialism]
• Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know.
  By Billy Wharton Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page B01 It took a massive global financial crisis, a failed military adventure and a popular repudiation of the Republican Party to make my national television debut possible. After 15 years of socialist political organizing -- everything from licking envelopes and handing out leaflets to the more romantic task of speaking at street demonstrations -- I found myself in the midtown Manhattan studio of the Fox Business Network on a cold February evening. Who ever thought that being the editor of the Socialist magazine, circulation 3,000, would launch me on a cable news career? The media whirlwind began in October with a call from a New York Times writer. He wanted a tour of the Socialist Party USA's national office. Although he was more interested in how much paper we used in our "socialist cubby hole" than in our politics, our media profile exploded. Next up, a pleasant interview by Swedish National Radio. Then Brian Moore, our 2008 presidential candidate, sparred with Stephen Colbert. Even the Wall Street Journal wanted a socialist to quote after the first bailout bill failed last fall. Traffic to our Web site multiplied, e-mail inquiries increased and meetings with potential recruits to the Socialist Party yielded more new members than ever before. Socialism -- an idea with a long history -- suddenly seemed to have a bright future in 21st-century America. Whom did we have to thank for this moment in the spotlight? Oddly enough, Republican politicians such as Mike Huckabee and John McCain had become our most effective promoters. During his campaign, the ever-desperate McCain, his hard-charging running mate Sarah Palin and even a plumber named Joe lined up to call Barack Obama a "socialist." Last month, Huckabee even exclaimed that, "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead, but the Union of American Socialist Republics is being born." We appreciated the newfound attention. But we also cringed as the debate took on the hysterical tone of a farcical McCarthyism. The question "Is Obama a socialist?" spread rapidly through a network of rightwing blogs, conservative television outlets and alarmist radio talk shows and quickly moved into the mainstream. "We Are All Socialists Now," declared a Newsweek cover last month. A New York Times reporter recently pinned Obama down with the question, "Are you a socialist, as some people have suggested?" The normally unflappable politician stumbled through a response so unconvincing that it required a follow-up call in which Obama claimed impeccable free market credentials.
  The funny thing is, of course, that socialists know that Barack Obama is not one of us. Not only is he not a socialist, he may in fact not even be a liberal.
• Pakistan arrests opposition leader Nawaz Sharif
  By ZARAR KHAN The Associated Press Sunday, March 15, 2009; 1:04 AM ISLAMABAD -- Pakistani authorities placed opposition leader Nawaz Sharif under house arrest Sunday to stop him from taking part in a major anti-government rally, a spokesman said. The move against former Prime Minister Sharif shows Pakistan's determination to squelch Monday's rally in the capital Islamabad but risks igniting anger among his supporters. It will also likely damage the democratic credentials of the one-year-old government led by U.S.-backed President Asif Ali Zardari (sic). [Democracy] [Double Standards] [Spin]
• Rising to the Occasion Reimagining Socialism
  By Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr.
  This article appeared in the March 23, 2009 edition of The Nation. March 4, 2009 Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now,"Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about the global economic crisis? The following essay will, we hope, kick off a spirited dialogue, with four replies in this issue and more to come here at TheNation.com. --The Editors
  AVENGING ANGELS If you haven't heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn't just because there aren't enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism--its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions. But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of "stimulus" are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment.
• Economy, Ecology, Empire
  By John Bellamy Foster
  March 10, 2009 We are living in a new historical moment. Today's threefold crisis of capitalism--viewed in terms of economy, ecology and empire--is potentially the worst in history, not excluding the 1930s and '40s. The current economic downturn already compares in many ways with the Great Depression, and the bottom has not yet been reached. The ecological catastrophe is the most serious that humanity has experienced, threatening the mass extinction of species and human civilization. The struggle over empire, with US hegemony waning but far from gone at present, points to the danger of more frequent and larger wars. I have discussed the three aspects of this historical crisis in The Great Financial Crisis (recently published with Fred Magdoff), The Ecological Revolution (forthcoming in April) and Naked Imperialism (2006). Any realistic treatment of the world situation, and the need for socialism, must attend to all three of these global contradictions emanating from capitalism.
• Charles Freeman's Statement in Wake of Withdrawal From Intelligence Post
  Charles Freeman, a veteran diplomat slated to become the top U.S. intelligence analyst, withdrew from consideration Tuesday. He released a statement denouncing the "Israel Lobby" for "character assassination." Here is the text of the statement. To all who supported me or gave me words of encouragement during the controversy of the past two weeks, you have my gratitude and respect. You will by now have seen the statement by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reporting that I have withdrawn my previous acceptance of his invitation to chair the National Intelligence Council. I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. [Dissension] [US foreign policy] [Israel]
• Fears grow Iraq violence will doom Obama's Afghan plan
  By Nancy A. Youssef and Sahar Issa | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — As the U.S. military begins to shift its focus to a new battle against extremists in Afghanistan, a recent spike in violence in Iraq has some military commanders worried that their Afghan strategy could falter with the need to keep a large force in Iraq to quell the mayhem there.
• 5 Years After It Halted Weapons Programs, Libya Sees the U.S. as Ungrateful
  By MICHAEL SLACKMAN Published: March 10, 2009 TRIPOLI, Libya — When Libya gave up its nuclear and chemical weapons programs in late 2003, President George W. Bush pointed to the decision as a victory in Washington’s so-called war on terror and as a potential model for pressing Iran and North Korea to give up their weapons programs, too.
  But now Libyan officials say they are dissatisfied with the way the deal worked out, insisting that the United States has done too little to reward Libya’s concessions. Officials here say they believe that Libya’s limited payoff undermines the credibility of the United States as it presses other nations to abandon weapons programs. Libya’s discontent suggests potential hurdles for the Obama White House as it tries to engage with nations the United States has shunned, like Iran and Syria, as part of a broader strategy reassessment in the Middle East. [Renege] [Sequencing] [US NK negotiations]
• U.S. Rebukes U.N. Official for Sharp Words
  By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, March 11, 2009; Page A12 NEW YORK, March 10 -- The Obama administration scolded the president of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, saying that his frequent public attacks against the United States and Israel are undercutting the standing of the world's most representative body. The rebuke comes one day after Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann lashed out at the United States during a visit to Tehran, where he met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other senior Iranian officials. The leftist Nicaraguan priest and diplomat defended Iran's nuclear program as peaceful and said the United States has not cooperated with other countries at the United Nations, according to Iranian news reports. Last week, d'Escoto also criticized the U.S. imprisonment of five Cuban agents convicted on espionage charges in 2001, and he urged the United Nations' Geneva-based Human Rights Council to look into alleged human rights abuses by U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, charging that "there are over 1 million civilian deaths in Iraq as a direct result of the U.S.-led aggression and occupation." [UNUS] [Israel]
• The Worst-Best Hope in Afghanistan? Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
  By PETER LEE March 9 , 2009
  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—a brutal, capricious, and violently anti-American warlord—may be the West’s best hope for its faltering adventure against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar is fighting alongside the Taliban against the Karzai government and ISAF and U.S. forces. Nevertheless, over the last five years, he has been the object of escalating blandishments by the Karzai government, Saudi Arabia, NATO, and perhaps even the United States, seeking to lure him away from the Taliban camp and into the Karzai government.
• Fashioning Resistance to Militarism
  Christine Ahn and Gwyn Kirk | March 9, 2009
  In the silver lining to the devastating economic crisis, critiques of excessive military spending are now beginning to echo around Capitol Hill and throughout mainstream media. Federal budget priorities — and the billions of dollars tied up in the military budget — are coming under much wider scrutiny. For years, the National Priorities Project, WAND (Women's Action for New Directions), and War Resisters League have calculated the tradeoffs for military spending with readable pie charts, diagrams, and interactive websites to educate and empower ordinary people to take part in this policy debate. Yet what all the facts and figures cannot quite crack is the deeply entrenched military mindset that so dominates American society and culture. That's why in May 2005 we worked with the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland, California to stage a popular education project, "Fashion Resistance to Militarism." Professional designers and home dressmakers created eye-catching outfits to deconstruct military policies. We wrote scripts for each runway that were read by a narrator as the models strutted their stuff. An enthusiastic crowd of 450 people convinced us that this unlikely genre is a highly effective way to discuss the militarization of culture in accessible terms and to get the audience thinking about heavy topics like the military budget or sexualized military violence. For all the talk of change, militarism hasn't gone away in the new administration. Despite campaign promises to sit down and talk with U.S. "enemies" and his recent announcement to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq by 2011, President Barack Obama is deploying 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan and has announced increases in military spending as well as increases in the overall number of U.S. soldiers and Marines. [Militarisation]
• Tsvangirai rules out foul play in crash that killed wife
  Zimbabwean prime minister tells mourners 'It was an accident,' quelling rumours of assassination attempt Alex Duval Smith in Cape Town guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 March 2009 13.25 GMT Article historyZimbabwe's prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, moved today to rule out foul play in the car accident that killed his wife, Susan, and forced him to convalesce in neighbouring Botswana. Tsvangirai flew into the Zimbabean capital, Harare, this morning ahead of his wife's funeral on Wednesday. His face still swollen but with no bandages visible, Tsvangirai, 56, told mourners at his home: "It was an accident. When something happens there is always speculation, but I want to say in this case, if there was any foul play, it was [a likelihood of] one in a thousand."
• As Retail Park Falters, Religion Steps In
  Faithful Fill Spiritual and Physical Vacancies in Prince William Strip Mall
  Gallery By Nick Miroff Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 10, 2009; Page A01 Wall Street and the titans of American commerce might be teetering, but at Sudley Corner Center, an aging business park just off Interstate 66 outside Manassas, the pioneer spirit is not yet vanquished. With low rents and loose zoning restrictions, Sudley Corner Center has become a draw for immigrant entrepreneurs, small specialty stores and shoppers from across cultures and socioeconomic classes. And lately, as businesses have gone bust, leaving empty storefronts in a community whose Latino presence is strong, it is love for the Lord Jesucristo to which Sudley Corner Center's warehouselike spaces increasingly have become devoted. The spiritual and physical vacancies wrought by the recession are being filled by evangelical and Pentecostal churches led mostly by Central American pastors, and, on most nights, prayers and songs sung in Spanish can be heard rising above the whoosh of traffic on the interstate. "Seems like whenever someone goes out of business here, another church opens up," said Randy Paris, the sole proprietor (and lone employee) of Gameroom Deals, which repairs and sells used arcade games, jukeboxes, pinball machines and other pre-PlayStation entertainment systems. [Religion]
• Harry free but others languish under draconian law
  March 2nd, 2009 Author: Nicholas Farrelly With the release of Melbourne man Harry Nicolaides from his Bangkok prison cell Thai authorities no doubt hope an archaic French legal term will fade from Australian memories. Lèse majesté—the crime of insulting the monarch—has given the tourist-friendly “Land of Smiles” unusually bad press. Harry Nicolaides' imprisonment is over, but lese majeste continues in full forceIn recent months images of a forlorn Nicolaides, manacled and pale, have been broadcast into millions of Australian living rooms. His crime was so petty and his punishment so draconian that many have asked: what is this law and why is it enforced? [Human rights] [Democracy]
• China's thirst for copper could hold key to Afghanistan's future
  By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers JALREZ VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this Taliban stronghold in the mountains south of Kabul, the U.S. Army is providing the security that will enable China to exploit one of the world's largest unexploited deposits of copper, earn tens of billions of dollars and feed its voracious appetite for raw materials. U.S. troops set up bases last month along a dirt track that a Chinese firm is paving as part of a $3 billion project to gain access to the Aynak copper reserves. Some troops made camp outside a compound built for the Chinese road crews, who are about to return from winter break. American forces also have expanded their presence in neighboring Logar province, where the Aynak deposit is. The U.S. deployment wasn't intended to protect the Chinese investment — the largest in Afghanistan's history — but to strangle Taliban infiltration into the capital of Kabul. But if the mission provides the security that a project to revive Afghanistan's economy needs, the synergy will be welcome. [ODI] [Incompetence]
• A Rising Dollar Lifts the U.S. but Adds to the Crisis Abroad
  By PETER S. GOODMAN Published: March 8, 2009 As the world is seized with anxiety in the face of a spreading financial crisis, the one place having a considerably easier time attracting money is, perversely enough, the same place that started much of the trouble: the United States. American investors are ditching foreign ventures and bringing their dollars home, entrusting them to the supposed bedrock safety of United States government bonds. And China continues to buy staggering quantities of American debt.  
• U.S. Downturn Dragging World Into Recession
  Report Says Global Economy Will Shrink for First Time Since 1940s
  Job candidates tussle for enrollment forms at a career fair in India, where more than half a million jobs vanished in the last three months of 2008, according to the World Bank. (By Mahesh Kumar -- Associated Press) By Anthony Faiola Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 9, 2009; Page A01 The world is falling into the first global recession since World War II as the crisis that started in the United States engulfs once-booming developing nations, confronting them with massive financial shortfalls that could turn back the clock on poverty reduction by years, the World Bank warned yesterday. The World Bank also cautioned that the cost of helping poorer nations in crisis would exceed the current financial resources of multilateral lenders. Such aid could prove critical to political stability as concerns mount over unrest in poorer nations, particularly in Eastern Europe, generated by their sharp reversal of fortunes as private investment evaporates and global trade collapses. In its report, released ahead of a major summit of finance ministers in London this week, the World Bank called on developed nations struggling with their own economic routs to dedicate 0.7 percent of the money they spend on stimulus programs toward a new Vulnerability Fund to help developing countries.
• In El Salvador Vote, Big Opportunity for Leftists
  By William Booth Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 9, 2009; Page A09 SAN SALVADOR -- After a 12-year civil war and a peace undermined by soaring crime, leftists in El Salvador are on the verge of completing a remarkable journey from armed struggle to the presidential palace. Their candidate is a veteran TV broadcaster and morning talk show host, Mauricio Funes, whose Facebook page lists his political views as "other." Funes, 49, a former correspondent for CNN en Español, was recently recruited by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the revolutionary group-turned-mainstream political party that is favored by polls to win the presidency in a vote scheduled for March 15.  
• High-Speed Rail Drives Obama's Transportation Agenda
  By Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 8, 2009; Page A01 The Northern Lights Express is little more than an idea -- a proposal for a 110-mph passenger train between Minneapolis and Duluth, Minn., that has crept along in fits and starts for years. But the slow ride may soon be over. The project is one of dozens nationwide that are likely to benefit from President Obama's initiative to fund high-speed and intercity passenger rail programs, including $8 billion in stimulus money and $5 billion more over the next five years in the administration's proposed transportation budget.
• Clinton says U.S. may consult Iran on Afghanistan
  Wed Mar 4, 2009 8:02pm GMT By Sue Pleming BRUSSELS (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Washington might consider consulting Iran over Afghanistan but accused Tehran of interference in the Middle East (sic). [Chutzpah] [Inversion]
• A Global Retreat As Economies Dry Up
  As World Trade Plummets, Bustling Ports Stand Idle And Foreign Workers Track Back Home
  By Anthony Faiola Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, March 5, 2009; Page A01 SINGAPORE This shimmering city-state was the house globalization built. When world trade boomed, Singapore's seaport at the crossroads of East and West became the Chicago O'Hare of freighters and supertankers. Singapore Airlines took off despite serving a country with no domestic air routes. Nearly everything manufactured here is made for export. One out of every three workers is a foreigner. But as the world enters a period of deglobalization, Singapore is a window into the reversal of the forces that brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labor. With world trade plummeting for the first time since 1982, the long-bustling port has become a maritime parking lot in recent weeks, with rows of idled freighters from Asia, Europe, the United States, South America, Africa and the Middle East stretching for miles along the coast. "We're running out of space to park them," said Ron Widdows, chief executive of Singapore-based NOL, one of the world's largest container lines. Thousands of foreign workers, including London School of Economics graduates with six-digit salaries and desperately poor Bangladeshi factory workers, are streaming home as the economy here suffers the worst of the recessions in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an epicenter of what analysts call a new flow of reverse migration away from hard-hit, globalized economies, including Dubai and Britain, that were once beacons for foreign labor. Economists from Credit Suisse predict an exodus of 200,000 foreigners -- or one in every 15 workers here -- by the end of 2010. [Migration]
• Think Again: Globalization
  By Moisés Naím
  Page 1 of 3 March/April 2009 Forget the premature obituaries. To its critics, globalization is the cause of today’s financial collapse, growing inequality, unfair trade, and insecurity. To its boosters, it’s the solution to these problems. What’s not debatable is that it is here to stay. No. That is, not unless you believe that globalization is mainly about international trade and investment. But it is much more than that, and rumors of its demise—such as Princeton economic historian Harold James’s recent obituary for “The Late, Great Globalization”—have been greatly exaggerated. Jihadists in Indonesia, after all, can still share their operational plans with like-minded extremists in the Middle East, while Vietnamese artists can now more easily sell their wares in European markets, and Spanish magistrates can team up with their peers in Latin America to bring torturers to justice. Globalization, as political scientist David Held and his coauthors put it, is nothing less than the “widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life”—and not just from one Bloomberg terminal to another. Around the world, all kinds of groups are still connecting, and the economic crisis will not slow their international activities. In some cases, it might even bolster them. [Globalisation]
• Cost of locking up Americans too high - Pew study
  Mon Mar 2, 2009 7:44pm GMT WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) - One in every 31 U.S. adults is in the corrections system, which includes jail, prison, probation and supervision, more than double the rate of a quarter century ago, according to a report released on Monday by the Pew Center on the States. The study, which said the current rate compares to one in 77 in 1982, concluded that with declining resources, more emphasis should be put on community supervision, not jail or prison. "Violent and career criminals need to be locked up, and for a long time. But our research shows that prisons are housing too many people who can be managed safely and held accountable in the community at far lower cost," said Adam Gelb, director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project, which produced the report. The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Justice. Most of those in the U.S. corrections system -- one in 45 -- are already on probation or parole, with one in 100 in prison or jail, the Pew study found. Those numbers are higher in certain areas of the country, and Georgia tops all states with one in 13 adults in the justice system. The other leading states are Idaho, where one in 18 are in corrections and Texas, where the rate is one in 22. In the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., nearly 5 percent of adults are in the city's penal system. This was the first criminal justice study that took into account those on probation and parole as well as federal convicts, Pew said. [Human rights]
• Many in Afghanistan oppose Obama's troop buildup plans
  Frustration and fear is sparking opposition to plans that would nearly double the size of US forces there. By Anand Gopal | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
  from the March 2, 2009 edition Kabul, Afghanistan - Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai says she has an innovative amendment to Washington's planned injection of up to 30,000 new troops here. "Send us 30,000 scholars instead. Or 30,000 engineers. But don't send more troops – it will just bring more violence." Ms. Barakzai is among the growing number of Afghans – especially in the Pashtun south – who oppose a troop increase here, posing what could be the biggest challenge to the Obama administration's stabilization strategy. "At least half the country is deeply suspicious of the new troops," says Kabul-based political analyst Waheed Muzjda. "The US will have to wage an intense hearts-and-minds campaign to turn this situation around." The lack of public support could provide fertile recruiting ground for the Taliban and hinder US operations, Mr. Muzjda says.
• 33 Minutes and why it is important in this New Missile Age
  33 Minutes: Protecting America in the New Missile Age is a one-hour documentary produced by The Heritage Foundation that tells the story of the very real threat foreign enemies pose to every one us. The truth is brutal - no matter where on Earth a missile is launched from it would take 33 Minutes or less to hit the U.S. target it was programmed to destroy. Despite this present and growing danger, our government has failed to build the missile defense systems capable of defending us against such attacks. Featuring rare footage and in-depth interviews with leading experts in the field, 33 Minutes is the definitive documentary exposing the untold vulnerability we all face and the action plan necessary to revive a strategic missile defense system that America uniquely can develop, maintain, and employ for its own defense and the peace-loving world's security. Missile defense] [Threat] [Spin]
• The Imperial Unconscious
  Tom Engelhardt | March 1, 2009
  Sometimes, it’s the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter. Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be 'modest, realistic,' and 'above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,' Gates said. 'The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan. Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: “There must be an Afghan face on this war.” U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace — and no less unremarked upon — for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on events there. Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory — and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War — ours — a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war. And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. [Imperialism] [Spin]
• The American Empire Project
  Americans have long believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words -- American empire -- have been on everyone's lips. At this moment of unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly. How did we get to this point? And what lies down the road? [Imperialism]
• Did the U.S. plan an invasion of Canada in the 1920s?
  February 4, 2003 U.S. plans to invade Canada after the First World War? This is one of the most bizarre stories I've come across on the Internet, and the most bizarre part is that it's true. The U.S. military really did develop a "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan--Red" in the 1920s and '30s, and it really did include provisions for an invasion of Canada by the United States. The document was declassified in 1974, so this isn't really a new story, but there has been some hoopla about it lately. Concerns in some quarters notwithstanding, the whole thing was just a theoretical exercise in military planning. The brass would have made better use of their resources planning for a war with Germany, but that wasn't politically expedient. They reasoned that planning for unlikely wars was better than no planning at all. War Plan Red was never intended to be put into action except in the event of a war with the United Kingdom, an eventuality that everyone would agree was highly unlikely after about 1900.
  But there would be a price to pay for any such war. Planners essentially wrote off the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa if the British tried to take them early in the war. Planners also anticipated a possible invasion of the U.S. Pacific coast by an allied force from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
• AIG's $61.7bn crash sends markets plunging
  Andrew Clark in New York guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 March 2009 02.48 GMT The insurer AIG lost $28m an hour in the largest quarterly loss in American history. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP The crisis-stricken insurance company AIG has crashed $61.7bn (£43bn) into the red with the biggest corporate loss in US history after being crippled by policies protecting troubled banks against default on loans and derivatives. In a renewed effort to prevent AIG from collapsing, the US government yesterday provided it with access to $30bn of emergency aid. This takes the amount of taxpayers' funds advanced to AIG to more than $150bn.
• Nice talking to you ... mobile phone use passes milestone
  A UN report reveals that half the globe now pays to use one, with the fastest growth taking place in Africa
  Chris Tryhorn The Guardian, Tuesday 3 March 2009 The speed and scale of the world's love affair with mobile phones was revealed yesterday in a UN report that showed more than half the global population now pay to use one. The survey, by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the UN, also found that nearly a quarter of the world's 6.7 billion people use the internet. But it is the breathtaking growth of cellular technology that is doing more to change society, particularly in developing countries where a lack of effective communications infrastructure has traditionally been one of the biggest obstacles to economic growth. By the end of last year there were an estimated 4.1bn mobile subscriptions, up from 1bn in 2002. That represents six in 10 of the world's population, although it is hard to make a precise calculation about how many people actually use mobile phones. Africa is the continent with the fastest growth, where penetration has soared from just one in 50 people at the turn of the century to 28%. Much of the take-up is thought to have been driven by money transfer services that allow people without bank accounts to send money speedily and safely by text messages, which the recipient - typically a family member - can cash in at the other end. Vodafone's M-Pesa money transfer service was launched in Kenya in 2007 and now has 5 million users. [ICT]
• East Asian Regionalism and its Enemies in Three Epochs: Political Economy and Geopolitics, 16th to 21st Centuries
  Mark Selden
  Précis: This paper examines the dominant forces at play in East Asia in an effort to chart regional dynamics within a global non-Eurocentric framework in the course of three epochs.* In the first era, spanning the 16th to the early 19th century a China-centered tributary trade order provided a geopolitical framework within which private trade could also flourish. At its height in the 18th century, as East Asia linked to a wider regional and global economy, core areas achieved high levels of peace, prosperity and stability. The second period is notable for dislocation, war and radical transformation spanning the years 1840-1970. In this era profound transformations were the product of system disintegration, colonial rule, world wars, and anti-colonial wars and revolutions. With the collapse of the regional order, bilateral relations, colonial and postcolonial, predominated. Since the 1970s there have been signs of the emergence of a third epoch notable for progress toward the formation of a new East Asian regional order resting on foundations of dynamic economic growth. From the perspective of East Asian integration, the US-China opening of 1970 marked both the end of a century of war and polarization and the emergence of economic complementarity and geopolitical restructuring that have transformed both East Asia and the world economy. In assessing the resurgence of East Asia and the emerging character of East Asian regionalism, emphasis is placed on relations among China, Japan and Korea as ascending regional-global powers and the position of the United States as a powerful but declining superpower. The analysis considers the interplay of geopolitics and political economy in structuring hierarchies of wealth, power and position both within Asia and in the world order or disorder. Is the emergence East Asian regional order a basis for regional independence or a new framework for US penetration? What insights can the past offer toward the emergence of a viable regional order in East Asia, or, at a minimum, pitfalls to skirt?
• Revenge of the Glut
  By Paul Krugman
  Monday, March 2, 2009 Remember the good old days, when we used to talk about the "subprime crisis" - and some even thought that this crisis could be "contained"? Oh, the nostalgia! Today we know that subprime lending was only a small fraction of the problem. Even bad home loans in general were only part of what went wrong. We're living in a world of troubled borrowers, ranging from shopping mall developers to European "miracle" economies. And new kinds of debt trouble just keep emerging. How did this global debt crisis happen? Why is it so widespread? The answer, I'd suggest, can be found in a speech Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave four years ago. At the time, Bernanke was trying to be reassuring. But what he said then nonetheless foreshadowed the bust to come. The speech, titled "The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit," offered a novel explanation for the rapid rise of the U.S. trade deficit in the early 21st century. The causes, argued Bernanke, lay not in America but in Asia. In the mid-1990s, he pointed out, the emerging economies of Asia had been major importers of capital, borrowing abroad to finance their development. But after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 (which seemed like a big deal at the time but looks trivial compared with what's happening now), these countries began protecting themselves by amassing huge war chests of foreign assets, in effect exporting capital to the rest of the world. The result was a world awash in cheap money, looking for somewhere to go.
• U.S. Retains Hidden Grip on Pakistan's Nukes
  By Richard Sale Published: February 27, 2009 With Islamabad's agreement, the U.S. installed unbreakable safety codes in Pakistan’s nukes. U.S. agents infiltrated weapons-making front companies and inserted parts or software that can render weapons inoperable. And U.S. ‘snatch teams’ kidnap rogue scientists. The photo shows anti-nuke demonstrators dressed like nuclear missiles marching in Washington, D.C. (KRT Photos via Newscom)  With Pakistan's political instability spreading, nervous concern has mounted over the fate of Islamabad's nuclear arsenal should Taliban sympathizers gain power within the Pakistan military, but under the terms of secret agreements, U.S. personnel have been stationed in Pakistan whose sole function is to guarantee and secure the safety of Islamabad's nuclear arsenal and keep it out of the hands of terrorists, according to several serving and former U.S. officials. Some of the American technicians have had direct access to the nuclear weapons themselves, these sources said. In any case, Pakistan's nukes are currently secure, in the opinion of several former and serving U.S. officials. "They are for now," said one.
  As early as 2000, the Clinton administration created a joint commission, a 'liaison' group, consisting of top American and Pakistani scientists. The purpose of this group was to help the Pakistanis create command and control codes for its nuclear weapons that would be unbreakable. One former senior U.S. intelligence source told me that in the course of such work, America gained "a pretty full knowledge" of Pakistan's command and control system. The United States then used Special Forces 'snatch teams' to kidnap Pakistani scientists who were peddling Pakistan's nuclear technology or knowledge of it to undesirables. For example, a group of such scientists abruptly disappeared while traveling in Burma, these sources said. [Abductees] [Sovereignty] [Double standards] [Imperialism]  
• MI5 cold-shoulders Hobsbawm request to see his file
  • Service says historian cannot see personal data • Labour peer asks ministers to lift ban on access
  Martin Kettle The Guardian, Monday 2 March 2009 Article history Eric Hobsbawm says he wants to see the files because they might help him to correct errors in his autobiography. Photograph: Jane Bown The former Labour leader Neil Kinnock once described Eric Hobsbawm as "my favourite Marxist". But now the Labour government is being challenged to explain to parliament why one of Britain's most eminent leftwing historians has been barred from seeing a file kept on him by the Security Service, MI5. Hobsbawm is 91 and a Companion of Honour, an award given to only 45 Britons for outstanding achievements and whose motto is "In Action Faithful and in Honour Clear". He has been told by MI5 he is not entitled to see the file, for which he applied under the Data Protection Act. Ministers face the potentially embarrassing task of having to explain to parliament why Hobsbawm, who joined the now defunct British Communist party in 1936 and is widely regarded as one of the world's leading Marxist historians, is worthy of receiving such an exclusive distinction from the Queen but is not trusted to see his own security file.
• Ukraine Teeters as Citizens Blame Banks and Government
  By Clifford J. Levy Published: March 1, 2009 KIEV, Ukraine — Steel and chemical factories, once the muscle of Ukraine’s economy, are dismissing thousands of workers. Cities have had days without heat or water because they cannot pay their bills, and Kiev’s subway service is being threatened. Lines are sprouting at banks, the currency is wilting and even a government default seems possible. Ukraine, once considered a worldwide symbol of an emerging, free-market democracy that had cast off authoritarianism, is teetering. And its predicament poses a real threat for other European economies and former Soviet republics.
• Tactical Success, Strategic Defeat
  Afghan Outrage at U.S. Raid Highlights Challenges Facing New Military Push By Pamela Constable Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, March 2, 2009; Page A01 FORWARD OPERATING BASE ALTIMUR, Afghanistan -- The U.S. soldiers entered the sleeping village in Logar province in the dead of night on Feb. 20, sure of their target and heavily armed. They surrounded a mud-walled compound, shouting commands, and then kicked down the gate as cries of protest erupted within. This Story Tactical Success, Strategic Defeat Field Notes From Afghanistan Exactly what happened next is disputed, but shots were fired and a man inside fell dead. Four other men were grabbed and arrested. Then the soldiers departed, leaving the women to calm the frightened children and the rumors to spread in the dark. By midmorning, hundreds of angry people were blocking the nearby highway, burning tires and shouting "Death to America!" By mid-evening, millions of Afghan TV news viewers were convinced that foreign troops had killed an unarmed man trying to answer his door.  
• U.S. Talks Tough on Gaza Aid
  Limits on Distribution of $300 Million Suggest Administration Is Hewing to Bush-Era Stance
  By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 2, 2009; Page A10 SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, March 1 -- The United States on Monday will pledge $300 million in humanitarian relief for people in Gaza after the 22-day war with Israel but will maintain restrictions to prevent any assistance from reaching Hamas, State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, attending an international conference here to raise funds for the Gaza Strip, will also announce $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority, which is controlled by Fatah, a rival of Hamas that is dominant in the West Bank. [Human rights] [Democracy] [Continuity]
• Russia Is Much Smarter This Time
  20 February 2009By Yevgeny Bazhanov Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong loved to say, "The world's two superpowers, the Soviet Union and United States, collide and collude, and the more they collide, the more they collude." By all accounts, Mao's interpretation of relations between Moscow and Washington is still relevant today under Barack Obama's presidency. Obama, who campaigned under the slogan "Change We Can Believe In," is serious about making fundamental changes to U.S. foreign policy, including its relations with Russia. To be sure, George W. Bush's hegemonic, unipolar approach to global affairs conflicts with Obama's basic political beliefs. Obama is not driven by "democratic fundamentalism" or neoconservatism, nor does he have the same close ties to the military-industrial complex, intelligence agencies or Texas oil magnates. What's more, the roughly 65 million Americans who voted for Obama are expecting him to institute real changes to U.S. foreign policy. Regardless of Obama's convictions and background, the new global architecture would have objectively required the White House to change its foreign policy in any case following Bush's legacy. Even going back to the two U.S. administrations preceding Bush, the United States' global status was heavily boosted by one external factor -- the internal dissolution and voluntary capitulation of its arch rival, the Soviet Union -- although it didn't stop Americans from rejoicing that they "won" the Cold War. Before the economic crisis, the United States was undoubtedly much stronger than any of its competitors, This inflated the perception in the Bush administration that the United States was the shining star of the civilized world -- the singular superpower with a moral mission to bring freedom and prosperity to other nations. Now, of course, these illusions have been shattered as the crisis has delivered a significant blow to the U.S. economy and its overly ambitious foreign policy agenda. But this by no means implies that the Obama administration will give up the U.S. position as the dominant global leader. [Imperialism][Russ US relations]
• Foreign policy adviser Scowcroft says U.S. isn't done yet
  By Abigail Curtis BDN Staff CAMDEN, Maine — While these are very troubled times internationally, the United States isn’t waning in relevance, according to foreign policy expert Brent Scowcroft who spoke Friday night at the 22nd annual Camden Conference. “I don’t believe we’re a finished power by any means,” Scowcroft said. “We need to find our values again. We need to restore our ability to lead. That’s our challenge and I hope the new administration is up to it.” Scowcroft was the keynote speaker at the conference, which is focused this year on Global Leadership and the U.S. role in world affairs. [Decline]
• Soft Power Politics in the Asia Pacific: Chinese and Japanese Quests for Regional Leadership
  H. H. Michael Hsiao and Alan Yang Regional leadership matters. It can facilitate cooperation among states and bring about a prosperous common future. Nevertheless, the struggle for leadership may lead to serious rivalry and regional instability. In East Asia, the quest for leadership has been controversial. Northeast Asian powers such as China, Japan and Korea have long been regarded as potential leaders striving to secure national interests by expanding their influence over their southeast neighbors. However, in the Asian financial crisis of 1997 none of these countries was able to play a dominant role, resulting in a “leadership deficit.”[1] To some extent, the Asian financial crisis did witness a new architecture of collective leadership in East Asia. “ASEAN Plus Three” (APT), inclusive of ten ASEAN member states in addition to China, Japan, and Korea, convened in Kuala Lumpur in late 1997, pointed toward a model of co-governance among regional powers. Based on this framework, the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) and Asian Bond Market Initiative (ABMI) resulted in successful responses to the financial catastrophe. Ten years after its inaugural summit, APT cooperation has become the most effective track for regional cooperation. [Softpower]
• The Axis of Upheaval
  By Niall Ferguson
  Page 1 of 2 March/April 2009 Forget Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” As economic calamity meets political and social turmoil, the world’s worst problems may come from countries like Somalia, Russia, and Mexico. And they’re just the beginning. Seven years ago, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 29, 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush warned of an “axis of evil” that was engaged in assisting terrorists, acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and “arming to threaten the peace of the world.” In Bush’s telling, this exclusive new club had three members: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Bush’s policy prescription for dealing with the axis of evil was preemption, and just over a year later he put this doctrine into action by invading Iraq. The bad news for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is that he now faces a much larger and potentially more troubling axis—an axis of upheaval. This axis has at least nine members, and quite possibly more. What unites them is not so much their wicked intentions as their instability, which the global financial crisis only makes worse every day. Unfortunately, that same crisis is making it far from easy for the United States to respond to this new “grave and growing danger.” When Bush’s speechwriters coined the phrase “axis of evil” (originally “axis of hatred”), they were drawing a parallel with the World War II alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan, formalized in the Tripartite Pact of September 1940. The axis of upheaval, by contrast, is more reminiscent of the decade before the outbreak of World War II, when the Great Depression unleashed a wave of global political crises. The Bush years have of course revealed the perils of drawing facile parallels between the challenges of the present day and the great catastrophes of the 20th century. Nevertheless, there is reason to fear that the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression could have comparable consequences for the international system.
• Facing Language Gaps and ‘Flying Trucks,’ U.S. Trains Afghan Pilots
  ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: February 27, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — Col. James A. Brandon flew Black Hawks when Moscow was considered a mortal foe of the United States and spent years in the Army studying enemy aircraft. So he now finds it a little bizarre to be piloting an old MI-17 Russian helicopter, a legacy of the Soviet invaders here, in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. Afghan and American pilots recently prepared a Russian-made helicopter for flying and shooting drills outside Kabul. “If somebody had told me in the 1980s that I’d be flying an MI-17 20 years later,” Colonel Brandon said last week, “I’d have said they were crazy.” But in a case of going to war with not just the military you have, but the military your enemy once had, Colonel Brandon is a leader of a bumpy American effort to build an Afghan Air Force from the wreckage up. To do that as quickly and (relatively) cheaply as possible, the United States is training American pilots to fly the helicopters of the former Soviet Union — Colonel Brandon calls them “flying trucks” — so the American pilots can in turn train, or retrain, Afghan pilots who once flew for the Russians, the Taliban or powerful warlords. The program, which is projected to cost American taxpayers $5 billion into 2016, is aimed at giving Afghanistan the ability to defend itself from the skies and one day allowing the Americans to leave. But for now it reflects all the problems of getting Afghan forces to stand on their own. [Incompetence]
• Paging Uncle Sam
  By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: February 24, 2009 Seoul, South Korea It is very useful to come to Asia to be reminded about America’s standing in the world these days. For all the talk in recent years about America’s inevitable decline, all eyes are not now on Tokyo, Beijing, Brussels or Moscow — nor on any other pretenders to the world heavyweight crown. All eyes are on Washington to pull the world out of its economic tailspin. At no time in the last 50 years have we ever felt weaker, and at no time in the last 50 years has the world ever seen us as more important.
  And that’s just on economics. President Obama’s first big security test could come here — and soon. North Korea has gotten crazier than ever; it has been made even poorer by the global economic crisis and by the withdrawal of aid by the new South Korean government. Now the North is threatening to test one of its Taepodong-2 long-range missiles, which may have the capacity to hit Hawaii, Alaska or beyond. The North last tried such a test in 2006, but the rocket exploded 40 seconds after its launch. If the North does test such an intercontinental ballistic missile again, American forces will have to consider blowing it up on the launch pad or shooting it out of the sky. We never should have allowed the North to get a nuclear warhead; we certainly don’t want it testing a long-range missile that could deliver that nuclear warhead to our shores, or anywhere else. [Hubris] [Imperialism] [Decline]

• The bloom is off ‘green’ in this withered economy
  The Prius had become commonplace. Politicians crammed windmills into campaign commercials. Talk of fluorescent lights shifted from how they make skin look pasty to how they save money. Green was golden. Then gas prices tumbled and the economy caved in. Green is now suddenly optional. When they’re buying at all, consumers have shifted back to roomy low-mileage vehicles that come without the extra cost of hybrid technology. Alternative energy makers look to the Obama stimulus package to put their idling industry back into gear. [Green]
• Asia, Europe Find Their Supply Chains Yanked. Beware the Backlash.
  By Steven Pearlstein Friday, February 20, 2009; Page D01 For the past two years, Asians and Europeans have tended to view their own financial and economic problems as largely imported from the United States. The impacts on their own economies, they reasoned smugly, would be modest and short-lived. Turns out they were wrong. Over the past two weeks, the bottom has fallen out of Asia's export economy while Europe has come face to face with a financial crisis that is as bad as ours and will probably become even worse without the kind of unified response that individual countries have so far resisted. And what does that mean for us? Nothing good. It means that our downturn will be longer and deeper than many had hoped and that we can't rely as much on export growth to pull us out of the ditch. Basically, there are two stories to tell here about the sudden downturn in the global economy. The easiest to understand is the collapse of industrial production in East Asia, where the supply chain starts in places like Taiwan and Vietnam and moves through places like China and Japan before cars, shoes, computers and flat-panel TVs arrive at stores in the United States, Western Europe and everywhere else.
• U.S. Holds Firm on Reparations, Israel in U.N. Racism Talks
  By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 20, 2009; Page A10 UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 19 -- The Obama administration on Thursday concluded its first round of politically charged U.N. negotiations on racism, pressing foreign governments to drop reparation demands for slavery and to desist from singling out Israel for criticism in a draft declaration to be presented at a U.N. conference in April. The United States is exploring whether it will participate in the conference, which will review progress on a declaration from the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The United States and Israel walked out of that meeting, held in Durban, South Africa. U.N. officials have urged the Obama administration to participate in the review conference, saying that the election of the first African American president presents the United States with an opportunity to inspire other minorities around the world and to highlight U.S. progress in the years since slavery was abolished and blacks were granted civil rights.
• Pakistan: The Final F*ck-Up
  China Hand
  Friday, February 27, 2009 There will be plenty more screw-ups in Pakistan, but the Pakistan Supreme Court’s decision banning Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from elected office will probably be remembered as the biggee, the reckless piece of political gamesmanship by Asif Zardari that sent Pakistan’s current experiment in democracy sliding into the abyss. Briefly put, the Pakistani government led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Zardari, is unpopular because of its pro-U.S. policy vis a vis the insurgency and Zardari’s personal reputation for corruption and feckless Machiavellianism. Sharif--who was Prime Minister until Musharraf removed him in 1999-- leads the other democratic party, the PML-N. He’s probably the most popular politician in Pakistan because of his conciliatory attitude toward the border militants, his distance from the United States, and an ostentatious regard for Islam. His political base is the economic and electoral powerhouse of Punjab, which—until yesterday—was run by his brother Shahbaz. Zardari and Sharif have been jockeying for advantage but the handwriting was on the wall: come the next general election, Sharif’s PML-N would probably dominate and his party would gain the prime ministership. So the Supreme Court, whose chief justice is close to Zardari, made its move on February 25 to bar the Sharif brothers from elected office for life because of criminal convictions related to the coup by Pervez Musharraf that removed Nawaz from office in 1999.
• A Swiss Bank Is Set to Open Its Secret Files
  By LYNNLEY BROWNING Published: February 18, 2009 In the hush-hush world of Swiss banking, the unthinkable is happening: secrets are spilling into the open. UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed on Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities. It is unclear how many of its clients’ names UBS will divulge. Federal prosecutors have been examining about 19,000 accounts at the bank, but UBS ultimately may disclose the identities of only a few hundred customers. But to some, turning over any names at all heralds the end of the secret Swiss bank account, whose traditions date to the Middle Ages. “The Swiss are saying that this is the end of Swiss banking as they knew it,” said Jack Blum, an offshore tax specialist. “Nobody will trust the security of the Swiss bank account.” [Corruption] [Globalisation]
• Palestine Backer or Israeli Spy? Lebanese in Shock Over Arrest
  By ROBERT F. WORTH Published: February 18, 2009 MARAJ, Lebanon — For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school. To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983. Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state.
  He was finally arrested last July by Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence apparatus in this country. It handed him to the Lebanese military — along with his brother Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy — and he awaits trial by a military court. Several current and former military officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues. It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well. [Espionage]
• Court Blocks Release Of 17 Uighurs Into U.S.
  By Del Quentin Wilber and Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, February 19, 2009; Page A04 A federal appeals court yesterday blocked the transfer to the United States of a small band of Chinese Muslims held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The decision by a three-judge panel reversed a lower court ruling that ordered the government to release the 17 Uighurs and resettle them with Uighur families in the Washington region. The government no longer considers the Uighurs to be enemy combatants and has been trying to find nations willing to take them in. U.S. authorities do not want to send the men home to China, where they are considered terrorists and may be tortured (sic). [Double standards] [Separatism] [Global insurgency]
• Victor Kiernan
  Historian with a global vision of empires, Marxism, politics and poetry
  Eric Hobsbawm The Guardian, Wednesday 18 February 2009
  Victor Kiernan, who has died aged 95, was a man of unselfconscious charm and staggeringly wide range of learning. He was also one of the last survivors of the generation of British Marxist historians of the 1930s and 1940s. If this generation has been seen by the leading German scholar HU Wehler as the main factor behind "the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s", it was largely due to Victor's influence. He brought to the debates of the Communist party historians' group between 1946 and 1956 a persistent, if always courteous, determination to think out problems of class culture and tradition for himself, whatever the orthodox position. He continued to remain loyal to the flexible, open-minded Marxism of the group to which he had contributed so much. Most influential through his works on the imperialist era, he was also, almost certainly, the only historian who also translated 20th-century Urdu poets and wrote a book on the Latin poet Horace. The latter's works he, like the distinguished Polish Marxist historian Witold Kula, carried with him on his travels.
• Chomsky: Understanding the Crisis — Markets, the State and Hypocrisy
  Sameer Dossani | February 10, 2009
  Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. Sameer Dossani interviewed him about the global economic crisis and its roots. His first interview with Chomsky can be found here. SAMEER DOSSANI: In any first year economics class, we are taught that markets have their ups and downs, so the current recession is perhaps nothing out of the ordinary. But this particular downturn is interesting for two reasons: First, market deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s made the boom periods artificially high, so the bust period will be deeper than it would otherwise. Secondly, despite an economy that's boomed since 1980, the majority of working class U.S. residents have seen their incomes stagnate — while the rich have done well most of the country hasn't moved forward at all. Given the situation, my guess is that economic planners are likely to go back to some form of Keynesianism, perhaps not unlike the Bretton Woods system that was in place from 1948-1971. What are your thoughts? NOAM CHOMSKY: Well I basically agree with your picture. In my view, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s is probably the major international event since 1945, much more significant in its implications than the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  One major exception to this is South Korea and Taiwan. They were very poor countries. South Korea in the late 1950s was probably about the level of Ghana today. But they developed by following the Japanese model – violating all the rules of the IMF and Western economists and developing pretty much the way the Western countries had developed, by substantial direction and involvement of the state sector. So South Korea, for example built a major steel industry, one of the most efficient in the world, by flatly violating the advice of the IMF and the World Bank, who said it was impossible. But they did it through state intervention, directing of resources, and also by restricting capital flight. Capital flight is a major problem for a developing country, and also for democracy. Capital flight could be controlled under Bretton Woods rules, but it was opened up in the last 30 years. In South Korea, you could get the death penalty for capital flight. So yes, they developed a pretty solid economy, as did Taiwan. China is a separate story, but they also radically violated the rules, and it's a complex story of how it's ending up.
  Well, you could say the example of the United States. During its major period of growth – late 19th century and early 20th century – the United States was probably the most protectionist country in the world
• Asia: The Coming Fury
  Walden Bello | February 9, 2009
  As goods pile up in wharves from Bangkok to Shanghai, and workers are laid off in record numbers, people in East Asia are beginning to realize they aren't only experiencing an economic downturn but living through the end of an era. For over 40 years now, the cutting edge of the region's economy has been export-oriented industrialization (EOI). Taiwan and Korea first adopted this strategy of growth in the mid-1960s, with Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee coaxing his country's entrepreneurs to export by, among other measures, cutting off electricity to their factories if they refused to comply. The success of Korea and Taiwan convinced the World Bank that EOI was the wave of the future. In the mid-1970s, then-Bank President Robert McNamara enshrined it as doctrine, preaching that "special efforts must be made in many countries to turn their manufacturing enterprises away from the relatively small markets associated with import substitution toward the much larger opportunities flowing from export promotion." EOI became one of the key points of consensus between the Bank and Southeast Asia's governments. Both realized import substitution industrialization could only continue if domestic purchasing power were increased via significant redistribution of income and wealth, and this was simply out of the question for the region's elites. Export markets, especially the relatively open U.S. market, appeared to be a painless substitute.
  In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label "mass group incidents," which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control. With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protest, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb. Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.
• Assad urges US to rebuild diplomatic road to Damascus
  In rare interview, Syrian leader calls on Obama to restore envoy and make good on promise of dialogue Ian Black in Damascus guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 February 2009 18.34 GMT Bashar al-Assad in an interview with Ian Black. Photograph: Syrian government press office Syria expects the US to send an ambassador to Damascus soon to make good on Barack Obama's offer to engage in dialogue with countries the Bush administration shunned, President Bashar al-Assad told the Guardian today. Assad used a rare newspaper interview to set out his hopes for a new relationship with the US now the Bush era is over – one he hopes will see Washington act as the "main arbiter" in the moribund Middle East peace process. "There is no substitute for the United States," Assad said.
• Swift, Steep Downturn Crosses Globe
  Markets Are Hammered as Hope Fades for Quick Recovery By Tomoeh Murakami Tse Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 18, 2009; Page A01 NEW YORK, Feb. 17 -- Markets around the world plunged Tuesday as evidence mounted that the global economic crisis is worsening. Japan is suffering its worst downturn in 35 years. The British economy is facing its sharpest decline in almost 30 years. Germany is slumping at its worst pace in nearly 20 years. Meanwhile, the job market in the United States, at the epicenter of the global downturn, is the worst in decades. And emerging economies are contracting at a pace few had predicted just months ago. Even China, whose economy still is growing at a 6.8 percent annual pace, is grappling with vast numbers of the unemployed, raising fears of unrest. The sharpness of the global slowdown has alarmed economists, who see no obvious engine for recovery.
• Clinton Says U.S. Seeks Unity With Muslim World
  Burma, N. Korea Also Major Topics in Tokyo
  By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 18, 2009; Page A09 TOKYO, Feb. 17 -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that the Obama administration will make "a concerted effort" to restore the image of the United States in the Islamic world and will seek to "enlist the help of Muslims around the world against the extremists." Clinton, who on Wednesday will travel to Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, told students at Tokyo University: "This is one of the central security challenges we face -- as to how to better communicate in a way that gets through the rhetoric and through the demagogy and is heard by people who can make judgments about what we stand for and who we truly are." [Islam]
• Onetime Obama foreign policy aides feel shut out
  President assembles a more centrist team By Paul Richter Los Angeles Times Posted: 02/16/2009 12:01:00 AM CST
  WASHINGTON — The spoils go to the victors in politics, and a candidate's campaign advisers usually are rewarded generously with top government jobs when an election is won. The exception has been President Barack Obama's team of campaign foreign policy advisers, who have fared poorly in the new administration's frantic job competition. The president, who ran as a liberal, has filled his government with appointees more in the political center.
• The new Fallujah up close and ugly
  By Dahr Jamail FALLUJAH - Driving through Fallujah, once the most rebellious Sunni city in Iraq, I saw little evidence of any kind of reconstruction underway. At least 70% of that city's structures were destroyed during massive US military assaults in April, and again in November 2004, and more than four years later, in the "new Iraq", the city continues to languish. The shells of buildings pulverized by US bombs, artillery or mortar fire back then still line Fallujah's main street, or rather, what's left of it. As one of the few visible signs of reconstruction in the city, that street - largely destroyed during the November 2004 siege - is slowly being torn up to be repaved. Unemployment is rampant, the infrastructure remains largely in ruins, and tens of thousands of residents who fled in 2004 are still refugees. How could it be otherwise, given the amount of effort that went into its destruction and not, subsequently, into rebuilding it? It's a place where a resident must still carry around a US-issued personal biometric ID card, which must also be shown any time you enter or exit the city if you are local. Such a card can only be obtained after US military personnel have scanned your retinas and taken your fingerprints.
• Two subs, dozens of nuclear warheads, one huge ocean - and a stroke of bad luck
  • HMS Vanguard hits French counterpart in sea depths • Bump almost led to freak catastrophe, say analysts Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Tuesday 17 February 2009 Article history HMS Vanguard going up the Clyde to its base on Saturday, having hit a French submarine eight days previously. Photograph: LA(P) Ritchie Harvey/AFP/Getty Images The good news was it proved that the British nuclear missile submarine was virtually undetectable. The bad news was that HMS Vanguard was rather too undetectable, apparently moving so stealthily that it colided with a French nuclear sub in the middle of the Atlantic. [Media]
• California, Almost Broke, Nears Brink
  By JENNIFER STEINHAUER Published: February 16, 2009 LOS ANGELES — The state of California — its deficits ballooning, its lawmakers intransigent and its governor apparently bereft of allies or influence — appears headed off the fiscal rails. Since the fall, when lawmakers began trying to attack the gaps in the $143 billion budget that their earlier plan had not addressed, the state has fallen into deeper financial straits, with more bad news coming daily from Sacramento. The state, nearly out of cash, has laid off scores of workers and put hundreds more on unpaid furloughs. It has stopped paying counties and issuing income tax refunds and halted thousands of infrastructure projects.
• The Politics of Economic Disaster
  Immanuel Wallerstein
  Commentary No. 251, Feb. 15, 2009 Every day, I read another economist, journalist, or government official opining on how best to achieve economic recovery in this country or that. Needless to say, the remedies all contradict each other. But almost all of these pundits seem to me to live in fantasyland. They actually seem to believe their remedies will work in some relatively short period of time. The fact is that the world is only at the beginning of a depression that will last for quite a while and will get far worse than it is now. The immediate issue for governments is not how to recover but how to survive the growing popular anger they are all, without exception, facing.
  So the regimes begin to appease their populations. How? First of all, by protectionism. Everyone has begun to complain about the protectionism of other countries. But the complainers are all practicing it themselves. And they will do a lot more of it. The free market economists all tell us that protectionism makes the overall economic situation still worse. That's probably true, but politically quite irrelevant, when there are people in the streets wanting jobs - now!
  How long will this gloomy picture prevail? No one knows or can be sure, but it will probably be a good number of years. In the meantime, governments will face elections, and voters will not be kind to the incumbents. Protectionism and social-democratic welfare serve governments the way the cellar does during a tornado. The quasi-nationalization of banks is another way of taking shelter in the cellars. What we the people have to think about and prepare for is what we do when we emerge from the cellar, whenever that is. The fundamental question is how are we going to rebuild. That will be the real political battle. The landscape will be unfamiliar. And all our past rhetorics will be suspect. The key thing to realize is that rebuilding can take us into a far better world - but it can also take us into a far worse one. In either case, it will be a far different one.
• Chávez Decisively Wins Bid to End Term Limits
  Fernando Llano/Associated Press President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela waved to supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace after the results of the referendum were announced. More Photos > By SIMON ROMERO Published: February 15, 2009 CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez handily won a referendum on Sunday that will end presidential term limits, allowing him to run for re-election indefinitely and injecting fresh vibrancy into his socialist-inspired revolution. The results, coming after voters had rejected a similar effort by Mr. Chávez just 15 months ago, pointed to his resilience after a decade in power, as well as to the fragmentation of his opposition, which as recently as November had won key mayoralties and governorships.
• Obama must fight the protectionist virus
  Author: Jagdish Bhagwati
  President Barack Obama faces protectionist pressures. These are not just from the labour lobbies that have led Joe Biden, US vice-president, to chide “pure free traders” and to ask for “fair trade”; and which, astonishingly, have also led the US president to use his first meeting with President Felipe Calderón of Mexico – overwhelmed by the brutal fight against drug cartels caused by the US failure to legalise drugs – to urge on him tougher labour standards, a protectionist demand that is clearly aimed at raising Mexican costs of production. The pressures come also from the lobbies pushing for a Detroit bail-out that is inconsistent with the World Trade Organisation. Trucks line up at the U.S. border (Don McArthur/Associated Press) Through all this, the “no-drama” Mr Obama has kept a low, indeed invisible, profile. With his innate ability to moderate highs and lows, he has been America’s first “lithium president”. Fortunately, on Tuesday he stepped up to the plate on the Buy American provisions in the stimulus package, leaving little doubt as to where his sentiments, and his policy preferences, lie. Yet, protectionism is a dangerous virus that requires a passionate response. Indeed, Mr Obama faces his two most serious protectionist challenges from the Buy American provisions that have infiltrated his stimulus package and from the China-bashing on “currency manipulation” that surfaced in the confirmation hearings of Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary.
  The accusation that China “manipulates” its exchange rate, which also promotes protectionism towards it, is another important cause for worry. Most senators are convinced the issue is clear-cut. It is not. The Washington magazine, The International Economy, once asked more than 60 economists: at what level should the Chinese currency be set? The answers, including those from some of our deepest thinkers on exchange rates, were revealing. Some wanted a float. Ron Mckinnon and Richard Cooper wanted to keep the currency at existing levels. And those who wanted revaluation fell into 11 groups ranging from 5 per cent revaluation to 40 per cent and above. [Protectionism]
• How Obama Plays, or Gets Played, Abroad
  By DAVID E. SANGER February 15, 2009 WASHINGTON — We’re about to find out what the Obama Factor is worth around the world. The Factor is all the good will, popular support and considerable charm that Barack Obama brought to the Oval Office nearly four weeks ago. At home, it’s still potent. But abroad, it’s questionable how far Mr. Obama can travel on promises to act as the anti-Bush, to use diplomacy and “smart power” before blunt force. Some of Mr. Obama’s aides acknowledge that those promises will eventually collide — perhaps first in Pakistan — with necessities to defend American interests.
• A world in revolt
  Paul Rogers
  The deepening recession is provoking widespread social discontent in the global south - and far more is to come. 12 - 02 - 2009 India's Subhiksha chain of discount stores has been one of the most spectacular successes of the country's retail sector, expanding tenfold to over 1,650 stores in just two years. More recently it has run into major financial difficulties and faced trouble raising new bank loans. The consequences include a failure to pay the security companies that provided guards for Subhiksha's stores and warehouses. Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001By the end of the first week of February 2009, many of the companies had withdrawn their security personnel. During the weekend of 7-8 February, many of the unguarded stores were looted; more than a third of the total run by the group (around 600) had been affected (see James Fontanella-Khan, "Retailers feel credit squeeze in India", Financial Times, 9 February 2009). The Subhiksha experience is a graphic example of the effect of the financial downturn even in a country that has been experiencing considerable economic growth. Moreover, it is not alone: a number of other Indian outlets are in trouble, and foreign retailers (including the Britain-based Argos group) have or are planning to cease operating in the country. Since the Indian economy's projected rate of growth in 2009 is (in a pattern certain to be repeated elsewhere) far lower than it needs to be to meet social demands, the pressures on the country's social and commercial order are likely to become even fiercer.
  The social discontent in India, China, and elsewhere is all the more significant in that it is erupting in what are still the early stages of a worldwide recession. The primary target of widespread resentment and anger is the mismanagement, corruption and injustice which disaffected groups attribute to domestic authorities. So far, these radical protests pay little attention to the financial misdemeanours in the minority world of the north, which have led to huge tranches of debt being pledged to save unstable banking systems. The sums involved are massively greater than those required to meet all of the United Nations's Millennium Development Goals; yet the link between the urgent bailouts in one kind of emergency and the neglect and delay in the other has not yet been fully made (see Simon Maxwell, "Development in a downturn", 4 July 2008). This, perhaps, will change with the emergence of transnational radical social movements.
  There is every chance that the early 2010s will indeed see the rise of fully transnational anti-elite movements triggered by wholesale deprivation, fuelled by anger, and armed with the hunger for an inclusive and just world. In time, they may be as or even more potent than the anti-colonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The attacks on supermarkets in India are a harbinger.
• Avoiding the worst: International economic cooperation and domestic politics
  Jeffrey A Frieden, 11/02/09 If the current crisis turns into a disaster on the order of the Great Depression, it will most likely be due to a breakdown of cooperation among the major economies. The history of the modern world economy - and especially of its collapse in the 1930s - makes clear that the principal powers have to work together if they are to maintain an integrated international economic order. International cooperation needs domestic support for openness Yet governments are only able to make the sacrifices necessary to sustain international cooperation if they can rely, in turn, on domestic political support for an open world economy. National publics unconvinced of the value of international integration will not back policies - often costly and difficult policies - to maintain it. This can lead - again, as in the 1930s - to a perverse process in which global economic failure undermines support for economic openness, which leads governments to pursue uncooperative policies, which further weakens the global economy. [Globalisation] [Protectionism]
• Obama's Bush-like foreign policy
  George Friedman, 12 - 02 - 2009 While the Munich Security Conference brought together senior leaders from most major countries and many minor ones last weekend, none was more significant than US Vice President Joe Biden. This is because Biden provided the first glimpse of US foreign policy under President Barack Obama. Most conference attendees were looking forward to a dramatic shift in US foreign policy under the Obama administration. What was interesting about Biden's speech was how little change there has been in the US position and how much the attendees and the media were cheered by it. After Biden's speech, there was much talk about a change in the tone of US policy. But it is not clear to us whether this was because the tone has changed, or because the attendees' hearing has. They seemed delighted to be addressed by Biden rather than by former Vice President Dick Cheney - delighted to the extent that this itself represented a change in policy. Thus, in everything Biden said, the conference attendees saw rays of a new policy. Policy continuity: Iran and Russia Consider Iran. The Obama administration's position, as staked out by Biden, is that the United States is prepared to speak directly to Iran provided that the Iranians do two things. First, Tehran must end its nuclear weapons program. Second, Tehran must stop supporting terrorists, by which Biden meant Hamas and Hezbollah. Once the Iranians do that, the Americans will talk to them. The Bush administration was equally prepared to talk to Iran given those preconditions. The Iranians make the point that such concessions come after talks, not before, and that the United States must change its attitude toward Iran before there can be talks, something Iranian majlis Speaker Ali Larijani emphasized after the meeting. Apart from the emphasis on a willingness to talk, the terms Biden laid out for such negotiations are identical to the terms under the Bush administration. [Obama]
• Rio Tinto fights back over Chinalco deal
  By Rebecca Bream and Kate Burgess in London Published: February 12 2009 23:23 | Last updated: February 12 2009 23:23 Rio Tinto on Thursday defended its planned $19.5bn capital injection from Chinalco, the Chinese state-owned metals group, as criticism of the deal intensified from the mining group’s UK shareholders. Heavily indebted Rio has proposed selling minority stakes in some of its best assets, including the Hamersley iron ore mine in Australia and the Escondida copper mine in Chile, to Chinalco to raise $12.3bn. It is also raising $7.2bn through an issue of bonds to the Chinese group that can be converted into equity, increasing its stake in Rio from 9 per cent to as much as 18 per cent. [China confrontation]
• Coke keeps its fizz in face of downturn
  By Jonathan Birchall in New York Published: February 12 2009 16:37 | Last updated: February 12 2009 19:03 Coca-Cola defied the recessionary gloom on Thursday, saying it would stick to its long-term growth targets in spite of what Muhtar Kent, chief executive, called an “incredibly challenging economic environment”. While other branded goods companies have suffered falling sales as consumers switch to cheaper options, the world’s largest soft drinks company is proving resilient in the face of the global economic downturn.
• Union backlash over £7.5bn 'super express' train contract
  • Consortium to construct first batch of carriages in Japan and keep some manufacturing there • News comes in wake of wave of recent strikes over use of foreign labour Comments (100) Dan Milmo and Richard Wray guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 February 2009 14.51 GMT Article history An artist's impression of the 'super express' which will be built under a £7.5bn contract awarded to Agility Trains. Photograph: DoT/PA The government sparked a trade union backlash today after awarding a £7.5bn train contract to a Japanese-led consortium and admitting that some of the 12,500 jobs created or safeguarded by the deal will be based outside Britain. The news came in the wake of a wave of wildcat strikes over the use of foreign labour at oil refineries and power plants. Britain's largest rail trade union, the RMT, added to those protests today after questioning the decision to award the trains contract to a consortium that will construct at least some parts of the first batch of 1,400 carriages in Japan rather than the UK. [Protectionism]
• The bloom is off Europe's Rose and Orange revolutions
  By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers TBILISI, Georgia — Some four years ago, as he stood before a cheering crowd of tens of thousands, former President George W. Bush declared that Georgia's pro-western government was "inspiring democratic reformers . . . across the world." Georgia's ouster of its Russian-linked leadership in the 2003 Rose Revolution and the following year's U.S.-backed Orange Revolution in Ukraine had sent a message that "freedom will be the future of every nation," Bush said. Today, though, the governments of Georgia and Ukraine are unraveling — symbols not of freedom but, to a large extent, of U.S. foreign policy errors, tarnished American allies and an emboldened Russia that's capitalized on its rivals' weaknesses.
• Will Obama say 'we're sorry'?
  By Pepe Escobar
  If United States President Barack Obama is really serious about "unclenched fists" in a new US-Iran relationship, he's got to take a serious, unbiased look at the US record. Former US secretary of state Cordell Hull's classic comment about Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo - "He's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch" - has been the norm for decades. From the Somozas in Nicaragua to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, from Indonesia's Suharto to the shah of Iran, US foreign policy over the past decades has enshrined a hefty SOB gallery. This gallery symbolizes the official Washington policy of US neo-colonialism - always indirect and non-ostensive, contrary to historical examples of European colonialism. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has demanded apologies from the US as essential for smashing the wall of mistrust between Iran and the US. He has a point.
• Halliburton, KBR Settle Bribery Allegations
  By Zachary A. Goldfarb Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 12, 2009; Page D01 Halliburton and Kellogg Brown & Root have agreed to pay $579 million in fines related to allegations of foreign bribery, the biggest fines ever paid by U.S. companies in a foreign corruption case, federal authorities and the companies said yesterday. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice alleged that Houston-based Halliburton and KBR were part of a joint venture that spent $182 million to bribe Nigerian government officials over a 10-year period to win more than $6 billion in construction contracts. Halliburton, which owned KBR during the time of the alleged actions and spun it off in April 2007, will be responsible for paying all but $20 million of the penalty. [Corruption]
• Major Powers 'Pressure IMF to Distort Data'
  An official in the British government claims that reports made by the International Monetary Fund are being distorted due to pressure tactics by the world's big powers. Adair Turner, chairman of England's Financial Services Authority, told the Financial Times newspaper that one of the problems with the IMF is that the world's big powers have used their diplomatic clout to tone down the fund's reports focusing on their economies. Lord Turner cited the United States as an example, saying the IMF has yet to issue a report on the U.S. economy because the U.S. government did not want such a report to be released. It refused to participate in the IMF's financial sector assessment program, agreeing to take part starting in 2006. The results of that evaluation are not due until at least 2010.
• Asia and the crisis: Unlucky numbers
  By David Pilling Published: February 9 2009 20:34 | Last updated: February 9 2009 20:34 Pick a number, any number. For Asia, they are all likely to be bad. Lau Wong-fat, the unfortunate Hong Kong official designated to select a fortune-telling stick on the city’s behalf during recent lunar new year celebrations, plucked out the number 27, seen by those present as the unluckiest possible omen for the year. A fortune teller at Che Kung temple, shrouded in incense and consulting the heavens for inspiration, declared it meant Hong Kong could not isolate itself from global economic turmoil. From a sprint to a limp: a country by country graphic But no such master of divination was needed. Not only Hong Kong, which as a port city and financial centre thrives on its openness to fast-dwindling world trade, but the whole of Asia is in trouble. All over the region, particularly in manufacturing-heavy south-east and north-east Asia, government statisticians have been summoning up evil-eye numbers of their own.
• The Road to Kabul Runs Through Beijing (and Tehran)
  By Parag Khanna
  Posted February 2009 The new Great Game on the Silk Road is already underway. Has Team Obama gotten the memo yet? Hail Mary: With the Khyber Pass threatened, NATO is scrambling for new logistics routes through Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The diplomatic and military surge into South-Central Asia that will define the Obama administration's early years has already begun. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Centcom head Gen. David Petraeus have become regular visitors to Islamabad and Kabul. Vice President Joe Biden recently came through for huddled conversations, and veteran Balkan negotiator Richard Holbrooke has just embarked on his first trip as special envoy to the region. Enough congressional delegations are passing through that the Pakistani media jokes that there must a "two-for-one" sale on Pakistan International Airlines. But perhaps people in Congress should be looking into ticket prices on China Air and IranAir as well.
• The Rising Risk of a Hard Landing in China: The Two Engines of Global Growth – U.S. and China – are Stalling
  Nouriel Roubini
  A comment by economist Brad Setser follows this article For the last few years the global economy has been running on two engines, the U.S. on the consumption side and China on the production side, both lifting the entire global economy. The U.S. has been the consumer of first and last resort spending more than its income and running large current account deficits while China (and other emerging market economies) has been the producer of first and last resort, spending less than its income and running ever larger current account surpluses. For the last few months the first engine of global growth has effectively shut down as the latest batch of macro news from the U.S. are worse than awful: collapsing consumption and consumer confidence, plunging housing, collapsing auto sales, plunging durable goods spending (while supply side indicators such as production, ISM (factory index) and employment are also free falling). The U.S. is entering its worst consumer recession in decades both supply and demand data look worse than in the severe recessions of 1974-75 and 1980-82. And in due time this tsunami of awful macro news, together with ugly downside surprises to earnings will take another toll on equity valuations that are now temporarily lifted by another bear market sucker’s rally. More worrisome there are now increasing signs that the other main engine of the global economy – China - is also stalling. Let us consider now in detail the evidence that China may be on its way to a hard landing…
• Too Many People Needlessly Have Their Appendix Out
  Appendectomies are among the most common operations, but the American Journal of Surgery reports that some 6 to 16 percent are unnecessary, thus laying doctors open to malpractice suits. The reason is that appendicitis is not easy to identify. Pain in the lower right abdomen is often a sign, but it can also be caused by strain or pain around other parts of the stomach, and one-third of patients shows such vague symptoms. Song Hyoung-gon, a professor of emergency medicine at Samsung Medical Center, said doctors simply have no way of identifying appendicitis 100 percent, even though it is the most common cause of emergency surgery. But if it turns out during the operation that the patient was not suffering from appendicitis, doctors usually remove the appendix anyway, reasoning that at least it prevents appendicitis in the future.
• From the high street to a tax haven
  Boots the Chemist has taken its headquarters from Nottingham to the canton of Zug, Switzerland
  Tax gap reporting team The Guardian, Monday 9 February 2009 Article historyBoots the Chemists has been a classic British household name for years. But the events that have recently gone on behind the shop windows of this much-loved retailer tell a disturbing story about financial engineering, which slashed its taxes. Boots' debts have soared: and its headquarters are officially no longer in Nottingham, where it was founded, but in the Swiss tax-haven canton of Zug. In June 2007, the American venture capital giant KKR was able to pull off Europe's largest private equity deal. Together with an Italian entrepreneur, KKR bought the company for £11.1bn by borrowing £9.3bn from the banks and other investors. It was the first private equity takeover of a FTSE 100 firm. The deal squeaked in with this enormous burden of debt just before the credit crunch brought such lending to a jolting halt. For the UK exchequer, too, the deal marked something of a record. Private equity's gain in acquiring the high street name turned out to be the taxpayer's loss. We calculate that Alliance Boots paid out £606m in net finance costs in 2007-08. But its profit in 2008 before interest was only £535m. The interest payments on the debt are so large that they have wiped out any profit in the UK and all the tax that used to go with it. In the preceding year Alliance Boots plc made profits of around £455m and its accounts for 2007 show £131m tax. Look back to the turn of the millennium and this was typical of Boots' history as a public company - it generally paid about one third of its profits in UK tax and the Revenue could expect to see a tax charge around the £150m mark each year. However, after its buyout, by the time of its March 2008 accounts it had managed to make a pre-tax loss of £64m. [Globalisation] [Corruption]
• A Visit to a U.S. Ally, but an Increasingly Wary One
  By JANE PERLEZ Published: February 8, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — When the envoy Richard C. Holbrooke arrives here Monday looking for ways to stop a runaway Islamist insurgency that is destabilizing Pakistan, he will find a pro-American but weak civilian government, and a powerful army unaccustomed and averse to fighting a domestic enemy. In a nuclear-armed nation regarded as an ally of the United States and considered pivotal by the Obama administration to ending the war in neighboring Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke will face a surge of anti-American sentiment on clear display by private citizens, public officials and increasingly potent television talk shows. Some remedies offered by his hosts are likely to be unappealing. On almost every front, Pakistani leaders are calling for less American involvement, or at least the appearance of it. The main reason for the swell in resentment here is the very strategy that the United States government considers its prime success against Al Qaeda: missile strikes delivered by remotely piloted aircraft against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
  o the surprise of many Pakistanis, who had been promised by their leaders that the new administration in Washington would be different, American drone aircraft fired missiles at two areas in the tribal belt just three days after President Obama’s inauguration. According to the Pakistanis, as many as 21 civilians were killed by the strikes, in North and South Waziristan.
• Afghan Leader Finds Himself Hero No More
  By DEXTER FILKINS Published: February 7, 2009 KABUL, Afghanistan — A foretaste of what would be in store for President Hamid Karzai after the election of a new American administration came last February, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator, sat down to a formal dinner at the palace during a visit here. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was a favorite of the Bush administration, but President Obama has said he is unreliable, and Mr. Karzai’s domestic standing seems to have declined. Between platters of lamb and rice, Mr. Biden and two other American senators questioned Mr. Karzai about corruption in his government, which, by many estimates, is among the worst in the world. Mr. Karzai assured Mr. Biden and the other senators that there was no corruption at all and that, in any case, it was not his fault. The senators gaped in astonishment. After 45 minutes, Mr. Biden threw down his napkin and stood up. “This dinner is over,” Mr. Biden announced, according to one of the people in the room at the time. And the three senators walked out, long before the appointed time. Today, of course, Mr. Biden is the vice president. The world has changed for Mr. Karzai, and for Afghanistan, too. A White House favorite — a celebrity in flowing cape and dark gray fez — in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Mr. Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own.
• Back on World Stage, a Larger-Than-Life Holbrooke
  Permalink By JODI KANTOR Published: February 7, 2009 Stashed in a drawer in his Manhattan apartment between snapshots of family vacations, a photograph shows Richard C. Holbrooke on a private visit to Afghanistan in 2006. He is mugging atop an abandoned Russian tank, flashing a sardonic V-for-victory sign and his best Nixon-style grin. The pose is a little like Mr. Holbrooke himself: looming, theatrical, passionate, indignant. Three years later, he has inherited responsibility for the terrain he surveyed from that tank. As President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Holbrooke will help reformulate and carry out American policy in what many call the most problematic region on earth.
• Walkouts spurred use of foreign workers
  By Jean Eaglesham Published: February 6 2009 23:30 | Last updated: February 6 2009 23:30 A rash of 1970s-style unofficial walkouts by British workers over issues such as tea breaks spurred employers to use foreign workers in the sector at the centre of a wave of industrial unrest in recent weeks, industry insiders have told the Financial Times. More protests are planned next week over the use of foreign workers at Staythorpe plant in Nottinghamshire, threatening a repeat of a national wave of wildcat strikes at oil refineries, gas terminals and power stations in sympathy with the dispute at Total’s Lindsey refinery. [Labour] [Globalisation]
• S.E. Asia Faces Long-Term Trade Shift
  Export-Dependent Nations Will See Less Demand From West, Analysts Say By Tim Johnston Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, February 7, 2009; Page A10 BANGKOK -- Stimulus packages being put in place by many export-dependent nations in Southeast Asia may not do enough to protect those economies from the consequences of the fundamental shift in trading patterns that underlies the current financial crisis, analysts warn. The exporting nations have taken slightly different paths in attempting to combat the global slowdown, but all their packages rest on a similar assumption: that the world economy will pick up in the third quarter, causing things to return to normal. Regional analysts say, however, that the present crisis is not just another cyclical downturn but is instead a structural realignment and that Southeast Asia's export economies need to act quickly to adjust to a new reality in which American and European consumers will no longer be the main market. "We are geared towards selling what the U.S. and Europe want, not what Asians want. We need a readjustment," said Supavud Saicheua, the managing director of Phatra Securities in Bangkok. "In the long term, Asians have to consume more, and Europe and the U.S. have to consume less."
• Moscow, Tehran force the US's hand
  By M K Bhadrakumar It may seem there could be nothing in common between the blowing up of a bridge in the Khyber, the usage of an air base nestling in the foothills of the Pamirs and the launch of a 60-pound (37.2 kilogram) satellite into the night sky that will circle the Earth 14 times a day. But band them together and they trigger the political and diplomatic equivalent of what is known in the game of chess as zwischenzug, which means an intermediate move that improves a player's position. Persians, who invented chess, would have mastery over zwischenzug. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi said in Tehran on Wednesday, "Iran has no plans to stop its nuclear activity. At its forthcoming meeting, the 'Iran Six' should draw up a logical approach and accept the fact that Iran is a nuclear state."
• Shifting horizons
  By Gideon Rachman Published: February 5 2009 20:39 | Last updated: February 5 2009 20:39 European policymakers will this weekend be able to have their first close look at the foreign policy team of President Barack Obama. The American delegation to the annual Munich security conference will be led by Joe Biden, US vice-president, and will include General James Jones, Mr Obama’s new national security adviser. Below: Clinton signals a smart retreat from democratisation But for those searching for clues to the new administration’s approach to the rest of the world, there is a treasure trove of evidence that has been little examined – the writings of the people who will shape foreign policy. Several are prolific authors. Many are moving across Washington, from venerable think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution on Massachusetts Avenue, into offices in the state department or at the White House. Others are arriving from universities including Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.
  The Obama administration has gone out of its way to signal a pragmatic, non-ideological approach. It is a modus operandi that stresses continuity with policy under George W. Bush in terms of the tools it uses while setting out arguably more “realistic” goals.
• With a nudge and a wink, MoD has dragged me through the mud
  Comments (13) Rachel Reid The Guardian, Friday 6 February 2009 Article historyYesterday it emerged that a senior British army officer, Colonel Owen McNally, had been arrested under the Official Secrets Act for allegedly passing classified information to a human rights worker in Afghanistan. Unnamed sources suggested he had become "close" to the campaigner Rachel Reid. Here, for the first time, she responds to what she says is a "vicious slur" [Media]
• General Says His Iraq Envoy Job Was Rescinded
  By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK LANDLER Published: February 5, 2009 WASHINGTON — When the vice president, the secretary of state and the national security adviser all say you have been tapped to be the next United States ambassador to Iraq, odds are it’s a done deal, right? Apparently not in the Obama administration.
  General Jones broke the news: “It’s going to be Chris Hill,” General Zinni said he was told. “As a sorry offer to placate me, they offered ambassador to Saudi,” he said in a separate e-mail message, referring to Saudi Arabia. “I told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
• Senate approves softened ‘Buy American’ plan
  WASHINGTON, Feb 4: The US Senate voted on Wednesday to soften a ”Buy American” plan in its $900bn stimulus bill after President Barack Obama expressed concern the original language could trigger a trade war. Senators, on a voice vote, approved an amendment requiring that provisions that upset Canada, the European Union and other trading partners be ”applied in a manner consistent with US obligations under international agreements.” [Protectionism]
• U.K. Court Rules to Keep Detainee Documents Secret
  Citing U.S. Threats on Intelligence Sharing, Judges Will Not Release Information on Guantanamo Inmate By Mary Jordan Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, February 5, 2009; Page A14 LONDON, Feb. 4 -- Two British High Court judges ruled against releasing documents describing the treatment of a British detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison, but made clear their reluctance, saying that the United States had threatened to withhold intelligence cooperation with Britain if the information were made public. "We did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence . . . relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be," Justice John Thomas and Justice David Lloyd Jones wrote. [Human rights]
• A Feast of Vultures On Corruption
  By Arno j. Mayer
  February 4, 2009 At irregular intervals the U.S. is shaken by high-profile cases of political and financial corruption. Every time the media indignantly denounces the miscreants as if to reaffirm that except for them America remains unspotted and innocent. There is barely a mention of the corrupt practices and conventions inherent in contemporary finance capitalism. Rod Blagojevich, governor of Illinois and would-be grifter, and Bernard Madoff, worldly moneyman, momentarily capture the headlines. With his alleged offer to auction off a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, Blagojevich followed in the steps of Plunkett of Tamany Hall and is a piker compared to Madoff, whose alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is apparently history’s largest private financial fraud. Ex-chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market and one of its major players, for decades Madoff lubricated his venture by making strategic political contributions and mixed business with philanthropy, in the process raising his social status and soothing his conscience. The explosion of Wall Street’s government-condoned financial bubble exposed Madoff’s pyramid scheme, which can only be understood in the context of the larger praxis and culture of corruption that makes it so difficult for President Barack Obama to separate the wheat from the chaff as he forms his cabinet, White House staff, and inner circle of advisers.
  Since corruption is chronic in political and civil society (and at certain moments, as Bertolt Brecht observed, “to find an official who accepts a bribe is to find humanity”), the issue is not corruption as such, but its scale and virulence and pervasiveness. [Corruption]
• EU issues warning over Buy America plan
  By Joshua Chaffin in Brussels and Alan Beattie in Washington Published: February 3 2009 21:15 | Last updated: February 4 2009 00:45 The European Union has warned of possible trade litigation against the US if Washington presses ahead with a Buy American provision in its forthcoming economic stimulus bill. EU officials said that the requirement for companies to use US steel and manufacturing products in projects funded by the bill could encourage protectionist measures from other countries. Barack Obama, US president, said on Tuesday that he did not want anything in the stimulus bill that would violate World Trade Organisation laws. [Protectionism]
• Buy American
  Posted by Tracy Alloway on Feb 03 15:43. “We may likewise diminish our importations, if we would soberly refrain from excessive consumption of forraign wares in our diet and rayment, with such often change of fashions as is used, so much the more to encrease the waste and charge; which vices at this present are more notorious amongst us than in former ages. Yet might they easily be amended by enforcing the observation of such good laws as are strictly practised in other Countries against the said excesses; where likewise by commanding their own manufactures to be used, they prevent the coming in of others, without prohibition, or offence to strangers in their mutual commerce.” That’s from Thomas Mun’s 1664 mercantilist treatise “England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade.” You’d be forgiven for finding it eerily familiar though. Part of Obama’s $819bn stimulus bill currently being debated in the Senate contains this little gem: The legislation, entitled “The American Steel First Act,” which the Buy America Coalition was instrumental in helping to develop, would require federally funded construction projects under the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use 100 percent American-made steel products. In short - infrastructure projects funded by the stimulus would have to use US-made steel. The domestic appeal of such a move is pretty obvious. But, should it pass the Senate, it will come at a cost — notably the ire of US trading partners. [Protectionism]
• British Army officer accused of leaking casualty figures
  Press Association guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 February 2009 04.16 GMT Article historyA senior British Army officer has been arrested in Afghanistan for allegedly supplying sensitive civilian casualty figures to a human rights campaigner. Lt Col Owen McNally, 48, was held in the war zone on suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act, it is understood.
  American generals in the Afghan capital Kabul are reported to be furious about the allegations. Last year campaign group Human Rights Watch said civilian deaths in Afghanistan from US and Nato air strikes nearly tripled to at least 1,633 between 2006 and 2007. The group said it used "the most conservative figures available". If charged, the officer will appear at the Old Bailey in London, which hears all such Official Secrets cases. He faces a maximum sentence of 14 years if convicted. Col McNally joined the Army as a private in 1977 and worked his way up through the ranks before being commissioned as an officer in 1995. He is thought to be one of the Army's most senior former non-commissioned officers.
• A way out of the global economic crisis? Interview with renowned Marxist economic historian Robert P. Brenner
  [New Year’s series] » Robert P. Brenner, right, and Jeong Seong-jin. Editor’s note: To celebrate the New Year, The Hankyoreh is publishing a series of interviews with progressive foreign scholars to examine the issues of economic growth and social welfare, international trade and monetary order, the environment and social development, income distribution, and production and consumption. In our second article of the series, economist Jeong Seong-jin talks with renowned Marxist economic historian Robert P. Brenner.
  Until now, East Asian governments have been happy to fund U.S. external and government deficits, in order to sustain U.S. consumption and their own exports. But, with the crisis overtaking even China, these governments may lose the capacity to finance U.S. deficits, especially as they grow to unprecedented size. The truly terrifying prospect of a run on the dollar looms in the background.
  Jeong: According to Rosa Luxemburg and, recently, David Harvey, capitalism overcomes its tendency to crisis by way of geographical expansion. According to Harvey, this is often facilitated by massive state investments in infrastructure, to back up private capital investment, often foreign direct investment. Do you think that capitalism can find an exit from the current crisis, in Harvey’s terminology, by way of a “spatial-temporal fix”?
  Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think that many of those who believe that there has been a decline in U.S. hegemony basically view U.S. hegemony as mainly an expression of U.S. geopolitical power, and, in the end, U.S. force. From this standpoint, it’s mainly U.S. dominance that makes for U.S. leadership, it’s U.S. power over and against other countries that keeps the U.S. on top. I don’t see U.S. hegemony that way. I see the elites of the world, especially the elites of the capitalist core, broadly conceived as being very happy with U.S. hegemony, because what it means for them is that the U.S. assumes the role and the cost of world policeman.
  Above all, China prefers U.S. hegemony. [Reserve] [Decline] [Imperialism]
• Iran Launches Satellite in a Challenge for Obama
  By NAZILA FATHI and WILLIAM J. BROAD Published: February 3, 2009 TEHRAN — Iran has fired a satellite into orbit and a shot across the bow of American diplomacy. Iran's official news agency, IRNA, said the satellite was launched using a Safir-2 rocket, pictured at a launch pad at an undisclosed location on Monday. Its first orbital launching, announced Tuesday, coincided with celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution and raised concerns in the United States and other countries about Iran’s potential use of long-range missiles to send warheads halfway around the globe. The rocket apparently went up late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. Weapons experts agreed that the act was mainly a symbolic accomplishment because the satellite was very small. Launching a heavy warhead intercontinental distances would require a far more powerful missile. The launching comes as President Obama has struck a conciliatory tone toward Tehran, suggesting that he will move toward dialogue after years of tensions. Even so, he may take a tough line in the coming months and could seek to tighten sanctions against Iran. In using its own rocket to launch the satellite, Iran joined eight other nations that have used their own technologies to send objects into orbit. Amateur observers have already spotted the bright craft in the night sky.
• The World Must Not Repeat Protectionist Mistakes
  The U.S. House of Representatives has recently approved economic stimulus bills worth US$819 billion with a “Buy American” provision added in the appendix, saying that builders who have received government aid must use only U.S.-made steel products. Democrats who led the move said it was wrong for foreign businesses to receive public funding from American taxpayers. [Protectionism]
• O’Leary keeps throttle wide open
  By Kevin Done, Aerospace Correspondent Published: February 2 2009 23:30 | Last updated: February 2 2009 23:30 Michael O’Leary is keeping the throttle wide open in spite the deepening recession. The Ryanair chief executive is sticking to his tried and tested formula of making a big grab for market share in a downturn, while EasyJet, his main low-cost airline rival in Europe, is becoming ever more cautious about fleet expansion. As his competitors retrench – or go out of business altogether – Mr O’Leary believes Ryanair’s unchallenged position as the lowest cost, lowest fares operator in Europe will allow it to continue to grow.
• Offshore - and out of reach to the Revenue
  The second day of a Guardian special investigation into the 'tax gap': the billions lost to company tax avoidance schemes - and we all foot the billTax gap reporting team The Guardian, Tuesday 3 February 2009 Article historyThree FTSE100 companies have quietly "offshored" legal ownership of their valuable trademarks to low-tax locations, the Guardian's tax gap investigation has found. Two drug firms, GlaxoSmithKline, and AstraZeneca, both headquartered in London, have moved title to their drug brands to Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. The Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, although it is still a British plc operating under UK company law, has shifted its trademarks to Switzerland and its main tax residence to the Netherlands. These are three of Britain's most successful corporations, continuing to generate huge profits and returns for their shareholders despite the global downturn. AstraZeneca has been one of the best performing shares on the FTSE over the last year, seeing its share price go from around £21.50 to around £28.60. At the same time, its market capitalisation has gone up by more than £10bn from £31.3bn to £41.4bn. Glaxo has also been one of the few companies to see its share price go up as the economic storm rages - from around £11 a year ago to around £12.50 now. Last week Shell revealed that its profits in the final three months of 2008 were down by more than a quarter on the previous year. The oil giant still made more than £25,000 a minute in profits and is forecasted to achieve record earnings this year of £21.5bn. All three enjoy the benefits of being a UK plc - access to capital, enhanced reputation, proper regulation and political stability. Yet they have moved the rights to their intellectual property to tax havens. This means they can reduce their UK-based profits and hence their British tax bills by paying royalties to the subsidiary in the tax haven for use of the trademarks. [Corruption] [IPR]
• Remaking America: The Ambiguities of Obama
  by Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 250, Feb. 1, 2009 Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, to the cheers of a vast majority of both the American people and the people of the rest of the world. In his inaugural address, he promised to "begin again the work of remaking America." In this short phrase, which was picked up by the world press in their headlines and analyses, Obama captured all the ambiguities of his presidential promises. The verb "remake" can mean quite different things. It can mean returning to a previous state that was better. And Obama seemed to indicate this possibility with another phrase, calling on American citizens "to choose our better history." But "remaking" can also mean more fundamental change, creating a quite different kind of America than the one the world presently knows. The ambiguity is whether Obama proposes merely to tinker with the structure and the institutions of the United States and the world-system or to transform them fundamentally.
  Obama is off to a very shaky start. The belief that he is ready to push for a fundamental remaking of America has weak evidence in its favor, despite his intelligence and his intellectual openness. The United States is getting good grammar. It needs bold remaking.
• From the Nanjing Massacre to American Global Expansion: Reflections on American and Japanese Amnesia
  Honda Katsuichi Translation by John Junkerman In the course of a forty-five year career, Honda Katsuichi has established himself as one of Japan’s, and the world’s, premier investigative journalists and authors. Hailing from a mountain village in Shinshu (Nagano) and an avid mountain climber throughout his life, Honda’s interests extended from nature and the environment to the politics of colonialism and war, with the Vietnam War as a critical moment in his development. In writing for the Asahi Shimbun and in a series of best-selling books, Honda has addressed the most controversial contemporary and historical issues confronting Japan as well as the United States and others. Most famously, he “broke” the Nanjing Massacre story in Japan thirty-four years after the event with first-hand interview reportage from China. His reportage and his book, Nankin Daigyakusatsu, published in English as The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame inspired a generation of Japanese, Chinese and international researchers who have excavated the Nanjing Massacre. It also touched off fierce polemics in the form of a Nanjing Massacre denial literature.
  The History of American Aggression in Asia From a macro perspective, the history of the US is a continuing series of incursions ever westward, from the late 18th century when the first president, George Washington, began encroachments from the eastern seaboard into Native American territory, throughout the 200-plus years that extend to the present occupation of Iraq. In this fashion, by the time of the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, just 100 years after Washington’s inauguration as president, the United States had overrun the entire North American continent, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Within eight more years, the US had made inroads into the Pacific, with the agreement to annex Hawaii, followed by Guam, the Philippines, and other territories annexed following the Spanish-American War. American Indian occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 What I want to stress here is the historical fact that the aggression visited upon the native peoples within the American continent over the course of a hundred years extended directly into the Pacific and from there into Asia. The very same soldiers continued their incursions into the Asian mainland, with the US joining the international forces that marched on and occupied Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.
  What is the fundamental distinction between Japan’s war in China and its war with the US? In the former, Japan was clearly the aggressor, while the latter was simply a conflict between two aggressor nations. [Japanese colonialism] [Imperialism] [War crimes]
• The US and the Temptation of Dollar Seignorage
  Kosuke Takahashi With a Comment by R. Taggart Murphy As the United States seeks to finance its ballooning budget deficits by printing more US dollar bills, Japanese economists are increasingly concerned that the excessive use of dollar seignorage by US financial authorities will further shake confidence in the US currency at a time when the world lacks an alternative globally accepted currency. The US government projects that even without the forthcoming US$825 billion fiscal stimulus package, the national budget deficit to September 2009 will be $1.19 trillion, the biggest since World War II, or 8.3% of gross domestic product (GDP). This amount is likely to grow as the US government continues to rescue failed parts of the economy. How will the US cope with its enormous and growing debt obligations? Therein lies the issue of the dollar's international seignorage as a savior for the US national interest. Seignorage is the revenue that a government raises by printing money. [Reserve]
• Interview: For Holbrooke, Situation in Pakistan, Afghanistan Is 'Dim and Dismal'
  By BRUCE O. RIEDEL AND BERNARD GWERTZMAN Published: January 29, 2009 Interviewee: Bruce O. Riedel, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution Bruce O. Riedel, an expert on South Asia, who has worked for the CIA, Pentagon, and National Security Council, says new special envoy Richard Holbrooke inherits a "dim and dismal" situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan. What is needed, he says, is for Holbrooke to reverse the negative momentum in both countries. He says the Taliban's military successes in Afghanistan have to be reversed, and Pakistan must help close their sanctuaries on Pakistani territory. But Riedel says "trying to get that cooperation out of the Pakistani government in my judgment will be the single hardest test that Ambassador Holbrooke faces and in fact may be the single hardest foreign policy challenge President Obama faces."
• Going Dutch
  How drinks giants spirited away Johnnie Walker label from UK tax liabilities by a technique known as outward domestication
  * The Guardian, Monday 2 February 2009 Diageo plc has its headquarters in Henrietta Place, central London, and its £3.6m-a-year chief executive, Paul Walsh, lives in Sussex. The drinks giant has 6,500 workers in Britain, mostly making and selling scotch. Their famous Johnnie Walker brand, blended in Kilmarnock, is exported all over the world. But this British firm has been paying very little UK corporation tax, relatively speaking. Despite average annual profits of almost £2bn over the last decade, its accounts disclose a mere £43m a year in average UK corporation tax charges. This is little more than 2% of its profits. The tax bill would be nearer £144m a year if it reflected Diageo's actual physical UK presence rather than the present system of taxing only those financial profits said to arise in this country. Some 30% of Diageo's production is located in Britain. Leaving aside legitimate allowances against profits, such a difference could be said to represent a notional "tax gap" of more than £100m a year. It takes 20,000 ordinary British households paying income tax to fill such a gap. [Corruption] [Globalisation]
• Low turnout in Iraq's election reflects a disillusioned nation
  By Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers BAGHDAD — Voter turnout in Iraq's provincial elections Saturday was the lowest in the nation's short history as a new democracy despite a relative calm across the nation. Only about 7.5 million of more than 14 million registered voters went to the polls. Interviews suggest that the low voter turnout also is an indication of Iraqi disenchantment with a democracy that, so far, has brought them very little.
• Boost for Maliki as party appears to sweep election
  Martin Chulov in Baghdad The Guardian, Monday 2 February 2009 Article historyIraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, long seen as too weak to lead Iraq out of the ruins of war, appeared last night to have emerged with an impressively strong victory in landmark weekend elections in which his candidates reportedly swept the nine Shia provinces. [Media]
• The Super Ad Bowl: Two Decades of Players
  Use the slider below and click on highlighted boxes to see the commercials that ran during the Super Bowl each year.
• If We Buy American, No One Else Will
  By DOUGLAS A. IRWIN Published: January 31, 2009 Hanover, N.H. Op-Ed Contributor
  WORLD trade is collapsing. The United States trade deficit dropped sharply in November as imports from the rest of the world plummeted in response to the financial crisis and global recession. United States imports from China, Japan and elsewhere declined at double digit rates. The last thing the world economy needs is for governments to give a further downward shove to trade. Unfortunately, we may be doing just that. [Protectionism]
• Asia Foundation Proposes Cooperation 'Triangle' for US, China, India
  A call for the establishment of a diplomatic "triangle of cooperation" -- among the United States, India and China -- is receiving a mixed reception at its unveiling in New Delhi. The influential Asia Foundation has rolled out its recommendations for the Obama administration's policy towards India. And, one key suggestion is hitting a log jam. It is the call for three-way cooperation among Washington, New Delhi and Beijing. Proponents say such an effort will be essential to helping solve such thorny regional issues as instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The proposal, put forward by a task force of distinguished academics and diplomats, is in a chapter authored by former American Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Karl Inderfurth. "There have been some who have suggested that our approach to India and our strengthening of relations has been part of a containment of China - a hedge against China's rise," he said. "I think this would be a grave mistake. I know my Indian colleagues and friends would not want to be involved, in any way, shape or fashion, of a containment policy against China. We need to engage both countries on their own merits and find ways that we can work together." The "cooperative triangle" is one of seven points for Indo-American relations put forth in a volume of policy recommendations, titled "America's Role in Asia," being released this week by the Asia Foundation. [US India China] [China confrontation] [Border war]
• Erdogan storms out of Davos debate
  By Richard Edgar and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in Davos Published: January 29 2009 20:46 | Last updated: January 29 2009 20:46 The World Economic Forum in Davos was rocked by a diplomatic fracas on Thursday night as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, stormed off the stage after an emotional debate with Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, in a session about Gaza and the case for Middle East peace. Klaus Schwab, organiser of the Davos gathering, scrambled to reassert “the Davos spirit” after Mr Erdogan said he would never come back to the Swiss resort. The incident was one of the biggest upsets to an event dedicated to what he called “natural understanding” between nations. Mr Erdogan, sitting beside Prof Schwab in a press conference, said that he had walked out because David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist chairing the session, had not allowed him to reply to comments about the conflict in Gaza by Mr Peres. Mr Peres had spoken for 25 minutes, twice the time Mr Erdogan had spoken and five times the length of time participants had been given for their opening remarks, he said
  Israel has long regarded Turkey as its closest ally among Muslim states, and has traditionally enjoyed diplomatic, commercial and military ties with Ankara. When the current Israeli government started its latest peace initiative with Syria, which has since been frozen, Turkey acted as the principal mediator. However, relations have taken a turn for the worse since Israel launched its offensive against the Gaza Strip in late December.
• Leaders of Turkey and Israel Clash at Davos Panel
  By Katrin Bennhold Published: January 29, 2009 DAVOS, Switzerland — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, vowing never to return to the annual gathering.
  Resisting efforts by Mr. Ignatius to end the session, Mr. Erdogan continued, saying to Mr. Peres, “When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill.”
• After Campaign Push, Obama Cultivates Military
  By ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: January 30, 2009 WASHINGTON — The outreach began more than a year ago when Barack Obama, the antiwar candidate who had never served in the military, turned to a group of young officers just out of active duty for a fresh perspective on America’s two wars. “He asked a lot of questions,” recalled one of the officers, Craig M. Mullaney, a former Army Ranger in Afghanistan who in campaign travels with Mr. Obama told him how his platoon of 35 men had vaccinated camels, worked with tribal elders and been in charge of security for a province the size of Vermont. That early outreach has since given way to a carefully planned campaign by Mr. Obama to build trust with the military and avoid the mistakes that hobbled Bill Clinton, the last Democratic commander in chief. By Thursday, when the president met for the first time with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in “the tank,” the secure Pentagon conference room, the campaign had progressed to the point that participants left “comforted,” as one put it, about Mr. Obama’s willingness to work with them. [Pentagon] [Songun]

• Obama's Middle East challenge
  By Mark LeVine, Middle East historian At the start of his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama told the audience at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC: "We are not at war with Islam ... [and] we will stand with those who are willing to stand up for their future." The challenge before Obama now is whether he is prepared to act on those far-sighted words. He used his first morning as president to halt prosecutions at Guantanamo Bay, has indicated his willingness to speak at a "major Islamic forum" within his first 100 days in office, and repeated his desire to "redefine our struggle" against Islamic extremism. He has already demonstrated that he understands the importance of changing the symbolic vocabulary the US uses with the Muslim world. However, symbols can be dangerous, especially when it comes to the Middle East not because the people of the region are too easily taken in by them, as Western Orientalists and viceroys have for two centuries claimed about the "Arab mind". Rather, it is because the West, and the US in particular, has a habit of taking symbols too seriously. It is assumed that because Western leaders claim to stand for democracy, peace and development, the policies supporting these goals are naturally derived of these ideals. Obama will now have to navigate a tightrope of competing agendas and hypocrisies, which have long been the stock and trade of foreign policy-making for great powers.
• UK to fare worst in recession, says IMF
  By Alan Beattie in Washington and George Parker in London Published: January 28 2009 21:41 | Last updated: January 28 2009 21:41 Britain is facing the deepest recession of any big industrialised economy, the International Monetary Fund signalled on Wednesday as it said that the UK economy would shrink 2.8 per cent this year. The forecast came in a gloomy IMF report that said the world economy would suffer its worst performance for more than 60 years this year. It coincided with a report from the International Labour Organization that said that the global recession would certainly cost at least 18m-30m jobs worldwide, and could claim more than 50m. The IMF said that world output, measured at market exchange rates, would fall in 2009 for the first time since the second world war.
• Aides Say Obama’s Afghan Aims Elevate War
  By HELENE COOPER and THOM SHANKER Published: January 27, 2009 WASHINGTON — President Obama intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan can expect a tougher line from the Obama administration, American officials said. Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan, the officials said, because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban. Among those pressing for Mr. Karzai to do more, the officials said, are Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The officials portrayed the approach as a departure from that of President Bush, who held videoconferences with Mr. Karzai every two weeks and sought to emphasize the American role in rebuilding Afghanistan and its civil institutions.
  They said that the Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and that it would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.
  An election is scheduled to be held no later than the fall, under Afghanistan’s Constitution. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who is a former United States ambassador to the United Nations and is viewed as a possible challenger to Mr. Karzai, warned that the Obama administration must tread carefully as it recalibrated its Afghanistan policy.
• Where is soft power?
  Nicolas Tenzer, 28 - 01 - 2009
  Soft power is one of the major tools for a nation engaged in the world affairs. The nation's power and influence are not only---or even principally--- based on military force and economic expansion. Soft power doesn’t rest only on public authorities, but also on business and academic circles. However, the specific mechanisms by which this influence is exercised are very often obscure and it is hard to assess what or where or how it is constituted. A research project for the French government covering 2 years, 40 institutions and which took me to 20 countries aimed to uncover these mechanisms and loci. [Softpower]
• Russia stops US on road to Afghanistan
  By M K Bhadrakumar Precise, quick, deadly - the skills of a soldier are modest. But then, US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is more than a soldier. The world is getting used to him as somewhere more than halfway down the road to becoming a statesman. Sure, there may be warfare's seduction over him still, but he is expected to be aware of the political realities of the two wars he conducts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is why he tripped last Tuesday when he said while on a visit to Pakistan that the American military had secured agreements to move supplies to Afghanistan from the north, easing the heavy reliance on the transit route through Pakistan. "There have been agreements reached, and there are transit lines now and transit agreements for commercial goods and services in particular that include several countries in the Central Asian states and Russia," Petraeus said. He was needlessly precise - like a soldier. Maybe he needed to impress on the tough Pakistani generals that they wouldn't hold the US forces in Afghanistan by their jugular veins for long. Or, he felt simply exasperated about the doublespeak of Janus-faced southwest Asian generals. The shocking intelligence assessment shared by Moscow reveals that almost half of the US supplies passing through Pakistan is pilfered by motley groups of Taliban militants, petty traders and plain thieves. The US Army is getting burgled in broad daylight and can't do much about it. Almost 80% of all supplies for Afghanistan pass through Pakistan. The Peshawar bazaar is doing a roaring business hawking stolen US military ware, as in the 1980s during the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. This volume of business will register a quantum jump following the doubling of the US troop level in Afghanistan to 60,000. Wars are essentially tragedies, but can be comical, too.
  Interestingly, Medvedev's remarks coincide with reports that Washington is cutting Afghan President Hamid Karzai adrift and is planning to install a new "dream team" in Kabul. Medvedev had written to Karzai offering military aid. Karzai apparently accepted the Russian offer, ignoring the US objection that in terms of secret US-Afghan agreements, Kabul needed Washington's prior consent for such dealings with third countries.
• Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold: The Case of Israel
  Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 249, Jan. 15, 2009 The state of Israel proclaimed its independence at midnight on May 15, 1948. The United Nations had voted to establish two states in what had been Palestine under British rule. The city of Jerusalem was supposed to be an international zone under U.N. jurisdiction. The U.N. resolution had wide support, and specifically that of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Arab states all voted against it. In the sixty years of its existence, the state of Israel has depended for its survival and expansion on an overall strategy that combined three elements: macho militarism, geopolitical alliances, and public relations. The macho militarism (what current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls the "iron fist") was made possible by the nationalist fervor of Jewish Israelis, and eventually (although not initially) by the very strong support of Jewish communities elsewhere in the world. Geopolitically, Israel first forged an alliance with the Soviet Union (which was brief but crucial), then with France (which lasted a longer time and allowed Israel to become a nuclear power), and finally (and most importantly) with the United States. These allies, who were also patrons, offered most importantly military support through the provision of weapons. But they also offered diplomatic/political support, and in the case of the United States considerable economic support. The public relations was aimed at obtaining sympathetic support from a wide swath of world public opinion, based in the early years on a portrait of Israel as a pioneering David against a retrograde Goliath, and in the last forty years on guilt and compassion over the massive Nazi extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War. All these elements of Israeli strategy worked well from 1948 to the 1980s
  The three-element strategy of Israel is decomposing. The iron fist no longer succeeds, much as it didn't for George Bush in Iraq. Will the United States link remain firm? I doubt it. And will world public opinion continue to look sympathetically on Israel? It seems not. Can Israel now switch to an alternative strategy, of negotiating with the militant representatives of the Arab Palestinians, as an integral constituent of the Middle East, and not as an outpost of Europe? It seems quite late for that, quite possibly too late. Hence, the chronicle of a suicide foretold.
• Why an Asia-Pacific Freeze?
  The Pacific Freeze is a campaign to freeze and then reduce the military spending of the United States, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and North Korea. These countries, which are participating in the Six Party Talks, account for more than 65% of global military spending. We urgently need to address the dangerous escalation in global military spending, which has increased 45% over the last decade. We are wasting precious resources on preparing for war when the world faces a dire economic crisis and the planet faces a catastrophic climate crisis. We believe the place to begin is with the major military spenders, particularly the United States. We believe the first step is a Pacific Freeze.
• Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and the Afghan and Iraq Wars
  Peter Dale Scott
  It is becoming clear that the bailout measures of late 2008 may have consequences at least as grave for an open society as the response to 9/11 in 2001.
  Back in February Eliot Spitzer, in one of his last acts as governor of New York, warned about the impending crisis created by predatory lending, and reveled that the Bush Administration was blocking state efforts to deal with it.
  Eliot Spitzer submitted his Op Ed to the Washington Post on February 13. If it had an impact, it was not the one Spitzer had hoped for. On March 10 the New York Times broke the story of Spitzer’s encounter with a prostitute. According to a later Times story, “on Feb. 13 [the day Spitzer’s Op Ed went up on the Washington Post website] federal agents staked out his hotel in Washington.” [22]
  For thirty years I have been writing about the persistence in America of a war mentality that, time after time, trumps reasonable policies of negotiation, and leads us further into armed conflict. This dominant mindset is not restricted to any single agency or cabal, but is rather the likely outcome of on-going tensions between hawks and doves in the internal politics of Washington.
  What I do want to contemplate is the serious prospect of war. America escaped from the depression of the 1890s with the Spanish-American War. [42] It only escaped the Great Depression of the 1930s with the Second World War. There was even a recession in the late 1940s from which America only escaped with the Korean War. As we face the risk of major depression again, I believe we inevitably face the danger of major war again.
• East Asian Regionalism and the End of the Asia-Pacific: After American Hegemony
  Mark Beeson
  The economic crisis that currently grips the world will have many consequences, not least for the US. A decade ago during the East Asian crisis, the US lectured East Asian elites on the shortcomings of ‘crony capitalism’ and close business relationships. Such claims look bizarrely anachronistic as the US government finds itself having to nationalise or bail-out large chunks of the domestic economy brought low by an inadequately regulated, predatory, but politically-influential financial sector. It is not just that the material significance of the US economy will be diminished as a consequence of this crisis, however, so will its ideational influence and authority. The Washington consensus centered on the dismantling of state regulation and the unfettered working of the market, had few admirers in East Asia even before the current crisis; [1] the current turmoil will further diminish its appeal and make alternatives more attractive. This diminution of the US’s overall ideological and economic importance compounded by its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is likely to undermine its influence in East Asia and its standing as both a regional and a global power. One consequence of this process may be to strengthen the attractiveness of exclusively East Asian regional organisations—especially if China’s economic development continues to cement its place at the centre of an increasingly integrated regional economy. I suggest that the US’s hegemonic influence over East Asia is consequently likely to decline and so is the significance of the ‘Asia-Pacific’ region of which it is notionally a central part.
  Hegemony has an important ideational or ideological component that is realised discursively, and which can be a crucial determinant of a hegemony’s power to achieve its goals peacefully
  Nevertheless, for most of the post-World War II period, much of East Asia benefited economically from the overarching multilateral, open economic order that emerged under U.S. hegemony. In the strategic sphere, however, the picture has always been more complex and for many less benign, despite the fact that a number of countries in the capitalist camp actually benefited economically from American involvement in the wars in Korea and Vietnam.[
  It is significant that ‘monetary regionalism’, a process that might provide the backbone of any closer economic ties and cooperation between Northeast and Southeast Asia, has been driven by Japan – a country with the capacity to underwrite such an initiative if a number of political and ‘technical’ obstacles to greater coordination of monetary policies can be overcome.[33] Perhaps the most significant aspect of this putative process is that Japan, normally the deferential client of its American protector, has asserted itself on its own behalf and as a champion of ‘Asia’.
  As Muthiah Alagappa points out, it is striking that ‘the development of international society has made the greatest progress in a subregion - Southeast Asia - after American disengagement and has made much less progress in a subregion - Northeast Asia – where the United States has continued to be engaged most heavily’.[59]
  At the very least, the legitimacy and moral authority of the ‘Washington consensus’ looks to be fatally damaged. [Decline] [Imperialism]
• Obama the imperialist
  Change? In foreign policy, hardly. The new president is in the classic liberal interventionist mouldComments (46) Richard Seymour The Guardian, Tuesday 27 January 2009 Article historyThe first Democratic president in the modern era to be elected on an anti-war ticket is also, to the relief of neocons and the liberal belligerati, a hawk. Committed to escalation in Afghanistan, his foreign policy selections also indicate bellicosity towards Sudan and Iran. During his first week in office he sanctioned two missile attacks in Pakistan, killing 22 people, including women and children. And his stance on Gaza is remarkably close to that of the outgoing administration. The question now is how Obama will convince his supporters to back that stance. Bush could rely on a core constituency whose commitment to peace and human rights is, at the very least, questionable. Obama has no such luxury. In making his case, he will need the support of those "liberal hawks" who gave Bush such vocal support. It is tempting to dismiss the "pro-war left" as a congeries of discredited left-wing apostates and Nato liberals. Their artless euphemisms for bloody conquest seem especially redundant in light of over a million Iraqi deaths. Yet their arguments, ranging from a paternalistic defence of "humanitarian intervention" to the championing of "western values", have their origins in a tradition of liberal imperialism whose durability advises against hasty dismissal. In every country whose rulers have opted for empire, there has developed among the intellectual classes a powerful pro-imperial consensus, with liberals and leftwingers its most vociferous defenders. Liberal imperialists have resisted explicitly racist arguments for domination, instead justifying empire as a humane venture delivering progress. Even so, implicit in such a stance was the belief that other peoples were inferior. [Obama] [Imperialism]
• The CIA Vs. the Mullahs
  By Reuel Marc Gerecht Tuesday, January 27, 2009; Page A17 How good is American intelligence on Iran? With the clerical regime intimately involved in Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, with the mullahs quite probably on the verge of enriching sufficient uranium to make a bomb, and President Obama promising to use more diplomacy and sanctions to stop them, it's a fairly pressing question.
  Yet this query has rarely been raised seriously in Washington
  In the 1990s, I saw a case officer who barely spoke Farsi debrief a potentially high-value Iranian official who barely spoke English.
  Unlike in Iraq under Saddam Hussein or North Korea today, the CIA can reach inside the Islamic republic if it really tries. [Intelligence]
• Military Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia
  Katharine H.S. Moon Where there are soldiers, there are women who exist for them. This is practically a cliché. History is filled with examples of women as war booty and “camp followers,” their bodies being used for service labor of various kinds, including sex. Contrary to common assumptions in the West, prostitution is not “part of Asian culture.” Just about every culture under the sun has some version of it during times of war and times of peace. In some ways, military prostitution (prostitution catering to, and sometimes organized by, the military) has been so commonplace that people rarely stop to think about how and why it is created, sustained, and incorporated into military life and warfare. Academic interest and analysis of this issue gained momentum only in the last twenty years and still remains scant and sporadic
• Joris Ivens and the Role of Film in the Indonesian Independence Movement
  Drew Cottle and Angela Keys Japan Focus Introduction From September 1945 to November 1946, the Singapore-based British Southeast Asia Command under Vice-Admiral (later Lord) Louis Mountbatten assumed responsibility for taking the Japanese surrender in Java. A similar role was assumed by the British in taking the Japanese surrender in southern Vietnam. Indonesian and Vietnamese nationalists viewed both events – correctly — as a cover for the return to power of, respectively, Dutch and French colonialists at a time when the British were vying to recover their own empire in Malaya, Singapore, India and elsewhere. [Imperialism]
• How GM Lost Its Sales Crown to Toyota
  It started with management decisions in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. High gas prices and the current recession only made matters worse By David Welch It's official. Toyota (TM) has finally surpassed General Motors (GM) as the world's biggest carmaker. The global sales battle has been neck-and-neck for a couple of years. But Toyota ended GM's 77-year grip on the crown in 2008, according to numbers that came out on Jan. 21, and the Japanese juggernaut did it with authority, selling 8.9 million cars to GM's 8.35 million. The margin of victory is two auto factories' worth of production. [Decline]
• You've been a great audience ...The gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning.
  Admit it: there's a part of him you're going to miss. Oliver Burkeman on Bush's comic legacyComments (8) Oliver Burkeman The Guardian, Thursday 8 January 2009 Article history President George W. Bush jokingly makes a face as he tries to open a locked door as he leaves a press conference in Beijing. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP The American presidency, it has been said, is the most intimate of offices. In the modern TV era, to elect a president - or even just to observe US politics from overseas - is to invite him and his family into your home for at least four years, and to learn altogether too much information about their lives. Bill Clinton's sexual activities are only the most lurid example of this; in some ways, revelations of Jimmy Carter's habit of reading Bible passages to his wife at bedtime were just as personal. Yet as the administration of George Bush reaches its final days, it's hard to escape the conclusion that even the last eight horribly eventful years haven't succeeded in revealing the character of the man. You can, of course, call him a warmonger, or a liar, or a stooge of the super-rich, or someone with reckless disregard for his compatriots faced with natural disaster. But these are labels, not descriptions of his internal life. Despite countless biographies and speculative newspaper and magazine articles, we're barely any closer to answering the question that seemed pertinent back before Florida, before 9/11, before Iraq or Katrina: what, exactly, is going on in there?
  "Often people ask me," Bush said last year, "'Why is it that you're so focused on helping the hungry and diseased in strange parts of the world?'" Many parts of the world did indeed remain strange to Bush, who sought to render them more familiar by bringing his own pillow everywhere he travelled. "Do you have blacks, too?" he is said to have asked the Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso in 2001, though the evidence for this anecdote is far from conclusive
• This crisis is fundamental crisis of capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein
  Interviews with Renowned sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein [New Year’s series] “ Editor’s note: On the occasion of the New Year, The Hankyoreh will publish a series of interviews with progressive foreign scholars to examine the issues of economic growth and social welfare, international trade and monetary order, the environment and social development, income distribution, and production and consumption. The financial crisis sweeping the world has led many to reconsider the neoliberal economic policies initiated by the U.S. government. In our first article of the series, Professor Suh Jae-jeong sits down with renowned sociologist and systems theorist Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein to consider the paradigm shift in global thinking on economic policy and the future of capitalism.
  Basically, the U.S. has no soldiers it can send anywhere. All the talk about North Korea, all the talk about Iraq, all the talk about Somalia is nonsense. There are no soldiers and you can’t just bomb them. It doesn’t work. So, we don’t have armed (inaudible), suddenly everybody realizes this and everybody is saying we’re not afraid of you because you don’t have any power. You don’t have military power. You’re spending your money on a big machine, but it doesn’t work. You can’t win a war with it. Now that people have suddenly really realized that, the U.S. has nothing to play with. [Decline]
• China Losing Taste for Debt From the U.S.
  By KEITH BRADSHER Published: January 7, 2009 HONG KONG — China has bought more than $1 trillion of American debt, but as the global downturn has intensified, Beijing is starting to keep more of its money at home, a move that could have painful effects for American borrowers. The declining Chinese appetite for United States debt, apparent in a series of hints from Chinese policy makers over the last two weeks, with official statistics due for release in the next few days, comes at an inconvenient time. [Reserve] [Decline]
• The West’s Selective Reading of Eastern History and Values: From Thermopylae to the Twin Towers
  Alain Gresh
  Translated by Donald Hounam Shortly after the First World War, the French literary critic and historian Henri Massis (1886-1970) preached a crusade against the dangers threatening European values and thought – largely identified with those of France, in his mind. He wasn’t entirely misguided: across the world, colonised nations were in revolt. He wrote: “The future of western civilisation, of humanity itself, is now under threat... Every traveller, every foreigner who has spent any time in the Far East agrees that the way in which the population thinks has changed more in the last 10 years than it did over 10 centuries. The old, easy-going submissiveness has given way to blind hostility – sometimes genuine hatred, just waiting for the right moment to act. From Calcutta to Shanghai, from the steppes of Mongolia to the plains of Anatolia, the whole of Asia trembles with a blind desire for freedom. These people no longer recognise the supremacy that the West has taken for granted since John Sobieski conclusively stemmed the Turkish and Tartar invasions beneath the walls of Vienna. Instead they aspire to rebuild their unity against the white man, whose overthrow they proclaim.” [1] These fears are resurfacing today in a very different context, also marked by a series of cataclysmic events: the end of the cold war, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and above all the restructuring of the global order in favour of new powers, such as China and India. [Realignment]
• Korea 'Among the Losers in 2009'
  Turmoil always begets winners and losers, and Korea could find itself among the losers in the global financial crisis, says Yale history professor Paul Kennedy. Kennedy predicted the decline of the U.S. in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," a book he published in 1988. In an article for Bloomberg on Saturday, Kennedy singles out Germany, China, India, and northern European nations as winners amid the economic turmoil in 2009. But losers will include Russia, Venezuela and Iran, most of Africa and Latin America, and Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The biggest loser, however, will be the U.S., he forecasts [Decline]
• Paul Kennedy Says New World Order Will Emerge: Year in Review
  Commentary by Paul Kennedy Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Every so often in the history of international affairs, a great transnational turbulence shakes the foundations of the world and brings many of its older structures tumbling to the ground, as we witnessed in 1919, 1945 and 1989. In the confusion and babble that follow, it’s difficult to see through the dust and recognize the shape of the altered strategic landscape. Peering through the wreckage of the past year’s financial crisis, it seems clear that every nation was a loser in 2008. The world’s developed economies have taken a heavy beating, whether measured by their collapsing industrial production, tumbling exports, surging unemployment, frozen credit markets or the near- paralysis of maritime trade.
  So: India up, China up, Germany up (all relatively). The developing world down, Russia down, most of Europe and Japan down, and President Barack Obama’s America down and down. I’d like to believe I am very wrong. I worry that I’m not. [Decline]
• Even to his defenders, Bush's legacy is 'debatable'
  By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — George W. Bush was supposed to be a president schooled in consensus building and tough, effective management. However, the first chief executive with a master's in business administration — from Harvard, no less, and the son of a president known for his foreign-policy expertise — is leaving President-elect Barack Obama a nation that's arguably in the worst shape since Herbert Hoover left Franklin Roosevelt the Great Depression and a world in which fascism was on the march 76 years ago.
  The 43rd president presided over a "free-for-all in which powerful insiders . . . have played roles as policy entrepreneurs," said Karen Hult, a presidential expert at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. "We can certainly talk about his remarkably sloppy decision-making process. That did have consequences," added George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. [Dissension] [Strategic incoherence]
• The Gaza catastrophe
  By Richard Falk
  FOR 18 months, the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian-arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot. During the ceasefire, the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a 10-year period, and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel’s 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement, which involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine and fuel to a trickle. Israel also refused exit permits to students with foreign fellowship awards and to Gazan journalists and respected NGO representatives. At the same time, it made it increasingly difficult for journalists to enter, and I was myself expelled from Israel a couple of weeks ago when I tried to enter to carry out my UN job of monitoring respect for human rights in occupied Palestine, that is, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza.
  Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, is also UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestine Territories. He was expelled from Israel two weeks ago.
• A 'West Side Story' That Finally Speaks to Latinos
  National's Staging Is Truly Bilingual By David Montgomery Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 3, 2009; Page A01 Many Latinos remember the first time they saw "West Side Story." Their memory of that musical reworking of "Romeo and Juliet" by way of Hell's Kitchen is bittersweet. One of the things to accept but not exactly love about the show was the language -- the sometimes clumsy accents, the random sprinkling of Spanish -- "Okay, Sharks, ¡Vámonos!" -- which gave a veneer of cultural savvy to the tale of gangs, lovers and immigrant dreams. Now we're in an age when Dora the Explorer and George W. Bush speak more Spanish than do Maria, Anita, Bernardo and the Sharks. The musical seemed less savvy all the time. But in a new production at the National Theatre, "West Side Story" is finally displaying a PhD in linguistics from the streets. The Puerto Rican characters now speak and sing in Spanish.
• Raul Castro says hopes too high for Obama
  Reuters Friday, January 2, 2009; 10:49 PM HAVANA (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama appears to be an honest and sincere man, but his election has awakened "excessive hopes" that the United States will change, Cuban President Raul Castro said in a television interview broadcast on Friday. Castro repeated previous assertions that he is open to talks at any time with Obama, who takes office on January 20, but said he is not desperate to do so. Obama has said he wants to ease the 46-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and meet with Cuban leaders as first steps toward normalizing relations with the Communist-run island 90 miles off U.S. shores. "Now there is a president who has raised hopes in many parts of the world -- I think excessive hopes," Castro said in an interview on state-run television. "Because even if he's an honest man -- and I believe he is -- a sincere man -- and I believe he is -- one man alone cannot change the destiny of a country and much less the United States," said Castro, who replaced his ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president in February. "I hope I'm mistaken in my assessment. I hope Mr. Obama has success," he said. "He can do much, he can take positive steps, he can put forth more just ideas, he can put a stop to the tendency of almost all U.S. presidents to have their war, or wars," he said. [Obama][Sanctions] US foreign policy]
• America's 2009 world: change and continuity
  Paul Rogers While a change of direction in US economic and environmental policy looks secure, the outlook for foreign policy is not bright, argues Paul Rogers. 29 - 12 - 2008 The United States’s security policy under Barack Obama may be less of a departure from that of his predecessor than many hope. Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracysince 26 September 2001. The Barack Obama administration which will take effect after the new United States president’s inauguration on 20 January 2009 looks likely to be very different to George W Bush’s in two major areas: economic policy and the environment.
• Iraq plans to close Iranian dissidents' border camp
  • Base was used in sabotage and assassination sorties
  • US fostered sect as tool for regime change in Tehran
  Jonathan Steele The Guardian, Friday 2 January 2009 Article historyIraq plans to close a camp for Iranian dissidents who used to cross into Iran to mount assassinations and sabotage - a decision that has sharpened political differences between Baghdad and Washington. Camp Ashraf, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, came under Iraqi control yesterday in a broad security handover that forms part of the US withdrawal agreement concluded late last year. Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, led a delegation of defence and interior ministry officials to the camp last weekend, warning its 2,500 male and 1,000 female inmates that "staying in Iraq is not an option". The Iraqi government said it "is keen to execute its plans to close the camp and send its inhabitants to their country or other countries in a non-forcible manner". US troops disarmed the opposition group known as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) after the 2003 invasion. They removed hundreds of armoured vehicles donated by Saddam Hussein but kept the camp intact because some Bush administration officials allegedly saw the MEK as a potential tool for regime change in Iran. [Terrorism] [Double standards]
• Helen Suzman Campaigner who single-handedly carried the anti-racism banner in South Africa's apartheid parliament
  Stanley Uys guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 January 2009 16.25 GMT Article history Helen Suzman, who has died aged 91, single-handedly carried the anti-racism banner in South Africa's apartheid parliament, her star the brightest in the liberal firmament. She was elected in 1953 and her solitary crusade lasted 13 years from 1961 to 1974. After that, the electoral tide took a sudden, fortunate turn, and she was joined by seven Progressive Federal party colleagues. She continued as an MP until 1989, standing down amid accolades from all over the world.
  Secondly, she seemed to have more energy than anyone else - she often attributed her physical health to the fact that she never drank wine, only whisky
• Two Advisers Reflect on Eight Years With Bush
  Bolten and Hadley Decry 'Mythologies'
  By Michael Abramowitz Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, January 2, 2009; Page A01 White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley remember conferring with President Bush during the darkest days of the Iraq war, in 2005 and 2006, when violence was out of control. In daily 7 a.m. meetings in the Oval Office, Bush reviewed "blue sheets" detailing incidents involving U.S. soldiers; he would circle the casualty figures and press his top aides for details about the deaths.
  But in a wide-ranging conversation lasting more than two hours, the two men also rebutted what they consider common misconceptions of the George W. Bush era, such as the president's alleged insulation from bad news and the view that Vice President Cheney wielded unbridled behind-the-scenes power. "One of the mythologies," Hadley said, "is that it was the vice president that somehow was pulling the strings on foreign policy in the first term and made it very ideologically driven and that somehow in the second term, the vice president's influence is in decline and, therefore, somehow the real Bush has come forward, and we have a more pragmatic foreign policy." "That's just hooey -- it's just hooey," the ever-polite Hadley concluded, with the strongest language he would muster for print. (Bolten chuckled and suggested earthier epithets, such as "bunk.") But at the same time, Bolten said that one of his goals when he took over as chief of staff in the spring of 2006 was to put Bush back at the center of decision-making. [Cheney]
• 9 Muslim Passengers Removed From Jet
  Others on Flight Say a Remark Was 'Suspicious'
  By Amy Gardner Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, January 2, 2009; Page B01 Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark. Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI. [Human rights] [Islam]
• Using American Power Smartly: Advice to the Next U.S. President
  By Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
  A Pacific Forum CSIS “Bill” and Jean Lane Lecture in Diplomacy Honolulu, HI, February 5, 2008 Issues and Insights Vol. 8-No. 2 Honolulu, HI February 2008
  This new unilateralism was based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of power in world politics. Power is the ability to get the outcomes you want. And whether certain resources will produce power or not depends upon the context. Contextual intelligence means that you have to understand the strength and limits of American power. We are the only superpower, but our preponderance is not empire, it can influence but not control other parts of the world. In fact, if you want to understand power and its different context in the world today, it helps to use the metaphor of a three dimensional chess game, in which you play on a top board, a middle board, and a bottom board, both horizontally and also vertically. On that top board of military power among countries, the United States is the only superpower, and nobody is about to replace us, I would argue, for at least a couple of decades, and that includes China or whoever else you want to nominate for that position. On the middle board of economic relations among countries, the world is already multipolar. We cannot get what we want in trade, antitrust, or other things without the European Union, China, Japan, and others cooperating with us. And on the bottom board of transnational relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, whether it be pandemics, climate change, drug trade, or transnational terrorism, this is a situation where power is chaotically distributed. Nobody is in charge; nobody has control. To call that American empire or American unipolarity is nonsense. It’s taking a theme which fits the top board and applying it to the bottom board. And yet ironically, it’s that bottom board where some of our greatest threats now come from. After all, it was from the bottom board that we got 9/11. [Softpower] [Imperialism] [Decline]
• A Smarter, More Secure America Report of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power
  Richard L. Armitage and Joseph S. Nye Jr.
  America’s image and influence are in decline around the world. To maintain a leading role in global affairs, the United States must move from eliciting fear and anger to inspiring optimism and hope. In 2006, CSIS launched a bipartisan Commission on Smart Power to develop a vision to guide America’s global engagement. This report lays out the commission’s findings and a discrete set of recommendations for how the next president of the United States, regardless of political party, can implement a smart power strategy. The United States must become a smarter power by once again investing in the global good—providing things people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of American leadership. By complementing U.S. military and economic might with greater investments in soft power, America can build the framework it needs to tackle tough global challenges. Specifically, the United States should focus on five critical areas: g Alliances, partnerships, and institutions: The United States must reinvigorate the alliances, partnerships, and institutions that serve our interests and help us to meet twenty-first century challenges Global development: Elevating the role of development in U.S. foreign policy can help the United States align its own interests with the aspirations of people around the world. g Public diplomacy: Bringing foreign populations to our side depends on building long-term, peopleto- people relationships, particularly among youth. g Economic integration: Continued engagement with the global economy is necessary for growth and prosperity, but the benefits of free trade must be expanded to include those left behind at home and abroad. g Technology and innovation: Energy security and climate change require American leadership to help establish global consensus and develop innovative solutions. Implementing a smart power strategy will require a strategic reassessment of how the U.S. government is organized, coordinated, and budgeted. The next president should consider a number of creative solutions to maximize the administration’s ability to organize for success, including the appointment of senior personnel who could reach across agencies to better align strategy and resources
• The Emerging Architecture for Security and Cooperation in Northeast Asia
  By James E. Goodby March 27, 2008 Issues & Insights Vol. 08 - No. 03 - March 28, 2008
• Asia: Less Continuity, More Change
  By Richard L. Armitage
  Issues & Insights Vol. 08 - No. 05 - April 30, 2008
  s ago I gave a speech about the U.S.-Japan alliance and Asia security called "continuity and change." And if you look at Asia now, there’s an awful lot of change and I don’t think there’s so much of the continuity. Look at Australia, we’ve got new leadership with Kevin Rudd, who met with our president today in Washington. And this is going to have implications for us. We talked about China today, but we ought to talk about our trilateral cooperation with Japan, Australia, and the U.S. I think that Mr. Rudd, who is a very fine guy and has a great affection for the U.S.-Australia Alliance, probably won’t have the same affection for our trilateral talks as his predecessor. He may engage in them, but I don’t think there will be the same amount of cooperation.
  As you might have gotten from the tenured tone of some of my comments today, I’m a little skeptical about what’s going on in North Korea. I think to some extent the North Koreans have again saved us from ourselves. I was very worried, I’ll be frank with you, that we were about to do something that great powers don’t do, namely trade-off our relationship with a great power to develop a relationship with a small power. Now if there are any Japanese in this room who will stand up and tell me there is not a great deal of distrust surrounding the Six-Party Talks and our participation in them, I’ll buy you breakfast in the morning. I don’t think it’s going to happen. But we have to understand this. This was deliberate on the part of the North Koreans to some 5 extent. They are going to have a harder time now driving a wedge between South Korea and Japan than they had earlier, but this was deliberate. Part of it was the way we negotiated it. Part of it is the way the North Koreans negotiate and part of it is the expectations of the People’s Republic of China. I think my purpose here tonight is to lay out some possible agenda points and also to be somewhat provocative. So I’ll make the following statement. As I’m leaving town tomorrow, I can get out of town before you can pin me to the wall on it. I’ve come to the conclusion that regarding North Korea, although the People’s Republic of China hates the idea of a nuclear armed North Korea, they would be willing to settle for it if that’s the price of stability. Now that’s just a personal view; the thing to debate tomorrow is whether or not U.S. policy is morphing in front of your eyes. Are you seeing a policy that’s slowly, not rhetorically, but actually is morphing from one of denuclearization of the Peninsula to a program of capping the nuclear program and turning into counter proliferation? I think the jury is out on that. I’d be interested in our Japanese friends’ views. And finally just a question about the abductees issue. Jim Kelly and I put North Korea on the terrorists list because of the issue of abductees. This was not done thoughtlessly; it was not done wildly; it wasn’t done on the spur of the moment. It was done with the feeling, first of all, there was a great deal of political interest in Japan; there’s no question about that. But it was done with a feeling that this would be an excellent way to test North Korea. Nobody expected North Koreans to be able to come up with the living abductees. But we certainly had a right to expect that they’d come up with some truthful answers. And the test case was whether or not North Korea could be expected to accord the basic consideration to human rights, and I’d say abductees’ families deserve a basic consideration of human rights. If they could not find it in themselves to live up as much as possible to their responsibilities on the abductees issue, how could we trust them to live up to an international agreement particularly given the previous agreements we had in 1994 that they didn’t live up to? So for Jim Kelly and for me, this was not a hard thing to do. It was a good basis on which to test the intentions of the North Koreans. But I agree with what was generally said here today, that if they were the Washington Redskins, they 6 have gone to the ground game; they are running out the clock, and they’re going to try to get a better deal from the next administration. [US-Japan alliance] [Terrorism List] [Abductees] [[US NK policy]
• Writing the Web’s Future in Numerous Languages
  By DANIEL SORID Published: December 30, 2008 The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States. The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India. Mr. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in his native Kannada. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even Mr. Ram Prakash finds challenging to learn.
• Moderate Arab States Feel Popular Anger
  By ROBERT F. WORTH Published: December 30, 2008 BEIRUT, Lebanon — After four days of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, an outpouring of popular anger is putting pressure on American allies in the Arab world and appears to be worsening divisions in the region. The sharpest rhetorical attacks have been aimed at Egypt, which is widely seen as having aided the Israeli campaign by closing its border with Gaza. But as major street demonstrations continued Tuesday from North Africa to Yemen, some marchers and opinion-makers also lashed out at other moderate Arab governments for failing to take a stronger stand. Syria and Iran, meanwhile, have drawn praise for their militancy.
• U.S. to Widen Supply Routes in Afghan War
  By THOM SHANKER and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. Published: December 30, 2008 WASHINGTON — The United States and NATO are planning to open and expand supply lines through Central Asia to deliver fuel, food and other goods to a military mission in Afghanistan that is expected to grow by tens of thousands of troops in the months ahead, according to American and alliance diplomats and military officials. The plan to open new paths through Central Asia reflects an American-led effort to seek out a more reliable alternative to the route from Pakistan through the strategic Khyber Pass, which was closed by Pakistani security forces on Tuesday as they began an offensive against militants in the region.