30 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI – At the end of an important week-long visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to South Asia, what does the complicated triangular relationship among Beijing, New Delhi, and Islamabad, three of Asia’s four nuclear powers, look like? Going by conventional wisdom, and most media reports, there was a sharp contrast between [...]
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30 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Ray McGovern
Initial press reports on information provided to the Senate by Robert Gates, President George W. Bush’s nominee for the post of defense secretary, show Gates hewing very closely to the rhetoric of his predecessor. Gates is more parrot than innovator in his responses to a questionnaire given him by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which [...]
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30 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Jim Lobe
Despite a growing and virtually universal consensus both in America and abroad that the United States must engage Syria and Iran if it hopes to stabilize Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush appears determined to ignore Baghdad’s two key neighbors as long as possible. That is increasingly the assessment of analysts in Washington who [...]
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30 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Aaron Glantz
A coalition of U.S. peace groups is pressing ahead with plans for what it hopes will be a massive march on Washington Jan. 27, even though newly released documents show the antiwar community is under Pentagon surveillance. “The peace and justice movement helped make ending the war in Iraq the primary issue in this [...]
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30 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Margaret Griffis
At least 92 Iraqis were killed or found dead and another 42 were wounded today as President Bush is in Jordan for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and others. Also, Coalition sources reported that an American soldier was killed on Wednesday and another GI today, both in Baghdad. The Coalition also stated that troops [...]
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29 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Ran HaCohen
A revealing book I have recently read about the present Middle East is Joris Luyendijk’s Almost Human. Luyendijk was a Dutch journalist who spent several years (1998-2003) in Arab countries as well as in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, working for two Dutch quality newspapers and for the television. His background as a social [...]
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29 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Aaron Glantz
Rural communities are experiencing a disproportionate amount of U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new study by the Carsey Institute, a think tank at the University of New Hampshire. "The mortality rate for soldiers from rural America is about 60 percent higher than the mortality rate for soldiers from metropolitan [...]
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29 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Arthur Silber
I find it almost impossible to write another post about our nauseatingly immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq. I’ve made my views clear, and offered numerous reasons for my conclusions. See, for example, “No Way Out – But Out,” “A Genuine Mission Impossible,” and “Get Out Now: Just Do It.” And “The Missing Moral Center: [...]
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29 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Loretta Napoleoni
While ethnic cleansing plagues "liberated Iraq," Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the powerful Shi’ite Mahdi militia, has issued an ultimatum to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Sadr warned that if Maliki met President Bush in Jordan this week, the cleric and his 30 followers in Iraq’s parliament would pull out of the shaky ruling coalition, effectively [...]
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29 November 2006 | Uncategorized | Tom Engelhardt
On Sunday, in a front-page New York Times piece (“U.S. Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself“), John Burns and Kirk Semple reported that a federal “interagency working group,” looking into the finances of the various branches of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, had come to the conclusion that it was now financially self-sustaining. [...]
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