While President Bush appears serenely confident about Iraq, the same cannot be said of the War Party propagandists who were plotting this conflict when Dubya was still a rookie governor of Texas.

William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right “unpatriotic conservatives” who “hate” America, now calls upon Bush for an “acknowledgement of defeat.”

Richard Perle says the administration “got the war right and the aftermath wrong.” Self-described “humiliated pundit” Andrew Sullivan confesses to “a sense of shame and sorrow.” Michael Ledeen says of Bush’s war, “Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place.”

Frank (“The End of History”) Fukuyama concedes that “Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.”

But it is a March 20 essay in The Wall Street Journal that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. Written by Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the piece urges Bush to begin the “rejuvenation of his presidency by shocking the media and political community with a sweeping overhaul of his administration.”

The purge Barnes recommends would have caused Stalin to recoil.

Barnes calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow – and Vice President Richard Cheney.

“The trickiest issue is how to handle Karl Rove,” says Barnes.

I don’t think so, Fred. I think “the trickiest issue” will be how to handle Dick and Lynne when they are told by Dubya they must give up a constitutional office to which Cheney was elected by the nation, vacate the vice presidential mansion and turn the keys over to Condi Rice.
antiwar.com

WASHINGTON – Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is removing its logo from a paper about the “Israel lobby” that was co-authored by its academic dean.

The new version of the paper also has a more prominent disclaimer warning that the paper’s views belong only to its authors.

The changes appear to be a sign that the university is distancing itself from the document in the face of a furor from faculty members, Jewish leaders, and a congressman who say it fails to meet academic standards and promotes anti-Semitic myths.

The paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” was written by the Kennedy School’s Stephen Walt and a political science professor and the codirector of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, and published by the Kennedy School.

In the 83-page “working paper,” the professors allege that a vast network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq.

Components of or influenced by the purported network include major publications, “Christian evangelicals,” top-ranking officials in the Bush administration, and scholars at prominent think tanks. The paper has won praise from Islamist groups and white supremacist and anti-Semite David Duke.

It also has drawn sharp criticism from prominent Harvard faculty, including Kennedy School lecturer Marvin Kalb, literature professor Ruth Wisse, and law professor Alan Dershowitz; Harvard students, and Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat of New York. Many critics have called for Harvard to withdraw the paper until it can be brought up to acceptable standards of scholarship, alleging that the document is riddled with factual inaccuracies and suffers from bias and faulty research.
nysun.com

Washington Post response: ‘Of Israel, Harvard and David Duke’

How tiresomely predictable. Kill the messenger. Question the scholarship. Only KKK Nazis could possibly agree…blah blah blah

Professor Says American Publisher Turned Him Down
John Mearsheimer says that the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a American-based scientific publication.

“I do not believe that we could have gotten it published in the United States,” Mearsheimer told the Forward. He said that the paper was originally commissioned in the fall of 2002 by one of America’s leading magazines, “but the publishers told us that it was virtually impossible to get the piece published in the United States.”

Most scholars, policymakers and journalists know that “the whole subject of the Israel lobby and American foreign policy is a third-rail issue,” he said. “Publishers understand that if they publish a piece like ours it would cause them all sorts of problems.”

I grew up in a time when two-parent families were still the norm, in both black and white America. Then, as an adult, I saw divorce become more commonplace, then almost a rite of passage. Today it would appear that many — particularly in the black community — have dispensed with marriage altogether.

But as a black woman, I have witnessed the outrage of girlfriends when the ex failed to show up for his weekend with the kids, and I’ve seen the disappointment of children who missed having a dad around. Having enjoyed a close relationship with my own father, I made a conscious decision that I wanted a husband, not a live-in boyfriend and not a “baby’s daddy,” when it came my time to mate and marry.

My time never came.

For years, I wondered why not. And then some 12-year-olds enlightened me.

“Marriage is for white people.”
washingtonpost.com

SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.
nytimes.com

And what is the demographic of these children who ‘test below grade level’? Overwhelmingly poor and non-white. So the most deprived people in the country are now being deprived of history, art, and science in their schools. Sickness.

Exams cut by third as stress on pupils soars
The true level of pressure facing children was laid bare last night as Britain’s most senior exams official admitted pupils faced a huge and excessive exam load that had distorted the balance of what was taught in schools.
Ken Boston, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), said he was determined to reduce the number of tests that pupils in England and Wales are forced to sit. He also admitted, however, that it was time to raise the standard of exams, with new higher-level grades and harder exams for the brightest students.

‘The assessment load is huge,’ Boston said. ‘It is far greater than in other countries and not necessary for the purpose. We are pushing for the overall burden of assessment to be reduced.’

Colleges and schools could see the exam load fall quite quickly. By 2009, A-level students will spend up to a third less time in the exam hall. The QCA plans to cut the time spent in the exam hall from 10.5 hours to a maximum of seven hours. Students will sit four papers over the two years rather than six.

That, argued Boston, would allow room for longer, essay-style questions that would pick out the most talented.

It would also reduce the stress for students facing competitive exams in four out of their five final years at school, he added. ‘We need to look critically at the assessment regime,’ said Boston. ‘Assessment for learning is critical but stacks of [tests] can distort the balance of the curriculum and put too much emphasis on what is examined. I think this has been happening.’

…The push to stretch the brightest children was welcomed by parents’ groups. Margaret Morrissey, chair of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: ‘Parents worry that if their child is bright they don’t get special attention that would lead them to a higher level. This is good news and a sign that the QCA is becoming more parent- and learning-focused.’

And what is the demographic of ‘the most talented’? Guess.

Earlier this year, a pregnant Pittsburgh Steelers fan told local reporters that she had asked her doctor to induce labor early so she could watch the Super Bowl. Once her obstetrician determined that the procedure would be safe, and that the Steelers were in fact headed to the big game, he consented. (Ultimately, the woman went into spontaneous labor and gave birth naturally.)

While her request may be unusual for its frivolity, American obstetricians are inducing labor more and more often, sometimes for no other reason than that the mother wants it. As of last count, in 2003, one out of every five American births was induced — double the figure for 1990. It is a surprisingly high rate given induction’s increased risk of fetal distress or a ruptured uterus. Inductions also make more likely a Caesarean birth — major abdominal surgery, with a long recovery period.
nytimes.com

Health authorities are secretly cutting millions of pounds in funding for psychiatric services, despite alarming new evidence of a crisis affecting an estimated one in five people in Britain. In a move branded “the real madness” by health experts, debt-ridden NHS trusts are slashing budgets and cutting care for the mentally ill.

An Independent on Sunday investigation has established that trusts are planning to cut more than £20m from budgets ear-marked for psychiatric care, using the cash to bail out other parts of the NHS instead.

In some parts of the country, primary care trusts have drawn up secret measures to slash spending on mental health care by up to a third.

With new figures today showing that children as young as seven are now being affected in an epidemic that costs Britain £100bn each year, the disclosures were seized on as evidence that mental health services were at breaking point.

…Reports by the Mental Health Foundation and the World Health Organisation reveal:

* 1 in 15 children self-harming;

* 19,000 suicide attempts by teenagers every year;

* 20 per cent of people suffering from genuine mental distress such as anxiety or depression and in need of urgent help;

* 25,000 people sectioned every year under the Mental Health Act
independent.co.uk

…For the first time in history these ‘elite women’ can succeed in any career they want. According to a remarkable thesis that has blown open the debate around feminism, sexism and the future role of women, a new generation of bright, rich professionals have broken through the glass ceiling and have nothing to fear from the men around them. They will be just as successful.

The thesis was expounded in a highly controversial article for Prospect magazine by Alison Wolf, a professor at Kings College London and author of Does Education Matter? She argues that the meteoric rise of this new generation of ‘go-getting women’ who want high-powered, well-paid jobs has dire consequences for society. Wolf says it has diverted the most talented away from the caring professions such as teaching, stopped them volunteering, is in danger of ending the notion of ‘female altruism’, has turned many women off having children – and has effectively killed off feminism.

‘[It is] the death of the sisterhood,’ Wolf writes. ‘An end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than men.

‘In the past, women of all classes shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns. Now it makes little sense to discuss women in general. The statistics are clear: among young, educated, full-time professionals, being female is no longer a drag on earnings or progress.’

The article argues that the most educated women will now earn as much as men over a lifetime if they have no children. Even with children, the gap will be small. The desire to be successful acts as a major disincentive to women starting a family, Wolf argues.

‘Families remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as raising the next generation, and yet our economy and society steer ever more educated women away from marriage or childbearing,’ she writes. ‘The repercussions for our future are enormous, and we should at least recognise the fact.’ The growth, Wolf argues, of the ‘because I’m worth it’ generation has led to the end of ‘female altruism’, where women would see the caring part of their life as normal.
observor.guardian.co.uk

Well the vast majority of females on the planet don’t have any of these opportunities. And it’s sort of ridiculous to fret about the END of workplace discrimination. ‘Female values’ are as unrepresented in the West as they are everywhere else, at least in any public discourse, and females often face the greatest physical danger from the terrorists they live with. If there were a true ‘sisterhood’ among Western women in the first place, our societies and our politics would look very different, and women would be fairly compensated for all the nurturing work that needs to be done in a healthy place. But the West is a pathological place, and worrying about the economic mobility of educated (and overwhelmingly white) females doesn’t strike me as the place to begin to address the pathology.

Hillary the Hawk
…From Leon Trotsky to Ralph Reed to Hillary Clinton is a long, torturous road to follow, yet the chameleon-like Wittmann—who styles himself a Bull Moose progressive in the tradition of his hero, Theodore Roosevelt—has navigated it expertly. Wittmann’s new role as Hillary’s unofficial Rasputin is perfectly suited to her current political needs. Eager to overcome her reputation as the leader of the party’s left wing, Hillary is “repositioning” herself, in modern parlance, as a “centrist,” i.e. a complete opportunist. She could have no better teacher than Wittmann, who from the pulpit of his “Moose-blog,” advises her to “seize the issue of Iranian nukes to draw a line in the sand.” While paying lip service to multilateralism, she should “make it clear that while force is the last resort, she would never take it off the table in dealing with the madmen mullahs and the psychotic leader of Iran.”

…Hillary hails the 1998 bombing of Iraq, ordered by her husband, which killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and recounts the official mythology promulgated by the Bush administration: “[T]he so-called presidential palaces … in reality were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left.” As we now know, there was nothing even approaching WMD in those palaces, and Iraq had been effectively disarmed at that point. In late February or early March, Scott Ritter, then a UN arms inspector, met with then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson. Ritter was told to provoke an incident so the U.S. could finish bombing by the start of the Islamic New Year holiday.

Hillary, however, didn’t let any inconvenient facts get in her way. She boasted that it was under a Democratic administration that the U.S. “changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change” and took credit for the bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and known liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly Standard editorial, reiterating each of the War Party’s talking points—the bio-weapons fantasy, the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the phantom nuclear arsenal: “This much,” she maintained, “is undisputed.”

La Paz, Mar 22 (Prensa Latina) The terrorist bombings in Bolivia have sparked widespread condemnation, as false explosive alarms proliferate.

Two people were killed in the bombings of two small hotels in La Paz late Tuesday and early Wednesday. A US citizen was one of two people arrested in connection with the terrorist actions, according to reports.

President Evo Morales described the attacks as destabilizing actions by oligarchic sectors affected by the ongoing process of change in the country, and recalled that history shows that terrorism always precedes military coups.

He called on the people to organize in committees of defense of democracy, and urged the US to prevent US people from coming to Bolivia to disrupt democracy, the government and the Constituent Assembly to be elected in July.
plenglish.com

Blum:The Cuban Punching Bag
The Committee to Protect Journalists, located in New York, calls itself “An Independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending press freedom worldwide”. In December it issued a report that said that “China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are the world’s leading jailers of journalists in 2005”.

On January 7 I sent them the following email:

“Dear People,

“I have a question concerning your report on imprisoned journalists. You write that you consider journalists imprisoned when governments deprive them of their liberty because of their work. This implies that they’ve been imprisoned because of WHAT THEY’VE WRITTEN PER SE. You show Cuba with 24. And I would question whether your criterion applies to the Cuban cases. The arrests of these persons in Cuba had nothing to do with them being journalists, or even being dissidents, per se, but had everything to do with their very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials.

“The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. During the period of the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba damage greater than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for victims of (at that time) forty years of aggression. The suit accused Washington policies of being responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and wounding or disabling 2,099 others.

“Would the US ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization inside the United States? Would it matter if these American dissidents claimed to be journalists? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States.

“Moreover, most of the arrested Cubans can hardly be called journalists. Their only published works have appeared on websites maintained by agencies of the United States.”

El Salvador 2006: Elections in a Broken Nation
…Dreams of a life in the United States are the norm here among working people. Since the country converted its currency to the dollar in 2003, the low wages and high unemployment mean working people live in poverty, if they are lucky enough to find a job. The maquilas pay starvation wages, and there are no unions. Each day, over 700 Salvadorans flee on the dangerous trek through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States. Young Salvadoran women look for a mate that is “going north”. I heard a tale of a high school class of 18 young men, all of whom got on a bus out of the country the day after their graduation. The effect of this economic migration is that 2 million Salvadorans working in the United States sent back $3 billion to their families in 2005. These remittances, or “remesas” support the economy, and are the source of the cash for the malls and fast food restaurants that proliferate in this poor nation. They are not a source for investment that develops the infrastructure. The cash simply recycles back to the corporations and banks of the United States and El Salvador.

…Certainly, the slave economy underpinned the riches of 18th century society. It also had a dominating influence across the British politico-financial establishment. Institutional investors in slavery included the Hanoverian royal family, numerous Oxbridge colleges and even the Church of England.

This needs to be the starting point for any commemoration. As Professor James Walvin has commented: “My worry about 2007 is that there will be such a euphoria of nationalistic pride that people will forget what happened before, which was that the British had shipped extraordinary numbers of Africans across the Atlantic.”

…Despite its barbarity, ending this lucrative trade was an uphill struggle. Few today would go so far as to hail it, as one contemporary did, as “the most altruistic act since Christ’s crucifixion”, but halting trafficking had serious economic costs. Yet the moral certitude of Wilberforce and his evangelical allies convinced MPs, many of whom had slaving interests, of the ethical case for abolishing “the foul iniquity”.

However, this had as much to do with purifying England from the taint of slavery as any great humanitarian concern for slaves. There was little sense of racial equality, and a new image of the ever-grateful black subject subsequently developed – seen to greatest effect in Josiah Wedgwood’s cameo of a slave kneeling in chains. The inscription read: “Am I not a man and a brother?” But few among Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect honestly thought so.
guardian.co.uk

Islamophobia at Downing Street: Tony Blair’s Bipolarity
This week, Tony Blair launched a scathing ideological attack on Islamism. Describing the conflict between Islamism and the world as a, “battle for modernity,” he quoted the conservative American historian, Samuel Huntington, in order to refute him. Contrasting his interpretation of a “conflict about civilisation” in a historical chiaroscuro with Huntington’s “conflict of civilisations,” Blair blasted Islamism as the fountainhead of the world’s escalating level of ultra-violence.

Promising to make further keynote speeches to address the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East, Blair sought to defend the pointed attacks on Islamic fundamentalism by George Bush and Christopher Hitchens as the raison d’etre for the war in Iraq. In his latest lamentation on the exclusively Islamic sources of ulta-violence, terrorism and war, Blair echoed the mantras of the coterie of deeply Islamophobic neoconservative intellectuals who emerged from the right-wing witches’ cauldron of Leo Stein at the University of Chicago.

Blair’s diatribe was the performance of a committed idealist, a demagogue mesmerized by his own ideology and not that of an intellectual, an academic, a mainstream politician or a statesman. Blair inhabits that shadowy region of Christianity that sees itself as totally separate and apart from the other faiths stemming from the house of Abraham: Judaism and Islam. In Blair’s vision of Christianity, there are no Muslims who accept the messianic status of Jesus; no Christians who launch terrorist atrocities and no Jewish terrorists, either.

In the mind of Tony Blair, the trouble with world terror stems exclusively from the ideology and culture of Islamic fundamentalism. In Blair’s deeply bipolar world, Christianity and Judaism are blameless for the rising tide of terror.

On March 10, 2006, the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found that the United States was denying the Western Shoshone people “their rights to own, develop, control and use their land and resources”. They warned the U.S. to respect their obligations according to the Convention”. The U. S. was urged to “freeze”, “desist” and “stop” their actions against the Western Shoshone and abide by the Committee’s “Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure”.

The Western Shoshone land base covers approximately 60 million acres, stretching across the states of Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California. Their land rights were entrenched in the 1868 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The U.S. used a procedure similar to that of the Canadian and Ontario governments when they turned land belonging to the Stoney Point people at Ipperwash into a park. The U.S. declared the Western Shoshone lands had become “public” or federal lands in violation of the treaty.

The U.S. uses Western Shoshone land for military testing, open pit cyanide heap leach gold mining and nuclear waste disposal planning. They have used military style seizures of Shoshone livestock, trespass fines in the millions of dollars and ongoing armed surveillance of Western Shoshone who assert their original and treaty rights. When the Western Shoshone questioned their actions, they were denied “fair access” to the U.S. courts. The U.S. courts represent the United States, one of the adversaries in the conflict. So the Western Shoshone took their case to the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This became the neutral tribunal required under international law.

In 2001 the Committee had already expressed alarm that U.S. laws and treatment of indigenous peoples continue to be based on the outdated, colonial era “doctrine of discovery.” The Committee’s decision is a direct negation of the colonial process.
montrealmuslimnews.net