MIRAN SHAH, Pakistan (AP) – Pakistani security forces backed by helicopter gunships struck a militant hide-out Wednesday in a tribal region near the Afghan border, killing more than 45 fighters including a Chechen commander linked to al-Qaida, officials said.

One civilian and a soldier were also reported dead.

near Saidgi, a village about nine miles west of Miran Shah, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said.
The assault ”knocked out a den of foreign militants” and killed more than 45, an army statement said.
newspress.com

U.S. soldier killed in Afghan fighting amid predictions of rising violence
KABUL (AP) – Fighting between U.S. forces and suspected Taliban rebels Tuesday killed one American service member and wounded two others in southern Afghanistan, the military said.

A military vehicle was damaged by a roadside bomb during the fighting, which left the two wounded service members in stable condition at a nearby base. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of one of our fellow service members,” said Maj.-Gen. Benjamin Freakley, a U.S. commander.

The victims’ names were withheld pending notification of their families.

The bombing raised the death toll of U.S. personnel in and around Afghanistan to 216 since the U.S. invaded in late 2001.

Military officials in Washington and Afghanistan said Tuesday that insurgent attacks rose sharply last year and are likely to worsen in 2006 as militants step up efforts to hamper the country’s gradual transition to democracy.

Good luck with that…

THE Pentagon has dismissed a poll’s finding that 72 per cent of United States troops in Iraq believe the US should pull out within a year or less.
“It shouldn’t surprise anybody that a deployed soldier would rather be at home than deployed, even when they believe what they are doing is important and vital work,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

The poll by Le Moyne College and Zogby International found that only 23 per cent believed US troops should stay in Iraq “as long as it takes”, as US President George W. Bush has insisted.

Nearly one in three troops said US forces should withdraw immediately.

Another 22 per cent said US forces should be out within six months, and 21 per cent thought they should exit within a year.

“I don’t think anybody is getting alarmed over any one poll, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Mr Whitman said.
dailytelegraph.news.com.au

Former US troops rail against war
Mr Viges said: “I am a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace. I was with the 82nd Airborne Division as a mortarman when my unit was deployed to Iraq in February 2003.
“I joined up the day after September 11, 2001. I saw action in Falluja and Baghdad. My mortar platoon dropped numerous rounds on the town of Samawa during the start of the invasion. I don’t know how many innocents I killed with my mortar rounds.

“I was so disgusted by the war that, after we came home in January 2004, I filed for conscientious objector status and received that status in December 2004. I’m a Christian. What was I doing holding a gun to another human being?”

“When in Rome,” you know…

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Bombings in Baghdad killed 26 people, and four others died when mortar rounds slammed into their homes in a nearby town Wednesday, the second day of surging violence after authorities lifted a curfew that briefly calmed sectarian attacks.

A spokesman for the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars criticized the Shiite-led government for failing to protect Iraqis, and he urged Sunnis to defend their mosques.

“All evidence has proven that the government and its security forces are incapable of taking any action,” said Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi, a spokesman for the Sunni clerical group.
chron.com

Shiites told: Leave home or be killed
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Salim Rashid, 34, a Shiite laborer in an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab village 20 miles north of Baghdad, received his eviction notice Friday from a man at the door with a rocket launcher.

“It’s 6 p.m.,” Rashid recounted the masked man saying then, as retaliatory violence between Shiites and Sunnis exploded across wide swaths of central Iraq. “We want you out of here by 8 p.m. tomorrow. If we find you here, we will kill you.”

We live under a system with a series of oppressions woven together: domination and exploitation of workers by elite classes of owners, managers and professionals; a system of gender inequality that disadvantages women; a racial hierarchy that places people of color at the bottom; oppression of gay people by a rigid heterosexist culture. And over it all, protecting elite interests, is a top-down state apparatus, not really controllable by the people even in so-called “democratic countries.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Humans have the capacity to control their own lives. We can think ahead and develop plans of action, to self-manage our own activity. This is the human potential for self-management. In the plans that we might develop, inspired by our own aspirations, many of the activities would inevitably require the help of others or involve common work for common benefit. Through communication and the back-and-forth process of giving each other reasons for proposed courses of action, we have the ability to coordinate and cooperate with each other, to self-manage together. In fact humans have not only the potential but the need to self-manage their own activities, to fulfill their goals through activities they plan out and control themselves.

But in both the capitalist and Communist countries, working people are forced to work to fulfill the plans of others, exploited for the benefit of elites. This is the denial of our human need for self-management. As class struggle anti-authoritarians, we propose to replace the existing systems of domination by a new arrangement that gives people free scope to develop their potential for self-management, to control their lives. Not only in social production but in all spheres of life. In what follows I focus mainly on eliminating the class system. We need to keep in mind that class is not the whole story about oppression.
zmag.org

It happens all the time. If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush instead. It doesn’t even have to be an election year to get the progressives fired up. They just don’t seem to get it. “How can you attack the Democrats when we have such a bullet-proof administration ruling the roost in Washington,” somebody recently emailed me, “Don’t you have something better to do than write this trash?!”

Well, not really. It’s too cold in upstate New York right now to do anything other than fume over the liberal villains in Washington. “Why do I write about the putrid Democratic Party?” I responded, “I’ll tell you, there’s a reason this Republican administration is so damn bullet proof — nobody from the opposition party is taking aim and pulling the trigger.”

And that’s why the Dems are just as culpable in all that has transpired since Bush took office in 2000. They aren’t just a part of the problem — the Democrats are the problem.
counterpunch.org

Those who worry that the world’s Arab and Muslim populations pose a threat to free speech in Western democracies need not fear. The first Amendment remains intact-particularly, it seems, when it comes to the “right” to inflict racial slurs. Indeed, the last few weeks have witnessed a spate of pundits and politicians exercising their right to freely engage in racist demagoguery against Arabs and Muslims without repercussion.

Celebrity hatemonger Ann Coulter did not disappoint the rabid crowd at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. last month. The highlight of Coulter’s address, sandwiched between speeches by Dick Cheney, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Newt Gingrich, was, “I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'” Journalist Max Blumenthal remarked, “This declaration prompted a boisterous ovation” from the overflow crowd.
counterpunch.org

NEW DELHI — Tens of thousands of Indians waving black and white flags and chanting “Death to Bush!” rallied Wednesday in New Delhi to protest a visit by President Bush.

Surindra Singh Yadav, a senior police officer in charge of crowd control, said as many as 100,000 people, most of them Muslim, had gathered in a fairground in central New Delhi ordinarily used for political rallies.

“Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message _ killer Bush go home,” one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd.
washingtonpost.com

Good Nukes, Bad Nukes
Juxtaposed this week are the two poles of the emerging world: India and Iran. They are alpha and omega, the dream and the nightmare. One symbolizes the promise of globalization, the other the threat of global disorder.

What they share, unfortunately, is a passion to be members of the nuclear club. India has nuclear weapons; Iran wants them. Between them stands the United States, trying to set rules that will apply to both — rewarding the good boy while maintaining an ability to punish the bad one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that intelligence “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” That has always seemed to me like an argument for enlightened hypocrisy. And maybe it’s the best explanation for why we should say yes to India’s nukes and no to Iran’s. The two cases are different because — they’re different.
The same rules don’t apply to both; one has shown that it is benign and the other behaves like a global outlaw.

Why India Should Choose Iran, Not the US
Dr Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and one of the leading technical nuclear experts in the United States, believes that even if India gets everything it wants under the US-India civilian nuclear agreement signed by President George W Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, it would still be only a tiny fraction of the oil and gas it could obtain from Iran to meet India’s growing energy needs.

It is not, Dr Makhijani argues, therefore worth jeopardizing India’s relationship with Iran by voting with the United States against Tehran at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

WASHINGTON – A civil war in Iraq could lead to a broader conflict in the Middle East, pitting the region’s rival Islamic sects against each other, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an unusually frank assessment Tuesday.

“If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country … this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world,” Negroponte said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats.

…Still, he told senators he is seeing progress in the overall political and security situation in Iraq. “And if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes, we can win in Iraq,” he said.

…At the Senate hearing, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, painted a similarly stark picture of Afghanistan.

While the government has made progress in disarming private militias, Maples said, his agency estimates that violence from the Taliban and other anti-coalition groups in Afghanistan increased 20 percent last year.

“Insurgents now represent a greater threat to the expansion of Afghan government authority than at any point since late 2001, and will be active this spring,” Maples said in his written statement.

…On Venezuela, Negroponte said U.S. intelligence expects President Hugo Chavez to deepen his relationship with Cuban President Fidel Castro and “seek closer economic, military and diplomatic ties with Iran and North Korea.”

Negroponte said the U.S. is concerned about Chavez’s arms purchases, using profits from oil production. “I would say that it’s clear that he is spending hundreds of millions, if not more, for his very extravagant foreign policy” at the expense of the impoverished Venezuelan population, he said.
news.yahoo.com

Two explosions hit Shiite targets in northern Baghdad after sundown Tuesday, killing at least 15 people and raising the day’s death toll from a series of attacks around Baghdad that killed at least 56 and wounded scores, authorities said.

In the latest attacks, police officials said either a car bomb or a mortar hit the Abdel Hadi Chalabi mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood, killing 14 people and wounding 62.

Mortar fire at the Imam Kadhim shrine in the Kazimiyah neighborhood on the opposite side of the Tigris River killed one and wounded 10.

A Sunni mosque in the Hurriyah neighborhood had been bombed before dawn Tuesday.
abcnews.go.com

Sunnis say they’re mobilizing to combat Shiites, protect mosques
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Sunni Muslims from across central Iraq, alarmed by how easily Shiite Muslim fighters had attacked their mosques during last week’s clashes, said Monday that they were sending weapons to Baghdad and were preparing to dispatch their own fighters to the Iraqi capital in case of further violence.

While no central Sunni group appeared to be coordinating the movement of weapons and people, the widespread claims were seen as the first evidence that Sunnis are organizing to combat Shiite militias, which had mustered thousands of armed men to control many Baghdad neighborhoods after last week’s bombing of one of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines.

The US and Britain have torn apart Iraq and now they want to do the same to Iran. The US military has been studying ethnic and religious tensions in Iran as part of its preparations for war.

The study was commissioned by the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA), which specialises in producing intelligence for low ranking soldiers.

This suggests that plans for war are advanced.

According to the Financial Times, the military wants to determine attitudes towards the central government and examine if Iran is prone to the same tensions that are tearing Iraq apart.

As with the planning for the war in Iraq, the Pentagon has recruited exiles to help with its survey. A similar group of Iraqi exiles told the Bush administration that US soldiers would be welcome when they invaded, and fed them false information about weapons of mass destruction.

The US plans for Iraq involved dividing the country into semi autonomous regions dominated by ethnic groups, and distributing government ministries according to sect. The result has been to drive Iraq towards civil war.

Now the White House has asked the US Congress to make available £43 million to fund a propaganda campaign aimed at Iranians.

Among the exile groups surveyed by the military are the Kurdish Democratic Party, who support the occupation in Iraq, and the followers of the deposed Iranian royal family, who hope a US invasion will restore the monarchy.
socialistworker.co.uk