A new poll finds that a plurality of Americans favor plans to censure President George W. Bush, while a surprising 42% favor moves to actually impeach the President.

A poll taken March 15, 2006 by American Research Group found that among all adults, 46% favor Senator Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) plan to censure President George W. Bush, while just 44% are opposed. Approval of the plan grows slightly when the sample is narrowed to voters, up to 48% in favor of the Senate censuring the sitting president.

Even more shocking is that just 57% of Republicans are opposed to the move, with 14% still undecided and 29% actually in favor. Fully 70% of Democrats want to see Bush censured.

More surprising still: The poll found fully 43% of voters in favor of actually impeaching the President, with just 50% of voters opposed. While only 18% of Republicans surveyed wanted to see Bush impeached, 61% of Democrats and 47% of Independents reported they wanted to see the House move ahead with the Conyers (D-MI) resolution.

The poll, taken March 13-15, had a 3% margin of error.
rawstory.com

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
lrb.co.uk

VARANASI, India — They came to banish ghosts, find a cure for eczema, seek succor for a cheating husband or an unruly child. Their feet bare, their heads covered, the believers, both Hindu and Muslim, entered the shrine in droves, stopping only to kiss each stair.

That was the scene March 9 at the tomb of Hazarat Syed Baba Bahadur Shahid, a Muslim, two days after homemade bombs tore through a Hindu temple and a railway station here in Hinduism’s holiest city, raising the specter of Hindu-Muslim violence.

But such violence did not come to pass. Indeed, the scene at the Bahadur Shahid shrine served as a reminder of a fact often obscured by the spasms of ruthless sectarian violence that strike India: that after living cheek by jowl here for so many centuries, Hindus and Muslims often find themselves quietly braided together in worship as in daily life.
nytimes.com

…Pentagon officials said the air assault, part of Operation Swarmer, was the largest since April 2003 when the 101st Airborne Division launched an air assault from Iskandiriya to Mosul, shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq.

On Friday, US and Iraqi troops could be seen purposefully moving through fields sown with winter wheat, searching isolated farm buildings US officials say may harbor scores of insurgents, including foreign fighters linked to Al-Qaeda.

While 48 people were detained and six weapons caches found, no insurgents have yet been encountered, US forces said.

But the deputy governor of Salaheddin province, Abdullah Hussein, suggested at least one key insurgent leader, whom he named as Jaish Mohammed, had been apprehended.

“The rebels in the area are a mix of local nationals and foreign fighters,” Hussein added. “We have their voices recorded along with their names and pictures.”

“There has been no contact with the insurgents,” admitted Major John Calahan of the 101st Airborne Division, a unit specializing in helicopter-borne air assaults that spearheaded the sweep.

“The aim of the operation is to dissuade anti-Iraqi forces from taking sanctuary here,” he said, adding that 60 helicopters were involved in the operation.
bakutoday.net

Crazy crazy crazy

AL-SADR FORMS SHADOW GOVERNMENT IN BAGHDAD STRONGHOLD
Erbil, 16 March (AKI) – A Kurdish source in Baghdad has told a Kurdish national daily that the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, ” has set up a shadow government in Sadr City in the centre of Baghdad”. The source told the Aso daily: “this group was tasked with carrying out the affairs of the city in the place of the Iraqi government and institutions.” The source explained that the Mahdi Army, accused of kidnappings and sectarian killings, has transformed the rundown Sadr city into an independent district with its security forces and its own courts which do not only judge local residents but also Shiites from other areas of the capital.

The source alleged that “the health and transport ministers, which both are headed by minsiters from the Sadr faction, have been completely monopolised by followers of this movement” adding that “in Sadr City the police forces, for example the local police, take their orders from Moqtada al-Sadr and not from the interior ministry.”

The Cultural Network of Iraq, an internet site which publishes news on the Shiite community, has said that “the peoples courts in Sadr City have condemned to death terrorists who carried out massacres in the city.”

The former government of Iyad Allawi and the movement of al-Sadr,. who has headed two lengthly revolts against the US-led coalition forces, clashed over these courts, which have special police forces and prisons. When the authorities in Baghdad tried to close them down and disband the militias they failed.

The power of Sadr’s militia and his huge constituency of loyal Shiite voters have made him a growing force in Iraq.

America Switches Sides in Iraq War
While President Bush was threatening Iran on Monday, he blamed the Iraqi Shiites and Iran for the insurgency. According to the AFP, Bush said that:

“Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq.”
I know what you’re thinking: President Bush is so stupid that giant mistakes like this should just be taken with a grain of salt. Even if he’s lashing out at Iran for intervening in the affairs of the Iraqi Shia, surely he’s not blaming the “improvised explosive devices” that are killing American soldiers and Marines in Iraq on the Shia. … Wrong. That’s exactly what he was doing.
“Asked about the linkage to Shiite forces, two US officials who declined to be named pointed to previously reported ties between the government of Iran and radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.”
The first problem is that the next day General Pace said he had no evidence whatsoever to back up the president’s false assertions and Secretary Rumsfeld just dissembled. The second is that the last time al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army was in violent conflict with the US was back in August of 2004 and the roadside bomb was not their tactic, those have been the tool of the home-grown Sunni insurgency which is led by the ex-Ba’athists and the recently under fire foreign fighter jihadist types.

Though al-Sadr has openly threatened war if America were to bomb Iran, he had been known as the leader of the least Iran-loyal faction among the Iraqi Shia, denouncing the federalism in the new constitution, and insisting on Iraqi nationalism regardless of religion and ethnicity. Recently, his political fortunes have been said to be on the rise, and though that may be in conflict with some genius’s plan to spread the war, a leader of the Iraqi insurgency he is not.

The U.S.’s natural allies would be Saddam’s Baathists, of course. Did the glorious liberators of 3 years ago ever seriously believe that the Shia would just curl up and hand the country over to Americans, of all people? Of course not. Maybe this Iran scenario was on the drawing board then.

Seven days in Iraq
An American hostage is murdered. Car bombs kill 58 at a street market. Police discover 29 bodies in a mass grave. And the US launches its biggest assault since the invasion. On the eve of its third anniversary, Audrey Gillan pieces together just another week in a war zone.

Sectarian violence leads to displacement in capital
BAGHDAD, 16 March (IRIN) – Dozens of families in the capital, Baghdad, have been displaced from their neighbourhoods due to the sectarian violence that has come in the wake of the Samarra shrine bombing in February and subsequent attacks.

“The explosions at the Samarra mosque and the attack on a market in the Sadr district [of Baghdad] have frightened minority communities in some neighbourhoods,” said Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) spokeswoman Ferdous al-Abadi. “They’re afraid they could become victims of sectarian violence.”

On 22 February, the bombing of a revered Shi’ite shrine in Samarra, about 100 km northwest of the capital, left more than 75 people dead and sparked sectarian reprisal attacks countrywide.

On Thursday, the Ministry of Interior announced that at least 630 people had been killed as a result of sectarian violence since the Samarra bombing.

Many families in Baghdad, lacking essential supplies, have preferred to camp outside their neighbourhoods rather than risk being killed in their homes by armed sectarian groups.

According to the IRCS, more than 300 families from different areas of the capital have been displaced, many of them Sunni residents of majority Shi’ite neighbourhoods.

HALABJA, Iraq, March 16 — For nearly two decades, Kurds have gathered peacefully in this mountainous corner of northern Iraq to commemorate one of the blackest days in their history. It was here that Saddam Hussein’s government launched a poison gas attack that killed more than 5,000 people on March 16, 1988.

So it came as a shock when hundreds of stone-throwing protesters took to the streets here Thursday on the anniversary, beating back government guards to storm and destroy a museum dedicated to the memory of the Halabja attack.

The violence, pitting furious local residents against a much smaller force of armed security men, was the most serious popular challenge to the political parties that have ruled Iraqi Kurdistan for the past 15 years. Occurring on the day the new Iraqi Parliament met for the first time, the episode was a reminder that the issues facing Iraq go well beyond fighting Sunni Arab insurgents and agreeing on cabinet ministers in Baghdad.

Although Kurdistan remains a relative oasis of stability in a country increasingly threatened by sectarian violence, the protests here — which left the renowned Halabja Monument a charred, smoking ruin — starkly illustrated those challenges even in Iraq’s most peaceful region.
nytimes.com

Kurds take out anger on Halabja monument
…Just two years ago, the then top US administrator in Iraq L Paul Bremer stood at the Halabja Monument with Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, who is now president of Iraq.

Mr Bremer said the town served as proof that the US-led invasion of Iraq was justified, and that the coalition would establish a $1m fund for Halabja. Mr Talabani urged people to “come to Halabja to see how mass destruction arms (were) used.”

Now, the people of the town are saying that officials have used the atrocities for their own political ends, but they have seen little in return.

TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki may have captured all the headlines when he announced that Iran would not use the oil weapon in the event it was slapped with sanctions by the UN Security Council. But in the world of Pipelineistan, the nuclear row waged by the US, the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), the United Nations and Iran is just a detail.

The heart of Pipelineistan itself has been transposed to Tehran for the International Conference on Energy and Security: Asian
Vision, organized by the Institute of International Energy Studies and the Institute for Political and International Studies. There could not be a better place to meet and discuss oil-and-gas geopolitics with an array of scholars and executives from Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Georgia, Venezuela and Germany.

And their overall message is unmistakable: the interdependence of Asia and “Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics”, as an Iranian analyst put it, is now total; the nuclear row should be solved diplomatically in the next few months; and Asian integration has everything to gain from Pipelineistan linking the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia and China.

It’s a gas, gas, gas
The heart of Iran’s gas strategy lies in the gigantic South Pars field, responsible in itself for 50% of Iran’s and 8% of the world’s natural-gas reserves. South Pars is strategically located between Bushehr to the west (where Russia is helping Iran to build its first civilian nuclear power station) and the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas to the east.
atimes.com

TEHRAN (AFP) – Talks between India, Iran and Pakistan on building a new gas pipeline to Southeast Asia ended without any agreement and a new round of negotiations scheduled for late April.

“Iran made a proposal on the price (of gas) that we must examine,” India’s Petroleum Secretary M.S. Srinivasan told reporters in televised remarks on Thursday.

Iran’s state news agency confirmed Tehran had proposed a price for gas, but India and Pakistan said they needed time for consultations.

The next round of talks are scheduled for Islamabad on April 30, state television reported.

The sides had hoped to settle on the framework for the project that would see Iranian gas travel by pipeline through Pakistan to India. They have yet to sign a memorandum to set the long- stalled project in motion.
news.yahoo.com

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — China, which for more than a century turned its back on Central Asia, has reached out to Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s biggest country, for one major reason: oil.

In 2005, the China National Petroleum Corporation bought Petrokazakhstan, a Canadian-run company that was the former Soviet Union’s largest independent oil company, for $4.18 billion and spent another $700 million on a pipeline that will take the oil to the Chinese border.

Petrokazakhstan was the largest foreign purchase ever by a Chinese company, in this case a state-owned one. Chinese oil producers were already operating four smaller oil fields in Kazakhstan.

“China is being increasingly dependent on Middle East oil and it wants a supply that would be blockade-proof in case of a conflict over Taiwan,” said Thierry Kellner, a specialist in China’s relations with Central Asia at the Free University of Brussels.

But the Chinese are paying a high price.

Shortly after the sale, Kazakhstan forced the Chinese company to resell a third of its new acquisition to KazMunaiGaz, the state oil company and industry regulator — and be paid in future revenue. A spokesman for KazMunaiGaz, Mikhail Dorofeyev, has said the deal is expected to be completed by the end of March.

Kazakhstan authorities are also believed to be easing the way for Lukoil of Russia to acquire the other half of Turgai Petroleum, which it now jointly owns with Petrokazakhstan. In addition, a local court recently awarded Lukoil a $200 million judgment against Petrokazakhstan in a dispute over how to share the oil in a common deposit. Both developments are unmistakable signals that Chinese ownership is no guarantee of a smooth ride.
nytimes.com

With a population of more than 20 million people, and dwindling water supplies, the Mexican capital is a stark example of the severe water supply issues facing many of the world’s rapidly developing mega-cities.

The parched ground crunches beneath your feet as you walk through the Texcoco area on the outskirts of the city. The bleached, cracked terrain stretches out in all directions. Nothing can grow here.

It is very difficult to imagine that, just 70 years ago, this area was filled with water. This was one of five lakes that used to enrich the Mexico City valley.

Today, in a prime example of what more than a century of water mismanagement can do, they have all but disappeared.

Population growth, the over-exploitation of subterranean aquifers, and a failure to recycle limited water supplies have turned a once-fertile region into a barren desert.

Many of Mexico City’s inhabitants get by on just one hour of running water per week.

And, most people consider the city’s tap water to be undrinkable – though water officials say it is now safe to drink – so Mexico has become the second-highest consumer of bottled drinking water in the world.
bbc.co.uk

The world’s water hotspots

Today our government celebrates its first month, the first 30 days of the democratic and cultural revolution that we are heading, with the overwhelming popular mandate of December 18, 2005, when Bolivians from the countryside and cities decided to turn the page on a history full of injustice and discrimination.

We have named a cabinet that is representative of the social movements, business owners, the middle classes, indigenous peoples, intellectuals and women. We are dealing with a cabinet never before seen in Bolivian history that tries to fully express a multicultural, dignified, sovereign Bolivia. I want to say, with a lot of pride, that this is the first cabinet formed as a result of an autonomous decision, without pressure from international bodies.

We have named a military high command that is a break with the past of the subordination of our armed forces to external interests. Instead, it privileges professionalism, discipline and the respect of our sovereignty as a country. We need to recuperate our sovereignty in the heart of the state, in the security bodies, in the military institutions and in the policing bodies.

For some it has been novel that this president begins work at 5am — like the majority of Bolivian workers and campesinos [peasants] — and that he has renounced 57% of his wage. However this measure has been a marker defining the spirit of our government: I am president, not to win more money, but to work more for the homeland. With this measure [which reduced the wages of other elected officials, who cannot be paid more than the president] the executive power has saved 13.9 million bolivianos [US$1.7 million], which will be our contribution towards obtaining 3500 new items in the education area, a sector that received for the first time in years a 7% increase in salaries, without marches, blockades nor other acts of pressure.
axisoflogic.com