Chances are you won’t hear a single word about U.S.-Indian military links in the mainstream media’s reporting about President Bush’s first visit to India this week. For months the media in both countries have been encouraged to speculate about whether a deal on U.S.-Indian cooperation on civilian nuclear power would be ready in time for Bush’s visit, but that deal is just the quid pro quo.

The actual “quo” was a de facto military alliance between India and the United States, but we don’t talk about that in front of the children.

“The largest democracy in the world and the oldest democracy in the world are becoming strategic partners, and that is a very consequential development in international politics,” said U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns on Feb. 24 after a visit to New Delhi.

“Consequential” is the right word. The two countries that will have the world’s second- and third-largest economies a generation from now have made an alliance against the country that will have the biggest economy, China – but hardly anybody in the media seems to have noticed.
strib.com

U.S., India Seal Nuclear Deal
NEW DELHI, March 2 — In a break from decades of U.S. policy, President Bush agreed Thursday to provide nuclear energy assistance to India for the first time in exchange for imposing new safeguards on India’s civilian weapons facilities.

Eight years after India startled the United States government by resuming testing of nuclear weapons, Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed off on a pact requiring India to separate its civilian and military nuclear programs to gain U.S. expertise and fuel to satisfy its energy rising needs.

Under the deal, the United States offered India nuclear fuel and technology in return for India agreeing to put a wall between its civilian and military nuclear facilities and place its civilian program under international inspections.

WASHINGTON (Feb. 28) – President Bush said his 2004 re-election victory over Sen. John Kerry was inadvertently aided by Osama bin Laden, who issued a taped diatribe against him the Friday before Americans went to the polls, The Examiner newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Bush said there were ”enormous amounts of discussion” inside his campaign about the 15-minute tape, which he called ”an interesting entry by our enemy” into the presidential race.

Bush’s comments in the Washington newspaper were excerpts from the new book ”Strategery” by Bill Sammon, a long-time White House correspondent.

”What does it mean? Is it going to help? Is it going to hurt?” Bush told Sammon of the bin Laden tapes. ”Anything that drops in at the end of a campaign that is not already decided creates all kinds of anxieties, because you’re not sure of the effect.

”I thought it was going to help,” Bush said. ”I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”

Yeah, some of us noticed…

It is not the Palestinians who should be welcoming the European Union’s decision to hastily donate another $142 million before the Hamas government is formed. It is Israel that ought to be pleased that the Western states will continue compensating the Palestinians for the economic decline that is a product of the Israeli occupation.

For it is not natural disasters that have transformed the Palestinians into a nation that lives on handouts from the world; it is Israel’s accelerating colonialist process. One facet of this is the continued takeover of Palestinian lands (whether “private” or public lands, it is the same thing), expansion of construction only for Jews, and de facto annexation by Israel of extensive tracts of Palestinian territory, while simultaneously breaking up the West Bank into enclaves and enclosures for Palestinians.

Another facet of this colonization is a regime of excessive restrictions imposed by Israel on the movement of Palestinians between their enclosures and enclaves within the West Bank, and between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
haaretz.com

Israelis ask Oscars to drop suicide bomb film
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A group of Israelis who lost children to Palestinian suicide bombings appealed on Wednesday to organizers of next week’s Academy Awards to disqualify a film exploring the reasoning behind such attacks.

The bereaved parents said they had gathered more than 32,000 signatures on a petition against the nomination in the best foreign film category of “Paradise Now”, a drama about two West Bank friends recruited to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv.

The controversial film was made by an Israeli Arab director and actors working with a Palestinian crew and locations. The producer was a Jewish Israeli and the funding was European.

Yossi Zur, whose teenage son Asaf was killed in a bus bombing, accused the film of sympathetically portraying a tactic hailed by many Palestinians waging a 5-year-old uprising.

“What they call ‘Paradise Now’ we call ‘hell now’, each and every day,” Zur told reporters. “It is a mission of the free world not to give such movies a prize.”

DAMASCUS (Reuters) – Syria’s liberal opposition has said it will not accept money from a U.S. offer to fund democratic groups in the country, saying that its credibility would be damaged if it took the cash.

A group of a dozen parties, known as the Damascus Declaration, said on Monday they had enough resources on their own to press ahead with a campaign for peaceful change to end a 40-year monopoly by the Baath Party on power.

“The Damascus Declaration refuses foreign funding, including the $5 million from the U.S. State Department for the Syrian opposition,” a statement by the group said.

The United Sates imposed several sanctions on Syria in 2004, accusing Damascus of supporting “terrorism.” Two weeks ago it announced a $5 million grant to fund what it called “democratic reformers” in Syria.

A U.S. State Department official said the money was not aimed at opposition or political groups in Syria.

“The funds are there to help civil society groups interested in promoting democracy at large. It is not a promotion of direct political parties or views,” he said in response to whether Washington was disappointed with the Syrian opposition response.

Damascus Declaration founding member Hassan Abdel Atheem told Reuters the United States cannot expect popular support for its policy toward Syria while it maintained sanctions against the country.

“Support by international powers for democratic change in Syria is welcome. This does not include financing because it means subordination to the funding country,” he said.

“Our project is nationalist, independent democratic change in Syria, not through occupation or economic pressure as we see the United states doing,” he said.
abcnews.go.com

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the Middle East to be free of nuclear weapons.

Speaking after talks with Kuwaiti leaders, Mr Ahmadinejad said nuclear weapons were a threat to stability.

He said Iran was a good neighbour, and reiterated that its nuclear programme was for peaceful, civilian purposes.

Gulf Arab states, including Kuwait, have said they want an agreement with Iran to keep the Gulf region free of nuclear weapons.

Mr Ahmadinejad’s brief visit to Kuwait was the first by an Iranian head of state since the Islamic revolution of 1979.
bbc.co.uk

smart

Egypt’s Mubarak says he warned the United States not to attack Iran
CAIRO, Egypt – Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak strongly advised the United States not to attack Iran, warning that military action would create more terrorists in neighboring Iraq, according to comments published Wednesday.

Mubarak also told Egyptian newspaper editors he warned Vice President Dick Cheney that ground troops “will have a hard time” in such a conflict.

“If an airstrike (against Iran) takes place, then Iraq will be turned to terror groups,” Mubarak was quoted as saying by the daily Al-Gomhouria.

He said Shiite Muslims in the Gulf region also could turn against the United States because “Iran generously provides for Shiites in every country and these people are ready to do anything if Iran is attacked.”

“Listen to my advice for once,” he recalled telling Cheney in English. “You have vital interests in the Gulf region, especially oil.”

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