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Old Sunday, March 25, 2012
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America’s Obsession With Israel and Iran
March 25, 2012
by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

The United States is obsessed with Iran and Israel. It’s not just the Administration in Washington that enjoys this weird fixation, because many Americans, including all Republican presidential candidates, agree with Israel that Iran is an enemy and must be dealt with in a drastic military fashion. Pending that final solution, the tactics are to try to strangle the country by imposing vicious sanctions and to threaten to cripple the economies of other nations that attempt to maintain commercial links with Tehran. As has been obvious for decades, sanctions on any country have little adverse effect on its leaders, but penalize the poor and weak by making their miserable lives even more dismal than usual.

But destroying innocent lives economically is quite acceptable to the US President and Secretary of State, who are also energetically threatening some countries who will not toe the anti-Iran sanctions’ line, while the Pentagon gets ready for yet another “Shock and Awe” farce, and deploys ever more ships and planes to the Persian Gulf in preparation for war on Iran. They won’t dare to try to bully China or India, of course, because the very existence of the US depends on Chinese economic goodwill, and India is a massive market for US weapons, nuclear technology and other vital items that provide generous profits for American companies. But nations such as Pakistan are in the direct line of fire because they have few means of retaliation.

US Secretary of State Clinton has made it clear that Pakistan will be punished if it continues to engage with Iran about construction of a natural gas pipeline. She cares not a fig that the people of Pakistan urgently need natural gas and, indeed, any sort of fuel that can assist the economy and make their lives easier. The Los Angeles Times records that “more than half of Pakistan’s manufacturers use natural gas to power their factories,” and 21 percent of Pakistani vehicles run on compressed natural gas, but “Pakistan produces only 30% of the natural gas it needs.” The Iran-Pakistan pipeline would provide the country with over 750 million cubic feet of gas per day.

It was reported in February that water levels in Pakistan’s two main power-generating dams are dangerously low. This, and the shortage of natural gas, leads to power cuts all over the country that make people’s lives utterly miserable, but means nothing to Secretary Clinton or anyone else in Washington. The fact that Pakistan’s entire economy is under threat because there is not enough fuel for power stations and industrial plants matters not a bit to the jet-setters of international affairs. They will never experience the slightest inconvenience to their luxurious lifestyles because they are cocooned from the problems experienced daily by so many millions of ordinary people.

Clinton is on record as saying that if Pakistan dares to try to improve its parlous economic state by “beginning the construction of such a pipeline either as an Iranian project or as a joint project . . . it would be particularly damaging to Pakistan because their economy is already quite shaky.” This putrid piece of perambulating filth was then reported as saying that “the US is working to find alternative solutions to the deficit that do not necessitate the building of the proposed pipeline.” Her “solution” to Pakistan’s appalling energy crisis involves a pipeline from Turkmenistan running through Afghanistan : “We think that that is a better alternative, both in terms of predictability and to avoid doing business with Iran.”

Anyone who imagines a pipeline could be built through Afghanistan belongs in the funny farm. But that is no reason to roll around the floor, laughing at the monocular moron who is US Secretary of State. She presents the policies of the most important country on earth and must to be listened to, if only because her statements give a good indication of just where that great nation is heading : down the moral plug-hole.

Washington’s obsession with Israel is understandable because Israel can do no wrong in the eyes of America, and US politicians are puppets in its hands. There isn’t a national politician in the United States who would dare criticize Israel, because if they did their political careers would end very quickly. Now that’s power; real power. When a plainly deranged man like Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu can get 29 standing ovations from a drooling and sycophantic Congress, then matters have become extremely grave, especially when you consider that they gave their own President a mere 25 standers for his last State of the Union Address. Talk about sit-up-and-beg. The US pawn-poodle pollies deserve some crackers, and they’ll get them, of course, in the shape of lots of lovely money from all the Israel-supporting squillionaires who buy politicians like they’re hamburgers.

In the past ten years Washington has vetoed ten UN Security Council Resolutions that condemned Israel for illegal and barbaric actions. On February 18, for example, “The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning all Israeli settlements established in occupied Palestinian territory since 1967 as illegal, saying that while it agreed that the settlements are illegitimate the resolution harmed chances for peace talks. The other 14 members of the Council voted for the resolution, which demanded that “Israel, as the occupying power, immediately and completely ceases all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem and that it fully respect its legal obligations in this regard.”

Israel’s settlements are not only unlawful, they are xenophobic, racist and based on greed. Tel Aviv’s treatment of Palestinians is contrary to international laws, especially those governing collective punishment, and is deliberately designed to make life hell for millions of innocents. But who cares? — Just listen to the Obama speech made at the beginning of this month to AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, and you’ll realize, between gagging at the oleaginous drivel he mouthed, that mighty America is in thrall to a bunch of murderous, land-grabbing avaricious thugs with an enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons.

It is, said Obama, “our common ideals that provide the true foundation for our relationship.” Yes — from Gaza to Guantanamo, from Palestine to Kandahar, the common ideals are there : to imprison people without trial, to subject them to torture, to blitz villages and slaughter children. He didn’t once mention the word ‘Gaza’ in his obsequious eulogy.

What, exactly, has the US got against the Palestinians whose land has been stolen and occupied by Israelis? Well, it’s simple, really: the Palestinians haven’t got any money to give to political campaigners in America or anywhere else. They have no fantastically rich and powerful organization like AIPAC that can buy and alter the ideals and principles of the President of the United States and all the Senators and members of Congress who packed the AIPAC auditorium. They are obsessed with Israel, and who can blame them, when their very careers depend on toeing the Israeli line?

And it goes deeper and wider, unfortunately, because some important sections of the US armed forces appear to be behind Israel to an alarming degree. Take Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz, for example, who told reporters that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have prepared military options to strike Iranian nuclear sites. “What we can do,” he announced, “you wouldn’t want to be in the area.” Strangelove lives, apparently. And according to the Jerusalem Post newspaper “When the Jewish Community Centers Armed Forces and Veteran’s Committee presented its Military Leadership Award to Schwartz in 2004, he said he was ‘Proud to be identified as Jewish as well as an American military leader’.”

When the most senior military officer in the US Air Force boasts of an allegiance other than to his country, the Service he serves, and those whom he has the honor to command, there should be alarm bells ringing. This is dangerous stuff.

General Schwartz’s senior civilian adviser until recently was Dr Lana (Ilana) Kass, who was born and raised in Israel and served as a major in the Israeli Air Force. Her three children were born in Israel. According to the now-deleted entry on the US Air Force website she was Schwartz’s “principal adviser on policy and strategy and formulates, develops, implements, and communicates the policies, programs and goals of the Air Force.”

Even the New York Times had to report, on March 17, that information about Iran’s nuclear program “has not been significant enough for the spy agencies to alter their view that the weapons program has not been restarted.” But General Schwartz makes it clear that his Air Force is ready to go to the extent that when it blitzes Iran “you wouldn’t want to be in the area.” What advice is Schwartz going to give to his President who offers unconditional support to Israel, in that “We’re providing Israel with more advanced technology the types of products and systems that only go to our closest friends and allies”?

Just as Washington is obsessed with Iran to such a degree that it is willing to destroy Pakistan economically if it engages in desperately-needed economic cooperation with its neighbour, so it is obsessed with Israel to the point of national humiliation. The US will support Israel’s bombing assault on Iran because it has no other option. But after that catastrophe, Israel’s puppets in the US Congress and Administration — and the Pentagon — will rue the day they bent their knees to a vile and racist regime that is intent on destroying a country that has never engaged in military conquest and does not seek to do so now. Obsession has a downside. When the US obeys Israel and supports war on Iran the price of oil will go through the roof. And the moral standing of America will go through the floor.

Brian Cloughley’s website is www.beecluff.com
Source: counterpunch
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Old Sunday, April 01, 2012
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America’s Love Affair With Terrorism
April 1, 2012
By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

Rudy Giuliani, the 2008 Republican Presidential candidate and the former New York Mayor has publicly stated that the United States should use a terrorist group to launch a military attack on Iran’s civilian infrastructure – the nuclear power plants. Giuliani is not alone in his support of the Mujahedin-e Khalq terrorist cult (MEK, also known by other acronyms such as MKO, NCRI). Many prominent voices have put their weight behind the terrorist group.

America has had a long-standing love affair with terrorists. Support for terrorist groups and governments has been part and parcel of American policy. According to William Odom, President Reagan’s former NSA Director, terrorism is a tactic with the United States having a long record of supporting terrorists[ see pdf ] [i] . But what is unique and novel about romancing the MEK is the political elite’s brazen public display of support for the group, and the shameless prostitution of their services for a fee.

This must be a rude awakening for the American public. After hundreds of thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars spent on waging a war on terror –“fighting them over there so they don’t come over here”, what has come home with the body bags and the debt is the realization that “they”, the terrorists ARE here – and they have out politicians in their pockets.

Many citizens fail to understand America of present day. They have a hard time reconciling “fighting there”, and the government establishing the Unites States as a battleground. They have difficulty understanding prominent politicians receiving payments from a group listed on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), while a provision of the defense authorization bill would grant the military the authority to detain and hold anyone indefinitely, or to assassinate any individual suspected of having ties to al Qaeda [ii] — a terrorist group who according to Hillary Clinton was funded and armed by the US (CNN see clip ).

Incomprehensible as the actions of these distinguished MEK supporters may be, it may well be that they take comfort in the fact that it is the MEK that is buying their lip service and not vice versa. Perhaps they would rather line their pockets instead of asking where the money comes from. But the question does bear asking.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations , the approximate number of the MEK terrorist cult is estimated at a few thousand members, 3-4,000 of whom live in Camp Ashraf , Iraq . While the MEK residents of Camp Ashraf greatly benefit from American hospitality, including being chauffeured around by American soldiers , it is unlikely that they would be major contributors to their American supporters.

Who then, provides the funding for the solicitation of America ‘s political elite?

The MEK has long had the support of the United States and policy makers ( History Commons ), although recently, after the most recent assassination of yet another Iranian scientist, U.S. officials disclosed to NBC that the MEK terrorist group was “financed, trained and armed by Israel ‘s secret service. With American tax payers forking out billions of dollars a year to Israel , buying the services of American politicians by the MEK gives new meaning to the words money-laundering and prostitution.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has a Master’s degree in Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg for Communication and Journalism and USC School of International Relations. She is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby groups in influencing US foreign policy.

Source: countercurrents
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Old Tuesday, April 03, 2012
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Foreign policy and war lovers
April 3, 2012
By Kurt Jacobsen & Sayeed Hasan Khan

“MADNESS in individuals is something rare,” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted, “but in groups, peoples, parties, ages it is the rule.”

Nietzsche, who himself went crazy from trying to look at life without illusions, had a point. Gaze at the deranged American scene today and it is starkly clear that what US elites most richly deserve as rewards for their recent activities is straitjackets.

American elites and not just the gibbering array of Republican presidential candidates demonstrate daily that they are as unmoored from common reality as the powdered wig French aristocracy before 1789.

Can sane human beings believe that this protracted and unnecessary recession can be remedied by picking the pockets of wage-earners through cuts in services, benefits and employment? Can one really solve the grotesque financial crimes that devastated western economies by rewarding Wall Street con artists such as Goldman Sachs with bailouts and appointing their minions to key government posts?

Can one truly improve democracy by encouraging billionaires to buy up the legislature? Can you create stability in the Middle East by turning a blind eye to Israeli behaviour and obsessively threaten military action against a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons capacity? Is repeating the Iraq catastrophe in Iran really such a good idea for the victim or the perpetrator?

Are escalating oil and food prices — which commodity index speculators relentlessly stoke — a welcome sign of growth, as mainstream media lamely assert? Can you call anything growth that raises stock prices for the wealthy who overwhelmingly own stocks, but depresses wages, degrades jobs and cuts the purchasing power of average consumers? Is a foreign policy stance truly cautious that views every imaginary threat by an independent oil-producing nation as a compulsory reason for war? Can you protect cherished American civil liberties by stripping them all away, as is the case with Bush’s Patriot Act and the new National Defence Authorisation Act.

It no longer seems to matter to the powerful people even to pretend to care about what the hard-pressed majority wants — which according to polls is single-payer national healthcare, jobs programmes, a return to free or low-cost public education, a restoration of taxes on the rich, the break-up and regulation of too-big-too-fail financial behemoths, and a sensible foreign policy.

The political game has been intricately rigged over many decades to produce outcomes the lofty one per cent desire. Indeed, virtually all the fruits of hard work (93 per cent of increased productivity) in the US flow into the pockets of the top one per cent — just like in a banana republic. Americans work harder and longer not to improve their own lives but to plump up the assets of
the super-wealthy. Don’t you have to be crazy not to see it?

The answer is ‘no’ if you own or work for American banks, Wall Street firms, arms industries, energy giants, insurance companies or the burgeoning homeland security racket who all benefit mightily from these short-term profit-boosting policies.

Short-term thinking is perfectly rational for the single-minded looters, but ultimately it is a flawed pursuit in a world full of other ‘players’ who are harmed and will react.

The answer also is ‘no’ if you are an ordinary American Tea Party fan — on the wane — believing in the outpour of neoliberal ‘free-market’ pieties and the anti-terrorist propaganda choking the air waves.

It wasn’t always this way in the US. President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s stated the credo that Americans embraced since the Second World War: “This nation is mighty enough, its society healthy enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the
world while still building a great society here at home.” During those war years US (mostly white) workers’ living standards rose 50 per cent, and industry profits, despite tough controls and steep taxation, shot up far faster.

The American middle class, and a regulated consumer society, was born in spite of industrial and financial tycoons who naturally launched a vast propaganda campaign after the war to grab all the credit for prosperity. Cold War arms spending kept
the economy rolling.

In the 1960s, poverty fell a bit but was not wiped out as President Johnson intended, because an expanding Vietnam War began hoovering up every spare federal cent. The Vietnam War did not bring as much prosperity. High-tech weapons require less
labour. Johnson had not made the right choice. Yet nothing seemed more apparent to US citizens than that elites, who detest welfare, are all too delighted to channel tax dollars to glut corporate coffers. So wars, until lately, augured full employment.

And for tycoons war still entails government-guaranteed profits, which is why there is such a belligerent foreign policy.

For higher circles, and those who aspire to join them, international relations is a theatrical game in which the players can prosper even when losing the match. The late John Kenneth Galbraith commented in the 1990s on the “recreational character of American foreign policy” for out-of-touch elites.

Choices between pursuing prosperity at home and grandiose goals abroad were made and they came out in favour of the former. Federal aid to cities, universities, and welfare uses fell, as did taxes on the rich.

No one has yet been indicted for Wall Street’s crimes, nor any Bush administration member prosecuted for the multitude of deceits that led to the Iraq invasion, while one Occupy Wall Street protester spent three weeks in jail just for scribbling on the
sidewalk.

The public is wising up. Two-thirds of Americans according to the Pew Research Centre recognise today that there is an outright conflict between the rich and poor. Obama has done nothing yet to show he is on the side of the so-called 99 per cent. This
spring the Occupy Wall Street movement promises to be very lively and interesting indeed.

The writers authored Parables of Permanent War.
-Dawn
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Old Tuesday, April 03, 2012
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Disconnect between US strategy and reality
April 3, 2012
Dr Maleeha Lodhi

A series of recent developments have renewed doubts about America’s Afghan strategy even though the US officials insist their plans are “on track” and the strategy warrants no change. These statements mask the growing disconnect between Afghan realities and Nato’s transition deadline of 2014, when all foreign combat troops are to leave the country.

There is rising concern across the region that the situation in Afghanistan is in danger of spinning out of everyone’s control. Two key planks of the US strategy aimed at securing an orderly transition are clouded in uncertainty: partnering with Afghan forces as they assume charge of security and persuading the Taliban to join a peace process. This calls into question the viability of the present exit plan.

To avoid an unravelling, Washington needs to review its approach and revise its strategy by aligning its military mission to the stated goal of finding a political resolution of the war. This means transitioning from a fight-talk strategy to a talk-talk one.

Last month’s violent backlash in Afghanistan following the burning of copies of the Holy Quran by US servicemen and the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians by an American soldier has been a telling indicator of growing public resentment against foreign occupation. Rising incidents of Afghan soldiers turning their guns on Nato personnel signalled how deep that resentment is.

Far from being isolated, these incidents reflect intensifying animosity between Western and Afghan forces. According to figures released in February by the Pentagon 80 Western servicemen have been killed by Afghan soldiers since 2007, mostly in the past two years. “The longer we stay”, admitted on American official to me, “the greater the risk of such incidents”. Intensifying public anger has already urged President Karzai to demand that Nato forces immediately leave Afghan villages.

On the heels of these incidents came the Taliban’s withdrawal from talks with American interlocutors. Although US officials see the suspension as a negotiating tactic rather than abandonment of talks, the blow to the nascent peace dialogue came at a delicate juncture in the approaching endgame.

Washington’s mounting regional difficulties are of course not limited to Afghanistan. Relations with Pakistan have yet to normalise. With the Nato supply route closed for the past four months and parliament taking its time over defining the new terms of engagement, America’s regional strategy is in flux.

The prolonged diplomatic impasse with Pakistan and the setbacks in Afghanistan have already led to a scaling back of US expectations from the Nato summit. Scheduled for May 20-21 in Chicago, the summit had been cast by US officials as a landmark event that would unveil a comprehensive plan to achieve the 2014 transition, as well as announce the start of a formal Afghan peace process. Now more modest aims are being set for the conference. Announcement of peace talks and formal opening of a Taliban office in Qatar are likely to again be postponed.

Although there are other reasons too behind an informal American offer to Pakistan to participate in the Chicago summit this is also being proposed as an “incentive” for Islamabad to expeditiously reopen the ground lines of communication (or GLOCs). The top US military officer General Martin Dempsey said recently that the restoration of GLOCs was being “urgently” sought before May. This was necessary, he explained, not just to ensure military supplies for the spring fighting season, but the departure of equipment from Afghanistan when the drawdown gets underway. In the next 18 months thousands of Nato forces will pull out including 22,000 “surge” forces this September; removal of military hardware will accompany this.

For Obama a summit that lays out a credible plan to ‘responsibly’ wind down the war is especially important in an election year. This will be his last big international event before the election campaign takes over. He might also announce an accelerated withdrawal. While the US military commanders would disapprove, his public would welcome this.

Recent setbacks have already shifted American public opinion decisively against the war. The latest New York Times/CBS poll found that 69 percent of the Americans did not support the war, reinforcing other poll findings that show majorities want the US troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.

Meanwhile with the Chicago summit approaching, American efforts have intensified to conclude a strategic partnership agreement with Kabul. This would allow the US a longer-term military presence after 2014, including access to Afghan bases. News reports suggest frenetic attempts to reach an agreement before May.

Given the Taliban’s opposition to the presence of any foreign forces, the agreement is seen by American officials as another way to press them to resume talks and regain the diplomatic leverage they have steadily lost as the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. Whether this agreement can be a negotiating lever and not a deal-breaker with the Taliban is yet to be determined.

Such an agreement is certain to erode the already fraying regional consensus. All of Afghanistan’s neighbours and key regional powers oppose an undefined, indefinite US military presence, irrespective of its size or configuration. Even Kabul has now sought answers from Washington on bases and the nature of the residual force.

As for the stalled peace talks, the Taliban have kept the door open for future negotiations. Their resumption however will require the Obama Administration to expend greater political capital than it has been prepared to do. The tardiness of its opening diplomatic move has much to do with Washington’s concern with the political fallout of talking to those it has been fighting for ten years. But it is also characteristic of President Obama’s modus operandi – a reluctance to remain consistently engaged and put his weight behind his own policy.

The Taliban have insisted on the transfer of five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to Qatar before the start of formal negotiations. Unwilling to use political capital to overcome Congressional opposition, the Obama Administration has procrastinated and insisted that the Taliban agree to a number of ‘confidence-building measures’ including joining a political process with “other Afghans” (i e the Karzai government).

Taliban representatives have thus far rejected what they describe as new conditions, citing these and Washington’s “inexplicable delay” on the prisoners’ transfer as the reason for last month’s halt to the talks. Taliban spokesman also cited vitiation of the atmosphere by a string of “brutal actions” as another reason to break off talks.

Unless the US is prepared to focus more energy and political capital on the diplomatic process and set realistic terms it will be difficult to swiftly put talks back on track. Washington may calculate this is at present politically costly and prefer to wait until after the presidential elections. But delay and making peace negotiations hostage to the election calendar will imperil the 2014 transition because that rests principally on progress towards a negotiated settlement. The closer the 2014 timeline draws without diplomatic headway the less the Taliban’s incentive to negotiate.

The question that Washington has yet to squarely address – which has far reaching regional implications – is whether it simply wants to head for the exits with an ‘appropriate’ face saver or genuinely search for a peace settlement, and be ready to make strategy adjustments and compromises to achieve this.

If the latter, then more important than assembling a showpiece Nato summit are the changes Washington makes to its strategy. This means directing efforts to secure the mutual de-escalation of violence and negotiating regional ceasefires to wind down the fighting. More fighting will not just delay but compromise chances of a peaceful end to the war. A strategic pause in the fighting will create conditions for meaningful negotiations and accelerate the peace process. This can start with an end to night raids in return for the Taliban ceasing its campaign of assassinations.

The Obama Administration says there is no military solution in Afghanistan. The time to turn these words into strategy is now. This will align the US objectives with those of the region, as well as make the reset with Pakistan easier and perhaps more lasting.
-The News
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Mitt Romney cannot Defeat President Obama
April 8, 2012
By Saeed Qureshi
Exclusive Article

Predictably, the Republican presidential contender, Mitt Romney cannot defeat the incumbent president Barack Obama in the forthcoming November elections. The foremost reason for this projection is that the Christians of all denominations most notably the orthodox and ultra right conservatives would not want a Mormon otherwise deemed heretic, to preside over the United States. The Mormon faith too is fragmented into various sub sects, and there are Mormon denominations that might also oppose Romney.

Notwithstanding the constitutional caveat granting religious freedom to all brands of religions and sects and banning bigotry; the ground realties markedly present a different scenario. The United States is essentially a Christian state where the majority of the population professes and practices Christian faith. As such, from G.W, Bush era onwards, thousands of new churches and Cathedrals have been built. On Sundays the churches and monasteries remain full of attendees who generously give away donations and charities.

Granting that the common Christian faithful may not know nor would care about the religious background and inclination of Mitt Romney, yet the powerful conservative Christian groups and Roman Catholic sections and even individuals including priests, cardinals, and pastors would resist and oppose the advent of a Mormon to lord over the Christian population. This sentiment or bias may not be manifest daringly, yet one can imagine it is happening in the wake of the vigorous resurgence of Christianity in the United States.
Mitt Romney hailing from a strong and well entrenched political background is still a not a very well known or acknowledged politician in the Republican Party like Gingrich, or Ron Paul. The religious zeal and unflinching conservatism of another candidate Rick Santorum brought him initial victories in some primaries and unprecedented and fabulous financial support from the conservative wealthy republicans. He is almost neck and neck with Mitt Romney for Republican nomination.

Rick has lagged behind in the race for final selection because of his other disqualifications such as his amateurish views about overhauling the taxation regime, streamlining the foreign policy domain, winding up of wars, ensuring safety nuts such as Medicare, and similar issues with a far reaching broad based reform package. His being a conservative religious hawk turned out to be more of a liability than as asset for him.

Mitt Romney is depending and asserting his acumen and experience in economic management and corresponding economic reforms mostly riveted on tax reform and budget making. However, president Obama has already established his ability and competence to stem the voluminous economic rot and stimulating the debt-ridden economy that, in fact was, a spillover from his predecessor.

Despite its flaws, his healthcare reform plan has been like a divine blessing for the countless common and ordinary Americans who could not pay for their medical bills either due to poverty or the refusal of the health insurance companies to pay beyond a certain limit. President Barack Obama is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel peace prize a rare honor, bestowed on him besides only on three other American presidents.

In his tenure which is to end by January 2013, president Obama has several meritorious achievements that are certainly laudable keeping in view his little or no experience in governance. He has been able to achieve many milestones of accomplishments despite a bias againt him of being a non-white president and also being young. He has been thoroughly above personal rancor and kept his political stature beyond aspersions or involvement in blame game.
He signed economic stimulus package in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for stimulating that certainly jacked up the stagnant and the ailing American economy. The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 are other landmark reforms that were also helpful in boosting the flagging economic sector of the United States.

Beside, a host of such laws and acts were passed and promulgated that were really like injecting a new life blood into the veins of the mauled socio-economic structure of the United States. These watershed initiatives include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010” and the Budget Control Act of 2011.

On the external fronts he wound up the war in Iraq, as well as a scheduled drawing down of American troops from Afghanistan by 2014.His administration singed the New START arms control treaty with Russia and rescued Libya from the despotic regime of Col Qaddafi . His administration’s hunting down Osama bin Laden and killing him in May 2011 is no mean achievement from the
American national security perspective.

He does not brag, is down to earth, does not vindictively retaliate, talks about issues, and is an intellectual and a visionary. He is one of the highly educated presidents of the United State. Obama has not faltered nor purposely did anything as to invite pointing fingers at him.

Obama’s role as the president of the United State has been markedly successful, smooth, plausible and not as thorny and whims-driven as that of his predecessor GW Bush: the architect of the ruination of American robust economy and slandering this great country’s fair reputation by launching unprovoked attack on Afghanistan and Iraq. President Obama has been mostly busy in righting the colossal wrongs wrought by his unscrupulous predecessor.
Mitt Romney is also a pleasant looking, jolly good person but he does not stand as tall with Obama in either intellectual caliber or in veritable achievements for the American people in such a short time despite the ground situation being so messy when he took over. While the American presidential elections are far for a few months, the gossips are reverberating that Romney is banking upon the support of the chairman of the House Budget Committee Representative Paul D. Ryan who prepared the Republican House budget. Merely to claim that he was successful businessman and would straighten the American economy is a puerile argument to win the popular vote.

Romney’s budget that dwells upon the deep cuts in cherished social programs to a Medicare overhaul, could drive up costs for future retirees and fundamentally change the popular health plan. Moreover, it would “cut taxes sharply for the wealthy; gut public education, medical research, and other government programs; and increase the burden on the elderly to pay for their own health care”.

This budget is neither realistic nor its overall tenor is in the public interests. Obama’s reforms to refurbish American dwindling economy far exceed the Ryan’s budget reform in their positive impact with regards to improvement of economy, creation of jobs and providing relief to the downtrodden in the society. Already the job situation is improving and less and less people are claiming unemployment allowances.

The American people are very conscientious who would weigh the pros and cons of both the sides and vote for the better one. They would not prefer to choose an unpredictable head of state who looks raw and offers an agenda with half baked recipes, that that may not come up to the expectations of the suffering sections of the American society. Obama’s achievements outweigh his drawback and pitfalls if any, and therefore, he should be the strong candidate to return to the American presidency for the second term.

The writer is a senior journalist and a former diplomat. He is also a regular contributor to pkarticleshub.com
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US battle to revive manufacturing
April 14, 2012
Bruce Stokes

In his January 2012 State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama mentioned the word “manufacturing” eight times.

In what was effectively the kickoff of his 2012 presidential reelection campaign, Obama told likely voters worried about the fate of the economy that: “we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back.” His words were music to the ears of a US public eager to return to a not-so distant past when manufacturing jobs provided an income that enabled the average American industrial worker to live a middle-class lifestyle, the ability to save to buy a home and pay for a child’s college education, and money and time to play golf or go fishing.

The loss of that manufacturing-supported standard of living weighs on Americans. A 2011 survey for the Alliance for American Manufacturing found that 79 per cent of likely 2012 voters said that the United States had lost too many manufacturing jobs.

So the president’s newfound interest in manufacturing – he had mentioned the word only once during his three previous State of the Union addresses – was in touch with voter sentiments. And it seems in touch with reality.

The country appears on the cusp of a manufacturing renaissance.

But the underlying reality of manufacturing’s comeback, the role it can play in America’s economic recovery and whether all this can help reelect the president in the fall is less certain. Manufacturing faces severe challenges, as outlined by a recent McKinsey report: technological change that creates new jobs but destroys existing ones, a widening gap between the skills that employers seek and the skills that employees possess, and a geographic mismatch between where the jobs are and where the workforce exists.

The US economy grew 3 per cent, after adjustment for inflation, in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the preceding quarter, the latest available data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. It signaled an acceleration of the US recovery from the Great Recession triggered by the 2008 financial crisis.

Industry has been a major driver of that growth. Its contribution to growth in 2010 was nearly twice that of the services sector. Manufacturing currently accounts for 11 per cent of America’s GDP – it was 25 per cent in 1947 and has been declining slowly since then, with a precipitate fall off beginning in the late 1990s.

The United States is the world’s mightiest manufacturing economy, producing 21 per cent of all goods made globally. China is second at 15 per cent.

Manufacturers are a major source of innovation, accounting for more than two-thirds of all research and development conducted in the United States. And manufacturing workers have higher pay and more generous benefits – about a fifth higher – than Americans holding non-manufacturing jobs.

Manufacturing remains critical to America’s success in the world marketplace. Exports of goods account for three-fifths of all US sales abroad. President Obama has promised to double US exports by 2014. And the only way to reach that ambitious target is to increase manufactured exports. That requires a stronger industrial sector.

Manufacturing employment is also on the rise. Some analysts contend that revival is just around the corner. A 2011 report by the Boston Consulting Group concluded that by 2015 manufacturing in some parts of the United States will be as economical as producing in China, ushering in a new era for American manufacturing.

The manufacturing revival going on in the United States, perhaps into the future, should not be equated with a revival in the American standard of living. There may be more manufacturing, but workers take home smaller pay packages than a decade earlier. Even then, the manufacturing rebound is happening in a small number of states.

However, manufacturing wages are growing slower than average weekly wages in seven of the 10 key states come November. So, manufacturing workers are losing ground in terms of their standard of living relative to that of their neighbours.

This harsh reality may explain why the recent increase in US manufacturing jobs and Obama’s newfound interest in promoting such resurgence may not benefit him in the fall US election. This reality may also help explain why the most recent public opinion polls show that, in head-to-head competition, Obama is ahead of Mitt Romney by more than the margin of error in only three of the 10 swing states.

So the US economy is recovering, and manufacturing is leading the way. But more jobs and growth will not necessarily translate into a rebound in the American standard of living. Thus despite the resurgence of manufacturing and the revival of US exports that Obama made the centerpiece of his economic strategy, he may still face a tight race for reelection.
Bruce Stokes is a transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

© 2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalisation
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Global Peace and Wars: America at War with itself
April 16, 2012
Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD
Exclusive Article


Built on lies and political deception, the on-going wars were suppose to create a new culture of FEAR amongst the American and European common masses, enabling the ruling elite to sustain their grip over the powerhouses for long time to come as did the Nazis, a war of thousand years to dominate the world. Instead, it has backed fire; the leaders are fearful day and night from the masses and unable to cope with the challenging public concerns on the war causalities or to answer rational questions about the outcome of these self-generated conflicts. Ironically, the American and British leaders are fighting wars they cannot win, nor afford to lose in the public eyes.

“Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.” Goethe

Wars and aggressions kill people and do not produce peace and harmony but resentment and degeneration. History illustrates when a nation or the leaders challenge the limits of the Laws of God and approach near the end of their lifespan, insanity takes-over common sense and they tend to ignore warnings and reject all voices of reason. Most of the conscientiously responsible Western scholars and political intellectuals are getting increasingly concerned, not to identify their interests with the minority ruling elite of the United States and Britain and other hired private mercenaries and the prospects of the indictment of the ‘war crimes against humanity’ charging George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair and their role in large scale massacres of the civilians and using uranium powered weapons for destruction of human habitats in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

C.E.M. Joad (Guide to Modern Wickedness), enlists divergent facets of evil thinking and minds that governed the Europeans to kill each other during and preceding the two World Wars. After prolonged history of barbarity, Europeans seem to be thinking rationally and soul searching for fighting against themselves and are at relative peace within the corridors of the EU. Whereas, some of the American political strategists are making headways for “Perpetual War and Perpetual Peace” to manifest the ambitious imperialism in another major global conflict to wipe out the whole of the humanity. The Western nations under NATO waging the bogus “War on Terrorism” use the mass media as a weapon to misinform and deceive the public of a possible threat to their life and security. The corporate run news media shield the leadership animosity to perpetuate wars for economic and political goals. NATO re-invented a new role to be an active belligerent institution in Afghanistan after its failed history to engage the former USSR on any real front of the major ideological conflicts. Bush and now President Obama claim they were invited to Afghanistan. Lies know no bound in contemporary political wickedness. There exists a wide gulf between the aspirations of the masses in the Western nations and thinking of the type of leaders they have in the ruling elite. People want peace and do not support the war mongering of the few against other human beings in the Muslim world.

Professor John Esposito (Georgetown University, and author of Unholy War and What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam), makes a candid observation:

“in many parts of the Muslim world the war against global terrorism has come to be viewed as a war against Islam and Muslims. The image of America has become that of a neo-imperial power that has sought to redraw the map of the Middle East and the Muslim world, influenced by an unholy alliance of neoconservatives and the militant Christian right.”

The recent wars have gone terribly wrong and the end is fast approaching, sheer madness in thinking and strategic decision making to create new Mi Lia of Vietnam particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Near their defeat, the Nazis resorted to mass killings across Europe, and so did the Soviet Union prior to defeat and surrender to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Daily massacres of the innocent civilians throughout Iraq and Afghanistan and the stage drama could rest on any given conclusive note to the pages of history. Katrina was the first installment in a series of warnings to come for those leaders who could listen and learn from the history. Not so, to the neo-conservative dominated US administration that failed to achieve its objectives in conquering Iraq and Afghanistan, just to ensure smooth oil supplies and global military and economic supremacy. The global community appeared optimistic after reading the “Audacity of Hope” that President Obama will emerge as a new leader undoing the Bush led extreme militancy and warmongering across the globe and will initiate global peace and harmony and bridge the broken relationships with the important Muslim world. The intensity of the Bush era led bogus wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan signal a different action agenda than peace making. President Obama continues to be acting as warmonger rather than a peace maker.

Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher had envisioned “Perpetual Peace”, the doctrine that gave war riddled Europeans much needed hope and optimism for peace making and conflict management. Once again, humanity appears to have been pushed back to the shameful annals of the European Dark Ages. In search of new animosity, few utopian scholars wanted to distract the humanity after the end of the Cold War to keep the liberal democracy working and ensure electoral voters active participation. In early 90’s, Samuel Huntington reinvented and re-ignited the old cliché – “a clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam – a new age of confrontation between the predominantly technologically advanced culture of the West and the subdued interdependent societal religious culture of the Muslim world. The powerful mass media and the official policy makers throughout the West, fuel the insane imagery that the Arabs and Muslims are “fundamentalists” and “terrorists.”

After the collapse of the ideological wars between the Communism and the Capitalism, the world political arena was free and conveniently available for a new ideology of “a clash of civilizations” to seal the closing chapters of the Cold War. Huntington was courageous and frank to admit “we need ennobling animosity” to survive and shield the decaying human culture of the Western civilization. Most Western leaders politically aligned with the ruling elite, would refute that “a clash of civilizations” is the underpinning framework of the official policy and the “War on Terrorism”, denying the premise of unilateral wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and onward to Pakistan. The mass media would elude ‘smart bomb’ theory hitting the terrorist targets but in reality, more than 3 million Iraqi civilians have reportedly been killed by the US led forces in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003. Deceptive claim as it is that there was a war between the US and Iraq. It was a media entertainment soap opera and above all, a unilateral act of aggression against a fellow UN member state, forbidden under the UN Charter. According to Kofi Annan, the UN General Secretary, it is an “illegal war” to occupy Iraq. French and German leaders resented and resisted politically and morally, but could not dare to challenge the US and Britain through any means of military force to stop the futuristic bloodbath in a country that had no quarrel nor posed any threat to the US or Britain. When facts are ridiculed, ignorant advisors construct dogmas to boast the defeated psyche of the leaders. That is where the former President Bush and British PM Tony Blair found their respective standing. History points out countless wicked people and nations that had transgressed the limits of the Laws of the God, and never acknowledged if there was anything wrong with their THINKING and BEHAVIOR until they experienced the consequential end and their destruction. The Al-Qura’an reveals that Pharaoh claimed, “handful of people have annoyed us, whereas, we are the most powerful people on guard to defend our values.” Moses and the followers crossed safely the Red Sea but God punished Pharaoh and his armies as they vanished in the Red Sea. Does it explain well as a role model, how the egoistic tyrants and transgressors meet their end in this world?

The image of a single most World Power is fixed and unquestionable, be it fair or foul. The net outcome shows the manufactured imagery of Muslims as the alleged terrorists and the sole inheritor of the 21st century political ideology. With massive corporate sponsorships and the Western mass media collaborative alliances, Islamic civilization is the only targeted client of this emerging business. What about the Arabs and Muslims, have they done anything to challenge the absurdity of the so called “war on terrorism” and to safeguard their political interests and human survivability? Even the most educated ones are indifferent and fearful of the prevalent authoritarian rule in their lands and the dictates of the Western masters to survive. With full awareness of the problem, they live in division, discard and helplessness.

There are no Muslim institutions to provide honest analyses or reflect on the possible remedies. Throughout the Arab-Muslim world, there is not a single established university teaching global peace, security and conflict management – the institutions dealing with the present and envisioning the future that the Western nations are built upon for change and development. Leaderless Muslim masses appear desperate to look for a visionary and intelligent leader to offer some consolence and intellectual security. Not so, in the Arabs or Muslim countries, leaders live in palaces, not with people. All the leaders are pre-screened by the CIA and the World Bank before taking a shape and form to move into a palace. The author of Muslim under Siege clarifies that leaders in Muslim countries are pre-screened and chosen by the West. Everywhere neo-colonial rulers operate the infrastructures and maintain the natural resources across the Muslim world but there are no leaders to organize and unite the Muslim as Ummah-one people, one nation intellectually and politically powerful enough to defend it against the odds.

The neo-colonial rulers have helped the Colonial Masters to make the Muslim masses helpless victim of their warmongering and inhuman atrocities being carried out at Gutanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib Prison, and Massacre at Fullajah, Haditah, Bughdad, Kandhar, South-North Waziristan and elsewhere. The ruling elite would not allow their national press to discuss such sensitive topics. There is no Sultan Salahuddin Ayoubi that the European would fear for centuries to come, there are no Sultan Babyar and Sheikh Izzuddin to give blowing defeats to Halaqu Khan – the Mongol warlord, and no Allama Iqbal or Ali Shariati to awake the sleeping folks and guide the believers to success.

Built on lies and political deception, the on-going wars were suppose to create a new culture of FEAR amongst the American and European common masses, enabling the ruling elite to sustain their grip over the powerhouses for long time to come as did the Nazis, a war of thousand years to dominate the world. Instead, it has backed fire; the leaders are fearful day and night from the masses and unable to cope with the challenging public concerns on the war causalities or to answer rational questions about the outcome of these self-generated conflicts. Ironically, the American and British leaders are fighting wars they cannot win, nor afford to lose in the public eyes. Majority of the well informed masses do not seem to support the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ugly as the outcome of the wars become, the furious will be the media propaganda embodying new strategies to cover up the entrenched leaders. Increasing disclosures of American and British military massacres of the Iraqi civilians, the home-based authorities will forge illegal arrests of young Muslims in North America and Western Europe, alleging connection with non-existing or dead Al-Qaeda group. More and more planned allegations will make news media headlines about the alleged “Terrorist Plan”, purchase of fertilizer commodity and “bomb-making” and what not. The intelligent ones in Washington and London draw the script to enhance economic and political market data. The strategic games are well known, create more problems to dilute and overshadow the massacres of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and distract people’s attention from the known acts of crime against the humanity. War is business and political deception is known and tolerable trait of the new global image-making trade.

If there were educated and intelligent leaders in the Muslim world, one could reason the unreason. But the oil exporting Arab leaders operate from a position of political weakness, not strength to play any useful role in international politics. They have built palaces over moving sand, not institutions to educate and protect the interest of the Muslim Ummah. Imagine the dichotomy of the living history, the Christian Crusaders came, ransacked and killed 170, 000 Muslims just in one day to occupy Jerusalem. Despite assurances of peace and religious sanctity, the Crusaders moved horses in blood-flown streets to capture Jerusalem. When Sultan Salahuddin Ayoubi reconquered Jerusalem, the visionary leader allowed and escorted all the Christian Crusaders to safety with human dignity, honor and material wealth. History shall describe a corporate world run by greed and animalistic savagery, preoccupied to influence and control the destinies of the living human beings under the guise of economic feasibility and market interests.

To enforce power of reason and ask for accountability of the few Western Warlords, the humanity has reason to be concerned with, well organized and united to oppose the unilateral barbarity of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This underlines an URGENT NEED for global morality and political accountability in world affairs. The solution cannot come from those who are parts of the problem but only from a civilized people under morally and politically responsible leadership who will know what peace means, and have no colonial history and are readily acceptable as genuinely civilized representatives of the humanity. Immanuel Kant (“Perpetual Peace”), must have sensed the threat to international peace and the nature of destructive wars – “standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard, 1997), former Security Advisor to President Carter, makes an historical reference: “American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives describe American priorities as the economic subjugation of the Soviet Union and the control of Central Asia and the Middle East.” With the continued wars of aggressions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the international institutions overwhelmingly controlled and managed by the Western Powers have become irrelevant to the 21st century needs of the global humanity. The UN and its Security Council are dormant bodies striving for their own functional survival and have abandoned their Chartered–based obligations to protect the humanity from the scourge of war and aggression. To undermine the UN functions, NATO has taken over the role of leading European-American operated institutions to protect the Western strategic and political interest outside its sphere of influence or legal mandate. Contravening its own charter and global undertakings, there is no effective UN organization except as a debating club, no International Red Cross as such, no UN Security Council, no competent Arab League, no other accountable global body to question or investigate why the occupying American and British armed forces are engaged in New Holocaust of the civilian population in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? The Western Crusade is solely aimed at killings of the Muslims and occupying their natural resources. Likewise, there are no Arab leaders or Muslim armies to offer sense of security to the besieged Arab population victims of the daily massacres in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General lacked courage to cross over the limits and question the US led war on Iraq and to “annoy” President Bush or PM Blair, it could have undermined his own candidacy as continued Secretary General of the UN failed body. He simply called the US-British aggression as an “illegal war”.

Across the Western world, masses vigorously oppose the on-going deadly wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. NATO, inadvertently, has assumed the role of fighting in Afghanistan. In wars people are killed, leaders are not. None of the Western leaders have ever fought a war on the real front. Simply put, there are politicians lacking reason and honesty of purpose, and are engaged in time killing discussions. In liberal democracies, leaders were supposed to be accountable to the will of the masses. Not so in the US or Britain, the places with strongest public opposition against the Wars on Terrorism. The leaders and the masses appear to be living in different time zones, not being able to cross-over the widening gaps to interact with one another as democratic rights and obligations would dictate within the working of the political system. Listening was meant to be political learning and reasoning, not any more even President Obama has continued according to Bob Woodward’s “Obama War.” The continued wars serve the interest of the corporate establishments and the Western economies. The image of deliberately dismantled system of global governance is meant to appease the economically influential and politically smart Western elite. Hitler and Mussolini were Europeans, not Arabs or Muslims, and they did not rule alone on their own, as there were millions to cheer them up and support their leadership egos with galvanized news media alignment of the time, and their personal ideologies as law and order of the day. At the initial stages of the 21st century, the replica is exactly the same from the pages of history, only the names and titles have been changed and adjusted – a small minority of ‘sick puppies’ are determined to occupy the oil and gas resources and to wipe out the Arabs and Islamic civilization under the guise of terrorism.

The authoritarian and oil-pumping Arab dictators cannot escape the accountability as they failed miserably to learn from the living history. God provided them ample opportunities to be the leaders of the mankind but they refuted the terms of reference- that was the Islam as a way of thinking and living. They discarded Islam and opted for transitory oil-based economic prosperity, planned, controlled and managed by the Western oil importing countries. This scheme of things had no human progress, values, importance or consideration for the Arab people, their culture, their faith or future. The Arabs remain where they were prior to the discovery of the oil resources – the people ingrained in “Jahalia”- age of ignorance. That is how their Western Masters view them and treat them. Now, the authoritarian rulers have come out in open to commit massacres of their own people – the truth that was covered with lies and deceptions by all the Arab rulers that they are the real enemies of Islam and Muslim people. The emerging conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya and massive killings of the civilian population across the Arab world are a prelude to ultimate economic, social and political breakdown and final collapse of the Arab regimes. It is happening fast in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria and in other Arab countries soon to be at the mercy of the US-Britain- the ‘camel jockeys’ as the Western media describes them. The vital question is, was the oil discovery a “fitna” – conspiracy to destroy the Arab world or was a blessing in disguise for the few tribal lords to get entrapped in undoing the Arab world? Do the Arab ruling elite have answers to some of these rational questions?

Changing the names of Hitler and Mussolini, now historian and prosecutors responsible for conducting the war crimes will mention Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair and many more. Britain knows what it lost, cannot regain in colonial history, but the American empire has yet to learn the hard lessons. It is more fearful that soon it could be replaced by China in combination of another economically viable power or group of nations from the emerging rival economies of Asia. Amazingly, under the stress of extreme fear and fatigue, America has lost sense of moral direction, values and the true spirit of its own history. Throughout the Two World Wars, the European madness knew its geography and national boundaries – Europeans enjoyed killing fellow Europeans. But under the American Empire, its dimensions are widely insane and global, exclusively aimed at to kill Arabs-Muslims and destroy the Islamic civilization. Professor John Esposito has summed up the History Lessons in a meaningful context:

“An important lesson of history is that rulers and nations do rise and fall. Unforeseen circumstances can bring up unanticipated change. Few expected the breakup of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe to occur when they did ……now is the time for those in all walks of life (political, economic, military, media and academic) who wish to see a new order not to be silenced but to speak out, organize, vote and be willing when necessary to make sacrifices in promoting a new global order.”

There is something terribly wrong with the strategic thinking and decision making process of the Western leaders. With all the technologically advanced firepower, they could not fight against handful of Talaban defending their country. None of the Western leaders have factual knowledge or experience for being on any war fronts. They manage to stage a puppet show to deceive and mislead their own people and the mankind for fighting a worthy cause when there was none. War is not synonymous for peace. Righteousness and wickedness cannot be combined in one mind and character. Foremost, it was an American led aggression against the people of Afghanistan as was the case in Iraq, and then the longest war continued to create new markets for the sale of obsolete US weapons to the oil exporting Arab nations. These wars will distract people to find solutions for the real problems of occupation of Palestine. It is their mindset that requires diagnostic treatment as the ordinary folks across the US and Europe have no interest in killing other people and would prefer to co-exist in peace and harmony with the Muslim people. On the blatant dishonesty to peace and human freedom and opinionated viciousness of the 20th century politicians, Robert Briffault (The Making of Humanity, Cambridge University), an earlier 20th century scholar offered the following rational observation:

“The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience, good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.”

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution and comparative Western-Islamic cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest one: Arabia at Crossroads: Arab People Strive for Freedom, Peace and New Leadership. VDM Publishers, Germany, September 2011. Comments are welcome at: kmahboob@yahoo.com)

The article is contributed to pkarticleshub.com
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Old Saturday, April 21, 2012
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US can’t abandon the Mideast
April 21, 2012
By Hassan Bin Talal

Early this year, the Pentagon’s strategic review signalled a shift in priorities for US foreign policy, suggesting that more attention would be paid to the Asia-Pacific region. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke of this as a “pivot” towards Asia, signalling what for many analysts and ordinary Americans has been a long-overdue transition away from Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East in general.

But there’s a problem with that. The act of pivoting involves turning your back, and the United States should not turn its back on the Middle East.

Of course it makes sense for the US to pay more attention to the Asia-Pacific region, which will be both a leader in economic growth and a security challenge during the 21st century. It is not just the United States that understands this. In Jordan, we are also directing more of our attention eastwards, which makes sense because we, along with much of the Middle East, are located in West Asia. Economic, political and military centres of gravity are clearly changing.

Still, America does have a duty to this region and to the Arab world in general. The euphoria generated by the “Arab awakening” cannot hide the fact that the Middle East is as much of a mess as it ever was. In 2009, President Obama spoke in Cairo of how “while America in the past has focused on oil and gas in this part of the world, we now seek a broader engagement.” Such engagement, which we all hope for, cannot be sustained by pivoting.

American military disengagement from Iraq and Afghanistan is welcomed within the Arab world. But other types of US engagement are still needed. The desire by many Middle Eastern countries for greater self-determination is also qualified by an obvious question: After a decade of war and continued stalemate in the peace process, will America abandon this region and leave it to pick up the pieces?

A sense of mission fatigue in Washington has meant that the lessons of history are being overlooked. Until there is peace between Israel and Palestine, this area of the world will continue to dominate the desks and the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council. There are currently four central powers in the Middle East: Israel, Iran, Turkey and the US. Not one of those powers is Arab. Any substantive pulling back by America is likely to create a power vacuum. In a region where intermediaries are important, this will have consequences. For instance, there is no security forum in the Middle East in which Iran and Saudi Arabia sit at the same table.

Beyond the question of Iran, there is growing potential for the movement of nuclear fissile material, including weaponisation technology, and biological agents, across the Middle East and North Africa. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, of which I am a board member, has concluded that 32 countries possess 1 kilogram or more of weapons-usable nuclear material. If that material ends up being illicitly moved anywhere, it is likely to end up here. West Asia and North Africa has long been a laboratory for every kind of weapon.

Recent upheavals have made borders far more porous: We have seen this in Syria, in Sinai and across the Sahel region, where a huge cache of weapons systems have crossed the border from Libya. The Middle East has the largest number of stateless and internally displaced peoples in the world, and recent upheavals have caused these numbers to surge.

The UN estimates that well over 1 million people fled Libya to border countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Niger and Chad. Archipelagoes of the dispossessed exist throughout the region. Locking down weapons-usable material and the weapons-based underground economy has never been more difficult. The potential for nuclear terrorism within the region has never been greater.

The United States would not be wise to pivot too far or too fast. There is too much that has been left undone. America can help in three ways. First by focusing on the resourcefulness of the people of this region rather than the resources of their governments. The Middle East is the most militarised region of the world, yet nowhere else is insecurity such a physical and psychological fact of life. Programmes that support start-up culture, creative enterprises and local good governance, or which provide training opportunities and micro-loans, actively combat anti-Western propaganda, promote social cohesion and propagate “human security”. People with hopes and opportunities do not become terrorists.

The second thing America can do is foster better relations between states within the region. The frameworks that connect West Asia and North Africa are ad hoc and personalised to an excessive degree. A lack of regional institutions means that when tensions rise, there is no release valve, and conflict is made all the more likely.

At present no body exists to coordinate water and energy policy between countries, despite the fact these resources are shared, take no account of national boundaries and are quickly depleting. There is no Council for Security and Cooperation in the region.

Thirdly and finally, America can renew its legacy in the Middle East, and its image in the world, by bringing about a firm, just and equitable settlement to the peace process.

The move to project American leadership in the Asia-Pacific region through economic growth, regional security and enduring values, in the words of Hillary Clinton, is broadly based on the three elements of the 1975 Helsinki Act: security, economic and technical cooperation, and human rights. Taken together, they form the foundation of a promising new blueprint for relations not just with the Asia-Pacific region but with West Asia too.

A member of Jordan’s royal family Hassan Bin Talal is a board member of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and founder of the West Asia-North Africa Forum.
Courtesy: Los Angeles Times
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Old Monday, April 23, 2012
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Bridging Sino-US gap
April 23, 2012
Stapleton Roy

If President Obama is reelected this fall, his relationship with Xi Jinping will be a key factor in how relations between China and the United States develop. Unless China and the United States can find ways to block the current drift toward strategic rivalry, tensions will rise. This will make it more difficult to preserve the climate of peace and prosperity that has made East Asia such a dramatic success story.

The next decade is likely to be a decisive period determining the future course of US-China relations. If China’s economy continues to surge ahead while the United States struggles to bring its burgeoning budget deficit under control, the PRC could emerge from this coming decade with the largest GDP in the world. This will have both psychological and strategic significance and could roil the waters of the bilateral relationship.

Recent US attention to East Asia, and particularly to Southeast Asia, is part of a coherent US policy approach in East Asia that seeks not to contain China but to restore confidence in the region. The United States, despite its budget difficulties, is truly committed to maintaining a robust US presence in both northeast and Southeast Asia. Not surprisingly, this flurry of US activity is causing many Chinese to see the United States as challenging China in its own backyard. In reality, the situation is more complex.

China labours under a unique handicap in determining its regional foreign policy. It is the only country in the world that has so many contentious territorial disputes with bordering countries. China’s instinctive desire to use its growing strength to be more assertive in defending its territorial claims only brings it into confrontation with its neighbours, which plays into the hands of the United States. The net result is that for a time China struggled to find the right response to the Obama administration’s policy of rebalancing in East Asia.

Since last summer, China has moved toward an effective counter-strategy marked by a pattern of less assertive behaviour, high-level meetings with leaders in Southeast Asia, and agreements with some of the other claimants to disputed territory over managing tensions. It also reaffirmed Deng Xiaoping’s concept of “setting aside disputes and pursuing common development.” In short, China has adopted the Bismarkian strategy of seeking to persuade the countries around it who feel threatened by China’s rapid rise that their interests will be better served by cooperation with China than by coalescing against it. Nevertheless, the nationalistic pressures unleashed by China’s enhanced claim to global leadership have the potential to undermine the domestic base for Beijing’s current approach.

Nevertheless, Beijing’s diplomatic nimbleness means that the United States must constantly calibrate its approach to the region. In particular, the United States should be careful not to overplay its hand. China’s more assertive behavior following the 2008 financial crisis did indeed increase the desire of Beijing’s neighbors for the United States to remain engaged to play a balancing role. But now, the very countries in Southeast Asia that welcome renewed US attention to the region are worried that the United States may be going too far in provoking China by trumpeting US determination to pivot back into East Asia.

US credibility is also affected by the discrepancy between the more vigorous US posture in Asia against the backdrop of an underperforming US economy and a political system that seems incapable of addressing domestic problems effectively. These factors strengthen the image of the United States as a declining power. America’s closest friends and allies in the region are worried that the United States may become distracted by its domestic difficulties and lack the staying power to counter China’s rise by other than military means.

Such considerations underscore the fact that successful US reengagement in Southeast Asia will place a premium on effective management of the US-China relationship. East Asians want the United States sufficiently engaged to cause China to be more cautious in using its growing power in inappropriate ways. But they do not want the United States to behave in ways that make China a more dangerous neighbour.

We should constantly bear in mind that China’s challenge to the United States is of an entirely different order than that posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The USSR never posed a serious threat of overtaking the United States in terms of the size or vitality of its economy. In China’s case, it has for an extended period been advancing in multiple areas that contribute to comprehensive national strength. There is no question that China faces daunting problems in sustaining its rapid growth, but US policy should not be based on expectations that China’s structural weaknesses will prevent it from becoming stronger and more prosperous.

Stapleton Roy is director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. In a career of 45 years he served as ambassador to China, Singapore and Indonesia and was Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research at the US State Department

© 2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalisation
Source: Khaleej Times
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Old Tuesday, May 08, 2012
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Obama… it’s still about hope
May 7, 2012
Flashpoint

Hope and change powered Barack Obama to the White House four years ago, but can he play the same gambit twice?

Conventional wisdom says no, given the fact that the US president is the steward of America’s demoralised economic state, but Obama, setting off on a six-month trek to a new presidential election, begs to differ.

“If people ask you what this campaign is about, you tell them it’s still about hope,” Obama on Saturday told crowds chanting “four more years” in battleground states Ohio and Virginia.

“I still believe … I still believe we are not as divided as our politics suggest,” Obama said, in an echo of the 2004 Democratic convention speech which shot the then unknown Illinois lawmaker to prominence. “I still believe we have more in common than the pundits tell us. I still believe in you, and I’m asking you to keep believing in me.”

Obama, at the first official rallies of his bid for the second term that all presidents crave, injected some badly needed poetry and excitement back into his brand after three prosaic, slogging years of governing. The president showed again on Saturday he can still move core supporters, who left an arena here buzzing. Carolyn Johnson — who traveled to the rally in Virginia’s state capital Richmond from Warsaw, 50 miles to the east — said she was inspired by Obama’s pep talk. The president seems bent on renewing the passion of 2008 in parts of his new stump speech, though other passages seemed to reflect an attempt by his campaign to throw out red meat to Democratic interest groups to see what works.

Before he bounded on stage, his campaign showed a video featuring Edith Childs, the elderly woman who inspired a tired Obama on a tough day in South Carolina four years ago and coined his chant “Fired, Up, Ready to Go!” And the Obama camp set the table for his debut swing with scorched earth negative campaign ads, questioning millionaire Romney over his Swiss bank account and asking whether he would have had the moxie to kill Osama bin Laden.

Though Obama’s job rating has been fairly robust, just below the 50 per cent threshold presidents see as boosting their reelection hopes, 47 per cent in a RealClearPolitics poll average still say they disapprove of the president.

Some analysts believe that Obama’s arguments on framing a “fair shot” for everyone in a more equitable economy only work if people feel a sense of imminent personal crisis is over.

Interestingly, Obama chose to stage his first official rallies in two states where the state unemployment rate is below the national average: the jobless rate was 7.5 per cent in Ohio and 5.6 per cent in Virginia in March.

Should Obama win both states, in which he currently leads Romney in latest polls, the electoral map sets up in such a way that he would be almost certain to retain the White House.

Republicans appear to scent the danger, and are desperate to make the election a referendum on what they see as a poor economic record. —
Source: Kahleej Times
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