From The Egypt Daily News
By Naomi Wolf

Is it possible to fall out of love with your own country? For two years, I, like many Americans, have been focused intently on documenting, exposing, and alerting the nation to the Bush administration’s criminality and its assault on the Constitution and the rule of law — a story often marginalized at home. I was certain that when Americans knew what was being done in their name, they would react with horror and outrage.

Three months ago, the Bush administration still clung to its devil’s sound bite, “We don’t torture.” Now, Doctors Without Borders has issued its report documenting American-held detainees’ traumas, and even lie detector tests confirm they have been tortured. The Red Cross report has leaked: torture and war crimes. Jane Mayer’s impeccably researched exposé “The Dark Side” just hit the stores: torture, crafted and directed from the top.
The Washington Post gave readers actual video footage of the abusive interrogation of a Canadian minor, Omar Khadr, who was seen showing his still-bleeding abdominal wounds, weeping and pleading with his captors.
So the truth is out and freely available. And America is still napping, worrying about its weight, and hanging out at the mall.

I had thought that after so much exposure, thousands of Americans would be holding vigils on Capitol Hill, that religious leaders would be asking God’s forgiveness, and that a popular groundswell of revulsion, similar to the nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement, would emerge. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if torture is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

And yet no such thing has occurred. There is no crisis in America’s churches and synagogues, no Christian and Jewish leaders crying out for justice in the name of Jesus, a tortured political prisoner, or of Yahweh, who demands righteousness. I asked a contact in the interfaith world why. He replied, “The mainstream churches don’t care, because they are Republican. And the synagogues don’t care, because the prisoners are Arabs.”
It was then that I realized that I could not be in love with my country right now. How can I care about the fate of people like that? If this is what Americans are feeling, if that is who we are, we don’t deserve our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Read more Dear World

From The Niagara Falls Reporter
By Bill Gallagher

President George W. Bush is talking to our enemies and making significant progress. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is salvaging a shred of accomplishment she hopes will cloak her long parade of diplomatic failures. Vice President Dick Cheney is seething, locked in his bat cave, sipping bourbon and wishing he could personally torture someone — Condi Rice, for starters.

North Korea got scratched from Bush’s Axis of Evil litany and removed from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror by agreeing to declare its nuclear program to the outside world, paving the way for negotiations aimed at keeping the entire Korean peninsula nuclear-free.

Since Bush has long scoffed at diplomacy, and Cheney — his master and commander — would rather bomb than talk any day, the deal with North Korea marks a seismic shift for the administration’s foreign policy. Though time is running out in the final year of his presidency, Bush has finally done something right. Hooray for Bush! There, I said it.

Of course, the talks should have begun eight years ago as a continuation of the negotiations President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, initiated. Then there might have been a chance of dissuading Kim Jong Il from building the nukes he now has and the missile capability to deliver them.

The North Koreans, perhaps with choreographic counseling from Americans, provided the conspicuous visuals television news just laps up. A cooling tower used for a reactor extracting plutonium for its nuclear weapons was demolished with a blast.

It was more symbol than substance, and I wonder how many people watching the event realized that, as part of the deal, the North Koreans, for now, get to keep the nuclear weapons they’ve already produced.

Read more Diplomacy

From The Seattle PI
By Thomas P.M. Barnett

A vociferous bureaucratic battle will occur across the first two years of the next administration, one that will greatly determine our military’s future capabilities in this long war against radical extremism.

On one side will be pitted the “big war” crowd with its emphasis on “resetting” the force following the inevitable drawdown in Iraq. This is mostly the air-sea crowd from the Air Force and Navy. On the other side will stand — ironically enough — those mostly ground forces from the Army and Marines that are logically slated to benefit maximally from any such “healing period.”

The “reset” argument rests on one very conspicuous assumption: Iraq was a one-off, not to be repeated and certainly no harbinger of future conflicts. It was, in effect, a second Vietnam, an asymmetrical war that cannot be effectively won using conventional military power.

To actually succeed in such warfare, you must make our force increasingly symmetrical to the enemies we face in insurgencies; more focused on generating security, winning hearts and minds, training up foreign militaries, and encouraging economic development. Adapting the U.S. military to these tasks, says the big war crowd, will thus ruin it for great-power war, something it must remain optimized to wage lest America invite such conflict in decades ahead.

In effect, the big war crowd asks us to either abandon our historic role as globalization’s bodyguard right at the apogee of our international liberal trade order’s expansion around the planet, or continue trading off hypothetical future casualties from big-war scenarios against current actual casualties from small war operations, suffering far more of the latter to prevent the possibility of the former.

Read more Pentagon Battle

From The Khaleej Times
By MJ Akbar

George Bush went to war in Iraq in order to create a new Middle East. Six years later, much to the shock of his allies and the horror of perceptive Americans, he has. The shock and horror arise from the fact that the Middle East has been changed by the Bush intervention in a direction sharply divergent from America’s fundamental interests as perceived by the Bush doctrine.

The Middle East was a term coined in 1903 by an American naval historian and strategic thinker, at the very height of British power across the world, when the Boers had been defeated in South Africa, the Ottomans had been virtually displaced from their most important colony Egypt, the Arabian Sea confirmed as a British lake and India itself was preparing to celebrate the glory of the Raj with a glittering durbar summoned by the Viceroy of Viceroys, Lord Curzon. India was a bulwark of this concept called the Middle East, a fortress of trade and imperial might that had neo-colonised China, and supplied the bulk of the troops for British expansion. The rupee was king from Singapore to Jeddah.

When Bush’s team visualised their new map of the world they included India in what they termed the ‘Greater Middle East’. India was not an intrinsic part of the new power flows, but it was integrated once again as the fortress of the East. Since India was run by Indians rather than British allies, Indians had to be co-opted into the engineering of the new design. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the man for the job.

Six years later Project Greater Middle East is tottering all across this strategic map. In Delhi, the Manmohan Singh government has been unable to bear the burden of an alliance with Bush. The Congress encouraged the illusion, with the help of a cabal of analysts, publicists and lobbyists, that the Left was a lapdog rather than a watchdog, and could be either appeased by a bone or silenced with a stick. When the moment came to choose, the Congress stood with Bush instead of Prakash Karat.

The official excuse for this decision is energy. But this is deception. Dr Manmohan Singh deliberately sabotaged a much cheaper and more immediate source of energy for the country when he deliberately undermined the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, raising one false spectre after another to mislead the country, so that it would seem that there was no option but to go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal. We have forgotten now that the first objection he raised, three years ago, was that financing would be a problem.

Read more Consequences

From The Asia Times
By Jim Lobe

While, in his dreams, US President George W Bush might have seen a “Mission Accomplished” banner unfurled as the cooling tower at North Korea’s plutonium-producing plant was blown up, Friday’s internationally televised fireworks at Yongbyon offered merely a glimmer of possible success in a foreign policy legacy that seems to be getting darker by the day.

Indeed, a week that was supposed to end on the bright note of Friday’s demolition produced instead a steady drumbeat of more bad news from overseas, not to mention the steep slide in US stock markets fueled in part by the continuing rise in the price of oil.

Increased North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)casualties in Afghanistan and the admission by a top US general that violence there has mushroomed by 40% this year have added to the impression that Washington and its NATO allies are losing the war there and that Bush’s decision to divert resources and manpower from Afghanistan to the Iraq invasion constituted a major strategic error.

Reports from Pakistan have added to that impression. Growing friction between the US and Pakistani militaries, the latter’s failure to prevent infiltration by the Taliban into Afghanistan, and the apparent extension of the influence of Pakistan’s own Taliban beyond the Federally Administered Tribal Areas to the very outskirts of Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, have persuaded a growing number of experts that South Asia, rather than Iraq, is indeed the central front in Bush’s “war against terror”.

Read more Sour Taste

From The Washington Post
By Dan Froomkin

President Bush today announced that North Korea was tentatively off his axis of evil, after the rogue nation submitted a declaration of its nuclear programs to the Chinese government.

It sounds like great progress in terms of U.S. relations with North Korea, and particularly in terms of containing that country’s nuclear threat. But the progress is relative.

Bush made time in his Rose Garden announcement this morning to characterize President Clinton’s approach to North Korea as failed appeasement. Yet there is a persuasive argument to be made that Bush’s bullheaded approach to foreign affairs had its second-worst outcome in North Korea.

Beginning in Bush’s first term, after he branded North Korea as “evil” and accused the country of violating the nuclear deal signed during the Clinton administration — an accusation that, it emerged last year, was based on flimsy intelligence — the North Korean regime launched an accelerated nuclear program and successfully built a small arsenal of weapons, including one that was exploded in a 2006 test.

Only now, in the twilight of Bush’s second term, are we seeing any positive movement. And there are significant questions about how much the North Korean regime is really giving up.

Read more Bush

From Tom Dispatch
By John Feffer

Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you’re shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.

Just ask the North Koreans.

In the 1990s, North Korea was the world’s canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe — though few saw it that way at the time.

That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now — escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea’s battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world’s highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

Read more Mother Earth

From The Washington Post
By Jim Hoagland

Standing observantly on the sidelines has never been George W. Bush’s intent or forte. But the president needs to master the skill for his twilight months in power.

A spirit of accommodation suddenly grips some of the world’s greatest trouble spots — in part because Bush is going and a new president is coming. This is a time when regional powers work out basic understandings on their own to prepare for a period in which American attention will turn decisively inward and American power will be uncertain in application and range.

The decision by Israel and Syria to commit publicly to indirect peace talks — under Turkish mediation and outside U.S.-sponsored channels — seems to fall into this category. So do the Arab League’s (at least temporarily) successful effort to get Lebanon’s warring factions to accept a plan for a new government there, and the notable warming between China and Japan this month.

Elsewhere, urban guerrillas allow Iraq’s government to take control of problem areas in Baghdad and Basra, North Korea turns over declarations on its nuclear weapons program demanded by the United States as a condition for continuing negotiations, and Pakistan’s new civilian government negotiates with and tries to co-opt tribal militias that support al-Qaeda and Taliban forces.

These probes, agreements and rapprochements all have local causes and effects. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, must hope that engaging Syria will boost his collapsing political fortunes at home and undercut the Palestinian radicals of Hamas. North Korea may have finally decided that it will get more from a legacy-hungry Bush than the next U.S. leader. And so on.

Read more Hope

From The Seattle PI
By Helen Thomas

Let us hope that the next president of the United States knows some history.

And let us hope that the next president will know that the United States cannot call all the shots, or pick and choose which leader-dictator we will talk to or decide which countries can have unconventional weapons.

In other words, the U.S. should not rely totally on the arrogance of its formidable power in its foreign relations.

That is why the performance of the New York Philharmonic in the Stalinist-style closed society of North Korea is a remarkable breakthrough.

Music is the universal language. In the case of North Korea, the New York Philharmonic’s concert last week may be viewed years from now as the small step that eventually opened the way for more cultural contacts and understanding between two countries that have been at sword-point since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Overwhelmed by the warm reception in Pyongyang, North Korea, Lorin Maazel, the Philharmonic’s music director, told reporters: “I think it’s going to do a great deal for Korean-U.S relations. We may have been instrumental in opening a little door.”

The White House did all it could to play down its significance.

“At the end of the day,” press secretary Dana Perino said, “we consider this concert to be a concert. And it’s not a diplomatic coup.”

Read more NY Philharmonic

From The LA Times
By Rosa Brooks

Christopher Hill, U.S. assistant secretary of State, stunned reporters Wednesday by announcing that North Korea has agreed to disable its nuclear facilities — and by attributing the breakthrough to a “a previously unknown but surprisingly effective” method of foreign relations recently discovered by U.S. officials, which Hill dubbed “diplomacy.”

“This is a real first for us,” Hill explained proudly. “And I won’t pretend that the idea of using this ‘diplomacy’ technique didn’t initially strike me as wacky. But so far, so good!”

In a written statement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice elaborated on Hill’s announcement: “This is an exciting moment in U.S. foreign policy. Now that we have discovered this innovative new method, ‘diplomacy,’ our nation will no longer have to rely exclusively on more traditional forms of foreign relations such as mockery, insults and unilateral military action.”

Not everyone agrees that diplomacy is “new.” Professor Richard F. Burton III, William Moreson Chair of Ancient History at UC Berkeley, notes that the art of diplomacy was fairly well known to past civilizations, from China’s Eastern Zhou dynasty (771-221 BC) to the U.S. administration of William Jefferson Clinton (AD 1993-2001).

“The idea of negotiating directly with your enemies, as well as your friends, isn’t novel. But from AD 2001-2007 — the New Dark Ages — diplomacy was vigorously suppressed, and by 2007, the art was presumed lost, along with the art of hand-carving accordions. It’s nice to see young persons taking an interest in diplomacy again.”

Read more Diplomacy