Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2007

The ‘American Century’ only began 60 years ago. But it seems already to be over, with the disaster of Iraq forcing some of the United States’ ruling elites to realise that its hegemony has been severely weakened. But nobody seems to know what to do next, or even how to behave (Keep reading…)

Harpers Magazine October, 2002

Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney’s masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan. (Keep reading…)

Truthdig Sep 18, 2007

Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some other, fresher way to explain why “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the “democratically elected government” of “liberated” Iraq does not explicitly have the legal power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to Iraq accountable for their deadly actions. (Keep reading…)

Special to Canadian Dimension September 11, 207

“Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.” (Keep reading…)

Special to Casnadian Dimernsion July 30, 2007

Rose petals fluttered out of the tricoloured flag — saffron, white and green — as it unfolded at the top of the flagpole. A boys choir shrieked out national hymns in Hindi on that cloudy, cool – by Rajasthan standards — monsoon August morning in 1947 on the lawns of our school in Jaipur. It was independence day. No, not the anniversary of an independence day, but the real thing. Hours earlier, Nehru had delivered his “tryst with destiny” speech. India had just gotten rid of the British imperialists along with their grandiloquent, grotesquely pompous and racist ideas of King and Empire. Mahatma Gandhi had finally won out over the policies of Winston Churchill. One, the greatest imperialist in recent history and even today, the icon of neocons everywhere. The other, a half-naked fakir (Churchill’s words; fakir means beggar). Gandhi did engineer the dissolution of the British Empire after all, something that Churchill had said he would never preside over. (Technically, he did not, because he had only recently lost power to Clement Atlee). The witch was dead, the empire was gone. Even as we were assembled on the school grounds, the white sahibs were headed west on P&O liners, never to return to this part of the world – or so we thought. (Keep reading…)

Counterpunch 2007

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has spawned the reemergence of the word imperialism into the lexicon of everyday language, after an absence of five decades stretching back to the end of Second World War. U.S. military adventures since then–particularly in Korea, Vietnam and Central America–were dressed up as defensive operations against the spread and threat posed by Communism and all its evil manifestations, namely, national liberation, self determination, and social and economic justice. (Keep reading…)

How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them

TomDispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com June 17, 2007 (Keep reading…)

TomDispatch.com 14 June 2007

How wars of the future may be fought just to run the machines that fight them. Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis - either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. (Keep reading…)

Special to Canadian Dimension June 17, 2007

“We shall have no peace as long as the whole territory of the Land of Israel will not return under Jewish control…. A stable peace will come only then, when Israel will return to itself all its historical lands, and will thus control both the Suez and the Ormudz channel…. We must remember that Iraqi oil fields too are located on the Jewish land.” Avrom Shmulevic, rabbi and historian (Keep reading…)

Global Day of Action - June 9 2007

The second week of June will mark forty years since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Six Day war. This is now the longestenduring military occupation in the world. While the Israeli governmentevades negotiations that would end the occupation and lead to a justpeace, the lives of Palestinians continue to be crushed daily by closuresand economic strangulation, their land confiscated for settlements andtheir communities made into prisons by the Segregation Wall. (Keep reading…)