George Monbiot
The Guardian
May 30, 2007
Motorised transport is a form of time travel. We mine the compressed time of other eras – the infinitisimal rain of plankton onto the ocean floor, the settlement of trees in anoxic swamps – and use it to accelerate through our own. Every tank of fuel contains thousands of years of accretions. Our future depends on the expectation that the past will never be exhausted.
Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
March 5, 2007
In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated the Bush Administration, in both it public diplomacy and its cover operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in part of the region, propelled it into widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Jeremy Scahill
The Nation
April 30, 2007
The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing up for a great sell-out on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a “showdown” or “war” with the White House, it is hardly that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the anti-war electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the Congressional leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation, even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that “this war is lost.”
Chalmers Johnson
ZNet
May 18, 2007
In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.
Amira Hass
Ha’aretz
May 22, 2007
Every few weeks some international body issues a report directly linking the policy of restricted movement imposed by Israel on the occupied territories and the state of economic deterioration there. The report is often accompanied by a warning that the situation cannot persist. Last week it was the turn of the World Bank to issue a cautionary report, entitled “Movement and Access Restrictions in the West Bank: Uncertainty and Inefficiency in the Palestinian Economy.”
Robert Fisk
Counterpunch
May 22, 2007
There is something obscene about watching the siege of Nahr el-Bared. The old Palestinian camp–home to 30,000 lost souls who will never go “home”–basks in the Mediterranean sunlight beyond a cluster of orange orchards. Soldiers of the Lebanese army, having retaken their positions on the main road north, idle their time aboard their old personnel carriers. And we–we representatives of the world’s press–sit equally idly atop a half-built apartment block, basking in the little garden or sipping cups of scalding tea beside the satellite dishes where the titans of television stride by in their blue space suits and helmets.
Stephen Zunes
Foreign Policy in Focus
May 18, 2007
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert continues to resist pressure that he resign following the publication late last month of the interim report by a special Israeli commission on Israel’s war on Lebanon last summer. Military chief Dan Halutz has already been forced to step down and Defense Minister Amir Peretz has announced he will also be resigning shortly. The report from the Winograd commission concludes that “the decision to respond with an immediate, intensive military strike was not based on a detailed, comprehensive and authorized military plan.” In making the decision to go to war in Lebanon, the Israeli government “did not consider the whole range of options, including that of continuing the policy of ‘containment.’”
Dilip Hiro
TomDispatch.com
May 10, 2007
Recently Turkey came close to experiencing a soft military coup. In late April, faced with the prospect of the moderate Islamist Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul becoming president, the country’s top generals threatened to overthrow the elected government under the guise of protecting “secularism.” When the minority secularist parliamentarians boycotted the poll for president, the Constitutional Court, powerfully influenced by the military’s threat, invalidated the parliament’s vote for Gul on the technical grounds that it lacked a two-thirds quorum — something that had never been an issue before.
Noam Chomsky
The International News
May 18, 2007
The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.
