Punishment for giving in to temptation is not reserved for the Day of Judgment. In this world too the price we pay is to make lesser human beings of ourselves. The loss of clarity, the loss of focus, the loss of direction all add up to limit our capacities to do anything meaningful. Giving in to temptation is initially distracting but eventually addictive and the person goes the way of all addicts. They lose control of their lives as they are consumed by their addictions.
The definition of temptation is to take small steps in the wrong direction. The power of temptation is to suck you in once you take that small step and make you think that you have the power to take out your toe if you have only dipped it in the quicksand. Small steps become giant steps, before you know it and giant steps mean that you will eventually embrace temptation as a way of life.
God promises forgiveness and redemption but only if you have not reached a point of no return. After that, God promises that He will not help you. Turn around NOW, while you may still have the power and don’t look back.
If there was no heaven or hell, no life after death, what would be the meaning of life?
Life would lose its higher purpose and people would be driven out of pure self interest which would start in self preservation but end up in greed.
Greed and self indulgence are obsessions which are difficult if not impossible to give up and the first thing they do is to dull the senses and people stop listening. They become arrogant and oblivious to reality and start living in a world created by themselves and pride themselves on the fact that it (their world) is Godless.
Khusro
Monday, October 29, 2007
Telling the US as it is.
Sample Posting
Gen. Asad Durrani: The only silver lining that I can show you is that the majority of military men in Pakistan today have no interest in getting involved with politics. I know many don't believe what I say, but that's the reality. "
Editorial Comment
It is good to have an insight of what some people are saying to American visitors. They seem to be saying the way it is and not what they think the Americans want to hear. It is even conceivable that Gen. Musharraf in private converations is equally frank. The Americans on the other hand come with an agenda. They undersand that their policies are making people anti American but they must be rationalising this by saying that these people don't know any better. What place can there be for such people in a free Democracy?
This is not limited to Pakistan. Seventy percent of Britons were against the attack on Iraq, a higher pecentage od Italians were against the attack but both the US and these Govts joined forces to attack Iraq. A majority of Americans might be against attacking Iran but that may not deter the US govt from attacking Iran.
A better question of Daschle would have been, " you don't really care what we say to you, do you.?"
Khusro
Tuesday, October 23, 2007Anjum NiazThe writer is a freelance journalist with over twenty years of experience in national and international reportingTom Daschle was in Islamabad. He is the former US Senate majority leader. His mission was to take back to Washington snapshots of the coming elections in Pakistan. He's a power engine in the National Democratic Institute (NDI) on Capitol Hill. His delegation's arrival coincided with Benazir Bhutto's caravan of democracy getting botched up by suicide bombings. More than the elections, Daschle appeared preoccupied with violence when he opened up a dialogue with members of PILDAT (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency) . Shahid Hamid, once a Farooq Leghari loyalist and former governor Punjab gave an opening statement on PILDAT's behalf, saying the electoral process was at a "sensitive stage." Among his team were Lt-Gen. (retd) Asad Durrani, former director-general Inter-Services Intelligence and military intelligence; Dr Ijaz Shafi Gilani, chairman Gallup, Pakistan; Tasneem Noorani, former interior secretary; Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, executive director PILDAT and Aasiya Riaz, joint director PILDAT.
Tom Daschle: How concerned are you about violence and what happened to Ms Bhutto yesterday?
Shahid Hamid: Benazir Bhutto targeted herself.Tom Daschle (pursing his lips): That's a very provocative statement?
Shahid Hamid: The impression here is that she will hand over A.Q Khan and allow America to fight its war on Pakistani soil when she becomes the prime minister. Naturally she's made enemies.
Tom Daschle: The lesson then is not to express yourself?
Tasneem Noorani: She anticipated an attack. She had already allied herself with an unpopular military government which was receiving active support from the US and the UK.
Asad Durrani: Senator, your interest appears focused on Benazir Bhutto? What was the need for her to make such provocative statements?
Tom Daschle: It means that there can be no open dialogue then? Intimidation appears to quell a dialogue? Perhaps demilitarizing the political process is the first step towards fair and free elections. I am curious to know why the ISI plays such a significant role. It is antithetical to free and fair elections.
Asad Durrani: The US prescription for fair and free elections means to engage with the General. The ISI is an instrument of the state and if you want the ISI out of politics then the military must get out first. Civil society has not been allowed a voice in the last few years. Benazir Bhutto has been saying things which have not gone down well with Pakistanis. People are now looking at a political scenario where battle lines have been drawn between pro-Musharraf (Benazir Bhutto and America) forces and rest of the political parties and civil society. An ideological divide has set in. Benazir Bhutto said that she expected an assassination attack at the airport tarmac on her arrival.
Ijaz Gilani: Yesterday's attack has been the bloodiest in our political history killing 150 people and maiming 500. It never happened before? Why did it happen now? The answer is that the mainstream in Pakistan is heavily tilted against Musharraf as seen in the recent International Republican Institute (IRI) poll. The General and Benazir Bhutto are unacceptable to 70 per cent of the population. Therefore when a violent action, like Thursdays bombing takes place, it finds acceptability among the general masses. This is an unfortunate twist of circumstances but Musharraf has encouraged violence. I am deeply surprised that in a country which is deeply polarized, political parties have not played their due role in the last 40 years. The streets are quiet. Politics instead, is being conducted in courts and in the mass media! General Musharraf has thrown a gauntlet to the people: 'if you show up on the streets to challenge me then I'll concede to you, otherwise winning an argument in the courts is not worth it. I don't care.' The point to mull over for us all is: Why hasn't politics appeared on the streets? I am troubled that people from different backgrounds and the general public want to play politics by taking their case to the courts where the establishment twists the law.
Tom Daschle: Who's the alternative to Musharraf and Bhutto? Nawaz Sharif unlike Benazir Bhutto has no street power as recently seen on his arrival? After 9/11, intelligence gathering has reached dangerous levels around the world. It's been extremely harmful. It means that the ISI and Musharraf will use more military intelligence in the name of security to advance his political goals?
Shahid Hamid: When there was a constitutional impasse between Nawaz Sharif and president Leghari in 1997, the army chief Gen Jehangir Karamat, who was abroad, received frantic calls from both the gentlemen. They wanted him to intervene. But Karamat stayed away. You will notice that at every cabinet meeting of Nawaz Sharif, General Musharraf was seen seated next to the prime minister. He was elevated as the most important man by Sharif. What does that tell us? In America, the defence budget gets debated by the lawmakers. In Pakistan, we have one-line entry!
Tasneem Noorani: The role of the ISI will expand in the years to come.
Shahid Hamid: How much more can it expand?
Bilal Mehboob: A number of US institutions like the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute are doing a good job in Pakistan, but when the US administration expresses a tilt towards the military government here, the entire work of such institutions gets diluted. We want you to carry back this message that while we respect and value the fine job being done by NDI and IRI, the Bush administration must be neutral and not take sides that openly.
Asad Durrani: The only silver lining that I can show you is that the majority of military men in Pakistan today have no interest in getting involved with politics. I know many don't believe what I say, but that's the reality.
Aasia Riaz: I agree with Gen. Durrani. The only way forward is for the army to step back and allow democracy to move on. While Benazir Bhutto agreed to play ball with the establishment and was allowed to stage a return, Nawaz Sharif sat back. But he's a force that must not be dismissed lightly.
Ijaz Gilani: Street power does not signify success at the polls as we saw in the 1970 elections. The religious parties came across as a dominant force showing their numbers on the streets, yet out of 300 seats, they only bagged eight in the national assembly. Similarly in 1997 elections, Benazir Bhutto was badly routed in Punjab, Frontier, while she only won 16 seats from rural Sindh. So while the PPP may be seen as the mainstream party today, all that is needed is a five percent tilt in Punjab to keep her from becoming the next prime minister! She may not win because she has aligned herself with the anti-people group comprising US and Musharraf. America has become a stakeholder in our political affairs just as the army is a stakeholder.
Sheila Fruman, country director NDI Pakistan: How can the role of the ISI be curbed?
Shahid Hamid: We don't have a law that regulates the ISI like you have in the US regarding the intelligence agencies. In the 2002 elections the ISI played a major role in prevailing upon the local leaders and offering them its support if they voted for the PML –Q. One is hoping that the ISI will not repeat its performance in 2008 elections. The actual rigging does not happen on the polling day but starts much in advance.
Tom Daschle: What happened in the 2002 elections?
Shahid Hamid: Crucial people in police and local administration sympathetic to the military government were posted in strategic places. Entire villages surrendered under their pressure and voted for the candidates put up by the ISI.
Ijaz Gilani: It's public knowledge that the DG ISI selects his juniors that go down to the polling stations to ensure that votes get cast for their candidates.
Tom Daschle: Is there no law prohibiting such a practice?
Asad Durrani: It's permitted by law!
Tasneem Noorani: Senator, you appear to be excessively bothered with the role of the ISI. Elections have already been pre-rigged by the US and UK's open support of Musharraf's re-election as president. When have international forces ever sided with the interests of the people? Never. So why are we talking about fair and free elections?
Gen. Asad Durrani: The only silver lining that I can show you is that the majority of military men in Pakistan today have no interest in getting involved with politics. I know many don't believe what I say, but that's the reality. "
Editorial Comment
It is good to have an insight of what some people are saying to American visitors. They seem to be saying the way it is and not what they think the Americans want to hear. It is even conceivable that Gen. Musharraf in private converations is equally frank. The Americans on the other hand come with an agenda. They undersand that their policies are making people anti American but they must be rationalising this by saying that these people don't know any better. What place can there be for such people in a free Democracy?
This is not limited to Pakistan. Seventy percent of Britons were against the attack on Iraq, a higher pecentage od Italians were against the attack but both the US and these Govts joined forces to attack Iraq. A majority of Americans might be against attacking Iran but that may not deter the US govt from attacking Iran.
A better question of Daschle would have been, " you don't really care what we say to you, do you.?"
Khusro
Tuesday, October 23, 2007Anjum NiazThe writer is a freelance journalist with over twenty years of experience in national and international reportingTom Daschle was in Islamabad. He is the former US Senate majority leader. His mission was to take back to Washington snapshots of the coming elections in Pakistan. He's a power engine in the National Democratic Institute (NDI) on Capitol Hill. His delegation's arrival coincided with Benazir Bhutto's caravan of democracy getting botched up by suicide bombings. More than the elections, Daschle appeared preoccupied with violence when he opened up a dialogue with members of PILDAT (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency) . Shahid Hamid, once a Farooq Leghari loyalist and former governor Punjab gave an opening statement on PILDAT's behalf, saying the electoral process was at a "sensitive stage." Among his team were Lt-Gen. (retd) Asad Durrani, former director-general Inter-Services Intelligence and military intelligence; Dr Ijaz Shafi Gilani, chairman Gallup, Pakistan; Tasneem Noorani, former interior secretary; Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, executive director PILDAT and Aasiya Riaz, joint director PILDAT.
Tom Daschle: How concerned are you about violence and what happened to Ms Bhutto yesterday?
Shahid Hamid: Benazir Bhutto targeted herself.Tom Daschle (pursing his lips): That's a very provocative statement?
Shahid Hamid: The impression here is that she will hand over A.Q Khan and allow America to fight its war on Pakistani soil when she becomes the prime minister. Naturally she's made enemies.
Tom Daschle: The lesson then is not to express yourself?
Tasneem Noorani: She anticipated an attack. She had already allied herself with an unpopular military government which was receiving active support from the US and the UK.
Asad Durrani: Senator, your interest appears focused on Benazir Bhutto? What was the need for her to make such provocative statements?
Tom Daschle: It means that there can be no open dialogue then? Intimidation appears to quell a dialogue? Perhaps demilitarizing the political process is the first step towards fair and free elections. I am curious to know why the ISI plays such a significant role. It is antithetical to free and fair elections.
Asad Durrani: The US prescription for fair and free elections means to engage with the General. The ISI is an instrument of the state and if you want the ISI out of politics then the military must get out first. Civil society has not been allowed a voice in the last few years. Benazir Bhutto has been saying things which have not gone down well with Pakistanis. People are now looking at a political scenario where battle lines have been drawn between pro-Musharraf (Benazir Bhutto and America) forces and rest of the political parties and civil society. An ideological divide has set in. Benazir Bhutto said that she expected an assassination attack at the airport tarmac on her arrival.
Ijaz Gilani: Yesterday's attack has been the bloodiest in our political history killing 150 people and maiming 500. It never happened before? Why did it happen now? The answer is that the mainstream in Pakistan is heavily tilted against Musharraf as seen in the recent International Republican Institute (IRI) poll. The General and Benazir Bhutto are unacceptable to 70 per cent of the population. Therefore when a violent action, like Thursdays bombing takes place, it finds acceptability among the general masses. This is an unfortunate twist of circumstances but Musharraf has encouraged violence. I am deeply surprised that in a country which is deeply polarized, political parties have not played their due role in the last 40 years. The streets are quiet. Politics instead, is being conducted in courts and in the mass media! General Musharraf has thrown a gauntlet to the people: 'if you show up on the streets to challenge me then I'll concede to you, otherwise winning an argument in the courts is not worth it. I don't care.' The point to mull over for us all is: Why hasn't politics appeared on the streets? I am troubled that people from different backgrounds and the general public want to play politics by taking their case to the courts where the establishment twists the law.
Tom Daschle: Who's the alternative to Musharraf and Bhutto? Nawaz Sharif unlike Benazir Bhutto has no street power as recently seen on his arrival? After 9/11, intelligence gathering has reached dangerous levels around the world. It's been extremely harmful. It means that the ISI and Musharraf will use more military intelligence in the name of security to advance his political goals?
Shahid Hamid: When there was a constitutional impasse between Nawaz Sharif and president Leghari in 1997, the army chief Gen Jehangir Karamat, who was abroad, received frantic calls from both the gentlemen. They wanted him to intervene. But Karamat stayed away. You will notice that at every cabinet meeting of Nawaz Sharif, General Musharraf was seen seated next to the prime minister. He was elevated as the most important man by Sharif. What does that tell us? In America, the defence budget gets debated by the lawmakers. In Pakistan, we have one-line entry!
Tasneem Noorani: The role of the ISI will expand in the years to come.
Shahid Hamid: How much more can it expand?
Bilal Mehboob: A number of US institutions like the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute are doing a good job in Pakistan, but when the US administration expresses a tilt towards the military government here, the entire work of such institutions gets diluted. We want you to carry back this message that while we respect and value the fine job being done by NDI and IRI, the Bush administration must be neutral and not take sides that openly.
Asad Durrani: The only silver lining that I can show you is that the majority of military men in Pakistan today have no interest in getting involved with politics. I know many don't believe what I say, but that's the reality.
Aasia Riaz: I agree with Gen. Durrani. The only way forward is for the army to step back and allow democracy to move on. While Benazir Bhutto agreed to play ball with the establishment and was allowed to stage a return, Nawaz Sharif sat back. But he's a force that must not be dismissed lightly.
Ijaz Gilani: Street power does not signify success at the polls as we saw in the 1970 elections. The religious parties came across as a dominant force showing their numbers on the streets, yet out of 300 seats, they only bagged eight in the national assembly. Similarly in 1997 elections, Benazir Bhutto was badly routed in Punjab, Frontier, while she only won 16 seats from rural Sindh. So while the PPP may be seen as the mainstream party today, all that is needed is a five percent tilt in Punjab to keep her from becoming the next prime minister! She may not win because she has aligned herself with the anti-people group comprising US and Musharraf. America has become a stakeholder in our political affairs just as the army is a stakeholder.
Sheila Fruman, country director NDI Pakistan: How can the role of the ISI be curbed?
Shahid Hamid: We don't have a law that regulates the ISI like you have in the US regarding the intelligence agencies. In the 2002 elections the ISI played a major role in prevailing upon the local leaders and offering them its support if they voted for the PML –Q. One is hoping that the ISI will not repeat its performance in 2008 elections. The actual rigging does not happen on the polling day but starts much in advance.
Tom Daschle: What happened in the 2002 elections?
Shahid Hamid: Crucial people in police and local administration sympathetic to the military government were posted in strategic places. Entire villages surrendered under their pressure and voted for the candidates put up by the ISI.
Ijaz Gilani: It's public knowledge that the DG ISI selects his juniors that go down to the polling stations to ensure that votes get cast for their candidates.
Tom Daschle: Is there no law prohibiting such a practice?
Asad Durrani: It's permitted by law!
Tasneem Noorani: Senator, you appear to be excessively bothered with the role of the ISI. Elections have already been pre-rigged by the US and UK's open support of Musharraf's re-election as president. When have international forces ever sided with the interests of the people? Never. So why are we talking about fair and free elections?
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Runaway Capitalism
Sample Post
It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West. " - Dalrymple
Editorial Comment
By William Dalrymple
A lesson in humility for the smug WestMany of the western values we think of as superior came from the East and our blind arrogance hurts our standing in the world10.14.2007 The Times (UK) By William DalrympleAbout 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue. Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi'ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together. Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: "No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him." He also argued for what he called "the pursuit of reason" rather than "reliance on the marshy land of tradition".
All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de'Fiori. It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he "was not afraid to say the West's values are better", and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: "Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment," he wrote. The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over the motion: "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values". (The motion was eventually carried, I regret to say.) Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ethical source of these values. Yet where do these ideas actually come from?
Both Judaism and Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch, Constanti-nople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe. Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value – universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.
And where was the first law code drawn up? In Athens or London? Actually, no – it was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient Iraq. Who was the first ruler to emphasise the importance of the equality of his subjects? The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, set down in stone basic freedoms for all his people, and did not exclude women and slaves, as Aristotle had done. In the real world, East and West do not have separate and compartmentalised sets of values. Does a Midwestern Baptist have the same values as an urbane Richard Dawkins-read-ing atheist? Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same ethical tradition as Osama Bin Laden? In the East as in the West there is a huge variety of ethical systems, but surprisingly similar ideals, and ideas of good and evil. To cherry-pick your favourite universal humanistic ideals, and call them western, then to imply that their opposites are somehow eastern values is simply bigoted and silly, as well as unhistorical.
The great historian of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, knew better. As he wrote at the end of his three-volume history: "Our civilisation has grown . . . out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident." He is right. The best in both eastern and western civilisation come not from asserting your own superiority, but instead from having the humility to learn from what is good in others, as well as to recognise your own past mistakes. Ramming your ideas down the throats of others is rarely a productive tactic. There are lessons here from our own past.
European history is full of monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, some of which – such as those of Salazar, Tito and Franco – survived into the 1970s and 1980s. The relatively recent triumph of democracy across Europe has less to do with some biologically inherent western love of freedom, than with an ability to learn humbly from the mistakes of the past – notably the millions of deaths that took place due to western ideologies such as Marxism, fas-cism and Nazism. These movements were not freak departures from form, so much as terrible expressions of the darker side of western civilisation, including our long traditions of antisemitism at home.
Alongside this we also have history of exporting genocide abroad in the worst excesses of western colonialism – which, like the Holocaust, comes from treating the nonwestern other as untermenschen, as savage and somehow subhuman. For though we like to ignore it, and like to think of ourselves as paragons of peace and freedom, the West has a strong militaristic tradition of attacking and invading the countries of those we think of as savages, and of wiping out the less-developed peoples of four continents as part of our civilising mission.
The list of western genocides that preceded and set the scene for the Holocaust is a terrible one. The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by British hunting parties who were given licences to exterminate this "inferior race" whom the colonial authorities said should be "hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed". Many were caught in traps, before being tortured or burnt alive. The same fate saw us exterminate the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as tribe after tribe of Native Americans. The European slave trade forcibly abducted 15m Africans and killed as many more. It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all – the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West.
For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for all that is remarkable and beautiful in our art, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-de-feating in western history. The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same.
If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right. Tragically, this western tradition of failing to respect other cultures and treating the other as untermenschen has not completely died. We might now recognise that genocide is wrong, yet 30 years after the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia and My Lai, the cadaver of western colonialism has yet again emerged shuddering from its shallow grave. One only has to think of the massacres of Iraqi civilians in in Falluja or the disgusting treatment meted out to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to see how the cultural assertiveness of the neocons has brought these traditions of treating Arabs as subhuman back from the dead. Yet the briefest look at the foreign policy of the Bush administration surely gives a textbook example of the futility of trying to impose your values and ideas – even one so noble as democracy – on another people down the barrel of a gun, rather than through example and dialogue.
In Iraq itself, we have succeeded in destroying a formerly prosperous and secular country, and creating the largest refugee problem in the modern Middle East: 4m Iraqis have now been forced abroad. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US attempt to push democracy in the region has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against its old client proxies – by and large corrupt, decadent monarchies and decaying nationalist parties. But rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed they would, Muslims have everywhere lined up behind those parties that have most clearly been seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention in the region, namely the religious parties of political Islam.
Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders "to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions." It will be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility.
William Dalrymple's new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history
It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West. " - Dalrymple
Editorial Comment
I used to think that the American Civilization is resting on a three legged stool. After reading Dalrymple, the penny has dropped that it is actually a four legged stool. The legs of this stool are the four pillars of this civlizations and they are as follows:
Capitalism
Secularism
Democracy
Arrogance.
The arrogance reflects itself in the racism that is still on display with the treatment of the blacks. It could be argued that arrogance is a by product of power, which it is, but it is also a by product of secularism. Perhaps it would be better, after all to call this a three legged stool. How ever Secularism is also a by product of Capitalism.
Taken individually we have much to learn from Democracy and Capitalism. Put all four in the mix and you may be asking for trouble. If America was a vehicle, Capitalism would be the wheel that it turned on. All the other wheels followed where ever Capitalism took it.
The problem is when the vehicle is going downhill, capitalism will take it down faster if there was no balancing by Democracy. Democracy would be unable to apply the breaks if arrogance had already eaten away its lining.
The situation we have today is what I call run away Capitalism, what Naomi Klien calls dDsaster Capitalism and what Robert Reich calls Super Capitalism. Reich asks the obvious question, "Why has capitalism become so triumphant and democracy so enfeebled? Are these two trends connected? What, if anything, can be done to strengthen democracy?"
"Supercapitalism" is his term for heightened competition, innovation and global integration. He pays tribute to its awesome productivity, calling it a triumph for consumers and investors. But as "citizens seeking the common good", he argues, Americans have fared less well. Dominant firms have retreated; unions have withered; regulators have been emasculated; economic insecurity reigns. Worse, money and market forces have spilled into politics, corrupting it. "Thus did supercapitalism replace democratic capitalism."
Naomi Klien in her book Disaster Capitalism says "the central myth of our time that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand is known to be a lie by the very people who are advancing it, and they will admit it on the record."
Runaway Capitalism has become the tail that wags the dog. It has proved that greed is a powerful motivator when it comes to hard work and productivity. It has also shown that greed has no scruples. In fact a person or Corporation with scruples is not greedy enough. To the Capitalist greed is a virtue to aspire to.
The quality of greed is that it is all consuming. The true Capitalist like an alchoholic becomes the slave of Capitalism. Eventually Capitalism and not the Capitalist dictates how to live your life. Capitalism becomes a religion, as it has in America and influences all aspects of life. The role of Democracy and Secularism is then to serve the interests of Capitalism. Money dictates who will be elected President or represent the people. The rich sit in Congress and serve the interests of Corporations and Lobbiests and of course Capitalism. War becomes a business and quality of life the highest American ideal.
With the demise of Communism, America should have become the leader of the world but it did not. Capitalism did not train it to be a leader. Capitalism is best at exploiting and that is what the worlds sole super power did. As a Seculat state, it looked out for it's own interest rather than those of Humanity. It refused to sign any treaty which would have asked it to help out with Global Warming. It refused to be bound by International law. It ignored the UN when ever it could and formed a minority Coalition of the Willing. It lost an opportunity when the world looked up to it, which may never be given to any other nation.
While pursuing riches, the Capitalist blames poverty on the poor and refuses to help people who to them are poor because they are lazy. Every good system has down sides, so why beat up on Capitalism. In any case what is the alternative?
The alternative is to do what is right then to do what is expedient. Amazingly in the US there are examples of such people. All is not lost for America if such people can succeed in this environment. The idea is to take Democracy back to where it belongs, with the people. The idea is to take money out of politics and bring back Community into politics. Just taking two examples from the internet will give you an idea of the concept. Wikepedia and Craigslist are two companies on the internet whose motive is not to make money. Craigs List, which is run by 25 people gets 8.6 billion page runs a month. It has been around for only 12 years. Wikepedia which has been around fot 3 years is amongst the top ten most popular sites in the world. It can be accessed in 150 languages. It is a not for profit.
If these companies wished to make money, their owners could become billionaires. The magic is that the purpose of these companies is to serve communities ( for free). Thet are not gimmicks, where you build up a volume and then start charging membership. They are do it yourself companies out to make the world a better place all around.
A new world is around the corner where countries could be run like this.
Khusro
For a review of Robert Reich's Book visit the link below.
www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2007/10/robert_reich.
The Times (UK) : A lesson in humility for the smug West
By William Dalrymple
A lesson in humility for the smug WestMany of the western values we think of as superior came from the East and our blind arrogance hurts our standing in the world10.14.2007 The Times (UK) By William DalrympleAbout 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue. Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi'ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together. Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: "No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him." He also argued for what he called "the pursuit of reason" rather than "reliance on the marshy land of tradition".
All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de'Fiori. It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he "was not afraid to say the West's values are better", and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: "Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment," he wrote. The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over the motion: "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values". (The motion was eventually carried, I regret to say.) Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ethical source of these values. Yet where do these ideas actually come from?
Both Judaism and Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch, Constanti-nople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe. Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value – universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.
And where was the first law code drawn up? In Athens or London? Actually, no – it was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient Iraq. Who was the first ruler to emphasise the importance of the equality of his subjects? The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, set down in stone basic freedoms for all his people, and did not exclude women and slaves, as Aristotle had done. In the real world, East and West do not have separate and compartmentalised sets of values. Does a Midwestern Baptist have the same values as an urbane Richard Dawkins-read-ing atheist? Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same ethical tradition as Osama Bin Laden? In the East as in the West there is a huge variety of ethical systems, but surprisingly similar ideals, and ideas of good and evil. To cherry-pick your favourite universal humanistic ideals, and call them western, then to imply that their opposites are somehow eastern values is simply bigoted and silly, as well as unhistorical.
The great historian of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, knew better. As he wrote at the end of his three-volume history: "Our civilisation has grown . . . out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident." He is right. The best in both eastern and western civilisation come not from asserting your own superiority, but instead from having the humility to learn from what is good in others, as well as to recognise your own past mistakes. Ramming your ideas down the throats of others is rarely a productive tactic. There are lessons here from our own past.
European history is full of monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, some of which – such as those of Salazar, Tito and Franco – survived into the 1970s and 1980s. The relatively recent triumph of democracy across Europe has less to do with some biologically inherent western love of freedom, than with an ability to learn humbly from the mistakes of the past – notably the millions of deaths that took place due to western ideologies such as Marxism, fas-cism and Nazism. These movements were not freak departures from form, so much as terrible expressions of the darker side of western civilisation, including our long traditions of antisemitism at home.
Alongside this we also have history of exporting genocide abroad in the worst excesses of western colonialism – which, like the Holocaust, comes from treating the nonwestern other as untermenschen, as savage and somehow subhuman. For though we like to ignore it, and like to think of ourselves as paragons of peace and freedom, the West has a strong militaristic tradition of attacking and invading the countries of those we think of as savages, and of wiping out the less-developed peoples of four continents as part of our civilising mission.
The list of western genocides that preceded and set the scene for the Holocaust is a terrible one. The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by British hunting parties who were given licences to exterminate this "inferior race" whom the colonial authorities said should be "hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed". Many were caught in traps, before being tortured or burnt alive. The same fate saw us exterminate the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as tribe after tribe of Native Americans. The European slave trade forcibly abducted 15m Africans and killed as many more. It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all – the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West.
For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for all that is remarkable and beautiful in our art, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-de-feating in western history. The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same.
If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right. Tragically, this western tradition of failing to respect other cultures and treating the other as untermenschen has not completely died. We might now recognise that genocide is wrong, yet 30 years after the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia and My Lai, the cadaver of western colonialism has yet again emerged shuddering from its shallow grave. One only has to think of the massacres of Iraqi civilians in in Falluja or the disgusting treatment meted out to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to see how the cultural assertiveness of the neocons has brought these traditions of treating Arabs as subhuman back from the dead. Yet the briefest look at the foreign policy of the Bush administration surely gives a textbook example of the futility of trying to impose your values and ideas – even one so noble as democracy – on another people down the barrel of a gun, rather than through example and dialogue.
In Iraq itself, we have succeeded in destroying a formerly prosperous and secular country, and creating the largest refugee problem in the modern Middle East: 4m Iraqis have now been forced abroad. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US attempt to push democracy in the region has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against its old client proxies – by and large corrupt, decadent monarchies and decaying nationalist parties. But rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed they would, Muslims have everywhere lined up behind those parties that have most clearly been seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention in the region, namely the religious parties of political Islam.
Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders "to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions." It will be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility.
William Dalrymple's new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history
The Collapse of Bush's Foreign Policy
Sample Post
"The turmoil in Turkey and Pakistan damages U.S. relations with two allies that are key to shoring up the countries under American occupation."
Editorial Comment
The speed at which the Bush’s foreign policy is unraveling is surprising even to me. At one time any country could be bought or beaten into submission. Countries are now beginning to see that the amount of money they receive for siding with America may not be worth the problems that it creates for them. They are beginning to see that the Americans have no plans, no strategy and no idea about any political solutions. The supposed war on terror is a sham and is creating more terrorism than reducing it.
Huge amounts of money are being poured into Iraq , Afghanistan , Pakistan without any favorable results. The loss of focus on other issues has meant that US has no idea of what is going on in then rest of the world and is no longer in control of any thing. Russia, China, South America, Africa have to take a back seat when the White House is obsessing about Iran.
The falling dollar, the growing budget deficit, the inability to spend as freely for domestic problems are all connected to a disastrous Foreign Policy. As International business gains in importance, American companies are moving their operations overseas because of unfriendly visa policies at home. Foreign Direct Investment is reducing as people are finding alternate markets which are more welcoming and more profitable. As the world begins to de link itself from America, America becomes the isolated island that it always wanted to be. Even Americans are venturing out less outside it's shores. The USA is becoming a Green Zone where the familiar images of McDonald's and the Stars and Stripes are reassuring of the fantasy that America does not need the world.
Khusro
From Turkey to Iraq to Pakistan, the mounting chaos proves the White House is just winging it.
By Juan Cole ( Salon.com)
Pages 1 2
Oct. 24, 2007 The Bush administration once imagined that its presence in Afghanistan and Iraq would be anchored by friendly neighbors, Turkey to the west and Pakistan to the east. Last week, as the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to deteriorate, the anchors themselves also came loose.
On Sunday, just days after the Turkish Parliament authorized an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish guerrillas ambushed and killed 17 Turkish soldiers inside Turkey. In Karachi, Pakistan, a massive bomb nearly killed U.S.-backed Benazir Bhutto, who was supposed to help stabilize the country. The Bush administration' s entire Middle East policy is coming undone -- if it even has a policy left, other than just sticking its fingers in the multiple, and multiplying, holes in the dike.
In Iraq, the Kurds of the north are the United States' most reliable allies. In addition to the 5.5 million Kurds in Iraq, however, persons speaking dialects of Kurdish constitute around 11 million of neighboring Turkey's 70 million citizens. There are another 4 million Kurds next door in Iran, and up to 2 million in Syria. All three of Iraq's northern neighbors fear that Kurdish nationalism, which has been fostered by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, could tear them apart. Opposition to that nationalism could provide a platform for an alliance of Syria, Turkey and Iran -- a nightmare for the Bush administration. Washington had hoped to isolate Syria, an ally of both Iran and of Hezbollah in Lebanon. That's not how it is turning out.
Even after Turkey declined to sign on to the Iraq war, then U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz praised it in April 2003 as a dependable ally and secularizing model for the Muslim world. Since then, however, Washington's relationship with Ankara has turned increasingly sour over U.S. favoritism toward the Kurds.
The Turkish Parliament late last week passed a resolution permitting the military to make incursions into Iraq in order to chase down guerrillas operating on both sides of the border. Syria's Bashar al-Assad piled on, appearing to support the Turkish move, though under pressure from Baghdad he denied he had urged an invasion. Iran also fears Kurdish terrorism and has shelled Kurdish villages in Iraq in reprisal for guerrilla attacks in Iranian Kurdistan. Perhaps as a quid pro quo for Syrian support against the Kurds, Turkey offered this weekend to broker an agreement between Syria and Lebanon. Bush's partiality to the Kurds has provided Damascus an opening for newly warm relations with Ankara.
On Sunday, guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) ambushed a Turkish military convoy, killing 17 soldiers. The Turkish military counterattacked, killing 32 persons it said were guerrillas. In Istanbul on Sunday, a thousand demonstrators came out to denounce the PKK. In the two weeks prior to Sunday, the PKK had killed 28 Turkish soldiers. The mustachioed president of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, a member of the Islamist-leaning AK Party, vowed that his country would "pay any price" to protect itself. The new tensions have roiled the world petroleum markets, hurt the Turkish economy, and further destabilized an already violent Iraq.
The Iraqi leadership, already presiding over a failed state, agonized at being caught in the crossfire. The Iraqi president, the avuncular Kurd Jalal Talabani, hypocritically condemned al-Assad for urging a foreign military invasion of an Arab country, even though he himself had supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Massoud Barzani, the pudgy turbaned leader of the Kurdistan Regional Authority, warned that his government would defend its citizens and not sit idly by if Turkish troops rolled through Kurdish cities in Iraq. On Sunday, the Iraqi Parliament, having been unable to agree on virtually any internal issue or enact any benchmark legislation, promptly passed a resolution condemning the Turkish Parliament.
The ratcheting up of tensions between Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Authority threatens to throw the last relatively quiet and prosperous corner of Iraq into turmoil. The turmoil is likely only beginning. The Iraqi Kurds are seeking to incorporate the oil-rich province of Kirkuk into their confederacy, and there is strong popular support for seceding from Iraq altogether. Turkish officials have repeatedly said that either move would set off a Turkish invasion.
As usual, the Bush administration has reacted to these predictable problems in a purely ad hoc manner. There is no evidence that anyone in the administration has crafted a policy for dealing with tensions between Ankara and America's Kurdish allies. The U.S. State Department has designated the PKK a terrorist group, but the PKK is given safe harbor by the Kurdistan Regional Authority of northern Iraq. What will Bush do about having wound up as the de facto protector of a radical peasant guerrilla group that is attacking the troops of a NATO ally? If the United States acts against the PKK, it risks alienating the Iraqi Kurds, whose pro-American peshmerga fighters perform security duties and enlist as troops in the new Iraqi army. If Bush does not restrain the PKK, then he is playing Mullah Omar to its al-Qaida and "harboring" terrorists, which he trumpeted six years ago as grounds for war.
Meanwhile, to the east, another supposed bulwark against terror is wobbling. The Bush administration had lovingly brokered the deal whereby Bhutto was allowed to return to Pakistan by military dictator Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf lacks grassroots support and has been shaken by powerful challenges from the country's supreme court, by his brutal crackdown on Muslim militants at the Red Mosque last summer, and by his continued inability to subdue the tribal forces and al-Qaida remnants in Waziristan and other rugged provinces along the Afghan border.
Washington therefore became convinced that Bhutto, who heads the popular Pakistan People's Party, might be able to come back as prime minister and cohabit with Musharraf, who was recently elected president by the Parliament and who has pledged to take off his uniform and rule as a civilian. Bhutto was elected prime minister twice, serving from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996, but both stints ended amid charges of corruption. She had lived in exile since 1999, when a military coup brought Musharraf to power. There are open cases against her in both Pakistan and Switzerland, and Interpol put her on an international wanted list in 2006 at the Musharraf regime's prompting. Washington persuaded Islamabad to drop the charges against her so that she could return.
The huge explosion that greeted Bhutto in her home turf of Karachi, however, suggests that her arrival is hardly the remedy for Pakistan's instability. Bush administration officials were dismayed when some in Bhutto's circle, such as still-exiled husband Asif Ali Zardari, initially accused the Musharraf government of being implicated in the bombing. The prospect of peace between the Bhutto camp and Musharraf's authoritarian military has been put into question.
Bhutto herself was quick to fix the blame on al-Qaida and militants in the tribal areas of the north. More dispassionate observers, such as Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin, have also suggested that the Karachi bombing may well have been planned by militants in northern Pakistan, where the remnants of al-Qaida are thought to be hiding out. Those areas are ethnically and politically linked to southern Afghanistan, which has seen a resurgence of guerrilla violence.
And in Afghanistan itself, the situation is in a similar downward spiral. More than 5,000 Afghans have been killed in political violence so far this year, 600 of them members of the police. The United States and its NATO allies in Afghanistan allege that a revived Taliban has taken the city of Musa Qala in Helmand province. This weekend, major gun battles in that vicinity left 50 guerrillas dead. Farther to the east in Kunar province, Afghan and NATO troops engaged Pushtun guerrillas, killing 20, with one civilian dead and six wounded. Just last Thursday, a Taliban ambush near Kandahar wounded 6 NATO soldiers.
The U.S. and NATO military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill, has said that between 40 and 60 percent of the Pushtun guerrilla movement is funded by opium poppies, the source of most of Western Europe's heroin. The dilemma for the Americans and NATO is that eradicating the lucrative poppy crops in southern Pushtun provinces such as Helmand appears to be driving more villagers into the ranks of the revived Taliban. Afghanistan has only some 30,000 poorly trained troops, less than half the 70,000 that NATO had planned on by this point, and the government of Hamid Karzai shows little prospect of being able to stand against insurgents for years to come.
Along with the failed state in Iraq, which has neglected to use any decrease in violence temporarily provided by the recent U.S. troop escalation to effect political reconciliation, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan raises the specter of a collapse of both of Bush's major state-building projects. The turmoil in Turkey and Pakistan damages U.S. relations with two allies that are key to shoring up the countries under American occupation.
After Sept. 11, when the Bush administration launched its global "war on terror," the United States enjoyed some clear assets in fighting the al-Qaida terrorist network. In the Middle East, the United States had the support of secular Turkey, a NATO member. The long relationship of the powerful Pakistani military with that of the United States enabled Bush to turn the military dictator Musharraf against the Taliban, which Pakistan had earlier sponsored. Shiite Iran announced that it would provide help to the United States in its war on the hyper-Sunni Taliban regime. Baathist Syria and Iraq, secular Arab nationalist regimes, were potential bulwarks against Sunni radicalism in the Levant.
Like a drunken millionaire gambling away a fortune at a Las Vegas casino, the Bush administration squandered all the assets it began with by invading Iraq and unleashing chaos in the Gulf. The secular Baath Party in Iraq was replaced by Shiite fundamentalists, Sunni Salafi fundamentalists and Kurdish separatists. The pressure the Bush administration put on the Pakistani military government to combat Muslim militants in that country weakened the legitimacy of Musharraf, whom the Pakistani public increasingly viewed as an oppressive American puppet. Iraqi Kurdistan's willingness to give safe haven to the PKK alienated Turkey from both the new Iraqi government and its American patrons. Search-and-destroy missions in Afghanistan have predictably turned increasing numbers of Pushtun villagers against the United States, NATO and Karzai. The thunder of the bomb in Karachi and the Turkish shells in Iraqi Kurdistan may well be the sound of Bush losing his "war on terror."
,
"The turmoil in Turkey and Pakistan damages U.S. relations with two allies that are key to shoring up the countries under American occupation."
Editorial Comment
The speed at which the Bush’s foreign policy is unraveling is surprising even to me. At one time any country could be bought or beaten into submission. Countries are now beginning to see that the amount of money they receive for siding with America may not be worth the problems that it creates for them. They are beginning to see that the Americans have no plans, no strategy and no idea about any political solutions. The supposed war on terror is a sham and is creating more terrorism than reducing it.
Huge amounts of money are being poured into Iraq , Afghanistan , Pakistan without any favorable results. The loss of focus on other issues has meant that US has no idea of what is going on in then rest of the world and is no longer in control of any thing. Russia, China, South America, Africa have to take a back seat when the White House is obsessing about Iran.
The falling dollar, the growing budget deficit, the inability to spend as freely for domestic problems are all connected to a disastrous Foreign Policy. As International business gains in importance, American companies are moving their operations overseas because of unfriendly visa policies at home. Foreign Direct Investment is reducing as people are finding alternate markets which are more welcoming and more profitable. As the world begins to de link itself from America, America becomes the isolated island that it always wanted to be. Even Americans are venturing out less outside it's shores. The USA is becoming a Green Zone where the familiar images of McDonald's and the Stars and Stripes are reassuring of the fantasy that America does not need the world.
Khusro
From Turkey to Iraq to Pakistan, the mounting chaos proves the White House is just winging it.
By Juan Cole ( Salon.com)
Pages 1 2
Oct. 24, 2007 The Bush administration once imagined that its presence in Afghanistan and Iraq would be anchored by friendly neighbors, Turkey to the west and Pakistan to the east. Last week, as the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to deteriorate, the anchors themselves also came loose.
On Sunday, just days after the Turkish Parliament authorized an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish guerrillas ambushed and killed 17 Turkish soldiers inside Turkey. In Karachi, Pakistan, a massive bomb nearly killed U.S.-backed Benazir Bhutto, who was supposed to help stabilize the country. The Bush administration' s entire Middle East policy is coming undone -- if it even has a policy left, other than just sticking its fingers in the multiple, and multiplying, holes in the dike.
In Iraq, the Kurds of the north are the United States' most reliable allies. In addition to the 5.5 million Kurds in Iraq, however, persons speaking dialects of Kurdish constitute around 11 million of neighboring Turkey's 70 million citizens. There are another 4 million Kurds next door in Iran, and up to 2 million in Syria. All three of Iraq's northern neighbors fear that Kurdish nationalism, which has been fostered by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, could tear them apart. Opposition to that nationalism could provide a platform for an alliance of Syria, Turkey and Iran -- a nightmare for the Bush administration. Washington had hoped to isolate Syria, an ally of both Iran and of Hezbollah in Lebanon. That's not how it is turning out.
Even after Turkey declined to sign on to the Iraq war, then U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz praised it in April 2003 as a dependable ally and secularizing model for the Muslim world. Since then, however, Washington's relationship with Ankara has turned increasingly sour over U.S. favoritism toward the Kurds.
The Turkish Parliament late last week passed a resolution permitting the military to make incursions into Iraq in order to chase down guerrillas operating on both sides of the border. Syria's Bashar al-Assad piled on, appearing to support the Turkish move, though under pressure from Baghdad he denied he had urged an invasion. Iran also fears Kurdish terrorism and has shelled Kurdish villages in Iraq in reprisal for guerrilla attacks in Iranian Kurdistan. Perhaps as a quid pro quo for Syrian support against the Kurds, Turkey offered this weekend to broker an agreement between Syria and Lebanon. Bush's partiality to the Kurds has provided Damascus an opening for newly warm relations with Ankara.
On Sunday, guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) ambushed a Turkish military convoy, killing 17 soldiers. The Turkish military counterattacked, killing 32 persons it said were guerrillas. In Istanbul on Sunday, a thousand demonstrators came out to denounce the PKK. In the two weeks prior to Sunday, the PKK had killed 28 Turkish soldiers. The mustachioed president of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, a member of the Islamist-leaning AK Party, vowed that his country would "pay any price" to protect itself. The new tensions have roiled the world petroleum markets, hurt the Turkish economy, and further destabilized an already violent Iraq.
The Iraqi leadership, already presiding over a failed state, agonized at being caught in the crossfire. The Iraqi president, the avuncular Kurd Jalal Talabani, hypocritically condemned al-Assad for urging a foreign military invasion of an Arab country, even though he himself had supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Massoud Barzani, the pudgy turbaned leader of the Kurdistan Regional Authority, warned that his government would defend its citizens and not sit idly by if Turkish troops rolled through Kurdish cities in Iraq. On Sunday, the Iraqi Parliament, having been unable to agree on virtually any internal issue or enact any benchmark legislation, promptly passed a resolution condemning the Turkish Parliament.
The ratcheting up of tensions between Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Authority threatens to throw the last relatively quiet and prosperous corner of Iraq into turmoil. The turmoil is likely only beginning. The Iraqi Kurds are seeking to incorporate the oil-rich province of Kirkuk into their confederacy, and there is strong popular support for seceding from Iraq altogether. Turkish officials have repeatedly said that either move would set off a Turkish invasion.
As usual, the Bush administration has reacted to these predictable problems in a purely ad hoc manner. There is no evidence that anyone in the administration has crafted a policy for dealing with tensions between Ankara and America's Kurdish allies. The U.S. State Department has designated the PKK a terrorist group, but the PKK is given safe harbor by the Kurdistan Regional Authority of northern Iraq. What will Bush do about having wound up as the de facto protector of a radical peasant guerrilla group that is attacking the troops of a NATO ally? If the United States acts against the PKK, it risks alienating the Iraqi Kurds, whose pro-American peshmerga fighters perform security duties and enlist as troops in the new Iraqi army. If Bush does not restrain the PKK, then he is playing Mullah Omar to its al-Qaida and "harboring" terrorists, which he trumpeted six years ago as grounds for war.
Meanwhile, to the east, another supposed bulwark against terror is wobbling. The Bush administration had lovingly brokered the deal whereby Bhutto was allowed to return to Pakistan by military dictator Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf lacks grassroots support and has been shaken by powerful challenges from the country's supreme court, by his brutal crackdown on Muslim militants at the Red Mosque last summer, and by his continued inability to subdue the tribal forces and al-Qaida remnants in Waziristan and other rugged provinces along the Afghan border.
Washington therefore became convinced that Bhutto, who heads the popular Pakistan People's Party, might be able to come back as prime minister and cohabit with Musharraf, who was recently elected president by the Parliament and who has pledged to take off his uniform and rule as a civilian. Bhutto was elected prime minister twice, serving from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996, but both stints ended amid charges of corruption. She had lived in exile since 1999, when a military coup brought Musharraf to power. There are open cases against her in both Pakistan and Switzerland, and Interpol put her on an international wanted list in 2006 at the Musharraf regime's prompting. Washington persuaded Islamabad to drop the charges against her so that she could return.
The huge explosion that greeted Bhutto in her home turf of Karachi, however, suggests that her arrival is hardly the remedy for Pakistan's instability. Bush administration officials were dismayed when some in Bhutto's circle, such as still-exiled husband Asif Ali Zardari, initially accused the Musharraf government of being implicated in the bombing. The prospect of peace between the Bhutto camp and Musharraf's authoritarian military has been put into question.
Bhutto herself was quick to fix the blame on al-Qaida and militants in the tribal areas of the north. More dispassionate observers, such as Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin, have also suggested that the Karachi bombing may well have been planned by militants in northern Pakistan, where the remnants of al-Qaida are thought to be hiding out. Those areas are ethnically and politically linked to southern Afghanistan, which has seen a resurgence of guerrilla violence.
And in Afghanistan itself, the situation is in a similar downward spiral. More than 5,000 Afghans have been killed in political violence so far this year, 600 of them members of the police. The United States and its NATO allies in Afghanistan allege that a revived Taliban has taken the city of Musa Qala in Helmand province. This weekend, major gun battles in that vicinity left 50 guerrillas dead. Farther to the east in Kunar province, Afghan and NATO troops engaged Pushtun guerrillas, killing 20, with one civilian dead and six wounded. Just last Thursday, a Taliban ambush near Kandahar wounded 6 NATO soldiers.
The U.S. and NATO military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill, has said that between 40 and 60 percent of the Pushtun guerrilla movement is funded by opium poppies, the source of most of Western Europe's heroin. The dilemma for the Americans and NATO is that eradicating the lucrative poppy crops in southern Pushtun provinces such as Helmand appears to be driving more villagers into the ranks of the revived Taliban. Afghanistan has only some 30,000 poorly trained troops, less than half the 70,000 that NATO had planned on by this point, and the government of Hamid Karzai shows little prospect of being able to stand against insurgents for years to come.
Along with the failed state in Iraq, which has neglected to use any decrease in violence temporarily provided by the recent U.S. troop escalation to effect political reconciliation, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan raises the specter of a collapse of both of Bush's major state-building projects. The turmoil in Turkey and Pakistan damages U.S. relations with two allies that are key to shoring up the countries under American occupation.
After Sept. 11, when the Bush administration launched its global "war on terror," the United States enjoyed some clear assets in fighting the al-Qaida terrorist network. In the Middle East, the United States had the support of secular Turkey, a NATO member. The long relationship of the powerful Pakistani military with that of the United States enabled Bush to turn the military dictator Musharraf against the Taliban, which Pakistan had earlier sponsored. Shiite Iran announced that it would provide help to the United States in its war on the hyper-Sunni Taliban regime. Baathist Syria and Iraq, secular Arab nationalist regimes, were potential bulwarks against Sunni radicalism in the Levant.
Like a drunken millionaire gambling away a fortune at a Las Vegas casino, the Bush administration squandered all the assets it began with by invading Iraq and unleashing chaos in the Gulf. The secular Baath Party in Iraq was replaced by Shiite fundamentalists, Sunni Salafi fundamentalists and Kurdish separatists. The pressure the Bush administration put on the Pakistani military government to combat Muslim militants in that country weakened the legitimacy of Musharraf, whom the Pakistani public increasingly viewed as an oppressive American puppet. Iraqi Kurdistan's willingness to give safe haven to the PKK alienated Turkey from both the new Iraqi government and its American patrons. Search-and-destroy missions in Afghanistan have predictably turned increasing numbers of Pushtun villagers against the United States, NATO and Karzai. The thunder of the bomb in Karachi and the Turkish shells in Iraqi Kurdistan may well be the sound of Bush losing his "war on terror."
,
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Religion has brought a bad name to God
Religion has brought a bad name to God. When we choose religion over God we try to become God. The need to experience God is paramount to our meaningful existence. We can lose sight of this in the routine performance of religious ritual and religion becomes the end rather than a means to being in touch with our creator.
Equally important in our religious duties is how we conduct ourselves towards our fellow human beings. Our relationships with our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends, our neighbors our adversaries and foes are equally a part of our experience of God.
At the same time people frustrated with the judgmental nature of religious practice have been advocating a separation of religion from the affairs of men. Without meaning to they are trying unsuccessfully to create a Godless society.
Khusro
Equally important in our religious duties is how we conduct ourselves towards our fellow human beings. Our relationships with our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends, our neighbors our adversaries and foes are equally a part of our experience of God.
At the same time people frustrated with the judgmental nature of religious practice have been advocating a separation of religion from the affairs of men. Without meaning to they are trying unsuccessfully to create a Godless society.
Khusro
Fareed Zakaria On Iran ( Newsweek)
Sample Posting
"Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world."
Editorial Comment
It has been clear for some time that Iran does not pose a threat to the US but it may to Israel. The fact that the US is prepared to go to World War III to appease Israeli paranoia, is an indication of how much of a stranglehold Israel has over the US.
Iraq never posed a threat to the US but may have to Israel and this paranoia has put the US in the mess that they are today, in Iraq. The fact that these policies are not in the interest of either Israel or America is lost on people who are fixed in a world view that they have created.
No contrarian view is accepted and people are labeled Anti Semitic left and right. This is no conspiracy theory, both the US and Israel acknowledge the bias. The US acknowledges that it cannot follow an even handed policy towards Israel. It cannot be an honest broker in resolving the Israeli dispute with the Palestinians.
While there is no justification for attacking Iran preemptively and while it is clear that it will put the US in a bigger mess than it already is in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wild rhetoric against Iran keeps getting wilder. Republicans and Democrats alike are united in this thinking. It does not really matter any more whether good sense will prevail. We know that it will not.
The Urdu saying that applies here is that, "Chewnti ki jub moth aati hae to oos kae per nikal aatae haen." ( when an ant has a death wish, it sprouts wings.)
Unwittingly Israel is on the verge of helping to create a new world order. Ironically it is one that will give no credit to Israel for this. The Bush-Cheyne extremist view was born in th elast Century. It has no relevance in this century. The chaos and destruction that we are seeing will get worse and world wide power will flow into the hands of extremists and away from moderates. We are already seeing this and the US has lost control of the situation. In the proposed attack on Iran the US is about to reach a point of no return, if it has not already done so.
Khusro
Subject: Fwd. Fareed Zakaria (newsweek) on Iran [Newsweek] To: Kirfani@aol.com
FYI
<<...Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea's Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for."
Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're mad.
Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
"Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world."
Editorial Comment
It has been clear for some time that Iran does not pose a threat to the US but it may to Israel. The fact that the US is prepared to go to World War III to appease Israeli paranoia, is an indication of how much of a stranglehold Israel has over the US.
Iraq never posed a threat to the US but may have to Israel and this paranoia has put the US in the mess that they are today, in Iraq. The fact that these policies are not in the interest of either Israel or America is lost on people who are fixed in a world view that they have created.
No contrarian view is accepted and people are labeled Anti Semitic left and right. This is no conspiracy theory, both the US and Israel acknowledge the bias. The US acknowledges that it cannot follow an even handed policy towards Israel. It cannot be an honest broker in resolving the Israeli dispute with the Palestinians.
While there is no justification for attacking Iran preemptively and while it is clear that it will put the US in a bigger mess than it already is in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wild rhetoric against Iran keeps getting wilder. Republicans and Democrats alike are united in this thinking. It does not really matter any more whether good sense will prevail. We know that it will not.
The Urdu saying that applies here is that, "Chewnti ki jub moth aati hae to oos kae per nikal aatae haen." ( when an ant has a death wish, it sprouts wings.)
Unwittingly Israel is on the verge of helping to create a new world order. Ironically it is one that will give no credit to Israel for this. The Bush-Cheyne extremist view was born in th elast Century. It has no relevance in this century. The chaos and destruction that we are seeing will get worse and world wide power will flow into the hands of extremists and away from moderates. We are already seeing this and the US has lost control of the situation. In the proposed attack on Iran the US is about to reach a point of no return, if it has not already done so.
Khusro
Subject: Fwd. Fareed Zakaria (newsweek) on Iran [Newsweek] To: Kirfani@aol.com
FYI
<<...Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea's Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for."
Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're mad.
Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
US Prosecution of Muslim Group ends in Mistrial
Sample Post
Prosecutors said the committees were controlled by Hamas and contributed to terrorism by helping Hamas spread its ideology and recruit supporters. The government relied on Israeli intelligence agents, using pseudonyms, to testify in support of this theory. "
Editorial Comment
The role of Israel in the conduct of US Domestic issues continues to get exposed. The fact that huge amounts of American funds ( from private individuals) are sent to Israel to fund illegal Settlements on Palestinian lands seems to bother no one.
Muslim Charities in The US are running scared lest fingures are pointed at them( for no good reason other than they are run by Muslims) and a lot of Humanitarian work in Muslim countries is being impacted adversely to the detriment of poor and suffering people around the world. This will only add to the growing resentment amongst Muslim people rich and poor alike against both Israel and America, worldwide.
Khusro
Complete news story go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/us/23charity.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Prosecutors said the committees were controlled by Hamas and contributed to terrorism by helping Hamas spread its ideology and recruit supporters. The government relied on Israeli intelligence agents, using pseudonyms, to testify in support of this theory. "
Editorial Comment
The role of Israel in the conduct of US Domestic issues continues to get exposed. The fact that huge amounts of American funds ( from private individuals) are sent to Israel to fund illegal Settlements on Palestinian lands seems to bother no one.
Muslim Charities in The US are running scared lest fingures are pointed at them( for no good reason other than they are run by Muslims) and a lot of Humanitarian work in Muslim countries is being impacted adversely to the detriment of poor and suffering people around the world. This will only add to the growing resentment amongst Muslim people rich and poor alike against both Israel and America, worldwide.
Khusro
Complete news story go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/us/23charity.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
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