The latest opinion polls are any indication, the John Kerry campaign is picking up steam, and for the first time since the Florida debates Kerry is way ahead of George II. It is time for the Kerry policy wonks to put their heads together and piece together a comprehensive agenda. Here is my take, for what it is worth. First, the badly tattered middle east policy particularly Iraq and the escalating violence in the West Bank needs to be addressed. Second,building bridges with Europe and repa...

When the Watergate scandal broke out more than 30 years back two journalists working with the Washington Post were instrumental in exposing the deciet and tissue of lies and falsehoods which clouded the excecutive branch at that time. This led to the exit of Richard Nixon from the White House. The Watergate was at best a botched attempt at political skullduggery, but what hag happened in the name of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq is far worse. Relentless attacks on civillian targets k...

Never before in American electoral history have Noble Prize winning scientists come out in the open against an incumbent President as they have against George Bush II. They have in a statement signed by 48 Lauretes critisized Bush for politicising science research as never before. Allowing fundamentalist Christian doctrines influence public policy is a clear violation of the separation of Church and State advocated in the Constitution.The important issue of stem cell research which had powerf...

]In these presidential elections, more than ever before, issues of foreign policy have come to the foreground. The Bushmen never tire of speaking of the "Kerry Test" and they shamelessly insinuate that John Kerry proposes to hand over a "veto" on American foreign policy to the rest of the world. It is quite obviousthat John Kerry was referring to the creation of a broad concensus in the international community which would help in sustaining the policy. This is exactly what Kissenger, the ...

The news from Iraq is getting messier by the day for Bush and his Bushmen. The wanton attack on civillian targets has not got the kind of play in the Weatern media that Darfur is getting. Amnesty International which is the first to critisize non Western governments for violation of human rights is keeping silent, showing that they are just a bunch of rent a cause liberals. U S troops who have largely been disciplined, are now showing every sign that civillian control is breaking down and in...

I watched the Arizona Debate very keenly, because I felt that Kerry would bushwack Bush out of the race as he did in the other two races. Though Kerry is the obvious winner, I was impressed about one or two aspects of Bush's demenour. He did not have that offensive smirk on his lips and secondly did not talk down for a change. This change in behaviour is too late to make any difference to the voter's final decision. For the first time Bush did not rave in generalities but addressed the q...

The justification given by the Bushmen for the barbaric and illegal invasuion of Iraq was the alleged possession of WMD by Saddam Hussein. Even the CIA appointed Deulfer Report has confirmed what the world knew all along that Iraq did not possess weapons that are in the ABC category. In fact had Iraq possessed such weapons Bush would not have dared to invade the country. Now it will be difficult for Nuclear power states to hold on to their nuclear monopoly, because there is a real incentive...

The UK is a parliamentary democracy, but under Blair it has becme more Presidential than parliamentary. This means that instead of the House of Commons playing a role in deciding the major issues of the day, the PM's personal staff and the unelected body of advisors play a major role in policy formulation. The failure of this model of decision making is found in the run up to the Iraq War. Instead of consulting his political colleagues Tony Blair had false intelligence reports selectively lea...

In September 2001 the Twin Tower attack took place and Afghaistan was rightly identified as a Terrorist State and the UN gave the sanction for a "regime change". There is no evidence that Saddam had any hand in the tragedy. In fact he abhored the brand of Islamic fundamentalism represented by the Taliban and their supporters,In fact, he had tried to weld a multi ethnic, sectarian and religious society into an Arab civil society. The sanctions put paid to his ambitions, leaving behind a socie...

The U S marines have only one rule in Iraq:shoot first clear the mess later. Any vehicle approaching within 100 meters of a US military humvee is peppered with bullets before questions are asked. Similarly any ordinary Iraqi with a cell phone risks having his guts ripped out by a splatter of M-16 gunfire. Deadly force has become the norm as for as the Anglo American forces are concerned. All this makes for a horrendous loss of civillian life. A 20 something U S soldier says proudly that "w...

The spate of bombing in Bagdad and Karbala has once more underscored the fact that even 25 months of American occupation there is as yet little hope for peace. The large scale violence that afflicts the political culture of Iraq today was not anticipated by the Anglo American occupying forces and are therefore entirely unprepared to deal with the situation. In the last 4 weels alone nearly 7 000 Iraqi civillians and 230 US troops hasve been killed making this one of the most blood soaked per...

It is now quite clear that the war against Iraq cannot be sustained much longer. At best the war can go on for another 6 months, after which questions, now muted, will begin to surface. Unlike the Vietnam era there is as yet no overwhelming golobal opinion against the war, for the simple reason the news from Iraq is tightly controlled and the military censors routinely censor what they preceive as "anti American" slant After Iraq What? This question is of prime importance to all those int...

In his book Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War, Evan Wright speaks of the horrors that he winesses duing the camapign to "liberate " Bagdad. Every generation has to bear witness to the holocaust visited upon peoples and societies so that the world will remember what they saw and bear witness to their everlasting creator the sufferings they have seen. This war has not yet found a Bob Dylan or a Wilfred Owen, but an embedded journalist has born...

More than 2500 years back, Thucydides, an Athenian who faught against Sparta, wrote that Athens which created an Empire in order to wage the war will eventually become a tyrant at home,putting an end to Athenian Liberty and Democracy. The words of this great historian should illumine the minds of all those who write about the Anglo American attack on Iraq as if nothing terrible is happening there. Need I remind that Timothy McVeigh was a decorated veteran of the First Gulf War. The experie...

The subject raised in my blog "Iraq Again: The Human Cost of Taking Fallujah" raised a range of issues. I begin by making it clear that I am not being critical or unduly judgemental. If some of the responses to my writing seemed too defensive, all I can say that it is not my intention to give aid and succour to Islamic Terrorists. Ilook upon this issue as a crisis in which ordinary Iraqi men and women and children are trying to cope in the most trying of circumstances. Michael Hoffman h...