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...
The American and their collabirating forces the British have declared Fallujah "Liberated". Dutifully the Western Media has reported this with all the usual claptrap of showing extreme "restraint" in the face of grave provocation from the "terrorists". I am sure decent law abiding citizens everywhere will be shocked to learn that in the two weeks of fighting that preceded the so called liberation, almost all the buildings in Fallujah have been destroyed. There is not a single mosque still sta...
One of the habits that I cultivated over my years at graduate school is to read any thhing remotely connected with my major area of interest which happens to be historiography. And so when I came across a new title ofessor Samuel Huntington, an old friend, I could not resist the temptation of reading. Huntington is worth reading for two reasons. First an impressive academic pedigree. Trained at an East coast University and holding the chair in the Department of Government at Harvard make hi...
In a recent issure of Foreign Affairs, Larry Diamond has presented a lucid analysis of monumental strategic and tactical blunders by the Bush Administration. Lack of cleatr political objectives is perhaps the most serious flaw. Merely overthrowing a discredited regime of Saddam Hussain and proclaiming to the world at large " mission accomplished" does not merit any attention. Force is used in international relations as a complement to diplomacy and statecraft. Force can never be an end in...
George Bush must lay credit to one significant neologism in the discourse on foreign policy--the concept of road map. As a geographical metaphor it is simple: a guige from place A to place B. These days everyone talks of roadmaps as if the conduct of foreign policy depends on a road map. Why not a navigation chart, a comparison that is certainly more appropriate because of its association with deep waters, treacherous depths and coral reefs. A road map is too simplistic a concept to chart ou...
For a change an "embedded journalist" hascaught a most horrendous act of violence against an unarmed civillian on camera.In almost all our blogs we have had one refrain: the war is inflicting unacceptable levels of mortality on the civillian population,Now here is the proof. Some have started comparing this photograph to the famous picture of a partisan excecuted on the streets of Saigon in 1967. This comparison will not hold water, because the excecution was performed in broad daylight by a ...
The highly respected medicak journal The Lancet that has been at the fore front of medical research for more that 150 years has in a recent issue highlighted the consequences of the American areal bimbing on Iraq using a sophisticated statistical technique called cluster analysis. The margin of error is less that 3% in most cases. The team looked carefully at the mortality figure reported in select households in the week immediately preceeding the Ameican bombing campaign in March 200...
Like many I too felty that John Kerry will win, but in the best tradition of Democracy, I salute George Bush who has been elected with a plurality of nearly 3.7 million votes. John Kerry showed grace in letting go of the election, though he could have made things difficult in Ohio. To say that George Bush is a highly popular politician would be incorrect, but he has proved many of us wrong in winning a free and substantially fair poll. He will now realise that the real difficuty bebins now....
By this time tomorrow the USA will either have a new president or for another 5 weeks there will be political bickering. In either case the President cannot avoid the following issues for too long. Iraq: The USA stands alone on this issue and the news from Fallujah is not encouraging. Deadly attacks on civillian targets is denting the image of the USA which has retreated dueto the Abu Gharaib scandal. A way out must be found. Economy:The huge federal deficit has to be curtailed and the...
The nuclear ambitions of the Islamic regime in Theran is causing a great deal of disquiet amongst the Europeans and of course, the USA. Iran has learnt an important lesson from the exprience of Iraq. In 1981 Israel with the tacit support of the Reagan Administration bombed the Osirak Reactor therby indicating to the world that the West will not permit an Islamic country to possess nuclear weapons. Iran is following the policy of distributing its nuclear facilities over a wide area making the...
Seldom in the history of the world do we see the strange sight of two "democratically"elected leaders whose fate is bound together in a deadly embrace.Tony Blair came to power in England offering a way out of Thatcherism and improving public health, education and welfare. In the 7years he has been in power he has shown little inclination of fulfilling these and other promises. He rushed to support Bush in war even though no vital national interest was involved. Anglo-Saxon solidarity was invo...
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...
When the American Constitution was framed in the eighteenth century, after the Continental Congress decided to form a federal republic the U S was certainly the mostmdemocratic nation in a world where kings and queens still reigned. Madison in the Fedaralist argued for a Republic. The great historian fron John Hopkins University J G A Pocock in his books has stated that the concept of Republic that the founding fathers had was based on the model provided by classical Rome before it turned i...