The recent terror strikes in Mumbai have all the charecteristics of the al-qaeda and was carried out by nearly 20-25 well trained and armed men, probably of Pakistani or British origin. The purpose of the attacks was to cripple the financial center of India which is being seen by sections of the liberal establishment as abn "emergin power". The fact in that under the Congress regime presently in power India has become a soft state utterly incapable of responing to any kind of terrorism or chall...
As we had been saying all along, the junior Senator from Illinois Barack Obama has become the 44th President of the USA. The imporatance of this event cannot be gainsaid: the perception of the world will change dramatically in favor of the USA not because an African-American has been elected but because Barack Obama has quite convincingly sold the messaGE OF hope. Now with the reality of power breathing down, Obama will realise the fact that the hopes that he has engendered all over the world w...
The 7oo billion $ suggested by the President of the US and his Treasury Secretary has been rejected by Congress and as I predicted in an earlier blog, the conservative Republicans voted against the bailout on the ground that state intervention in the economy would be a betrayal of the very creed of Burkeian conservatism represented in the strand of Reaganomics. There is no doubt that a bail out package will eventually be passed as the US economy cannot survive for long in the present state...
Philip Bobbit, a scholar with an unfortunate name, is a leading American interpreter of the changing patterns of interstate behavior, post 9/11. He is a nephew of Lyndon B Johnson and holds a doctorate both in History and Constitutional law, and if there is anyone eminently qualified to write about statecraft in the modern world it is this scholar. I had come across quite a few references to the book, The Shield of Achilles:War, Peace and the Course of History and decided to order the ...
George Bush has done something that no true conservative would ever dream of doing. By using federal resources to buy up the bad debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the leading mortgage firm in the US, Bush and his Treasury Secretary have in effect nationalised the company, a policy that runs counter to the basic principles of fiscal conservatism. Yesterday that bailout was further extended with the 85 billion $ bailout of Lehman Brothers. Henry Paulson has set a very bad precedent and the US...
George Bush has done something that no true conservative would ever dream of doing. By using federal resources to buy up the bad debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the leading mortgage firm in the US, Bush and his Treasury Secretary have in effect nationalised the company, a policy that runs counter to the basic principles of fiscal conservatism. Yesterday that bailout was further extended with the 85 billion $ bailout of Lehman Brothers. Henry Paulson has set a very bad precedent and the US ...
Politics is an unforgiving game. Barack Obama delivered a splendid sppech at Denver while accepting the nomination of his party to the Presidecy of the United States. He quite rightly laid out his domestic and foreign policy and set to rest the niggling doubts that some people had about his ability to lead the country in a time of war. It seems that the Republicans have forgotten that the US constitution makes the President the Commander-in- chief and not the other way around. Barack Obam...
The Georgian President Mikhail Saakashivili, US educated and unabashedly pro-NATO has bitten more than he can chew. By ordering his troops into the breakaway provice of Osettia and encouraging them to indulge in wanton war crimes in that region, the state of Georgia has invited international condemnation. Even George Bush could only request a return to status quo ante and the US State Department understood that Georgia has invited trouble for itself in the hope that the Russia advance will resu...
The campaign of Barack Obama is in trouble and everyone seems to understand it except the candidate and his team. Given the unpopularity of George II and the Iraq War, Obama should be poised for victory as the polls are less than 100 days away. Sure he enjoys a 5 point lead over Maccain but that lead is well within the margin of error and unless Barack Obama crosses the 8 to 10 point margin one cannot be sure of his victory. Of course, Barack Obama himself has not made any major faux p...
The peace in the middle east seems to be extremely difficult because both Israel and Palestine are locked in a state of mutual recrimination: peace with justice means that the existing paradigm for ordering the relations between the two societies has to be reconsidered. The Ashkenazi elite from eastern Europe and Poland that is essentially the ruling aristocracy of Israel has dominated the politics of Israel since 1949 and given its long association with Zionism is unlikely to support the obvio...
Nearly a century back two young scholars from Oxford University, B P Grenfell and A S Hunt set out to excavate a site on the banks of the Nile in Egypt at a time when the tensions between the French and the British over the status of Egypt was particularly accute. Napoleon had already discovered the antiquities of Egypt and had published them in 11 volumes and Joseph Champillon had read the Rosetta's stone thereby unlocking the secrets of Egypts past. Just at a time when the pursuit of archae...
A remarkable discovery has recently been announces by the National ; Geographic Foundation. In Viginia the home of the first President General George Eashinton has been found and excavations are presently underway.The expensice hand painted pottery excavated at the site suggests that the people owning that site were very wealthy as the creamware pottery is a sure status marker, to use an archaeological jargon. The picture of the pine bears a masonic ...
While the two presidential candidates battle each other a quiet game is being played out in Iraq. Some may say that the gambit currently undeerway is the end game as far as Iraq is concerned, others may say that it is the beginning of a new phase in US occupation of Iraq. The UN security council resolution by which the "coalition of the willing" operates in Iraq expires in Cecemer 2008 and US diplomats and the Bush Administration even in the dying days of its Presidency is preparing the ground f...
Barack Obama seemed to be making all the right noices, well, until he clinched the Democratic Party nomination. The speech given before the AIPAC yesterday came as a huge surprise to me. I did not expect him to break the traditional frienship with Israel, but I did not expect him to sign on to the extreme right wing interpretation of Israeli-US relations. Obama was of course courting the powerful jewish American vote and we are all realistic or cynical enough to understand that the ocassio...