Pope John Paul II’s death last night (Saturday night) will be mourned not just by the tens of millions of Roman Catholics around the world but also by other Christian denominations and followers of all other faiths. Muslims in the Middle East will feel the loss particularly deeply.
John Paul’s 26-year pontificate will go down as one of the more remarkable in the church’s history because he was not afraid to be strongly critical when he believed world leaders were behaving wrongly or dishonestly. From the very beginning of his reign, he announced his absolute support for peace and justice, not least for the Palestinians.
Remembering the man who had so often voiced sadness at the cycle of violence blighting the Holy Land, Palestinians gathered in the square in front of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and kept up vigils for him.
Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesman for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, voiced the feelings of many: “He shared the sufferings of the Palestinian people ... We will miss him.“
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nasser Al-Qidwa spoke for the world when he said that the pope “had contributed to building bridges between religions and civilizations and to consolidating the roots of peace and friendship between the peoples.“
John Paul was equally strident in his condemnation of George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq which he described as “a crime against peace and a defeat for humanity.“
Until the very last minute, papal envoys were doing all they could to head off what he saw as not a solution but a bloody escalation of the challenge posed by Saddam. John Paul meant what he said and millions of people, not only in the Middle East but around the world, were deeply grateful for his strong moral stands.
It may yet prove that he was instrumental in stopping the Americans from turning the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions into a new crusade against Islam.
Despite President Bush’s typically unfortunate use of the word “crusade“ after 9/11, American policy became notably more sensitive toward Islam. The pope meanwhile made a point of apologizing to the Muslim world for the original Crusades. Shortly after 9/11, John Paul called a day of prayer for peace at the shrine of St. Francis of Assisi which was attended by Muslim and Jewish religious leaders as well as representatives from Christian groups. His simple, somber message was that war and violence solved nothing and that nations would only advance through peace and brotherhood.
He was not prepared to compromise his clear moral view for anyone. His simplicity and abundantly clear good faith carried the Roman Catholic Church through the immense upheavals of post-Communist Europe and into the dangerous new world of aggressive American diplomacy.
Right after his election, John Paul said the Roman Church should “make known... our intention to really devote ourselves to the continual and special cause of peace, of development and justice among nations.“ And he never wavered from that view. He will be sorely missed.
ARABNEWS.COM

Poor Bangladeshi women sort used plastic bottles before sending them for reprocessing in Dhaka, March 16. (Reuters File Photo)

In my new book The End of Poverty, I show how extreme poverty can be ended by 2025, but only if the rich world follows through on its promise to help the poorest countries. In order to thrive, and to foster the private-sector investment needed for long-term growth, an economy requires functioning health and education systems, investments in soil nutrients and water management, and basic infrastructure such as electricity and motorised transport. Yet the poorest countries, even well governed ones, lack the resources to finance these investments.
Lack of adequate foreign assistance is one of the greatest disgraces on our planet, and the United States has been the biggest laggard of all. It is urgent that the US wake up to global realities, and that it follow through on its commitments.
The most famous single promise by the rich countries has been to provide aid to the poorest countries equal to at least 0.7 percent of their GNP. The commitment began 44 years ago, in 1961, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the objective that foreign assistance should increase significantly, “so as to reach as soon as possible approximately one percent of the combined national incomes of the economically advanced countries.“ At the time, foreign assistance was about 0.5 percent of rich-country income.
Despite the promises, aid continued to decline. By the early 1990s, official development assistance was still around 0.33 percent of donor GNP, and by the early 2000s, it had declined to around 0.22 percent of GNP. Now it is roughly 0.25 percent of GNP.
At the start of the new millennium, the world’s leaders got together to adopt the Millennium Development Goals, the global commitment to halve extreme poverty by 2015. To implement these commitments, world leaders, including US President George W Bush, met again in Monterrey, Mexico, to adopt the Monterrey Consensus on how to achieve the breakthrough on poverty. The personal presence of Bush is notable, because the rich countries once again adopted the target of 0.7 percent of GNP, with the US being a signatory.
The US government often declares these days that it is not bound by any “arbitrary“ numerical target such as 0.7 percent of GNP. In fact, US official development assistance amounts to just 0.15 percent of America’s GNP, which is less than one-fourth the global target. This contrasts with the four percent of GNP that the US spends on its military, roughly $500 billion this year.
Sadly, the ideological mouthpieces for the super-rich in the US, especially the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, remain bitterly opposed to foreign aid, even if it’s just 70 cents per hundred dollars of income! In criticising my book, a Wall Street Journal review said that I was calling for “Giving Till it Hurts.“
But there is a limit to greed. I am quite sure that The Wall Street Journal does not really represent the interests or views of many or even most of American rich people, including the millionaires and billionaires whose contributions to aid could make a huge difference for the lives of millions of people.
Instead of worrying that 70 cents per $100 is giving till it hurts, our slogan in the rich countries should be “Giving Till it Heals.“
Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
DAILYTIMES.COM.PK

On Tuesday, March 29, Syria informed the U.N. that it would withdraw all of its troops from Lebanon before that country holds elections later this spring. The neo-Jacobins are celebrating Syria’s eviction from Lebanon as another great victory for democracy and the Rights of Man. But given what the removal of Syrian forces from Lebanon is likely to mean, they are slicing the baloney a bit thin. It is too easy to see through it.
As Washington now conveniently forgets, America and the rest of the world welcomed the entry of Syrian troops into Lebanon. Why? Because they came to put an end to Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, which raged from 1975 to 1990. Now, the departure of those same troops has an excellent chance of reigniting that civil war. Already, three bombs have gone off in Christian neighborhoods. The democratic forces Washington is supporting are Christian-led; with the expulsion of Syria, they see a chance to re-establish Christian domination of Lebanese politics. Hezbollah will be willing to fight to prevent that from happening. As usual, the neocons are smoking in the powder magazine.
Here is where they have cut the Lebanon baloney too thin. The likelihood of a renewed Lebanese civil war is sufficiently great that no one can overlook it including the neocons themselves. They are ignorant of the world, but not that ignorant. So the key question becomes this: why would the neocons and the Bush administration they dominate want a renewed Lebanese civil war?
I suspect the answer is to be sought less in Washington than in Tel Aviv. The most effective of the non-state enemies Israel now faces is Hezbollah. Hezbollah drove Israel out of Lebanon. While it remains comparatively weak in the West Bank and Gaza, where Hamas has the lead, it is striving to build up its influence there. From Israel’s perspective, what better way could there be to diminish Hezbollah’s power than to embroil it in a new civil war in Lebanon?
The well-orchestrated demands for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon appeared across the board, in Lebanon and internationally, immediately after the car bomb assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Syria has been blamed for the assassination. But if we ask who benefited from it, the answer is Israel, not Syria. Could the whole thing have been a Mossad operation? The choreography of the anti-Syrian reaction, including Washington immediately jumping on board, suggests it could.
A renewed Lebanese civil war in turn fits into a larger Likud strategy, a strategy that leading Washington neocons helped draft. In essence, that strategy calls for destabilizing every existing Middle Eastern regime, on the grounds that Israel would then dominate the region as the only remaining stable country. The neocons camouflage the call for destabilization by dressing it up as democracy and freedom, but even they know that democracy in the Middle East is about as likely as old Bessie, teets flailing, jumping over the moon. Plus, if any Muslim country in the region did hold a genuinely free election, Osama bin Laden would win it.
William S. Lind
ANTIWAR.COM

For the last few years we have been ruled by lexicographers. Never has an administration spent so much time creating, defining, or redefining terms, perhaps because no one (since George Orwell) has grasped the power and possibility that lay hidden in plain sight in the naming and renaming of words. In a sense, our post-9/11 moment began with two definitions: The Bush administration named our global enemy “terrorism“ and called the acts that followed a “war,“ which was soon given the moniker “the global war on terror“ (later reduced to the acronym GWOT, also known as World War IV), which was then given an instant future--being defined as a “generational struggle“ that was still to come. All this, along with “war“ itself, was simply announced rather than officially “declared.“
Given that we were (by administration definition) at war, it should have been self-evident that those we captured in our “war“ on terrorism would then be “prisoners of war,“ but no such luck for them, since their rights would in that case have been clearly defined in international treaties signed by the United States.
So the Bush administration opened its Devil’s Dictionary and came up with a new, tortured term for our new prisoners, “unlawful combatants,“ which really stood for: We can do anything we want to you in a place of our choosing. For that place, they then chose Guantanamo, an American base in Cuba (which they promptly defined as within “Cuban sovereignty“ for the purposes of putting our detention camps beyond the purview of American courts or Congress, but within Bush administration sovereignty--the sole kind that counted with them--for the purposes of the Cubans).
In this way, we moved from a self-declared generational war against a method of making war to a world of torture beyond the reach of, or even sight of, the law in a place that (until the Supreme Court recently ruled otherwise) more or less didn’t exist. All this was then supported by a world of pretzeled language constantly being reshaped in the White House Counsel’s office, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon so that reality would have no choice but to comply with the names given it.
The way gunmen once reached for their six-guns, so the various legal and other counselors of this administration reach for their dictionaries. The lawyer-authors of the various tortured memos about torture that came out of the White House Counsel’s office and the Justice Department, for instance, expended much effort acting as if they were part of a panel for a new edition of some dictionary.
Here are just a couple of examples of their new words.
Homeland n: A term successfully used by the Germans and the Soviets in World War II, less successfully (and in the plural) by Apartheid-era South Africa. It means neither home, nor land, has replaced both country and nation in American public speech, and is seldom wielded without the companion word “security.“ It is the place to which imperial forces return for R&R.
Homeland Security: synonymous with Homeland insecurity.
Homeland Security Department: The new Defense Department, known for declaring bridges yellow and the Statue of Liberty orange.
Homelandism n: a neologism for love of the Homeland Security State as in, “My Homeland, ’tis of thee, sweet security state of libertyÉ“
Intelligence n: What Dick Cheney wants and the CIA must provide -- or else.
Nationalism n: How foreigners love their country (when they do). A very dangerous phenomenon that can lead to extremes of passion, blindness, and xenophobia.
Oil n: 1. Black gold. 2. (defunct acronym) Operation Iraqi Liberation or OIL (name changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, OIF, without explanation). 3. What the Bush administration wasn’t after in Iraq and isn’t after in Iran.
Patriotism n: How Americans love their country. A trait so positive you can’t have too much of it, and if you do, then you are a super-patriot which couldn’t be better. (Foreigners cannot be patriotic. See, Nationalism)
Tom Engelhardt
TOMDISPATCH.COM

Before his overthrow last week, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan had used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal “third force“, linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power.
The third force is the title of a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which details how Western-backed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can promote regime and policy change all over the world. The formulaic repetition of a third “people power“ revolution in the former Soviet Union in just over one year--after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003 and in Ukraine last Christmas--means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of US-backed coups consolidated that country’s control over the Western hemisphere.
Many of the same US government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in Eastern Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former US ambassador to Belarus, who boasted in 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua: “Supporting democracy“. As protesters ransacked the presidential palace in Bishkek last week (unimpeded by the police who were under strict instructions not to use violence), a London Times newspaper correspondent enthused about how the scenes reminded him of Bolshevik propaganda films about the 1917 revolution. The London Daily Telegraph extolled “power to the people“, while the London Financial Times welcomed Kyrgyzstan’s “long march“ to freedom.
This myth of the masses spontaneously rising up against an authoritarian regime now exerts such a grip over the collective imagination that it persists despite being obviously false: Try to imagine the American police allowing demonstrators to ransack the White House, and you will immediately understand that these “dictatorships“ in the former USSR are in reality among the most fragile, indulgent and weak regimes in the world.
The US ambassador in Bishkek, Stephen Young, has spent recent months strenuously denying government claims that the US was interfering in Kyrgyzstan’s internal affairs. But with anti-Akayev demonstrators telling Western journalists that they want Kyrgyzstan to become “the 51st state“, this official line is wearing a little thin.
Even Young admits that Kyrgyzstan is the largest recipient of US aid in central Asia: The US has spent $746m there since 1992, in a country with fewer than five million inhabitants, and $31m was pumped in 2004 alone under the terms of the Freedom Support Act. As a result, the place is crawling with what the ambassador rightly calls “American-sponsored NGOs“.
The case of Freedom House is particularly arresting. Chaired by the former CIA Director James Woolsey, Freedom House was a major sponsor of the orange revolution in Ukraine. It set up a printing press in Bishkek in November 2003, which prints 60 opposition journals. Although it is described as an “independent“ press, the body that officially owns it is chaired by the bellicose Republican Sen. John McCain, while the former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake sits on the board. The US also supports opposition radio and TV.
Many of the recipients of this aid are open about their political aims: The head of the US-funded Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, Edil Baisalov, told the New York Times that the overthrow of Akayev would have been “absolutely impossible“ without American help. In Kyrgyzstan as in Ukraine, a key element in regime change was played by the elements in the local secret services, whose loyalty is easily bought.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK