There are seven areas of great political interest at this time: Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Taiwan and Korea.
These similar cases have strong differences and unique aspects. Still three basic groupings are evident: 1. Afghanistan and Iraq, 2. Ukraine, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and 3. Korea and Taiwan.
Afghanistan and Iraq are countries recently invaded by the United States and sustain strong US military presence.
Ukraine, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are areas shedding or seeking to shed historical “oppressors“ and “occupying“ forces through internal political evolution and internationally monitored dialogue with an historical “oppressor“.
Taiwan and Korea, though different, make a group because the United States is associated militarily with one partner in both occasions (South Korea in the fragile, nuclear tinderbox on the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan in the complex and deeply ideological standoff involving the claims of the People’s Republic of China).
In sum, two cases with the US military already embroiled, three cases without explicit US military presence and two cases with the US military teetering precariously on the periphery of nightmare scenarios.
Of the three groupings, only in Iraq and Afghanistan do death and war-related injury increase daily.
The Iraq death toll is now more than 3,000 US and coalition deaths and over 11,000 US and coalition casualties. Iraqi civilian casualties exceed 17,000. In Afghanistan they exceed 4,000.
War costs for Iraq stand at $168 billion.
The US military arguably is the best in history; not only for its power, but also more gloriously for the humane ethic and ideal it pursues. Even the horrific exceptions meet swift, self-imposed justice.
Nevertheless US military presence has proven perfectly ill conceived as a concept for bringing peace and stability. The tragic attempt at diplomacy-by-army is surely discredited if even so “good“ and so powerful a group of young people prove powerless to suppress ideological commitment to resistance.
The experiment is a failure not in its result, but in its premise. The world no longer admits of mixing war and good. It is a crime to ask America’s noble young soldiers to serve as the agents of “goodwill“ and the bearers of the “democratic ideal“.
America’s rise to the position of “world’s sole super-power“ blinded us to the roots of our greatness. In both Afghanistan and Iraq where violence abounds, we claim our massive military presence remains to train and support the nascent indigenous security forces necessary to protect and rebuild the infrastructure deemed necessary to allow the maturation of “democracy“ and social stability.
The problem here is that the roots of American freedom and stability are not based on security. We do not have military and paramilitary forces keeping majorities and minorities apart in our country. American democracy, freedom and social stability are the result of theological and social concepts that convince us of human equality. From this we recognize, support and defend the rights of our compatriots, even those whom we do not like. On this foundation we live together, at first reluctantly and over time in harmony.
Our democracy, freedoms and social stability were not imposed upon us by force by foreign powers. They are imposed on us by conscience and an enlightened ideal. If these are our roots, where did we get the idea that security and military force are the roots of democracy?
Frank Kaufmann, director of the Inter Religious Federation for World Peace
METIMES.COM

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI vowed to Rome’s former chief rabbi that he would renew the Vatican’s commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue. The statement, which came at the same time that Germany unveiled its new Holocaust memorial in central Berlin, was but one of several gestures the new pope has extended toward a receptive Jewish community. The Israeli government, the Anti-Defamation League and the European Jewish Congress have welcomed these overtures and urged Benedict to continue his predecessor’s work.
But from my own experience as the chairman, more than 30 years ago, of the first international Jewish delegation to meet formally with a comparable delegation from the Vatican, I am far from certain that a new age in the Jewish-Catholic relationship has dawned. At that Paris meeting in 1971, we asked the Vatican to acknowledge that it had remained silent while Europe’s Jews were murdered. The Catholic delegation responded that it was not empowered to act.
The delegates were following the instructions of the Vatican’s commission on theology, which held that the policies of Pope Pius XII and the church under the Nazis could not be questioned, because the church and its leader are, as the First Vatican Council declared in 1870, free of error on matters of doctrine and morality. When Cardinal Ratzinger became the head of that Vatican commission, he issued the same advice to Pope John Paul II, who pronounced the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis an unspeakable crime, but a crime by some Catholics, not by the church.
This position obscures the fact that in 1930’s and 1940’s Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was the only institution that possessed the moral stature and strength to denounce and forbid the murder of the Jews. It did not do so. And in all the years since, rather than acknowledging this failure to provide moral leadership in the critical hour, the Vatican has repeatedly claimed that while individual Catholics behaved sinfully or misunderstood what the church taught, the sin of letting the Holocaust happen at its doorstep need not haunt the church as an institution.
This remained the Vatican’s view throughout the 1990’s, even though both the German and the French bishops’ national conferences issued ringing confessions of their wartime sins. In 1995 the German bishops pointed out that the “church community“ had “looked too fixedly at the threat to their own institutions“ and “remained silent about the crimes committed against Jews and Judaism.“
The French bishops, for their part, stirringly concluded their September 1997 statement with the following words: “In the face of so great and utter a tragedy, too many of the church’s pastors committed an offense, by their silence, against the church itself and its mission,“ and added: “This failing of the church of France and of her responsibility toward the Jewish people are part of our history. We confess this sin. We beg God’s pardon, and we call upon the Jewish people to hear our words of repentance.“
Not only did the Vatican fail to adopt a similar attitude of contrition, but Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, who was then in charge of Jewish-Catholic relations, devalued the French and German bishops’ statements.
Arthur Hertzberg
NYTIMES.COM

An Indian Dalit, member of Hinduism lowest caste, lies on papers while participating in a hunger strike at the 2004 World Social Forum, in Bombay, Jan. 19. (AFP File Photo)

India’s 170 million Dalits, formerly called Untouchables, rejoiced recently when a high government official was arrested for hurling caste-related abuse at his junior. But joy turned to dismay when the Bombay high court quashed the charge under India’s 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act because the offense had been committed in a private office and not in public. However, the court directed the police to register a case under another law, the 1955 Civil Rights Protection Act.
At least this legal nit-picking was not as grotesque as the Madras high court’s acquittal in 1973 of 23 upper-caste Hindu landowners who had burned 43 Dalit men, women and children to death in their huts. The judge argued speciously that people of their rank would hire others to do their dirty work while “keeping themselves in the background.“
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights will now examine the abominations of what has been called the world’s oldest color bar--the Sanskrit word for caste being varna, or color. “Dalits have pierced through the wall of silence in the UN,“ exulted the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights convenor, Paul Divakar.
Three years of study are expected to enable the rights commission’s two special rapporteurs, Yozo Yokota and Chin-Sung Chung, to compile a set of draft guidelines to bury the job-oriented caste hierarchy, which goes back millennia.
The two will find that discrimination persists not because India’s government condones it but because poorly enforced laws have failed to move society. They will also discover contradictions that hinder reform.
Dalits are traditionally employed as sweepers and cremation ground attendants. They keep “unclean“ animals like pigs and are subjected to every conceivable form of discrimination. But their leaders enjoy considerable political clout because, in an effort to redress the injustice of ages, India’s Constitution lavishes generous privileges on them.
Dalits live apart from the rest of the community in the interior of states like Bihar and Rajasthan in northern India and Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in the south. They are forbidden to enter temples, draw water from village wells, bathe in communal ponds or walk along certain streets. Teashops and eating-houses throw them out.
Dalits own less land than other Indians. Their education lags behind the national average. They are the poorest in India. No wonder some have turned to Marxist-Leninist rebellion. Others have become Buddhists. Romance across the caste divide in these places is punished with swift severity: Daring Dalit boys are killed, Dalit girls raped.
Dalit luminaries who have taken their woes to the UN, the World Conference Against Racism in Durban and the European Parliament (which condemns “continual acts of discrimination in Indian society based on caste-related, social or religious status“) would be the first to protest if positive discrimination ends.
The real worry is whether anything the Commission on Human Rights does will help impoverished and illiterate Dalits in remote villages. Obscurantist high-caste officials will thwart reform; so might their own pampered leaders. The international spotlight is a good thing, but experience shows that India’s economic revolution, bringing education and social and political awareness in its train, is the best guarantor of minority rights.
IHT.COM

Iran’s possible development of nuclear weapons has acquired a central importance in the US foreign policy. The importance of proliferation is enhanced by the potential to reshape the politics and security of an already turbulent and volatile region. There is further consideration to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. If there is a proliferation then who is responsible for it? Do nuclear states like the US oppose proliferation simply out of concern for their citizens’ safety or is there something more strategic at work? But why do countries want nuclear weapons? What will happen if Iran really goes nuclear?
Iran has been a party to the NPT (Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) since 1970, but in 1996 congressional testimony, Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch stated that Iran was actively pursuing an indigenous nuclear weapons capability.
The US claims that the Iranian nuclear programme is technologically broad based, includes redundant facilities, and is well dispersed across many different sites.
Time and again, Iran has insisted that it has a burgeoning population of nearly 67 million, which is likely to double in 20 years or so, thus it needs nuclear energy. Gas and oil are non-renewable resources, and, therefore nuclear energy seems a suitable alternative in fields of agriculture, industry, health and mining sectors. However, the US alleges that Iran is rolling in petro-dollars and their oil wealth is financing much more than words.
Everyone knows that Iran caricatures the US as the ’Great Satan’ whereas, the US includes it in the ’axis of evil’ states. In fact, the US antipathy goes back to the Iranian Revolution and the ’unfinished business’ of more than two decades of hostile relations. The US has not forgotten the humiliating detention of the American Embassy staff in Iran for 444 days. This episode still rankles deep in the American consciousness.
Iranian leaders’ motivations for pursuing nuclear weapons are not easily accessible to outsiders. If the US is concerned about Iran’s behaviour, such as its support for terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, then, Iran too is concerned about its security concerns vis-a-vis Israel. The US for many years has not only practised its containment policy against Iran but also supported expatriate groups bent on overthrowing the regime in Tehran, including through violent means.
Regime change has been a recurrent theme in the US policy as it has been consistently in the policy of Israel. With US military power next door, Iran is insecure as never before. Iran feels that it is Israel that calls the real shots for the US policies in the Middle East.
It is in reality the Israeli security-enhancing script that is being enacted by weakening or changing regimes-Iraq, Iran, possibly Saudi Arabia. In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had programmed the invasion of Iran in one big sweep the day after Iraq was crushed.
More important to Iran is the matter of power and presence in the Persian Gulf. With the defeat of Iraq and with rising risks of turmoil in Saudi Arabia, is in a better position to compete for pride of place in the Persian Gulf. Of course, Iranian nuclear weapons could be a card to play in a contest for influence. Petro-dollars also pay to help build long-range ballistic missiles-that can reach not only Israel but Western Europe.
When the Israelis suggested they might unilaterally stop the Iranian nuclear threat, as they did with Iraq in 1981, Tehran responded with economic blackmail: Any attack would result in Iran mining the Hormuz Straits-through which 40 percent of the world’s oil is transported. Lets not forget that the US depends on foreign oil: 60 percent of oil is imported. The slowly recovering US and global economy depends on the slippery black substance. So, contrary to the Bush administration claims, Iran’s nuclear programme isn’t the paramount reason to attack the country. Any assessment of Iran’s strategic importance to the US should focus on its huge oil reserves. Even the OPEC ministers meeting in Iran, recognised the per barrel price of increasingly scarce crude is very close to squelching the year-old upturn.
At a time when Iran is widely suspected of trying to acquire nuclear weapons, Western governments are warning about the threat of nuclear terrorism, North Korea says it has nuclear weapons and the US administration is toying with the idea of building a new generation of ’usable’ mini-nukes. The Bush administration isn’t discouraging US nuclear scientists from asking Congress for money to develop a relatively low-yield bomb designed to attack underground bunkers, in its view, for terrorists or arsenals of ’rogue states.’ What message is the US sending to the non-nuclear states? The message is clear that nuclear weapons equal respect and act as a deterrence against foreign invasion. What the US needs to understand is what are the reasons behind the fact that the countries want to go nuclear? No amount of military might or economic pressure allows a country to wish away the bomb. Why? It is cause of US tilted approach towards Israeli nuclear capability. The US must accept that Israeli nuclear capability has made the region of Middle East insecure along with the rest of the world.
NATION.COM.PK

David Trimble, who resigned as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party this week, will be remembered as the one political figure who prodded unionism past its just-say-no attitude toward Irish nationalism. He lost his seat in the British Parliament to a member of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, which now needs to devise a joint governing arrangement with Sinn Fein, the militant nationalist party that Trimble helped to bring fully into the politics of Northern Ireland.
A decade ago, Trimble and Paisley were dancing down a street in Portadown, where they had pressured the British government to allow a march by Protestant unionists through a Catholic, nationalist area. This militancy earned Trimble the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party, which has dominated politics in Northern Ireland for 80 years.
He could have maintained a hard line to insure primacy for Ulster Unionists, but instead he took a great risk--negotiating and signing the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. As a result, Sinn Fein became a junior partner in a government with the Ulster Unionists and the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labor Party. To allow negotiations to proceed, the Irish Republican Army stopped its war to force the British out of Northern Ireland.
A bare majority of unionists in Northern Ireland ratified the agreement in an island-wide referendum. This was supposed to be followed by IRA disarmament, but, despite three episodes of “decommissioning,“ this has never taken place. The provincial government was rarely able to function as a result, and Trimble’s hold on unionism weakened.
Trimble wasn’t helped by a prickly, unappealing personality, but his basic political problem was that unionist voters were unwilling to enter into government with a party that had a private army at its back.
While the Democratic Unionists had refused to take part in the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement, they, like Sinn Fein, joined the government. Once Paisley’s party became the dominant force in unionism, they negotiated with Sinn Fein, albeit indirectly, something that would have been unthinkable in the days of the Portadown dance. Even with Paisley in command, they have been nudged toward moderation by the process Trimble set in motion.
Trimble, already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, will go into an honorable retirement from politics with a seat in the British House of Lords if he wants it. Now the IRA needs to get itself and its weapons out of the way so that Democratic Unionists are faced with the responsibility of governance that Trimble tried valiantly to undertake.
BOSTON.COM