Relatives grieve as the bodies of executed men are brought to the Yarmuk hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Aug. 1. (AFP Photo)

Three years ago I submitted my Record-Courier op-ed entitled “Bush’s Bad Idea Must Not Go Unchallenged“ to the Common Dreams web-site. Within a few hours of its posting e-mail responses started popping up on my computer monitor.
Common Dreams describes itself as “An eclectic mix of politics, issues and breaking news with an emphasis on progressive perspectives that are increasingly hard to find with our corporate-dominated media.“ I had discovered it in late 2001 as I trolled the Internet for news and opinion I wasn’t seeing in local or national newspapers. By the following March, I, and most Common Dreams readers, were well aware that Bush was gearing up for a war on Iraq. “Bush’s Bad Idea“ was my first effort to write about it.
Since that time, as Bush’s Bad Idea has ripened into a horror of killing, destruction, torture, and more terrorism, I have had posted on Common Dreams some thirty more columns dealing directly or tangentially with the war on Iraq. Each essay has generated an average of about 20 e-mail responses; generally about a third just brief expressions of support; about 10 percent coarse, hateful or insulting. But a substantial number have been critical, thoughtful statements dealing with the issues and their paradoxes, and appealing for practical actions citizens could undertake to prevent or mitigate the war. Quite a few noted the shortcomings of my suggestions.
In the two weeks since my latest column the toll of terrorism has surged: 88 in Sharm el-Sheikh, 178 in Iraq. In the three years since my first column, tens of thousands have died, Osama bin Laden has not been captured, no WMDs were found, cities have been leveled and the Iraqi people are worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein, the threat of nuclear war has increased, genocide and AIDS have spread in Africa, torture has become thinkable, and the rape of our planet has accelerated.
Clearly, Bush’s war isn’t working. But just as clearly, opposing Bush and his war isn’t working either.
Two years ago Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling“ warned us that our democracy had been taken over by extremists from the religious, economic and ideological right who challenge the sanctity of civil rights and liberties, who have undertaken to replace government of, by, and for the people with divine authority, who are subverting Social Security and social welfare programs, and who deny the legitimacy of taxes and regulation by the federal government.
I am belatedly realizing that while we liberals have been protesting a cruel and needless war against another nation, a silent, well-funded political revolution has eaten the heart out of our own nation and the democracy we trusted to work for our common good.
Democracy has failed us; we have failed democracy. It hardly matters which way you put it. Our destiny is no longer in our hands. Democracy has been hijacked, and we are all responsible, if not complicit. We have let die practices and customs that might have saved us, and let stand those that drag us down into distrust, hate, torture, brutality, and selfish competitive individualism justified by faith in a vengeful God.
Bush deserves to be impeached for his crimes: murder of children and destruction of homes and livelihoods, sacrifice of young American lives, embezzlement of public funds, theft from the poor, sick and old, rape our natural resources, betrayal of a CIA agent, and usurping the sovereignty of the American people.
Caroline Arnold
COMMONDREAMS.ORG

Finally, the Irish Republican Army has done what its critics have long demanded. Last week it formally announced that it was ending its armed campaign to free Northern Ireland from British rule.
The IRA has fought for over 30 years to get the British out of Northern Ireland. The campaign has resulted in more than 3,500 deaths and left a deep and bitter division that runs through cities, neighborhoods and even some families. At regular intervals, both sides of the political and religious divide have tried to reach out, but those attempts have invariably failed. The usual cause of the breakdown has been the IRA’s insistence on the right to retain its weapons and the right to resume the armed struggle. All too often, those demands have been punctuated by killings that proved the group’s commitment to the political process was superficial at best, no matter what its political arm insisted.
Last week’s announcement appears to end that equivocation. The statement released by the IRA was direct: “All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. All volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programs through exclusively peaceful means.“ The move was made “to advance our republican and democratic objectives, including our goal of a united Ireland. We believe there is now an alternative way to achieve this and to end British rule in our country.“
What prompted the IRA change of heart? The most important factor may have been the revulsion that followed the killing of a Catholic man by suspected IRA guerrillas in January. That murder turned many of the group’s backers, including those in the United States, against it. The recent London bombings and the war against terror may also have contributed to IRA thinking about the way it is perceived and the diminishing acceptance of any form of violence to bring about political change.
While the announcement is welcome--and its clarity makes the IRA’s traditional ability to hedge extremely difficult--actions that show an irreversible commitment to peace are the real measure of progress. The IRA’s political partners and opponents, the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in particular, will only be convinced by such steps. The DUP’s opinion matters: It routed more moderate Protestant parties in general elections last year, and its demand for proof of the destruction of IRA arms stopped the peace process in its tracks. The DUP will block a resumption of local government--in which it would share power with Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm--as long as possible to test the IRA’s true intentions.
Opponents of the IRA note that last week’s announcement does not call for the group to disband. This is worrisome given the IRA’s involvement in crime, such as drug running and bank robbery. The statement released last week says that “Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever,“ a presumed reference to criminal activities. Many observers worry that crime is too profitable and confers too much power on IRA members for them to give it up. They note that the decision has not yet been ratified by a full convention of IRA activists, and therefore may not command complete obedience by all members.
If the conversion is genuine, however, there is a way to end the doubts. The IRA leadership can destroy its weapons in a transparent manner. It will renounce all criminal and paramilitary action and turn in to Northern Irish authorities for punishment anyone who violates that declaration.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

Belgian self-assertion usually involves Belgian self-gratification. Look at any Brussels restaurant with its velvet-covered banquettes occupied by bodies chomping their way through the mussels and it’s easy to be convinced by the permanently fixed solidity of all things Belgian. This country enjoys its bourgeois comforts--and the average Belgian physique is a tribute to the fleshed-out pleasures that go with chocolates and Burgundian wines.
Everything Belgian, at first sight, seems so prosaic--with its conventionally constitutional monarchy at the service of material prosperity. But beneath the sobriety there’s also an awkwardly assertive desire to prove Belgium’s right to exist. It’s as if there’s a fear that the all-too-stolid nation will dissolve away in that surrealist style established pictorially by two of its sons. RenŽ Magritte, of course, appears in any list of “famous Belgians“. But Paul Delvaux should also figure with his painted skeletons walking through a classically designed landscape that combines two worlds, the dead and the living, both equally disturbed.
Belgium, 175 years old this year, can celebrate its survival between two great powers prone to intermittent megalomania. Fought over and invaded twice in one century, Belgium has been subjected to endless condescension about its status as a country invented from above by the superpowers. But Czechoslovakia, the 20th-century version of the Belgian two-cultures-in-one-state experiment, has come and gone. The price paid for Belgian survival, though, has been a high one. Resilience in this case has meant accommodation to some of the very worst Franco-German habits.
But Belgian evasiveness has far deeper roots. In particular, the country is still finding it difficult to deal with the shame of its colonial legacy in Congo. This is partly because King Leopold II, who ran the Congo Free State as his personal fiefdom from 1885, destroyed the records relating to his rule when he was forced to hand over the land to the Belgian government in 1908. He had good reason to hide the facts. A mercenary army established a system of forced labour. Rebellion was punishable by death: soldiers collected the severed hands of dead “rebels“ to prove they had killed their quota. Figures for this major genocide remain uncertain. Estimates vary between 5 and 10 million.
All post-imperial states find it difficult to establish a new style of self-respect. Almost a century after the end of the Austro-Hungarian hallucination, Austria is on reasonably good, if boring, terms with itself (apart from the odd Haider blip). Spain’s disentanglement from empire was complicated by Francoist fascism, which meant that the emergence of a new Spain was delayed a full century and a half after the end of its Latin American empire. But there are too many unappeased ghosts that haunt the Belgian past.
Accorded the status of Europe’s administrative heartland, Belgium’s easy adoption of new European virtue has always seemed too quick off the mark to be true. The order imposed from outside is a welcome tutelage because it represents so facile a wiping of the slate. But the cruelties of empire gave the country its meaning, and its money, for a very long time.
Healthier self-recognition, and repentance, might lead to a saner kind of self-confidence among Belgians and convince them that their post-Napoleonic construct of a country is here to stay. Then they might start winning international brass band competitions.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Since tube wells became popular as a source of drinking water in Bangladesh in the 1970s, tens of millions of people have been slowly poisoned by arsenic. Exposure to arsenic from the contaminated wells is projected to double the number of cancer deaths in Bangladesh in the next two to three decades.
Potential solutions to the crisis have received less attention than the problem. It is time to plan a course of action that takes into account the current reliance on tube wells since a wholesale rejection of their use in Bangladesh isn’t realistic at this time. For now, we should focus on a feasible strategy that is relatively inexpensive yet can greatly improve the lives of millions of Bangladeshis.
More than 10 million tube wells have been installed in Bangladesh since aid organizations started promoting groundwater as a safer alternative to polluted stream or pond water that exposed consumers to potentially life-threatening illnesses like diarrheal diseases. The vast majority of these wells are privately owned, demonstrating that Bangladeshi families have been willing to spend several months of income on a reliable, nearby source of water that is not contaminated by human or animal waste.
The data already is available to make the best possible use of those aquifers that are low in arsenic instead. This option is preferable to ones that are more costly, require more maintenance or are vulnerable to contamination.
In a program sponsored by the World Bank, Unicef and other organizations, nearly five million wells in the most affected half of the country have been tested for arsenic. Approximately one-third of the tested wells are considered unsafe; but thankfully, in many villages unsafe wells are near a safe well. Follow-up surveys have shown that about one-third of the households with an unsafe well were able to switch to a neighboring safe well in response to test results. What can be done to provide safe water to the remaining 12 million people who continue to rely on their poisoned wells for drinking and cooking? It turns out that safe groundwater is reachable in most villages of Bangladesh.
The information available from the testing program can distinguish those villages where local drilling teams can manually install a safe community well from those where a mechanized rig with the ability to go deeper will have to be called in. For the villages that do not already have enough safe wells that can be shared, the installation of roughly 50,000 community wells could alleviate much of the problem at a cost of approximately $50 million.
The community-based structure of the large, successful nongovernmental organizations operating in Bangladesh is well suited to directing the installation of community wells by local teams of drillers, while a centralized government program may be needed for installing deeper wells.
An equally important task that could be taken on primarily by nongovernmental organizations is the establishment of a permanent well-testing service at the village level. A small fraction of safe wells will become tainted over time, not because an entire aquifer becomes contaminated but because shallow groundwater with elevated arsenic levels can enter through faulty connections between a well’s plastic pipes. The cost of testing - about 50 cents per test - could be paid for by communities and households.
This plan does not rule out other options, including surface water treatment, removing arsenic from groundwater, shallow dug wells, or piped-water systems that could play an important role in the long term. Ideally, Bangladeshi villagers will one day also have access to safe water from a tap at home.
In the meantime, a safe, regularly tested community well in the center of each affected village provides the best chance of addressing the problem quickly throughout the country.
IHT.COM

China's biggest single-currency note, a 100 Yuan (or Renminbi) note (AFP File Photo)

Decades from now, when historians are sorting through what became of the U.S. economy, they will surely begin their investigations with a meeting that took place on the late afternoon of July 21, 2005, in a conference room at the headquarters of the People’s Bank of China in Beijing.
Or maybe not.
The bank, in an announcement last week before representatives of the world’s largest banks, revalued China’s currency, the yuan, causing it to rise in value by about 2% against the dollar.
Almost immediately, doomsday scenarios and best-case analyses were competing for headlines: Mortgage rates would go up (because the Chinese would buy fewer U.S. bonds). American manufacturers would do better (because their products would now be cheaper in China). Toys would cost more (because so many of them are made in China).
All of this may be partly true, but probably overblown. There are many other factorsÑ-the disparity in labor costs, for oneÑ-driving the commercial relationship between the U.S. and Beijing, yet the blame-China crowd in Washington has been obsessing over the currency peg, which not long ago Washington liked. So Beijing has done what it has learned to do so wellÑ-cater to the American marketplace.
If economics is the dismal science, then the study of exchange rates and their attendant effects is enough to put it on suicide watch.
It is pointless to hypothesize about the effects of the revalued yuan, in part because it is unclear how far China is willing to take its new policy. Until we know that, all is speculation. In the meantime, two points deserve mention.
First, the change is significant not in its details but for its mere existence. For more than a decade, China set the value of the yuan rigidly at 8.28 per dollar, in part to give its economy some stability. From now on, the yuan’s value will be set against a “basket“ of currencies, and central bank officials have said they will allow it to fluctuate by 0.3% a day. This is a sign that China is willing to become more integrated into the global economy.
Which leads to the second point: Be careful what you wish for. Now that China is officially on the record with a more flexible currency policy, U.S. politicians may find it harder to complain when China is, well, more flexibleÑ-allowing the yuan to rise or fall in response to economic conditions, and working to manage those conditions to its benefit.
Of course, China will have to be careful too, as its new policy will undoubtedly attract currency speculators.
Last week’s revaluation may be the beginning of a gradual and historic shift in global economic power, with China asserting itself more forcefully and the United States in more of a reactive role. Then again, changes in currency policy are hardly uncommon, and the U.S. economy is remarkably proficient at responding to them. Check back in a few decades.
LATIMES.COM