Twenty-five years ago, on March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot down while celebrating Mass in San Salvador. In the years before his murder, Romero had emerged as an outspoken defender of the Salvadoran poor, making him one of the best-known embodiments of the liberation theology that was infusing new life into the Catholic Church in Latin America in the ’70s and ’80s.
Opinion Piece Why Wolfowitz? Jim Vallette Tompaine.com March 17, 2005
What do you reckon will be Bush’s mantra in the second term? Will prompting democracy be his new ideology? Do you think that the Bush administration is genuinely pursuing the establishment of democratic systems in ME or is it just a rhetoric to conceal the real U.S. goals and schemes?
President George W. Bush has now asked Congress and the U.S. taxpayers for the fourth time in two years for more money to fight the Iraq War. This time the request is for $82 billion, the highest amount asked for so far. But more striking than the dollar amount is that Mr. Bush, for the fourth time, has failed to present a strategy for success in Iraq.
Polls in recent weeks show a full 59 percent of Americans are now in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. But they’re not acting on this view, in part because they worry about the potential for even greater chaos following a U.S. exit.
Opinion Piece Dealing with the Powers in PyongyangJohn Feffer Ft. Worth Star-Telegram February 16, 2005
The World Bank, the planet’s largest lender to poor nations, will soon have a new leader. The Bush administration should support a candidate who will bring about changes within the mammoth institution necessary to make it more effective at its primary task: ending World poverty. Given that by tradition, the U.S. picks the World Bank president, this is a golden opportunity to help mend some fences and improve the nation’s standing internationally at a time when U.S. popularity is suffering.
Continuing to fund these big-ticket systems is one reason the Army is still scrambling to provide adequate body armor and well-protected Humvees to our troops in Iraq.
The news is leaking out that the Pentagon will be making deep cuts in its 2006 budget for weapons. The cuts appear headed in the right direction: toward scaling back weapons systems that were designed to fight the cold war and have little relevance to the wars we are actually fighting. Calling them “deep cuts,” however, is a stretch. It would be another stretch to believe that there will be anything left over to address important deficits in U.S. security.
Remember when we used to talk about how the war in Iraq was about oil?