Polls show that the American people are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the war in Iraq and want our beloved troops to come home as soon as possible. Nearly 80 communities nationwide have put these sentiments in city and town council resolutions that call for bringing our sons and daughters home from a war that has become a deadly quagmire and an occupation as unpopular in Iraq as in the United States.
This is what passes for a security debate in the halls of Congress these days. The House and Senate Armed Services committees are on track to hand the president the 460-odd-billion-dollar military budget he asked for, give or take a billion or two.
President Bush has yet another supposed “emergency” on his hands. This time it’s illegal immigration. His response is to deploy thousands of National Guard troops along the Mexican border. The tactic is eerily familiar: send soldiers on a murky mission under the pretense of promoting homeland security and the war on terror.
Even though North Korea’s long-range missile turned out to be a dud, Pyongyang has nevertheless achieved its aim by getting the world’s attention. Governments around the world have rushed to condemn Pyongyang. Japan and the United States want to bring the full weight of the United Nations against the country. North Korea, meanwhile, has argued that it would consider comprehensive sanctions an act of war. It’s threatening a nuclear strike if attacked.
There is a whiff of Âregime change in the air these days, but not where you might expect it. Not in Iraq, where the conservative U.S.-backed Shiites are already in power. Not in Iran, where White House threats have served to unite, rather than divide, that country. But in Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf has recently fallen out of U.S. favor.
The U.S. Congress failed in recent weeks to take even symbolic steps to encourage a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, even though the majority of Americans support an end to the war. Many anti-war advocates are hoping that the mid-term U.S. elections in November will push Congress into Democratic hands and thereby increase the chances of ending the war. Don’t hold your breath.
While U.S. coalition forces and Abu Musab al Zarqawi were intertwined in a perverse deadly duel, Iraqis were caught in the crossfire. To most Iraqis Zarqawi was an American creation–he was just another foreigner using Iraq to stage his pyrotechnics under the auspices of spreading his ideology. Iraqis are happy to see him eliminated from the scene.
A date to remember will be the night of June 20, 2006. That’s the night Congress was fooled for the second time.
Since the Palestinian Legislative Council elections earlier this year, in which the Islamist group Hamas captured a majority of seats, the Bush administration has suspended U.S. economic assistance to the Palestine Authority (PA) and has led an international effort to impose sanctions against the Palestinians. This has meant enormous hardship for ordinary Palestinians, with reports that hospitals in Gaza have difficulty providing immunizations for children or dialysis machines for kidney patients. The World Health Organization warns of a “rapid decline of the public health system … toward a possible collapse.”
The recent announcement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the United States will open an embassy in Libya was welcome news all around. Long overdue, the restoration of full diplomatic relations is a win-win situation for both Libya and the United States, as well as for other states in and out of the Middle East. The U.S. decision also marks a significant shift in the foreign policy of the Bush administration, a change most observers have overlooked.