30th January 2006

The US occupation of Iraq has turned its neighbour into a new regional power. But the contagion is spreading far wider

Iraq: 'the greatest strategic disaster in US history'

In March 2003, before US troops reached Baghdad, Middle East scholar Volker Perthes wrote that while the risks of this "illegitimate" war were enormous, those of "a US failure to stabilise postwar Iraq would be even higher". With those words looking increasingly prophetic, no one, in picturing the implications of such failure, is now more lurid than the Bush administration. The direness of the prospect has become its strongest argument for "staying the course", but for others it is already a given, amounting to "the greatest strategic disaster in US history", in the words of the retired US general William Odom.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1685320,00.html

Bullying Iran not an option

Mary Riddell - The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,,1683950,00.html

Endless war

A Taliban revival, drawing on exchanges of military expertise with Iraqi insurgents, promises to make 2006 a difficult year for the United States and its Nato allies in Afghanistan. Paul Rogers writes on this and the US 'strategy' of 'endless war':
www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=3152
www.opendemocracy.net/articles/View.jsp?id=3193

Comment re Ahmadinejad from RealNews

Eric Margolis is a journalist, author, contributing editor to The American Conservative magazine says in a provocative analysis: "Anybody who says Iran is a threat to the world -- loudmouthed and aggressive as Iran has been -- is lying or they don't know what they're talking about. Ahmadinejad is speaking to his voters in Iran, and he's adopted what I think is an outrageous tone in his speeches, saying Israel has to be wiped off the face of the map and that the Holocaust is a myth. He looks like he's trying to push all the buttons and wave the flag - 'Come and attack me'. But, he's talking to his voters."

He continues: "President Bush is calling for global Jihad against Iran, Afghanistan, and God knows who is next. He's fulminating to his Bible Belt constituents in the States, saying things that outrage people around the world; and Ahmadinejad is saying things to his constituents that outrage us. The TV that we are getting in the western world, particularly in North America, is so biased, so determined to present one particular point of view and not present others that we are getting a very distorted picture of what's going on in the Middle East, which is very often much more to do with domestic American politics than with the reality abroad."

See the whole interview at: www.TheRealNews.com