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Several items at World Net Daily today focus on the impending release of Bill Clinton's memoirs , titled "My Life" ("Mein Lebensweg" in German), for which he has reportedly been paid $10 to $12 million.

Associated Press says US Grant sets the benchmark in success for presidential memoirs, which have often proven to be bland and unappealing.

Both Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were less successful in book sales than their wives.

Some of the greatest presidents did not write memoirs. Lincoln, JFK and FDR all died in office, while Woodrow Wilson died before he could finish writing a book. Thomas Jeffersen, James Maddison and the two Adams chose not to pen memoirs.

Kennedy won a Pulitzer prize for a book he penned (apparently with assistance from his wife) before he became president.

WND queries in one of its own books the death of Clinton Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, along with the strange deaths in short order of two other persons at the Department of Commerce who worked closely with Brown.

Of course it is highly unlikely that answers to these and many other questions will be found in the new book.

Although Clinton has been able to fend off a number of legal challenges, many still characterize his administration as corrupt.

Some on the Democrat side recognize examples of Clinton "playing fast and loose" in respect of fund-getting activities, but believe that an unfair amount of attention was focused on these vis-a-vis other administrations. No president before Clinton had to contend with the Internet.

Wealthy Republican presidents like the two Bushes had to deal with less challenged circumstances in obtaining financial backing.

The Democrat president's detractors point to numerous deaths, as well as flights from jurisdiction and mysterious behavior amongst witnesses and persons with knowledge regarding investigations involving the Clintons. They say that the extent and tenor of activity around Clinton is similar to that which surrounds investigation of organized crimes figures.

President Bush has been seen, since he assumed office, to curtail probes into the Clinton administration.

Some of his presidential predecessors have said that the United States would gain nothing from "the jailing" or indictment of one of its leaders.

Clinton critics say it is unacceptable that a US president subvert the very system he heads in the interest of self-preservation, and that his example undermines confidence amongst citizens in the rule of law and damages the credibility of US activities abroad.

Regarding the latter, Islamofascists cite Clinton's "Monica bombs" as facade operations carried out by the US in the style of "Wag the Dog" - contrary to the public perception in the US - only to divert attention from the president's domestic travails.

"What is that?"I asked increduously. The girl appeared to be working a sharp-looking stick into her eardrum.

"Cleaning my ears," she said, continuing the deep, dangerous-looking probe while I cringed. She nonchalantly returned my fearful gaze and asked "Haven't you ever seen this before?"

I emphatically shook my head.

Over the next few months I learned about this stick.

The tool doesn't really have a name but Chinese people know it as a "wa ee zai gon go" which, funnily enough, translates roughly as "stick for scooping muck out of ears". It's a thin foot-long wooden stick that bends slightly into a flat scoop at one end and has a fluff-ball on the other end.

For Chinese people, I was told, the tool is standard issue, maybe at birth.

The idea is that after you've finished scooping with one end, you twirl the thing around and brush away any yucky left-over items with the fluff ball.

And it works like a charm.

It took me months to work up the courage to try it. When I finally did, it was with extreme trepidation and only on the condition that my expert friend do the scooping for me. "What if there's an earthquake?" I inquired, many times.

The amount of disgusting stuff that came out of my ears was jaw-dropping.

Over many years of cleaning my ears with cotton buds, I have never ever seen such dramatic results as those gotten with the stick on almost every occasion. Once over the fear of puncture, one can actually grow to enjoy scraping away layers that, inevitably and surreptitiously, grow on the ear's thin protective membrane.

It's funny, but every time I use it I can't help but think back to my early childhood days.

My grandparents especially, and people of their generation, had a standard line for admonishing naughty children with a penchant for sticking into their mouths any small item that would fit.

"Don't do that," they would say, "It's been in Chinamen's ears."

Which seemed, at the time, like a funny thing to say. Of course it didn't stop me putting things into my mouth. But it sure made me wonder what adventures each targeted coin and nick-nack might have had.

How strange it is to realize, as a "gwailo" adult, that if the coins were able to speak they might have confirmed that Chinese ears are perhaps the cleanest of all.

More often than not the aim of war is to win territory. Borders tend to change - one way or another - in the face of aggressive campaigns.

Hence the Ottoman boundaries in the Middle East disappeared following the defeat of Turkey in WW1. The countries carved out of the area by the French and the British in 1918 have, by and large, survived to the present day.

In the 1930s and 40s the map of Europe changed in the face of Hitler's WW2 advance, and was then restored by the Allies' successful counter, culminating in the division of Germany into East and West after the war.

That division of Germany is now as passe as Mesopotamia, Siam and Gaul, all of which loomed large on human maps at various times over thousands of years.

In a philosophical sense national borders are but creations of our imagination, as is the very concept of "country" itself.

So arguments purporting ultimate truth in such matters can be obscene, often inspiring futile and bloody battles. Fairness, reasonableness and good-heartedness are not simply esoteric ideals but, I believe, ultimately very helpful in the serious business of divvying up this planet we all share.

Bigotry and chauvinism would not seem to be great assistants in this regard. Not if the aim is peace.

This little meandering is prompted by the range of reactions to Israeli PM Sharon's announced intention to shrink his country - again - this time out of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank.

Remember that it was Sharon's Likud Party, which the New York Times' James Bennett helpfully described recently as a "bulwark for Greater Israel", which ceded the Sinai peninsula (an oil-rich desert area larger than Israel itself) to Anwar Sadat-led Egypt 25 years ago.

A more extreme reaction than Bennett's, as always, is the latest instalment of hate-Israel/ hate-America spittle by rabid propagandist Robert Fisk.

Fisk describes US President Bush, a commender and backer of Sharon's plan, as a "most dangerous man" , ("...a thief?...a criminal?") as well as a "gutless, cowardly" wilfiul and boring liar who's "lunacy and weakness " make him "more frightened of the Israeli lobby (both the Jewish "cabal" and the "Christian Sundie" fundamentalists) than he is of his own electorate", and who connives to use Iraqis as "sandbags" in a "firing line".

For a short article (written before the Rantisi assassination) that might seem like an amazingly obtuse tirade, but it is typical of Fisk.

The issue at hand is indeed Sharon and Israel. The references to Iraq, one suspects, are merely to help the reader see the bigger Bush-as-criminal /idiot-picture that looms so large (and menacingly/stupidly, but never contradictorily) in Fiskworld.

The Gaza withdrawal itself is only fleetingly mentioned by the writer as "puny". He instead castigates, with more adjectives than I can sensibly cram into this sentence, the "prepostorous demands" of "colonial" Israel & "Sharon's plan to steal yet more Palestinian land, (in fact) ...(v)ast areas" of the West Bank.

Then he likens Bush's endorsement thereof to resurrecting (now, in 2004) the various Nazi landgrabs and the former European colonizations around the globe over hundreds of years.

We may as well give the Netherlands to Spain, and Egypt and America to Britain. So says Fisk.

In one fell swoop this "yellow-streak"ed US President, he claims, has justified terrorism, boosted Bin Laden's recruitment drive and destroyed US credibility as a middle-man.

From here on in, says Mr Fisk, everyone who loses life or limb (from terrorism anywhere, one assumes) has Bush to blame.

And the reason the US President done this horrible thing (of, keep in mind, applauding Sharon for wanting to move completely out of Gaza and out of most of the West Bank)?

Because, claims Fisk, he is a Christian Zionist fanatic who endorses Sharon because of the belief that "the state of Israel must exist there according to Gd's law until the second coming.......I kid thee not!"

When you open a newspaper like "The Guardian" or Fisk's"The Independent", drooling bigotry like this pours out in synch with that tired leftish formula: Israel and the United States as the arch-enemies of mankind, Ariel Sharon as the devil incarnate, Palestinians the perennial victims, and anyone opposing the aforementioned bad guys as automatic good guys and current victims.

Jews are fine so long as they hate Israel but if they support Israel they are dogs deserving of slow death.

And, of course, capitalism sucks. (Well, maybe not, at least to some extent, European capitalism...)

Test the Fisk paradigm by slotting in the recent news that 68 innocent people, many of them in a targeted busload of schoolchildren, were massacred by a series of exploding lemming attacks in Iraq.

You will find no emphasis, for example, that the exploding lemmings themselves must surely have been convinced - possibly by apparently wise and trustworthy bearded fellows - that they were to be rewarded with virgins in heaven for their holy murderous actions.

That the said bearded fellows are all about using force, intimidation and barbaric spectacle. To achieve, apparently, hegemonic power - world hegemonic power.

That they regard the people they mass murder along the way as mere political pawns necessarily sacrificed in the name of their version of Allah. How weak is America for lamenting the loss of human life, they chuckle.

Slot this news story into the Guardian paradigm and you will find no analytical treatment of the possibility that but for such kind of intimidation this brand of demented fanatical belief has given and offers the world not a stitch.

No role model society, no technological or economic or social clout, no leadership in just and popular endeavours. Just the crude, trogladite threat to relieve the world of both the "Pax" and the "Americana" in Pax Americana, as well as the democratic and libertarian ideals that underscore it; such relief to be achieved the only way it can: by bypassing the voluntary marketplace of popular ideas in which the American brand of democracy has thrived,

Instead of such irrelevant digression (regarding the news about the 68 slaughtered innocents) the denizens of newspaper far leftism get to the meat of things as they see it:

That the loss of 68 lives was the fault of one G. W. Bush. That fanatics are never (or rarely) responsible for their own actions. That the "brutal American occupation" of Iraq makes them understandably upset.

And Bush's support of Sharon's terrible plan to withdraw from Palestinian territories is intolerable.

So instead of righteously castigating a fanatical belief system that presents a direct, actual and constant threat to the average person in almost any street anywhere, Robert Fisk of the Independent instead pokes malicious fun at the Christian Zionists, who in his perception control the US President like a puppet on a string.

Never mind that President Bush, like all US Presidents, believes in and adheres to the rigid American constitutional necessity of separating church and state.

Never mind that the current President has stressed repeatedly the hope that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will prompt Palestinians to build a prosperous Mediterrannean resort there instead of a launching pad for murder and mass-murder attacks. Including those same Palestinians who were wildly and happily cheering after the 9/11 attacks.

Sharon first had contact with Bush in 1998, as George Will points out, when the then-governor of Texas accompanied him on a helicopter tour of the Israel's vulnerabilities and saw the place where Israel, from 1949 until 1967, had been nine miles wide ( "Why, in Texas we have driveways longer than that" ).

Fisk is or ought to be well aware that it was in that context that Bush referred to a realistic solution involving Israel keeping parts of the West Bank. That previous US Presidents adopted the same position. That in any case Bush said that nothing Israel does now affects final status negotiations.

That in accordance with the "international law" that Fisk cites so piously, famous UN Resolution 242 (passed after the 1967 Six Day War), required the withdrawal of Israel "from territories occupied in the recent conflict." Not from "the" territories. Israel insisted on deletion of the "the" because it implied, as Arab and other powers acknowledged by vehement opposition to the deletion -- withdrawal from all territories.

Bush does not talk plain English, in Fisk's view. He supports Sharon's plan only because of the evil Jewish "cabal" on the one hand, and the Christian perception of Armageddon and Rapture on the other.

Forget that President Bush has raised record-breaking levels of campaign funds from a wide range of corporate and individual sources, only a small percentage of whom might even be loosely affiliated with those two, err, "groups".

Forget that a US President has tremendous independent powers and Bush would not stand a chance of election, let alone re-election, if he was or was perceived as a meek follower under the thumb of any kind of warped sectional interest.

Forget that Bush won plaudits throughout an unprecedentedly (that's right) successful gubernatorial political career as a unifier and a man with great powers of outreach; George W. Bush was the only governor to achieve re-election in the history of the state of Texas.

You have to forget all of that to appreciate the Fiskworld experience, where George W. & co. are bad guys plain and simple, and anything they do is wrong.

Including trying to take a step towards a just two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians a la the latest Sharon move.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I believe it is intellectually appalling try to argue, as Fisk perennially does, that "true" ownership of Palestine lies with the Arabs. The Jewish arguments are also very compelling. Jews certainly believe them to be valid and are also willing to die for their own principles. They have, indeed, already done so in numerous wars and continue to do so at present.

The condition of being "Jewish" is certainly a very real identificant, one that has been the object of mistreatment when in stateless condition, and one that is tied up　with the view of being worthy of self-determination and having a nexus with the Middle East in that respect.

Huge numbers of Jews were also forced to migrate to Israel from the Arab world until 1948, just as many Arabs were forced to leave Israel so many years ago.

While over a million Arabs live in Israel today (that is, in Israel itself, exclusive of the West Bank and Gaza) very few Jews are presently able to live anywhere in the Arab world.

And the entire region of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is a tiny area. That is why fairness and a non-violent attitude amongst the people living there is so important. All peoples can achieve happy lives if they focus on the difficult business of state building for themselves, instead of the emotionally easy extensions of envy: dehumanising, blaming and seeking to destroy others.

We can be encouraged that many Arabs may also be open to a reasonable and just two-state solution, considering the point made by Walter Mead in today's Bush is Bad News that:

"In Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries, the large majority of people I spoke with are ready to tolerate the Jewish state - most even understand that the final boundaries of Israel will include some of the heavily settled areas beyond the pre-1967 borders. They also understand that few if any Palestinians will return to the homes they lost after the war that erupted when Israel declared its independence in 1948."

If this is true, which I hope it is. It may be a stretch, considering the worldview entertained by many in the media and as discussed hereinabove. But the media must sell product, and perhaps people everywhere are not so ignorant of that. What would a fringe-dwelling propagandist have to hate and to write about if peace were to break out?

If one is to look seriously at peaceful solutions, something along the lines of that described by Mead - and initiated by Sharon- is all that is viable.

Former NY City Mayor Ed Koch praises Eagleberger and admonishes NY Times:


"On Sunday, April 4, while watching the Fox News Channel, I saw former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger interviewed on the rising insurrection in Iraq. The interview followed a whole day of televised gloom, doom, pessimism and Bush-bashing by the talking heads of medialand...

"The next day, I expected Eagleburger's views to be covered by the media. There was not one reference to his comments..."

(Koch reproduces this excerpt:)




REPORTER: It's a bad day for the U.S. military ...


EAGLEBURGER: Very bad day, it's a mess, but I must tell you I think we're going to see more of this as we get closer to that June turnover date ... not less of it. Unless we get very tough, I think it's going to be a real difficult time when that June date comes around.


REPORTER: No, I agree, so what do you mean by getting tough? What do you think we need to do?


EAGLEBURGER: Well, I will now make myself terribly unpopular, but there's going to have to be some killing. I don't know any other way to put this. You cannot go into a place like we just saw there in Baghdad and just let this continue. Now I know there are women and children and so forth, but the fact of the matter is these people are out in the streets, there's only one way to deal with them and that is you have to get them off of the streets and if you have to shoot at them to do that, we're going to have to do some of that.


REPORTER: You're talking about heavy firepower ... you're talking about strategic strikes ... or more of an overall?


EAGLEBURGER: Well, what I'm really talking about is\ you've got to get enough troops in there, and I'm not the military genius here, but it does seem to me that with sufficient force, these people could be put down. And every time they raise their heads it's got to happen again. I'm sorry but I do not believe that we can go on like this, threatening that we're going to retaliate and not retaliate, and when we retaliate, it had better be forceful.


REPORTER: When you say "better be forceful," are you talking airpower, are you talking ground, a combination? ...


EAGLEBURGER: Well, clear and cohesive message [that] it won't be tolerated, and if that means level it ・I don't think you're going to have to level it, but if what I'm saying here is going to upset people I might as well say it: Unless we are prepared to take whatever actions are necessary militarily to put these people down so we can go on with a steady transition to an Iraqi government, the transition will not take place, because there won't be anything to transit to. ... [End of excerpt]

Sometimes statistics, while often liable to be exploited and used selectively, spell out sad imbalances:

"In 1969, there were 502 convictions for tax fraud. Such cases, called 'white-collar crimes', usually involve people with a good deal of money. Of those convicted, 20% ended up in jail. The fraud averaged $190,000 per case; their sentences averaged 7 months.

"That same year, for burglary and auto theft (crimes of the poor) 60 % ended up in prison. The auto thefts averaged $992; the sentences averaged 18 months. The burglaries averaged $332; the sentences averaged 33 months."

(From Howard Zinn' "A People's History of the United States")

Olympic years have sometimes coincided with significant Middle East milestones.

The state of Israel came into being in 1948, the first Olympic year after WW2. The first Arab-Israeli war after that date was in 1956. Rumor has it that ruthless billionaire Yasser Arafat privately boasts of kickstarting his career with sponsorship of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Arafat is said to have been previously trained and sponsored by the Soviets. Perhaps it was, as some claim, under their tutelage that he mastered the art of proferring both gun and olive branch, always tantalising with the olive branch and then withdrawing it slightly out of reach, while constantly firing a gun.

So it was that he scotched the Oslo peace process with the (impossible) last-minute demand for a Palestinian "right of return" that would demographically destroy the Jewish state.

By virtue of this move Arafat destroyed the political career of dismayed Israeli Labor PM Ehud Barak, but also resurrected the career of his Lebanon-era nemesis Ariel Sharon.

Frightened and disaffected Israelis identified with Sharon when he visited the Jewish Temple Mount in Olympic year 2000, incensing Arabs protective of what is also a Muslim holy site. The politically calculated move provided the catalyst for the murder lemming-led bloodshed that has flown since that time. It also catapulted Sharon into the prime ministership.

Now we are in another Olympic year. And it is Sharon making the moves that represent the greatest current hope of curtailing violence in this horrible saga: the launch of Israel's security fence, the decapitation of Islamofascist (new word? ) icon Yassin, and now the withdrawal from Gaza.

Sharon's plan will finally force the removal of a few thousand Jewish Israelis from the midst of over a million Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza strip. It is a sensible move that is a relief to most Israelis and to most Jews around the world who can't understand how these settlements survived for so long in the first place.

It lifts a great burden from the Israeli security forces, and removes an enormous inconvenience to long-suffering Palestinians living in the vicinity of the settlements. Main transport arteries, for example, are currently blocked for hours on a daily basis while the Israeli army guards the movement of Jewish settlers to and from their Gaza homes.

In tandem with this the erection of the security fence, as US Ambassador Dennis Ross explained to FNC's Brit Hume yesterday, renders redundant the myriad of roadblocks Israelis have placed throughout the West Bank. These have afforded Israel a preventative buffer against terrorist attacks, but of course also grossly hinder the free movement of the vast majority of Palestinians who are not involved with such attacks.

Such roadblocks, with the erection of the fence, will be no more. Israelis and Palestinians will, as Mr Sharon says, have the opportunity of (hostile) "disengagement".

It's early days yet, but Arafat's answer to all this so far has been to criticise (again), to scream "right of return" (again), and to petition the good old United Nations - which, in the last few days, yet again voted to censure Israel for "human rights violations" even as 11 Palestinian suicide bomb attempts were foiled in Israel in one week and it was revealed that the woman carrying the last bomb may have been pressured to do so to repent for having sex before marriage.

The reactions of European leaders have generally been more cautious and positive. Even German Chancellor Schroeder recognises Sharon's move as a positive first step, and Joschka Fischer's reaction was similarly hopeful.

The real test for Middle East peace, however, is in the attitudes on the ground amongst ordinary Arabs. The Washington Post reports today the comment of a Palestinian who became a refugee in Jordan:

"Our main job is to raise children to return to Palestine, even if it's in a million years.
"So Bush can say whatever he wants. My great hope is that my two sons will die as martyrs for Palestine."

When such people accept Israelis as humans, accept and make the best of the hand they are dealt, and dream that their children might be Olympic heros rather than martyrs, that is when we will see peace in the Middle East.

70% of 90,000 people who voted in today's Fox News Poll said: "My opinion is the same -- I support the President's strategy in Iraq.". Those are quite hefty figures, with voters reflecting virtually no change from their existing opinion. The figures are all the more compelling when one considers that triple the number of cable viewers watched President Bush's recent speech via Fox News Channel rather than CNN (per Drudge ).

Even the full court liberal press given to the 9/ll Commission Inquiry in concert with the recent rioting in Iraq has not wrought a significant shift in public opinion in the United States or amongst its allies.

It seems that various aspects of liberal schadenfreude (look it up ), the inanity of the shallow Vietnam comparisons, the collusion between press and Democrats in opposing the Bush administration, the quality of National Security Advisor Rice's testimony and the common sense of President Bush's confirmation of intent et cetera are apparent to the public.

Or it could be as Henry Kissinger sees it: "Success is the only strategy" (see George Will today).

Nobody (except Spain's new socialist government) believes the United Nations will succeed if the US fail, for as Will also points out:

"Before the war, the United Nations presided over spectacular corruption in the oil-for-food program. After the war, it took just one bomb to blow the United Nations out of Iraq. And the democratic forces in Iraq despise the United Nations as a collaborator with Saddam Hussein.

"However, some involvement by the United Nations would usefully blur the clarity of U.S. primacy..."

Nobody, or at least not many watchers of Bill O'Reilly's FNC program, are fooled or influenced by the overt and highly publicised anti-Bush campaigning by relatives of US soldiers who have died in Iraq. But if you opened (US) ABC News' website yesterday you would have been subjected to this triumphally placed "Quote of the Day":


' "I can't live another year like I've lived this one. The sacrifice that this family's made can never be understood by someone who hasn't gone through it … It's a burden I can't bear. My family can't bear it."

- John Witmer, whose daughter Michelle was killed in combat in Iraq. Now, he wants to prevent her two sisters from being sent back to Iraq. '

The Japanese government is evidently well aware of the dangers of this type of emotional appeal where it conflicts with official government policy. Somehow, the relatives of hostage victims have been persuaded not to publicly demand withdrawal of Japanese forces, which they were doing until yesterday. Prime Minister Koizumi, Japan's longest-serving head of state in two decades, continues to hold together the alliance with the US in Iraq in the face of strong opposition.

Vietnam comparisons are a flavor of the moment in the US press, and the Bush administration is certainly aware that public opinion started to significantly turn against that US campaign only after American soldiers had been dying and killing in a faraway place for many years.

Another interesting "Vietnam comparison" is brought to mind by William Safire's point today that John Kerry, if he were elected President, would need "Pentagon G.O.P. support, as Bill Clinton did" (Safire thus entertains the idea that Kerry night also appoint a Republican as Defence Secretary).

Just as the Defence establishment has traditionally been a Republican stronghold, the media has been a liberal stronghold. It was on the Vietnam issue that the two famously clashed and the media "won" a "war" of attrition over public opinion. The Watergate affair followed shortly after, and it was also in the '70s that the "pressure Israel" mantra took root and grew into the inane monster it is today.

Perhaps the tide is now turning, and the line taken by the Bush administration in the Iraq war will finally bury the nonsense we have seen since Vietnam.

The gullible and confused should take note: Iraq is not Vietnam:

"The anti-coalition insurgencies by parts of the Sunni and Shia communities in Iraq have led to a renewed outbreak of the V-word in the Western media. V for Vietnam, that is...

"With one exception, these comparisons do not stand up to serious analysis. They signify either wishful thinking by an obsessively anti-American faction of politicians, journalists and academics, or an abysmal ignorance of history.

(The exception is thus-)

"Like the Vietcong before them, the Iraqi insurgents are hoping to convert their military losses into a political victory, courtesy of reporting and commentary that is at times emotive, confused and gullible."



On the subject of Vietnam, there is an interesting treatment in Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", a tome that would be more aptly titled "A Socialist's Cataloging of Negative Excerpts from the History of the United States" and is tiresome and juvenile in its focus on protest movements and in is presumption throughout of the following formula:

Capitalism = Evil
Rich People = Evil
Poor People = Good
'60s = Yeah Baby
Black people = Good if poor and downtrodden

So you might imagine how the author would wax lyrical in describing an event like the Vietnam War. The reminder of the insidious role of America's erstwhile ally France is what really catches attention here though. Zinn reproduces the following Vietnamese description of the French occupation of their country:-

"They have enforced inhuman laws...They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots, they have drowned uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion...They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials...They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes... (in a period of about 6 months) more than two million of our fellow citizens died of starvation..."

The last point is emphasized by Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh in one of eight (ignored and unanswered) letters he wrote to President Truman in 1945-46:

"Two million Vietnamese died of starvation during winter of 1944 and Spring 1945 because of (the) starvation policy of (the) French who seized and stored until it rotted all available rice...Unless (the) great world powers and international relief organizations bring us immediate assistance we face imminent catastrophe..."

What a tragedy it was that the United States approached the Vietnamese conundrum through the paradigm of its anti-Communism and its WW2-forged alliance with France. When Japan was forced to leave Vietnam (known then as Indochina) in 1945, a million Vietnamese celebrated joyously in the streets of Hanoi and issued a Declaration of Independence that began like it's American predecessor:

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; amongst these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Behind the Vietnamese was the French occupation and the Japanese wartime occupation that supplanted it. But instead of achieving the independence they yearned for, they found the French finagling their way back into Vietnam, bombing and warring on the place to enforce their rule, and ultimately embroiling the United States in the conflict when they were booted out.



Arnaud de Borchgrave, who covered Tet as Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam, says in The Washington Times:

"...Tet was an unmitigated military disaster for Hanoi and its Viet Cong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that was not the way it was reported in U.S. and other media around the world.

"It was television's first war. And some 50 million Americans at home saw the carnage of dead bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans running around. ...a military disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a week or two later ...the damage had been done...

"As South Vietnamese troops fought Viet Cong remnants in Cholon... reporters, sipping drinks in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel, watched the fireworks 2 miles away. America's most trusted newsman, CBS' Walter Cronkite, appeared for a standup piece with distant fires as a backdrop.

"Donning helmet, Mr. Cronkite declared the war lost...

"It was this now famous television news piece that persuaded President Lyndon Johnson six weeks later, on March 31, not to run for re-election...

"Hanoi thus turned military defeat into a priceless geopolitical victory...

"Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the antiwar demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp...

"That is the real lesson for the U.S. commitment to Iraq. Whatever one thought about the advisability of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States is there with 100,000 troops and a solid commitment to endow Iraq with a democratic system of government. While failure is not an option for Mr. Bush, it clearly is for Sen. Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, who called Iraq the president's Vietnam...

"It is, of course, no such animal. But it could become so if congressional resolve dissolves...

"Kennedy should remember that Vietnam was the war of his brother who saw the conflict in the larger framework of the Cold War and Nikita Khrushchev's threats against West Berlin. It would behoove Kennedy to see Iraq in the larger context of the struggle to bring democracy, not only to Iraq, but the entire Middle East."

Democracies cannot be built overnight, Barbara Amiel

"When our Founding Fathers said 'We the people,' they didn't mean me. It took us a while to get to the kind of multi-ethnic society that works."

- US National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, at today's 9/11 Commission hearings.


"(T)he status of African Americans in economics, housing, education, health, social justice and civic engagement is 73 percent of their white counterparts.

"That statistic resonates with a terrible chapter of black American history, when the original Constitution declared slaves would be counted as only three-fifths of a "person" for purposes of reapportionment.

"But, while a gap definitely persists between blacks and whites, the gap has gotten smaller since the 1960s. We are going in the right direction. We need to keep going. The system works. Unfortunately, it is not working for all of us. The real question of the moment should be how do we take what we have learned and make it work for others? "



Israeli PM Ariel Sharon tells Maariv newspaper he will make settlers leave their homes:

Sharon: That is extremely hard. Hard for the settlers, some of whom have already had grandchildren there. It is very hard for me too. I gave much thought to the issue until I reached the conclusion that part of the settlement enterprise, in Gaza probably the entire one, would eventually have to be evacuated. I said this even prior to my first term in office.

Ma'ariv: True, but no one took you seriously.

Sharon: Let me give you a piece of advice: Take me seriously. I said it in the clearest of terms. … It is a difficult decision, one that caused me a great deal of pain. But it must be done and I hold the responsibility.

Luckily for us, most people aren't on the front lines in Iraq. Hundreds of US (and some coalition) soldiers have died brutal deaths over there.

Spared direct involvement, the Iraq war only exists for the vast majority of people on television screens, in newspapers and on the Internet.

So if the war is portrayed by significant media institutions with relentless negative bias, that is a most serious offence not only against the ordinary citizen but also against the brave young men and women fighting the war.

If the war is portrayed at home as unjust, it will inevitably affect the morale and performance of troops at the front.

It will also raise the morale of the enemy, who in the interconnected global vollage that is the world in 2004 are not only fully aware of public machinations in the western world but geared to exploit them. This we can see in the recent events in Spain, in the evidence of bribe money to western figures paid by Saddam Hussein's regime and, we might infer, in the recent upscaling of attacks on US soldiers coinciding as it does with events in an election year in the US.

The 9/11 attacks were clearly themselves icily calculated media events.

Yet, the qualitatively low level of anti-Bush and anti-US sloganeering has been exposed to astoundingly little critical analysis. The current spate of rioting is said by it's Shi'ite leader to be be an action of "resistance" to US "occupation", even though the US is trying to build an independent democracy and fully intends to leave Iraq as soon as possible, and even though such rioting can only prolong death and conflict.

For the US to succeed in its intention is the only moral and correct option for all concerned and most especially the poor people of Iraq, yet opponents of the Bush administration are focusing their attention to besmirching every historical and current aspect of their government's efforts.

So Ted Kennedy's recent and aggressive remonstrations are granted wide media coverage, with nary a reference to that Senator's own dubious credibility. Internet travelers can see at Newsmax.com a reminderof the various unsavoury incidents that have ruined Senator Kennedy's own presidential ambitions - most significantly the night he left young campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to die in his crashed Oldsmobile underneath Edgartown Bridge in July 1969 after a night of drinking and partying, then swam himself to safety and tried to get his cousin Joe Garghan to say he was behind the wheel.

But such references are not made by the television networks highlighting his attacks on the war. All three US networks will this Thursday broadcast live National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 2001 attacks. We can assume that the networks might draw motivation from the fact that the White House had initially insisted that Rice's testimony be private before bowing to political pressure from both Republicans and Democrats that she speak publicly.

We have already seen that even though the man at the centre of the inquiry, Clinton appointee and CBS partner Richard Clarke, is vitually devoid of credibility his criticisms of President Bush have been feasted on by the media.

The current situation is indeed, as the President recently said, a stringent test of US resolve in Iraq. Most hope that the US will survive the test, and that hope is what people want to see reflected in the media's portrayal of the war. But it has not been, and if Bush succeeds and is re-elected, many in the electorate will certainly glean emotional satisfaction from any appropriate consequences dealt upon those who so unconscionably and readily betrayed the trust of the public in its fourth estate.




The Looming Islamization of Europe

Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post, May 11, 2004


'Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione ("The Force of Reason"). And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam. Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development:

The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition or its historic values. The number of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call Europe the "new dark continent."

Already, analysts estimate Britain's mosques host more worshipers each week than does the Church of England.

An anemic birthrate. Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 per woman, and falling.

One study finds that should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today's population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075. To keep its working population even, the EU needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually.

Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims. As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive, and ambitious. As Europeans under-reproduce at advanced ages, Muslims do so in large numbers while young.

Some 5% of the EU, or nearly 20 million persons, presently identify themselves as Muslims; should current trends continue that number will reach 10% by 2020. If non-Muslims flee the new Islamic order, as seems likely, the continent could be majority-Muslim within decades.

When that happens, grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization – at least until a Saudi-style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up. The great national cultures – Italian, French, English, and others – will likely wither, replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity that merges North African, Turkish, subcontinental, and other elements.

This prediction is hardly new. In 1968, British politician Enoch Powell gave his famed "rivers of blood" speech in which he warned that in allowing excessive immigration the United Kingdom was "heaping up its own funeral pyre." (Those words stalled a hitherto promising career.) In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published Camp of the Saints, a novel that portrays Europe falling to massive, uncontrolled immigration from the Indian subcontinent.

The peaceable transformation of a region from one major civilization to another, now underway, has no precedent in human history, making it easy to ignore such voices.

There is still a chance for the transformation not to play itself out, but the prospects diminish with time. Here are several possible ways it might be stopped:

Changes in Europe that lead to a resurgence of Christian faith, an increase in childbearing, or the cultural assimilation of immigrants; such developments can theoretically occur, but what would cause them is hard to imagine.

Muslim modernization: For reasons no one has quite figured out (education of women? abortion on demand? adults too self-absorbed to have children?), modernity leads to a drastic reduction in the birthrate. Also, were the Muslim world to modernize, the attraction of moving to Europe would diminish.

Immigration from other sources. Latin Americans, being Christian, would more or less permit Europe to keep its historic identity. Hindus and Chinese would increase the diversity of cultures, making it less likely that Islam would dominate.

Current trends suggest Islamization will happen, for Europeans seem to find it too strenuous to have children, stop illegal immigration, or even diversify their sources of immigrants. Instead, they prefer to settle unhappily into civilizational senility.

Europe has simultaneously reached unprecedented heights of prosperity and peacefulness – and shown a unique inability to sustain itself (one demographer, Wolfgang Lutz, notes that "Negative momentum has not been experienced on a large scale in world history").

Is it inevitable that the most brilliantly successful society will also be the first in danger of collapse due to a lack of cultural confidence and offspring?

Ironically, creating a hugely desirable place to live would also seem to be a recipe for suicide. The human comedy continues.






"From Japan, we don't sell cheap products anymore."

With global demand surging for ultra-up-market gadgets, a broad variety of local companies making new investments on Japanese soil, including Sharp and Canon Inc., are posting record profits

For fiscal 2003, which ended last week, Japan's Nikkei 225 stock index jumped 46.9 percent, the fourth-largest increase since World War II.

Exports to China soared 33.2 percent to $62.5 billion in 2003.

Cellular phone production alone jumped 28.8 percent in 2003, contributing 7.2 percent of Japan's overall increase in industrial production. Digital camera production jumped 48.4 percent, adding 4.7 percent to industrial output, according to government statistics.

To date, the largest market for flat-screen TVs has been Japan itself ... In the United States, experts said, the price for flat-screen TVs will need to come down substantially before they become common in American homes.

Because only about 2 percent of TV owners worldwide have flat-screen TVs, the market is ripe.



(Speaking of upscale Japanese gadgets, check out the Toyota Prius.

Is this Islam?

Four Americans, who were providing security for food deliveries in the violent Sunni triangle, were killed by militants in Fallujah, their bodies dismembered, burned and hanged on display.

Sheikh Faysal Mawlawi, deputy chairman of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, wrote "it is permissible to mutilate the dead ... in case of retaliation."

Other sheikhs offered dissenting opinions on whether mutilation is ever warranted or justified.

Television pictures broadcast outside the United States showed the incinerated body of one of the four contractors being kicked and stamped on by people in a jubilant crowd in Fallujah, while another body was dragged down the road by its feet. Two bodies also were temporarily hung from a bridge.

Iraqi Shiites, an oppressed majority during the regime of Saddam Hussein, turned on the U.S.-led coalition yesterday in a bloody uprising that resulted in the deaths of dozens, including many American soldiers.

The Shiite militia revolt was coordinated and hit several parts of the country - including the heart of Baghdad.

WND's Joseph Farrah sees yesterday's events as an attack on the US coordinated through Iran




Japan presses competing proposal for Russian oil pipeline that would bypass China

Japan has extended as much as $6 billion to finance its construction, and billions of dollars more via private companies for oil exploration in eastern Siberia,

If a pipeline could instead (of going directly to China) reach the Pacific, running about 2,500 miles, it would allow Russia to sell crude to Japan as well as South Korea, China and perhaps refineries on the West Coast of the United States.

Only a decade ago, China was an oil exporter. Now, it is the third-largest importer after the United States and Japan. Beijing reckons it will need to import up to 600 million tons of oil a year by 2020, more than triple its anticipated domestic production.




Queen urges Britain and France to stand together against terrorism

In a rare foray into the political arena, she emphasised that the two countries, at odds over the military campaign in Iraq, must not allow "immediate political pressures" to divide them at a time of great uncertainty and threat.

Baseball on the up, despite crises

Fans are flocking to ballparks. ... Attendance probably will top 73 million, a record. In 1950 average attendance was 14,105 per game -- in 1970, just 15,130. Last year? 28,013.

As Sparky Anderson, a greater manager than grammarian, once said, "We try every way we can do to kill the game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it."

Hispanic players ... are among the more than 25 percent of major leaguers (and almost 50 percent of all professional baseball players) from outside the United States. This geyser of talent is one reason why ... baseball ... is: soaring ...in spite of the steroid crisis.

In a nation ... where Viagra-enabled men pursue silicone-contoured women ... Steroids threaten the health of the 5 to 7 percent of players proved... to be using them. ... Further, steroids subvert what baseball is selling -- fair competition.

Americans standing in stockings while their shoes and luggage are X-rayed at airports doubt that privacy considerations should prevent random, year-round testing, backed by serious sanctions, for illegal drugs that traduce baseball's integrity


British worry about immigration floodgates

The Blair government's Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt said Britain's labour shortages meant more immigrant workers were needed. She rejected the idea of imposing any limit or quota as "old-fashioned central planning".

The comment comes at a time when the Government has been alarmed by a series of opinion polls suggesting a majority of the public did not believe the Government was tough enough on immigration issues.