The US media were saying that Bush apologized for his flip rhetoric. But look again. He did not. He said he had been "misinterpreted" in some parts of the world. (Which?) How do you misinterpret "bring it on?" And, why in the world is he apologizing for saying he wanted Bin Laden dead or alive? What has that got to do with Iraq, anyway?

Iran Offered Recognition of Israel, Nuclear Cooperation
Bush: "How dare you!"

In 2003, Iran offered to come in from the cold in a proposal to George W. Bush. Recognition of Israel within 1967 borders, pressure on Hizbullah and the Palestinians to moderate, signing the additional protocols of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, it was all there for Bush's taking.

What did Bush do?

He reprimanded the Swiss embassy, which takes care of US affairs in Iran, for daring to forward this proposal to Crawford on the Potomac.

Why?

Why?

Bush and his various constituencies (the military-industrial complex; the Christian Right; the Likudnik Lobby; and Big Oil) do not want peace with Iran.

Hamas’s Next Steps

Finding the road to Palestine

Helena Cobban

Six weeks after the election, I sat down separately with two of the key architects of the Hamas victory, Prime Minister–designate Ismail Haniyeh and Foreign Minister–designate Mahmoud Zahar, and with a dozen other Hamas leaders, activists, and supporters in Gaza and the West Bank.

—“already gave answers to those questions. So why do they ask us this over and over again? Anyway, why does the international community always face us with questions and conditions? It’s Israel that they need to ask. We ask that the international community demand that Israel recognize the rights of Palestinians and recognize a Palestinian state in all the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967. Then, for sure, we will have a response to this question.”

They ask us to recognize Israel without telling us what borders they’re talking about! First let us discuss borders, and then we will discuss recognition.

But these days, another factor may help: since March 2005 Hamas has stuck in a remarkably disciplined way to a unilateral cessation of attacks against Israel that it negotiated through the PA’s Fateh Party president, Mahmoud Abbas. The only exception came last September, after a series of explosions in a Hamas military parade killed 19 Hamas fighters. The explosions were soon found to be the result of an accident, but not before the Hamas military and other militants had fired a “retaliatory” barrage of rockets into Israel, killing five. But the Hamas leaders were able almost immediately to reinstate the self-restraint regime.

Thus, in 2005, a pattern emerged: each side proceeded with its own unilateral project but in parallel with the other, and though neither side admitted it, each depended on the other’s success.

from spring 2002 onward the Sharon government abandoned any pretense of coordinating its policies, economic or otherwise, with the PA. It also used its military to destroy key nodes of the PA economy such as the airport and the fisheries market in Gaza. Indeed, Israel’s control over all aspects of Palestinians’ external trade resembles the hold that apartheid South Africa once exercised over its Bantustans.

If we push ahead with regard to opening our border with Egypt, we can certainly make it work to the benefit of both sides. You know, in September, right after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, when our border with Egypt was unsecured, we learned that our people spent $8 million in El-Arish in just ten days because the prices of everything in Egypt are so much lower than the prices the Israelis impose on us here.

But Zahar was the most outspoken on this point of any of them. “The conflict should not be solved in our age, because the power equation here is not yet balanced,” he said. “If the Israelis leave us alone a while and want to come to talk to us later, then okay.”

What is the difference between Israeli extreme rightists and extreme leftists? On central issues like Jerusalem and the right of return, there is no difference. How can we persuade people who took away all our rights?

These days, the U.S. presence in Iraq is helping the Palestinian people because the failure of the U.S. project there will certainly weaken Israel. Also, the picture of the U.S. as oppressing people—at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo or elsewhere—all this increases anti-U.S. attitudes. . . .

What, I asked, did he predict the Palestinian situation would look like in another two years? “I see a further Israeli withdrawal in the West Bank. There will be a flourishing in our economy and in our society. We’ll be represented in the international community, and people around the world will see a good example of how a people without resources can build strong industries.” He made no mention of peace talks with Israel.

But if there is no peace process and Israel is proceeding with an openly annexationist plan—and Washington still continues to give significant financial and political support to Israel—then the United States’s standing in the Middle East is bound to be harmed. This at a time when the U.S. troop deployment in Iraq and its lengthy supporting supply lines are already very vulnerable to actions taken by the region’s many nationalist or Islamist groups.

ZNet | Latin America

Interviewing Galeano

by Eduardo Galeano and Amy Goodman; Democracy Now; May 20, 2006

EDUARDO GALEANO: Yes, I think that all these recent events, elections won by progressive forces and a lot of different movings, is like something that's moving on and expressing a need, a will of change, but we are carrying a very heavy burden on our backs, which is what I call “the traditional culture of impotence,” which is something condemning you, dooming you to be eternally crippled, because there is a cultural saying and repeating, "You can't." You can't walk with your own legs. You are not able to think with your own head. You cannot feel with your own heart, and so you're obliged to buy legs, heart, mind, outside as import products. This is our worst enemy, I think.

EDUARDO GALEANO: Yeah. It's forbidden to remember. I’m not in love with the past, you know. For instance, I’m a very bad visitor in museums, because I get bored soon, and I always prefer a live life and in present days. But there is no frontier between past and present when you can revisit the past and make it alive again. And then it would be a good mirror to look at yourself and to understand. Perhaps it would help to understand your present actuality, your present reality. If you don't know where do you come from, it would be very difficult to understand where are you going.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it's fair to say Iraq saved Latin America, that with the attention of President Bush on Iraq, we're seeing Latin America go in a very different direction?

So, weapons need wars, and wars need alibis, and alibis are demons, the evil forces which are our daily danger. And so they have invented that Chavez may be a danger for humanity and that he's a tyrant and he’s a despotic dictator. He won eight elections. It's strange, being a dictator, eight clean elections won by him

EDUARDO GALEANO: I never decided. It's something -- I’m written by my books. I mean, they write me, so I never decide anything. Well, I was always looking for a language who could integrate everything that has been culturally divorced from, for instance, heart and mind. So I was looking for a feel-thinking language, sentipensante, “feel-thinking.” It's a word. I didn't invent the word. It’s a word I heard years ago in the Colombian coast. A fisherman told me, "Hay gigrere en las palabras sentipensantes," when I told him I was a writer. "Ah, you're a writer." "Yes." "Oh." And he asked me if I was using a sentipensante language, a feel-thinking language. And so, he was a master. I mean, I learned a lot from this sentence forever. I am a sentipensante.

I think one of the divorces that has avoided a full integration of human condition is this divorce between our emotions and our ideas. In other divorces, separating journalists, for instance, literary journalists, saying, well, this is an essay. This is a poem. This is a novel. This is an -- I don't know what. And I don't believe in frontiers. I think that in no -- I don't believe at all in frontiers. And then, how would I practice the alguanas, I would say, the immigration controls between literary journalists? I believe that --

AMY GOODMAN: You don't believe in borders.

EDUARDO GALEANO: No. I think that when the world -- perhaps one day the world, the world, our world, won't be upside down, and then any newborn human being will be welcome. Saying, "Welcome. Come. Come in. Enter. The entire earth will be your kingdom. Your legs will be your passport, valid forever." And for me, this is true also for words. I mean, the same thing with words, persons, words. I really believe in the universal dimension of human condition, not globalization, which is the universal dimension of money, but the universal dimension of our human passions.

EDUARDO GALEANO: Everywhere, every day, soccer is a source of power nowadays. Silvio Berlusconi is the result of the success of the Milan club in Italy. And almost all politicians in the Latin countries have close relationships to not only president or politicians, but even military dictators. One of the first acts of General Pinochet in Chile was to become president of a very popular soccer team, Colo-Colo, because he knew perfectly well that soccer is a source of prestige and power.

EDUARDO GALEANO: Yeah, there is a concentration of power nowadays on a world scale, in Latin America and everywhere, even here in the States. And this is not good. Not good news for humanity, this concentration of power, because it threatens to reduce the freedom of expression to the freedom of oppression. I mean, it becomes the monopoly privilege of a small group of enterprises, who are closing the big factories of public opinion in a worldwide scale.

But democracy now exists, and a lot of other independent spaces open everywhere. They have a narrow space nowadays. If you compare, for instance, a proportion of independent media in the ‘40s or the ‘50s, half a century ago, with the actual proportion, the present proportion, it's terrifying. I mean, it's terrible, the concentration of everything. But there are new ways, internet and so on, that are giving expression to the voiceless movements or the movements condemned to be sounding in campana de palo -- how is it? -- in wooden bells.

EDUARDO GALEANO: No, I have no discipline at all. I learned to write really from music, a Cuban musician. He played drum, tambor, in Santiago a lot of years ago. He was absolutely magic. This drum was wonderful, playing music on earth but directly from heaven. It was so marvelous that I asked him, “Please give me your secret.” And he said, “Yo toco cuando me pica la mano.” Now you should shout at me, because I cannot say it in English.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I play when my hand begins to itch.

EDUARDO GALEANO: That's it. And I write when my hand begin to itch. I mean, I never give myself orders, saying “Now, you must write,” or “You must write about this subject,” or “You must say this or that,” or -- no. I leave it. Let it be. I leave it as something growing inside. And it's hard work. Each one of these short stories, a lot to write, have, some of them 20, 30, 40 versions before being published. It's very hard for me.

The path out of denial

The idea that the Euston Manifesto is pro-war is a result of a misreading of the geography of the left

Norman Geras
Thursday May 25, 2006

Guardian

But a longer answer is worth spelling out for what it reveals about the "geography" of the left in relation to the Iraq war, and how this is simplified by some of the war's opponents. Their story is of a three-way division within left-liberal opinion, comprising: (1) those who supported the war, the "left hawks" or "muscular liberals"; (2) on the other side, but merely marginal, a small body of anti-war opinion - people in and around the Socialist Workers party and Respect - actually wanting America to come to grief in Iraq, supporting or making apology for the so-called resistance and its murderous methods; (3) in between these, the largest sector of anti-war opinion, opposing the war for a combination of reasons, prominent among these the belief that it was likely to turn out badly.

This mapping of the terrain underlies the mystification over how people who opposed the war could support the Euston Manifesto, and also the upset over criticisms directed at the left, when according to that map they apply only to a few souls on the far and hard left.

The real geography, however, has been different. Within the large "middle" sector of left-liberal opinion opposed to the war there has been, from the start, a differentiating subdivision - between those who opposed the war without being in denial about the considerations on the other side of the argument, and those who precisely have been in denial about them. This latter group extends well beyond the far left.

The signs of denial are abundant in the recent public life of the western democracies: in the banners and slogans for that Saturday on February 15 2003, from which one would never have known that Saddam's Iraq was a foul tyranny; in the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime-change war; in a constant stream of comment in liberal daily papers and weeklies of the left; in the excommunications issued and more recent calls for apology or recantation; and, most seriously, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George Bush.

That is the actual geography, with four regions, not three. A significant segment of the international left lost touch with some of its most important values.

Conceived in a small blogospheric

A few minutes later – 11 o’clock on the dime, more or less – my train pulled out of Cairo station. The trip south, which was supposed to take 10 hours, ended up taking 12, and was every bit as fascinating and vivid as I’d hoped. However, that story – and what happened when I arrived in Luxor in the middle of the night with no cash -- will have wait to for my next dispatch.

For now, all I can say is that my initial fear that the Egyptians may have changed, at least in their attitude towards Americans, since my last visit here 15 years ago proved completely unfounded in Cairo last Tuesday. They’re still the same endearing, exasperating, hospitable and long-suffering people they always were, and probably always will be. And I learned that I’m still very fond of them – bank pashas excepted, of course.

A few minutes later – 11 o’clock on the dime, more or less – my train pulled out of Cairo station. The trip south, which was supposed to take 10 hours, ended up taking 12, and was every bit as fascinating and vivid as I’d hoped. However, that story – and what happened when I arrived in Luxor in the middle of the night with no cash -- will have wait to for my next dispatch.

For now, all I can say is that my initial fear that the Egyptians may have changed, at least in their attitude towards Americans, since my last visit here 15 years ago proved completely unfounded in Cairo last Tuesday. They’re still the same endearing, exasperating, hospitable and long-suffering people they always were, and probably always will be. And I learned that I’m still very fond of them – bank pashas excepted, of course.

Well, here's a single data point that addresses both questions. It's a chart that shows median income for 35-44 year old men and women since the end of World War II.

First the good news: women have made steady increases — though it's worth noting that about half of that gain is because women work more hours than they did 30 years ago. On an hourly basis, the increase since then amounts to about 1% per year.

And men? Not such good news. The average 40-year-old guy made $44,000 in 1973, and that was as good as it ever got. Today that number is about $40,000. It's gone down even though the American economy has nearly doubled on a per-person basis during that time.

So where did all the money go? What happened in 1973 that suddenly stopped wage growth for half the population in its tracks? And what should we do about it?