The Rahbar, Imam Seyyed Ali Khamenei of Iran has repeatedly drawn attention to the importance of developing a ‘Resistance economy’. This includes reliance on indigenous talent and production to eliminate the need for imports or external support.
Life for the Afghan people has never been easy but having suffered war for nearly four decades, they want some peace and security. These are denied them because of the conflicting interests of external players.
Muslims face multiple challenges from foreign imposed wars to gross incompetence and corruption of their rulers. Imperialists and Zionists also continue to secularize Islam and divide Muslims by promoting sectarianism.
FAST FOOD NATION: WHAT THE ALL-AMERICAN MEAL IS DOING TO THE WORLD by Eric Schlosser. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Pp. 386. Pbk. £7.99.
STUPID WHITE MEN (AND OTHER SORRY EXCUSES FOR THE STATE OF THE NATION) by Michael Moore. Pub: Penguin Books, London, 2002. Pp: 281. Pbk: £7.99.
Welcome to the new global economic order free from the chains of US imperialism.
US enmity towards Iran has nothing to do with Iran’s peaceful nuclear program. It is merely a pretext used by Washington for Iran’s refusal to fall in line with US demands.
It is always difficult to reconcile with decline in one’s power and clout. This is as true of individuals in old age as it is of societies and empires in their twilight years.
The era of US unilateralism has ended. Apart from its European allies — and there too, only some of them — the rest of the world has dismissed Washington’s demands to impose oil and trade embargo on Iran.
After the latest American rampage through three Afghan villages in the Pajway district of Qandahar on March 11, US President Barack Obama issued the following statement: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”
When it comes to the War on Terror, it appears there is always a possibility to find legal justification for just about anything. Despite there being an “absolute” prohibition on torture under international law, John Yoo, then a Deputy Assistant Attorney at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
The enterprise of US perpetual war is confronted with a persistent problem. Spiraling rates of psychological and social problems in returning war veterans is placing enormous stress on the narratives that the US government has constructed around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
As human rights campaigners around the world commemorated the 10th anniversary of the opening of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, marking a decade of human rights abuses known as the “war on terror”, one would have expected that Western governments would be contemplating scaling back their aggressive rhetoric and draconian laws which have become a feature of the 21st century.
How long this standoff will continue is debatable but what we need to consider is how this situation has deteriorated to a point that the US feels it can attack and kill Pakistanis at will.
The world is babbling with news about Iran being on the threshold of going nuclear, in a military sense. Israeli words are coming out of American mouths. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CBS news that Iran could build a nuclear bomb in a year or less (music to Israeli ears).
Pakistan’s relations with the US have never been easy but recent developments have brought them to such a point that even the polite and usually soft-spoken Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was forced to concede: “we do not trust the Americans.”
In contemporary global politics, two ingredients are considered essential to project power: wealth and military might. The two are inter-related. Obviously, without wealth, military hardware cannot be acquired and without military might, wealth can neither be protected nor additional amounts accumulated. There is also a third factor: the power of iman (faith-commitment).
There are a host of organizations — the United Nations (UN) with its Security Council, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — that are touted as world bodies whose function is to maintain peace, security and stability — financial and nuclear — in the world. The UN and IMF were created around the time of World War II.
Is the US endgame in Afghanistan real? If so, it appears to have entered a crucial phase under the cover of a series of international conferences to facilitate US troop withdrawal from the war-torn country. Some observers, however, believe America is playing a double game trying to give the impression of preparing to leave while working behind the scenes to establish permanent military bases in the country.
In the face of its collapsing economy and spiraling domestic unrest, the US is blithely proceeding with its blueprint of remaking world cartography. After dispatching Muammar Qaddafi in a hail of gunmetal, US imperialists are confronting the Syrian stumbling block, item No. 2 on its regime change wish-list.
