Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. “The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react,” he said. In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”

For supporters of the cause, it was a sight for sore eyes. It might even strike pangs of guilt in cynical politicians who would sell whole populations for a piece of paper. A hundred survivors of the Catastrophe, from all parts of the world, converged on London to restate their inalienable rights, after decades of neglect by the world’s governments. What do they want? They want to go home.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has called on the international community to “give, and give generously” at a conference for the reconstruction of Iraq. He failed to mention that the dire state of the country is as much to do with the 1990’s UN sanctions regime as the invading capitalists, or that the result of his call will make matters worse the country.

Despite mounting criticism of the administration’s Iraq policy, Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be ratcheting up his commitment to the circle of neoconservative intellectuals who helped spearhead President Bush’s war policy, adding one of its most controversial proponents to his national security staff in a little-noticed move last month.

A seven-mile dam is being built with the support of the World Bank across a northern section of the shrunken and dying Aral Sea in Central Asia, which is already described as the world’s worst environmental disaster. This latest move would sound the region’s economic and ecological death knell, condemn millions to poverty and ill health, and could spark off a region-wide war.

Rebel MP George Galloway has announced the launch of a new political movement which could change the face of British politics for ever. The British anti-war movement will turn into a political force to take on Tony Blair’s New Labour in the European elections in June 2004.

Washington is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to develop a media channel that will counter al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, and serve to indoctrinate Arabs into welcoming them with open arms. However, according to independent analysis, most Iraqis see the broadcasts as no more believable than the ‘patriotic’ drivel of the days of Saddam Hussein.

The ‘Geneva Accord’, negotiated earlier this month by informal ‘non-representatives’, would formally end the Palestinian claim to land lost to Israeli soldiers and settlers alike, and would renounce all right of return for exiles from previous wars. Who gave these suited politicians the right to contradict international law and basic human rights, by agreeing that Palestine people should give up their homes to invaders?

Once upon a time there was a place known as The Greatest Country In The World. This place had forgotten its true name. Grandparents had told children had told grandchildren had told great-grandchildren for so long now: “You live in The Greatest Country In The World (and incidentally that makes you The Greatest People In The World),” that the true name of the land had been lost.

After two years of guerrilla warfare with almost dry supply lines, the Taliban are now in a position around the important cities of south and south-eastern Afghanistan to begin the next phase of their campaign to oust foreign troops from the country. At present, they are poised to close in on Qandahar, Khost, Jalalabad, Asadabad and Gardez.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. A man such as Ariel Sharon, who epitomises the worst charicatures of the symbolic political pig, couldn’t have thought of a more fitting insult to the hopes for peace in the Middle East under his steerage than to enlist the unwilling help of factory farmed pigs in defence of the illegal settlements in Palestine, and their Zionist inhabitants.

With ethnic destruction continuing unabated in Palestine, from wall building to house demolition, most Palestinians are rendered powerless but defiant. Meanwhile in USA occupied Iraq, many Muslims are growing in confidence that they can resist the occupation of their country.

USA imperialism is not just going badly in Iraq. Following a dramatic increase in local resistance to the occupation of Afghanistan, and it’s rule by a USA-created oil industry government, the United Nations have confirmed that they are withdrawing from much of southern Afghanistan, which is now totally under the control of Taliban supporters.

According to Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, Dick Cheney is in a class of his own, when it comes to lying about Iraq’s invisible ‘weapons of mass destruction’. He suggests that the USA Vice President ought to be censured by Congress. A few reading this web site may have better ideas for what to do with him…

If there is any doubt that Israel’s ‘separation barrier’ is a cynical and corrupt way of “creating facts on the ground”, effectively extending the borders of Israel into illegally occupied territory at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, reading this article will put you right.

This report shows with graphic detail how for weeks the Israeli army has been crushing resistance in the Palestinian refugee town of Rafah, in a manner which rivals the destruction of Jenin last year. But it is all carried in the name of ‘stopping terrorism’ so the international community has remained silent.

Who told the director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze’evi to declare, “Better Palestinian mothers should cry and not Jewish mothers”? Is the head of army intelligence now also to be in charge of setting Israel’s moral priorities? And what prompted the commander of the Ground Forces, Major General Yiftah Ron-Tal, to decide that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has to be liquidated?

Five Iraqis have been killed and several civilians seriously injured by USA troops on a day of resistance attacks that left about 20 occupation soldiers wounded.

Thirty years ago the British physician, Julian Tudor-Hart published his famous ‘inverse care law’: “those who most need medical care are the least likely to get it.” Modern pharmaceutical research is playing Dr. Hart’s law out on a macabre global scale. While the debilitating diseases of the poor - such as malaria, tuberculosis and sleeping sickness - have few or no treatments, the drug companies are busy working on cures for a ballooning set of ‘made-up’ diseases of the rich and privileged.

Iraqi resistance fighters early this morning carried out an audacious raid in Baghdad, from which Paul Wolfowitz, USA Deputy Defence Secretary, barely escaped with his life. Wolfowitz was staying in the heavily defended al-Rasheed hotel in the centre of the Iraqi capital, along with a number of other top-ranking USA military officials, when several co-ordinated rocket attacks were launched against the hotel, at the same time and from different parts of the area.

It won?t get you much mileage in the playground if you get into a fight and you say: “My uncle?s George Bush.” But mention Osama and the enemy backs off.  To be the hardest kid on the block you would get no credibility saying your grandfather was Tony Blair, but kids who claim their grandfather is Osama bin Laden get instant respect, especially if they have some Middle Eastern credentials.

The unfortunate truth is that, according to his own political dynamic, Sharon simply must act when there is a militant attack and he has the character to do so, but it leads nowhere except the spiral of violence already witnessed in his relations with the Palestinians. This may be enough for Sharon, but is it enough for the Middle East?

The power of the weak lies in a people’s acceptance of suffering. The weakness of the strong is that a disproportionate use of force against the weak eventually corrupts their own society.

Barely two years after the USA invasion of the ‘Axis of Evil’ that was Taliban Afghanistan, a Karzai government spokesmen confirmed today that a key Taliban government minister has been released from USA custody, is back in his Qandaha home, and may soon take a place in the government.

For those who think that hollywood and the fashion industry don’t care about world poverty, think again. This hilariously satirical review of a recent back-passage motion picture, shows that the corporate world not only cares about starving children, they positively love the idea.

A solemn message was delivered on behalf of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Seville, Spain. “Suicide bombings are immoral. They are counter-productive. They must be stopped,” he said. Annan’s seemingly upright observations however, underscored a profound, even a formidable presentation of a political and intellectual trend, essential for Israel to sustain its genocidal war against the Palestinians.

Spring 2003. George Bush and Tony Blair invented lies, and crowed for war. The nation roared its opposition. Elected representatives of the British people made self-righteous platitudes one way or another. All except one. Labour M.P. George Galloway bravely spoke the truth, knowing that it meant risking his career in parliament. Today, his executioners took the knife to him.

The image was not an edifying one: the president of the United States a horse, his vice president, the rider. But that is the image that Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used to describe the power relationship between USA President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in a recent interview with the National Journal.

Police dog bites cop outside Parliament House. Inside, Green Party leader Bob Brown breaks through a Coalition human shield to shake the hand of George Bush. It was that sort of day when George W Bush visited Australia, as its shuddering democracy proved that despite John Howard’s best efforts at total control, it still refused to privilege form over substance and still insisted on being heard.

A leading British aid group today attacked the USA-controlled provisional authority in Iraq, accusing it of failing to account for four billion dollars - eighty percent of the total - given by international donors for the country’s post-war reconstruction.

"If America does not leave,” warned Dr. al-Jumaili, “then I expect to see a huge wave of resistance approaching. The White House can deal with one death here, and two there, but very soon… much sooner than they think… it will be 10 dead soldiers here, and 20 there.”

As the Oslo Accords’ promise of a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish Israel suffocates underneath the sheer weight of demolished houses, separation barriers, illegal Israeli settlements, and murdered civilians from both sides, veteran Jordanian diplomat, Hasan Abu Nimah suggests that the only thing left is the possibility of a single state with democracy for all.

Guerrillas have kept up attacks on USA forces in Iraq, after an Oil Ministry source acknowledged that this week’s pipeline explosion was the most destructive carried out by saboteurs to date, providing a sobering backdrop to an international donors’ conference on Iraq that starts in Madrid on Thursday.

In a decision that marks a gauge of world opinion, the UN General Assembly today overwhelmingly approved a resolution demanding that Israel remove it’s “separation barrier”. The resolution “demands that Israel stop and reverse the construction of the wall in the occupied Palestinian territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, which is in departure of the Armistice Line of 1949 and is in contradiction to relevant provisions of international law.”

International targets to reduce child poverty are going to be missed because globalised trade and cuts to aid budgets are creating an ever-greater chasm between the richest and poorest countries.

Protests against USA President George W. Bush were staged in several cities across Indonesia today, one day ahead of his brief visit to Bali. In Jakarta, about 300 members of the Indonesian Muslim Students Action Front (KAMMI) rallied outside the USA Embassy, torching pictures and an effigy of Bush, as well as American flags.

Do you try to promote peace in your “little corner of the world”? Do you consider yourself to be an anti-war activist? If your answer to these questions is “yes”, you like many others, may be feeling discouraged during these dark times on earth.

It matters little whether the mastermind behind the killing of three Americans in Gaza on Wednesday, October 15, was a Palestinian group or Israeli intelligence. What?s of relevance, however is that the Palestinian people, their leadership, resistance and aspirations will wholly bear the brunt of the incident.

The Israeli army has launched a further two missile strikes on targets in the Gaza Strip, killing at least eight Palestinians and wounding scores more. The latest attack, the day’s fifth, was aimed at an unknown target. The fourth - minutes earlier - struck a car in Nusayrat refugee camp, killing three. The vehicle took a direct hit from what witnesses said was a missile fired by an Apache helicopter, killing its two occupants.

As the al-Aqsa Intifada in Palestine enters its fourth year, one cannot but note the epic sacrifices that the Palestinian people have made over a period of 36 months, during which they were subjected to mass murder, assassination, torture, arrest, detention, house demolitions, curfews, daily humiliation at check points and the brutal practices of an Israeli occupation that is both funded and supported by the world?s sole superpower.

Critical to the neo-con plan to obtain control of the resources of the Middle East is a need to portray Arabs not just as mendacious, but also as “barely capable” of running their own countries without benign outside interference. The neo-con notion that Arabs need “civilising” and “assistance” in shaping their future differs very little from the attitudes of the first British imperialists in Africa more than a century ago.

The rape of Iraq - civilisation, history, economy, homeland and future is crowned now by a shameful record of sexual torture of 4000 reported cases of rape of Muslim women in traditional Arab dress. Peasant women in their black gelabas and in their forties and fifties are forced to perform fellatio on members of uniformed cowboys under the gun. Group rapes and military orgies became the order of the day. Women are pulled out of their homes by the hair across the desert sands to host the liberating troops between their legs. Keep cheering victory!

When Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon threatens Syria and warns it against opening its harbours and airports to Iran, which it claims could wage an attack against Israel, he is really saying that there are high chances he will repeat the attack he had made against the Iraqi nuclear reactor, this time against Iran, hence leading Tehran to retaliate. When U.S. President George Bush repeats his criticism of the UN, and hints at its impotence, as he did on the eve of the war against Iraq, this suggests that another war is on the way.

In seeking to solve disputes using arbitration of a third party, one has to be sure that such a third party is utterly neutral to the disputants, and that the arbitrator would genuinely employ justice, fairness and international legality in reaching the proper judgment on these issues. Can anyone nominate the USA as an honest arbitrator in helping to solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem?

Amid rising casualties in Iraq, last week’s UN Security Council resolution was seen by the USA government as legitemation of its calls for more international troops to be sent to its aid. Turkey announced last week that it would be the first state with a Muslim population to do so. However, investigators into last week’s attack on the Turkish embassy in Baghdad suggest that the bombing may have been the work of Kurdish separatists, and now the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, has hinted that he may not send troops there after all.

When the popular sectors of Bolivia march, there is common call and response: One of the marchers asks the contingent: “What do we want?” The response varies according to the demands of the mobilization. The demonstrators begin to call out, “When?” And then the response, “Now!” On Friday, the “now” of the popular revolt became reality. After killing more than 80 Bolivian citizens, after wounding more than 400, and receiving the rejection of more than 400 hunger strikers, S?nchez de Lozada literally flew out of his post… toward Miami.

At the recent meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Countries, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Muhamad, urged the Islamic world to unite in the struggle to achieve peace with honour and justice in the Muslim world.  His request was rejected. The mass media focussed almost exclusively on his controversial remarks about the political power of world Jewry, and the meeting ended without a condemnation of the occupation of Iraq, or an expression of support for the Palestinian revolt in occupied Palestine. For those who wish to go beyond the sensationalist headlines, the World Crisis Web here records his speech in its entirety.

The passage of more than a century has failed to quell the passion attached to three bronze church bells that were commandeered by American soldiers as trophies of war during a bloody conflict in the Philippines.

Despite a two-week public-relations offensive designed to persuade the world and the USA public that it knows what it is doing in Iraq, the Bush administration appears increasingly at sea.

Despite (maybe even because of) solid support from the USA government for the Bolivian President, Gonzalo S?nchez, it looks increasingly likely that the country will undergo a people’s revolution within the next few weeks - whether he resigns or not. The many Indian protesters who choked the streets and highways of this Andean nation again on Thursday may be poor and speak broken or accented Spanish, but they have a powerful message. It is this: no to the export of gas and other natural resources; no to free trade with the United States; no to globalization in any form other than solidarity among the downtrodden peoples of the developing world.

In attempting to turn an elected president into a figurehead, then a refugee, Israel is sending a clear message to all Palestinians and Arabs. Its decision to expel Yasser Arafat, or worse, is part of a consistent policy. Since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel has been determined to turn the interim self-rule agreement into a final one. Israel has never accepted the historic compromise that Arafat hoped would come out of Oslo: a Palestinian state within the pre- 1967 lines.

Iraq’s USA-led authorities are preparing for a showdown with a militant Shia Muslim cleric whose ‘illegal’ militia has fought recent gun battles with both USA troops and ‘moderate’ Shia groups, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

In an unprecedented event, a thousand French Jews have urged to have Israeli Premiere Ariel Sharon prosecuted for his “criminal policies” against Palestinians, and supported the notion of a Palestinian state with occupied east Jerusalem as its capital.

The Pentagon has assigned the task of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets to an Army general who sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan.

"Ladies and gentleman, this is your enemy,” Boykin said to the congregation as he flashed his pictures on a screen. “It is the principalities of darkness It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.”

As India and Pakistan ready their nuclear arsenals for deployment, their leaders seem to be slipping into denial mode, refusing to acknowledge that they are being inexorably sucked into a dangerous, and potentially ruinous, nuclear arms race.

"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” While, for George Bush, the war against Iraq represented the modern version of “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war”, as this ironic editorial from The Guardian shows, the decision by the USA administration to take Shakespeare to entertain and edify the occupation forces in Iraq may yet turn out to prove the rule, “That in the captain’s but a choleric word, which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.”

World Food Day, which is today, seems an appropriate occasion to consider both where our food comes from and also who’s hungry in the world. Rich countries spend hundreds of billions a year subsidizing their farmers, making it almost impossible for poor nations to compete. By blocking access to the market, rich nations end up depriving poor nations of an opportunity to improve their living standards.

Lyndon LaRouche, one of only two Democratic Party Presidential candidates certified by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as qualified for federal matching funds, issued a strong warning today that the world is facing a major eruption of war in the Near East in the immediate weeks ahead, unless President Bush can be forced to intervene forcefully and publicly, to curb Israel’s breakaway ally regime under Ariel Sharon.

There’s nothing like a war to bring out the inner George Orwell in a government. In ways little and small, Uncle Sam has been morphing into Big Brother - spinning the news, even, apparently, manufacturing news.

A powerful bomb exploded beside a bullet-proof USA Embassy car Wednesday, killing three suspected CIA agents.  Local militias unusually fail to accept responsibility.

USA ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, vetoes a resolution condemning Israel’s internationally illegal practices for the second time in two months.

The number of people seeking refuge as a result of environmental disaster is set to increase dramatically over the coming years. Ironically, given current attitudes, we in Britain will resist accommodating them, and yet they will have become refugees as a direct result of the way we in the west live. Global warming - more than war or political upheaval - stands to displace millions. And climate change is being driven by our fossil fuel-intensive lifestyles.

The UN has inherited the very built-in defects that caused the demise of the League of Nations, and the veto power which the “victors” had carved for themselves turned to be a destructive privilege, and a tool for serving superpower illegitimate interests, manipulation and outright political blackmail. The depressing outcome is a UN self-contradicting system, protecting aggression and injustice, deepening international discord, spreading despair and frustration and, therefore, threatening rather than protecting the world peace and security, as the charter had originally promised.

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan criticised today the new USA draft resolution on Iraq for making few significant changes as France, Russia and Germany submitted amendments to speed up Iraqi self-rule.

Albright’s most egregious lie revolves around the cruise missile strike on a Sudanese pharmaceutical warehouse in the capital, Khartoum, in August of 1998. The parallels between this event and the current war in Iraq are so obvious as to be ridiculous.

Say the U.S. was occupying Syria, and needed some help with the occupation?some troops who might help to put the occupied Syrians at ease. Would we invite in neighbouring Israeli troops to help us? Unlikely you say? Or let’s try Poland. Say we were occupying Poland and wanted some help there. Would we invite German troops in?

With Afghanistan daily slipping into more anarchy and chaos, United States authorities, aware that they are unlikely to ever bring stability to the country by military means, continue to explore political avenues that ultimately could pave the way for them to withdraw from the country.

Encouraged by the absence of international reactions to its rampageous onslaught against the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation Forces on Tuesday decided to deport a number of Palestinian citizens from their hometowns in the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, hundreds of kilometers away.

News is just reaching the world of a new and brutal collective punishment practice adopted by the “liberating” forces in Iraq.  Late last month, in the relatively quiet rural centre of the country, the conspicuous sound of jazz music from loudspeakers could be heard, as sunglasses-clad USA solders uprooted ancient groves of date palms, as well as orange and lemon orchards, belonging to the farming communities there.  The tactic was part of a policy of collective punishment for farmers who fail to co-operate with the invaders by giving information about opposition activities in their area.

Apartheid was all about empowering the whites; making sure they all had access to the best education the country had to offer, so that when finished with school they can all own five farms, hotels, restaurants and whatever else they thought deserved to be owned by white people. In the “new South Africa” the legacy of apartheid lives, however, it?s clothed in neo-liberal economics.

In Kabul yesterday, guerrillas attacked a training centre for recruits to the Afghan national army where American troops were observing an exercise. One American soldier was slightly hurt, but the attack was further evidence that the anti-government forces were willing to take their fight to the capital itself, despite the presence of 5,500 Nato-led peace-keeping troops.

This weekend, in scenes reminiscent of the Jenin massacre last year, Israeli occupation forces waged total war on a refugee camp, using tanks, helicopter gunships, and armoured bulldozers against innocent civilians and lightly armoured Palestinian defence forces.

Five people were reported killed on Sunday after Bolivia’s government sent thousands of troops backed by tanks to quell increasingly violent protests against right-wing President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

The UN Security Council is presently discussing both the attempt by the USA to garner official support for it’s occupation of Iraq, and Syria’s attempt to pass a resolution criticising Israel’s recent illegal air strike against Damascus.  While the USA would condemn anyone vetoing the former, it has itself threatened to veto the latter. At this point, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the seventy-seven times the USA has used its veto against proposed resolutions inside the Security Council over the last thirty years.

All this blood and destruction so that Bush might remain in power, and dole out the plunder of two nations—Iraq and America—to the gilded corporate mafia he represents. And now the greatest prize in the history of the world beckons: domination of the world’s oil reserves, precisely at the point when the rising, insatiable demand for oil is about to exceed the remaining supply. Nations will be increasingly desperate, willing to pay any price—financial and political—to those who control access to the precious, dwindling resource.

The Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr ended his Friday sermon yesterday by declaring that he is to set up a rival government, and to call independent elections open to all Iraqis, in contravention of USA plans for the country.  Meanwhile, more than 10,000 Shiites, many armed, marched alongside the coffins of the two men killed in a recent shooting by USA troops. They raised their fists, roaring: “There is no God but Allah. America is the enemy of Allah”.

Grenada was catapulted on to the front pages in October 1983 when troops from the world’s most powerful country invaded the nutmeg-exporting island in order to effect “regime change”. The White House sledgehammer was successful and US forces soon withdrew, but claims that a minuscule place with no army and a population of less than 100,000 could conceivably be a military threat prompted derision.

The neo-conservatives in and around the administration of US President George W Bush may be on the defensive, but Washington’s reaction to the Israeli attack on Syria on Sunday shows that they remain in the driver’s seat at the White House. Bush’s explicit embrace of Israel’s attack on an alleged Palestinian training camp in Syria is a striking departure from decades of US Middle Eastern diplomacy.

Washington’s freshly minted plans for Iraq are fragmenting as soon as they begin to take shape. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan torpedoed the Bush administration’s draft resolution before it was tabled at the Security Council. Annan said he could not send UN staff - who has been withdrawn - back into Iraq unless the world body is in charge of reconstruction and the restoration of Iraqi rule.

Some say the 1960s ended with Woodstock in August 1969. Others date the decade’s demise to the break-up of the Beatles eight months later. Both are wrong. The 60s died 30 years ago this week when, on October 6 1973, Egypt and Syria chose Yom Kippur, the holiest date in the Jewish calendar, to launch a surprise attack on Israel.

While seemingly intent on obliterating the symbols of Saddam, the Coalition Provisional Authority shows little compunction in rehabilitating the real instruments of his brutal control. After months of chaos and confusion, it appears that the CPA has come around to the view that it cannot rule effectively without the security and intelligence services.

Tony Blair wants to be a world leader, a statesman. Fine. Right now would be a good time to start. Instead of whispering from the sidelines, let the UK Government?s voice be heard loud and clear in Washington and Tel Aviv. Let Tony Blair properly represent decent and common-sense opinion here and across the world by telling his buddy in arms, George Bush, to stop supporting Israel?s policies against its Arab neighbours.

Israel?s refusal to approve the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in addition to strong speculations that Israel owns up to 300 nuclear warheads and the Arab League?s most recent assertion to the IAEA that Israel now has the capability of producing a hydrogen bomb, are all not enough to convince the US that Iran and Iraq aren’t the real ‘imminent’ danger.

I need a drink! I?ve just arrived back from town, after another humiliating session with the employment agency. They wanted to know why I wouldn?t take a job making synthetic rubber at the local Dupont factory, and they weren?t being very discrete about suspecting the reasons I gave for turning it down. I could almost hear their thoughts - “He?s just a lazy get. Three hundred pounds a week, and real prospects for promotion, and he?s whingeing on about ethics and the poor”. From their perspective, they couldn?t understand why I find multinational corporations so morally objectionable. I only hope that, as I write this article, I can explain at least to myself, why the money and prospects alone can?t tempt me into taking this kind of employment.

Tensions have sharply increased in Chechnya over the past few days. The situation is so complicated that the invaders? command is forced to admit that the activities of Chechen Armed Forces are threatening to develop into large-scale war operations.

Buoyed by USA backing, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday his nation would not hesitate to strike at its enemies wherever they were.

The test tube of botulinum presented by Washington and London as evidence that Saddam Hussein had been developing and concealing weapons of mass destruction, was found in an Iraqi scientist’s home refrigerator, where it had been sitting for 10 years, it emerged yesterday.

An ultra-Zionist Israeli settler has joined forces with the nephew of the Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi to promote investment in Iraq. The venture - which has excellent connections with the Pentagon and the new Iraqi government - is the first joint Israeli-Iraqi business project publicly documented since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Two years after the “sensational victory” in Afghanistan, observers are increasingly concluding that life under the USA and oil industry puppet regime is little better than it was before the USA invasion. Meanwhile, the rising number of attacks against the occupying forces, and the failure of world powers to prevent or even locate insurgents amongst the population in western Afghanistan, testifies that Mullah Omar’s Taliban is growing in both strength and popular support.

Fanatical bombers talk about “Islam”, but in fact Islam condemns these acts of violence. The Prophet Muhammad gave Muslim armies clear instructions not to attack civilians—women, children, the elderly, and religious people engaged in worship (2:194). The Qur’an does not recognize “collateral damage” as legitimate even during war. Some have tried to arbitrarily label Israeli civilians as “combatants” to circumvent Islamic injunctions - a logic that has no precedent in Islamic history.

When my husband decided to go to Baghdad, he knew that I would protest. He told me that I was exaggerating the risks; that there was nothing to be afraid of because he was a reporter, an objective witness, neither on this nor that side, and because of that was protected by world protocol. He bid us farewell, apologising for having been so busy. He promised to make it up to me and our daughter, Fatimah, when he returned.

A quarter of a million troops are committed to the Iraq war theater, most of them bogged down in Baghdad. Morale is declining and casualties continue to increase. In addition to the human cost, the war in dollars costs $1 billion a week, adding to the additional burden of an already depressed economy.

The situation in Iraq continues to worsen. Already six months into the occupation, the security situation is so grave that the United Nations secretary general is withdrawing UN staff whose presence there is vital for humanitarian work. In addition to the armed robbers who have been roaming the streets of Iraqi cities, terrorising people since the collapse of the old regime, the resistance is acting indiscriminately, targeting, besides the occupying forces, foreign missions, UN installations, Iraqi police, worshipping places, political figures and members of the Governing Council. With every added day to the already delayed and indeed incapable handling of the growing security problem, the outlaws grow stronger and harder to remove.