tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90721192007-12-29T21:56:25.942-05:00SARTREBlogger939125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1148989445743026882006-05-30T07:43:00.000-04:002006-05-30T07:44:05.746-04:00

The relationship between N.A.T.O. and Russia is one of ups and downs. Structural cooperation started in 1997 with the Founding Act providing frequent consultations on a number of security issues. As a result of N.A.T.O.'s air attack on Kosovo in 1999, however, Russia postponed all cooperation with N.A.T.O. In the beginning of the current decade, Russia returned to negotiations with N.A.T.O.,

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1148988799449206932006-05-30T07:32:00.000-04:002006-05-30T07:33:19.493-04:00

The secretive group known as Bilderberg will hold its annual secret meeting at the posh Brook Street Resort a few miles from Ottawa, Canada, June 8-11. The location and part of the agenda was disclosed to American Free Press by a source inside Bilderberg’s inner circle. High on the Bilderberg’s secret agenda this year are oil prices and the political upheaval in Latin America. When meeting last

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1148903419997682772006-05-29T07:49:00.000-04:002006-05-29T07:50:20.033-04:00

When there is no solution, there is no problem, observed James Burnham, the former Trotskyite turned Cold War geostrategist. Burnham's insight came again to mind as President Bush ended his meeting with Ehud Olmert by announcing that the Israeli prime minister had brought with him some "bold ideas" for peace. And what bold ideas might that be?

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1148902031017703052006-05-29T07:26:00.000-04:002006-05-29T07:27:11.053-04:00

After reading Wayne LaPierre's "The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the UN Plan to Destroy the Bill of Rights" and experiencing vicariously the boot-stomping good times of globalists as they play the latest round of Guns-Be-Gone, Rosie O'Donnell's call-for-all-arms seems almost patriotic. "Most discussions at the United Nations are deservedly obscure, but the debate over guns really matters,"

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1148295719816128192006-05-22T07:01:00.000-04:002006-05-22T07:01:59.843-04:00

Something remarkable happened on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Commentators began to declare, in somewhat exultant tones, that America had at last become a true empire. America was of course also a benevolent empire, they insisted, but that nod to altruistic tradition could not hide their excitement that America had at last joined the greatest empires of the past.

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147778238701095472006-05-16T07:16:00.000-04:002006-05-16T07:17:18.703-04:00

While the polarization between US President George W. Bush and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez has not burst yet, it has escalated. The block composed of Chávez, Cuban ruler Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales resolved to bolster, by means of energy pressure, the revolutionary socialist triangle. Their space, so far, is the Americas, with no national exceptions. Polarization

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147778143655218832006-05-16T07:15:00.000-04:002006-05-16T07:15:43.656-04:00

Throughout history, empires and their civilisations have come and gone. During the first part of the last century, the US quietly built its empire, first in the North and Central Americas and in South America. Soon after the Second World War, the US worked to maximise the advantages it gained, and the power it assumed, between 1943 and 1945, from its victory over Germany and Japan, and as a

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147778058053789622006-05-16T07:13:00.000-04:002006-05-16T07:14:18.110-04:00

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. Russell Tice, who worked on what

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147729409337464352006-05-15T17:42:00.000-04:002006-05-15T17:43:29.376-04:00

With his recent letter to President Bush, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become part of a long tradition of Third-World leaders who, under imminent military or political threat from the United States, communicated with Washington officials in the hope of removing that threat. Let us hope that Ahmadinejad's effort doesn't result in the equally traditional outright US rejection.

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147690126388862662006-05-15T06:48:00.000-04:002006-05-15T06:48:46.420-04:00

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice couldn't possibly have been more accurate when she accused Iran of "playing games" with the international community. Rice was specifically referring to an announcement made April 30 by the deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency, Muhammad Saeedi, that his country is willing to allow "snap inspections" by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147688426029528992006-05-15T06:20:00.000-04:002006-05-15T06:20:26.063-04:00

Strange things happen when a reporter strays off his beat. Vast regions of the earth turn out to have different priorities. The latest conspiracy theory for the murder of ex-Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri--that criminals involved in a bankrupt Beirut bank may have been involved--doesn't make it into the New Zealand Dominion Post. And last week, arriving in the vast, messy, unplanned city

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147423181149774142006-05-12T04:39:00.000-04:002006-05-12T04:39:57.663-04:00

Via Le Monde, a translated text of the letter from Ahmadinejad to Bush. This week, for the first time in 27 years, an Iranian leader has written directly to an American president. As Juan Cole notes, the letter from Iranian President Ahmadinejad to George W. Bush is either badly translated, or, equally likely, an accurate reflection of Ahmadinejad's own muddled thoughts. (As evidenced by his

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147298721490266682006-05-10T18:04:00.000-04:002006-05-10T18:16:32.310-04:00

Iran’s president Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be “wiped off the map,” although Shimon Peres did say “the president of Iran should remember that Iran can also be wiped off the map.” As Anneliese Fikentscher and Andreas Neumann note, Ahmadinejad was deliberately misquoted as part of an ongoing propaganda campaign against Iran by the neocons, in particular the Middle East Media Research

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147298498180287462006-05-10T18:00:00.000-04:002006-05-10T18:04:05.926-04:00

The escalation of the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute reveals the erosion of U.S. influence in Northeast Asia. Washington's basic policy in the region is to collaborate with South Korea and Japan to balance China's rising power and to roll back or at least contain North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Faced with deepening tensions between its two allies, both of those aims are in jeopardy.

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147175910986649292006-05-09T07:57:00.000-04:002006-05-09T07:58:31.056-04:00

The slogan on the aircraft carrier was wrong. It should have read, "The War Is Over," and not "Mission Accomplished." And President Bush should have emerged from his arrival jet not in a flight suit but in civilian dress. The conundrum is underscored by Shelby Steele's "White Guilt and the Western Past" article in a recent Wall Street Journal. An excellent exegesis of the current American

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147087676724348592006-05-08T07:27:00.000-04:002006-05-08T07:27:56.726-04:00

Nothing displays the true nature of the media and the liberal establishment more than their sneering attitude to democracy itself. Rather than having any common decency or sense of fair play, the BNP election results were treated by David Dimbleby and his coterie of fawning C List political commentators on the BBC with sneering and derision. Once again the BBC revealed is cosmopolitan,

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147086271219757442006-05-08T07:03:00.000-04:002006-05-08T07:04:31.253-04:00

Two London papers have speculated this weekend that complaints by President George W. Bush forced a British minister from his post because of his opposition to the use of nuclear force against Iran. The Independent suggests that a phone call from the U.S. president to British Prime Minister Tony Blair led to the removal of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw Friday.

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147084311603287832006-05-08T06:31:00.000-04:002006-05-08T06:31:51.603-04:00

Police files hold the DNA of more than 50,000 children who have committed no offence. And that's only the tip of the iceberg - Britain now has the largest DNA database in the world.

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1147083826168144622006-05-08T06:23:00.000-04:002006-05-08T06:23:46.196-04:00

The great danger of war with Iran as an imminent possibility resides not only in this administration's proven warlike proclivities, but in the very similar appetites of the "opposition" party. Leading Democrats, including likely presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, far from seizing on recent pronouncements by the Bush White House as another round of duplicitous war propaganda, have

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1146829187525311912006-05-05T07:38:00.000-04:002006-05-05T07:39:47.550-04:00

At this hour, the leftist leaders of Argentina and Brazil are meeting with the populist-radicals who run Venezuela and Bolivia. Topic of discussion: The nationalization by Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian and the first indigenous president in Bolivian history, of the international gas companies operating in his country. Morales' troops, to the cheers of Caracas' Hugo Chavez, invaded the offices of

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1146827252881693732006-05-05T07:07:00.000-04:002006-05-05T07:07:32.906-04:00

Most British citizens assume that liberty grows wild in their country and needs neither cultivation nor protection, and they are unmoved by these events because they think that tyranny cannot happen here. Perhaps they are right, but if a tyranny does arise here, it will find all the weapons it needs conveniently to hand, sharpened, polished, and oiled. As our overstretched, under-equipped

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1146764430797907362006-05-04T13:39:00.000-04:002006-05-04T13:40:30.843-04:00

President Bush is risking a backlash that could injure the Jewish community — and his own cause — by repeatedly citing Israel as his top rationale for possible U.S. military conflict with Iran, Jewish leaders and Middle East analysts warned this week. Bush’s repeated, sometimes exclusive, focus on Israel could spark public fury against the Jewish state and Jews if U.S. military action is

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1146740285784510342006-05-04T06:57:00.000-04:002006-05-04T06:58:05.786-04:00

It was the potshot heard round the world that touched off a counter-crusade. Packaged in Western free speech cliches, and marketed as innocent satire, the newspaper Jylland-Posten's depiction of the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist/suicide bomber with a ticking bomb for a turban was "provocation-entrapment" propaganda. Dual-use entertainment, in this case frivolous caricature, is an unexamined

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1146739158890670992006-05-04T06:38:00.000-04:002006-05-04T06:39:18.893-04:00

When the deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency, Muhammad Saeedi, said recently that his country is willing to allow "snap inspections" by the International Atomic Energy Agency, he conditioned his country's concession on excluding the United Nations Security Council from any involvement in inspecting Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. Quite properly, US Secretary of State

SARTREtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9072119.post-1146738913183263912006-05-04T06:34:00.000-04:002006-05-04T06:35:13.240-04:00

Withdraw immediately or stay the present course? That is the key question about the war in Iraq today. American public opinion is now decidedly against the war. From liberal New England, where citizens pass town-hall resolutions calling for withdrawal, to the conservative South and West, where more than half of “red state” citizens oppose the war, Americans want out. That sentiment is

SARTRE