Is there a foreign policy initiative that Bush has pursued that did not involve war, or the threat of it? There is good reason for this. It is the one area in which America reigns supreme, accounting alone for 40% of the global military expenditure.

Shortly before the first Gulf war the recently retired chairman of the United States joint chiefs of staff, Admiral William Crowe, went for lunch with his successor, Colin Powell. In words that resonate today, Crowe warned Powell that "a war in the Middle East - killing thousands of Arabs for whatever noble purpose - would set back the US in the region for a long time. And that was to say nothing of the Americans who might die".

But despite his own misgivings, Crowe clearly believed military intervention was likely in the interests of presidential prestige.

"It takes two things to be a great president," he told Powell. "First you have to have a war. All the great presidents have had their wars. Two you have to find a war where you are attacked."

Six years into his presidency it is difficult to think of a single, substantial foreign policy initiative that US president George Bush has pursued that did not involve war, or the threat of it. There is good reason for this.

It is the one area in which America reigns supreme, accounting alone for 40% of the global military expenditure and spending almost seven times the amount of its nearest rival, China.   more »

Although the actor Rob Lowe became a pariah in Hollywood in the 1980's when he taped himself having sex with two women, one a minor, amateur sex tapes today seem to juice up careers, at least for celebrities who already have a certain cheese factor.

Two years ago Red Light District, a little known video company in California, hit the jackpot when it landed distribution rights to the Paris Hilton sex tape, an explicit bedroom video shot by a former boyfriend.

The DVD has sold some 600,000 copies, establishing Red Light District as the leading player in a lucrative niche of the pornography industry: a purveyor of explicit videos of famous people, sold to an eager public, often over the vehement objections of the participants.

Ms. Hilton tried to stop distribution of the tape, although its notoriety paradoxically catapulted her to an even higher orbit of fame, establishing her as a kind of postmodern celebrity, leading to perfume deals, a memoir and the covers of Vanity Fair and W.

For its part Red Light District is hoping for a follow-up hit with a new celebrity sex tape featuring two rock stars, Kid Rock and Scott Stapp, who is the former front man of a Christian rock group, Creed.   more »

Present western policy faithfully reproduces 19th-century European policy. This proposed the modernisation and democratisation of the Ottoman empire and the Persian monarchy, but only as a cover for colonial ambitions and for the dismemberment of those declining entities.

Those colonial ambitions brought the Balkan cauldron to the boil, thus precipitating the first world war, which led to the second.

At the beginning of the 21st century, it seems increasingly likely that it will be the Middle East cauldron that will bubble over and scald us all...

An adviser to Israel’s prime minister, summing up its strategy after the Hamas election win, said the Palestinians should be ‘put on a diet but not starved to death’.

They will be punished for practising democracy, and both the United States and the European Union endorse that punishment. Western double-talk about democracy and justice has provoked outrage in Muslim countries and encouraged resistance to foreign intervention   more »

The US has no qualms about setting itself up as the global arbiter of democratic observance. The Bush administration is in the habit of branding opponents as undemocratic, or even as rogue states and outposts of tyranny. The only way to change is to organise free elections.

But with those free elections everything depends upon the outcome. Hugo Chávez has been elected president of Venezuela several times since 1998, under democratic criteria guaranteed by international observers, and will submit again to the ballot in December 2006.

Much good may it do him. The US, which sponsored a failed coup in April 2002, continues to attack him, calling him a danger to democracy.

Iran, Palestine and Haiti demonstrate that it is no longer enough to be democratically elected.

DEMOCRACY'S GREAT...SO LONG AS 'OUR' GUYS WIN   more »

Once again, French students are leading the march - this time against an unpopular employment law - but these protests are also about the country's future on an increasingly globalised planet

It was the same bright spring sunshine and the same familiar elegant landmarks, but the hundreds of thousands of young demonstrators on the streets yesterday were a whole new generation.

Almost 40 years since the great student protests of 1968, France's students are again manning barricades, café tables are being thrown at police riot shields, and tear gas hangs over the Left Bank.

France was again showing its revolutionary fibre and, in the republican tradition, it looked last night as though victory was close to being with the people.

As early as today beleaguered Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is expected to begin talks with trade unions to find an honourable climbdown from the Contrat de Première Embauche (CPE) - the controversial employment contract for under-26s that allows employers to dismiss workers in the first two years without reason - which was rushed into law on 8 March.

Villepin may yet restore order by suggesting he might pave the way to withdraw or delay the new law, after a week in which the government and President Jacques Chirac have sent out signals that they want a way out. It's a move that could well put paid to Villepin's reported ambition to run for president in 2007.   more »

Three years into the war in Iraq and now about two out of three Americans are against it, as against about one out of fifty elected politicians. In Iraq 2,315 Americans have died, and 17,100 wounded, many of them with limbs lost, some facing a lifetime in a wheel chair.

Of the tens of thousands who have returned from combat to army bases or civilian life here, around 2.5 per cent are suffering from severe post traumatic stress syndrome, powder kegs, a menace to themselves and their families. There will be psychic as well as physical wreckage across America for years to come.

In Iraq, the Johns Hopkins study last September made an accounting of the full death toll wrought by the devastation of the US invasion and occupation.

It concluded that "about 100,000 excess deaths" (in fact 98,000) among men, women, and children had occurred in just under eighteen months. Violent deaths alone had soared twentyfold.

But, as in most wars, the bulk of the carnage was due to the indirect effects of the invasion, notably the breakdown of the Iraqi health system.

Re-working the Johns Hopkins study with the benefit of better techniques of statistical analysis Andrew Cockburn concluded here early in the New Year that on the basis of the raw sample data compiled by Iraqis for the Johns Hopkins study, the true number of dead in Iraq in consequence of the war had probably hit around 180,000.   more »

19 MARCH

Spike Lee Puts Down Condi Rice and Picks Up Katrina Conspiracy Theory

The Bush Regime's Bogus Macho Posturing

Maureen Dowd on America's Addiction to Hypnotics [Insomnia Medication]

Why Are the Americans in Iraq? To Establish a Permanent Colony

Today's Civil War in America

Blair and Brtain's Imperial Ambitions

Bin Laden: An Inspiration to All of Us

The Three-Year War in Iraq: History Will Condemn the Bush Regime