Rockets glare o'er Kabul

Rockets, the BBC reports, within a mile of the US embassy in Kabul. Incidents of attacks against NATO, and especially beefed up American troops' strength, are on the increase So are the casualities,mostly from IED's. The Taliban are upping the ante They have called for a boycott of the forthcoming elections, and are therefore increasing in number and sophisticated materiel; they're are aiming to disrupt any strategem to weaken or defeat them militarily or outwit them politically. Guam Diary won't rule out that the Taliban will try a do or die offensive against Kabul in the hours leading up to national elections. They will fail where the Vietnamese succeed during the 1968 Tet offensive.

Obama's birth certificate

Love and war, all's fair, the old saw says. The weapons of choice are many and varied. Consider the latest brouhaha over Barack Hussein Obama's birth certificate. Among the right wing fringe, a belief subsists since the US president began running for the highest office of the 'home of the free, land of the brave'. Take his middle name, it's foreign and Arab. His father was a non believing Muslim. Ergo, Mr. Obama is a muslim, not only a closeted muslim but he is somehow affiliated to terrorism. Think Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Bokum Haram, Al Shabbab, Islamic Jamiayah, and the list is long. In spite of evidence that the US president is a practising, confirmed Christian, the disbelievers won't recognise the truth. And on top of this, now surfaces the issue of his birth right. He ain't born in America. He's not a Yankee, and by fraud, he's subverted the American constitution which simply and clairly states that only an born American can become president.
What makes this absurdity of interest, it is held by a goodly number of Republicans...58 per cent is the quoted figure. They like all Americans have lived through harrowing times. Think 9/11 and then the worst economic recession almost turning into another Great Depression of the 1930's. Such moments of crisis have turned the US in on itself, and like a tongue searching a rotting tooth,the US relives an age of intolerance and nativism, whereby the foreign or the exotic is not only not one of us, but dangerous and threatening, and what's more if the foreign doesn't look like the magazine model of a typical American, our way of live is threaten with destruction. It doesn't matter that Mr. Obama was born on American soil, in Honolulu, Hawaii. It's a lie, they believe. He really, some say, was born in his father's Kenya. Besides believing in the number of angels dancing on the head of political absurdity, it is the right wing Republican talking heads who are trying to throw rivers of water on this spreading forest fire of the Big Lie. Ann Coulter for one, Fox's Bill O'Reilly for another. They, it seems, have an inkling that such a lie can further distance the party from Main Street, if not from sanity and commonsense. What is more amazing is that joining the big mouths pushing the issue of Mr. Obama's birthright and place, is that populist, anti elitist, with a Harvard degree, the gasbag Lou Dobbs. We know from where Dobbs is coming from...look at his campaign against illegal immigrats. For all his spit and polish the birth issue is pushing Mr. Dobbs to the head of the no nothing class. But Mr. Dobbs works for CNN which is doing very little to stop his mischief and mayhem. Why? It means ratings; it's making money for the them and sponsors. It is an false claim which CNN hopes will help claw its way back to elbow out Fox and MSNBC of the race for the top dog of mindless cable television and vacuous opinion making. Yes, CNN is falling behind, and that means loss of money and influence.
Dobbs & co. are symptomatic of the chronic illness affecting the US media. They go for the jugular in trivia and gossip and innuendo. It is Grub Street or yellow journalism or mud slinging journalism, all over again.
Of course the land of birth of Mr. Obama has racial overtones. It is also a signpost that these men and women with a 19 century mentality are out of step with what's happening in the US and the world. Alas, they and the big money behind them, pull the strings, as the inflammatory rhetoric of their burn down the barn they've sought refuge in. They intend to do much harm. And they've an army of faithful who will answer their noxious call. And blindly they will sally forth into the valley of their own destruction.

Guests like fish begin to smell after 3 days

JFK, it was said, quipped during the early days of his administration's involvement in Vietnam, that the US could get out of its entanglement there by declaring victory and take his marbles [advisors, military] back to Washington with America's held up high and reputation intact. He died too soon, before he could ever take his own advoice, if he ever gave a second thought to it. LBJ didn't, and we know the sorry history of the US' defeat in Vietnam. In history's mind's eye, the sorry image of the US ambassador fleeing from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, the mighty stars and stripes in his possession as at helicopter lifting him to the safety of an American ship, as the North Vietnamese army triumphantly entered the Republic of Vietnam's capital.The US indeed had overstayed its welcome after a quarter century in Vietnam.
In today's online edition of 'The New York Times', we find an article by Michael R. Gordon, outlining a blunt memo by Colonel Timothy R. Reese, repeating JFK's advice, as it pertains to America's preemptive 6 years war in Iraq. He was one of the Bush administration's cheer leaders for the war, and a purveyor of less than forthright reporting on WMD [weapons of mass destruction].]So, it is an irony of sorts that he is covering a story the message of which is 'we should declare victory and withdraw'. The advice is sound, no doubt, after the waste in lives and billions in materiel and corrupt practices in sustaining weak Iraqi politicians and failing to rebuild a shattered army and police; in allowing the fault line of religious and ethnic differences to overwhelm a country which had never supported Islamic extremists, to offer a haven to them, to fight the invaders [read, the US]; billions wasted, where even today there is no 24 hour flow of electricity but in the US fortress known as the 'Green Zone'; no steady flow of running water; no sustained agriculture; in brief, Mr. Bush's war, based on his wishful thinking and patent lies, laid waste to a weaken Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein.
Now the question arises can the US truly pack up its bags, say 'sayonara', and close the door behind its as it 'triumphantly' [sic] marches out of Iraq? Hardly. The geopolitics of the region are against Col. Reese's recommendations. Iraq once a foil to Iran, needs a US presence to check Iran rise as a dominant regional power. We can thank Mr. Bush & co. for creating conditions for strengthening Tehran's hand in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Mr. Bush's lack of clarity on Iran has simply accelerated its nuclear programme and technical advances in rocketry and military weaponry. So as a countervailing presence Washington cannot simply withdraw. Furthermore, it has studded Iran with military bases and in the Green Zone, which we know from press accounts is a large as 8 US football fields, it has built an embassy which would put Citizen Kane's Xanadu to shame. Withdrawal from Iraq, would run counter to Baghdad since its authority rests on wobbly legs, and it need American taxpayer dollars and America's military might to shore it up. Furthermore, Iraq is sitting on one of the largest pool of oil which the US coverts.
Mr. Bush's war has implicated more deeply into the sorry and sad politics of the region. Washington has to stay to keep the Israelis in line.
In a few words, although Reese's words offer a way out of Iraq, of an Iraq with anti Americanism running a high fever, the realities politically keep the US there, one way or another, by design or by default. Yes, the American presence in Iraq smells like a barrel of rotten fish. Like it or not, the Iraqis will have to hold their noses and put up with a foreign presence till such time that they can chase the Americans out.

Ban Ki moon weighs in on the side of direct talks between Pyoongyang and Washington

UN secretary general Ban Ki moon threw his authority behind the DPRK's [Democratic People's Republic of Korea aka North Korea]proposals to talk directly to the US. Although he did not dismiss the failed and now dead for the DPRK, the six party talks in Beijing,e he quietly did point out that there are other ways in discussing outstanding issues between Pyongyang and Washington. And face to face talks was certainly one such avenue.
You can imagine the displeasure secretary general Ban's pronouncement provoked in Fortress Foggy Bottom where US secretary of state Hillary Clinton & her band of Asian specialists hold forth.By voicing his opinion which bears the weight of a 'globacl village', a metaphor dear to Mme. Clinton's heart, Mr. Moon has taken a step away from the hardline US policy and the two resolutions that it sponsored for sanctions against the DPRK, in April and June 2009. The secretary general has grasped the hand that North Korea is extending to the Obama administration for a way to get discussions on its nuclear programme off of arctic ground zero, discussions which may also lead to unfreeze more than a half century of icebergs of issues going back to the Korean War. Mr. Moon sees an opportunity which should not be thrown as others openings in the past, on the dust heap of lost causes. It is a chance to lower quickly mounting temperatures on a very tense divided Korean peninsula, as well as to cool off the propaganda war and macho posturing.
President Barack Obama [BHO] & his team at State, the Treasury, and the Pentagon do not share the secretary general's standpoint. On the contrary, Mme. Clinton rejected the DRPK proposals out of hand, insisting that the proper venue for talks is at the table of the six parties in Beijing. The presence of China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, the US, and North Korea was a smokescreen and a face saving devise for the Bush White House not to talk man to man with the DPRK. The idea of a six neighbours at the table would put pressure on North Korea to change its unconventional ways. It was thought in Washington, that the US had found a surrogate in Pyongyang's ally China, in arm twisting Kim Jong il to come to his senses. In other words, agree to Washington's demands. This tack had more to do with beating the drum and blowing the horn of a giant publicity campaign, but of little flexibility on the US' side to come to any meaningful agreement with Pyongyang. As a result, the talks broke off from time to time with a certain measured predictability. When BHO called for sanctions against the DPRK before the UN Security Council in April 2009, Pyongyang folded its tent, and walked away for good.
Mme. Clinton had not grasped the significance of North Korea's farewell. She continues to believe absurdly that it will return to the talks. Mme. Clinton & co. at Fortress Foggy Bottom are slow in understanding the import of the DPRK's proposals for direct talks. As Guam Diary has previously noted, they knock the stuffings out of Washington's ploy to use China as a Trojan Horse for its onerous demands of surrender to the DPRK. Beijing is out of the game, not completely by directly. BHO's Clinton team has fallen back on the simplistic explanation that the US and the DPRK already have had talked on the edges of the six party meetings. But that's not the same thing as formally have face to face talks!
Fortress Foggy Bottom has embraced the hardline approach of South Korea and Japan, in facing down North Korea. This trioka of allies thought that a hardline common front would cower Pyongyang into making concessions. How naive and wrong they were!
Washington may now realise that Pyongyang's proposals cut Seoul and Tokyo out of the picture. And where is Mme. Clinton now without the crutch of Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo? Kim Jong il's proposals have shown that the emperor BHO is wearing no new clothes in dealing with the DPRK. Are we seeing the lamps burning late into the nights at Foggy Bottom, as the policy makers and talking heads go looking for new ideas? Guam Diary cannot say for sure. One thing is certain, however: the US' response has not gone off its usual message, and it has the mainstream media in its pocket.
Will BHO respond kindly to secretary general Ban Ki moon's suggestion? Guam Diary is not in the business of reading tea leaves. But one thing is certain, Mr. Ban has stepped hard on toes in Washington. His term in office is coming up for renewal, and Washington's anger will try to strike him, making him a one term secretary general. He is at a risk at playing gadfly with Washington.
Fortress Foggy Bottom is slowly coming under siege on the matter of the DPRK. It is only a matter of time possibly for other allies of the US to call for Washington's direct talks with Pyongyang. Is it too a matter of time for a call for the reconvening of a Geneva conference to deal globally and once and for all with the large bag of issues dating back to the Korea War?

Mme. Clinton responds to the DPRK's offer for direct talks

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has rejected out of hand the DPRK's [Democratic People's Republic of Korea aka North Korea]proposals for face to face discussions with the US. Instead true to State's mantra, she encouraged the DPRK to come back to the six party talks in Beijing. Now, Mme.Clinton is a busy lady; she's a large delegation of Chinese who are in meetings with secretary of the treasury Timothy Geithner and herself and BHO [Barack Obama] to deal with. So her swift reply to Pyongyang may have been hastily formulated. Nonetheless, her team of Asianists and Pyongyangologists surely either didn't carefully read North Korea's proposals or if they did, they had to be of shortsight, since Pyongyang restated its position of April 2009, that it had quit the six party talks and wouldn't return to them. Case closed.
Now Mme. Clinton may play a cat and mouse game, but Kim Jong il's position is not. As Guam Diary observed, the North Korean proposals is not 'deja vu all over again', but a strong desire to cut through the war of nasty words and get to the heart of matter of issues affecting Washington and Pyongyang. Mme. Clinton's & co.'s inability or reluctance to think outside the box, reveals how primitive the tools of diplomacy Foggy Bottom has on hand. Furthermore, they fail to recognise the changes under which the DPRK itself is going. For them, North Korea remains a solid block of ice, massive and impenetrable. Perhaps, as a suggestion, they might available themselves of the knowledge that their British cousins have first hand by the mere fact that London has an embassy in Pyongyang or the Swiss who have laboured long in the DPRK through NGO's and who set up a business school, teaching the tricks of the trade of global finance, in the North Korean capital.
Mme. Clinton seemingly remains aloof to the realities and wisdom of what's going on in the DPRK.
BHO has espoused the cause of South Korea's Lee Myung bak who dumped unceremoniously the 'Sunshine Policy' for whatever its warts, had engaged Pyongyang directly. Once in office, he reversed gears,and single handedly restored the cold war status quo ante with North Korea. BHO aligned himself with Lee, and reaffirmed solidarity with Japan's hardline position as well.
Is BHO the man his image projects? Pragmatist, a healer, an extender of an open hand? Hardly when it comes to engaging the DPRK. Rather, he has donned the cloak of John Bolton, and with the steel glove of State, sought to revive the Truman MacArthur doctrine.
As Guam Diary posits, he is doomed to failure. The coalition that he forged in the US Security Council is showing cracks. China and Russia will not go the full 9 yards in imposing sanctions on North Korea. In fact, with Pyongyang's dealing a death blow to the six party talks, have kicked the legs out from under the US strategy for using Beijing as a battering ram to force open Pyongyang's resistance to US demands.
In brief, by rejecting without much consideration let alone thought and analysis, Mme. Clinton & co. are up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Of course, diplomacy is an art of the possible, so it is not stricken from the record the possibility that the US might reconsider DPRK's call for bilateral talks in a different light.

NYU returns Singapore's dirty linen unwashed!

America's media hardly covers Singapore. This rich and highly developed state belongs in the old British sphere of influence. Every now and then something news worthy with an 'exotic' flavour will grace the eyes but hardly the ears of the grand American public.
Singapore's sitting member of parliament and professor at the National University of Singapore [NUS] Thio Li ann withdrew her invitation from New York University [NYU]. The renowned university with an endowment larger and more buoyant that Harvard's, and charging the highest tuition in the US, had offered her a year's visiting lectureship on human rights at its prestigious law school. And here begins the tale.
In Singapore Dr. Thio has a sorry reputation as a bigot and a unprincipled political operator. She is a born again Christian who got religion at Oxford. She comes from the evangelical wing of Singapore's Anglican community. In the well of parliament during a debate on the relaxation of buggery among consenting adults. This draconian law is a holdover from the days of British role; it was amended to permit anal sex between man and woman, but denied man and man the same right.
MP Thio in the well of parliament waxed eloquent and flowery on the spread of homosexuality in Singapore, coupling it with the decline of manners, morals, and civilisation. She denounced anal sex between consenting men as drinking with a straw up one's nose. Well such utterances might raise the hackles of Singapore's gays, but it is standard fare in Singapore's politics. Sharp and brittle, it is not out of the ordinary.
Dr. Thio is a respected scholar, who in her own right, has written on constitutional issues in Singapore. She doesn't write about homosexuality, as NYU stated. NYU however remained oblivious of her rantings against gays in parliament.
What made the ruling People's Action Party [PAP] very nervous was the putch Mme. Thio's mother and her band of evangelical Christians carried out in AWARE, Singapore's equivalent of NOW in the US. She and her band of believers took over Singapore's women's organisation through stealthful means. Now, AWARE is an umbrella organisation which has put out standards of teaching tolerance and diversity; its manual apparently calls for an understanding, humane approach to human sexuality which is an anathema to Thio and her band of angels. Their tactics caused such an exchange of e mails, much protests, and a stirring among a docile population, which sent up red flags to the PAP, which has the ruled the city state for last 45 years without interruption. What Thio and her angels did was taboo in the Singapore environment. It was the imposition of one brand's thoughts and message on all Singapore. Now Singapore, albeit majority Chinese, is a delicate balancing act of races and religions. The PAP makes jolly well sure that neutrality is respected; it has no desire to see in its midst a replay of the open wound of racial riots in neighbouring Malaysia. Thus, what Thio & co. tried to do, but failed, for they were immediately voted out of office in AWARE, was to tip the balance towards Christian evanglicals who brand what they touch with an iron of intolerance.
In the denouement of the AWARE crisis, Dr. Thio remained silent. On a matter of human rights, she refrained from defending them; human rights which she was going to lecture on at the NYU law faculty.
And here is where the NYU invitation to Thio Li ann was manna from heaven! Thio Li ann's hateful speech resounded long and loud in Singapore. Her name was never out of the public's mouth. It attracted more attention owing to her mum Thio Su Meen's undemocratic means of taking over AWARE, in order to silence its humane approach to respect the rights of others.
This is the context which escaped NYU's ken. Nor did it bargain for the international blogsphere and a rush of commentary and e mails to NYU gays and straights about who and what Thio Li ann is.
Hardly had the university announced her courses, a din of protests arose, letters sent to the university's administration, alumni notified. Such a quick response was snowballing into a sorry critique of the university and damanging its reputation. By damaging its reputation, doesn't translate into having an unpopular lecturer on staff, it boils down to drying up contributions to NYU's endowment. In brief, it means the old do re me; it signifies getting a hit in the bank book.
NYU took swift action withdrawing, according to a press release, and an article in 'the New York Times'; bolsters by a lack of enrolment and enthusiasm for Dr. Thio's approach to human rights, NYU had to wipe egg off its face. For her part, Thio Li ann decided to turn down NYU's offer.
And where does that leave the PAP? It no longer has much to fear from Dr. Thio. She stands disgraced; she tarred with the brush of bigotry. She has the stigma of professional shame to live with. One thing is sure: she won't sit in parliament after the next general election, and she will have to forebear martyr like the whispers of her colleagues at NUS and the enemies she has made.She will not receive any invitation to lecture at any major American or European university of note. She will no doubt find solace in her religion and her church.

North Korea speaks up!

After weeks of US hectoring and badgering Pyongyang, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [DPRK aka North Korea] spoke up. Dismissing firmly US secretary of state Hillary Clinton taunting and brimades and bromides and her readings in pop psychology on behaviour, the DPRK has dotted its own i's and crossed its own t's; it cut through the morass of US verbiage, and has called for direct talks between Pyongyang and Washington to discuss issues of common concern.
For Pyongyang ologists, the DPRK's response should alert them to one important and cardinal point: gone are the speculations about Kim Jong il's succession, any conflicts in the minds of the Workers' Party elite, for the internal debate is over. It is evident that Kim Jong il is in complete command, and rumours to his suffering from a virulent form of cancer, must needs be buried in the muck and mire of gossip from which they sprang.
If US president Barack Obama [BHO] was counting on relying on China as a lever to persuade North Korea to rejoin the six party talks in Beijing. Kim Jong il knocks the pins from under that tack. No one seemed to consider the seriousness of Mr. Kim's words when he stated simply and cleared that the DPRK wouldn't return to those multiparty discussions, after BHO's administration pushed to sanctions on two occasions in the US Security Council. Once for violation of Resolution 1718 for launching a satellite on a long range rocket which had questionable legal footing; the other time, for testing a 'nuclear' device which scientifically no one, not even 200 nuclear sensors posted worldwide, could find traces of uranium fallout. ['Science' published an article by a Mr. Clery who seriously questioned that Pyongyang had detonated a nuclear device.]. The US managed to ram through Resolution 1879 calling for tighter sanctions, for the boarding of North Korean vessels on the high seas, which Pyongyang immediately denounced as a 'causus belli', freezing of foreign bank accounts, so on and on. North Korea's ally China in a snit, voted for both resolutions. By not returning to Beijing, China has 'lost face'; Pyongyang can play the game as the best of them. Furthermore, although China may rap the DPRK on the knuckles, it wasn't going to play the patsy for the US. Beijing would protest loudly but hardly enforce sanctions in the way Washington wanted.
The DPRK has understood from the beginning the direction of the US campaign to check and mate it on the international chessboard. As Guam Diary has noted, BHO has reenforced George W. Bush's strong armed measures towards North Korea; he has polished them so that they took on a John Bolton glow. In announcing that the 'six party talks are gone forever', Pyongyang has called Washington's hand to force the DPRK into 'total surrender' on all issues.
How will the US respond to the DPRK's call for direct negotiations? Will Washington's reluctance in the past to meet Pyongyang face to face continue? It doesn't take a rocket sciaentist to fanthom the US' move towards a six party talk to deal with North Korea. It is a reflexion of America's operating on assumptions of a kindergarten nature, ill defined and out of touch with experience and reality. Where a nuanced and sophisticated approach toward Kim Jong il's regime are called for, Guam Diary, among others, find that call for measured and reasoned approaches based on the hard facts and commonsense. Instead BHO's team at State, the Treasury, and the Pentagon turned towards vilification and eyewash and muddied the waters on serious issues. Which led to conflation of heated words and threats by turning the DPRK into a malevolent world menace. Shades of Mr. Bush's shtick on 'axis of evil'!
The US has always been reluctant to deal from the top of the deck with the DPRK. Washington has never forgiven North Korea [and China] for fighting the US flying the UN flag to a stalemate during the Korea War. This brings up another matter. Kim Jong il at the same time that he walked out of the six party talks for good, tore up the 1953 Aritmistice Agreement. In on quick move, the frozen war became verbally a hot one again. And if Washington decides to talk with Pyongyang that is an issue of high priority which may lead to the reconvening in Geneva of a peace conference. [See Guam Diary's 'A call for a Geneva conference'.]
The ball is now in BHO's court.