American War Psychosis

Answering Arab scepticism, President Bush promised to stay engaged in pulling Israelis and Palestinians toward a peace pact by the end of his term. “When I say I’m coming back to stay engaged, I mean it,” said Bush. “When I say I’m optimistic we can get a deal done, I mean what I’m saying.”

Except Mubarak and Abbas – the two on US dole – nobody is going to believe that what Bush ignored during seven years of his presidency, he would fix in the next 11 months.

“I’m absolutely confident that people in the Middle East are working on building a society based on justice,” and Egypt can play a role in the “freedom and justice movement.”

The Egyptian government has waged a heavy crackdown on its strongest domestic opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting hundreds of the Islamic activists, as well as some secular opponents. Bush did not mention jailed political opponent Ayman Nour, whose case the State Department called a “miscarriage of justice.”

President Bush at the ting Abdullah’s horse farm near the Saudi capital, Riyadh raised the issue of oil prices. President Bush asked Saudi Arabia and other members of OPEC to consider the strain the high cost of oil was having on the American economy. He expressed concern about the economy in some of his starkest language yet, saying that rising oil costs and gasoline prices were causing hardship for American families. “When consumers have less purchasing power because of high prices of gasoline, it could cause the US economy to slow down. If the economy slows down, there will be less barrels of oil purchased.”

The loony debate over whether it is more important to choose the first woman or the first African-American nominee for president is lurking on the horizon. Recent experience shows that campaigning with colour is fraught with peril – even in the most liberal of precincts. As Barack Obama found out, it’s O.K. to make history, to allow people to feel good while making history. But it’s quite another to be “the black guy.”

For a while, it looked like Obama could be the rare African-American leader whose race was nearly invisible. He’s post-Civil Rights, and after that Iowa victory, people felt something had passed into our collective rear-view mirror. Now it looks like every mention of race is bad for Obama.

The New York Times has started a series of articles about US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who after coming home have committed killings, or have been charged with shooting or other serious crimes.

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.” The New York Times has so far found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed killings.

US national intelligence chief Mike McConnell has said the interrogation technique of water-boarding “would be torture” if he were subjected to it. He said the legal test for torture should be “pretty simple.” It would also be torture if water-boarding, which involves simulated drowning, resulted in water entering a detainee’s lungs. He told the New Yorker there would be a “huge penalty” for anyone using it if it was ever determined to be torture. The US attorney-general has declined to rule on whether the method is torture.

In December, the House of Representatives approved a bill that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation techniques such as water-boarding. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill, which would require CIA to follow the US Army rules and abide by the Geneva Conventions.

A middle-class wedding in Afghanistan costs an average of $20,000, several times the salary of most bridegrooms. For most, the bride’s family sets the terms. The bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also related expenses, including several huge pre-wedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.

Hamid, a midlevel bureaucrat in the Afghan government who supports his six-member family on a salary of $7,200 per year, said his bill was going to top $12,000. And by Afghan standards, that would be considered normal, or even a bargain.

Extravagant weddings, a mainstay of modern Afghan life and an important measure of social status, were banned by the Taliban, which also outlawed beauty parlours and the instrumental music that is traditional at wedding parties. But since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, the Afghan wedding industry has rebounded and is now bigger than ever.

President Bush urged wary Persian Gulf allies to rally against Iran “before it is too late.” Bush rhetoric ignores the International Atomic Energy Agency announcement that Iran had agreed, yet again, to answer outstanding questions about its nuclear programmes within four weeks.

Mr. Bush focused not only on what the United States believes are Iran’s nuclear ambitions but also its suspected support for Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He called Iran’s government “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism” and accused it of imposing repression and economic hardship at home. “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere.”

President Bush is discussing a new agreement with Baghdad that would govern the deployment of American troops in Iraq. With so many Americans adamant about bringing our forces home as soon as possible, Mr. Bush wants to ensure continued US involvement in an open-ended war.

The White House and the Iraqi government decided in December 2007 to pursue the pact as a way to define long-term relations between the two countries, including the legal status of American military forces in Iraq. Iraqi officials, increasingly unhappy with restrictions on sovereignty because of the presence of 160,000 foreign troops, have said that they won’t extend the United Nations mandate beyond this year. A Washington-Baghdad deal would have to take its place for the troops to stay.

The new disclosure rules confirm the pre-eminence of Representative John Murtha at procuring eye-popping chunks of pork for contractors he helped put in business in Johnstown, Pa. He secured $162 million in district favours. In all, eager members in both houses enacted 11,144 earmarks, worth $15 billion. Taxpayers may be inured to $113,000 for rodent control in Alaska or a million for Idaho’s weed management.

A court in London has sentences a 23 year-old IT student to 16 years in prison for inciting murder purely based on the Internet. Younes Tsouli, a computer expert from Shepherd’s Bush in West London, used his top-floor flat to help Islamist in a propaganda war against the West, The Daily Mail reported.

Under the name Irhabi 007 – combining the James Bond reference with the Arabic for scary – he worked with the insurgents in Iraq and came up with a way to convert videos into a form that could be put onto the Web.

Citi Bank has disclosed an $18.1 billion write-down, is raising rates on credit cards and tightening the amount of credit it would extend. It is also reducing the amount of residential mortgage loans it is making. In the fourth quarter, it lent $29.5 billion to American homeowners, down 16.4 per cent from the same period in 2006. It was the lowest total for any quarter since the first three months of 2005. Citi is not alone. Most banks have made loans more expensive for many.

After years of debate, the US Food and Drug Administration declared that food from cloned animals is safe to eat, clearing the way for milk and meat derived from genetic copies of prized dairy cows, steers and hogs to be sold at the grocery store. The decision was hailed by cloning companies and some farmers. Because clones are costly, it is their offspring that are most likely to be used for producing milk, hamburgers or pork chops, while the clones themselves are reserved for breeding.

“This is a huge milestone,” said Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, a leading livestock cloning company in Austin, Texas.

There have long been suspicions. This week a heavily promoted cholesterol-lowering drug had flunked a clinical trial of its effectiveness. The two companies that reap billions from the drug had been cynically sitting on the results for more than a year.

The drug, Zetia, and a combination pill that contains it, Vytorin, made by Merck and Schering-Plough is used by millions of patients. They generated more than $5 billion in sales last year. The companies sponsored a clinical trial of the drug’s effectiveness in hopes for positive results. The trial was conducted in 720 European patients with genes that cause abnormally high cholesterol levels. For two years, the patients received either Zocor or Vytorin. The assumption was that Vytorin would reduce the growth of fatty plaques more than Zocor alone. As it turned out, the plaques grew almost twice as fast in patients taking the Vytorin.

The companies’ grudging release of the data has raised disturbing questions. The findings also raise doubts about the current belief that lowering cholesterol is the key to cardiovascular health.

A study released last year by the Pew Research Centre dubbed Americans aged 18 to 25 as the “Look at Me” generation and reported that this group said that their top goals were fortune and fame.