Kashmir_The US as honest broker?
Mind you, But for Diversionary Tactics and respective gains.  
(US needs frontline states to take the bullets, be the canon-fodder to keep USA Inc. safe)

So there are at least two good reasons for the US to be an honest broker wishing to ensure a lasting peace in Kashmir.

*Unfortunately, there is a catch. There is a semi-good reason for the US to want to keep Kashmir on the boil. This has to do with diversionary tactics.

The alliance of Christian fundamentalists and neo-conservative Jews(exemplified by the PNAC or Project for a New American Century) that is running American foreign policy is very concerned about the survival of Israel.
They were the architects of the Iraq war, and they worry about other countries that can damage Israel, eg Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia.

They know Israel and the US are the biggest targets of Islamist hatred.However, they calculate that if Islamist terrorism can be directed elsewhere, that would make Israel and America safer.
Americans have perhaps deliberately allowed the creation of 'front-line'* states (read separatist movements, religion-politicking, proxy warriors, minority hit & run squads and of course mercenaries cum missionaries and........)* that took the brunt of the damage.
For instance, there is a school of thought that the Americans were perfectly happy to let the Kashmir problem simmer along because it kept a lot of radical Muslims occupied in low-intensity conflict there, never mind the damage to India, so long as there was no damage to the American mainland.

*I would say this same thought-process extends to protecting Israel via diverting the Islamists towards Kashmir. After all, soft State India will merely complain about the murder of its citizens, and will never actually do anything to the terrorists.

Americans may still use the Kashmir issue to keep India pre-occupied.
Will US managers look long-term? Given America's past record of seeking instant gratification, that is unlikely. Therefore, I have
to conclude, regretfully, that the Americans are playing games with India over Kashmir.
*They see no reason to move away from the State Department's historic tilt towards Pakistan.

Instead of military action, the Bush administration will encourage a "popular uprising" in its effort to overthrow Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and lend financial support to Iranians to get the job done.
 
Here we go again. While postwar Iraq continues to crumble, the Bush administration is now setting its sights on a new target-Iran-in its so-called effort to reshape most of the Middle East and bring democracy to countries ruled by vicious dictators. But the Bush administration is again relying on flimsy evidence and thin intelligence information in claiming that the Iran poses an immediate threat to the United States.

The U.S. still hasn't uncovered any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was the prime reason for launching an attack against the country. Rumsfeld said in an interview reported by CNN Tuesday that it's possible the WMD in Iraq may have been destroyed prior to the war. So right now, the Bush administration doesn't have much credibility here or with countries that rightfully opposed the war in Iraq.

Ari Fleischer, Bush's press secretary, said during his daily press briefing Tuesday that Iran hasn't taken the appropriate steps to round up al Qaeda terrorists allegedly hiding out within its borders. Moreover, Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons puts the U.S. in grave danger. Therefore, regime change is in order.

"The future of Iran will be determined by the Iranian people, and I think the Iranian people have a great yearning for government that is representative of their concerns," Fleischer said.

Iranian officials have denied harboring al-Qaeda operatives and said the country would vigorously defend itself against any U.S. threat, which in the eyes of the Bush administration, could set the stage for another war and further increase anti-American sentiment and put the U.S. in more danger of terrorist attacks, according to several Democratic lawmakers.

However, the real cover story is the one the Bush administration is spinning in order to win public support for what was already planned for Iran months ago, well before "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Before the United States military decimated Iraq, the neocons at the highly influential think tanks the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century were already advising Bush administration officials, like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on how to overthrow the ruling parties in Iran, Libya and Syria after the war in Iraq was over. Many of AEI and PNAC's former members are now working in Bush's administration. PNAC's influence on Bush's foreign and defense policies are so powerful that many of its recommendations on how to transform the military have already been adopted by the Pentagon.

Still, the Bush administration has its agenda and it seems that Iran is indeed its next target. Instead of military action, the Bush administration will encourage a "popular uprising" in its effort to overthrow Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and lend financial support to Iranians to get the job done.

To get Iranians to rise up against its government, U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, has drafted an amendment to the Senate Foreign Authorization bill titled The Iran Democracy Act that calls for using the new Radio Farda to host programming from Iranian Americans who communicate with their families inside Iran about the desire for an internationally monitored referendum vote on what form of government Iran should have.

The amendment would also provide grants for private radio and TV stations in the U.S. that broadcast pro-democracy news and information into Iran. The amendment also provides funds to translate books, videos and other materials into Persian - specifically, information on building and organizing non-violent social movements.

Moreover, Brownback introduced legislation that would establish an Iran Democracy Foundation to provide grants to the Iranian-American community and for the radio and TV Stations in the U.S. that broadcast directly into Iran.

AI's role in Poland is not a secret any longer.

"For Iran, the approach might be compared to the approach the United States and other democratic states took to Poland in the 1980s," said David Frum, President Bush's former speechwriter, who is credited with coining the phrase "axis of evil," in an April 5 presentation at AEI.

"In Poland, as in Iran, an economically incompetent authoritarian regime ruled over an increasingly angry population.
In Poland, as in Iran, a mass opposition movement rose up against the regime: Solidarity in Poland, the student democratic movement in Iran.

Back in the 1980s, the United States and its allies* never confronted the Polish communists directly. Instead, they imposed stringent economic sanctions on the regime--and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for its covert newspapers and radio stations and to support the families of jailed or exiled activists…as the regimes economy disintegrated, the Polish communists were compelled first to open negotiations with Solidarity, next to permit Solidarity to compete in semi-free elections, and finally to step aside for a Solidarity government."

Richard Perle, who sits on the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises Rumsfeld, is more blunt in the reasons for going after Iran and he is not shy about suggesting that military force be used if necessary.

Michael Ledeen, another influential AEI scholar, claims that the U.S. ought to "bag" Iran's regime because of its anti-American views.

A regime change in Iran? Or a strike at its nuclear establishment? Do Clandestine stations in Balochistan to monitor Iran have anything to do with special treatment being planned for Musharraf?

Since 9/11, the Government of Iran has been co-operating with the international coalition led by the USA in its war against terrorism originating from Afghanistan.  Such co-operation is in the form of effective sealing of Iran's borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan to prevent the crossing over of Al Qaeda remnants from Afghanistan into Iran, assurances of assistance to the US in missions undertaken by its armed forces for the rescue of any American air crew forced to land in Iranian territory due to hostile ground fire in Afghanistan  etc.

Geneva-based diplomats of the different countries which constitute the coalition against terrorism have been meeting periodically  to compare notes on the war.  They are referred to as the Geneva Group.  Iran has not only been actively participating in its meetings, but also having direct interactions with the American diplomats in the margins of the Group meetings.

Despite this, the US has, from time to time, been expressing its concerns over what it perceives as the lack of satisfactory co-operation from Iran. There were mainly three irritants.  The first was the presence in the Iranian territory of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar of the Hizbe Islami (HI) and his associates after they were defeated by the Taliban in Afghanistan.  In view of the Pakistan Government's pre-9/11 support to the Taliban, Gulbuddin and his associates apprehended threats to their lives if they took sanctuary in Pakistani territory. They, therefore, crossed over into Iran.

Till now, there are no indicators that apart from keeping up the psychological pressure on Iran, the US is planning any other action of an overt or covert nature. Overt military or covert para-military action would require time for preparation. Surrogates, who will do the US bidding, have to be identified, motivated and trained. Bases from which covert actions could be mounted have to be found.  

The ideal locations for such bases would be Iraq and Pakistan. Since Musharraf's visit to the US in February last year, there has been speculation that he has agreed to the US intelligence agencies setting up clandestine stations in Balochistan for monitoring developments in Iran and that it was due to unhappiness over this that Abdul Sattar, the then Foreign Minister, resigned, ostensibly on health grounds.  

It is understood that this subject figured during the recent discussions of Lt.Gen. Ehsanul Haq, the Director-General of the ISI, with US intelligence officials in Washington and that there would be further discussions on it during Musharraf's forthcoming visit to the US in the second half of June. The Pakistani collaboration with the US in this matter is being projected as part of the war against terrorism, intended to monitor the activities of Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists from the Iranian territory and not as part of any destabilisation project directed against Teheran. In its present unsettled state, Iraq is unlikely to be of any major use to the US though the MEK terrorists could prove handy.

A more likely possibility is a preventive strike to destroy the Iranian nuclear establishments before they are completed and commissioned next year. It would be similar to the Israeli pre-emptive strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor, which was being constructed in Iraq in the early 1980s with French assistance. Either the US could itself carry out the strike or encourage Israel to do so. The Israeli Government would be only too happy to oblige.   

The US calculation would be that a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear establishments would convey a suitable warning to Teheran to act more rigorously against terrorists and to keep off Iraq and at the same time prove immensely popular in the US in the run-up to next year's Presidential elections, without getting the US involved in a messy and protracted war which may not be advisable before the elections.
 
outlooktraveller.com | outlookmoney.com
©Hathway Investments Private Limited 2002, Our Technology Partner : 4Cplus.com 

FAIRFIELD, Ohio - Along a quiet strip of gray corrugated metal buildings, across the street from a La-Z-Boy distribution center, Gary Allen and his ever-expanding crew are running one of the most urgent operations of the Iraq war.

Around the clock, seven days a week, O'Gara Hess & Eisenhardt churns out heavily armored Humvees, designed for the guerrilla combat and roadside bombs bedeviling U.S. troops. Last August, a back-lot warehouse held excess inventory. Now, after a $1.5 million investment, 30 new workers on two shifts produce 500 sets of three-inch-thick bulletproof glass a week. As many as 10,000 sets are on back order.

In November, the company snapped up a 40,000-square-foot building down the road, moved its entire commercial armoring operation there and in three days, with an additional $1.5 million, it doubled the Humvee operation.

In six months, employment has more than tripled, to over 600, and 250 more people in this part of southwestern Ohio work as direct suppliers. Production manager Ronnie Carson figured he interviews 15 job applicants every day and hires 10 to 12 of them. Just yesterday, the company's parent corporation, Armor Holdings Inc., announced it received an additional $16.6 million from the Army to ramp up production yet again. The clocks setting the pace on the assembly line were reset, from one vehicle every hour and a half to one every hour and 15 minutes.

"For us, the economy is great," said Allen, senior vice president and general manager of Armor Holdings Inc.'s Mobile Security Division. "It's a sad situation, but . . . " His voice trailed off, then he added, "I don't think anyone here is thinking about it that way."

In this corner of a critical presidential-election battleground state, the economy is surging with the urgency of a boom. But it wasn't President Bush's tax cuts, Federal Reserve interest rate policies or even a general economic turnaround that did the trick. It was war.

The frenetic activity is repeated all over the country. New kilns in California bake ceramic body-armor plates. Apparel plants in Arkansas, Alabama, Florida and Puerto Rico struggle to keep up with uniform orders. Once-idle textile mills in South Carolina spin rugged camouflage fabric. Army depots operate 24/7 to repair and rebuild the wreckage of war in time to ship it back with the next troop deployment.

In the first three months of this year, defense work accounted for nearly 16 percent of the nation's economic growth, according to the Commerce Department. Military spending leaped 15.1 percent to an annualized rate of $537.4 billion, up from $463.3 billion in the comparable period of 2003, when Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq over.

"That's pretty good, considering it's only 3 to 4 percent of the economy," said Joseph Liro, an economist at the New Jersey-based research firm Stone & McCarthy. "For one quarter, that's a pretty big number."

It is impossible to know how many of the 708,000 jobs created in the past three months are defense-related, since the Labor Department does not track defense contractor employment. But anecdotal evidence suggests the contribution is significant.

The flagging textile and apparel industry, which lost 50,000 jobs last year, gained 2,400 in April and is up 500 through the first four months of 2004, said Charles W. McMillion, president and chief economist of MBG Information Services. That is the first net job gain for the industry in the first four months of any year since 1990, the last year for which the Labor Department maintained statistics. Since civilian textile demand is satisfied largely through imports, "Buy American" military orders must be driving the increases, McMillion said.

In pockets of the country, the effect is magnified greatly, as in picturesque St. Marys, Ohio, 90 miles north of here, where a 65-year-old red-brick Goodyear plant bustles around the clock, building the tracks for the Army's Bradley Fighting Vehicles, supplies of which have been dangerously depleted. Goodyear officials refused to open the plant for a visit or even to comment on operations and employment there. Workers also would speak about the factory only on condition of anonymity.

But over beers at the windowless Wayne Street Bar and Grill, just beyond the plant gate, a Goodyear manager confided that at around 650, employment is up, overtime is up and "it's humming pretty good, I'll tell you." After a terrible lull, traffic is picking up at the bar as well, said bartender and waitress Debra Temple.

'The economy is always helped by war. That's just a fact.'
- Gary Gayer, Salesman, St. Marys, Ohio
 
"The economy is always helped by war. That's just a fact," said Gary Gayer, an appliance salesman in St. Marys.

There are economic downsides. In inflation-adjusted terms, the war's cost will surpass the United States' $199 billion share of World War I sometime next year. Coming on top of three major tax cuts, that spending will drive the federal budget deficit to more than $400 billion this year. That borrowing will eventually have to be repaid in higher taxes or reduced government services and benefits.

Economists have long argued that war is an inefficient use of government revenue. A dollar spent on a highway not only employs workers but also creates a lasting, broadly shared benefit for the economy. A dollar spent on military equipment is soon lost to enemy attack or the rapid wear of war. If it bought a bomb or bullet, it simply explodes.

The families of thousands of National Guard members and reservists have been dealt severe financial blows by the extended deployments of breadwinners.

'We're only a pawn'

"They've taken husbands and wives and sons and daughters over there, and we're working and struggling to make up for it," said Temple, noting that a new contingent of reservists from the St. Marys area will soon ship out. "Somebody's got to help these people."

Then there's the constant worry that all this work will disappear as quickly as it materialized. A machinist at the Goodyear plant, whose son drives an Army truck in the volatile area west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle, fretted that Goodyear has put too many eggs in the military basket.

"We're only a pawn. You know that. Everybody in this community hopes like hell that Goodyear keeps this plant here. If the military drops out, we could be done. It's a bad deal," he said.

But for now, it's a good deal for thousands of workers. The Red River Army Depot, near Texarkana, Tex., has hired 400 people -- 27 percent of its current workforce -- in the past four months to repair and rebuild wheeled vehicles laid low by the war, said Jimmy Shull, the depot's chief of staff. Sixty new security guards will be coming to work this month.

Columbia Sewing Co., in nearby Magnolia, Ark., lost its main customer in 2001, when Bass Pro Shops took its business to China, said Brian Smith, the company's vice president. Columbia nearly closed. Then came the war, and the firm's first military contract, to sew battle-dress trousers and woodland camouflage coats. Employment is up 30 percent over last year.

"We needed business, they needed small businesses and it fell in just right," Smith said. "If it wasn't for [Defense Department] contracting, we would not be here, and 200 people would be out of a job."

American Apparel Inc. of Selma, Ala., the largest military uniform supplier, is sewing 50,000 uniforms a week, said Jim Hodo, the company's chief operating officer. To keep up with demand, the firm invested more than $1 million to open two new plants in the impoverished Alabama towns of Opp and Roanoke, and hired 300 workers; 150 more could be added soon.

"We had so many minorities out of work," said Roanoke Mayor Betty Slay Ziglar. "These people have grown up sewing in textile plants, and there are so few now. They were desperate to have jobs, and it's going to expand again. I am just so grateful."

For the South Carolina textile mills supplying the fabric, the impact may have been even more dramatic, Hodo said.

"They were sitting down there, staring at the empty walls, wondering what was next," he said of his suppliers, Delta Mills Marketing Co. and Milliken & Co. "It's been a godsend to them."

At Goodwill Industries of South Florida, which trains and employs severely disabled people, orders for camouflage trousers have jumped 70 percent in the past year, said Dennis Pastrana, the organization's president and chief executive. Within a three-mile radius of the plant, per-capita income averages a mere $10,590 a year, but nearly 600 workers now have sewing jobs, more than double Goodwill's prewar level.

There's no sign that it will end soon. Hodo said military officials assured him the buildup will last at least another year, and Allen at O'Gara Hess said the same. The Humvee plant turned out 600 vehicles in 2002, 860 last year, and on Thursday the last Humvee on the assembly line sported a tag identifying it as the 890th vehicle so far this year. To get to one vehicle every 51 minutes, as the Army wants, O'Gara Hess will have to hire an additional 100 workers by July.

"At the rate I'm at, all these people will be here through 2006," Allen said.

As his shift neared its end, Don Meier, a 24-year-old still sporting an Army-issue crew cut and an Operation Iraqi Freedom T-shirt, took a break from installing heating and air-conditioning equipment into battle-ready vehicles he would have loved to have had a year ago.

Back then, he was a mechanic with the Army Reserve's 478th Engineering Battalion, ducking mortar rounds and pulling up the rear as troops pushed toward Baghdad. He recalled watching Pvt. Jessica Lynch and her crew set off on their ill-fated supply mission last spring. He and his comrades were driving basic Humvees that his plant now loads with 3,000 pounds of glass, steel and ceramics to protect the soldiers who followed him to Iraq.

When Meier returned home -- on July 26, 2003, he said with relish -- he first found work stocking shelves at an AutoZone store. Then a friend told him that O'Gara Hess was hiring at $11 an hour, with full benefits. He might get to meet acting Army secretary Les Brownlee or Gen. Paul J. Kern, commander of the Army Materiel Command, on their frequent plant visits.
"It's a regular job to pay my bills with," Meier said, "but at the same time, I know if you get one of these vehicles, you're well off."
Bo Gilmore, another former military man, said: "To be able to do something like this, protecting our troops, that's invaluable."

 © 2004 The Washington Post Company

Uncle Sam, Heel Thyself_of Human Rights violations_15032004 = File ?