"Twenty years ago this summer," the vile Otto Reich writes for the July 18 National Review, "Washington’s hottest debate centered on the Contras’ war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — and how to keep the nations of Central America from falling into the hands of Marxist terrorists or right-wing death squads. It was the equivalent of today’s Iraq debate. The eventual victory of freedom in Nicaragua came at a cost of tens of thousands of lives — and it is now in jeopardy. The hard Left in Latin America has learned its lessons: It is no longer trying to gain power by force, because it fears (with just cause) the unmatched power of the United States and the willingness of recent Republican presidents to use it in the defense of freedom; it is therefore resorting to political warfare to regain power, and one of its battlefields is again Nicaragua."

We recently noted the new rapprochement between India and Burma, traditional rivals, which has worked to the detriment of indigenous groups in the remote rainforest straddling the border, heretofore able to play the two powers off against each other to win some local autonomy. Now it seems, as usual, the international reconciliation is lubricated with hydrocarbons. Despite an international boycott, India is hoping to build a pipeline to import Burmese natural gas. Bangladesh is exploiting its position between the two countries to try to wrest trade concessions in exchange for allowing the pipeline to cross its territory. This AFP story (online at the Democratic Voice of Burma website) doesn't say so, but what makes the Bangladesh route so essential is that the only alternative would be through the remote jungle border to the north, the domain of armed indigenous separatist movements which would be certain to impede construction...

This analysis from Lebanon's Daily Star, July 12, online at Kurdish Media, makes clear the dilemma of the Syrian Kurds. The fact that they are disenfranchised by the Damascus regime makes them a convenient football for White House hawks. And their demands for basic political rights are all too likely to be used as a lever for "neoliberal" reform: privatization, austerity and the rest. Or, if tensions finally explode in Syria's corner of Kurdistan, for actual "regime change" in Damascus. Apparently the issue was grappled with at Syria's recent Baath Party congress.

So read a July 14 article on the JTA. Some settlers write back?

Several Gaza Strip settlers wrote their Israeli identification numbers on their arms in a bid to recall concentration camp inmates’ tattoos.

Thursday’s protests, adopted by several residents of the Gush Katif settlement bloc, appeared to have begun with a local woman who scrawled her identification number on her arm and showed it at a military checkpoint rather than furnish her ID card. The Yesha settler council urged the protesters to abandon the ploy, which outraged survivors of the Nazi genocide.

“The plan by some right-wing activists to put their identity numbers on their arms perverts the historical facts and damages the memory of the Shoah,

It's starting to look like the truce is off following yesterday's suicide blast in Israel. From DPA, July 14:

Israel recaptured Tulkarm early Wednesday, after a suicide bomber from that West Bank town killed four Israelis and injured dozens when he blew himself up at a pedestrian crossing in the nearby Israeli coastal city of Netanya.

One armed Palestinian was killed and another wounded as a large army force entered the autonomous Palestinian town before dawn in search of those behind the suicide bombing.

The first apparent example of what Christopher Hitchens called "bloody foolishness" that he hoped Britons would be too civilized for following the London attacks. From Pakistan's Daily Times, July 15:

Pakistani shot dead
LONDON: Pakistani national Kamal Raza Butt was killed in a suspected racial attack in Nottingham, said police on Tuesday. Butt died on Sunday, three days after the London bombings, and the attack was "being investigated as a racially-aggravated incident," said a Nottinghamshire Police, adding that six youths arrested on Monday were in custody and being questioned. Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala linked Butt's death to Thursday's terrorist attacks. Butt (48) had been staying in Nottingham with a friend, said police, adding that he was assaulted shortly after he left a neighbourhood shop.

From the UK Guardian, July 14:

At least 27 people, most of them children, were killed and up to 25 wounded when a car packed with explosives targeted a convoy of US soldiers on a community relations mission in a Shia area of east Baghdad.

The explosion left one US soldier dead and three injured as nearby buildings were enveloped by a fireball.

It was the second big suicide bomb in the capital this week, following the attack on an army recruitment centre on Sunday that killed at least 25 people. Last weekend senior US military officers in Iraq had claimed success in their drive to stem the relentless wave of suicide bombers in the capital.

From the Chicago Sun-Times, July 14:

Military investigators said they proposed disciplining the prison commander at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because of abusive and degrading treatment of a suspected terrorist that included forcing him to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog.

They said Wednesday they recommended that Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller be reprimanded for failing to oversee his interrogation of the prisoner, who was suspected of involvement in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.