One Step Ahead Future Network Project

Anti-Drinking and Driving Statewide Campaign

AAA Texas Offers Free Tipsy Tow Service for Fourth of July Weekend

As expected, most new users are interested to know what is new with Vista and what makes it better to use than previous editions. Will it be easier to use? Will there be better safety and security features? Five Most Significant Features in Microsoft Vista

ROME (Reuters) - Italy’s economy minister has sparked uproar by offering “big babies” a tax break if they let go of their mother’s apron strings and left home. Uproar over tax break for “big babies”

Barack Obama is considering a trip to Iraq this summer. I fear he has been forced into this visit by John McCain, who keeps taunting him on his limited foreign policy experience, saying he has not been to Iraq since 2006 and so does not understand how the “surge” was “victorious.”

McCain’s taunts are ridiculous. His foreign policy-making experience is also limited, since he was not in the executive. To the extent he has been involved in others’ foreign policy initiatives, he has been wrong most of the time. He demanded more money in the 1980s for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, some of whom later morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He coddled Pakistani military dictators such as Gen. Zia ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf. Gen. Zia promoted the fundamentalist Jama’at-i Islami and the ‘Islamization’ of Pakistani law. Musharraf declined to follow through on former PM Nawaz Sharif’s pledge to send in a SWAT team to get Usama Bin Laden, in fall of 1999. McCain also was tight with Ahmad Chalabi and helped get up the Iraq War in the first place.

So much for the Arizona Senator’s ‘experience’ and good foreign policy sense.

Moreover, as CNN war correspondent Michael Ware observed from Baghdad recently, any VIP visit to Iraq, cocooned inside the US military and the Green Zone, would be more dog-and-pony show than fact-finding mission. Guerrilla wars are not apparent on the surface. People shop, cars circulate, things look all right. But then in this neighborhood or that there is a bomb, there are killings. Neighborhoods slowly change their ethnic complexion. Outsiders wouldn’t even notice it. Over time, the horror of guerrilla war, like a determined serial killer, imprints itself on the society. The fear stays in the back of peoples’ minds. But you couldn’t see it on a VIP visit.

Moreover, the McCain camp is hoping for a ‘Dukakis moment.’ They hope they can get Obama looking awkward or nerdy, trying to play soldier in Iraq. Then they can do a remake of Bush Sr.’s notorious hit job on then presidential candidate Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts.

So here is some advice for Senator Obama if he goes to Iraq.

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As Clinton and Romney win the Nevada primaries, Justin Elliot asks at Mother Jones why the leading candidates don’t have more to say about crucial Middle East policy, including Israel-Palestine issues.

The new issue of Arab Media and Society is available online. It is an exciting journal, and this crop of articles is especially germane to our various crises.

Charles Smith has more on Bush and the Palestine issue.

Barnett Rubin weighs in on the issue of whether Afghanistan poppy cultivation can be fought through simple forced eradication or whether it is wrought up with livelihoods.

Rubin also points to recent important pieces on the Pakistan crisis.

Saturday Reading

ON MERCY AND REDRESS

Matthew Walleser

There have been over four million Iraqis displaced because of the war and its effects, both inside and outside Iraq. They have fled to destinations that span the far reaches of the globe, from Jordan to Sweden, and many places in between. Some of those who have fled have at some point worked for the United States government in its war efforts. They have been translators and interpreters, who have helped our soldiers and provided or relayed information that no doubt saved many lives. They have been forced to flee because of death threats to themselves and to their families. They have been tortured by insurgents and have also been betrayed by the U.S. government.

In 2006, a former USAID employee, Kirk Johnson, created The List: Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. The effort now has its own blog and the issue was profiled by George Packer at the New Yorker. Johnson began compiling a list of Iraqi friends and colleagues he had worked with in Iraq. The List has since grown to immense proportions, filled with others who have worked for the government and feel that they have nowhere to turn but to him. The List now is comprised of an enormous ring binder, of which names are added to every day, the result of a constant bombardment of emails and calls for help.

The State Department has pledged to help bring some Iraqis who have worked for the U.S. government to the United States. But these efforts are mired in a bureaucratic system so slow it cannot keep up with itself. The number of refugees that the U.S. has promised to bring in is far, far fewer than those who actually make it to our shores.

It is nothing less than tragic that in the last fiscal year, Sweden has taken in almost ten times as many Iraqi refugees as the United States. Indeed many nations are carrying a burden which they in all honestly cannot afford to carry. An example is Jordan, where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees reside. Mounting prices are taxing the economy and its people, and refugees are having the hardest time of it. Until Iraq becomes stable enough to allow those Iraqis that helped the U.S. return to livable and sustainable conditions, the State Department, and the U.S. government have an obligation and a duty to give them safe haven and asylum within the United States, as well as to look after their wellbeing.

Many say that this is an impossible undertaking. But it has been done before by the United States, and is being done now by Great Britain. In 1996 the United States instituted Operation Pacific Haven, where they airlifted around 6000 Iraqis, mostly Kurds, to the American territory of Guam. It was there that they went through the administrative procedures of being allowed into United States, and most if not all were there by the next year. Now the British have initiated their own Guam Option, allowing for up to 1500 Iraqis who have helped them in Iraq to be offered safe haven in Britain, where they will be able to start their lives anew under the governments aid and supervision.

This is what has to be done by our government in this great time of need for Iraqi refugees which helped out the U.S. and are now at the end of their ropes. They have few options left and few places to turn. The U.S. government has the capacity and the funds to carry out this operation. The only matter left to contemplate is whether it has the compassion to do so. No matter what you think about the war and its discontents, this is not about politics. It is about helping fellow human beings who put their lives on the line and have yet to be repaid in full. It is time for our government to step up to the plate.

Please write your congressional representatives and senators and plead that the US do the right thing here.

Matthew Walleser

Walleser Guest Editorial on Imperilled US Allies among the 4 Million Iraqi Refugees

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For next year?s final presidential debates, New Orleans should emerge hands down as the site for the debate that will be dedicated to the nation?s domestic problems. Editorial: Where to Discuss the Nation?s Ills

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli judge has ordered the country’s prison authority to pay an inmate over $1,000 in compensation after he complained of having to share a cell with cockroaches. Prisoner gets compensation over cockroaches

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