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[A longer version of this article appears in the US Monthly Review magazine, at < http://www.monthlyreview.org>.] From Green Left Weekly, April 7, 2004 http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/578/578p19.htm
On April 27, 1994, the racist apartheid system was smashed. One person, one-vote democracy and deracialisation of government was achieved as a result of the mass struggle conducted largely under the 72- year long leadership of the African National Congress (ANC). Ten years later, (…)

Honduras has followed Spain in announcing it will pull its troops out of Iraq, and Thailand said its 451 medical and engineering troops will be withdrawn if they are attacked.
The President of Honduras, Ricardo Maduro, a close ally of the US, said he had already told coalition countries that Honduras’s 370 soldiers in Iraq would leave soon.
The withdrawal would be carried out "in the shortest possible time and under safe conditions for our troops", he said in a television and radio (…)

Poland is planning to withdraw its troops from Iraq in the coming months, dealing another blow to the US-led coalition forces there.
The revelation yesterday by a senior government adviser that Poland’s 2,500 soldiers would leave Iraq comes just a day after the new Spanish Prime Minister, Mr José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, announced the pull-out of Spanish troops "as soon as possible".
President Bush reacted to the Spanish decision by accusing Mr Zapatero yesterday of giving "false comfort (…)

In a gruesome incident, terrorists chopped off ears of two persons for participating in election process in Mahore area of Udhampur district in Jammu and Kashmir, official sources said on Wednesday.
Unidentified terrorists kidnapped Misruddi and Haji Amkala from Kalwa village in Mahore Tehsil of Udhampur district on Tuesday and later chopped off the left ear of Misruddin and right ear of Amkala before freeing them, they said.
The terrorists snatched a bag containing posters of a (…)

The House of Saud continues to reap what it has sown, and the mujahedin they have supported for so long continue to try to compel them to end their alliance with the U.S., or be forced from power so that someone else can end it. From AP:
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A suicide attacker bombed a security police building in the Saudi capital Wednesday, killing at least four people and wounding 148. The attack had the hallmark of an al-Qaida operation, officials said. The explosion, heard three (…)

A memorandum of understanding issued by the leadership of Palestinian prisoners in Israel under the patronage of jailed Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti calls for a total end to the armed struggle emanating from Gaza if a series of conditions are met. The conditions detailed in the document, or "proposal," sent to Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, includes "complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, including the `Philadelphi Route’ on the Israeli-Egyptian border; full Palestinian sovereignty over (…)

Occupied Arab Jerusalem
Bush’s embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral plan to annex six major West Bank settlement blocs and reject the internationally-recognized Palestinian right of return as a quid pro quo for Sharon’s pull-out from most Gaza settlements represents a major defeat for Palestinian human rights and international law, and a huge consolidation of the U.S.- Israeli alliance. While U.S. policy has, since 1967, tacitly accepted Israel’s illegal settlements (…)

Democracy Now! speaks with Michael Cervantes, an Army veteran with Veterans for Peace who is campaigning against Bush’s policy to target high school students for military recruitment.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has descended into chaos. Over 700 U.S. troops have now been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion, 100 of them in April alone. The past 14 days have reportedly been the deadliest two-week span for US troops since October 1971 during the Vietnam War. In the face of (…)

U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who so ably opposed the Bush administration’s rush to attack Iraq in 2003, continues to offer the steadiest and wisest criticism of this deeply misguided war.
On Wednesday, as some of the most violent fighting since the start of the war dramatically increased the death toll of Americans and Iraqis, Byrd said to the Senate: "Surely I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam in this development."
Byrd’s words were not greeted warmly by Republican (…)

Iraq isn’t Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.
It’s true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size (…)