Global

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Cambodia wants to divert Southeast Asia's Mekong River into a planned $1.7 billion, Chinese-financed shipping canal to reach a deep-sea port at Kep near Sihanoukville on southern Cambodia's Gulf of Thailand coast.

The canal would enable Cambodians to be "breathing through our own nose," said newly elected Prime Minister Hun Manet, son and heir to long-time authoritarian former prime minister Hun Sen.

Cambodia, for the first time, could to import and export goods by ship from its capital Phnom Penh's port via the canal to a would-be deepwater port in Kep province on the Gulf of Thailand, opening onto the South China Sea.

Ships to and from Hong Kong, Singapore, and other ports could reroute, or add shipping lanes, to Kep to access the canal if it increases trade.

Shipping containers from those ocean-going vessels would be transferred by cranes at Kep to and from canal barges.

A successful Chinese-financed canal would also deepen Beijing's economic, diplomatic, and other links with Phnom Penh, and lessen Cambodia's dependence on Hanoi.

Wednesday, April 10th, 2019

By Robert C. Koehler

How dare she question the sanctity of American militarism?

As national security adviser John Bolton declared last fall, the International Criminal Court constitutes “an assault on the constitutional rights of the American people and the sovereignty of the United States.”

That’s you and me that Bolton is speaking about, and the recent revocation of ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s visa — in the wake of her insistence on investigating, among other things, U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan — is just the latest step in the diplomatic war the United States has declared against the court since it was established in 2002.

One expects that anyone involved in politics will lie whenever they think they can get away with it to burnish one’s own image and while also distorting reality to promote policies that are being favored. Nevertheless, the record of high crimes committed by a series of presidents and their top aides since the so-called “war on terror” began has established a new low for government veracity. One would have thought that the fake intelligence fabricated by a group of Zionists in the Pentagon and White House to launch the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq would be as bad as it could possibly get, but the Joe Biden team has outdone even those unfortunately unindicted criminals by allowing itself to be maneuvered by friends in NATO and by Israel into situations that are one step short of nuclear war.

Israel described its clearly deliberate killing of seven humanitarian aid workers on April 1 as a “grave mistake”, a “tragic event” that “happens in war”. 

 Israel is, obviously, lying. This entire so-called war - actually genocide - in Gaza, has been based on a series of lies, some of which Israel continues to peddle. 

invited three insightful analysts of present-day U.S. foreign policy to share their thoughts in a roundtable discussion. Here are excerpts from Phyllis Bennis, Jackson Lears and Jeffrey Sachs.

-- Norman Solomon

 Question: How would you assess the most important aspects of current U.S. foreign policy?

 Phyllis Bennis: I think the most important aspects are the most problematic ones. The focus on militarism that leads to a military budget this year of $921 billion, almost a trillion dollars, an unfathomable number translates to $0.53 out of every discretionary federal dollar going directly to the military. And if you add in the militarism side of things, the federal prison system, the militarization of the borders, ICE, deportations, all those things, you come up with $0.62 out of every discretionary federal dollar.

 So the militarism is, I think, the single most important problem. The issue of unilateralism remains a huge problem when the rise of the so-called “global war on terror” essentially wiped out the possibility of a post-Cold-War peace dividend, which had currency for about a week, as I recall, and that unilateralism continues.

An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win!

Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics — the souls in despair — tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once put it, “un-invent nuclear weapons.” So apparently we’re stuck with them until the “big oops” happens and humanity becomes extinct. Until then: Modernize, modernize, modernize. Threaten, threaten, threaten

David Barash and Ward Wilson make the case that this is completely false. We're not "stuck" with nuclear weapons any more than we’re stuck with obsolete and ineffective technology of any sort, bluntly pointing out: “Crappy ideas don’t have to be forgotten in order to be abandoned.