Free Republic

This week's six-party agreement is just another in a long line of victories by North Korea's leaders over a fading superpower. It means that US President George W Bush acknowledges that North Korea is a full-fledged nuclear weapons state that can wreak havoc any time it chooses, writes Kim Myong-chol, unofficial spokesman of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il.

There is an unspoken, de facto alliance between these two extremely powerful interests - an alliance that might be called the military-industrial-Zionist alliance. More than anything else, the alliance is based on a conjunctural convergence of interests on war and international convulsion in the Middle East. Let me elaborate on this point. Arms industries and powerful beneficiaries of war dividends need an atmosphere of war and international convulsion to maintain continued increases in the Pentagon budget and justify their lion's share of the public money. In the debate over allocation of public resources between the proverbial guns and butter, or...

A people without progeny will not accept a single military casualty. If this generation is the last, there will be no children for whom to sacrifice. Today's Europeans value their distractions and amusements more than they do prospective children. Germany's 2005 birth rate of only 8.5 per 1,000 inhabitants indicates that Europe is following the low variant of UN population estimates. These guarantee the virtual disappearance of the Europeans by the end of the present century. A people without progeny will not accept a single military casualty. If this generation is the last, there will be no children for whom...

'Misunderestimating' Bush's Iraq Amid all these problems, there is the danger of the "Hezbollah model" being adopted in Iraq. Muqtada, who has been a nightmare for the Americans since they invaded, has all the credentials to create such an organization in Iraq, modeling himself after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Muqtada is young. He is well connected in the religious establishment, he hails from a prominent Shi'ite family and he has a large following among Iraqis. Like Nasrallah, he is opposed to both the US and Israel. Like Nasrallah, he is an Arab nationalist at heart who does not want to...

Lebanon threatens to halt deployment The Lebanese defence minister has threatened to halt the army's deployment in south Lebanon if the UN does not take up the issue of Saturday's Israeli commando raid. "If there are no clear answers forthcoming on this issue, I might be forced to recommend to the cabinet early next week the halt of the army deployment in the south," Elias Murr said after a meeting with UN representatives on Saturday.