Get Ready for World War III

By Paul Craig Roberts

08/17/05 "LewRockwell" -- -- With every poll showing majorities of Americans both fed up with Bush’s war against Iraq and convinced that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has made Americans less safe, the White House moron proposes to start another war by attacking Iran. VP Cheney has already ordered the US Strategic Command to come up with plans to strike Iran with tactical nuclear weapons.

Bush refuses to meet with Cindy Sheehan, instead using his vacation time at the Crawford ranch to talk war with Israeli television. In a recent interview with Israeli TV, Bush said: "All options are on the table" with regard to Iran.

Israel’s Likud government is Bush’s last remaining ally in his war against "Islamic terrorism." Israel, which is loaded with nuclear weapons and is not a signatory to the nuclear pacts, is the accuser against Iran, asserting that Iran’s nuclear energy program is just a veil behind which to produce weapons. Iran, however, has signed the nonproliferation pact and is willing for the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor the nuclear energy program. 

Bush, however, dismisses all facts and assurances and is willing to attack Iran based on nothing but paranoia.

Bush can ignore the American public, because the Democrats, like the Tory Party in the UK, have completely collapsed as an opposition party. 

The only check on Bush is the lack of US troops. Bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, US commanders are stating that a third rotation of our exhausted and demoralized troops in Iraq can be avoided only by troop withdrawals by next spring. 

However, on August 11 Bush nixed the military’s talk of reducing US troops in Iraq. The next day the commander of US logistics in Iraq announced that the number of insurgent attacks on US forces along supply routes has doubled in the last year, making it clear that far from winning, the US is not even holding its own.

Cindy Sheehan has the right question for Bush: What noble cause is being served by all this suffering and destruction? 

Bush is in hiding from Mrs. Sheehan, because he knows only ignoble causes are being served. According to the CIA, the main beneficiary of the war is Osama bin Laden’s recruitment drives. While America’s military recruitment falters and US generals announce that the war has broken the Reserves and National Guard, the cause of Islamic extremism basks in the Iraqi war. 

Gentle reader, do you realize the danger of having a president so disconnected from reality that he plots to attack Iran – a country three times the size of Iraq – when he lacks sufficient forces to occupy Baghdad and to protect the road from Baghdad to the airport? 

Despite all the high profile "sweeps" of US forces through insurgent strongholds, US commanders report a doubling of insurgent attacks. 

The Bush administration is insane. If the American people do not decapitate it by demanding Bush’s impeachment, the Bush administration will bring about Armageddon. This may please some Christian evangelicals conned by Rapture predictions, but World War III will please no one else.

Dr. Roberts <mailto:paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com> is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. 

Copyright © 2005 Creators Syndicate

Iran, China discuss defense cooperation 

By Mehr News

08/17/05 -- --TEHRAN -- (MNA) -- “The excellent discipline in the Chinese Army is one of the most illustrious characteristics of the country,” the commander of the Ground Forces of the Iranian Army, Brigadier General Nasser Mohammadi Far, said here on Wednesday. 
Mohammadi Far made the remarks in a meeting with a Chinese military delegation that has come to Iran to hold negotiations on developing military relations between Iran and China, deepening bilateral ties between the two countries, and paving the way for military cooperation. 

He went on to say that the vast country of China has organized a powerful army in the region through relying on efficient military training, perseverance, and discipline. 

“Our mutual enemies possess advanced military technology, and undoubtedly they would rely on this technology in any possible future wars. Therefore, it seems necessary that both Iran and China upgrade their defense and military technology,” he noted. 

Mohammadi Far added that, relying on Almighty God and the eight-year experience of the Iraqi imposed war on Iran, the Army of the Islamic Republic has increased its defense capabilities such that it can turn the tide in any possible war. 

For his part, the head of the Chinese military delegation expressed satisfaction about his visit to Iran and his talks with Iranian military officials. 

Iran and China have had close relations in various spheres and have always maintained their brotherly relations over the course of history, since they have always had some mutual objectives, he observed. 

At the end of the meeting, Mohammadi Far presented the military emblem of the Iranian Army to the Chinese delegation and received the military emblem of the Chinese Army in return. 

© 2003 Mehr News Agency 

Green Hands Dipped In Blood: The DDT Genocide

By John Jalsevac

Acrobat version - http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005_docs/DDTworstcrime.pdf

1. The Worst Crime of the 20th Century

“Which kills more: ideology or religion?”1  asks author Andrew Kenney in the title of what is certainly one of the more startling pieces I’ve read in some time.

For Kenney, however, it’s not the meat of that question that’s really up for debate, and it’s not his answer to the meat of it that’s startling; after all, a summary finger count shows that the man who favors the religious wars has his work cut out to match the math of the fascist and communist regimes that have dropped the metaphorical guillotine since the French Revolution.

What makes Kenney’s article startling is not that the self-professed atheist necessarily concludes that the reds (communists) and the browns (fascists) have contributed much more heartily to history’s flow of blood than any religion, but that, of the three available ideological colors, it is the extremists of the green standard whose hands are perhaps guiltiest for the last century’s outpouring of crimson.

According to Kenney over 50,000,000 people died in the 20th century because of the gratuitous recklessness of eco-extremists; this estimate is actually quite conservative in comparison to junkscience.com’s claim that over 80,000,000 have dropped at the hands of the tree-huggers. 

“In purely numerical terms,” says Kenney about the alleged murderous scheme, “it was the worst crime of the 20th century.”

 But what was the worst crime?

“The banning of DDT,” says Kenney.

Of course this could be comfortably put to rest as the ranting of just another, competing ideological nut were it not that Kenney is in very, very good company.

A New York Times article of January of this year, titled It’s Time to Spray DDT proclaimed what long ago became the obvious, that “the evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives.”2  The American Council on Science and Health printed an article in 2002 entitled The DDT ban turns 30 – millions dead of malaria because of ban, more deaths likely.3  In 2003 Front Page Magazine ran an article entitled Rachel Carsons’ Ecological Genocide, similarly concerned with the DDT ban, and employing that loaded word “genocide”.4  And in his popular novel, State of Fear, Michael Crichton also espoused this view, describing the DDT ban as “arguably the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” He continues, “since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.”5

2. The Tragic History Of DDT and Silent Spring

The history of DDT is a tragic one. The chemical, the proper name of which is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, was first isolated in the late 19th century. No practical use was found for it, however, until Paul Herman Muller determined in 1939 that it made for an effective insecticide.

Used extensively during WWII and afterwards, the remarkably cheap and easy-to-process pesticide is widely credited with the complete eradication of the scourge of malaria from the Western world. The white powder, once dusted on the walls of a house or on the human body, works by killing malaria and typhus carrying vectors such as mosquitoes or lice.

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia DDT performed the feat of reducing the worldwide malaria mortality rate from a hefty 192 per 100,000 to a low of 7 per 100,000. Paul Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1948 for his lifesaving work with DDT.

With Muller’s miracle-pesticide in widespread use the movement towards a malaria-free earth was progressing swimmingly until Rachel Carson erupted hysterically onto the international scene. She alleged in her deeply influential 1962 book Silent Spring that DDT caused cancer and was aiding the rapid extinction of raptors such as bald eagles by thinning their egg shells. Environmentalists everywhere took up the cause and soon achieved the first great and unifying victory of the modern environmental movement—the worldwide banning of DDT.

And that would be perfectly all right, perhaps, if any of Carson’s allegations were true.

3. Rachel Carson’s Allegations Disproved

But in 2004 a study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons concludes “Public pressure [to ban DDT] was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research. Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated. The worldwide affect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths .”6   In fact, it is difficult to choose which of the countless studies that have vindicated DDT over the years I should cite.

One study saw volunteers consume 35mg of raw DDT daily for a period of two years with no short or long-term ill effects .7   One anti-DDT-ban scientist began his every lecture on the subject by ingesting a teaspoon of DDT powder.8  Of the workers who applied thousands of tons of DDT without any protection, none have shown an increased risk of cancer or any other illness. Even the alleged thinning of the eggshells of raptors that environmentalists now tout as a last and desperate reason for continuing the archaic ban has been proven false.

4. The DDT Ban Put In Perspective

Allow me to provide some perspective. According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization (WHO), DDT is classified as Group 2B carcinogenicity; that is, there is an admitted insufficient evidence of carcinogenicity.9  On the other hand, a report issued but a few weeks ago by the IARC classified combined estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives, the most widely prescribed contraceptive on the market, as Group 1 carcinogenicity.10

The oral contraceptives, which the WHO claims over 100 million women worldwide regularly ingest, are by this classification defined as definitely carcinogenic. And yet, DDT,  by now proven innocent as a babe after decades of scrutiny, the harmless miracle-chemical the purpose of which is to prevent the excruciating death of millions, is strictly regulated with a worldwide ban, while the proven carcinogenic, cancer-causing contraceptive, used to prevent the creation of human life, is handed out like candy.

But here’s the real kicker. According to the WHO there is some evidence that besides causing substantially increased risks of breast, liver, and cervical cancer, combined oral contraceptives may cause a decrease in the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer. The WHO therefore justifies downplaying the immediate risk to hundreds of millions of women worldwide because “it is possible that the overall net public health outcome may be beneficial.”

Curiously, however, the WHO’s analysis of DDT grants the pesticide no such benevolent handicap. DDT has saved millions of lives, and the ban, based upon long disproved claims of carcinogenicity, is perpetuating the annual death of millions. Talk about a beneficial “overall net public health outcome”! But of course, maybe after another forty years of testing and research it will be found that DDT powder once caused someone to sneeze to death.

Adding insult to injury, over the past five years numerous powerful international bodies have sought to make the DDT ban even stricter. 

Currently it is possible for tropical nations most ravaged by malaria to apply for exceptions to the DDT ban, which exceptions undergo review every three years by the WHO. This provision is of little use to most third world nations, since there is a global stigma attached to DDT, and many charitable bodies will not fund relief efforts unless it is agreed that DDT will not be used. Besides that, the cost of DDT has increased substantially. But in 2000, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) convention in Johannesburg flaunted science and common sense and sought to choke that final loophole of grace and make the DDT ban total; ultimately they failed in their bid, due to the ardent pleas of malaria experts and the third world countries most affected by malaria. In addition the Stockholm Convention, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund have all clamoured since the year 2000 for the total banning of DDT.

5. Why Does the DDT Ban Continue?

But if it is so patently illogical and scientifically apocryphal, why is it that the ban continues unabated?

The answer to that riddle is likely beyond even the powers of Oedipus to discover in full, and is certainly beyond the limited scope of this article. It probably has a lot to do with what Charles Wurter, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund said in October 1969: “If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, much more is at stake than DDT.”11  It seems more than safe at this point to call that statement prophetic. For the green extremists to admit defeat now would be to renege in large part the authority won by the victory they achieved in the DDT war.

Perhaps this malaria holocaust is, in large part, allowed to continue because the millions who needlessly die by the disease do so outside of the scope of the roving eye of the West. DDT long ago made malaria a tropical and not a Western phenomenon, and thus the millions of third world malarial deaths have no visible faces to excite Western sympathies or funding.

However, more fundamental than that, it appears, is the singular and sinister nature of modern environmentalism as an ideology. Professing a creed that is eminently respectful of life of such, it often happens that adherents of the green ideology come out with things that don’t jive. The scientist mentioned earlier, J. Gordon Edwards, who regularly consumed raw DDT powder before speaking about it, once called Rachel Carson’s philosophy a “lack of concern for human lives.” He continued, “She could vividly describe the death of a bird…but nowhere in the book does she even think to describe the death of a human by an insect-borne disease.” 12

And Carson, as one of the mothers of environmentalism, has left that sordid legacy behind her.

Earth First! Founder Dave Foreman’s beliefs typify that legacy. “Ours is an ecological perspective,” he said in his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, launching into a description worthy of Wordsworth, “that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g. malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”13  Unless, I presume, Mr. David Foreman happened to be the one convulsing to death.

The environmentalist movement long ago distanced itself from whatever token respect it once professed for human life and has come out instead in cooing support of panda life. This would be cute were it not murderous.

Apparently, however, some eco-extremists are coming to recognize the deficiencies of their own ideology. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their controversial essay The Death of Environmentalism allege that “Environmental groups have spent the last 40 years defining themselves against conservative values like cost-benefit accounting, smaller government, fewer regulations, and free trade, without ever articulating a coherent morality we can call our own. Most of the intellectuals who staff environmental groups are so repelled by the right's values that we have assiduously avoided examining our own in a serious way.” 14

If we are to believe these remarks of Shellenberger and Nordhaus (and I certainly do), then environmentalists have initiated and stubbornly sustained a genocidal ban on DDT, because they are “repelled” by the morality of the “right”. And like rebellious teens they would  rather react and continue to react against an established order than to consider the destruction they are leaving in their wake.

6. DDT and Population Control

But that is certainly not yet the end of the story. One of the most revealing quotations related to the issue at hand is another by Charles Wurster, who was reported to have said in 1971, after it was pointed out to him by a reporter that the widespread usage of the pesticide DDT saved lives: “So what? People are the main cause of our problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them…”

Some members of the left have alleged that this quote by Wurster is false, fabricated by a disgruntled former employee of Wurster’s. And that may be so though it has hardly been proven; but either way, that statement remains in essence the clearest, bluntest _expression of a theory and an attitude that has flourished ever since Thomas Malthus published his infamous work “An Essay on the Principle of Population”; individuals as diverse as Nietzsche, Hitler and Margaret Sanger have all expressed it in one form or another.

Francis Galton, the influential British eugenicist, elucidated these ideas in a more ‘academic’ fashion in his book Memories of My Life, saying:

[Eugenics] first object is to check the birth rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the Fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for; and those only of the best stock. 15

It is no coincidence that population control and environmentalism have always been inextricably entwined in the grand scheme of liberal ideology. Both are founded upon an pernicious belief that man is little more than a pollutant, a scum to be prevented from interfering any more than necessary with the purity of the natural biosphere. As such it is especially difficult to believe that the fact that malaria is yet another of the scourges unleashed upon the poor and sick of the third world that goes unchecked by the Western world is merely a coincidence.

The DDT ban, ostensibly supported by false and archaic claims of carcinogenicity, makes no sense unless the goals of environmentalist/over-population activists are taken into account. As one environmentalist commentator put it: “What I said is that the mosquitos [sic] and malaria in question acted as a natural population control. After the introduction of DDT into some areas of Africa, the population increased so much that people began starving.  Population control sounds a lot better to me than starvation and the environmental destruction caused by overpopulation.”16

Junkscience.com claims that “In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, ‘Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing’.”

In short, it is much easier for the West to kill off the poor, or allow them to die at the hand of “natural” diseases, than to determine how to feed them. And that is quite true, for the mouth of a corpse doesn’t cry out to be fed. But is it right? No; a thousand times no.

The “green eco-imperialist legacy of death” mentioned above junkscience.com’s infamous malaria clock,17  which calculates over 89,000,000 malaria-ravished corpses since DDT was banned, is exactly right. But now it is time for that genocidal legacy to come to an end; it is time that environmentalists threw off their adolescent petulance, admitted their grievous wrong, learned to respect the lives of all no matter their race, creed or economic status, and again permitted Third World countries what they deserve—easy access to the desperately needed, life-saving malaria-fighting pesticide DDT.
______________________________________________________________________________________

1.Kenney, Richard, “What Kills More: Ideology or Religion?” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1411041/posts, 2005.
2. Kristof, Nicholas, “It’s Time To Spray DDT”  http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D12FE355D0C7B8CDDA80894DD404482, 2005.
3. Seavey, Todd, “The DDT Ban Turns 30 — Millions Dead of Malaria Because of Ban, More Deaths Likely”  http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID.442/healthissue_detail.asp, 2002.
4. Makson, Lisa, “Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide” http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9169, 2003.
5. Crichton, Michael, State of Fear, (Harper Collins, 2004) Pg. 487
6. Edwards, J. Gordon, “DDT: A Case Study In Scientific Fraud” http://www.fightingmalaria.org/pdfs/Edwards%20-%20DDT%20Fraud.pdf, 2004.
7. Hayes, W. 1956. JAMA 162:890-897.
8. Cashill, Jack, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45063, 2005. 
9. IARC, “DDT and Associated Compounds” , http://www-cie.iarc.fr/htdocs/monographs/vol53/04-ddt.htm, 1997. 
10. IARC, “IARC Monographs Programme Finds Combined Estrogen-Progestogen Contraceptives and Menopausal Therapy are Carcinogenic to Humans”, http://www.iarc.fr/ENG/Press_Releases/pr167a.html, 2005.
11. Tren, Richard and Bate, Roger, "Malaria and the DDT Story" . IEA Research Paper No. OP 117. http://ssrn.com/abstract=677448.
12. Cashill, Jack, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45063, 2005.
13. Foreman, Dave. Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. (New York: Harmony Books), 1991.
14. Shellenberger, Michael and Nordhaus, Ted. “The Death of Environmentalism” http://www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf, 2004. 
15. Galton, Francis, Memories Of My Life, http://www.mugu.com/galton/books/memories/galton-memories-1up-v2-300dpi.pdf, 1908. (Emphasis mine)
16. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/1/9/173940/4293 
17. http://www.junkscience.com/malaria_clock.htm

"Follow that chicken" is not one of the more inspiring lines in the history of detective fiction, nor one of the more frightening in the genre of horror. It's perhaps on the level of that classic grade-Z sci-fi film, Night of the Lepus, in which the giant, rampaging, mutant rabbits were just... well, big bunnies. And yet, don't be fooled, the chicken, probably first domesticated in Southeast Asia some 8,000 years ago, might prove the death of many of us, and for its possible depredations, we are painfully unprepared.

In 1918, a flu epidemic emerged from the trenches of World War I's Western Front -- essentially the war‘s equivalent of the slums -- and swept across the world (twice) ridding it of somewhere between 25 million and 100 million human beings (the equivalent in today's population terms of possibly upwards of a billion people). There have been flu pandemics since, but none faintly on such a scale. For nearly a decade, epidemiologists, public health officials, and veterinary researchers -- by now, in fact just about the whole global medical/scientific community -- have been warning that such a new pandemic is a frightening possibility, if not a near certainty. At the same time, some of them have been performing prodigious genetic detective work as a mutant flu virus, H5N1, has lodged in the systems of wild fowl in southern China, moved into massed domestic fowl populations nearby, and begun to spread to human beings; all the while still genetically evolving in birds (domestic and wild), swine, and even perhaps people, "looking for" the means to leap not just from bird to bird, or bird to swine, or even from bird to human, but from human to human at a staggering rate.

Nothing could more quickly remind us that we humans are part of nature than a flu pandemic; yet three quite unnatural changes in our world have drastically increased the danger of such a pandemic. A livestock revolution has gathered domestic birds together -- think Tyson chickens -- onto giant corporate farms in prodigious numbers, clustering them into what are essentially giant bird slums, where any new disease is guaranteed to spread more easily. Meanwhile, throughout the third world, impoverished human beings have been gathering in far greater urban concentrations than anything imaginable a century ago, and any of these are potential hatcheries for a pandemic. Finally, globalization and global air travel have made the spread of a pandemic, once started, almost instantaneous. In the meantime, H5N1, spreads by an older set of air paths -- avian migration routes -- having just made it to Russia. And we wait.

What makes this an especially dangerous situation in the U.S. is that the Bush administration has largely chosen to redirect its public-health budget to preparations for "biowar" possibilities -- smallpox, Ebola Fever, and the like -- which may never endanger us, while scanting the kind of biowar (think Hitchcock's The Birds, not Osama bin Laden) that is actually likely to do so. Between the administration's priorities and Big Pharma's urge to go for the profits -- flu shots are unprofitable products -- America's public health structure is in increasingly woeful shape and certainly, despite endless warnings about what might come, in no shape at all to deal with a nationwide flu pandemic.

All of this, by the way, I know only because Mike Davis has just published a must-read, brief new book, Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu, a scientific detective story, a tale of potential horror, and a sociological thriller about our 21st century world. This is a situation with which we should all be acquainted. Even the President evidently belated agrees. Along with Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar (about which I won't even speculate) and a history of salt, he's taken John M. Barry's account of the 1918 flu pandemic, The Great Influenza off to Crawford to read. Maybe I should send a copy of the Davis book down to Crawford as well and Cindy Sheehan could present it to him at their meeting.

Recently, avian flu, which for some years had flown below the headlines and nested on the inside pages of our newspapers, has hit the front-page. (On this issue, as Davis points out, the New York Times has been especially good.) The latest headlines -- about a potential vaccine for this possible pandemic -- undoubtedly caused a collective sigh of relief. Unfortunately, relief is not actually in sight as Mike Davis explains below, offering his latest update on the monster at our door. Tom

Has Time Run Out?

The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic
By Mike Davis

Deadly avian flu is on the wing.

The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Over the next ten weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls, and cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually, Australia.

An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu subtype that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918. As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete the virus into the water where it risks spreading to migrating waterfowl from Europe as well as to domestic poultry. In the worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi, and Mumbai.

The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread through the lake's entire avian population, killing thousands of birds. An ornithologist called it "the biggest and most extensively mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds."

Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when injected with "genotype Z," the fearsome H5N1 variant currently killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.

Yi Guan, leader of a famed team of avian flu researchers who have been fighting the pandemic menace since 1997, complained to the British Guardian in July about the lackadaisical response of Chinese authorities to the unprecedented biological conflagration at Lake Qinghai.

"They have taken almost no action to control this outbreak. They should have asked for international support. These birds will go to India and Bangladesh and there they will meet birds that come from Europe." Yi Guan called for the creation of an international task force to monitor the wild bird pandemic, as well as the relaxation of rules that prevent the free movement of foreign scientists to outbreak zones in China.

In a paper published in the British science magazine Nature, Yi Guan and his associates also revealed that the Lake Qinghai strain was related to officially unreported recent outbreaks of H5N1 among birds in southern China. This would not be the first time that Chinese authorities have been charged with covering up an outbreak. They also lied about the nature and extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic, which originated in Guangdong but quickly spread to 25 other countries. As in the case of SARS' whistleblowers, the Chinese bureaucracy is now trying to gag avian-flu scientists, shutting down one of Yi Guan's laboratories at Shantou University and arming the conservative Agriculture Ministry with new powers over research.

Meanwhile, as anxious Indian scientists monitor bird sanctuaries throughout the subcontinent, H5N1 has spread to the outskirts of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet; to western Mongolia; and, most disturbingly, to chickens and wildfowl near the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk.

Despite frantic efforts to cull local poultry, Russian Health Ministry experts have expressed pessimism that the outbreak can be contained on the Asian side of the Urals. Siberian wildfowl migrate every fall to the Black Sea and southern Europe; another flyway leads from Siberia to Alaska and Canada.

In anticipation of this next, and perhaps inevitable, stage in the world journey of avian flu, poultry populations are being tracked in Moscow; Alaskan scientists are studying birds migrating across the Bering Straits, and even the Swiss are looking over their shoulders at the tufted ducks and pochards arriving from Eurasia.

H5N1's human epicenter is also expanding: in mid-July Indonesian authorities confirmed that a father and his two young daughters had died of avian flu in a wealthy suburb of Jakarta. Disturbingly, the family had no known contact with poultry and near panic ensued in the neighborhood as the press speculated about possible human-to-human transmission.

At the same time, five new outbreaks among poultry were reported in Thailand, dealing a terrible blow to the nation's extensive and highly-publicized campaign to eradicate the disease. Meanwhile, as Vietnamese officials renewed their appeal for more international aid, H5N1 was claiming new victims in the country that remains of chief concern to the WHO.

The bottom line is that avian influenza is endemic and probably ineradicable among poultry in Southeast Asia, and now seems to be spreading at pandemic velocity amongst migratory birds, with the potential to reach most of the earth in the next year.

Each new outpost of H5N1 -- whether among ducks in Siberia, pigs in Indonesia, or humans in Vietnam -- is a further opportunity for the rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene or even simply the protein mutation that it needs to become a mass-killer of humans.

This exponential multiplication of hot spots and silent reservoirs (as among infected but asymptomatic ducks) is why the chorus of warnings from scientists, public-health officials, and finally, governments has become so plangently insistent in recent months.

The new U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an "absolute certainty," echoing repeated warnings from the World Health Organization that it was "inevitable." Likewise Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as "100 percent."

In the same grim spirit, the British press revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is reported to have readied "Cobra" -- a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies like the recent London bombings from a secret war room in Whitehall -- to deal with an avian flu crisis.

Little of this Churchillian resolve is apparent in Washington. Although a sense of extreme urgency is evident in the National Institutes of Health where the czar for pandemic planning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warns of "the mother of all emerging infections," the White House has seemed even less perturbed by migrating plagues than by wanton carnage in Iraq.

As the President was packing for his long holiday in Texas, the Trust for America's Health was warning that domestic preparations for a pandemic lagged far behind the energetic measures being undertaken in Britain and Canada, and that the administration had failed "to establish a cohesive, rapid and transparent U.S. pandemic strategy."

That increasingly independent operator, Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), had already criticized the administration in an extraordinary (and under-reported) speech at Harvard at the beginning of June. Referring to Washington's failure to stockpile an adequate supply of the crucial anti-viral oseltamivir (or Tamiflu), Frist sarcastically noted that "to acquire more anti-viral agent, we would need to get in line behind Britain and France and Canada and others who have tens of millions of doses on order."

The New York Times on its July 17 editorial page, a May 26 special issue of Nature and the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs have also hammered away at Washington's failure to stockpile enough scarce antivirals -- current inventories cover less than 1% of the U.S. population -- and to modernize vaccine production. Even a few prominent Senate Democrats have stirred into action, although none as boldly as Frist at Harvard.

The Department of Health and Human Services, in response, has sought to calm critics with recent hikes in spending on vaccine research and antiviral stockpiles. There has also been much official and media ballyhoo about the announcement of a series of successful tests in early August of an experimental avian flu vaccine.

But there is no guarantee that the vaccine prototype, based on a "reverse-genetically-engineered" strain of H5N1, will actually be effective against a pandemic strain with different genes and proteins. Moreover, trial success was based upon the administration of two doses plus a booster. Since the government has only ordered 2 million doses of the vaccine from pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur, this may provide protection for only 450,000 people. As one researcher told Science magazine, "it's a vaccine for the happy few."

At the least, gearing up for larger-scale production will take many months and production itself is limited by the antiquated technology of vaccine manufacture which depends upon a vulnerable and limited supply of fertile chicken eggs. It would also likely mean the curtailment of the production of the annual winter flu vaccine that is so often a lifesaver for many senior citizens.

Likewise, Washington's new orders for antivirals, as Senator Frist predicted, will have to wait in line behind the other customers of Roche's single Tamiflu plant in Switzerland.

In short, it is good news that the vaccine tests were successful, but that does little to change the judgment of the New York Times that "there is not enough vaccine or antiviral medicine available to protect more than a handful of people, and no industrial capacity to produce a lot more of these medicines quickly."

Moreover, the majority of the world, including all the poor countries of South Asia and Africa where, history tells us, pandemics are likely to hit especially hard, will have no access to expensive antivirals or scarce vaccines. It is even doubtful whether the WHO will have the minimal pharmaceuticals to respond to an initial outbreak.

Recent theoretical studies by mathematical epidemiologists in Atlanta and London have raised hopes that a pandemic might be stopped in its tracks if 1 to 3 million doses of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were available to douse an outbreak in a failsafe radius around the early cases.

After years of effort, however, the WHO has only managed to inventory about 123,000 courses of Tamiflu. Although Roche has promised to donate more, the desperate rush of rich countries to accumulate Tamiflu will be certain to undercut the World Health Organization's stockpile.

As for a universally available "world vaccine," it remains a pipe-dream without new, billion-dollar commitments from the rich countries, above all the United States, and even then, we are probably too late.

"People just don't get it," Dr. Michael Osterholm, the outspoken director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota recently complained. "If we were to begin a Manhattan Project-type response tonight to expand vaccine and drug production, we wouldn't have a measurable impact on the availability of these critical products to sufficiently address a worldwide pandemic for at least several years."

"Several years" is a luxury that Washington has already squandered. The best guess, as the geese head west and south, is that we have almost run out of time. As Shigeru Omi, the Western Pacific director of WHO, told a UN meeting in Kuala Lumpur in early July: "We're at the tipping point."

Mike Davis is the author of the just published Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) and the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).

Copyright 2005 Mike Davis

Is the Iran Crisis for Real?
 
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Are the Iranian mullahs close to acquiring the bomb? Has Iran violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty by restarting its conversion of yellowcake into uranium hexaflouride? The answer to both is no.

By a recent U.S. intelligence review, Iran may be 10 years away from a bomb. And under the NPT, Iran is allowed to enrich uranium for use in her own nuclear power plants.

Why, then, this talk of confrontation and pre-emptive strikes? Even if Iran had a weapon, to give it to a terrorist or to use it on a U.S. target would be an act of suicidal insanity by a regime that, no matter how militant, has shown no desire for war with America.

What is the worry? Just this. If or when Iran goes nuclear, she has a deterrent to intimidation. U.S. freedom of action in the Persian Gulf comes to an end. We would have to behave as gingerly with the mullahs as we do with Kim Jong Il, something intolerable to our neoconservatives and President Bush.

For the Israelis, an Iranian bomb would have the same impact as Stalin's explosion of a bomb had on us in 1949. Israel's invulnerability would come to an end. She would enter the world of Mutual Assured Destruction, like the one we had to live in during the Cold War. Thus, for Israel, the sooner the Americans pulverize Iran's infant nuclear facilities, the better. But herein lies the problem for President Bush.

Britain, France and Germany do not want to take the first step to confrontation by asking the U.N. Security Council to vote sanctions on Iran for restarting the enrichment process. And even if the Europeans agree to go to the Security Council, a resolution calling for sanctions would face vetoes by Russia and China.

If the council then rejects sanctions, but America and her NATO allies impose them, the world will be divided between Russia-China-Iran on one side and the United States and its backers on the other. It would be interesting to see how many U.S. allies are willing to support sanctions on the third largest oil producer on earth when oil is running at $65 a barrel.

Moreover, if the present negotiations end in sanctions on Iran, then, just as North Korea sped up its nuclear program when talks broke down, Iran might do the same. That would leave the United States with the final option: air and missile strikes to destroy all of Iran's known facilities for the enrichment of uranium.

But as Iran is permitted such facilities as long as it allows absolute freedom for U.N. inspectors, how could we justify such acts of war?

After all, we give a $160 billion trade surplus to China, though she is targeting our cities with nuclear missiles. President Bush cut a deal to help India develop nuclear power, though she has tested bombs. We give foreign aid to Pakistan and Israel, which had clandestine and successful programs that built atomic weapons. And we have a basket of goodies on offer to Kim Jong Il if he will shut down his nuclear facilities and hand over any bombs.

Where is the consistency here?

There is another consideration. Iran's response to any U.S. strike is unlikely to be to go limp like a peacenik demonstrator. As Michael Mazeer of the U.S. National War College writes in The New Republic, Iran's best strategy might be to lash out in retaliation.

What could Iran do? Plenty. Send Revolutionary Guards into Iraq to make that country a worse hell for the 135,000 U.S. troops. Incite Hezbollah to launch rockets on Israel to widen the war. Attack U.S. allies in the Gulf. Encourage the Shi'ites in Iraq and Saudi Arabia to attack Americans. Mine the Strait of Hormuz. Activate Islamic loyalists to bring terror home to the United States.

In short, a U.S. attack on Iran could lead to war across the region and interruption of the 15 million barrels of oil a day that come from the Gulf, which would drive the world economy into instant cardiac arrest.

And as the United States lacks the ground forces to invade Iran and topple the regime, U.S. retaliation would be restricted to air and cruise missile strikes. But just as 9/11 united Americans behind President Bush, attacks on Iran might unite the Iranian people behind the mullahs' regime, enhancing its prestige as it fought America to protect Iran's equal right to pursue nuclear power and nuclear technology, an issue upon which almost all Iranians agree.

President Bush should think long and hard before yielding to the War Party a second time. Iran is a nation three times the size of Iraq and with three times the population. This would be no cakewalk.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.