Three suicide bombers exploded trucks loaded with explosives and tanks of chlorine gas in Iraq's Anbar province March 16, killing at least two Iraqi police and sickening more than 350 people. In the first attack, a pick-up truck carrying chlorine blew up near a checkpoint northeast of Ramadi, the provincial capital, wounding a US soldier and an Iraqi civilian. In the second, a dump truck filled with chlorine exploded outside the town of Amiriya, south of Fallujah, killing two police officers. Local police and hospital officials said that as many as eight people were killed in the attacks. The perpetrators were said to be Sunni militants, even though the chlorine attacks came in an overwhelmingly Sunni region. The New York Times writes March 18: "Some local officials blamed militants linked to the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for the attacks Friday and said they were part of a campaign to intimidate moderate tribes that have declared their opposition to such fundamentalist insurgent groups." Could be. But the article also states that on March 17 a bomb partly destroyed a Sunni mosque in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood. Was this also the work of Sunni extremists—or of Shi'ite militants? The Times does not venture to speculate...

It is endless, and it comes (tellingly) from the both the right and the left. The latest entry is from Columbia University scholar Mahmood Mamdani, writing in the March 8 London Review of Books—who probably fancies himself on the left. But like his counterparts on the right and even in the Bush administration, he has a lot invested in denying that there is genocide in Darfur. What's particularly maddening is that Mamdani's piece, "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency," could be a good starting point for a sorely needed discussion—could, that is, if it were not guilty of exactly what he accuses his opponents of...

BBC Monitoring reports on a March 14 story on the website of the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, "Libya hints at [possibility of] expelling the Palestinians under the pretext of combating settlement in the diaspora":

The Palestinians have expressed surprise at Libya's remarks of the possibility of expelling thousands of Palestinian residents under the pretext of combating settlement, and called on Col [Mu'ammar] al-Qadhafi to refrain from that [measure].

Talk about hideous historical ironies. Ammar Alwan writes for Reuters, March 16:

TANAF, Iraq - Hameda Um Firas has lived most of her 70-odd years as a refugee -- now she is stranded in a tent again at Iraq's border with Syria where hundreds of Palestinians have fled to escape violence in Baghdad.

From AP, March 16:

NORTHAMPTON - Maha Ghosananda, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated monk who rebuilt Buddhism in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, has died.

The Bush administration has announced a new $750 million aid package for development and security in Pakistan's northwest, where the tribal areas are thought to be a staging ground for Islamist militant attacks both into Afghanistan and increasingly within Pakistan. Islamabad will be pleased by the failure of a measure pushed by US senators Joe Biden and John Kerry, which would have made demonstrated progress on democratic reform and gains against the Islamists a criteria for future military aid. A similar measure is still pending in the House. (Madrid11.net, Dawn, March 16)

The Hungarians seem to be in something of a Cold War time-warp. It is good to see them protesting their corrupt, self-serving Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, but they seem to be so conditioned by two generations of Soviet domination that they are mis-reading what he represents. We have noted that in China, critics and dissidents too often employ anachronistic anti-communist rhetoric, even as the "People's Republic" embraces the most savage capitalism. Similarly, the Hungarian protesters call Gyurcsany a "communist pig" because he "became a millionaire courtesy of property deals struck in the early years of privatization"—in other words, for being a successful and unscrupulous capitalist!

More sinister propaganda on the New York Times op-ed page March 16, this time from Russell L. Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut and chairman of the B612 Foundation, "which promotes efforts to alter the orbits of asteroids." Entitled "The Sky is Falling. Really.," the piece warns that there is a one-in-45,000 chance (gasp!) that an 850-foot asteroid called Apophis could collide with the Earth "with catastrophic consequences" on April 13, 2036. As we have noted before, these supposed efforts to save the Earth from rogue asteroids are really a transparent ploy to find a new rationale for nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War era. It seems to us nuclear weapons have far greater potential to destroy the planet than a rogue asteroid. Talk about creating what you fear!