“Obama’s New West Asian Policy: Prospects and Challenges”-July 2009 Seminar at ICWA

"Obama's New West Asian Policy: Prospects and Challenges"-
Seminar at Indian Council of World Affairs on 13 July, 2009

"History is ruled by an inexorable determinism in which the free
choice of major historical figures plays a minimal role", Leo Tolstoy

After more than two years I went over to attend a seminar ,having been
forced to decline owing to ill health an all paid invite to
participate at the conference as one of the keynote speakers on the
issue of "The future of Turkish-Indian Relations " at Istanbul
,organized by Bogazici University-TUSIAD (Turkish Businessmen and
Industrialists' Association and Sabancı University Competitiveness
Forum in November ,2007.Normally during my visits to Delhi I delivered
lectures at universities in India .military colleges , IIC,FSI,
Habitat center and other centres. But since Oct 2007 I have been
laptop bound.

Most speakers and the audience at the seminar, barring a few
exceptions appeared to be brain washed by western corporate media and
its poor copy in India. Obama's speech inn Cairo came for praise (Can
one take seriously his claim that US cannot be at war with Islam -then
what all is going on ,war on Muslim countries for their oil resources
or strategic space for energy transfer etc) .

My observations, Amb Chhatwal , who presided , was kind enough to give
me 10 minutes, did not find much acceptance .Like Obama is but a
product of Chicago Jewish machine and those who have destroyed US
economy , contributed 600 million dollars for his election ,so what do
you expect. US are ruled by Military-Industry and energy complex and
that America is on fast decline.

Like downfall of both Greek -Roman -Byzantine and rival Persian led to
their decline after centuries of confrontation ,whose territories
were easily conquered first by desert Arab Bedouins and then Turkish
nomads .Similarly defense over reach and expenditure first brought
down USSR in 1990, now it is America's turn , which spends as much on
defense aka 600 billion dollars as the rest of world put together ,
equivalent to its trade deficit which has grown to 7-8 trillions
dollars of debt to China, Japan, Oil states and others .US has failed
to even tackle housing mortgage crisis ,it has still to face the
credit card crisis among others.

I might have succeeded in creating in the mind of the audience some
doubt about the invincibility of US power and its ability to recover
this time around. But I remain dismayed by Indian elites touching
faith in US capability, simple because they just follow western
corporate media (in US 5 conglomerates control 90% of media -BBC is
just a govt mouthpiece)
I wrote my first piece 'Decline of the American Century ' on 11 Sept ,
2002 on the anniversary of stunning attacks on symbols of US economic
and military power for Asia times a year earlier .It was Asia Times
most read piece and copied by dozens of websites mostly in the west
.It is reproduced in full at the end .

Since then I have written four more pieces on the subject .Many weeks
of surfing non-corporate media for facts and figures were consumed
.URLs are provided for those interested to pursue through them
.Decline and fall of US hegemony is there , if not like USSR then like
Great Britain after WWII. Like a new lean General Motors after its
bankruptcy.
Thambi Varadrajan recently wrote in Hindu that US has persuaded G-8
not to pass on enrichment and reprocessing technology to India .Did
not PM tell parliament in 2006 that India will have the same rights as
nuclear weapons states (US, Russia, China, France and UK) after
signing the Indo-US treaty .India has given up its strategic options,
annoyed Iran and lost independence of action. Whatever for? But no
discussion in Indian media .Let repeat again what Turkish Deputy PM
told me," Mr. Ambassador, you can not trust the Americans , not even
on what they have given in writing " Indians , claiming to have a
strategic alliance with US are such suckers! While US Nato ally Turkey
have intelligently remodeled their foreign policy, making up with
historical neighbours like Russia, Iran, Syria and ticking off Israel
when necessary.

Cheers and take care Gajendra 13 July, 2009 , Delhi .

Poison Ended Arafat’s Palestinian Mission Impossible!

Poison Ended Arafat's Palestinian Mission Impossible!

 

Pontus King Mithradates VI the Great (meaning "gift of the Aryan god Mithra"), a common name among Anatolian rulers, had contested Imperial Rome's hegemony in Asia Minor. He used to take poison in small doses to avoid being poisoned by his enemies. He did not die of poisoning but after many ups and downs, Roman General Pompey defeated him comprehensively .Mithradates escaped to Crimea. Cornered, Mithradates a powerful man would not die of poisons, so he had to order a slave to kill him.

After the sweep and repulse of Ottoman arms reaching up to the Gates of Vienna in 16^th century .first the Europeans and then the US led West has monopolised the assassination of patriotic and nationalist leaders opposed to them, by every possible mean, fair or foul, most often illegal even by Western national laws. There is litany of such assassinations. One being Iraqi president Saddam Hussein but he while being lynched spat out at his enemies. The most recent example is Col Kaddafi , who sometimes stood up to the West and even helped Western leaders with election and other funds , but he was allowed to be lynched and even sodomised by Western supported criminals , to the great glee of western media .No investigation by ICC or of human rights violation and the deaths in Libya since UNSC resolution 1973 .The riffraff is now fighting among themselves in a civil war .Western destruction of Libya was begun against the UNSC resolution , but then Washington has been in the forefront of illegal actions.

 

Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was tried by ICC at the behest of Europe and USA, but Washington has not ratified its membership .Staffed by non-descript mercenary lawyers, many from Africa, it is another tool to punish leaders for not bending to the Western will and objectives of loot Milosevic died of illness as the West would not let him be treated in Moscow. Washington has coerced or bribed many countries to avoid being tried for its crimes by ICC. But this did not stop the trial and conviction recently of George Bush, Tony Blair and other Western leaders who mounted an illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 against UN Charter by an independent international Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur.

 

Bush administration's foreign policy undermined the fragile structure of international law and conventions built up during the past three centuries, to which the United States made important contributions. Former president Billy Carter, wrote in the Washington Post in end 2002 that, "formerly admired almost universally as the pre-eminent champion of human rights, our country has become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life". A lot of dirty water has since flowed in the Potomac.

 

And now the menace of illegal drone warfare in which enemies of the USA are targeted and killed without any international authorization , which also kill many more civilians .International Law and conventions have been almost totally undermined by a hubris ridden Washington. For how long!

 

Add to the West's list of eliminated leaders Yasser Arafat who it is becoming clearer was poisoned at the behest of Israel and Washington possibly with the connivance and complicity of so-called Palestinian leaders who eke miserable lives under the boots of Israeli heels. Who gained the most from this murder? It has been reported that the United States and France are opposed to an international investigation ( But West has launched so many crooked investigations to suit their aggressive objectives like the Hariri assassination to implicate Syria )

 

Wrote Gilad Atzmon," Since we now have conclusive evidence that Arafat was poisoned by radioactive polonium 210 and since Israel is the prime suspect in Arafat's 2004 assassination, surely it is time to point the finger at Israel and its leadership and to demand explanations."Already in 2004, Silvan Shalom, at the time Israeli Foreign Minister, rejected as "scandalous and false" the idea that his country had a role in Arafat's death. However, this is despite the facts that Israel had earlier threatened Arafat, blaming him for Palestinian violence and, after losing 15 citizens to suicide bombings in September 2003 and had decided to "remove" Arafat – though without elaborating publicly precisely how this might be achieved. As if this were not enough, an Israeli newspaper quoted Avi Dichter, at the time Shin Bet director as saying that it would be better to kill Arafat than exile him.

 

No wonder when Yasser Arafat expired on 11 November  2004 "in exile " in a Paris hospital, away from his Israeli battered Ramallah residence in Palestine, there were valid suspicions about  his death so suddenly.

 

Suha Arafat asks for an investigation

 

The debate about Arafat's death was renewed last week after Qatar satellite channel al-Jazeera  ( which has joined BBC and CNN in sprouting spins and lies about Libya ,Syria and Iran ) after it aired an investigative report indicating that Arafat was poisoned with toxic radioactive polonium. Arafat was ill for more than two years, confined by Israel in his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah.

 

On Monday, the Palestinian leadership asked Swiss scientists from the Lausanne-based Institute of Radiation Physics, which al-Jazeera had hired for testing Arafat's personal belongings. Following the report, the Palestinian leaders have agreed to exhume Arafat's body from his West Bank grave if his family so requests. The Swiss Institute had found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210 on Arafat's clothing - the substance used to kill former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

 

"I want the world to know the truth about the assassination of Yasser Arafat," Suha Arafat told Al Jazeera. Her lawyer Pierre-Olivier Sud said in a statement after Mrs. Arafat made an application in French Court, "Madame Arafat hopes that the authorities will be able to establish the exact circumstances of her husband's death and uncover the truth, so that justice can be done."

 

Below is an article written soon after Arafat's death in 2004?

 

K.Gajendra Singh 14 July, 2012

http://tarafits.blogspot.com/2011/08/amb-rtd-k-gajendra-singh-cv-post.html

 

                                                        

LIFE & TIMES OF ARAFAT - Mission Incomplete 

 K. Gajendra Singh 15-11-2004   http://www.saag.org/papers12/paper1166.html

Yasser Arafat, who died last week "in exile " in a Paris hospital, away from his Israeli battered Ramallah residence in Palestine, would always be remembered for creating a Palestine nation and identity against insurmountable odds. But his mission to create an independent and a sovereign state remained incomplete. A fact not much highlighted even in these days of growing catastrophic religious divide between Judaism and Christianity on side and Islam on the other, lies in his keeping the Palestinian liberation movement secular in spite of many pressures. He was very popular in India and was always a welcome visitor. 

Arafat, born in Cairo 75 years ago and at whose funeral at the military airport Al Maza, presidents, kings and other world leaders paid their last respects on 12 November, was the perfect example of " One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."   Others so called terrorists who fought for the freedom of their nations were Benjamin Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Jomo Kenyatta, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Subhash Chandra Bose (all by the British), Ho Chi Minh, Houari Boumidienne, Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman, Nelson Mandela among others. 

For half a millennia under the Ottomans, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan was all part of Greater Syria with ill-defined borders based on tribal grazing rights than cartographic delimitation. It is curious that Israel, USA and some others, while accepting UN division of Palestine recognized Israel but not the state of Palestine. Israelis established contacts with late Emir Abdullah of Jordan to divide Palestine and add areas to his Kingdom after the 1948 Arab Israeli war. Abdullah did that but paid the price. He was assassinated in 1951 by a Palestinian when coming out of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Egypt took over Gaza. Palestinians were just Arabs and their homeland was up for grabs. Yet, the Palestinians are denied citizenship rights and continue to live in refugee camps since over half a century. 

Arafat died with his dream of independent Palestine unfulfilled, but even when sick, he refused to bow and accept Bantustans for a Palestinian state. Incarceration of Arafat in a few bombed out rooms in Ramallah, the land of his ancestors, with US corporate media maligning him would remain a blot against human rights and dignity. It is a dark tribute to the Jewish hold over US politics that both the candidates in the recent presidential polls dared not say a word against Sharon's policies. Verily proving the Israeli strangles hold over US electoral system and the bankruptcy of US policy in the Middle East. 

Blame on Arafat's refusal to accept a dysfunctional Palestine with little sovereignty is a result of the spin off so called western media in the words of John Pilger and Robert Fisk. A lack of solution lies squarely with the Maximalist Israeli rulers, mostly former military generals .The claims for non- acceptance of Clinton Camp David and Taaba talks are similar to the corporate western propaganda claims that Iraq was somehow responsible for 11 September and Iraq and Al Qaida were interlinked. Western propaganda's bark against those "not with us "is worse than unilateral wars against UN and world opposition.

"Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth," the Old Testament

Israeli Labour leader Simon Peres was considerate after Arafat's death and said " The Palestinians see in Yasser Arafat the father of their nation. Like a father, he did much for his children, but he was also often overprotective of them. Arafat is a difficult figure with whom to come to terms. He did more than any other leader to forge a unique and separate Palestinian identity. He was the voice and symbol of the Palestinian cause. His tireless efforts brought the Palestinian cause to the forefront of the international agenda and kept it there for four decades." Peres also called on his countrymen to 'let bygones be bygones and let openings be openings'.

But the Guardian reported that while after the death of Yitzhak Rabin, condolence and sympathy was offered to the Israelis by many Palestinians; by some who had lost sons, husbands and brothers to Rabin's "iron fist" policies; to "break the hands and legs of every stone-thrower" during the first intifada. Leaders of the Palestinian Authority, who were interviewed by the Israeli media, talked of their grief. Arafat got special permission to visit the bereaved widow, Lea Rabin, in Tel Aviv, and sat with her, tears in his eyes. But the Israeli government announced, as soon as a dying Arafat was flown to Paris, that he would not be allowed to be buried in Jerusalem, where Arafat claimed he was born.

Inbal Gavrieli, member of the Knesset, shouted at Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, that Arafat was "a dog". Yosef Lapid, one of Mr Sharon's ministers, said in an interview with Israeli Radio. "I hated him for the deaths of Israelis ... I hated him for not allowing the peace process ... to move forward." An Israeli official, critical of Mr Lapid's intervention, said: "Arafat was a monster but it is not right to say such things on the day that the Palestinians are preparing to bury him." But many Israelis followed suit with insults and celebrations at Arafat's death. This hatred and self-righteousness is the harvest of Ariel Sharon's policies.

Arafat: early life and influences

Born at Cairo in 1929 and named Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, the sixth child of a Palestinian middle class merchant, Arafat was sent at the tender age of 4 years to live in a house by the Wailing Wall and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. His exposure to the struggle between marauding Jewish settlers and a disorganized and aggrieved Arab peasantry left an indelible mark on the little boy. He was a witness to the Zionists' passionate struggle to take over the traditionally Muslim-administered Wall and other disputed holy places in an atmosphere charged with emotions .He also witnessed anguished debates about the country's future, and the beginnings of the "great rebellion", and armed uprising of a desperate and dispossessed poor people. 

The other child hood influence was the female domination at home, which made him rebellious and independent .His marriage when 62 years to a 40 year younger Suha Tawil was a hangover of that trait, which created much embarrassment all around. But such marital alliances were not uncommon and socially accepted in the region. Now it caused an acrimonious debate between Suha and the PLO leadership over Arafat's health and then his will and money.  

Arafat returned to Cairo in 1937 and thus escaped the Arab catastrophe in Palestine, when the ill prepared Arab Armies led by corrupt leaders were defeated in 1948 by the new state of Israel, adding to the humiliation already felt by the Arabs under the British colonial rule. After the war the Jews imposed their rule on 78% of Palestine. Arafat could empathise with the terrors and humiliation of mass flight and exile of his people, the Palestinians from their homes. Over 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee. But Arafat had become a key, intrepid figure in smuggling arms from Egypt into Palestine. However, when "an Egyptian officer came to my group and demanded that we hand over our weapons ... we protested ... but it was no good ... in that moment I knew we had been betrayed by these regimes." He was convinced that if Palestinians relied on others, they would never recover their homeland. 

While doing civil engineering degree he took over the stagnant Cairo-based League of Palestinian Students with some help from Moslem Brotherhood, which was then organizing and asserting itself. He was tireless, wily, domineering, but he had another vital trait which makes for charisma; of showmanship and the theatrical gesture. In 1955 at a congress in Prague, he suddenly donned the keffiyeh, the traditional chequered headdress, which, while hiding his entirely baldpate, also became his emblem. He referred to himself, perhaps half-jokingly, as "Mr Palestine", which he ultimately did become. 

Arafat then went to Kuwait in 1958, and could have become a multi-millionaire as a building contractor as many others have. But his stay in Cairo had left a lasting impact, where Col Gamal Nasser, had begun his revolution in the Arab world. He stood up to the British colonial power, removed its military bases and nationalized the Suez Canal. The ignominious failure of the British –French –Israeli aggression in 1956 made him a hero not only in the Arab world but in Asia and Africa, then recovering freedom from colonial rule. Nasser openly supported freedom movements from all over the world, with headquarters in Cairo! The author, posted as a young diplomat there in early 1960s savored that revolutionary air, and later in Algiers, where he met with Che Guevara.   

Arafat's business experience in handling money and men was later useful as the leader of his people, when he disposed of billions of dollars and made canny use of it as an instrument of policy and patronage. But personally he led a most Spartan private life, his only failing being love of honey .He reportedly had liaisons with women, but he could claim that he was married to his Revolution until in 1992 he took as wife Suha, from a wealthy Christian family of Jerusalem.

Helped by funds and his zeal, Arafat took the first clandestine steps that led to his emergence as one of the household names of the age: an ideal, however flawed, of all the aspirations to most Palestinians; of all the evil and the would-be destructor of their state, to most Israelis. He also took the name of "Abu Amar" .If Arab regimes exploited him and the Palestine cause; he became a sacred, exasperating, and unavoidable obligation to most Arab regimes. During decades of his leadership he transformed himself from a "terrorist" to politician, even statesman, in the eyes of the world. If the Palestine cause and presence in the Arab world proved cement in uniting the Arabs, he threatened that it could also act as dynamite if the cause was ignored.

To begin with, in 1959 with his close friend Abu Jihad in Kuwait, he edited the magazine "Our Palestine " .It highlighted the Palestinian refugees' plight and the inaction of Arab regimes, and espoused the ideal of the "Return to Palestine ", with a full-scale "popular liberation war" as the only means of achieving it. The two established the Fatah guerrilla organization's first, five-man underground cell. On 1 January 1965, ill-trained, pitifully short of both weapons and funds, the Fatah Feyadeen (those who sacrifice themselves), mounted their first trans-frontier raid into the "Zionist gangster-state".

But in political terms Arafat's guerrillas were a much greater challenge to the Arab regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes too were preparing to liberate Palestine - but mostly by talk, by conventional military means in their own good time. The early Arafat exploits, were mere pinpricks that gave Israel another reason to fight a war that would end with it gaining the remaining 22% of Palestine; East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - after the shattering Arab defeat in the 1967 war. But the guerrillas' power grew steadily in Jordan, to which 380,000 Palestinians had fled after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, joining others who had arrived earlier in 1948. 

Arafat's major daring feat remains the battle of Karameh, a small Jordanian town in the valley, when on March 21 1968, and an ill-armed band of guerrillas inflicted heavy casualties on a vastly superior force of Israeli invaders. Having been humiliated in 1948 and 1967, the Fedayeen became the Arab world's darlings with volunteers flocking in to join it. Arafat became chairman of the executive committee and commander in chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969. The Palestinian National Council, the PLO's parliamentary body, adopted Al Fatah's goal: "creating a democratic society in Palestine where Muslims, Christians and Jews would live together in complete equality." PLO was established in 1964 by Egypt's President Nasser. 

But Al Fatah became a state within the Jordanian state. When with swaggering guerillas behaved almost like masters of Jordan, in which Palestinians from 55% of the population, it became intolerable for the Hashemite King Hussein. The hijacking of 3 civilian planes by guerillas by a faction outside PLO control and their destruction in Jordan's deserts was the last straw. In September 1970 (named Black September events by PLO), King Hussein used his tribal Bedouin soldiers against PLO guerillas to drive them out of his Kingdom. In the planning of the operations Brigadier Zia-ul Haq then on deputation played a key role. Zia's boss in Pakistan received a message that "a kingdom has been saved". With some Palestinian officers involved in attempts to overthrow King Hussein, Jordan's armed forces and security services have few Palestinians now. Open provocative declarations by senior Israeli leaders that Jordan is Palestine did not help matters. 

PLO and its guerillas then shifted to Lebanon, where they fitted easily into that country's ethnic and ideological divisions. Arafat built himself a stronger power base. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war when a US military Hardware Bridge made Israelis roll back Egyptians' initial gains, began the American peace-making. Arafat then began moving away from "revolution till victory" towards a "doctrine of stages". He sought what immediate gains he could make from a political settlement without renouncing the historical right to all of Palestine.

After the Arabs had accepted the PLO as "the sole legitimate spokesman of the Palestinian people" in 1974, King Hussein, his historic Arab rival, also did the same. Soon Arafat addressed the United Nations general assembly at its first debate on the "Palestine question" since 1952, thus becoming the first leader of a "national liberation movement" to be so honored. That diplomatic triumph was followed by a dreary period of diplomatic military-strategic reverses, inflicted by Arabs and the Israelis. He sided with the Muslim-leftists in the Lebanese civil war. But then Syria's President Assad sent in his army to help the right-wing Christian Phalangists. The civil war's first phase ended in 1976 with the siege and fall of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tal al-Zaatar. But at an emergency summit, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rescued Arafat from Syrians.

In 1982 the Israelis with Ariel Sharon as defence minister invaded Lebanon and hunted Arafat using F-15s as flying assassination squads, killing 200 people when a laser-guided vacuum bomb, flattened an apartment block Arafat had left moments before. Under US pressure and assurance, Arafat and his fighters were exiled to Tunisia which became his headquarters. But PLO lost its Lebanese politico-military power base across Israel and occupied West Bank.

Then under the benign gaze of Ariel Sharon the Phalangists carried a pogrom against defenceless Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila. When Arafat slipped back 15 months later into the Syrian-controlled part of Lebanon, where Assad had helped foment a rebellion against him in the ranks of what was left of the Fatah guerrillas, he was rescued by a European-arranged safe passage from Tripoli, being bombarded by Israel from the sea and besieged by Syria. "Such is the bizarre ending of a movement that, for all its daring, never found a political vision," prematurely declared the New York Times.

Far away in Tunis Arafat appeared irrelevant. But the Israelis never gave up on Arafat and his comrade's .In 1985 Israeli F-15s killed 73 people at his seafront Tunis headquarters. Arafat was out "jogging" at the time. At the 1987 summit, to his fury, Arab leaders for the first time put something other than Palestine - the Iraq-Iran war - at the top of their agenda.

But in November 1987, when the Israelis thought they had created a South Africa style regime in the Occupied Territories and exploited cheap Palestine labor for its economy, the young Palestinians, fed up with daily humiliations and oppression rose up against the occupying Israeli forces in a spontaneous, non-armed intifada. The Palestinians had fought from West bank, part of Hashemite Kingdom up to 1967, then from Jordan up to 1970 and then from Lebanon up to 1982. Now with PLO far away in Tunis, the grass roots Palestinians refused to accept slavery and worse. It is this leadership, which will now decide the future of Palestine.

It was not difficult for Arafat to take over Intifada as he still embodied the idea of rebellion and Palestinian aspirations .It was a new asset, stronger than the long, costly "armed struggle". The stones that youngsters hurled at Israeli soldiers were more potent than Kalashnikovs and the harsh Israeli response telecast around the world on TV screens aroused passions and anger even among American people .In order to keep the Intifada non-violent and united, Jordan TV used to telecast Attenborough's film Gandhi, which was seen by Palestinians, Jordanians and Israelis alike.

Arafat accepts 'two states solution

Then in a bold political move in 1988, Arafat solemnly proclaimed recognition to the "two-state" solution, which meant that the Palestinians gave up 78% of their original homeland. He recognizes Israel's right to exist. Then began a long sought US-PLO dialogue; called the Palestinians' "passport to the world". But it turned out to be a historic mirage, a failed gamble. For Israel, he remained the unregenerate terrorist; and Washington was too beholden to Israel.

Only President Saddam Hussein supported the Palestinian cause fully, so Arafat aligned himself to a militarily powerful and increasingly militant Iraq. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he backed him, a miscalculation in American eyes. But then he had to respond to the feelings of the Palestinians. Even King Hussein, so reliant on the west, had to listen to the majority of his Palestinian origin population .He did not join the US led coalition against Saddam Hussein, which almost all Arab and Muslim countries did, for money, rivalry and some other consideration .So much for Arab solidarity .It was Saddam Hussein who had saved the Gulf Kingdoms and Sheikhdoms from the fury of the Iranian Shiite revolution after 1979. So much for gratitude!

But USA had to promise its Arab, Muslim and other Allies in 1991 war that it would make a serious effort to resolve the Arab-Israel problem, which had been highlighted by Saddam Hussein. So in late 1991 the Madrid peace conference was recognize. Arafat persuaded the Palestinians to go to the conference. For the first time Israel and its Arab neighbours talked to each other and at each other across a table. But the Arabs did so at the cost of historic concessions. The Israelis went through the exercise. They chose which Palestinians they would talk to. There was no place for PLO members, let alone Arafat, in the Palestinian delegation. They also largely set the agenda; the Americans backed their refusal to discuss anything suggesting the Palestinians' right to "self-determination". Israelis saw that Madrid got nowhere.

But an inveterate traveler, Arafat kept up his endlessly airborne routine. In 1992, his aircraft crash-landed during a Libyan sandstorm. The crew sacrificed themselves to save him – testimony to the loyalty he inspired. His escape was described as a "heavenly referendum" by many Palestinians. The relief and joy was genuine enough all around the world. It was in Tunis that at 62, and to the disapproving surprise of his people, Arafat took a 28-year-old wife, Suha Tawil.

1993 Oslo Accords

Soon Arafat began the secret talks that astonished the world and from which the Oslo agreement emerged. Some of his officials unkindly whispered that the crash, the shock to his faculties already going awry, had pushed him into this last extremity of "moderation". Others accused him of individualism, vanity, deviousness, authoritarianism and a mystical belief in his infallibility. What he wanted almost at any price was to internalize the Madrid conference and face the rise of the "insider" leadership, and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists, which all threatened to bypass him. Israel which had helped create Hamas took full advantage.

The 1993 Oslo Accords were along the lines of the Labour Party's Alon plan which called for the annexation of 35-40 percent of the Occupied Territories, and either Jordanian rule or some form of autonomy for the remaining land to which the Palestinian population would be assigned. In the past, the Palestinians had always opposed such plans, which would take away too much of their land. Perhaps without realizing its ramifications, Arafat had agreed. Only an apparent "smashing victory" could have kept Arafat in focus and power. So behind the back of the Palestinian negotiating team headed by Haider Abd al-Shafi, Arafat accepted an agreement that left all Israeli settlements intact, even in the Gaza Strip, where 6,000 Israeli settlers occupy one-third of the land, while a million Palestinians are crowded in the rest.  

On September 13 1993 in a signing ceremony on the White House lawn, overseen by Bill Clinton, the 64-year-old former "terrorist" shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Prime Minister and was accepted as a statesman. For this he shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Peres. But the price was immense. He claimed that the accord would inexorably lead to Israel's withdrawal from all the occupied territories; the Palestinians were on the road to statehood with its capital in East Jerusalem. Nine months later he returned "home" to Palestine. But the self-governing areas were the merest fragments, in Jericho and Gaza, not merely of original 1948 Palestine, but of the post-1967, 22% of it, on which he was to build his state. 

According to Labour leader Simon Peres, Arafat once bitterly told him after the Oslo accords "Just see what you did to me: From a popular figure in the eyes of my people, you have turned me into a controversial personality in the eyes of the Palestinians and the whole of the Arab world." 

Oslo had provided for a series of "interim" agreements leading to "final-status" talks. An Israeli commentator said of the first of them: "when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly ecognizes that the Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject." For 6 years nothing happened except what Israel wanted, with the balance of power now more overwhelmingly in Israel's favour than ever. The "interim" agreements which should have advanced Arafat's conception of "final status" only advanced the Israeli interests.

A revolutionary, Arafat was not good at building democracy .PLA was no different from other Arab regimes he denounced as corrupt. More people went into Palestinian jails than in Israeli ones. His so-called economic "advisers" shaped a nepotistic edifice of monopoly; racketeering and naked extortion which enriched them as it further impoverished the people. Funds meant for the PLO were distributed among close associates (some of them look quite well fed and content).In 1999, 20 leading citizens denounced not just high officials and their business cronies, but even the "president", who had "opened the doors to the opportunists to spread their rottenness through the Palestinian street". There was open opposition to his dictatorial one-man rule and open corruption. This is a common problem with all revolutionary organizations when they acquire levers of power.

By 1997, three years after Arafat's triumphal return to Gaza, the Palestinian economy was stagnant and per-capita annual income in Gaza had declined by $100, to $1,050. Refugee camps were mired in squalor, a situation that did not improve with time. According to United Nations figures, 50 percent of the 2.2 million Palestinians on the West Bank were living below the poverty line in 2004, compared with 22 percent in 2001; the figure is now 68 percent in teeming Gaza, with its 1.3 million people.

Israel's Phantom offer

Israeli PM Ehud Barak then conceived the idea of telescoping the "interim" stages, which had fallen behind schedule as well as the "final status" which had been left to the end precisely because they were so intractable - into one climactic conclusion to end the 100-year conflict. US President Bill Clinton fell in line. Most US presidents in their second term want to write their names in history .In July 2000, at Clinton's Camp David retreat, Barak laid before Arafat his take-it-or-leave-it "historic compromise." In return for his solemnly dropping all further claims, Israel would agree to the emergence of a Palestine state, covering even less than the 22% of the original homeland to which he was confined to without real sovereignty or East Jerusalem as its capital, or the return of refugees. And the illegal settlements would remain.

The summit collapsed as Arafat stood firm, evidently deciding that to cede historic goals would be ruinous. Even he had no Palestinian, Arab or Islamic mandate for ceding Jerusalem's sovereignty or abandoning the rights of four million refugees. From this collapse grew the second intifada, essentially a popular revolt, first against the Israeli occupation and the realisation that the Oslo peace process would never bring it to an end and, potentially, against Arafat and the discredited Palestine Authority. It took on its own life and momentum with Arafat only in nominal control. Its true leaders were men of a younger generation such as Marwan Barghouti.

The intifada's other activists were the fundamentalists of Hamas and Islamic jihad. They did not oppose Arafat, nor did they owe any allegiance to him. Their suicide bombers inside Israel proper harked to the much larger meaning which the intifada carried for them: "complete liberation." The death toll mounted beneath the overwhelmingly superior Israeli firepower, from small-scale attrition of sniper and small arms fire, through systematic assassinations, to tanks, helicopter gunships and F-16s unleashed on targets in densely populated civilian neighborhoods. This has only increased poverty, hatred and despair and the willing bomber volunteers. Most Israelis saw the intifada as an existential threat and they all blamed Arafat. For the peace-seeking Israeli left he had betrayed them with a resort to violence just when a historic breakthrough seemed possible .The right, felt he was the unregenerate killer he always was. This led, in February 2001, to the rise of Ariel Sharon, tainted from by the Sabra and Shatila massacres, to head Israel's most extreme and bellicose government in history.

Like Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the events of September 11 2001 were a further setback for the Palestinians. This time Arafat was determined to put himself on the US side by supporting America's "war on terror". But his attempts to end the intifada, arresting militants who broke the ceasefire and protested against the US led assault on Afghanistan had little effect. George W. Bush, the most pro-Israeli president ever, did little more than look on as Sharon re-conquered much of the West Bank, wreaked havoc on the infrastructure of the PA, and subjected Arafat himself to a humiliating siege in his headquarters in Ramallah, his office reduced to mounds of rubble.

In the summer of 2002, Bush pronounced Arafat unfit to rule and "irrelevant", as he had imperiously declared UN in early 2003. In Sharon's world, along with Saddam Hussein, Arafat was ready for"regime changes" which Bush now envisaged across much of the Middle East. In 2003, Bush secured the appointment of a docile prime minister, Mahmud Abbas aka Abu Mazin, hoping he would do what Arafat would not - to war against the Islamic militants without any assurance of worthwhile concessions. But Arafat, with his continued grip on the levers of power, drove the hapless and unpopular Abu Mazen to despair and resignation.

With the total breakdown of the ceasefire and the "road map" in tatters, and a resumption of the suicide bombings, the Israeli government announced its intention to "remove" Arafat, this "absolute obstacle to any attempt at reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis." As time went by, Israel extended the "Arab-free" areas by new settlements and connecting roads etc in the Occupied Territories to about 50 percent of their land. Labor circles had talked about the "Alon Plus" plan, namely even more land to Israel.

At the time of Oslo Accords, the majority of Israelis were tired of war. They thought fights over land and water resources were over. Haunted by the memory of the Holocaust, most Israelis believed that the 1948 War of Independence, with its horrible consequences for the Palestinians, was necessary to establish a state for the Jews. But now both sides with their states could live normally and peacefully. Most people on both the sides believed that what they were witnessing were just "interim agreements" and that eventually the occupation would somehow end, and the settlements would be dismantled. Two-thirds of Jewish Israelis supported the Oslo agreements in the polls. It was obvious there was no stomach for any new wars over land and water.

But the ideology of war over land never died out in the Israeli army, or in the circles of politically influential generals, whose careers moved from the military to the government. From the start of the Oslo process, the Maximalists objected to giving even that much land and rights to the Palestinians. This was most visible in military circles, whose most vocal spokesman was then chief of staff Ehud Barak, who objected to the Oslo agreements from the start. Another beacon of opposition was, of course, Ariel Sharon. In 1999, the army got back to power through the politicized generals - first Barak, and then Sharon.

So the Maximalist generals-turned-rulers decided to correct what they viewed as the grave mistakes of Oslo. In their eyes, Sharon's alternative of fighting the Palestinians to the bitter end and imposing new regional order may have failed in Lebanon in 1982 because of the weakness of the soft Israeli society, but now, given the new war philosophy established through US military operations in Iraq, and earlier in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the political generals believed that with Israel's massive air superiority, it might still be possible to execute that vision.

However, in order to get there, it was first necessary to convince the Israeli society that, in fact, the Palestinians were not willing to live in peace, and was still threatening Israel's very existence. Sharon alone could not have possibly achieved that, but Barak did succeed with his generous offer- fraud. There was no real offer on the table. It was a media-assisted creation like the belief created in the US population that Iraqis were responsible for September 11.

"The Israeli press is as obedient as elsewhere, and it recycles faithfully the military and governmental messages. But part of the reason it is more revealing is its lack of inhibition. Things that would look outrageous in the world are considered natural daily routine," writes Israeli Prof Tanya Reinhart. Earlier the world was made to believe that Israel was willing to withdraw even from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. In the polls, 60 percent of the Israelis, hoping for peace, had enthusiastically supported dismantling all settlements in the Golan Heights. But the end of this round of peace negotiations ended in the same way as with Palestinians. It was made out that Syrian leader Hafiz al-Assad did not comprehend and had let the opportunity slip. But it was not true. Media then convinced the Israelis that it was the rejectionist Assad who was unwilling to get his territories back and make peace with Israel.

Second Intifada

Why did Barak permit Sharon a provocative visit to Temple Mount/Haram to ignite the boiling frustrations accumulated in the Palestinian society? The massive security forces used rubber bullets against unarmed demonstrators. When the visit triggered more demonstrations the next day, Barak escalated the shootings and ordered Israeli forces and tanks into densely populated Palestinian areas. By all indications, the escalation of Palestinian protest into armed clashes could have been prevented had the Israeli response been more restrained. Even in the face of armed resistance, Israel's reaction was grossly out of proportion, as stated by the General Assembly of the UN, which condemned Israel's "excessive use of force" on October 26, 2000. The second intifada has so far left more than 900 Israelis and almost 3,000 Palestinians dead. And an Israel less secure.

The first Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli civilians inside Israel took place on November 2, 2000, a month after Israel used its full military machine against Palestinians including helicopters, tanks and missiles. So it was not defense against terrorism as claimed by Israel. It would appear that another plan to destroy the Palestinian infrastructure and to discredit Arafat, i.e. that he had never given up the "option of violence", was ready in October 2000 and are contained in a manuscript known as the "White Book".

Professor Tanya Reinhart suggests in her book Israel/Palestine that despite the horrors of the past years, there was still another alternative. "Israel should withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967. The bulk of Israeli settlers (150,000 of them) are concentrated in the big settlement blocks in the center of the West Bank. These areas cannot be evacuated overnight. But the rest of the land (about 90-96 percent of the West Bank and the whole of the Gaza Strip) can be evacuated immediately. Many of the residents of the isolated Israeli settlements that are scattered in these areas are speaking openly in the Israeli media about their wish to leave. It is only necessary to offer them reasonable compensation for their property. The rest ... are a negligible minority that will have to accept the will of the majority." 

But this not likely to happen.  Instead a Berlin wall, in spite of a ruling against it by the International Court in The Hague, continues to be built to claim more Palestinian territory. The United Nations concluded that the barriers and enclosures had cut off 11.5 percent of the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. Israel has confiscated 24 per cent of the area of the West Bank and Gaza and 89 per cent of East Jerusalem for settlements, highways, military installations, etc. It controls 80 per cent of the water resources of the occupied territories and also appropriates a large quantity, equal to one-third of its consumption, from the Jordan River. Fourth-fifths of the water from the West Bank's sole underground aquifer go to Israel.

The greatest, and most immediate, challenge is offered by Ariel Sharon's plan to wind up all the 21 settlements in Gaza and four others in the West Bank, beginning in 2005.The "Disengagement Plan" is opposed by a large number of Palestinians because it is part of Israel's comprehensive strategy to continue its occupation under more favorable conditions while freezing the peace process. And as Sharon's senior adviser D. Weisglass openly says: "When you freeze the peace process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state." Sharon wants to bypass any political process and reconfigure the entire territory of Palestine and make a genuine two-state solution virtually impossible. The strategy to change the facts on the ground is being implemented thoroughly.

Conclusion

There appears little chance of peace or accord in Palestine, in spite of some recent polite talk by Bush to lift Tony Blair's spirits in Washington a few days ago. Bush, whose re-election was on 'more of the same "will look around for a Hamid Karzai if not an Iyad Allawi among Palestinians? Both Abu Mazen and Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia command little support among Palestinians. According to a recent survey by An-Najah University in Nablus, less than 43% of Palestinians have confidence in Abbas, while Qureia, commands even less support, with just 28 believing he is capable of managing the PA's affairs. From the outset, these "outsiders" antagonised the Israeli-occupied "insiders". Arafat parceled out office among his inner circle of cronies - old, sycophantic, inefficient, corrupt - who depended entirely on him for their survival, as he did on them for the preservation of his autocratic style.

According to Yahia Said, of the London School of Economics, PLA was a 'rudderless' Authority with 'pervasive decay' for which Arafat was 'directly responsible'. 'Arafat elevated symbolism to a full-time job,' said Said. 'We are seeing the end of a generation of politicians who were seen as almost divine.' Yes, Arafat's death signals the end of the era of major historical figures - such as Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad of Syria and Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt - who emerged from the various nationalist, socialist-influenced, post-colonial liberation movements in the Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century.

Their doctrines are now being replaced; it appears by Islamic radical ideologies.  Recent polls show that Palestinians' support for Islamic groups went up from 17 per cent to 35 per cent in last four years while support for Arafat's Fatah movement, slipped from 37 per cent to 28 per cent. The main Islamist party, Hamas, will certainly be a key player in any election - either by actively endorsing a candidate or because the organization can make or break any incumbent by unleashing suicide attacks on Israeli targets. If local elections are held, Hamas is expected to win a number of municipalities, especially in Gaza. They have taken over the dominant, heroic role in the national struggle. As for governance, they have demonstrated their potential in their welfare services, with dedication and competence. It was this kind of service and organization in Turkey, which brought to power its Justice and Development party, with its Islamist roots.

As for PLO, public supports the former head of Fatah's military wing on the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti, but he is in an Israeli prison serving five consecutive life terms for organising attacks on soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories. After the departure of the Symbol, time is now for home grown leadership from the two Intifadas. But with the father of Palestinian identity and nationalism gone, things are likely to get worse than better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russian Dregs of Cold War Confrontation in Afghanistan

Russian Dregs of Cold War Confrontation in Afghanistan

 

A fascinating , sad and even tragic account of the life of Russian soldiers caught and left behind in north Afghanistan after the Soviet forces withdrew in 1985 .A bit like many Hindu and Sikh children lost in Pakistan after the partition of Hindustan in 1947 . Most were converted to Islam.

 

Afghanistan. Punjab, Palestine, Turkey, Romania and many others come in the way of marching armies and have been victims of much turmoil in the past.

 

As for post US troops departure Afghanistan, Prof Paul Kennedy said in early 2010 that

 

 "The Afghanistan-Pakistan entanglement is an issue so vexed and complicated that it would have tested the wisdom of the greatest leaders and strategists of the past. It is not totally fanciful to imagine Augustus, William Pitt the Elder, Bismarck or George Marshall pondering over a map which detailed the lands that stretch from the Bekaa Valley to the Khyber Pass. None of them would have liked what they saw." Look at the distances, the awful topography, the willingness of the other side to accept appalling casualty rates, make a limited war—a finely calibrated war—something of nonsense. Kennedy after talking to those with Afghan field experience feels that US "at least cannot "win" in the sense that knee-jerk congressmen and rabid Murdoch newspapers understand that word, a victory grotesquely skewed by their habit of invoking American football language: smash, overrun, crush, annihilate." 

 

"Pulling out should not be construed as appeasement since US "would not be the first to leave those wretched mountains and their defiant tribes to their own devices; indeed, we would simply join that long list of former occupation armies which eventually thought the better of it and made for the exit. -- A three-time British Prime Minister and four-time Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury once observed, nothing is more fatal to a wise strategy than clinging to the carcasses of dead policies." Yet , Kennedy feels ,"few administrations have the resolve to let go; and frankly, in the case of Afghanistan, a mushy compromise—half-concealed withdrawal—might be the least-worst way to go, at least for now. But not forever."

 

This was written before the Western 'liberation' of Libya into chaos and civil war  , Arabs revolt against US propped up dictators and NATO –GCC supported Sunni uprising against Shia Alwaite dominated ruling elite in Syria .US led West is caught up in Libya and moving down  into  Africa south of Libya but  is face to face in a tug of war with Russia  around and in Syria , with Damascus supported by Hezbollah in Lebanon , Shia regime in Baghdad and mother Shia nation of Iran , with UNSC support from China against  NATO and Sunni states in the region .Beijing would be quite happy with the stand off  as long as it does not explode and affect Iran where its energy interests lie . Moscow is happy seeing the current plight of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan .Let them expend treasure , manpower and political capital to hang on with dignity and unharmed an ;then leave, now scheduled for 2014 !

 

It would appear that in this epochal current twist of  history , US led West is in its last stage of military hardware induced hubris with defence expenditure beyond their means , with US economy reduced to 20% or so of world economy compared to 50% after WWII , and this includes up to 40% financial industry ie jiggery pokey of derivatives and high level corruption accounting , like the Libor manipulation by Barclays Bank , the latest example .On the other hand China, Russia have shown clear determination to strive for peace in the region and elsewhere in order to build their economies for the uplift of their people , something in which India ,Brazil and South Africa are joining ie the BRICS group.

 

Below are some human interest sad and tragic stories of cannon fodder pawns in the imperialist wars and Cold War confrontation .What about US burnt cannon fodder from Iraq and Afghanistan .More than hundred thousand military personnel have been injured maimed and mentally deranged for life . Would US just pack up and leave Afghanistan (and Iraq) after all the destruction and mayhem as from South East Asia! And how!

 

Hidden in Afghanistan: Soviet Veterans of a Previous War Compare and Tremble Time Magazine 9712

http://world.time.com/2012/07/09/hidden-in-afghanistan-soviet-veterans-of-a-previous-war-compare-and-tremble/

 

There are only a few of them left — deserters and MIAs of the huge Soviet Red Army divisions sent in to control Afghanistan. But they still remember how it all ended — and worry that the American war will end the same way

 

By JOHN WENDLE / KUNDUZ  | July 9, 2012 | 28

 

Satyen’s Bos(e)on of Higgs or God’s Particle

Satyen's Bos(e)on of Higgs or God's Particle

 

The 'boson' in the Higgs boson particle, whose investigation and ultimate detection still being celebrated around the world, and rightly so, has been one of the longest and most expensive research projects in the history of science. Boson owes its name to Bengali Professor Satyendra Nath Bose who in 1924, unable to get his paper published on the subject sent it  to Albert Einstein for publication .Einstein liked the paper , translated it into German and got it published in Zeitschrift für Physik  along with his own related paper .Bose had earlier  translated Einstein's Theory of relativity into Bengali .

 

Prof Bose 's paper described a statistical model that led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon and laid the basis for describing the two classes of subatomic particles - bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

 

The discovery will help understand as to what happened just after the Big Bang aka creation of the Universe? Why did matter dominate over anti-matter, when, in laboratory settings, they are created in equal amounts? This is a fascinating world of speculation, hypothesis and theory lubricated mostly by intuitive imagination and higher mathematics and then confirmed by experiments. Further research and work will increase understanding not only about our minor planet earth in our vast galaxy but will also be another step to understand zillions of galaxies some millions of light years away and human matter and perhaps human mind itself . Just see how puny vain human being is.

 

But our fragile planet earth is now threatened by the US led west determined to hang on to their power of destruction ,domination and exploitation of the rest of the world .In India there are many specially English knowing ignorant and educated in their schools and universities , who accept and have internalized the superiority of the uncivilized West , who themselves derived their powers of destruction from the knowledge discovered and developed in the East led by the many civilizations in Mesopotamia , which now lies destroyed , debased and contaminated by nuclear poisons . How would have civilizations been advanced through new technologies without Zero and the Arabic Numerals, which the Arabs call Hindsa ie from Hind ie India!

 

The coverage of the results of this successful experiment at the European Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) by ignorant Indian corporate media, which obediently repeated western wire news stories, showed it obsession with trivialities and celebrities and parroting the west. Little background was given about Bose and his life .West as usual overlooked Bose and flaunted and gushed over the messenger Professor Peter Higgs of the Edinburgh University.

 

And perhaps this was the reason in 1920s when in spite of this path breaking epic formulation by Bose , not only was he denied a Nobel prize but not even conferred  a doctorate , although since then a few Nobel prizes have gone to those who worked on Bose' theory .The fault is not entirely of the ruling British , who wanted to keep the natives down as they still regularly endeavor against India's strategic and vital interests ,but infects most info-challenged and white colour inferiority complexed  Indians ( original sin by fairer colored Brahmins , which the British accentuated and still persists ) Indians continue to exhibit this in  obnoxious ads for creams for crass nouvo riche by Bollywood witless jokers.

 

http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=206

 

More on Satyen Bose & his visit to Cairo in 1963, where the author was then posted, at the end

.

Higgs Bosons or God's Particles Simplified 

 

http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-elusive-higgs-boson-revealed-faq-what-next/20120704.htm

 

The term God particle was coined by American experimental physicist and Physics Nobel winner Leon Lederman in his popular science book on particle physics: 

The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

 

According to Higgs, it wasn't Lederman's choice to call it the god particle: "He wanted to refer to it as that 'goddamn particle' and his editor wouldn't let him."

 

Why chase it?

 

Simply put, it answers the question: How does nature decide whether or not to assign mass to particles?

 

How did the idea of tracing the God particle originate?

The Higgs mechanism, which gives mass to vector bosons, was theorized in August 1964 by François Englert and Robert Brout ("boson scalaire"), in October of the same year by Peter Higgs, working from the ideas of Philip Anderson, and independently by G S Guralnik, C R Hagen, and T W B Kibble who worked out the results by the spring of 1963. 

The three papers written by Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Higgs, Brout, and Englert were each recognized as milestone papers by Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration. 

Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were the first to apply the Higgs mechanism to the electroweak symmetry breaking. The electroweak theory predicts a neutral particle whose mass is not far from that of the W and Z bosons

 

What questions are being answered by this Endeavour?

 

Click to comprehend BIG BANG expansion; 13.7 billion years (I hope the URL can be used to view the fascinating Big Bang Expansion).

 

Finally how little we know of our universe and ourselves but are determined and far advanced into bringing everything to an early explosive end triggered say by West's current and unreasonable and illegal demands on Iran and elsewhere.)

 

http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-elusive-higgs-boson-revealed-faq-what-next/20120704.htm 

 

By exploring the world of infinitely small particles, physicists hope to provide answers to the origin and fate of our universe. 

What happened just after the Big Bang? Why did matter dominate over anti-matter when, in laboratory settings, they are created in equal amounts? 

What would you say if you found out we do not live in a four-dimensional world (three dimensions of space and one of time), but rather one containing extra hidden dimensions? 

There are enough strange, puzzling questions and even stranger possible answers to blow your mind!

 

Does Higgs boson impact the current description we use for the universe?

The Higgs boson will complete our description of the visible matter in the universe, and of the fundamental processes governing the Big Bang since it was a trillionth of a second old. 

The Higgs boson may have played a role in generating the matter in the universe, and may be linked to dark matter. It may even provide a clue how the universe inflated to its present size. 

On the other hand, the Higgs boson is a very different particle from the others we know, and poses almost as many questions as it answers. For example, what determines the mass of the Higgs boson and the density of dark energy? According to conventional ideas, both should be much larger than their observed values. The quest continues.

 

Has Boson been proved!

 

Built in a tunnel 100 meters (325 feet) below ground at the European Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) straddling the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom-smasher, was designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together replicating conditions which prevailed in split-seconds after the "Big Bang" that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

 

Conceptualized around a quarter century back, approved for construction in the mid-1990s and over a decade in the making, this technological marvel of a machine accelerated counter rotating beams of protons in two steel pipes 27 kilometers in circumference. 

 

Engineers threw the switch to start up the LHC in September 2008 to global fanfare. All went well until it had to be shut down again 36 hours later. The incident -- which led to a helium leak into the tunnel housing the superconductor ring -- is thought to have been caused when a faulty electrical wire between two magnets was melted by the high current passing through it. 

Repairs and a new safety system cost them a bomb. The LHC was restarted in November 2009 and became the most powerful particle accelerator in the world later that month.

 

In December 2010, LHC scientists revealed they had caught a first tantalizing glimpse of the particle. Since the initial excitement the scientists sifted through vast quantities of data from innumerable high energy collisions in an effort to reduce the chances of being wrong.

How was the data from LHC analyzed?

 

A theoretical model was used to predict what phenomena and particles might be seen, and experimental physicists estimated what their detector response would be to such events, using complex simulation methods. 

 

They did this first so that they could predict the various expected types of events that will come out of the LHC. These simulated events looked just like the events collected in the detectors, except they are generated using all our knowledge of what can be produced when protons collide in the LHC.

 

Then the experimentalists determined a series of criteria for selecting new physics, partly defined using simulations. The selection criteria were designed for the sole purpose of spotting a needle in a field full of haystacks. 

For this, physicists studied in detail the characteristics of possible interesting events (such as the Higgs boson), comparing these characteristics with those of known processes. 

At this stage, the name of the game was to isolate the signal from all other types of events, which physicists referred to as background. Most of the time, the background constitutes the bulk of all collected events.

 

The final step was to compare the simulations of the known processes that survive the selection criteria to the collected data set. In some cases, comparison with simulations might not be necessary, and physicists may just need to subtract potential Higgs signals from the background directly inferred from the actual data.

 

What next?

 

The data recorded so far in 2012 have not been completely analyzed, and the LHC is still taking data. Further analysis is needed and ongoing. 

Despite the strong evidence for its existence, the properties of the Higgs boson need to be explored and understood. As the particle is identified and studied more completely, the physics models will have to be updated.

But doesn't it mean that the July 4 revelation is not exactly a discovery?

 

The results presented on July 4 have been labeled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. A more complete picture of Wednesday's observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data. 

The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. 

Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic? 

The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4 percent of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96 percent of the universe that remains obscure.

 

 Bosons of Satyendra Nath Bose

 

In particle physics, Boson is a subatomic particle  that is governed by Bose-Einstein statistics. Bosons include mesons (e.g., pions and kaons), nuclei of even mass number (e.g., helium-4), and the particles required to embody the fields of quantum field theory (e.g., photons and gluons). Bosons differ significantly from a group of subatomic particles known as fermions in that there is no limit to the number that can occupy the same quantum state. 

 

Bose wrote a short article called Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta taking for the  first time the position that the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant.

 

Bose 's paper deriving Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics and using a novel way of counting states with identical particles was  seminal in creating the very important field of quantum statistics. Albert Einstein to whom this article was sent in Germany, recognizing the importance of the paper, translated it into German himself and submitted it on behalf of Bose to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik , which was published in 1924 along with his paper supporting Bose's paper.

 

This theory is now called Bose–Einstein statistics and laid the foundation of quantum statistics, as acknowledged by Einstein and Dirac. Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.

 

Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose–Einstein statistics and Bose–Einstein condensate—the latest being the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given for advancing the theory of Bose–Einstein condensates—Bose himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize. The noted Indian physicist Jayant Narlikar observed that it was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and could be considered in the Nobel Prize class. 

 

Meeting with Satyendra Nath Bose

 

As an Arabic language trainee and later as Asst Press Attaché at the Indian Embassy in Cairo in early 1960s , airport duties to handle visiting VIPs and delegations and taking them around for meetings and museums etc could be quite often a very pleasant and educationally a rewarding experience .

 

During the heyday of close and very friendly relations between India and Egypt which along with Yugoslavia, Indonesia and others were the leaders of the non-aligned movement, the author met with Satyendra Nath Bose, a member of a visiting scientific delegation from India. Bose was not the leader of the delegation but this nearly seventy year old gangly and casually dressed inquisitive scientist Satyen Bose was the one whom his counterpart Egyptian scientists paid great attention and respect .It was said that he should have been awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics.

 

Bose and later Homi J Bhaba, another great scientist were also curious and very well informed about Egypt's history and culture unlike the dry and morose Indian ambassador .

 

Bhaba looking at the massive Pharaonic sculptors and millions of huge stones brought to build the Giza Pyramids near Cairo (oldest built around 2560 BC) from Aswan, 600 miles away, observed that to bring them the ancient Egyptians perhaps tied the boats over the stones and then floated them down the river Nile, to carry them .It can be thus said that the Egyptians discovered much earlier the Archimedes' principle. It is a law of physics stating that the upward force (buoyancy) exerted on a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the amount of fluid the body displaces. In other words, an immersed object is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it actually displaces. Archimedes' principle is an important and underlying concept in the field of fluid mechanics. This principle is named after its discoverer, Archimedes of Syracuse (287 BC – c. 212 BC) 

 

Eureka!

 

^{K Gajendra Singh. ( July, 2012 ) Mayur Vihar, Delhi}