by Marc Cooper

For more than a decade, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega was in the nightmares of U.S. policymakers. As leader of the Sandinista revolution of 1979, and then as president of Nicaragua, he was a lightning rod for Washington's fears of hemispheric subversion and anti-American rebellion. The Reagan and Bush administrations spent hundreds of millions of dollars--to finance a "Contra" war and various campaigns of political destabilization--to rid Nicaragua of Ortega and his Marxist Sandinistas. In 1990, the U.S. won when Ortega was voted out of office and replaced by pro-American rivals. But in presidential elections taking place today in Nicaragua, the same Ortega, now 55, has an even chance of being voted back into power.

Ortega's return to prominence--and possibly to the presidency--is more than an irony of history. It is also a cautionary tale about the type of nation-building the U.S. may intend for Afghanistan.

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by Chandra Muzaffar

KUALA LUMPUR - A dangerous idea is gaining currency in the U.S. administration and among a significant segment of the American public: If a person does not support the U.S.-led bombing, it means that he or she backs Osama bin Laden and the Qaida network.

This simplistic approach owes a great deal to the assertion by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 tragedy that governments and peoples the world over have to choose. They are either with his government or with the terrorists who slaughtered the thousands of innocent people in New York and Washington.

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by Robert Kuttner

AS THE TWO-MONTH anniversary of the World Trade Center attack approaches, the Bush administration faces rougher going on three key fronts - domestic politics, economic and homeland security, and the war itself.

Politics. Though the commander-in-chief's personal approval rating remains around 90 percent, Democrats are poised to pick up two governorships, in moderate New Jersey and Virginia, as well as the mayor of New York. These contests are being decided by local issues. In both governor's races, the Republican is in trouble for having run too far to the right.

If the Democrats do make these gains, pragmatic Republican strategists will caution the president to distance himself from the party's right wing, which has pretty much called the tune on everything from tax policy to privatization to religious involvement in public services. This will fracture the GOP.

Despite Bush's narrow win in the Electoral College, even before Sept. 11 public opinion was more sympathetic to the Democratic position on a broad range of domestic issues. Since then, public solutions have come emphatically back into fashion.

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by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas — I don't see how we can call the House "economic stimulus" package anything but war-profiteering. The bill is a disgrace, and the usual suspects from Texas — Tom Delay and Dick Armey — hold large responsibility for it.

What happened here, while we were all being exposed to anthrax-scare 24-7, is that corporate hitchhikers, who got left out of the earlier tax-cut package in favor of rich people, moved right in for the kill in the name of patriotism and economic stimulus.

The bill provides big tax cuts for big, profitable corporations — IBM, General Motors and General Electric get a total of $3.27 billion in immediate tax rebate checks. A total of $25 billion in immediate tax rebates goes to large, profitable corporations, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. That's twice as much instant rebates to profitable corporations as the House, by two votes, decided to give the 37 million low-income families who didn't qualify for the original tax rebate.

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by Marty Jezer

The bombing of Afghanistan is entering its fourth week. What began as an attempt to destroy the country’s air defense and military infrastructure in anticipation of direct attacks on bin Laden’s mountain lair has turned into an attempt to destroy the Taliban regime. What was supposed to be a new kind of war, to attack and destroy a terrorist network that knows no national bounds, has turned into the same old strategic bombing we know from previous wars. Carpet bombing, cluster bombs, one-thousand pound bombs that hit houses, health clinics, food warehouses and other civilian targets. The Afghan people, who have not been implicated in any terrorist crime, are the ones who are hurting.

Even before the September 11 attack, over five million people were on the edge of starvation in Afghanistan, surviving only because of international aid. The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and other international humanitarian organizations were in Afghanistan working desperately to truck in food before winter closed the roads.

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