LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES RE KASHMIR

Your op-ed presents a biased picture of history as it recommends the UN get involved. The history is that at the time of independence in 1947, Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu. Under the British administration of the partition, princely states could opt to join India or Pakistan. As the Hindu ruler demurred, forces from Pakistan 'surged into Kashmir', and took by force what is now called POK - Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir. This illegal seizure induced Kashmir's ruler to sign to join India. That obviously included the portion seized by Pakistanis. The Indian Army was capable of repulsing this invasion and reclaiming by force what is now POK. But in view of Gandhi's beliefs on non-violence, and that India and Pakistan were 2 limbs of the same body, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (himself a Kashmiri Pandit) ordered the army to desist. A line of control developed (LOC). Arguably, the Indian army can still take POK, although now the situation is far more calamitous, with nuclear weapons on both sides. Having grabbed a third or more of Kashmir by force, Pakistan never stopped trying to seize the rest by force. Wars in 1967, 1971, and 1999 followed. Pakistan's own massive crimes against what was East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) include the murder of millions using weapons supplied illegally by the US via Iran's SAVAK and Saudi Arabia. This led to Bangladesh's independence as India had no choice but to intervene as millions of East Pakistani refugees flowed into West Bengal. This was a by-product of the 1971 war. Having failed to grab Kashmir though open wars, Pakistan switched to supporting terrorist acts both in India-controlled Kashmir (ICK) and in India. The history of murderous bombings in Indian cities is well established, including with what is called 26/11 in India - the attacks on the Taj and Sheraton hotels and the train station formerly called Victoria terminus, in Mumbai. In all of this of course, there was a direct line to the fanatic jihadists installed in Afghanistan, trained under ISI auspices, by the CIA, to oust the USSR, which (if Zbigniew Breszinski is to be believed) was lured in by an American coup in Kabul (removing a Soviet-friendly government) to 'give the Soviets their own Vietnam'. So this is a more complete history than what you have written. Then there is the case that Pakistan itself has committed human rights abuses in POK. The hysterics of PM Imran Khan ever since India moved to integrate ICK into the Indian federation, show clearly the continued lust for territory of Pakistan. The claim on Kashmir by Pakistan is based on the fact that a majority of ICK residents are Muslim. That does not amount to a legitimate argument, as India has more Muslims than all of Pakistan. And Pakistan's history of treating Muslims who moved there from India during partition is a poor one - they are called 'mohajirs' (refugees) - decades after the partition, and subjected to open discrimination. All things considered, Pakistan does not have any legal rights to the Kashmir that has been part of India since 1947.

FALSE FLAG OP IN THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ

The US, joined by its usual ally the UK, and invisibly by its partner Israelin all anti-Iran matters, has immediately accused Iran of attacking 2 tankers in the Hormuz Straits off the coast of Iran, where it had already sent an aircraft carrier. The immediacy of such accusations, backed by 'intel', should be viewed with great skepticism. The US has a history of such 'false-flag' operations, including Operation Northwoods (which was not carried out but replaced with other actions against Cuba), the Gulf of Tonkin incident with which it gave itself the pretext to attack North Vietnam (after already having drenched South Vietnam with Agent Orange), and more recently the Weapons of Mass Deception used to attack Iraq in 2003, following 9/11 which half-a-dozen books by Professor David Ray Griffin and others including Christopher Bollyn allege was unquestionably an 'inside job'; the 'incontrovertible' evidence of which has been dismissed as conspiracy theory, while the official US government theory that 19 Arabs successfully conspired to smash the security systems of the world's sole superpower blankets any open discussion of the 'real' facts. The ultra-right wing neo-cons of the W. Bush administration had discussed in their long-planned 'Project for a New American Century' or PNAC, the need for a 'catalyzing event', a 'New Pearl Harbour', to accelerate their plans to re-arrange the oil-rich Middle East, consonantly with the Israeli 'Oded Yinon' plan to create a 'Greater Israel' comprising chunks of smashed Muslim countries, that supposedly existed thousands of years ago according to the Old Testament. Iran, being the strongest of the ME countries, was the last target on the list, and its invasion has been delayed by the insurgency in Iraq which has cost the US trillions of dollars, which made 'boots on the ground' invasions of Libya and Syria (also abetted by Russia) impractical. That the US position is loaded with duplicity is also demonstrated by the fact that under Trump the US has broken a US-negotiated deal with broad international support including Europe and Russia, by which Iran was curtailing its nuclear activities in exchange for easing of US-imposed sanctions. Iran accepted this deal notwithstanding the fact that Israel is allowed to keep more than 100 nuclear weapons with not a word of Western protest, but rather massive support of every kind - financial, diplomatic, technological and military - by the US. The best option for Iran, and the most logical one, is to re-commence nuclear development. Its leaders have been painted as reactionary and unstable and impossible to trust with a nuclear bomb by the US and Israel for the plain and obvious reason that a bomb would neutralize much of US-Israeli threats and plans against Iran. Like the smaller and weaker North Korea, Iran would acquire a far more effective 'defense' against its enemies. A slightly older review of history, brazenly suppressed by Western media, is that Iran was the US's #1 ally in the ME between 1953 and 1979. 1953 was when the US and UK supported a coup d'etat in Iran, toppling a democrat and installing a puppet dictator (the Shah) who terrorized, tortured and killed thousands of Iranians, while having breakfasts flown in from Paris on the Concorde as his wife took baths in tubs of milk, while the population suffered as the pitiful oil revenues went to buying US weapons. Kissinger used his considerable influence to pressure US universities including MIT, to accept Iranians into nuclear engineering programs. But all that changed when the Iranians kicked out the Shah in 1979, when Iran went overnight from being US ally # 1 in the region to US enemy # 1. A war with Iran will continue the genocide of millions of Middle-Eastern Muslims, by an increasingly stretched and desperate superpower, anxious to keep its hands on the throttle.