South African President Nelson Mandela has criticized U.S. policy on Iraq and says the U.S. has set itself up as a global police force. During a television interview last Sunday, he said it was wrong for the U.S. to have so many representatives on the weapons inspection team, as there are a number of qualified people in other countries with the necessary qualifications for seeking out and dismantling stockpiles of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Mandela called the Iraqi conflict a regional dispute, and said that South Africa would leave it to Arab nations and the U.N. to work out a resolution to the crisis--also implying that the U.S. and Great Britain should just butt out, too.

In other related developments, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson flew to China last week, but failed to enlist the support of the Chinese government for a U.S. bombing campaign. Various Russian officials have continued to vociferously oppose the use of force.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., opinion polls show that the U.S. public's support for Clinton is a mile wide and an inch deep. He has the highest approval rating of his tenure in office, yet most people say they like his "management style," while far fewer admire him as a human being. Most give him high marks for "balancing the budget" and creating a budget surplus (never mind that this is mostly a publicity gimmick--the deficit still exists, and with a growing world financial crisis, the "projected" surplus may never materialize). This has led media pundits to speculate that Americans now cynically expect their president to be "an effective CEO," but not a role model of ethical behavior. Of course, pundits didn't consider the other explanation: that the U.S. public is simply ignoring the whole, boring, LewinskyGate drama.

National Public Radio, that luminous beacon of news, continues to produce gems of misinformation. Last week, Daniel Schorr castigated Russian politicians for speaking out against a U.S. bombing of Iraq; he claimed that most of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons materials originally came from Russia. How quickly he forgets: most of the materials came from U.S. and European corporations, and were purchased with funds made available to Iraq by U.S. and European banks.

If only Daniel Schorr and the rest of the U.S. media would do a little investigative research, they could help us to understand why Russia is so alarmed at the U.S. military build-up in the Persian Gulf. Instead, U.S. newspapers have reported Boris Yeltsin's remarks about nuclear weapons in a way that has made Yeltsin look as if he suffering from Alzheimer's. But the unreported facts put Yeltsin's concerns in a more realistic light. Here's a long quote from an article by Felicity Arbuthnot, which was released by Scientists for Global Responsibility:

On November 15, 1995, at a meeting of the Nuclear Weapons Council Standing Safety Committee in the U.S., a request was made to accelerate the completion date of the B61-11 to December 1996. The B61-11 is the nuclear version of the deep-penetrating bomb, destroying its intended target underground by means of a nuclear explosion. It was developed and deployed without congressional approval, despite assurances that no new nuclear weapons were being developed in the U.S.