"No world leader" is going to the Beijing Olympics? The world is a-changing. A handful of US or Europeans bigshots do not make up the "world."

Besides, when those high-&-mighty dispensaries of moral lectures pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, tell their Israeli friends to lay off, and quit running for corporate interests, maybe they'd be a bit more credible. A bit more only, for even if they stop now, there would still be the past to settle accounts over.

Darfur? The US is arming the southern rebels, hoping one day to grab the oilfields in southern Sudan. Somebody tell newborn "anti-imperialists" Mia Farrow or George Clooney? Germany's giving (not selliing) nuclear-capable subs to Israel. Britain wants corporate giants to grab hold of raw material and water supplies in southern Africa (hence the Mugabe issue). France has troops posted all over French-speaking Africa to prop up friendly leaders there. It's also setting up a military base in Dubai.

China? Only running by standard capitalist rules, like all the others, and paradoxically helping drive sub-Saharan Africa's 5-6 percent annual average growth rates. "World leaders" from the oh-how-sweet Western countries never did.

Salil Sarkar

Paris, France

Hypocrisy is a mother of all the world's evil.

No world leader should come to Being for the Olympic Games, not because of Chinese occupation of Tibet but as punishment for the criminally bad jobs they have been doing.

For sixty years the world leaders have failed to solve the Palestinian problem.

For sixty years the leaders of USA, Great Britain, France and Germany failed to prevent and actually facilitated the colossal infringement of fundamental human rights (stealing of the private land and property, prevention of the refugees to return to their homes, political, diplomatic and military protection of the occupying force, apartheid-like treatment of people of different religion (people from thousands of miles away were allowed to move to certain territory while the original inhabitants were forcefully prevented from doing the same either by being imprisoned or by being killed for equal attempts).

Now, if the world leaders believed that evil wouldn’t create more evil, that killings wouldn’t result in more killings and that hatred wouldn’t inflame more hatred (what is the direct result of the not solving the problems promptly and efficiently), then they are the most stupid and uneducated people in the world.

The same world leaders are proud today that their occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq or a pressure on Mr. Abas has resulted in Afghan-on-Afghan, Sunni-on-Sunni, Shiite-on-Shiite, Palestinian-on-Palestinian civil wars. The same leaders are pressuring and demanding General Musharaf to launch the same kind of madness in Pakistan.

Luckily, the new, democratically elected Pakistani government categorically rejected such a prodding from the Western leaders.

If any problem is left unsolved, it is going to grow and metastasize into something far worse.

It means that the situation in the 1970s was far better than it is today and that we will remember the 2000s as the good old days looking back from the 2030s unless the world leaders solve the problems that are very easy to solve right here, right now.

From this perspective, any nation that let its leaders attend the Olympic Games in Beijing or let its leaders take a single day of vacation or a single day off unless they solve decades-old problems first is deeply masochistic and likes the wars, killings, hardships and sufferings.

The most important factor in dealing with a forest fire is to start acting immediately and take no breaks until a problem is extinguished.

Only the nations that have no domestic or international problems should let their leaders go to Beijing.

We should expect from our leaders far more personal sacrifices than from our soldiers we ship out so easy into the bloody wars.

Sending the troops into a quagmire and the leaders to the Olympic Games is an ultimate hypocrisy.

Kenan Porobic

Charlotte, NC