The US must now redraw Israel's 'road map' to peace
The Sharon government has offered revenge, but no resolution
Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, November 1, 2002
It is an indication of how weirdly oblique Israeli politics can be that the Labour party could only raise the profoundly moral issue of the settlements by staging a row about what they are costing the government.
That the settlements are the cause of a war which takes lives every day of the week somehow takes second place to the fact that they are burning a hole in the pockets of taxpayers.
Army braces for 'primordial combat'
Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, October 31, 2002
Recent experimentation by the Marine Corps has shown that battlefield casualties exceed 30 percent in simulated urban operations involving troops who receive, on average, only about two weeks of urban combat training per year, said retired Marine Col. Randy Gangle, an official at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.
Senior Iraqi officials have already said they would try to lure U.S. forces into Baghdad, acknowledging that the Persian Gulf War in 1991 taught them the folly of fighting in the desert against superior American armor and air power. Bluffing or not, the Iraqis understand that the U.S. military’s overwhelming technological advantages are to some extent nullified in cities, where buildings shelter enemy forces from reconnaissance aircraft and satellites and the presence of civilians makes the use of even the smartest bombs infinitely more difficult.
The terrorist next door?
Rick Holmes, Milford Daily News, October 27, 2002
He lived upstairs, with his wife and daughter, in a house in south Framingham. He was an engineer, working at The Mathworks, a software company on Rte. 9. His wife, who was working on her doctorate, was "an absolute sweetheart," recalls Ginny Marino, who lives downstairs.
They were from Canada, and he often brought Marino maple sugar or other treats from his trips north. Early last year they moved back to Ottawa. Last month they took a family trip to Tunisia. On his way back to Canada, while waiting for a connecting flight to Montreal, the husband was grabbed, apparently by agents of the U.S. government. After weeks of mystery, when neither his wife nor Canadian officials knew where he was, he was found - locked up in a Syrian prison.
See also Canadians warned about visiting US
Making a killing: The business of war
The Center for Public Integrity, October 28, 2002
At least 90 companies that provide services normally performed by national military forces – but without the same degree of public oversight – have operated in 110 countries worldwide, providing everything from military training, logistics, and even engaging in armed combat. Amid the global military downsizing and the increasing number of small conflicts that followed the end of the Cold War, governments have turned increasingly to these private military companies to intervene on their behalf around the globe, a new investigation by the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found.
CIA concerned US war on terror is missing root causes
Agence France Presse, October 29, 2002
The US Central Intelligence Agency has warned that US counterterrorist operations around the world may not eliminate the threat of future attacks because they fail to address the root causes of terrorism, according to new documents.
In an unusual display of candor, the CIA pointed out that continued instability in Afghanistan, challenges facing Saudi rulers and the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict were likely to fuel radicalism in the Muslim world.
Saddam safe on home front, CIA says
Bill Gertz, Washington Times, October 29, 2002
Saddam Hussein's hold on power in Iraq remains strong and his military forces can defeat any internal opposition, according to a CIA analysis.
"Saddam maintains a vise grip on the levers of power through a pervasive intelligence and security apparatus and even his reduced military force remains capable of defeating more poorly armed internal opposition groups," the CIA stated in written answers to questions posed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a February annual threat briefing.
France is defending global order
Jacques Chirac is not concerned with Iraq, but US unilateralism
Jacques Amalric, The Guardian, October 31, 2002
The struggle between the French and American ambassadors that has been going on for the past two weeks in the corridors of the United Nations does not, of course, mean that Mr Chirac has suddenly rekindled his former love affair with Iraq, which dates back to the early 1970s, and that he is trying by every means available to save Saddam's skin.
No, what the present incumbent of the Elysée palace is defending is an international order - or an international disorder, depending on your point of view - that was born after the collapse of the Soviet Union and is threatened today by the new US doctrine of preventive unilateral intervention.
Anti-war protesters plan day of civil disobedience
Matthew Tempest, The Guardian, October 31, 2002
Thousands of people were today expected to take part in a series of demonstrations up and down Britain to protest against military action on Iraq.
The Stop the War umbrella group was hoping for "the largest protest of direct action and disobedience there has been in Britain for decades", with mini-protests, sit-downs and occupations "from Beccles to Bournemouth, Canterbury to Aberdeen".
The people must protest
Paul Foot, The Guardian, October 30, 2002
Forty years ago, I sat down proudly in Trafalgar Square alongside Bertrand Russell and thousands of others in protest against Britain's weapons of mass destruction. We were all breaking the law.
There was a lot of civil disobedience at that time, organised by the Committee of 100. The committee's arguments were founded in the horrific nature of nuclear weapons and the urgency of alerting the government to widespread public disquiet about them. The square was cleared by police in the early morning and the committee eventually vanished.
Now, however, 40 years on, a monstrous war looms in the Middle East for which there is not the slightest justification. Every single charge against Saddam Hussein - that he has nuclear weapons, repeatedly breaks international law by invading his neighbours, and is a constant threat to peace in the region - applies tenfold to the client state of the United States in the region, Israel.
The military-industrial complex
James Fallows, Foreign Policy, November, 2002
Has U.S. politics shifted to the right? The domestic records of two 20th-century Republican presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, remove any doubt. Nixon took stands that would make him an isolated leftist among modern Democrats. He enforced (albeit grudgingly) school busing and racial-quota hiring plans, established the Environmental Protection Agency, redirected federal funds to state and municipal welfare programs, and tried to enact a "guaranteed annual income." Eisenhower sent troops to make sure schools were integrated and enacted public-works programs on a scale not seen since his time: For transportation, the interstate highways. For public health, the polio-vaccine campaign. For education and science, the flow of federal funds to local schools after Sputnik. The only Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a comparably liberal record of accomplishment is Lyndon Johnson, with Medicare and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Labour walkout shatters Israeli coalition
Justin Huggler, The Independent, October 31, 2002
Israel's coalition government collapsed yesterday when Ariel Sharon's main Labour party partners resigned, leaving the country in political confusion even as an American war on Iraq loomed and amid the Palestinian intifada.
Mr Sharon faces a choice between calling early elections or trying to struggle on with the support of the hard right, which would give him a tiny majority.
An alliance with the hard right would be bad news for the little that is left of the peace process because its members are even more opposed to compromise with the Palestinians than Mr Sharon. There could be months of uncertainty ahead.
Hawks trot out World War II to justify Iraq
Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service, October 25, 2002
In 1966, two years after Congress approved the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that authorised U.S. escalation in the Vietnam War, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, deplored both the decision and the debate surrounding it.
''We Americans,'' he writes in his classic critique of U.S. policy, The Arrogance of Power, ''are severely, if not uniquely afflicted with a habit of policy-making by analogy: North Vietnam's involvement in South Vietnam, for example, is equated with Hitler's invasion of Poland and a parley with the Viet Cong would represent 'another Munich'.''
''The treatment of slight and superficial resemblances as if they were full-blooded analogies - as instances, as it were, of history 'repeating itself' - is a substitute for thinking and a misuse of history,'' he warned.
Fulbright, of course, was completely vindicated in his argument that Ho Chi Minh was neither the equivalent of Adolf Hitler; nor was he the puppet of an expansionist international communist movement orchestrated by Moscow and/or Beijing, as the hawks of the 1960s insisted. Nonetheless, the mis-analogy led directly to the loss of more than 50,000 U.S. lives, not to mention an estimated two million Vietnamese.
Division, danger and diversion
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., The Nation, October 27, 2002
This is the text of the speech given by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., at the anti-war rally in Washington, DC, on Saturday, October 26.
War crimes debate in Israel heats up again
Jim Lobe, OneWorld, October 30, 2002
A three-month-old controversy in Israel over a peace group's efforts to collect evidence of alleged war crimes committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against Palestinians intensified Tuesday when a senior member of the ruling Likud Party submitted a bill in Israel's parliament that would make it a crime for any Israeli citizen to provide assistance, documents or information to the new International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague.
To some, real threat is U.S.
Many members of the U.N. Security Council see American bullying, not Iraqi defiance, as the greater risk to geopolitical stability
Maggie Farley and Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2002
For President Bush, this month's debate in the U.N. Security Council is all about Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. But for France, Russia and other countries, the issue isn't just the Iraqi threat—it's the U.S. threat, too.
The United States says it is providing leadership, lighting a fire under a Security Council that has failed for years to enforce its own mandates on Iraq. President Saddam Hussein's flagrant defiance has made the world body look "foolish," Bush said Monday during a campaign stop in Denver. "Our message from America is this: If the United Nations does not have the will or the courage to disarm Saddam Hussein ... the United States will lead a coalition and disarm Saddam Hussein."
But to many members of the Security Council, it appears as if the United States is using its strength not to lead, but to bully. These ambassadors fear that if Washington sidesteps the U.N. to attack Iraq, the result will be irreparable damage to the institution that should be at the center of international affairs, not on the margins.
Picking olives and removing roadblocks as acts of resistance:
An interview with Ghassan Andoni
Ida Audeh, Counterpunch, October 28, 2002
It is olive picking season in Palestine, and so far about 120 activists from almost a dozen countries - the US, England, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Italy - have responded to an appeal by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and arrived to help Palestinians harvest their groves. But the season is not getting off to a good start. Reports from Jayous (near Qalqilya), Aqraba, Inbus, and Awartha and Beit Furik (in the Nablus district) tell of beatings and shootings of Palestinians by the Israeli settlers and at least one shooting death, that of Hani Yousef, a 22-year-old Palestinian from Aqraba. In some instances, the settlers harvest the olives while Palestinians watch, helplessly. The Israeli army does nothing to prevent this. Since October 2000, Israeli soldiers and settlers have bulldozed, uprooted, or set ablaze about 200,000 Palestinian olive trees, at a cost to Palestinian farmers of about $10 million.
Daniel Ellsberg's Iraq scenario
Ahmad Faruqui, Daily Times, October 29, 2002
In recent speeches and interviews, Ellsberg paints a very grim future about the coming war with Iraq. Recalling the "Nuclear Posture Review" that was leaked to the Los Angeles Times earlier in the year, he says that "Israeli and US tactical nuclear weapons could very plausibly be launched against Iraq within months," if Saddam Hussein launches short-range missiles armed with chemical warheads against invading American troops or against Israel. Both countries have warned that such an act would lead to the "annihilation" of Iraq and to the "destruction" of its society. Ellsberg opines that the American people should not think that these are just threats that are meant to deter Saddam. They are statements about Washington's future intentions.
What is the likelihood that Saddam would use his biological and chemical weapons against the US armed forces? CIA chief George Tenet provided a letter to the House and Senate committees on intelligence prior to the Congressional vote on Iraq. Tenet wrote that his Agency had concluded that Baghdad "appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [Chemical and Biological Weapons] against the United States." The Agency also had determined, "Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions." Tenet argued, "Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." In other words, Saddam is not likely in the near future to hit the United States or share his weapons with Al Qaeda or other anti-American terrorists, unless the United States assaults Iraq. This is hardly the picture the President is sharing with the American public.
Cost of Iraq war could total $1,600 billion, prof says
Elana Bildner, Yale Daily News, October 29, 2002
William Nordhaus hears the "drums of war" beating as the United States debates an attack on Iraq, but he would rather be listening to another sound: that of the Bush administration's number-punching as it computes the costs of such a conflict.
In a lecture Monday before an overflow crowd at Luce Hall, Nordhaus, a Sterling Professor of Economics, noted the lack of public discussion concerning economic consequences of war in Iraq. To fill this gap, he proposed his own estimate of these costs, which he said could total "$1,600 billion" in a worst-case scenario.
Influencing the debate on Iraq
When defense expert speaks out on policy, Washington listens
Johanna Neuman, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2002
When he was assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, adversaries called Perle the Prince of Darkness for his fierce resistance to arms-control treaties with the Soviets. Now he is often described as the administration's leading hawk on Iraq. As chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a panel of leading Republican foreign-policy thinkers who advise the secretary of defense, his sway inside government circles is considerable. He speaks to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld regularly. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is a friend.
But it is his role outside the government -- from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute -- that affords Perle the luxury of moral outrage. While liberals look for accommodation with European allies before taking action against Iraq, Perle offers that it would be nice if antiwar German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would resign. When some military experts urge time for weapon inspections to work, Perle charges appeasement, invoking the specter of Britain's Neville Chamberlain underestimating the menace of Adolf Hitler.
Scenes from the rubble
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, October 25, 2002
Until this week, the rubble that remained in the wake of the Israel Defense Forces' incursion half a year ago had been left untouched. Now the Jenin refugee camp has begun to clear away the rubble. For half a year the ruins lay in place, as a monument to what happened. But no one took any interest. The camp, which for a moment captured the world's attention, has been utterly forgotten and has sunk back into its routine of a life of unemployment and death.
The residents left the heaps of rubble intact in the hope that someone would remember them and the ruins of their lives. Now, having despaired of that, they have decided to get rid of the rubble. A Palestinian bulldozer cleared away the remains of houses this week. Two weeks ago, the IDF published its full report of the events in the camp, which contained not a word about the vast destruction wrought by the soldiers - as though the army had nothing do with the present situation. The upshot is that the hundreds of newly homeless people have remained totally destitute, refugees for the second or third time, trying somehow to rehabilitate their lives in rented apartments, while the next crop of terrorists is undoubtedly springing up among the smashed houses.
Appeals court again hears case of American held without charges or counsel
Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, October 29, 2002
In nearly two hours of oral arguments here, the government said today that the Bush administration had the authority to hold a United States citizen caught in the Afghan battle for an unlimited period without charging him with anything or giving him access to a lawyer.
But the public defender, Frank W. Dunham Jr., said that finding such detentions lawful would set a precedent that would impinge on the civil liberties of all Americans.
The case is a potentially landmark clash between the powers of a president in wartime and the constitutional protections of due process for American citizens. It appears to be the first case in modern American law in which a citizen has been detained without being charged and without being given access to a lawyer. As such, it seems destined for the United States Supreme Court.
Hady Hassan Omar's detention
Matthew Brzezinski, New York Times, October 27, 2002
Since his arrest on Sept. 12, 2001, Omar had been fighting a losing battle. No one would believe that he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He passed polygraph tests, but the F.B.I. still seemed convinced that he was linked to Al Qaeda. The guards in the isolation wing of Pollock maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana kept telling him that under new antiterror measures, he could sit in jail forever. He wrote the attorney general. He even went on several hunger strikes. But the corrections officers just threatened to strap him to a gurney and force-feed him through a tube up his nose.
Omar was running out of the little hope he had left. His only solace now was prayer. He became convinced that he would never leave this place. His baby daughter, Jasmine, would take her first steps, utter her first words and grow up without him. If he could not be with her on her first birthday in December, he decided, life was not worth living.
U.S. knew about nuclear link between N. Korea, Pakistan
Dan Stober and Daniel Sneider, San Jose Mercury News, October 24, 2002
Despite its startling announcement a week ago, the Bush administration had detailed knowledge for more than a year about North Korea's program to covertly make uranium fuel for an atom bomb, the Mercury News has learned.
North Korea's admission that the country's secretive, authoritarian government was pursuing a new route to nuclear weapons sparked international alarm last week. But interviews with experts and former Clinton administration officials, and a review of little-noticed statements by Bush officials, raise questions about why the administration waited so long to deal with this threat, now the subject of intense diplomatic efforts.
In addition, the administration had strong evidence, dating back to the Clinton presidency, that North Korea got help from Pakistan's top nuclear weapons scientist.
The Pakistanis appear to have given nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for long-range ballistic missiles that could reach deep into the territory of its traditional foe, India. Bush administration officials pointed a finger at this in early June 2001, at a time when they were courting India. But since Sept. 11, when Pakistan became a key ally in the war on terrorism, they turned mum on the Pakistan connection.
Al Qaeda's new leaders
Susan Schmidt and Douglas Farah, Washington Post, October 29, 2002
"It would be much easier if we had a more centralized structure to aim at, like al Qaeda was in Afghanistan," said a senior U.S. official. "Now, instead of a large, fixed target we have little moving targets all over the world, all armed and all dangerous. It is a much more difficult war to fight this way."
Iraq as prison state - a review of Milan Rai's War Plan Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, October 15, 2002
War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq by Milan Rai ... serves as a bracing antidote to the daily trawl of Pentagon-approved press releases that pass for war reporting in the US press. Indeed, Rai's book, just published by Verso, is nothing less than a pre-emptive strike on the Pentagon's rationale for war on Iraq, dismantling piece-by-piece the case for invasion.
The case against Saddam boils down to the following allegations: Iraq is in league with al-Qaeda; Iraq is re-building it's chemical and biological weapons capability; Iraq is close to developing a nuclear bomb or radiological weapon; Iraq is exporting weapons of mass destruction to other nations or terrorist groups. Most of these allegations are accepted as fact by the US press, but Rai proves there's precious little substance to the charges. Instead, he cleaves through the indictment of Iraq with a Chomsky-like precision.
The book is far from an exculpation of Saddam and his coterie of Baathist thugs. It is a defense of the Iraqi people and an evisceration of those, in Saddam's regime and in the Bush cabinet, who would further victimize the people of Iraq for self-indulgent geo-political purposes.
Afghans tell of Guantanamo ordeal
BBC News, October 29, 2002
Three Afghans who have just been freed from a US military base in Cuba have spoken of their ordeal during months in captivity. The men, two of whom are believed to be in their 70s, are the first former detainees to describe the harsh conditions inside Guantanamo Bay.
See also Afghans freed from Guantánamo Bay speak of heat and isolation
US weapons secrets exposed
Julian Borger, The Guardian, October 29, 2002
Respected scientists on both sides of the Atlantic warned yesterday that the US is developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.
The scientists, specialists in bio-warfare and chemical weapons, say the Pentagon, with the help of the British military, is also working on "non-lethal" weapons similar to the narcotic gas used by Russian forces to end last week's siege in Moscow.
They also point to the paradox of the US developing such weapons at a time when it is proposing military action against Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is breaking international treaties.
France issues warning on Iraq as UN deadline nears
Patrick Wintour, Alan Travis, Nicholas Watt and Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, October 29, 2002
France is privately warning the US and the UK that they will be left alone in the political and economic task of reconstructing Iraq if they press ahead with a war on Saddam Hussein without UN support.
The French warning comes as the US and UK demanded a decision from the UN security council this week in support of a tough new resolution, or recognise that the British and the US will take unilateral action.
The Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency
How the hawks plan to find a Saddam/al-Qaida connection
Fred Kaplan, Slate, October 28, 2002
You've got to hand it to Donald Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew at the Pentagon. They know all the stratagems of bureaucratic politics, and they play the game well. In their latest maneuver, reported on the front page of last Thursday's New York Times, the secretary of defense has formed his own "four- to five-man intelligence team" to sift through raw data coming out of Iraq in search of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida terrorists.
Rumsfeld has publicly continued to push this link as a prime—or at least the most easily sellable—rationale for going to war with Iraq, even after the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency have dismissed the connection as tenuous at best.
Good signs
The nascent antiwar movement and Saturday's rally in Washington
Kathryn Lewis, The American Prospect, October 28, 2002
Living in Washington, I've come to expect poorly attended marches -- but this weekend proved to be a pleasant surprise. A consortium of antiwar groups, spearheaded by International A.N.S.W.E.R., brought thousands to town on Saturday to protest George W. Bush's Iraq policies. While the streets were peppered with the usual suspects -- black-clad anarchists, radical cheerleaders, giant puppets -- the collection of protesters at this march appeared larger and more diverse than the crowd at September's anti-globalization rallies. It was also more focused on a single message -- not to mention unencumbered by the sideshow of confrontation and mayhem that accompanied the September protests.
One of the most hopeful elements of the budding antiwar movement -- its multi-generational make-up -- was on full display Saturday.
War on Iraq will heighten risk of further al-Qaida attacks - report
Associated Press, October 28, 2002
A U.S.-led war on Iraq would heighten the risk of regional conflict and increase support for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network, researchers warned Monday.
The independent Oxford Research Group said conventional war would kill 10,000 civilians in Iraq, and could trigger a desperate and destructive response from Saddam Hussein's regime.
The Baghdad regime was bent on survival at any cost and would retaliate using "all available military means," including chemical and biological weapons, which could in turn trigger a nuclear response from the United States and Britain, the group warned in a new report.
The shrinking Saddam
Bush blows off CIA report that cites higher risks from al Qaeda
David Corn, LA Weekly, October 25, 2002
The CIA says that al Qaeda is a threat today, that North Korea dictator Kim Jong Il has an active nuclear-weapons program under way, and that Saddam Hussein is likely to lash out at the United States only if Washington hits him first. And what does President Bush do? He talks up Saddam as public enemy number one. On the campaign trail for Republican congressional candidates, Bush has been devoting more rhetoric to Iraq than to al Qaeda and what’s-his-name (that would be Osama bin Laden). He has not been expressing outrage — or even concern — over the bomb-making actions of North Korea, a charter member of his “axis of evil.”
Hold the missiles — please
L.A.'s Iraqi community opposes Bush war march
Celeste Fremon, LA Weekly, October 25, 2002
As part of his push to get Congress and the United Nations to sign off on war with Iraq, President Bush has repeatedly promised that the Iraqi people are clamoring for liberation by U.S. forces. Likewise, the State Department has been holding regular meetings with a half-dozen Iraqi-American exile groups, talking up the post-Saddam future.
These are the proxies who have purportedly endorsed the U.S. invasion strategy, described by retired Army Lieutenant General Thomas McInerny in his August 1 testimony before the Senate, as "blitz warfare . . . [designed] for a devastating, violent impact [using] the most massive precision air campaign in history."
Scant evidence exists, however, that the State Department's hand-picked Iraqi interlocutors faithfully represent the prevailing views and desires of the 400,000 Iraqis living in the U.S., 78,000 of whom reside in Southern California.
Dispatches from the peace movement
Don Hazen and Tai Moses, AlterNet, October 28, 2002
There can be no doubt about it -- there is a peace movement. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld and the armchair Chicken Hawks have provoked a full-fledged peace movement in just a few months, helped along greatly by the Internet.
Energy companies weigh their possible future in Iraq
Neela Banerjee, New York Times, October 26, 2002
Though Iraq's future is hazy, energy companies have begun to weigh the roles they might play in the revival of the country's huge but dilapidated oil industry. According to a report by Deutsche Bank, oil field services companies like Schlumberger Ltd. and the Halliburton Corporation could be the early winners, but the prospects for oil companies themselves are less clear.
Oppose Iraq war like Gandhi, says Indian author Roy
Reuters, October 23, 2002
Indian novelist Arundhati Roy urged anti-war campaigners Wednesday to use civil disobedience to oppose military action against Iraq, just as Mahatma Gandhi used it to fight for India's independence from British rule.
Meet the new Zionists
Matthew Engel, The Guardian, October 28, 2002
The members of the Christian Coalition of America are some of the most passionate defenders of Israel in the United States. There's just one catch: they want to convert all Jews to Christianity.
OCTOBER 26 - OPPONENTS TO WAR STAND UNITED
Americans rally against war in Iraq
Kevin Anderson, BBC News, October 26, 2002
Tens of thousands of protesters came to Washington from across the United States in one of the largest anti-war demonstrations since the Vietnam War. They filled Constitution Gardens within sight of the Vietnam War Memorial and spilled out down Mall before marching to the White House. They came from across the country, some travelling all day and night crowded onto buses to attend the rally. They wanted to counter the image and the polls that say a majority of Americans support a war against Iraq.
See also The usual suspects - and beyond and Antiwar protest largest since '60s
S.F. peace march draws thousands
Wyatt Buchanan, Christopher Heredia, Suzanne Herel, San Francisco Chronicle, October 27, 2002
Tens of thousands of protesters marched down Market Street in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon in a major demonstration against President Bush's policy on Iraq -- the largest peace rally police and protesters could remember since the Vietnam War.
Police estimated the throng at 42,000, while protesters said more than 80, 000 people joined the 11 a.m. march, which began at Justin Herman Plaza and ended with a rally at the Civic Center.
Thousands of demonstrators turn out in Europe and beyond to protest war against Iraq
Geir Moulson, Associated Press, October 26, 2002
Demanding an end to threats of an "unjustified" war against Iraq, thousands gathered in cities across Europe and beyond Saturday to demonstrate their opposition against U.S. policy toward Iraq.
Peace activists turn out in force
Aimee J. Frank, Daily Freeman, October 27, 2002
An estimated 1,500 peace activists from around the Hudson Valley filled Academy Green Park on Saturday to protest a potential U.S. attack on Iraq.
Global rally against war on Iraq
Associated Press, October 27, 2002
Tens of thousands of demonstrators have gathered in cities across Europe, the United States and beyond for a show of opposition to U.S. President George W. Bush's policy toward Baghdad.
In Berlin, demanding an end to threats of an "unjustified" war against Iraq, crowds of people brandishing placards that declared "War on the imperialist war," "Stop Bush's campaign" and "No blood for oil," along with a few Iraqi and Palestinian flags, converged Saturday on the downtown Alexanderplatz square and marched past the German Foreign Ministry.
Montpelier, Vermont: 1,000 rally for peace in city of 8,000
Anne Wallace Allen, Associated Press, October 27, 2002
About 1,000 Vermonters marched through the capital city under snow, sleet and rain Saturday to rally for peace.
They listened as one speaker after another stood at a podium on the granite steps of the Statehouse to call for an end to aggression.
Many who spoke out or who listened said they wanted the Bush administration to know its policies don't represent the desires of most people.
"Bush is ignoring the will of the people," said Matt Holland, 37, a Web site designer. He said the threat of a war against Iraq has prompted many people to become activists for the first time.
Thousands march with message of peace
Keith Edwards, Blethen Maine News Service, October 27, 2002
A crowd estimated at 2,500 by organizers marched through a steady, cold rain on Saturday to rally against war.
Swedish anti-war demonstrators condemn Saddam, possible U.S. war against Iraq
Associated Press, October 26, 2002
More than a thousand demonstrators gathered Saturday in a rainy Stockholm under a sea of red banners, Palestinian flags and umbrellas to protest a possible U.S. attack on Iraq.
The right peace
Conservatives against a war with Iraq
Christopher Layne, LA Weekly, October 25, 2002
Not all Americans concerned about the Bush administration’s headlong rush to war with Iraq are on the political left. Many conservatives and serious academic students of international politics are equally troubled. I am one of them.
Brakes of war
Signs are on that a full-scale invasion of Iraq is off
Bruce Shapiro, LA Weekly, October 25, 2002
Something unexpected has happened on the way to Baghdad. When Congress left for election break, relieved leaders of the House and Senate thought they had washed their hands of the troublesome Iraq debate. With overwhelming approval from both houses for President Bush’s resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein, an invasion seemed to both its advocates and its enemies a foregone conclusion. Yet in the last two weeks, while Congress and most of the Beltway media continue to talk about war as inevitable, the Bush administration — frustrated and constrained by reluctant allies in Europe, the Middle East and even the Republican Party — has in fact been modifying its goals on an almost daily basis.
Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11
Sunder Katwala, The Observer, October 27, 2002
America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.
Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.
Anger builds and seethes as Arabs await American invader
Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times, October 25, 2002
Confronted by American plans for Iraq, people in the Middle East are facing more than just the prospect of war. They now must consider the possibility that the American government, backed by its military, may exert daily administrative control over a swath of Arab soil for a long period.
The idea summons up angry emotions in a region where sensitivities about the colonial past run deep. When asked about American plans for Iraq, people here evoke the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret pact in 1916 between France and Britain to carve up Arab lands and Turkey from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. It led to British and French control of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, and the death of early Arab nationalist dreams; Britain had already occupied Egypt in 1882.
Antiwar forces face a test
Sarah Ferguson, Mother Jones, October 24, 2002
On the eve of concurrent mass demonstrations in Washington, DC and San Francisco, antiwar activists are predicting that more than 150,000 people from across the country will gather for what would be the largest display yet of domestic opposition to a US-led war against Iraq.
These national protests will be the first test of whether the groundswell of voices calling for an alternative to military action can congeal into a movement -- and whether that movement can succeed in preventing a war before it starts.
Protest is patriotic
Marty Jezer, CommonDreams, October 23, 2002
Great speeches and inspiring moments are rare at demonstrations. In 1966, at a rally in front of the White House, Carl Oglesby, the new and then unknown president of Students for a Democratic Society, gave an oration titled "Let Us Shape The Future" that galvanized the audience, brought people cheering and to their feet. In it he made the distinction between corporate liberals who serve the corporate state and humanistic liberals who profess higher ideals. The details of the speech are bound-up in history, but Oglesby’s distinction directly addresses the problems of the Democratic Party today. .
The only other inspiring moment I remember was at the Washington Monument in 1968 when Dr. Spock, the beloved baby doctor, and Pete Seeger led more than a million people in John Lennon’s "Give Peace A Chance." The astonishing size of that demonstration had a profound effect on government policy, encouraging wavering politicians to decisively break with the Vietnam policy of the Johnson Administration. A huge turnout at tomorrow’s demonstration could have a similar effect. That’s the main reason I’m going: to be a number. If there are enough of us in Washington, politicians may be emboldened to say what they’re thinking.
A strategy foretold
Tom Barry, Foreign Policy in Focus, October 17, 2002
September 11 did not change everything. It certainly did not change the security strategy that a network of hawks and neoconservatives has been promoting since the early 1990s.
One year after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington the Bush White House released its National Security Strategy document. The radical overhaul of U.S. defense posture as outlined in the strategy document was no surprise. High officials in the Pentagon have, since the beginning of the Bush administration, made clear their intent to overhaul U.S. foreign and military policy in the very ways outlined in the National Security Strategy statement of September 2002. During his commencement address at West Point in June 2002 President Bush himself spoke of a fundamental shift in the U.S. defense posture toward preemption and away from the collective security framework—one that abandoned the core operating principles of the past 55 years.
Give deterrence a chance
Susan B. Martin, Foreign Policy in Focus, October 24, 2002
The White House would have us believe that an Iraq armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is a direct threat to the security of the United States, and that the only way to deal with that threat is to go to war. Fortunately, there are many reasons to believe that the White House is wrong, including one big reason: We can rely on deterrence to prevent the Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), so there is no need for preemptive war. To the contrary, it is the effort to overthrow the Iraqi regime that poses the biggest threat, because it is this effort that is likely to trigger Iraqi use of WMD.
The root of American-style terrorism
Jack Levin and James Alan Fox, Christian Science Monitor, October 23, 2002
After the Sept. 11 attack on America and before the Washington-area sniper's killing spree, many Americans associated terrorism with violence perpetrated by Hamas, Al Qaeda, or Hizbullah. Yet the largest number of what the FBI calls "terrorist" acts in this nation have not come from the Middle East at all, but from our own citizens.
FBI statistics show there have been nearly 500 "terrorist" acts on US soil over the past two decades – the agency defines terrorism as the unlawful use of violence to intimidate or coerce a government or a civilian population. Most of these incidents involved Americans targeting fellow Americans.
The endless war
Daniel Meltzer, Baltimore Sun, October 24, 2002
World War I was called the "war to end all wars." World War II proved it wasn't. Korea was a "police action," not a war. Vietnam was a tunnel, from whose end shone a perpetual light that never got closer but blinded us nonetheless. The current conflict may well end up being the "war without end" (WWE).
President Bush says that we are already at war, and Congress eagerly has surrendered to him its constitutional right and duty to declare it. Everyone in a position to commit our youth, money and integrity to the fight seems to agree that the war has begun, although no one can name the nation or "axis" of enemies whom we must defeat to end it. The theater of operations appears to be the planet.
It's a war against terrorism, Mr. Bush says. But terrorism has no borders, no capital, no chancellor or premier, no commanding general, common flag or uniform.
'Refusenik' reservists in Israel make their case
Laura King, Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2002
The timing of this case is sensitive, coming as the defense minister is locked in a confrontation with Jewish settler rabbis who have been urging soldiers to disobey orders to dismantle illegal settlement outposts.
The refuseniks -- some of whom are highly decorated officers with distinguished combat records -- say their case is fundamentally different, focusing as it does on whether soldiers should be called upon to perform actions that they believe violate the human rights of Palestinians, such as demolishing homes, uprooting orchards or endangering civilians by use of heavy weapons in densely populated areas.
"These are people for whom conscientious objection is not easy. These are not people who evade service," their attorney, Avigdor Feldman, told the justices in a lengthy and impassioned statement.
"These are not political people -- each of them stands on his own, saying, 'I experienced terrible things. I witnessed things that shocked me.' ... They saw soldiers firing into a Palestinian house, not knowing who was inside. They saw tanks shelling houses, not knowing who was inside. They are saying, 'I'm shocked, I cannot be a part of this. I'm a man whose conscience is speaking.' "
Good reasons aren't enough for Bush
Richard Cohen, Washington Post, October 24, 2002
Appearing on the old "Dick Cavett Show" back in 1980, the writer Mary McCarthy said of her fellow writer Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " The same cannot yet be said about George W. Bush and his administration -- but it has not been around as long as Hellman was and is not nearly as creative.
The evidence is accumulating, though, that neither Bush nor his colleagues are particularly punctilious about the truth. For good reason, they sorely want a war with Iraq -- but good reasons are not, it seems, good enough for this administration.
Instead, both the president and his aides have exaggerated the Iraqi threat, creating links and evidence where they do not exist. Even before this war starts, its first victim has been truth.
Pentagon sets up intelligence unit
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, New York Times, October 24, 2002
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior advisers have assigned a small intelligence unit to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists that the nation's spy agencies may have overlooked, Pentagon officials said today.
Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.
But officials who disagree say the top civilian policy makers are intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq.
[Editor's note: Let's not forget what Rumsfeld was quoted as saying on September 11, 2001 (from CBS News):
With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.
Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.
"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."]
A $4 billion-a-month war
Hampton Pearson, CNBC, October 21, 2002
When lawmakers asked the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office to estimate the cost for a still undefined and undeclared war with Iraq, they got two vastly different scenarios. The estimated cost for a “heavy air war” with one month of combat, but no occupation force would cost about $21 billion. A “heavy ground war” with three months of combat, heavy ground troops and a five-year occupation force could total more than $272 billion.
Against terrorism or expansion of the American Empire?
William Blum, YellowTimes, October 22, 2002
If your heart and mind tell you clearly that the bombing of impoverished, hungry, innocent peasants is a terrible thing to do and will not make the American people any more secure, you should protest it in any way you can and don't be worried about being called unpatriotic.
Drum beats in Congress, debate in the hinterlands
Mindy Cameron, Seattle Times, October 23, 2002
A genuine debate about the wisdom of war in Iraq is under way across America. From my spot in the relative isolation of a small town in the conservative, rural hinterlands of the Northwest, one thing is clear: D.C. think tanks, national commentators and urban sophisticates have no monopoly on thoughtful, nuanced contributions to this important debate.
I don't watch television or listen to talk radio. When I want to gauge the mood and level of interest of average folks, I turn to the letters pages of local newspapers to see what people are thinking and writing.
'Smarter' bombs still hit civilians
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, October 22, 2002
In the Gulf War, just 3 percent of bombs were precision-guided. That figure jumped to 30 percent in the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, and to nearly 70 percent during the Afghan air campaign last year.
Yet in each case, the ratio of civilian casualties to bombs dropped has grown. Technology, say analysts, isn't the key issue. In Afghanistan, tough terrain, inability to discern combatants from civilians, and paucity of fixed military targets led to estimates of 850 to 1,300 civilian deaths. Red Cross food depots depots were hit twice, as well as some mosques, and so was a wedding party of mostly pro-US civilians last July.
By one estimate, the number of civilians killed per bomb dropped may have been four times as high in Afghanistan as in Yugoslavia.
A survey in high schools in 12 countries helps reveal
Why they hate us...
Margaret H. DeFleur and Melvin L. DeFleur, Global Beat Syndicate, October 17, 2002
We’ve seen the future, and it’s not pretty. We saw it clearly through the media-soaked eyes of more than 1,200 teen-agers in 12 countries from all parts of the world whom we surveyed for a project entitled The Next Generation’s Image of Americans.
With rare exception, they hold uniformly negative perceptions not only of our government but of all Americans.
The fog of war on terrorism
Richard Reeves, Hartford Courant, October 20, 2002
When I saw the cruel scenes of death and destruction along the beach in Bali, my first thought was coldly political: This means the Republicans will win the congressional elections next month.
I'm more than a little ashamed of that, of how my mind works - as if life were a column. But I know that in the White House, under most any president, political minds work as if all life is prelude to the next election. My own journalistic calculation was that President Bush has been saying, "They're everywhere! They're everywhere!" - and now it seems they are. His rhetoric, even the hysterical bits about Iraq and its generic connection to the terror of Sept. 11, 2001, has been validated for now or, at least, become just another blurred image in the fog of globalization.
How to shut up your critics with a single word
Robert Fisk, The Independent, October 21, 2002
Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel's cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya'alon, Ariel Sharon's new chief of staff, described the "Palestinian threat" as "like a cancer – there are all sorts of solutions to cancerous manifestations. For the time being, I am applying chemotherapy."
Where else can we read that the Israeli Herut Party chairman, Michael Kleiner, said that "for every victim of ours there must be 1,000 dead Palestinians". Where else can we read that Eitan Ben Eliahu, the former Israeli Air Force commander, said that "eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories". Where else can we read that the new head of Mossad, General Meir Dagan – a close personal friend of Mr Sharon – believes in "liquidation units", that other Mossad men regard him as a threat because "if Dagan brings his morality to the Mossad, Israel could become a country in which no normal Jew would want to live".
You will have to read all this in Ma'ariv, Ha'aretz or Yediot Ahronot because in much of the Western world, a vicious campaign of slander is being waged against any journalist or activist who dares to criticise Israeli policies or those that shape them. The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone – people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children – in an attempt to shut them up.
White House spins out on an axis of evil
Robert Scheer, WorkingForChange, October 22, 2002
What a nuisance! Just as the Bush administration had Saddam Hussein back in the cross hairs as the top target of the president's global evil-eradication program comes the news of more urgent threats. And once again, the bad news about Al Qaeda and North Korea could not be logically connected in any way with Iraq.
Their little secret
Richard Cohen, Washington Post, October 22, 2002
The smug spirit of Enron pervades the Bush administration. When it learned that North Korea had a secret nuclear arms program, it moved the disclosure off the books lest it complicate the confrontation with Iraq. The information that Congress needed as it held another one of its self-proclaimed "historic" debates was withheld -- a footnote known to only a few key members who, as with Enron's board, passively kept their mouths shut.
Making our voices heard
Paul Loeb, WorkingForChange, October 22, 2002
Now, in a time when Bush audaciously claims that "America speaks with one voice," we must make our voices heard even more. This means continuing to speak up, preferably in ways that reach out as much to our fellow citizens as to our elected representatives. If enough of us take public stands, we may yet avert going to war with Iraq--or at least limit the power of this administration, whose backers speak blatantly about the virtues of empire, to wage further wars to come. We never know the full impact of our actions.
Nobel laureates say "No" to war with Iraq
Agence France Presse, October 22, 2002
Nobel peace prize laureates meeting in Rome delivered a resounding "No" to war with Iraq and gave their full backing to the need for UN resolutions to avoid a conflict.
Beyond Right: The temptations of empire
Why the ant-war movement should listen to the 'real right's' patriotic arguments against invading Iraq
Justin Raimondo, Mother Jones, October 21, 2002
While the noisiest opposition to this administration's policy of perpetual war has come from the Left, the most effective voices of dissent are heard on the Right -- and within the military. General Anthony Zinni's stinging denunciation of "chicken-hawks," and the public testimony of a platoon of retired high-ranking officers, had more effect on public opinion, and Congress, than all the left-wing hootenannies from the Left Coast to the East.
Beyond Left: The principles of democracy
Why progressives should reject knee-jerk ideology, and organize along real-politik lines
Geov Parrish, Mother Jones, October 21, 2002
Could America's decaying democracy have life yet? The astonishing recent flood of calls, letters, e-mails, and faxes to Capitol Hill opposing the Bush Administration's desire for a blank check for blitzkrieg were important for several reasons that transcended the vote itself. The outpouring itself was important, but so were its speed and lack of organizational sponsors, and the ideological and demographic diversity of the critics.
For Bush, facts are malleable
Presidential tradition of embroidering key assertions continues
Dana Milbank, Washington Post, October 22, 2002
President Bush, speaking to the nation this month about the need to challenge Saddam Hussein, warned that Iraq has a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used "for missions targeting the United States."
Last month, asked if there were new and conclusive evidence of Hussein's nuclear weapons capabilities, Bush cited a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency saying the Iraqis were "six months away from developing a weapon." And last week, the president said objections by a labor union to having customs officials wear radiation detectors has the potential to delay the policy "for a long period of time."
All three assertions were powerful arguments for the actions Bush sought. And all three statements were dubious, if not wrong. Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States; there was no such report by the IAEA; and the customs dispute over the detectors was resolved long ago.
Threat of unreality TV
In the media, places like Bali only feature as tourist playgrounds. That endangers us all
George Monbiot, The Guardian, October 22, 2002
The victims of the Bali bombing could be said to have legitimate grounds for complaint not only against the intelligence services (whose efforts have been diverted from unpicking the terrorist networks into supporting two futile wars) but also against the media. Both of them could and should have warned westerners that Indonesia has become a dangerous place for them to visit.
Are the Saudis the enemy?
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, October 22, 2002
Osama bin Laden succeeded magnificently, it seems, in at least one of his goals: creating a rift between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Odds are that Osama shrewdly sought to create discord by deliberately choosing Saudis to be the grunts of 9/11, picking them to fill 15 of the 19 hijacker positions, even though the teams were led by an Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, and other key players were from Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. Al Qaeda had plenty of Yemenis, Kuwaitis and north Africans whom it could have tapped, but it apparently went out of its way to choose Saudis to be the foot soldiers.
The plan, if that's what it was, worked perfectly. The 60-year friendship between Saudi Arabia and the United States is now in tatters, and it will probably get even more poisonous in the coming months if we invade Iraq. It turns out that Saudis have as much animosity for us as we have for them.
Playing God in a game of nuclear roulette
David Waters, GoMemphis, October 20, 2002
First it's Iraq. Now it's North Korea. Next it probably will be Iran. Before you know it, every nation is going to want weapons of mass destruction.
Not so fast, says the leader of the world's biggest weapons-maker, owner and dealer. "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons," Bush said earlier this year.
Isn't that like the pusher complaining about all the drugs and crack heads in the neighborhood?
March for peace on Saturday
Alternet, October 21, 2002
This Saturday, Oct. 26, tens of thousands of students, peaceniks, priests, union members, war veterans and working moms and dads will gather in Washington D.C. and San Francisco to protest the war on Iraq. It will be the latest and biggest in a series of protests that have been spontaneously emerging across the nation over the past few weeks.
The Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington think-tank that compiles a list of anti-war events planned throughout the country over the next two weeks, says it can barely keep up. "People are organizing at all levels," co-director Amy Quinn told the Washington Post. "I'm not surprised that people are coming out against the war. I am surprised at how organized and vocal people are."
And organizers predict that the Oct. 26 march will be huge. The vote in Congress authorizing Bush to attack Iraq may have been the tipping point for an anti-war movement that has been steadily gaining momentum with each passing week.
US anti-war groups flex their muscle
Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, October 22, 2002
Medea Benjamin has been close to both President Bush and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, over the past few weeks. So close, in fact, that she was arrested.
Most memorably, Ms Benjamin was one of two women seen directly behind Mr Rumsfeld at last month's congressional hearings on Iraq holding an anti-war placard and later charged with "disruption of Congress".
This Saturday, she will help lead what organisers hope will echo in scale the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era three decades ago.
On going to war
Moral reflections on an impending war
Stephen A. Privett, San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2002
A unilateral, pre-emptive strike against Iraq at this time by the United States is wrong for moral, legal and pragmatic reasons. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a ruthlessly brutal dictator who has started wars and committed appalling human rights abuses against his own people. He is clearly a danger to world order, but it has not been proved that he now poses a direct and imminent threat to the United States or our allies.
Many of the arguments around Iraq are long on rhetoric and short on evidence. Universities such as ours teach people to follow evidence to a logical conclusion and to allow arguments to rise or fall on their own merits, not on partisan or ideological convictions. Political decisions fraught with consequences for good or ill are inherently moral decisions that must be supported by compelling evidence, not stirring exhortations.
Dancing in the dark
Bob Herbert, New York Times, October 21, 2002
There may yet be a way to avoid the war with Iraq that President Bush appears to so desperately want. But if the U.S. does go barreling into Baghdad, with or without the sanction of the United Nations, the American people should at least have some clear sense of the potentially very heavy consequences that may ensue.
The Bush administration, with its muscular rhetoric and its trumpeting of a new generation of weapons even smarter than those used in the gulf war, would be happy to have the public think of the war as little more than a walk in the park.
'They're coming after us.' But who are they now?
Douglas Frantz, New York Times, October 20, 2002
From Lackawanna, N.Y., to Bali, officials use the words Al Qaeda to explain the potential threat or the grisly reality of almost anything resembling a terrorist attack, potential anti-government plot or suspected sleeper cell. The message is heavily coated with fear.
George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, made the case dramatically before Congress Thursday: "They have reconstituted," he said. "They are coming after us . . . They plan in multiple theaters of operation. They intend to strike this homeland again."
But defining what Al Qaeda is seems to become only more difficult with time, as alleged operatives range from a handful of Muslim converts in Portland, Ore., who tried to get to Afghanistan but never made it, to a fundamentalist Muslim cleric in Indonesia suspected in the disco bombings that killed nearly 200 a week ago in Bali.
Unequal opportunity for tyrants
Mary McGrory, Washington Post, October 20, 2002
At a glance it would seem as if the warlords in the White House are as clueless as the frustrated police pursuing the shooter who has been rampaging through Washington's suburbs for the past 21/2 weeks.
George W. Bush, who had been doing a credible imitation of Alexander the Great conquering the known world, was stopped in his tracks by North Korea.
Preventive attacks fail test of history
Robert Dallek and Robert Jervis, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2002
The Bush administration asserts that an attack on Saddam Hussein would be a preemptive strike against a potential attacker. Deterrence and containment, which brought down the Soviet Union and its communist empire, are no longer viable options in a world of terrorists ready to use weapons of mass destruction, it says, and Hussein is a likely supplier if he can cover his tracks.
This is a specious argument. An attack on Iraq would not be a preemptive strike but a preventive action in response to a speculative and future, rather than visible and present, threat. The distinction is more than rhetorical: The recent history of U.S. preventive actions is not one of great success.
Iraq: The case against preemptive war
Paul W. Schroeder, The American Conservative, October 21, 2002
This essay proposes to confront this case for preemptive war on Iraq head on. My argument stresses principles and long-term structural effects rather than prudence and short-term results. It rests not on judgments and predictions about future military and political developments, which I am not qualified to make, but on a perspective missing from the current discussion, derived from history, especially the history of European and world politics over the last four centuries. Rather than criticizing the proposed preemptive war on prudential grounds, it opposes the idea itself, contending that an American campaign to overthrow Hussein by armed force would be an unjust, aggressive, imperialist war which even if it succeeded (indeed, perhaps especially if it succeeded), would have negative, potentially disastrous effects on our alliances and friendships, American leadership in the world, the existing international system, and the prospects for general peace, order, and stability. In other words, a preemptive war on Iraq would be not merely foolish and dangerous, but wrong.
U.S. weighing Israeli plan on Iraq
Barry Schweid, Associated Press, October 19, 2002
The Bush administration is weighing an Israeli proposal for a joint operation in Iraq's western desert to disarm Iraqi missiles before they could be launched against Israel.
If successful, the operation might not only protect Israeli civilians from an Iraqi attack like the one they weathered in the 1991 Persian Gulf War (news - web sites) but eliminate the troublesome prospect of an Israeli retaliatory attack on Iraq.
Jewish settlers' zeal forces Palestinians to flee their town
Joel Greenberg, New York Times, October 21, 2002
The alleys of this Palestinian hamlet were silent today, the empty stone houses locked, the small local school deserted.
The last families living here left on Friday, broken by what they said was a year of steadily mounting violence by Jewish settlers living in neighboring outposts on the hills. The gunfire, stone-throwing, physical assaults and vandalism had become unbearable, they said.
'This is from God and the army'
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, October 18, 2002
As he was loading vegetables at the market, Ahmed Satiti was killed by fire from an IDF tank. His friend, Tawfik Hamrashi, paid a condolence call to the family and on his way home, was also shot to death by a tank. In Jenin, life is cheap.
War plans under fire as even Bush heartland talks peace
Dissent is coming from all quarters - even in Bush's own church
Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, October 20, 2002
As the United States edges towards a possible war against Iraq, a sudden torrent of concern has begun to flow - a revolt by the intelligentsia spreading beyond the expected opposition political circles and penetrating the heart of the media and foreign policy establishment.
From New York to the plains of Kansas, local and provincial papers, glossy magazines, serious periodicals and heavyweight national dailies have carried a range of articles and essays that challenge not only the proposed war, but the notion and conduct of unilateral American power in the world.
But the most dramatic intervention comes from President George Bush's own United Methodist church which launched a scathing attack on his plans for war.
'But why do they hate us?'
Iraqis face up to the threat of a US attack
Rory McCarthy, The Observer, October 20, 2002
Suad Mahmood is trying to study the great works of American literature in her rundown classroom at Baghdad University. She used to be fascinated by American culture, but lately the 23-year-old post-graduate student has had a change of heart.
Her library stocks a handful of copies of the Steinbeck texts she needs, but not a single work of literary theory or criticism. 'I tried sending letters to American universities to ask for their help. But I got nothing back,' she said. 'I know they don't want to help us, but now they want to attack our country again. I just don't understand why they hate us.'
Life for many Iraqis under the regime of Saddam Hussein has been unbearably harsh. No one will say so in public, but few would mourn his departure after a US and British attack. But the past 12 years of sanctions and a decade of American-led bombing raids have significantly changed attitudes towards the West.
Anti-war Web site boosts Democrats
Matthew Daly, Associated Press, October 18, 2002
Democrats who cast what some considered a politically risky vote -- opposing the resolution authorizing use of force against Iraq -- are getting a financial reward for their troubles.
MoveOnPAC.org, an Internet site, raised more than $1 million this week for four members of Congress that the group calls "heroes."
Fight terrorism fairly
David Cole, New York Times, October 19, 2002
To the prosecution, they are a terrorist "sleeper cell." To the defense, they are five idealistic but misguided young men who found themselves in a Qaeda training camp but never intended to further terrorism. Where the truth lies is the mystery at the heart of the Justice Department's case in Lackawanna, N.Y.
Under the law, however, it may not matter. Because of an overly broad statute, the government wins this case no matter which version of the story is true. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, passed in 1996, makes it a crime to provide "material support" to any group designated as "terrorist" — without regard to whether the support was actually intended to further terrorist activity.
For 40 years, Australian governments have colluded with state terrorism in Indonesia. Now, the Bali outrage allows John Howard to distract attention from his hypocrisy
John Pilger, October 17, 2002
The Australian prime minister, John Howard, says the atrocity on the island of Bali is "proof" that "the war against terrorism must go on with unrelenting vigour and with an unconditional commitment". What he means is that he will continue to perform his holier-than-Blair role as George W Bush's most devoted, if not universally recognised, foreign gang member.
The Australian military is, in effect, an extension of the Pentagon. Australian ships operate with the American fleet in the Gulf, enforcing an embargo against Iraq which, according to the United Nations Children's Fund, has led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 600,000 Iraqi children. In Indonesia, Australians, together with their American counterparts, have secretly resumed training the Indonesian military, which, in the world cup of terrorism, is the undisputed champion.
Al-Qaeda has been fingered in Washington for the Bali outrage. The script is unchanged. To Bush, Blair and Howard, the Bali bombing will be simply further justification for attacking Iraq.
How truly bizarre the American enterprise of world conquest has become. First, there was the bombing of Afghanistan, the equivalent of bombing Sicily in order to eradicate the Mafia. "Terrorism" is the enemy; or as Python's Terry Jones remarked, "They're bombing an abstract noun!" What is clear is that the more bellicose Bush and Blair and Howard become, the more they place the citizens of their own countries at risk.
Read between the lines
The current 'intelligence war' between the CIA and the Bush administration highlights the questionable nature of the evidence against Baghdad
Julian Borger, The Guardian, October 16, 2002
The determination of the current US administration to seek an urgent confrontation with Baghdad has convinced many Americans that it must know something the rest of us are not aware of. But over the past few days it has become clear the Bush team has access to the same ambiguous mix of information and speculation as the rest of the world. It simply requires a lower standard of proof.
The past week has witnessed a behind-the-scenes revolt by US intelligence and other government employees in sensitive positions, against the White House and Pentagon over the use of classified information about Saddam Hussein's activities.
Piece by piece, the evidence against Baghdad laid out by President Bush and his senior aides has been called into question. It has become clear that the administration's case has been built on a reading of intelligence that has been selective to say the least.
X marks the despot
Bombing Iraq into democracy could well prove counterproductive
Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, October 16, 2002
If we really wanted to create beacons of democracy in the region, there is a lot we could do in practical ways to help those countries along the road, without the need to bomb Iraq into democracy.
Beacons of democracy are fine, of course, so long as we are prepared to live with the results. There's a widespread assumption that Middle Eastern voters would, given half the chance, throw out the men with moustaches and elect clean-shaven figures like George Bush and Tony Blair.
But we should not bank on that. In the present climate, with the US swaggering around the region and making no effort to clear up the festering sore of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's more likely that military moustaches would be replaced by the straggly beards of Islamic militancy.
The reality, however, is that the US has no genuine interest in democratising the Middle East. Its interest is in obtaining governments that are malleable, not anti-American or anti-Israeli, and willing to collaborate in the "war on terrorism" even at the expense of human rights. So long as they do that, democracy is neither here nor there.
This crime proves none of us are safe - and Britons may well be the next targets
Robert Fisk, The Independent, October 14, 2002
Why? Yesterday's crime against humanity in Bali provoked an almost identical reaction to the atrocities of 11 September 2001. Everyone wanted to know who had planted the bombs – almost certainly a satellite of al-Qa'ida – and everyone wanted to know how the killers planned their massacre.
But no one – neither the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, nor Tony Blair nor Jack Straw – wanted to talk about motives. "Terrorism" was the all-important word (an accurate one too), which was used to smother any discussion about what lay behind the crime.
Of occupation and apartheid
Do I divest?
Desmond Tutu, Counterpunch, October 17, 2002
The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure-- in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation.
Divestment from apartheid South Africa was fought by ordinary people at the grassroots. Faith-based leaders informed their followers, union members pressured their companies' stockholders and consumers questioned their store owners. Students played an especially important role by compelling universities to change their portfolios. Eventually, institutions pulled the financial plug, and the South African government thought twice about its policies.
Similar moral and financial pressures on Israel are being mustered one person at a time. Students on more than forty campuses in the U.S. are demanding a review of university investments in Israeli companies as well as in firms doing major business in Israel. From Berkeley to Ann Arbor, city councils have debated municipal divestment measures.
"The largest prison in the world"
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram, October 17, 2002
As if last week's massacre in Khan Yunis was not enough, the Israeli army has kept up the carnage this week, killing even more Palestinian civilians.
The killing often seems so wanton and unprovoked that many observers are now concluding that the Israeli army is carrying out unwritten instructions to kill an average of five or six Palestinians, and maim as many, on any given day.
Predictably, the Israeli army denies that such instructions exist. In Nablus, for example, Israeli soldiers, in armoured personnel carriers, didn't hesitate to open fire on school children this week, killing two. Their "crime" was "violating the curfew" and "going to school".
This barbaric behaviour manifests itself on a daily basis in the streets of Nablus, Jenin, Rafah and Khan Yunis. Not a day passes without a Palestinian child, housewife or labourer being murdered by Israeli occupation soldiers.
A country of the mind
Outside our old house in Jerusalem, I confronted the lost world of my Palestinian childhood
Ghada Karmi, The Guardian, October 19, 2002
The human costs of Israel's establishment to Palestine's people have never been properly computed or recorded. The issue is usually dehumanised in abstract terminology and dry statistics. Palestinians become objects that can be "transferred", to use Israel's favourite euphemism for naked expulsion. Their right of return is discussed in much the same mechanistic way, as if they were parcels waiting to be posted. It is a method that disguises the manifold tragedies of this complex story.
U.S. says Pakistan gave technology to North Korea
David E. Sanger and James Dao, New York Times, October 18, 2002
American intelligence officials have concluded that Pakistan, a vital ally since last year's terrorist attacks, was a major supplier of critical equipment for North Korea's newly revealed clandestine nuclear weapons program, current and former senior American officials said today.
The equipment, which may include gas centrifuges used to create weapons-grade uranium, appears to have been part of a barter deal beginning in the late 1990's in which North Korea supplied Pakistan with missiles it could use to counter India's nuclear arsenal, the officials said.
"What you have here," said one official familiar with the intelligence, "is a perfect meeting of interests — the North had what the Pakistanis needed, and the Pakistanis had a way for Kim Jong Il to restart a nuclear program we had stopped." China and Russia were less prominent suppliers, officials said.
The White House said tonight that it would not discuss Pakistan's role or any other intelligence information.
Bali bombing fuels debate on Iraq war
Bush aides worry that attacks will erode public support for confronting Hussein
Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, October 17, 2002
Some Bush administration officials have become concerned that the rash of attacks in Indonesia, Yemen and Kuwait in the past week could undermine public support for a confrontation with Iraq by reminding Americans that the country still faces a long struggle in the war on terrorism.
One senior administration official said that, in the debate over the congressional resolution authorizing military action against Iraq, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) made a forceful argument that a war against Iraq now would not only undermine the war against terrorism but possibly expand it.
"The odds of another strike against the people of the United States by al Qaeda or another international terrorist group goes up when we attack Baghdad," Graham said during the floor debate last week, before terrorists killed more than 180 people at a Balinese nightspot.
"In the past few days, after Bali, people around here have thought the argument that Senator Graham made will have some resonance with the public," the official said.
I'm an American tired of American lies
Woody Harrelson, The Guardian,October 17, 2002
I went to the White House when Harvey Weinstein was showing Clinton the movie Welcome to Sarejevo, which I was in. I got a few moments alone with Clinton. Saddam throwing out the weapons inspectors was all over the news and I asked what he was going to do. His answer was very revealing. He said: "Everybody is telling me to bomb him. All the military are saying, 'You gotta bomb him.' But if even one innocent person died, I couldn't bear it." And I looked in his eyes and I believed him. Little did I know he was blocking humanitarian aid at the time, allowing the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
I am a father, and no amount of propaganda can convince me that half a million dead children is acceptable "collateral damage". The fact is that Saddam Hussein was our boy. The CIA helped him to power, as they did the Shah of Iran and Noriega and Marcos and the Taliban and countless other brutal tyrants. The fact is that George Bush Sr continued to supply nerve gas and technology to Saddam even after he used it on Iran and then the Kurds in Iraq. While the Amnesty International report listing countless Saddam atrocities, including gassing and torturing Kurds, was sitting on his desk, Bush Sr pushed through a $2bn "agricultural" loan and Thatcher gave hundreds of millions in export credit to Saddam. The elder Bush then had the audacity to quote the Amnesty reports to garner support for his oil war.
A decade later, Shrub follows the same line: "We have no quarrel with the Iraqi people." I'm sure half a million Iraqi parents are scratching their heads over that. I'm an American tired of lies. And with our government, it's mostly lies.
Outrage as Iraq views UK arms
Jason Burke, The Observer, October 13, 2002
A British Minister will lead a major sales drive by UK weapons and military technology firms at an exhibition attended by high-ranking Iraqi military officials this week.
The news has sparked outrage among arms control campaigners and groups opposed to military action against Iraq. 'It is absurd that we are gearing up to fight a war against these people and simultaneously rubbing shoulders with them at an arms bazaar,' said Martin Hogbin of the Campaign Against Arms Trade.
Around a dozen British firms will be displaying equipment such as tanks, thermal imaging night sights and state-of-the-art air defence missiles at the exhibition in Amman, Jordan. Machine tools that could be used to produce weapons will also be on show. The government-run Defence Export Services Organisation will also have a stall.
Promotional material for the Sofex military fair boasts that Saddam Hussein is sending an official delegation. Sultan Hashim Ahmad, the Iraqi Defence Minister, attended the last Sofex. Sudan, Syria, Libya and Iran - all listed as sponsors of terrorism by the US State Department - are also expected to attend.
Wall Street/Washington insider spills the dirty secret of Iraq war
Bill Vann, World Socialist Web Site, October 16, 2002
A US war against Iraq is “probably the most bullish thing I can think of,” William Seidman, a senior economic adviser under four US presidents, told his audience at the posh Peninsula Club.
Seidman, a commentator for CNBC, was an adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush senior. He is the former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and also headed the Resolution Trust Company, the federal agency created to bail out the scandal-ridden savings and loans industry in the 1980s. He served as a consultant on the junior Bush’s transition team, and maintains close ties with top administration officials.
According to the Grand Rapids Press, which was alone in reporting the remarks, Seidman told the meeting that he had just come from a State Department briefing in which US plans for a military occupation of Iraq were outlined.
Removing the Iraqi government and installing a US military regime that would control the country’s oil fields is “at least as important as eliminating weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Getting control of that oil will make a vast difference in all sorts of things, but particularly the price of oil.”
“We are planning to set up a MacArthur-like” government in Iraq, the ex-official said enthusiastically, referring to the US occupation regime established in Japan at the end of World War II. “If we are in Iraq, nobody can use oil as a weapon.”
Is it all about oil?
Cheap oil may not be the prime US motive in confronting Hussein, but it could be the outcome
Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 2002
"If we go to war it's not about oil.... But after Saddam, it becomes all about oil," says Lawrence Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation.
Subverting the UN
Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Nation, November 4, 2002
As a healthy response to the Bush Administration's war policies, the number of people taking to the streets in protest is increasing with each step toward war. These protesters realize that they do not want the United States to initiate a pre-emptive and illegal war, but perhaps they do not yet realize that they are also fighting to retain an international order based on multilateralism, the rule of law and the United Nations itself.
To save the UN from the Administration's destructive and radical unilateralism, other key nations will have to stand up to its bullying. France, Russia and China, because of their veto power in the Security Council, could withhold legal authority for America to proceed to war. Whether they will exercise this power, given the pressure they're under from the Administration, remains to be seen. But if one or more of them does so, the Administration would be faced with acting in direct contravention of the Security Council, with a probable serious erosion of Congressional and public support. If it were to go ahead with war, it could deliver a death knell not only to Iraq but also to the UN itself. It is emblematic of US global waywardness that it is necessary to hope for a veto to uphold the legitimacy and effectiveness of the UN as a force for peace but to also be concerned that Administration threats of unilateral military action could render the veto ineffective and thereby the role of the Security Council largely meaningless.
Israeli families say peace is revenge
Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet, October 17, 2002
In 1994, following the abduction and murder of his 19-year-old son Arik by the terrorist group Hamas, Yitzhak Frankenthal founded the Bereaved Families Forum -- an organization of 190 bereaved Israeli parents, Palestinian and Jews, who lost their children during army service or in an act of terrorism. The organization, also referred to as Parent's Circle, promotes peace and coexistence through educating for tolerance and compromise. The group recently set up a free service to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to talk on the telephone.
Bush and Iraq
Anthony Lewis, New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002
If President Bush's purpose was really just to see to it that Saddam Hussein has no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, he greatly complicated his problem by his aggressive rhetoric. If from the beginning he had adopted the tone of his General Assembly speech, if he had concentrated on getting a genuinely enforceable inspection system, if he had reached out to the hesitant permanent members of the Security Council—China, Russia, France—I believe they would more readily have supported his effort and the necessary council resolution. They knew that Saddam Hussein was a monster in whose hands weapons of mass destruction would be extremely dangerous. But they needed to be convinced that George W. Bush would make a good-faith effort to avoid war.
The countries whose support the President needed could hardly have been reassured by the arrogant tone of so much that he and his associates said, their insistence on America's right and duty to act alone. Nor could they have been impressed by the gangster talk of Ari Fleischer about having an enemy rubbed out. If Mr. Bush was serious about working through the United Nations, his tactics were extraordinarily inept.
But I find it increasingly hard to believe that Mr. Bush's objective is limited to seeing that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction. The history and the theology of the men whose advice now dominates Mr. Bush's thinking point to much larger purposes. I think this president wants to overthrow the rules that have governed international life for the last fifty years.
Ten years ago Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, and Paul Wolfowitz, his undersecretary for policy, began assembling the doctrine of a world ruled from Washington. They are still at it now. But instead of the first President Bush, who was steeped in the post–World War II philosophy of alliances and multilateralism, they are advising a President Bush with no experience in that postwar world and, by all signs, with an instinct for the unilateral.
Bait and switch
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, October 18, 2002
Listen to the American hawks after a few glasses of wine, and you might be seduced into thinking that after overthrowing Saddam Hussein we're going to turn Iraq into a flourishing democracy.
But I'm afraid it's a pipe dream, a marketing ploy to sell a war.
In the terror trap
Rather a small chance of being bombed than the certainty of being bugged
Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, October 17, 2002
So now we all live in Washington DC. A lone terrorist can pick you off outside Safeway, or as you wait for the bus. And if he doesn't get you at Safeway, he'll kill your daughter at a nightclub in Bali. In the cold war, the enemy was the Red Army. Now it's the professor in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, stalking the streets of London with his right hand always clasped around the India-rubber ball in his trouser pocket, the detonator of a suicide bomb: "He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable - and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on, unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men." Or, as George Bush puts it, in the less memorable prose of the United States' new security doctrine: "Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank." Meanwhile, Tony Blair tells us the war against international terrorism is like the second world war.
There is an atmosphere emerging here, an atmosphere of menace which the media help to transport and magnify. And don't we know it already from a hundred bad movies? The hard question now is whether the conduct of the "war against terrorism", in this atmosphere of menace, might not end up being as much a threat to our own freedoms as terrorism itself.
Making our voice heard:
Hope for the peace movement even after the Congressional vote
Paul Rogat Loeb, CommonDreams.org, October 16, 2002
For those of us who think Bush's pending war against Iraq is reckless madness, it's tempting to retreat into bitter despair after the Senate vote giving him a blank check to attack. Like Dickens orphans pleading for gruel, the Democratic leadership politely requested that Bush consult them, work with the UN and other allies, and exhaust all diplomatic means before going to war. Then they caved and gave Bush--and men like Richard Perle, who believed in winnable nuclear wars, and Dick Cheney, who opposed the freeing of Nelson Mandela--the power to lead us into a war that will fuel rage and resentment throughout the Islamic world and beyond.
So what to do other than nurturing bile and resentment? Or writing angry emails and letters to those who've once again shown no moral courage? Or thanking the 23 Senators and 133 Representatives who found the strength to resist all the lies and threats?
UN's largest group of states rejects war on Iraq
Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service, October 17, 2002
The largest political grouping at the United Nations rejected Wednesday ''any type of unilateral action against any member state of the United Nations''. The 114-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which represents the overwhelming majority of the 191 U.N. member states, said it just does not want a war with Iraq. Speaking on behalf of NAM, South African Ambassador Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo said: ''We would rather this be resolved in a peaceful manner.'' Contrary to the stand taken by the United States, NAM wants the Security Council to allow U.N. arms inspectors to return to Iraq without further delay.
B'tselem report:80% of Palestinians killed in curfew violations are children
Jerusalem Post, October 16, 2002
Israeli human rights group B'tselem on Wednesday accused the IDF of frequently using gunfire to enforce curfews in Palestinian cities in the West Bank, and said 12 of at least 15 Palestinians killed for apparent curfew violations in the past four months were under the age of 16.
"Curfew is no longer a tool to meet specific security needs, but a sweeping means of collective punishment," according to the report, "Lethal Curfew," issued Wednesday by B'Tselem. "The prolonged curfew has made Palestinian life in the West Bank intolerable."
The report said that at least 15 Palestinians had been killed and many more wounded for being out of their houses during curfews since mid-June, when Israel occupied seven West Bank towns in response to a series of deadly suicide bombings. Twelve of those killed were under the age of 16, constituting 80 percent of those killed.
"Shooting a person simply because he left his home during curfew constitutes excessive use of force," the report said, adding that some of those killed or wounded apparently did not know the curfew was in force.
The report said B'tselem had found that in many cases IDF soldiers fired live ammunition at civilians who are outside their homes during curfew.
Rumsfeld's style, goals strain ties in Pentagon
Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, October 16, 2002
Nearly two dozen current and former top officers and civilian officials said in interviews that there is a huge discrepancy between the outside perception of Rumsfeld -- the crisp, no-nonsense defense secretary who became a media star through his briefings on the Afghan war -- and the way he is seen inside the Pentagon. Many senior officers on the Joint Staff and in all branches of the military describe Rumsfeld as frequently abusive and indecisive, trusting only a tiny circle of close advisers, seemingly eager to slap down officers with decades of distinguished service. The unhappiness is so pervasive that all three service secretaries are said to be deeply frustrated by a lack of autonomy and contemplating leaving by the end of the year.
"I'm not sure which planet they live on"
Hawks in the Bush administration may be making deadly miscalculations on Iraq, says Gen. Anthony Zinni, Bush's Middle East envoy
Eric Boehlert, Salon, October 17, 2002
President Bush continues to encounter war critics in the most unlikely places -- the United States military, for example. Last summer, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security advis0r to Bush's father during the Gulf War, bluntly expressed his doubt about a unilateral war against Iraq. A few weeks later, a trio of four-star generals appeared before Congress to echo that concern.
One of them was Gen. Wesley Clark, a former NATO military commander. "If we go in unilaterally, or without the full weight of international organizations behind us, if we go in with a very sparse number of allies, if we go in without an effective information operation ... we're liable to supercharge recruiting for al-Qaida," Clark said.
Now comes retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, who has worked recently as the State Department's envoy to the region with a mission to encourage talks between Palestinians and Israelis. Zinni, a Purple Heart recipient who served in Vietnam and helped command forces in the Gulf War and in Somalia, spoke last Thursday in Washington at the Middle East Institute's annual conference and laid out his own reservations about a potential war with Iraq.
Dick Cheney, dove
Timothy Noah, Slate, October 16, 2002
Dick Cheney, then Defense Secretary, April 13, 1991: "If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?"
The Bali bombing must kill off war with Iraq
Simon Jenkins, The Times, October 16, 2002
It defies common sense now to light a fuse under Islamic militancy with a “pre-emptive war” on Iraq. It defies common sense to incite extremist opposition in Pakistan, Iran and Egypt, on whose Governments the search for al-Qaeda depends. It defies common sense to confuse Saddam and al-Qaeda and link them to every outrage. The Bali bombs could be an Indonesian reaction to Australian action in East Timor. Why glorify al-Qaeda with omnipresence? Common sense would a year ago have built on the outpouring of sympathy for America after September 11. Even Iran, Syria, Libya and the Palestinians offered help to combat the new terrorist curse. To be anti-American was then to be beyond any tolerable pale. September’s “coalition against terror” was genuine. A campaign to isolate al-Qaeda could have been launched across the world, including in Indonesia whose Islamic militants are now on the rampage.
The bombs that fell on Kabul wrecked that coalition. The bombs that may again fall on Baghdad will obliterate it. Setting up Osama bin Laden and Saddam, once sworn enemies, as idols of anti-Americanism was strategically reckless. Al-Qaeda was not crushed in Afghanistan. If the Bali bomb was indeed al-Qaeda’s, the organisation has clearly lost none of its ability to reduce Western states and their economies to quivering terror.
More anti-war activists snagged by "no fly" list
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, October 16, 2002
The No Fly list is still up and running. The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration have a list of suspicious people they distribute to the airlines, and the airlines check the names of their passengers against this list. The existence of the list was first reported here on this web site and then in the June issue of The Progressive, after a group of peace activists were detained in Milwaukee on April 19.
On August 7, two more peace activists found themselves on the list. Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams were detained by San Francisco police at the airport there, reported Alan Gathright of The San Francisco Chronicle on September 27.
US press ignores Australia's pain
The Age, October 15, 2002
The British press has dubbed the Bali bombings Australia's own September 11. But in the US, Australia is hardly rating a mention. One report in the Washington Post about the twin night club blasts at Kuta Beach states: "Many of the victims were from Australia, south of Indonesia". But readers of the Miami Herald online would be in the dark about Australia's death toll now believed to be the majority of the 183 confirmed dead. The online paper refers to two Americans killed and three injured in the blast. As for the rest: "Most of the dead are foreigners," the article stated.
Locked in war's embrace
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon needs Hamas and its suicide bombers to destroy Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority
Amy Wilentz, Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2002
True to type, Sharon is a person who does not hesitate to invade another's "personal space." He's not standoffish. During the days of Oslo, he was not much visible, but you knew he was around. One way to sense the presence was to walk through the Arab quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. If you passed by a certain doorway there, you'd notice that it was guarded by two or three Israeli soldiers in full uniform, with machine guns. If you bothered to inquire about what important building this could be, you'd be told that this was a house that Sharon had bought in the quarter. Just to show he could do it, people said. To make a point. That he had the right. This house and the reason he occupied it certainly came to mind when Sharon showed he had the right to march on the Temple Mount in September 2000 and, by doing so, gave the Palestinians the final excuse they needed to begin the bloody and destructive Al Aqsa intifada.
Indonesia at the crossroads
Eric Boehlert, Salon, October 16, 2002
In an interview Monday, Robert Hefner, a Boston University professor, Indonesia expert and author of "Civil Islam," dissected the Bali terrorist attack -- its effect on the struggle for Indonesia, and the larger impact on the war on terrorism.
Was it an opening blast in a bloody fight for an Islamic state in Indonesia, and yet another front for al-Qaida? Or was it a miscalculation that will shock Indonesian moderates, including public officials, into action and mark the end of the Islamists' crusade?
Hefner argues that moderate Muslims would never allow Indonesia to become an Islamic state, and that Abu Bakar Baasyir may soon be under house arrest. But he cites one complicating factor that could give Indonesian radicals political cover in coming months: likely U.S. plans to invade Iraq and the backlash it would create among Muslims in the Southeast Asian country.
Clean lies, dirty wars
Patricia Axelrod, Reno News & Review, October 16, 2002
It was October 1992. The first George Bush was in his second bid for the presidency. Central to his campaign was the glorious Desert Storm victory. Desert Storm, said the president, was a model war. A hundred thousand tons of explosive power had been dropped on a nation one-third smaller than the state of Texas, from which Bush hailed. The official line was only good news. America's new wonder weapons--depleted-uranium-tipped munitions and precision-guided missiles--had destroyed the Iraqi army but spared Iraqi civilians. The media in their enthusiasm had labeled Desert Storm a "clean war."
The years I've spent as a weapons system analyst told me otherwise, as did Desert Storm veterans I'd interviewed, who spoke of civilian slaughter and brought home photographs of blackened corpses melted by depleted uranium--bodies nicknamed "crispy critters" by soldiers. And so I set out to uncover the dirty lie.
Who will lead?
Todd Gitlin, Mother Jones, October 14, 2002
An antiwar movement is finally, thankfully stirring. But the ideology-bound leaders of that movement are steering it away from the millions of Americans whose concerns and ambivalence might fuel it.
The opportunists
Steve Kettmann, Mother Jones, October 14, 2002
The Bush administration is dismissing critics of its war designs, calling them political opportunists and questioning their patriotism. But the questions and concerns those critics have raised can't be so easily brushed aside.
Intoxicated with power
Leon Fuerth, Washington Post, October 16, 2002
According to recent news stories, the Bush administration may have decided that if the United States ultimately invades Iraq, it will establish a military government under the control of an American military officer who will simultaneously run and redesign the country, on the model of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II. Whether this turns out to be the policy of the Bush administration, the fact that consideration of such an approach has reached this level warns us that there may be a dangerous intoxication with American power, and a serious loss of judgment as to its limits, among the most senior persons in our government.
Are Bush officials exploiting Bali blast...and leaning on CIA?
David Corn, The Nation, October 15, 2002
Can George W. Bush be trusted as he further heats up the rhetoric on Iraq?
Two days after a horrific bomb blast in Bali, Indonesia, killed over 180 people--including at least two Americans--Bush, appearing at a Republican campaign rally in Michigan, cited the assault as yet another reason for vigorous prosecution of the war on terrorism. But as he rallied the GOP loyalists, he focused less on al Qaeda (which, naturally, is suspected of being associated with the Bali attack) and more on Saddam Hussein. Bush maintained that the Iraqi dictator hopes to deploy al Qaeda as his own "forward army" against the West, that "we need to think about Saddam Hussein using al Qaeda to do his dirty work, to not leave fingerprints behind," and that "this is a man who we know has had connections with al Qaeda."
White House keeps a grip on its news
Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, October 14, 2002
"If the National Hurricane Center were as stingy with its information, there would be thousands dead," John Roberts, the senior CBS News White House correspondent, deadpanned in his West Wing broadcast booth the other day.
Mr. Roberts may have been joking, but the sentiment was real. "Ari has the uncanny ability to suck information out of a room," he added.
Tensions have escalated far beyond the inevitable grousing between press secretaries and journalists, who said they could not remember a White House that was more grudging or less forthcoming in informing the press. Complaints from the White House press corps ranged from the paucity of presidential press conferences to fewer briefings from administration policy experts to instances where they believe they have been frozen out by White House officials when they ask questions considered out of bounds.
Islamic West Asia and US foreign policy:
A tale of strategic self-delusion
Harold Gould, Counterpunch, October 14, 2002
The principle question persistently being raised by the critics of waging war with Iraq is whether that country's military capabilities (both in terms of conventional weaponry and WMDs) really constitute a dire enough threat to US security either at home or abroad. to warrant resort to such extreme measures.
And there is an additional (perhaps the primary) concern. Based upon past performance, there is a paucity of evidence to show that United States diplomacy can be counted on to get things right once the fighting is over. This certainly has not been the case in the aftermath of previous sorties into the affairs of Islamic West Asia.
Cheney is fulcrum of foreign policy
Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin, Washington Post, October 13, 2002
Vice President Cheney likes to operate discreetly, leaving the spotlight to others. But in the doldrums of late August, as President Bush relaxed on his ranch in Texas, it was Cheney who stepped forward to address the gathering chorus of complaints about the administration's Iraq policy.
"If the United States could have preempted 9/11, we would have, no question," he declared at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville. "Should we be able to prevent another, much more devastating attack, we will, no question. This nation will not live at the mercy of terrorists or terror regimes."
Cheney's speech, laden with historical references and a detailed rebuttal of administration critics, was the moment when the administration turned from debating Iraq internally to publicly setting the stage for a confrontation. It also offered a rare glimpse of the singular role that Cheney plays in the making of U.S. foreign policy.
Al Qaeda evolves into looser network, experts say
Douglas Frantz, New York Times, October 15, 2002
Since the rout of Al Qaeda last year in Afghanistan, intelligence and law enforcement officials in the United States and elsewhere have been forced to redefine their thinking about the organization and the threat it represents.
Stripped of their sanctuaries in Afghanistan and with their leadership on the run, Al Qaeda's followers dispersed throughout the world to re-establish themselves within a loosely knit alliance of like-minded but independent groups, officials said.
Bali proves that America's war on terror isn't working
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, October 15, 2002
The world has every right to feel angry. Not just with the perpetrators of the Saturday night massacre in Bali, but with the governments who vowed to wage a "war on terror" which would make attacks like it less likely.
Of course, no one is accusing our leaders of having a chance to prevent this act of mass murder and deliberately failing to take it. (No one, that is, except the conspiracy obsessives of radical Islamism, already spreading the word that Saturday's bombers were US agents, seeking to justify and intervention.)
But there is much western governments promised to do after 9/11 which would at least have obstructed the path of the men who plotted evil last weekend. Washington called it a "war on terror" and, with remarkably little resistance, most of the world's people either signed up for it or acquiesced in it. Prevention of horrors like Saturday's was the new strategy's primary purpose. Yet all too little of that "war" effort has actually materialised.
Still living dangerously
Paul Krugman, New York Times, October 15, 2002
A smart terrorist understands that he is not engaged in conventional warfare. Instead he kills to call attention to his cause, to radicalize moderates, to disrupt the lives and livelihoods of those who would prefer not to be involved, to provoke his opponents into actions that drive more people into his camp.
In case you haven't noticed, the people running Al Qaeda are smart. Saturday's bombing in Bali, presumably carried out by a group connected to Al Qaeda, was monstrously evil. It was also, I'm sorry to say, very clever. And it reinforces the sinking feeling that our leaders, who seem determined to have themselves a conventional war, are playing right into the terrorists' hands.
Blair makes a case ... for inspections, not war
David Corn, The Hartford Advocate, October 10, 2002
Blair, Bush's closest ally in the campaign against Saddam, is clearly saying an attempt to revive the weapons inspection program should occur before the United States and Britain wage war against Iraq. That is not how the media characterized his presentation. And it is not the White House position.
Seeking middle ground on privacy vs. security
Amitai Etzioni, Christian Science Monitor, October 15, 2002
Since Sept. 11, discussion has swirled around whether Americans have sacrificed too many rights to shore up national security. As I see it, much of the debate around this question started out on the wrong foot, the same foot on which the Luddites tried to stand.
War worries
Support for attacking Iraq begins to wane across the U.S.
Bill Redeker, ABC News, October 14, 2002
As the administration prepares for war with Iraq, a new mantra has emerged in the campaign to win the hearts and minds of Americans and, in effect, put Saddam Hussein on notice.
"America speaks with one voice," says President Bush.
In Washington, Bush, having been empowered by both houses of Congress to use force, sems to face very little opposition on Iraq.
On the streets of America, nothing could be further from the truth.
Across the nation, in city after city, ABCNEWS found voices of opposition, and many of them were from military towns.
Anti-war protests get louder in California
Evelyn Nieves, Washington Post, October 14, 2002
In the Bay Area, bastion of the most liberal Democrats in the country, speaking out against unilateral action on Iraq is like preaching the dangers of binge drinking at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. Anti-war rallies on two consecutive weekends drew 10,000 people each, and hastily called protests draw several hundred. Unlike the rest of the country -- or even the rest of California -- activists here can boast that most of their elected representatives (10 of 13) heeded their thousands of phone calls and voted against the resolution on Iraq.
But the Bay Area is not, as some pundits would have it, "out there" alone.
It is simply the most obvious place, veteran peace organizers say, to see a burgeoning national anti-war movement that is gaining momentum by the day.
Peace groups believe they can still avert a war by convincing politicians that the majority of Americans oppose unilateral action against Iraq.
Most Americans -- about 61 percent, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll -- support using force to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but anti-war activists contend that is true only when people are asked the question in the broadest terms. When voters in the Post-ABC poll were asked whether the United States should launch an attack over the opposition of its allies, for example, support dropped to 46 percent.
Bitter harvest
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, October 11, 2002
For years, settlers would chop down Palestinians' olive trees or prevent them from working their land. Now a new trend has emerged: the theft of olives. This week, a Palestinian was killed and two others wounded when settlers opened fire on them as they worked in their grove.
America's obsession with Iraq leaves others free to kill
Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, October 14, 2002
For months, while their political masters have been increasingly obsessed by Saddam Hussein, western intelligence agencies have warned of planned terrorist attacks by al-Qaida or, more likely, other Islamist extremist groups with similar objectives and outlook.
They have warned in particular about the likelihood of attacks on such American and British targets as bases and embassies - targets, in other words, which represent the governmental, military, presence of major western countries in the Muslim world. Commercial targets, equally symbolic, were also in their sight.
The awful message of the bombing of the Bali nightclub is that Islamist extremists appear to have changed their tactics with horrific implications. Bali may be a Hindu region dominated by western tourists in the world's largest Muslim country, but the nightclub was the easiest and softest of targets.
Bush aiming at wrong target, US critics fear
Julian Borger, The Guardian, October 14, 2002
The upsurge in terrorist attacks on western targets around the world over the past month, culminating in the bombings in Bali, has fuelled criticism of the Bush administration that its focus on Iraq has sapped its effort against an undefeated al-Qaida.
Sept. 11 and wars of the world
Osama and Saddam pose real threats, but the Bush administration may be too incompetent -- and too arrogant -- to stop them
William M. Arkin, Salon, October 11, 2002
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that those who know about the war plan for Iraq aren't talking, and those who are talking don't know. So I'm grateful to be invited here to deliver this first lecture at the Naval War College tonight. I guess the Secretary was busy. Rumsfeld has more one-liners than David Letterman these days.
Will Bush's carve-up of Iraq include getting hands on its oil?
Robert Fisk, The Independent, October 12, 2002
There is no Emperor of Iraq – or is there? The problem for General Tommy Franks – if he really does turn up in Baghdad to play the role of General Douglas MacArthur – is that the one unifying, sovereign symbol that held Japan together amid the ashes of nuclear defeat in 1945 was the Emperor Hirohito, mysteriously absolved of all responsibility for Japan's atrocities in the Second World War. His military underlings went to the gallows on his behalf.
But in Iraq, the emperor is called Saddam Hussein and – if we are to believe the US administration – the Caliph of Tikrit will be in the dock along with the rest of Iraq's war criminals. General Franks will have to combine the role of emperor and colonial governor – which is how America's whole imperial adventure is likely to come unstuck.
Radical Shias are a worry for Bush as well as Saddam
Ian Cobain, The Times, October 12, 2002
President Bush held out hope of democracy in Iraq in his speech to the United Nations last month, and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, says that he foresees the country being governed “in a democratic fashion”.
But a democratic Iraq would be a predominantly Shia Iraq and one which may choose to forge closer ties with its Persian co-religionists in Iran, the second nation in President Bush’s “axis of evil”. Some in the West fear even that a Shia Iraq may become an Islamic state.
America's for-profit secret army
Leslie Wayne, New York Times, October 13, 2002
With the war on terror already a year old and the possibility of war against Iraq growing by the day, a modern version of an ancient practice — one as old as warfare itself — is reasserting itself at the Pentagon. Mercenaries, as they were once known, are thriving — only this time they are called private military contractors, and some are even subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies.
The Pentagon cannot go to war without them.
Often run by retired military officers, including three- and four-star generals, private military contractors are the new business face of war. Blurring the line between military and civilian, they provide stand-ins for active soldiers in everything from logistical support to battlefield training and military advice at home and abroad.
Bush doubted on 9/11 panel
Lawmakers say he doesn't want new commission
Helen Dewar, Washington Post, October 12, 2002
Angry lawmakers accused the White House yesterday of secretly trying to derail creation of an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks while professing to support the idea. The White House responded by renewing its pledge of support for the proposal and suggesting an agreement was near.
A day after collapse of an announced deal to create the commission, there was little agreement on anything, including causes of the disagreement. The White House said the remaining disputes involve how many votes from commission members would be required to issue subpoenas and who would appoint the chairman. Lawmakers said the issue is whether the White House really wants a commission.
Our fears are not a reason for war
Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, October 13, 2002
Did ever a declaration of war (or its functional equivalent) spring from a more dampered debate? It's not that there weren't impassioned speeches of opposition in both the Senate and House chambers this past week as Congress gave President Bush the unilateral authority he wants to wage war against Iraq. Critics of the administration's policy raised doubts about the Iraqi threat, the distraction from our war against al Qaeda, and the wisdom and propriety of preemption itself. Old Robert Byrd of West Virginia did a pretty fair imitation of Frank Capra's young Mr. Smith.
But there's an emotional undercurrent to the Iraq debate that was largely missing from this nation's earlier deliberations on war and peace, and that most certainly played no part in the wrangling over Vietnam. That emotion is fear -- in the Congress, but more important, in the nation as a whole. And the president has done a masterful job of exploiting it.
U.S. anti-war movement growing
Jim Lobe, OneWorld, October 11, 2002
As both houses of the United States Congress voted Thursday to authorize President George W. Bush to take military action against Iraq, anti-war forces claimed that their movement was rapidly gaining momentum around the country.
"We are seeing a remarkable mobilization against a war that has not yet even begun," declared Robert Borosage, the founder-director of the Campaign for America's Future, at a press conference sponsored by Foreign Policy in Focus held Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.
Borosage noted that more than 200 demonstrations and other protests have taken place around the U.S. while Congress debated the resolution agreed by Bush and the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Dick Gephardt, last week.
War will not end terrorism
Tamim Ansary, AlterNet, October 10, 2002
Whenever I read about destroying the infrastructure of terrorism, I am troubled by the hard fact that terrorism doesn't need any infrastructure to succeed. Indeed, its lack of infrastructure is its main advantage. Historically, terrorist tactics have been exploited by groups without state power, without the capacity to field armies, and without permission to operate in the open.
Foreseeing a bloody siege in Baghdad
Barry R. Posen, New York Times, October 13, 2002
Advocates of regime change in Iraq have presented an optimistic view of the coming war. Most assert that the Iraqi military will not fight. A dazzling attack by smart weapons and computer viruses will shut down Iraq's military nervous system. Western forces will dash for key military and political centers, cutting the Iraqi military up into isolated fragments. Most troops will surrender; a few diehards will huddle with Saddam Hussein and patiently await their destruction by a second wave of smart bombs.
The war could indeed go this way, but it may not.
While the Iraqi military is less than half as capable as it was in 1991, when it suffered a devastating defeat, this will be a different kind of war with different military objectives. These objectives will give Iraq the opportunity to impose significant costs on the United States.
The voice of America
Only his people can stop Bush now - and many are speaking out against war in Iraq
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, October 12, 2002
Who can stop Bush on Iraq? Not the UN security council, it seems, where US diplomatic kneecapping and punishment beatings proceed apace. Not an intimidated US Congress where, with honourable exceptions, the call to arms trumpets irresistibly over November's hustings. And not any number of international lawyers, vainly brandishing the UN charter and pre-emptively disregarded by high counsel to the White House hyperpower. In Whitehall, worried marchers scare pigeons but not the Pentagon. As the drum beats and the rhetoric rises, respected analysts opine that nothing now can prevent the war. Bush will have his way because, whatever bishops and imams vicariously preach, no power on earth can stop him.
This is not entirely true; in truth, not true at all. Americans can stop America's next war as they have stopped similar planned or actual idiocies in the past. That the Bush clique pays scant heed to Arab and Muslim concerns, has no time for "euro-wimps" and other appeasers is brutally clear. But domestic public opinion is a different story - and that story is changing. Slowly, inconsistently but palpably, ordinary Americans are making their voices heard. This is no anti-war movement to compare with Vietnam. Their motivations are often practical, even mundane. But a strange phenomenon is now apparent in which Karl Rove, Bush's top electoral strategist and poll-watcher, may yet emerge as a more potent force than the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis and all the other full-spectrum dominators combined.
Israel, Iraq, and the United States
Edward Said, Al-Ahram, October 10, 2002
The whole theme of the war against terrorism has permitted Israel and its supporters to commit war crimes against the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, 3.4 million of them who have become (as the going phrase has it) non-combatant collateral damage. Terje-Roed Larsen, who is the UN's special administrator for the occupied territories, has just issued a report charging Israel with inducing a humanitarian catastrophe: unemployment has reached 65 per cent, 50 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, and the economy, to say nothing of people's lives, has been shattered. In comparison with this, Israeli suffering and insecurity is considerably less: there aren't Palestinian tanks occupying any part of Israel, or even challenging Israeli settlements. During the past two weeks Israel has killed 75 Palestinians, many of them children, it has demolished houses, deported people, razed valuable agricultural land, kept everyone indoors under 80-hour curfews at a stretch, not permitted civilians through roadblocks or allowed ambulances and medical aid through, and as usual cut off water and electricity. Schools and universities simply cannot function. While these are daily occurrences which, like the occupation itself and the dozens of UN Security Council resolutions, have been in effect for at least 35 years, they are mentioned in the US media only occasionally, as endnotes for long articles about Israeli government debates, or the disastrous suicide bombings that have occurred. The tiny phrase "suspected of terrorism" is both the justification and the epitaph for whomever Sharon chooses to have killed. The US doesn't object except in the mildest terms, eg, it says, this is not helpful but this does little to deter the next brace of killings.
We are now closer to the heart of the matter. Because of Israeli interests in this country, US Middle East policy is therefore Israelo-centric. A post-9/11 chilling conjuncture has occurred in which the Christian Right, the Israeli lobby, and the Bush's administration's semi-religious belligerency is theoretically rationalised by neo-conservative hawks whose view of the Middle East is committed to the destruction of Israel's enemies, which is sometimes given the euphemistic label of re-drawing the map by bringing regime change and "democracy" to the Arab countries who most threaten Israel.
Storming the streets of Baghdad
Stan Crock and John Carey, with Paul Magnusson, Geoffrey Smith, and Otis Port, Business Week, October 21, 2002
Pentagon strategists are hoping that the campaign will follow the script of the 1991 gulf war: a pulverizing bombardment followed by a lightning ground attack and capitulation. But this may not turn out to be the antiseptic, largely casualty-free affair the U.S. has grown accustomed to.
True, the U.S. will deploy a devastating arsenal of high-tech wizardry, from missiles that strike within feet of their intended targets to bombs capable of burrowing deep into bunkers before exploding at the right subterranean level. But while U.S. military planners think in terms of Star Wars, Saddam wants a battle more like Somalia, where the U.S. would be forced into difficult and bloody urban combat. "The U.S. is gambling that precision weapons and rapid land maneuvers will cause the spontaneous combustion of Saddam's regime," says John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. "Saddam is gambling that won't work."
The reason: If the battle does end up in Baghdad, much of America's dazzling high-tech weaponry will be less effective in the gritty, house-by-house fight likely to ensue. In fact, some new technologies for close-in combat, like migraine-producing sound blasters, are not ready for prime time. And current high-tech gear may not work well in the urban environment.
"The bottom line is I don't trust this president and his advisors"
Rep. Pete Stark, Salon, October 11, 2002
"Make no mistake, we are voting on a resolution that grants total authority to the president, who wants to invade a sovereign nation without any specific act of provocation. This would authorize the United States to act as the aggressor for the first time in our history. It sets a precedent for our nation -- or any nation -- to exercise brute force anywhere in the world without regard to international law or international consensus.
"Congress must not walk in lockstep behind a president who has been so callous to proceed without reservation, as if war was of no real consequence."
The spoils of war
James Ridgeway, Village Voice, October 9, 2002
As they prepare to make war on Iraq, cowboy-in-chief George Bush and his cohorts have pulled out all the stops. They're trying to convince us that this act of pure aggression is a "preemptive" move that will allow Americans to sleep more peacefully in their beds, while the Iraqi masses cheer the conquerors who have starved them for a decade and then bombed them to smithereens.
And that's just for starters. In the imaginations of Bush and his advisers, this Wild West approach to the Middle East stands to knock out Syria's despot, rein in the Saudi royal family, inspire the neighboring Iranians to their own pro-American putsch, banish the Palestinians to Jordan, and clear the way for Israeli settlers.
Ex-commander opposes Iraq invasion
Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, October 11, 2002
The former U.S. military commander for the Middle East came out against a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq yesterday, saying that he believes the policy of containing President Saddam Hussein has been working.
'Saddam will use everything within his reach'
Samir Zedan, MSNBC, October 10, 2002
Iraq's former head of military intelligence assesses the chances of a military coup in Baghdad - and warns that, if cornered, the dictator will use his weapons of mass destruction.
Concerns rise about Iraq's options for retaliation
Faye Bowers, Christian Science Monitor, October 11, 2002
If his country is attacked, will Iraq's Saddam Hussein retaliate against the United States in some horrific way?
That question has grown more urgent of late, as the drumbeat of war gets louder and as a CIA report, declassified this week, concluded that a cornered President Hussein would more than likely unsheath his arsenal – which includes chemical and biological weapons – perhaps even in attacks on US soil.
Hussein may dodge US hunt
From Osama bin Laden to Pancho Villa, the US has always struggled to neutralize high-profile foes
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, October 11, 2002
If played out on the silver screen, an American manhunt for Saddam Hussein would have a predictable end: John Rambo would penetrate Baghdad, track the Iraqi leader to his deeply buried bunker, and carry out the White House policy of "regime change" with a single bullet – and then make a safe getaway.
But while the tidy world of the movies may appear to shape some US options for Iraq, former American military officers and analysts warn that going after Mr. Hussein to "cut off the head" of the Iraqi regime may prove to be Mission Impossible.
Bush's Iraq plan is a policy of fear, not strength
Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, Newsday, October 11, 2002
I have no love for Saddam Hussein's brutal regime, and I would support any action that the international community, the United Nations and our friends in the Muslim world agreed was in the best security interests of the world. But I do question why the Bush administration would choose now to bring this issue to a vote.
On the floor of the House of Representatives this week, I voted and spoke against House Joint Res. 114, which would give the president unilateral authority to use force against the Iraqi regime.This debate and vote comes at a time when many Americans, particularly many New Yorkers, are still in pain from the trauma of the attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
At a time when the economy is faltering and many other domestic issues are being left unattended, this Congress is being forced to consider the authorization of the use of force, perhaps unilaterally, against a regime we've known about for years.
This regime has always been undemocratic and brutal against its own people. Yet our government once ignored those facts, because it once felt it was in our own best interests to support that regime with the very same capabilities we now say threaten America.
U.S. has a plan to occupy Iraq, officials report
David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, October 11, 2002
The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein, senior administration officials said today.
The plan also calls for war-crime trials of Iraqi leaders and a transition to an elected civilian government that could take months or years.
In the initial phase, Iraq would be governed by an American military commander — perhaps Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of United States forces in the Persian Gulf, or one of his subordinates — who would assume the role that Gen. Douglas MacArthur served in Japan after its surrender in 1945.
Get serious
Michael Kinsley, Slate, October 10, 2002
According to the Bush administration, the threat posed by Iraq is serious enough to risk the lives of American soldiers, to end the lives of what would undoubtedly be thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians, and to risk a chemical or biological attack on the American homeland, but not serious enough to interrupt prime-time television. None of the big three broadcast networks carried Bush's case-for-war speech Monday night because, they say, the White House didn't ask. Pre-empting Saddam Hussein is one thing, apparently, but pre-empting Drew Carey is another.
Ashcroft fails to produce arresting developments
The US attorney general has not made one significant breakthrough in America's domestic 'war on terror'
Julian Borger, The Guardian, October 10, 2002
After the arrest of four alleged followers of al-Qaida and the Taliban last week, John Ashcroft declared it "a defining day" in the fight against terrorism.
It may well turn out the attorney general was right, but not in the sense he intended.
The arrests, in Portland, Oregon and in Detroit, defined Ashcroft's performance so far at the justice department in that they were low-level, seemingly timed to create the impression of progress in the struggle with terrorism, and extravagantly hyped to emphasise the threat of the "enemy within".
UK spies reject al-Qaida link
Intelligence MI5 and MI6 dismiss Iraq terror 'evidence'
Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, October 10, 2002
British intelligence agencies are dismissing claims by the Bush administration that there are links between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network.
The claims are being used by President Bush to press his case against Saddam Hussein, amid growing unease among Americans of the prospect of a US military invasion of Iraq, especially without British participation.
The allegations have already sparked off a dispute in the US over the way information and speculation by the CIA is being used by the Bush administration for its own ends.
Both MI5 and MI6 have been deeply concerned about unsubstantiated claims made by senior members of the Bush administration, notably Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, about the threat posed by al-Qaida. They say the claims could be counter-productive since they are plainly misleading.
Stop ethnic cleansing in the Mideast before it starts
Helena Cobban, Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 2002
"No deportations of Palestinians!" "Get back to the negotiating table!" Should these things even need saying to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when he visits Washington Oct. 16? One would think not. But given President Bush's long record of negligence in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, they probably need restating to Mr. Sharon very loudly – and by the president – right now.
Most of the attention regarding how Israel might behave in the event of an American war against Iraq has thus far focused on whether Sharon's government would launch a military response against Iraq if Iraq should start aiming at Israel during the war. But there's another possibility, even more feared by members of the peace camps in Israel and Palestine. That's the prospect that – with or without receiving a prior hit from Iraq – Sharon might use the cover of a "big war" in the region to undertake new and serious escalations in his campaign against the Palestinians.
Israel mints ultranationalist hero
Ben Lynfield, Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 2002
The high school students listening to principal Arik Wurzburger's lecture may not have realized it, but they were participating in the creation of a new Israeli hero.
Rehavam Zeevi, assassinated a year ago by Palestinian militants, was regarded almost to the end of his life as an extremist for his anti-Arab views. But now, with a push from the government, and amid the charged emotions generated by war and terrorism, he is taking on new life after death. His call for "transfer," a euphemism for a mass expulsion of Palestinians, is now embraced by an estimated 20 to 30 percent of Israelis.
A battle over Mr. Zeevi's legacy came to a head this week when some, but not all, schools offered lessons about his "heritage" in keeping with a government recommendation.
Pitting a small but vocal left-wing opposition against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's national unity coalition, the debate over Zeevi's legacy offers a window into a larger contest over Israel's identity.
Congress must resist the rush to war
Senator Robert C. Byrd, New York Times, October 10, 2002
A sudden appetite for war with Iraq seems to have consumed the Bush administration and Congress. The debate that began in the Senate last week is centered not on the fundamental and monumental questions of whether and why the United States should go to war with Iraq, but rather on the mechanics of how best to wordsmith the president's use-of-force resolution in order to give him virtually unchecked authority to commit the nation's military to an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation.
Bush studied '67 pre-emptive strike
Summer reading includes account of the Six Day War
Howard Fineman, Newsweek, October 9, 2002
A president's reading list is always news, especially if the president is George W. Bush - not known as a fan of big-think books. Which is why, as I listened to him make his case the other night for a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein, I suddenly recalled something that Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, had told me. Last summer, on his Texas ranch, Card said, Bush read Michael B. Oren's "Six Days of War," an account of Israel's stunningly successful (at least militarily) pre-emptive attack in 1967 against neighboring Arab states that had been poised to destroy it.
Belafonte lashes 'house slave' Powell for serving Bush
Agence France-Presse, October 10, 2002
The singer and activist Harry Belafonte has accused the United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell, of selling out his race by joining the Bush Administration.
The attack came during a radio interview in San Diego on Tuesday when Mr Belafonte ripped into Mr Powell for belonging to President George Bush's administration.
The veteran singer and leading political and anti-apartheid activist compared Mr Powell to a slave on an old southern cotton plantation who had become beholden to his "master".
Mr Belafonte, who like Mr Powell is of Jamaican descent, said: "There's an old saying. In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and there were those slaves that lived in the house.
"You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master ... exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him," he said.
The silence of the bombs
Gar Smith, The-Edge, October 9, 2002
George W. Bush repeatedly insists that Iraq poses a direct military threat to the U.S. This claim seems rather strange in light of the fact that it is the U.S. that has been bombing Iraq -- not just threatening -- nonstop for nearly four years.
Scramble to carve up Iraqi oil reserves lies behind US diplomacy
Ed Vulliamy, Paul Webster, and Nick Paton, The Observer, October 6, 2002
Oil is emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of Russia and France for military action against Iraq, according to an Observer investigation.
The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry, is keen to pounce on Iraq's massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in the world after Saudi Arabia's. But France and Russia, who hold a power of veto on the UN Security Council, have billion-dollar contracts with Baghdad, which they fear will disappear in 'an oil grab by Washington', if America installs a successor to Saddam.
Rift over plan to impose rule on Iraq
James Dao and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, October 10, 2002
The Bush administration is considering plans to create a provisional government for Iraq that could provide a base for opposition to President Saddam Hussein and form the core of a new government if Mr. Hussein is ousted, senior administration officials said.
But the proposal, which is being pushed by several Iraqi exile groups has received mixed reaction inside the administration. It has strong support among Pentagon officials, who want to incorporate it into invasion plans. But the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have been cool to the idea.
War plans and pitfalls
Michael T Klare, The Nation, October 21, 2002
After months of internal wrangling over tactics and strategy, it now appears that the White House has settled on the basic design for the US invasion of Iraq. President Bush was given a detailed plan for the assault on September 10, and it appears that key combat units have been moved to the Middle East or are being readied for deployment to the region. Although most of the world is still focused on the diplomatic whirlwind at the United Nations, American military personnel are behaving as if a war with Iraq is imminent. And while it is impossible to predict the exact day and hour when hostilities will commence, it is unlikely that "D-Day" will occur much later than the second or third week of February 2003.
This marks the death of deterrence
Bush's new doctrine kills the principle of state sovereignty
Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, October 9, 2002
Whatever the outcome of the intense diplomatic manoeuvres at the UN, whatever cover the UN might give to an American attack on Iraq, they cannot hide a fundamental truth. It has profound implications for future relations between states. Henry Kissinger, archpriest of realpolitik, has called it "revolutionary". Tony Blair appears to have embraced it, though we cannot be sure.
A new doctrine of war has been laid down by the Bush administration that casts aside all the traditional tenets of international law as well as the UN and Nato charters. It abandons the concept of deterrence, considered the bedrock of stability throughout the cold war and cited by successive British governments as justification for their nuclear arsenal.
Ever since September 11 last year, it has been reflected in speeches, notably by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. It was spelt out most clearly by Bush himself in June. The US, he said, would no longer rely on "deterrence" and "containment"; it had to be "ready for pre-emptive action".
He added: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless." This new doctrine was enshrined in the Bush administration's National Security Strategy document published last month.
See also The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
C.I.A. letter to Senate on Baghdad's intentions
New York Times, October 9, 2002
CIA Director George Tenet: "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or C.B.W. [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States.
Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or C.B.W..
Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a W.M.D. attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
Interview with Lewis Lapham
Stefffen Silvis, Willamette Weekly, October 2, 2002
The whole approach to the forthcoming invasion of downtown Baghdad seems to take place outside the context of history. You listen to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, and it's as if they were unaware of the last 100 years, forget the 2000 preceding ones. It's a very ahistorical approach, and that to me is always dangerous. It's frightening. It's as if these people don't know what they're doing. If they do know, they are running against the current of our own history as well as against the grain of the American people. I've found within the last few days talking to audiences that there are a lot of people who object to what's happening, more than the polls and media care to recognize. Certainly, I've seen it at Harper's. There's been a great deal of mail since Sept. 11 from readers who appreciate our magazine's questioning of events. In fact, the magazine's newsstand rate has risen from 30,000 to 40,000 this year.
The case against preemption
Peter Mark, Asia Times, October 9, 2002
The Bush administration threatens a preemptive attack on Iraq. It is important to ask what affect such an attack might have on the relationship of the United States to the rest of the international community. Almost without exception, America's closest allies have voiced opposition to a military attack against Iraq.
Bush's October 7 speech on Iraq
The Institute for Public Accuracy provides line-by-line expert analysis of Bush's speech.
Vets group wants Rumsfeld out over alleged shipment to Iraq
Lawrence Morahan, CNSNews, October 08, 2002
The American Gulf War Veterans Association (AGWVA) is calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his reported denial that he knew anything about U.S. shipments of chemical and biological agents to Iraq in the 1980s.
If the defense secretary is unaware or in denial of the sale of biological materials to a country the United States is preparing to attack, then he represents a danger to the lives of service members, said Joyce Riley vonKleist, a spokeswoman for AGWVA.
Manifesto
Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, October 7, 2002
The vision laid out in the Bush document [The National Security Strategy of the United States of America] is a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination. It's a vision of a world in which it is American policy to prevent the emergence of any rival power, whatever it stands for—a world policed and controlled by American military might. This goes much further than the notion of America as the policeman of the world. It's the notion of America as both the policeman and the legislator of the world, and it's where the Bush vision goes seriously, even chillingly, wrong. A police force had better be embedded in and guided by a structure of law and consent. There's a name for the kind of regime in which the cops rule, answering only to themselves. It's called a police state.
The Bush doctrine's answer to this objection is essentially this: Hey, we're the good guys. People—especially people who share our values, like the citizens of democratic Europe, but everybody else, too—should embrace American hegemony, because surely they know that we would use our great power only for good things, like advancing democracy, keeping powerful weapons out of the hands of terrorists, and facilitating peaceful commerce. And so we have done, most of the time; and so no doubt we would do, most of the time. But what a naïve view of power and human nature! What ever became of the conservative suspicion of untrammelled power, the conservative insight that good intentions are not, are never, enough? Where is the conservative belief in limited government, in checks and balances? Burke spins in his grave. Madison and Hamilton torque it up, too. Are we now to assume that Americans are exempt from fallen human nature? That we stand outside history? It's as if the Bush authors' brains had been softened by an overdose of anti-"moral equivalency" vaccine. Conservatives used to fault liberals (often unfairly, but never mind) for thinking that there was no such thing as evil, that the Soviets (and the criminals, and the terrorists) were just put upon and misunderstood. Conservatives spend a lot of time congratulating themselves on their "moral clarity." The Soviet Union was an evil empire; Osama is evil; the axis of evil is evil. Nothing more need be said, nothing more need be understood. And if the other side is absolutely evil then we must be absolutely good, so it's fine for us to be absolutely powerful. We should be neither surprised nor indignant if our friends in Europe and elsewhere don't see things in quite the same way.
Some administration officials expressing misgivings on Iraq
Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, Knight-Ridder Tribune News, October 8, 2002
While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq, a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war.
These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East.
They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.
"Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Robert Byrd chastises White House, Democrats
John Nichols, The Nation, October 7, 2002
Typically, [Senator] Byrd was strongest when he asked today's politicians to square their actions against the historical imperatives and insights that he, above all other members of Congress, recognizes and understands. In a speech that began with reference to the Roman historian Titus Livius and closed with a detailed recreation of the Senate debate that preceded the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Byrd summoned the words of an Illinois congressman who in the 1840s chastised a proponent of expanded presidential warmaking powers:
"Representative Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, stated: 'Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - - and you allow him to make war at pleasure... The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.'"
White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'
Julian Borger, The Guardian, October 9, 2002
President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.
Officials in the CIA, FBI and energy department are being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.
"Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence.
Bush's leaps of illogic don't answer people's questions about war
Robert Jensen, Counterpunch, October 8, 2002
George Bush got one thing right in his speech Monday night -- that "many Americans have raised legitimate questions" about his mad rush to war with Iraq.
But he continues to misunderstand what the American people and the rest of the world want in this debate over war -- credible evidence, not speculation and lies; defensible claims, not leaps of illogic; and a response to the growing skepticism about his administration's motivations.
Tanker attack fits bin Laden's economic war
Robert Fisk, The Independent, October 8, 2002
To look at those images of the French oil tanker Limburg, scorched and holed off Yemen, you had to remember the very last sermon Osama bin Laden gave before he disappeared in Afghanistan last December.
The American economy, he said, would be destroyed. "Oil tankers," a Palestinian friend told me later. "If he goes for the oil tankers, the Americans will have to escort every tanker round the Gulf with a warship. Think what that would do to the price of oil."
Yesterday – as the world mulled over the Limburg captain's report of a small explosives-laden boat ramming itself against the side of his 300,000 ton double-hulled supertanker – the price of a barrel of oil duly broke the $30 envelope.
An Iraqi man of letters
Nicholas D. Kristoff, New York Times, October 8, 2002
I started my quest for the nuanced Saddam in the northern city of Tikrit, where he grew up. Saddam has elevated fellow Tikritis — especially relatives — to top positions in the army and government. That's one reason to be skeptical that an American invasion will trigger a coup: Many of the people in a position to mount one are Tikritis or even family members (internal security is controlled by Qusay), and when Saddam is finished, so are they.
Saddam rules like a Tikriti sheik, and even within his clan the rivalries are ferocious. The Ibrahim branch of his family battles the Al-Majid branch, and disputes among his wives (he is believed to have three) have resulted in murders.
While the government bans journalists from Tikrit, I happened to drive to another city farther along the same road and thus had the chance to go through Tikrit twice. I couldn't stop long, and got only glimpses.
Still, they were illuminating: Tanks guard the approaches to the city, and its defense seems to be a priority. Indeed, Saddam might make his last stand in Tikrit, because people here are less likely to betray him than in Baghdad.
The thing to know about Tikrit is that Saddam will never be its most famous son. It's also the birthplace of Saladin, the sultan who in 1187 defeated the Crusaders. Saladin is renowned not just as a warrior but also as a man of culture, and Saddam's yearning to become a second Saladin may explain both his literary and military grandiosity.
Illusions of Iraqi democracy
Fawaz A. Gerges, Washington Post, October 8, 2002
In its effort to garner domestic and international support for a military campaign to disarm Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein's regime, the Bush administration has promised to bring democracy into the country and strategically transform the whole region. President Bush and his senior aides note that liberating Baghdad would usher in a peaceful, democratic dawn in Iraq that would spill over into other authoritarian Arab states. It is a tall and ambitious order for the Middle East. But as America moves closer to war with Iraq, the policy debates have focused on procedural issues, not on the internal conditions in Iraq that will determine the likelihood of a peaceful, democratic state after Hussein's departure.
Iraq's fragmented society and blood-soaked political history should make anyone wary of predicting the swift creation of a viable democracy there. The U.S. establishment does not seem to appreciate how deeply entrenched are sectarian, tribal and ethnic loyalties and how complex would be the job of reconnecting Iraqi communities, estranged from one another by decades of divisive official policies.
Truth on Iraq seeps through
Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2002
In a speech intended to frighten the American people into supporting a war, the president Monday again trotted out his grim depiction of Saddam Hussein as a terrifying boogeyman haunting the world. However, a CIA report released late last week and designed to bolster Bush's case for preemptive invasion instead provided clear evidence that Iraq poses less of a threat to the world than at any other time in the past decade.
In its report, the CIA concludes that years of U.N. inspections combined with U.S. and British bombing of selected targets have left Iraq far weaker militarily than in the 1980s, when it was supported in its war against Iran by the United States.
The CIA report also concedes that the agency has no evidence that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons, although it lamely attempts to put the worst spin on that embarrassing fact: "Although Saddam probably does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them."
Of course, that is a statement about intent, not capability, and one that can be made about dozens of the world's nations, many of them run by dictators as brutal as Hussein.
Total surrender? More like total hypocrisy
Kenneth Davidson, The Age, October 7, 2002
So now we know. Last week the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers carried well-timed and well-informed leaks of the American draft of the proposed United Nations Security Council Resolution ostensibly governing the operations of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq.
What these leaks show is the US is demanding what amounts to an "occupation agreement", which is usually imposed after unconditional surrender.
Inspection as invasion
George Monbiot, The Guardian, October 8, 2002
There is little that those of us who oppose the coming war with Iraq can now do to prevent it. George Bush has staked his credibility on the project; he has mid-term elections to consider, oil supplies to secure and a flagging war on terror to revive. Our voices are as little heeded in the White House as the singing of the birds.
Our role is now, perhaps, confined to the modest but necessary task of demonstrating the withdrawal of our consent, while seeking to undermine the moral confidence which could turn the attack on Iraq into a war against all those states perceived to offend US strategic interests. No task is more urgent than to expose the two astonishing lies contained in George Bush's radio address on Saturday, namely that "the United States does not desire military conflict, because we know the awful nature of war" and "we hope that Iraq complies with the world's demands". Mr Bush appears to have done everything in his power to prevent Iraq from complying with the world's demands, while ensuring that military conflict becomes inevitable.
A peace movement emerges
Sarah Ferguson, Village Voice, October 7, 2002
In the first major sign of popular opposition to a unilateral war with Iraq, an estimated 20,000 people filled the East Meadow of Central Park on Sunday to pledge their resistance to President George Bush's military plans.
Evangelical figures oppose religious leaders' broad antiwar sentiment
Laurie Goodstein, New York Times, October 5, 2002
Christian leaders and ethicists who represent a broad swath of the nation's Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and African-American churches are speaking out against war with Iraq, a chorus of opposition that prompted five conservative evangelicals yesterday to announce their support for the president.
Public says Bush needs to pay heed to weak economy
Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, New York Times, October 7, 2002
A majority of Americans say that the nation's economy is in its worst shape in nearly a decade and that President Bush and Congressional leaders are spending too much time talking about Iraq while neglecting problems at home, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The power paradox
Christopher Layne, Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2002
Conventional wisdom holds that Sept. 11 "changed everything," particularly with regard to foreign policy. But long before the Al Qaeda attacks, the key foreign policy debate centered on the issue of U.S. hegemony, our geopolitical dominance by virtue of overwhelming military and economic capabilities. Since Sept. 11, hegemony has become an even more crucial issue.
By removing the only counterweight to U.S. power from the geostrategic equation, the Soviet Union's collapse vaulted the United States into the seemingly enviable position of global preeminence. Since the Cold War's end, three successive administrations--Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II--have explicitly embraced the strategic objective of maintaining this hegemony. But it's a dangerous business.
Afghanistan imperiled
Ahmed Rashid, The Nation, October 14, 2002
There are mounting fears in Afghanistan that President George W. Bush's war against Iraq will seriously compromise further attempts by the US-led Western alliance to stabilize Afghanistan--even as the US Defense Department appears to be finally acknowledging its failures in helping to rebuild the country.
This woman lost everthing in a US air raid. A year on, she is still living amid the rubble
Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, October 7, 2002
Few people paid a higher price when America's military machine launched its war in Afghanistan a year ago today than Orfa. She was away visiting relatives when the American fighter jet dropped out of the clear midday sky and dived towards her village in the hills outside Kabul. When she returned home a few days later it was left to her neighbours to explain the inexplicable.
They told her that the aircraft, almost certainly an F-16, had mistakenly fired a precision Mk 82 500lb bomb directly at her small mud and stone house, killing her husband, carpet weaver Gul Ahmad, his second wife, five of their daughters and one son. Two children from the house next door also died.
A pair of mass destruction wild cards
How Hussein and Sharon react to Iraq war will determine the devastation
Geoffrey Aronson, Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2002
As the Bush administration commences a second round of hostilities, a central concern is, once again, the possibility that Iraq will use nonconventional weapons to attack Israel, which would then feel compelled to enter the battle against Baghdad with its own sophisticated array of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.
Nation's memory of 9/11 colors the debate on Iraq
Blaine Harden and Peter Kilborn, New York Times, October 6, 2002
In scores of interviews along Interstate 80, in cities and small towns, on farms and a college campus, last year's attacks framed the debate about a war in Iraq, with many people insisting that America should never again be caught unaware.
Missionaries and marines: Bush, Blair and democratisation
Anatol Lieven, Open Democracy, September 18, 2002
The real ‘line’ of the Bush administration on Iraq is ‘regime change’. A compliant not democratic Iraq is its objective, the aim being to secure a compliant Middle East. Now, in its rhetoric, the administration is calling for democracy in Iraq, and Bush academics are calling for, and explaining the US strategy in terms of, a desire to bring democracy to the entire Arab world. This is a stroke of malign brilliance. It is unbelievable to those who study what is actually happening. Nonetheless, it may prove highly influential in the US because of the way in which rigid, ideological paradigms dominate the public discussion here.
In origin, the commitment to Arab democracy is no more than a cynical cross between war propaganda (stressing the undemocratic, therefore barbarous nature of the Arab enemy) and a giant diversionary tactic intended to distract attention from Israel’s crimes and US complicity in them. However, it also has the capacity to co-opt and silence what might otherwise have been a good part of liberal opposition to the war in the US.
For in the US, a belief in the universal applicability of democratic institutions, and America’s right and duty to promote or even impose them, is so widely and unquestioningly held that it is part of what Richard Hofstader and others have called ‘the American Creed’, the core beliefs which define the American nation. So deep and universal is this creed that it is extremely difficult for liberal Americans to stand up against an argument presented in these terms – even when the argument is intended to justify a war of aggression and the flagrant violation of international law. The propaganda of ‘democratisation’ therefore is a way of enlisting the sickly pieties of the Clinton era in the service of the ruthless geopolitical ambitions of Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle, and of allying genuine sentiments of liberal universalism with vicious ethno-religious hatreds.
Nothing and no one will stop this drift towards war
Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, October 4, 2002
An Iraq war looms because a group of American conservatives, now very influential inside and outside this administration, came to the conclusion years ago that Saddam had challenged the US and got away with it, and that his victory could not be allowed to stand.
Not allowed to stand because he might once again disturb a region of political and economic importance to the US, and because he might threaten Israel, a cause as dear to the hearts of most of this group as the security of America itself, or understood as indistinguishable from it.
United Nations Security Council resolutions currently being violated by countries other than Iraq
Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus, October 2, 2002
In its effort to justify its planned invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has emphasized the importance of enforcing UN Security Council resolutions. However, in addition to the dozen or so resolutions currently being violated by Iraq, a conservative estimate reveals that there are an additional 91 Security Council resolutions about countries other than Iraq that are also currently being violated. This raises serious questions regarding the Bush administration's insistence that it is motivated by a duty to preserve the credibility of the United Nations, particularly since the vast majority of the governments violating UN Security Council resolutions are close allies of the United States.
[Note: 30 Security Council resolutions are being violated by Israel alone.]
Nato used the same old trick when it made Milosevic an offer he could only refuse
Robert Fisk, The Independent, October 4, 2002
It's the same old trap. Nato used exactly the same trick to ensure that it could have a war with Slobodan Milosevic. Now the Americans are demanding the same of Saddam Hussein – buried well down in their list of demands, of course. Tell your enemy that you're going to need his roads and airspace – with your troops on the highways – and you destroy his sovereignty. That's what Nato demanded of Serbia in 1999. That's what the new UN resolution touted by Messrs Bush and Blair demands of Saddam Hussein. It's a declaration of war.
Rush to war ignores U.S. constitution
Senator Robert C. Byrd, United States Senate, October 3, 2002
The great Roman historian, Titus Livius, said, " All things will be clear and distinct to the man who does not hurry; haste is blind and improvident."
"Blind and improvident," Mr. President. "Blind and improvident." Congress would be wise to heed those words today, for as sure as the sun rises in the east, we are embarking on a course of action with regard to Iraq that, in its haste, is both blind and improvident. We are rushing into war without fully discussing why, without thoroughly considering the consequences, or without making any attempt to explore what steps we might take to avert conflict.
Fighting terrorism with democracy
Richard Rorty, The Nation, October 21, 2002
A year after 9/11, the United States is still not facing up to the hardest questions that that disaster posed. Nobody has yet explained how the government might hope to take effective precautions against, for example, the arrival of nuclear or biochemical devices in shipboard freight containers. One suspects that the officials of our government are well aware that no precautions are likely to eliminate, or even substantially lessen, the chances of further terrorist attacks. But these officials are not about to tell the public that their government can think of little more to do than to tighten security at airports.
Still, governments must pretend to their citizens that they are doing something to provide the protection that the taxpayers think their taxes should buy. The use of military force in Afghanistan gratified the public's need to have the government take action in response to 9/11, but it was not enough, nor was setting up a new bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. So for the past eleven months we have had a steady series of cryptic utterances from President Bush and his Cabinet officers, and of calculated leaks to the press, suggesting that an invasion of Iraq is in the works. Yet the Bush Administration has never even tried to argue that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein will do much to lessen the probability of terrorist strikes.
The stones of Baghdad
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, October 4, 2002
From their perch in Washington, President Bush and his advisers seem to have convinced themselves that an invasion will proceed easily because many Iraqis will dance in the streets to welcome American troops. That looks like a potentially catastrophic misreading of Iraq.
Consider Dahlia Abdulrahim and Intidhar Abdulrahim, two young women I met at an English-language used-book shop in Baghdad. Dahlia reads romance novels, while Intidhar favors Thomas Hardy. So will they be cheering the American troops rolling through Baghdad?
"I will throw stones at them," Dahlia said.
"Maybe I will throw knives," Intidhar said brightly.
Those two women are broadly representative of Iraqis I spoke to. If American military strategy assumes popular support from Iraqis facilitating an invasion and occupation, the White House is making an error that could haunt us for years.
WAR, DEMOCRACY AND ETHNIC CLEANSING
COMMENT -- The advocates of war against Iraq are fond of pointing out that democracies don't wage war against one another. Bring democracy to the Middle East and peace will reign - so the argument goes. But a review of the history of the state of Israel, as Israeli historian Benny Morris shows in the following article, does not describe the march of democracy, but rather the unrelenting drive to secure the ethnic purity that a Jewish state requires. If Sharon (along with his representatives in the Bush administration) truly believe that Arabs and Jews can never peaceably inhabit the same land, what in the long run does this say about the strength of democracy in the "melting pot" of America?
A new exodus for the Middle East?
Benny Morris, The Guardian, October 3, 2002
Once again, "transfer" is in the air - the idea of helping resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict by transferring or expelling some or all of the Arabs from Palestine. During recent weeks Israeli newspapers published an interview with Shmuel Eliahu, the chief rabbi of Safad and the son of Israel's former chief Sephardi rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, in which he called for the transfer, to "Jordan, the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, or Canada," of Arabs who are unwilling to accept Israel as a Jewish state; and a large advertisement, by Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc), a coalition of ultra-left groups, warning that prime minister Ariel Sharon is pressing the US to attack Iraq and intends to exploit the chaos that will follow "to carry out his old plan to expel the Palestinians from the whole country ("Transfer")."
US hardline on Iraq leaves full-scale invasion a 'hair-trigger' away
Julian Borger, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Black, The Guardian, October 3, 2002
Washington last night revealed its intention to use UN weapons inspections as a possible first step towards a military occupation of Iraq by sending in troops, sealing off "exclusion zones" and creating secure corridors throughout the country.
In a leaked proposal for a UN resolution drafted by the US with help from British officials, the Bush administration is seeking to transform the inspections process into a coercive operation. The resolution would place a full-scale invasion of Iraq on a hair trigger, authorising UN member states "to use all necessary means to restore international peace and security" if Iraq does so much as make an omission in the weapons inventories it presents to the security council.
Vatican says preventive strike raises ethical, legal questions; majority of Italians oppose war on Iraq
Associated Press, October 2, 2002
The Vatican renewed its opposition to war in Iraq on Wednesday, saying military action would only make matters worse and that a pre-emptive strike raised serious ethical and legal problems.
"It's unilateralism, pure and simple," the Vatican's U.N. observer, Archbishop Renato Martino, said in comments published in the Italian newsweekly Famiglia Christiana.
The principle of a "first strike" as well as its possible use in Iraq "provoke profound reservations be it from the ethical or legal point of view," he said.
He recalled the Vatican's opposition to the 1991 Gulf War, saying: "Everyone knows the way it turned out. War doesn't resolve problems. Besides being bloody, it's useless," he said.
Butler accuses US of nuclear hypocrisy
Gerard Noonan, Sydney Morning Herald, October 3, 2002
The former chief weapons inspector in Iraq Richard Butler has lashed out at United States "double standards", saying even educated Americans were deaf to arguments about the hypocrisy of their stance on nuclear weapons.
Mr Butler, an Australian, told a seminar at the University of Sydney's Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies that Americans did not appreciate they could not claim a right to possess nuclear weapons but deny it to other nations.
"My attempts to have Americans enter into discussions about double standards have been an abject failure - even with highly educated and engaged people," Mr Butler said. "I sometimes felt I was speaking to them in Martian, so deep is their inability to understand."
Doubts set in on Afghan mission
Rupert Wingfield Hayes, BBC News, September 28, 2002
I was hailed by two young soldiers lounging in one of those huge American Humvee jeeps. Clearly these two were not part of the guided tour.
"Excuse me sir," they asked. "But do we really have to say this baloney?"
The actual word they used was a little more colourful.
"What baloney?" I asked. They handed me a small laminated card. On it were instructions on how to deal with journalists. Every soldier had been given one. These were not just general ground rules. It actually listed suggested answers:
"How do you feel about what you're doing in Afghanistan"?
Answer: "We're united in our purpose and committed to achieving our goals."
"How long do you think that will take?" Answer: "We will stay here as long as it takes to get the job done - sir!"
Power shift to president may stick
Linda Feldmann and Warren Richey, Christian Science Monitor, October 3, 2002
Since the beginning of the Republic, American presidents have vied with the other branches of government for power. And in times of war and national emergency, presidents have exercised heightened levels of authority – in some cases openly sidestepping the Constitution to do what they felt was necessary.
In the larger battle for power, America's 43rd president, George W. Bush, seems no different.
What is different, say experts on presidential power, is that the open-ended nature of Mr. Bush's "war on terrorism" is fast creating new realities of executive power, with no firm expiration date. Some question whether the exigencies of preventing future terror attacks are fundamentally and permanently tipping the constitutional balance of power to the president's advantage.
Manufacturing anti-Semites
Uri Avnery, Counterpunch, October 2, 2002
The Sharon government is a giant laboratory for the growing of the anti-Semitism virus. It exports it to the whole world. Anti-Semitic organizations, which for many years vegetated on the margins of society, rejected and despised, are suddenly growing and flowering. Anti-Semitism, which has hidden itself in shame since World War II, is now riding on a great wave of opposition to Sharon's policy of oppression.
Sharon's propaganda agents are pouring oil on the flames. Accusing all critics of his policy of being anti-Semites, they brand large communities with this mark. Many good people, who feel no hatred at all towards the Jews, but who detest the persecution of the Palestinians, are now called anti-Semites. Thus the sting is taken out of this word, giving it something approaching respectability.
The practical upshot: not only does Israel not protect the Jews from anti-Semitism, but quite on the contrary - Israel manufactures and exports the anti-Semitism that threatens Jews around the world.
In Israel's interests?
Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect, October 21, 2002
No one doubts that Israel will face serious risks the moment that President George W. Bush orders an American offensive against Iraq. Memories remain fresh of Iraqi Scuds falling on Tel Aviv and Haifa during the 1991 Gulf War. American foreign-policy experts suggest that this time around, facing his end, Saddam Hussein might use any capability he has to strike Israel with chemical or biological weapons.
Nonetheless, conventional wisdom in the United States, Israel and elsewhere is that Bush's plans for "regime change" in Iraq serve Israeli interests at least as much as U.S. ones. That assumption has boosted support for President Bush's Iraq policy among American Jews and among pro-Israel American politicians. Even Israel's once-dovish Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has lobbied for war, his vision of a peaceful "New Middle East" apparently stashed in his archives alongside his youth movement diaries. The long-term danger to Israel of Hussein with nuclear arms, says the standard reasoning, far outweighs any risks posed by war.
The debate on Bush's war plans, however, is not about whether Iraq should have the bomb. At best, it's about a particular policy for preventing that development. The policy includes war, the way the Bush administration has prepared for war, its fuzzy plans for what to do after the war and the doctrine it posits to justify war. From where I sit -- in Jerusalem, on the slopes of a hill that looks out over the occupied West Bank and the mountains of Jordan in the haze beyond -- each piece of that policy deserves questioning. In the end, the Bush policy may well create greater dangers for Israel than those it claims to eliminate.
The push for war
Anatol Lieven, London Review of Books, October 3, 2002
The most surprising thing about the push for war is that it is so profoundly reckless. If I had to put money on it, I'd say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given US military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein's rule, the unreliability of Baghdad's missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer-term gains for the US look pretty limited, whereas the consequences of failure would be catastrophic. A general Middle Eastern conflagration and the collapse of more pro-Western Arab states would lose us the war against terrorism, doom untold thousands of Western civilians to death in coming decades, and plunge the world economy into depression.
These risks are not only to American (and British) lives and interests, but to the political future of the Administration. If the war goes badly wrong, it will be more generally excoriated than any within living memory, and its members will be finished politically - finished for good. If no other fear moved these people, you'd have thought this one would.
What war looks like
Howard Zinn, The Progressive, October, 2002
In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians and newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is something missing. The talk is about strategy and tactics, geopolitics and personalities. It is about air war and ground war, weapons of mass destruction, arms inspections, alliances, oil, and "regime change."
What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will do to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings who are not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with "national security" but with personal security, with food and shelter and medical care and peace.
Senators threaten to rein in Bush
President faces dissent from his own party on Iraq
Julian Borger, The Guardian, October 2, 2002
The White House was last night trying to fight off a Senate effort to place limits on George Bush's authority to launch a military assault on Iraq after leading Republicans sided with the Democrats over the president's war powers.
Mr Bush accused the Senate of attempting to tie his hands over Iraq after a prominent Republican senator, Richard Lugar, backed a resolution that would give the administration the right to act militarily only to enforce the disarmament of Saddam Hussein's regime. The resolution would also require the administration to assemble an international coalition before considering an attack.
U.S. faulted over its efforts to unite Iraqi dissidents
Judith Miller, New York Times, October 2, 2002
While endorsing "regime change" and democracy in Iraq, the Bush administration is stumbling in its efforts to forge a cohesive opposition to Saddam Hussein. According to Iraqi opposition leaders and experts on Iraq, its approach remains plagued by differences over who should lead the dissidents and who would rule the country most effectively if Mr. Hussein were overthrown.
Lawmakers seek Iraq bill compromise
Jim Abrams, Associated Press, October 1, 2002
"This debate should not be driven by how much it will cost U.S. taxpayers," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D. But he said it was important to keep in mind that three months of combat with a heavy ground force and a five-year occupation by a large U.S. force could cost more than $272 billion.
Unlike in '90, fear of U.S. defines U.N. Iraq debate
Diplomats say respect for American resolve has given way to qualms about bullying
Tyler Marshall, Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2002
Respect for the United States remains, but diplomats here say the admiration that once accompanied it has been replaced by something else: fear. These diplomats say the U.S. has dropped persuasion as its main tactic and replaced it with intimidation.
In 1990, "there was great excitement that the most powerful country was gathering together the world community to meet this challenge," recalled David Malone, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations who now heads an independent New York think tank focused on U.N. activities. "That excitement and support have been replaced by apprehension and fear.
"The Security Council is operating under great pressure to accommodate the United States, but the trouble is, this administration is seen as the ugly American," Malone said. "They don't make their case. They just bully when they can."
A case not closed
Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, November 1, 1993
The confrontation between the United States and Iraq has revived interest in a decade-old charge—that Saddam Hussein ordered the assassination of President George H. W. Bush. This alleged plot has been cited in recent days by the current President Bush as one of the U.S.'s grievances against Hussein. In this article, from 1993, Seymour M. Hersh investigates the assassination story.
Congress overwhelmed with anti-war calls from "The Silenced Majority"
Democracy Now, October 1, 2002
Republican and Democratic Senate offices report “overwhelming” opposition from their constituents to war with Iraq. This comes as Congress prepares to pass a war resolution granting President Bush sweeping powers to invade Iraq.
Wake up and smell the Occupation
Sam Bahour, Counterpunch, October 1, 2002
As Israel jumps from one self-made crisis to the next, the State of Israel itself is in an alarming condition.
The peace and security that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised during his year 2001 election campaign have vanished in the dust of Israeli tanks rampaging Palestinian cities. Israel's economy is declining at a record pace. The right-wing Sharon government has sparked a national debate in Israel that questions the legal right to citizenship for over 1.1 million of its Palestinian citizens. Israeli families across the social strata are sending their children to study abroad and emigrating at a pace that was not thought possible only a few years ago. Over 400 Israeli conscripts, soldiers, or reservists are refusing to serve in the occupied Palestinian areas and some are now imprisoned in Israeli jails as consciousness objectors. The moral fabric of Israeli society is tearing apart at the seams as the Israeli military proudly reverts to a policy of assassination, imprisonment, demolition of homes, deportation, and collective punishment.
The peace movement lives
Geov Parrish, Working For Change, October 2, 2002
As soon as next week, Congress may vote on a resolution authorizing use of the American military to invade Iraq. That's the timeline President Bush wants, because questions about the wisdom of such an invasion -- relegated to the fringes of discourse among political elites for the better part of a year -- have suddenly gained the upper hand. The White House is desperate to forestall an anti-war movement that has seemingly materialized from thin air.
The sun can't set on this empire too soon
The U.S. has no right to indulge in imperialism
Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2002
It sure smells like imperialism. That's the word historians use when powerful nations grab control of desired resources, be it the gold of the New World or the oil of the Middle East.
Imperialist greed is what "regime change" in Iraq and "anticipatory self-defense" are all about, and all of the rest of the Bush administration's talk about security and democracy is a bunch of malarkey.
Bush's war drive:
Fear, distraction & self-adulation
Neve Gordon, Counterpunch, September 30, 2002
One better think twice before supporting Bush's initiative to launch an attack on Iraq if only because war, as Martin Luther King pointed out, is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrows.
A good way to grasp the logic underlying Bush's plan is by examining the intricate mechanisms his Administration is using to shape public opinion, the most conspicuous of which are distraction, fear, and self-adulation.
Who am I to question the Commander-in-Chief?
Charles Sheehan-Miles, AlterNet, September 30, 2002
Last week a group of Gulf War veterans formed a team to raise questions about our impending invasion of Iraq. Together, we agreed on some basic principles, none of which was "anti-war." Rather, our goal is to ensure before we commit our forces to war, we consider all the key issues.
Those issues are simple: whether or not the invasion will destabilize the region; full medical care for returning soldiers (which never happened in 1991); the Bush administration should release any information justifying an attack; Congress is the body that should approve any war and ensure adequate oversight; we should meet our international obligations, including working through the UN Security Council, and a full accounting must be made for those who are missing-in-action.
Counting casualties
How many people would die in an Iraqi war?
Michael O'Hanlon, Slate, September 25, 2002
A central question about the war in Iraq is the likely cost in terms of casualties. Many Americans who would support an invasion on the assumption of 250 dead might feel very differently if our losses numbered 10 times as many. Unfortunately, such predictions have proven notoriously inaccurate in the past. On the eve of Operation Desert Storm, several military experts forecast U.S. losses in the range of several thousand, and the Pentagon expected even higher numbers killed. Actual American losses were just under 400 (of whom about 150 were killed by direct enemy action, the others being lost in accidents or friendly-fire episodes).
|
|
