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  The War in Context
     war on Iraq :: war on terrorism :: Middle East conflict :: critical perspectives
     news - analysis - commentary
No threat from Iraq
Saul Landau, Open Democracy, November 29, 2002

US policy towards Iraq is a replay of the deceits that launched and sustained its long conflicts with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. The detail of its past support for the Saddam regime reveals the Bush administration’s chilling hypocrisy. The coming war is not justified and must be opposed.

The war movement and the peace movement
Tod Gitlin, Open Democracy, November 27, 2002

It’s the burden and sometimes also the glory of a serious life that in good conscience you don’t want to win the hard arguments too easily. Political decency consists not just in taking the right position, but in being willing to face contrary positions: face them at their strong points, not win arguments cheaply – but face the bad music; face the suffering that goes on if you do the right thing, also face the suffering that goes on if you don’t do the right thing. And make a judgment, which might well be in fear and trembling, about which is the better way. The smiley-face actions are damned rare. War in Iraq is not one of them. Neither is the absence of war in Iraq. I don’t see how to have a nice day, one way or the other – certainly not for Iraqis.

Ending the silence
Mike Woodsworth and Raůl Sŕnchez, Open Democracy, November 27, 2002

The US debate on war with Iraq is spreading. The key issues - interests of Iraq's people, justice and morality of war, US power and UN role - were discussed at a major New York University event on 22 November. Two observers summarise and critique the panelists' views.

Sleeping with the enemy
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, November 28, 2002

Why, in its ruthless pursuit of the September 11 murderers and their supporters - a chase that has encompassed most of the Middle East and south and south-east Asia - is the Bush administration so loath to confront the Saudis?

Why, if there is persuasive evidence of Saudi complicity in those and subsequent attacks, has stern action (such as sanctions or trade embargoes) not been taken, or at least formal, public diplomatic protests made?

Why indeed is the current focus of US military and diplomatic efforts on Baghdad, not Riyadh? Why, in other words, does Bush, not known for being a man who bites his lip when it comes to terrorism, look at the Saudis and turn the other cheek?

Well, the answer could be that all these anti-Saudi allegations are foul and unjustified calumnies for which there is not a shred of evidence. But if you believe that, you can stop reading right here (and maybe seek professional help).

Or it could be that, sad to say, the Bush administration is operating a double standard. It could be that the US government is only too aware of the Saudi terror connection, but is not prosecuting it vigorously on behalf of the September 11 victims and the American people because it has other priorities.

For Israelis - and Jews everywhere - fear is now international
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, November 29, 2002

For more than two years Israelis have lived with the daily possibility of violent and random death within their own borders. Every parent worries that the bus carrying their child could blow to pieces; a trip to the mall could be a deathtrap; a pizzeria could be a minefield. That constant fear has seeped into the marrow of the society. Nothing is normal.

But Israelis always had one way to escape the fear. A holiday outside the country could be the valve that releases the pressure. Home may not have been safe, but abroad could be.

Now Israelis have lost even that comfort. Now they will believe that nowhere is safe. They will be hunted down wherever they are, targeted for the crime of being Israeli. That is the message of yesterday's attack: Israelis cannot live at home, they cannot live in the world.

Misinformation about Iraq
Edward Said, Al-Ahram, November 28, 2002

The flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation about the looming US war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq continues unabated. It is impossible to know, however, how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of psychological war against Iraq, how much the public floundering of a government uncertain about its next step. In any event, I find it as possible to believe that there will be a war as that there will not. Certainly the sheer belligerency of the verbal assaults on the average citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result that very little is totally certain about what is actually taking place. No one can independently confirm the various troop and navy movements reported on a daily basis, and given the lurching opacity of his thinking, George W Bush's real intentions are difficult to read. But that the whole world is concerned -- indeed, deeply anxious -- about the catastrophic chaos that will ensue after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the people of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.

Elusive Bin Laden still has the global reach to strike terror at will
Robert Fisk, The Independent, November 29, 2002

Two months ago, Israel's senior military intelligence officers were privately expressing concern that al-Qa'ida would strike Israel next. They talked about high buildings in Tel Aviv, nuclear missile sites in the Negev desert – they talked about this softly, of course, because the world is not supposed to discuss Israel's nuclear capability – but they feared, rightly, that Bin Laden would try to put Israel in the same frame as the United States.

And he has. For whatever al-Qa'ida did yesterday, it set Israel up alongside America. The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has claimed, since 11 September, that Israel stands beside President George Bush in his "war on terror". The conflict has – thanks to Washington's one-sided, hopelessly biased Middle East policy – given the impression that Mr Sharon and Mr Bush espouse the same goals.

Now the world has to acknowledge that Mr Sharon – regarded as a war criminal by millions of Arabs for his "personal responsibility" for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinian civilians – has a reason to fight al-Qa'ida.

Consequences of war
Arabs' anti-American sentiment rising as U.S.-Iraq war looms

V.K. Malhotra, ABC News, November 27, 2002

Anti-American sentiment has been on the rise within the Arab world in recent months. The tough rhetoric of the Bush administration, combined with the threat of an invasion of Iraq, and the ongoing violence between the Israelis and Palestinians is turning public opinion in the Arab world even farther against the United States.

Sporadic acts of violence in recent weeks against Americans in the region have raised the level of concern for the United States. In the past month alone, there have been several attacks on American soldiers in Kuwait, the murder of an American diplomat in Jordan, and just last week, the killing of an American missionary in Lebanon.

Here. Now. Do something.
William Rivers Pitt, TruthOut.com, November 28, 2002

There's an old man who lives down the street from my house. I made a point to introduce myself to him roundabout last September, after he put a No War sign up in his front yard. About a week before Bush showed up here for a GOP fundraiser, he put up a second sign describing the date, time and location of Bush's arrival. Under this information was a single word: Protest! His hand was twisted with arthritis when I shook it, but he still used it to drive those signs into the ground.

No sum could fund president's ambition
Steve Chapman, Baltimore Sun, November 26, 2002

If the Bush administration gets its way, defense spending next year will be $394 billion, or about $100 billion higher than in Bill Clinton's final year. The United States has the most powerful military on Earth. We now spend six times more on defense than the next 15 countries combined. And you know what? It's not enough.

Despite the swelling budget, there is still a big gap between our resources and the administration's ambitions. The president's new strategy proclaims that we're not only going to meet any military challenge that may arise, but we may attack any country we see as a developing threat. If we're serious about that, even an unlimited budget won't suffice.

The administration gives us a glimpse of what to expect. The president's budget calls for piling spending increases upon spending increases, boosting national defense outlays to $442 billion by 2007 - up by nearly 50 percent from 2000.

Most Americans support war as a last resort
Richard Benedetto, USA Today, November 25, 2002

Most Americans support going to war against Iraq if it is found to have weapons of mass destruction, but first they want to give the United Nations every chance to disarm the country peacefully, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds.

The poll shows that most people believe Iraq has chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, often lumped together as "weapons of mass destruction," and would use them against the United States. Solid majorities believe that a U.S. attack on Iraq is justified if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein tries to block U.N. arms inspectors, who will begin work Wednesday.

Overall, 58% favor using U.S. ground troops to remove Saddam from power, a percentage that has held fairly steady since mid-October.

The survey finds complex attitudes on what would justify invasion. Two out of three, 64%, say the United States should first get U.N. authorization to launch an attack if Iraq defies a U.N. resolution calling for full inspections. The Bush administration says it could act without additional U.N. approval.

But 63% in the poll favor letting Saddam off the hook if weapons are found and he agrees to destroy them.

If U.N. inspectors find no evidence of weapons of mass destruction or facilities where they could be produced, 52% oppose sending troops.

"If there is any step short of war that can be taken to disarm Iraq, most Americans will take it," says Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.

The Latest Kissinger Outrage
Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation?

Christopher Hitchens, Slate, November 27, 2002

The Bush administration has been saying in public for several months that it does not desire an independent inquiry into the gross "failures of intelligence" that left U.S. society defenseless 14 months ago. By announcing that Henry Kissinger will be chairing the inquiry that it did not want, the president has now made the same point in a different way. But the cynicism of the decision and the gross insult to democracy and to the families of the victims that it represents has to be analyzed to be believed.

Kissinger's back...as 9/11 truth-seeker for Bush
David Corn, The Nation, November 27, 2002

Asking Henry Kissinger to investigate government malfeasance or nonfeasance is akin to asking Slobodan Milosevic to investigate war crimes. Pretty damn akin, since Kissinger has been accused, with cause, of engaging in war crimes of his own. Moreover, he has been a poster-child for the worst excesses of secret government and secret warfare. Yet George W. Bush has named him to head a supposedly independent commission to investigate the nightmarish attacks of September 11, 2001, a commission intended to tell the public what went wrong on and before that day. This is a sick, black-is-white, war-is-peace joke--a cruel insult to the memory of those killed on 9/11 and a screw-you affront to any American who believes the public deserves a full accounting of government actions or lack thereof. It's as if Bush instructed his advisers to come up with the name of the person who literally would be the absolute worst choice for the post and, once they had, said, "sign him up."

US abandons shadowplay in Iraq
Julian Borger, The Guardian, November 27, 2002

After ten months of secrecy and denial, US military preparations for the looming conflict with Iraq have abruptly been turned into well-catered press events over the last few days. Clearly, the message has changed.

American journalists have been invited into the vast tented camps run by US forces in Kuwait's western desert, concentrated along the Iraqi border. All together, some 12,000 troops have taken over an entire quarter of Kuwaiti territory, which is now off-limits to civilians.

US television crews have been asked aboard the warships cruising in the Persian Gulf, where a fearsome armada including four or five aircraft carriers will have gathered by the end of December. Journalists have even been permitted to fly in planes patrolling the skies of northern and southern Iraq.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana last week, a group of more than a dozen foreign journalists - including a crew from the Arabic language television station, al-Jazeera - were allowed to visit the Fort Polk urban training centre to watch the 101st Airborne, the 'Screaming Eagles', practice house to house combat.

Someone somewhere in the Pentagon has decided we should be allowed to see everything.

The invisible death of Iain Hook
Ira Chernus, CommonDreams, November 25, 2002

You probably heard about the latest tragic suicide bombing in Israel. You probably did not hear about the equally tragic death of Iain Hook. Unlike the Israeli deaths, Hook’s murder last Friday was not big news here in the U.S.

It certainly was big news for Hook’s employer, the United Nations. Hook, a senior manager for the U.N. Relief Works Agency in Jenin, was the first U.N. official to be killed in two years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Amazingly, the U.S. media gave his death little notice. The journalistic double standard is alive and well, it seems.

Keep Big Brother's hands off the Internet
Senator John Ashcroft, USIA Electronic Journal, October, 1997

There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state's interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens' Bill of Rights.

Embracing Big Brother
William Raspberry, Washington Post, November 25, 2002

I can't tell you how often I've heard some version of: If you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't care that the government is watching your mail, monitoring your phone calls, clawing through your financial records or reading your e-mail. That nonchalance is especially commonplace as America continues to do battle against international terrorism. The response, in effect, is that terrorism is such a threat that it's worth giving up all we hold dear in order to oppose it.

Death toll in two years in Mideast
Associated Press, November 25, 2002

Here is a breakdown of 2,612 deaths in more than two years of Israeli-Palestinian violence. The Associated Press reviewed each incident and recalculated the toll as of Monday, based on information compiled in interviews with relatives, witnesses, doctors and visits to hospital morgues.

A would-be Iraqi leader, caught by his past
Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, November 25, 2002

In a simple two-bedroom apartment set in an anonymous block of flats in a small town in Denmark, the general waits.

Once he was the most senior officer of Saddam Hussein's army, with a row of ribbons across his chest, a million Iraqi soldiers under his command, and the respect and admiration of a nation. Then he fell out with the Iraqi leader and fled abroad -- lured, he said, by promises from the CIA of support to lead the grand revolt that would topple the dictator and restore Iraq to greatness. He would be Iraq's Charles de Gaulle.

Nizar Khazraji, 64, says he is ready to play the role that his entire life has prepared him for, that the time is ripe now that Washington and the world are applying new pressure on the faltering government. But he is going nowhere. For the general has a past, and a pursuer.

He faces allegations that he played a role in the Anfal, the brutal campaign against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq in which Hussein's forces slaughtered more than 100,000 civilians, razed hundreds of villages and sprayed poison gas.

U.S. is wooing a Shiite exile to rattle Iraq
Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, November 25, 2002

An Iranian-backed ayatollah may seem an unlikely ally for the Bush administration. But consider Ayatollah Muhammad Bakir al-Hakim.

The ayatollah is an Iraqi Shiite who has been living in Tehran for more than two decades. He is backed by the Iranian government, the one that President Bush has derided as part of an "axis of evil." His father once gave sanctuary to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery anti-American cleric who later rose to power in Iran's 1979 revolution.

Still, the United States and the Shiite cleric are in the process of forging a political alliance of convenience.

Wishful thinking on Afghanistan
Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, November 25, 2002

Major General Akin Zorlu, commander of the international peacekeepers in Afghanistan, is not a swashbuckling, charge-right-at-'em sort. He speaks steadily, fingering a pen with elegant gold trimmings; his spectacles give him a studious appearance. If you ask him about U.S. policy, he's politely diplomatic. But if you listen between the lines of his pronouncements, you get a different message.

The message is that Pentagon and NATO strategy is hopelessly wishful. At the Prague summit last Thursday, NATO's leaders declared that "responsibility for providing security and law and order throughout Afghanistan resides with the Afghans themselves."

Which Afghans, precisely, are supposed to play this role?

Perhaps NATO's leaders were alluding to Afghan police forces. Here's Zorlu's description of that option. "If you visit any police station you see that they have 50 police officers or soldiers but only two very primitive guns and two bicycles. No radio assets, no vehicles, nothing.

Prophetic students
Ruth Rosen, San Francisco Chronicle, November 25, 2002

Who would have imagined how swiftly the American government could threaten our precious civil liberties and basic rights in the name of fighting terrorism?

Looking back, I now realize that my former students saw it coming.

The year was 1999. Bill Clinton was president, the stock market was soaring,

and the 175 students in my history course at UC Davis had no reason to fear the kind of secret detainment or government surveillance the Bush administration has already employed and that Congress has just sanctioned.

See you in court, Tony
We should help the Iraqi people overthrow Saddam, but not by flouting international law

George Monbiot, The Guardian, November 26, 2002

Parliament might have been denied its debate and the cabinet might have been silenced, but there are other means of holding the government to account. If, by 4pm today, his lawyers have failed to agree that he will not attack Iraq without a new UN resolution, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament will take the prime minister to court. For the first time in history, the British government may be forced to defend the legality of its war plans in front of a judge.

The case, hatched by the comedian Mark Thomas, looks straightforward. The UK and the US are preparing to invade, whether or not they receive permission from the UN. Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, has stated that the UK will "reserve our right to take military action, if that is required, within the existing body of UN security council resolutions". But no UN resolution grants such a right.

Grappling with the politics of fear
Don Hazen, AlterNet, November 25, 2002

There's an ongoing debate among media experts, peace advocates and funders about what media messages and symbols could galvanize popular opinion against the seemingly imminent Bush Administration invasion of Iraq.

A number of ads from peace advocates have recently appeared in the New York Times and in other newspapers, with more in the pipeline. Each of the ads makes a somewhat different argument for why Americans should be resisting the will of the Bush administration to take over Iraq and try Saddam for war crimes.

Yet, it is increasingly apparent that the climate of fear promoted by the Bush Administration in the wake of a series of national traumas is having wide effect. It seems clear that the politics of fear and safety has been underestimated by progressives and pundits. This political message likely had more impact on the Democratic losses and Republican gains in the recent elections than the widespread sense that the Democrats had no message.

Iraq's nuclear non-capability
Imad Khadduri, YellowTimes, November 21, 2002

As the war storm against Iraq swirls and gathers momentum, seeded by the efforts of the American and British governments, serious doubts arise as to the credibility of their intelligence sources, particularly the issue of Iraq's nuclear capability. It has been often noted that reliable intelligence on this matter is not immediately forthcoming. Moreover, such intelligence as has been presented is spurious and often contradictory. Perhaps it is not too late to rectify this misinformation campaign.

I worked with the Iraqi nuclear program from 1968 until my departure from Iraq in late 1998. Having been closely involved in most of the major nuclear activities of that program, from the Russian research reactor in the late sixties to the French research reactors in the late seventies, the Russian nuclear power program in the early eighties, the nuclear weapons program during the eighties and finally the confrontations with U.N. inspection teams in the nineties, it behooves me to admit that I find present allegations about Iraq's nuclear capability, as continuously advanced by the Americans and the British, to be ridiculous.

Can mercenaries protect Hamid Karzai?
Out of service

Jonathan D. Tepperman, New Republic, November 18, 2002

One warm day in Kandahar early this fall, a uniformed Afghan soldier stepped in front of the car carrying President Hamid Karzai--and opened fire. Karzai ducked, narrowly escaping the hail of bullets, and was instantly surrounded by heavily muscled, fair-skinned men who returned fire. Although the assailant was never conclusively identified, Karzai's rumpled plain-clothes guards quickly were. They turned out to be American Special Forces troops, part of the small garrison that has shadowed the Afghan president at his request since late July, and they have already thwarted several assassination attempts.

Unfortunately, the next time someone tries to kill Karzai--and there will be a next time--the faces around him will be different. Washington is about to replace Karzai's crack Pentagon bodyguards with hired guns; specifically, the employees of DynCorp, Inc., a Virginia-based "private military corporation" (PMC).

While PMCs like DynCorp may be popular in Republican Washington, which is now enthusiastically outsourcing many of America's military duties to the private sector, using them in Afghanistan could be a dangerous mistake. Private contractors seldom prove cheaper or more effective than uniformed soldiers. Worse, they are virtually impossible to control and have committed a litany of abuses in America's name. Using these unproven freelancers to guard Karzai thus will send precisely the wrong message to Washington's friends and enemies around the world and will increase the risks of a foreign policy disaster in Afghanistan.

The military's new war of words
William M. Arkin, Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2002

It was California's own Hiram Johnson who said, in a speech on the Senate floor in 1917, that "the first casualty, when war comes, is truth."

What would he make of the Bush administration?

In a policy shift that reaches across all the armed services, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior aides are revising missions and creating new agencies to make "information warfare" a central element of any U.S. war. Some hope it will eventually rank with bombs and artillery shells as an instrument of destruction.

What is disturbing about Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare is that it has a way of folding together two kinds of wartime activity involving communications that have traditionally been separated by a firewall of principle.

The first is purely military. It includes attacks on the radar, communications and other "information systems" an enemy depends on to guide its war-making capabilities. This category also includes traditional psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda to enemy troops.

The second is not directly military. It is the dissemination of public information that the American people need in order to understand what is happening in a war, and to decide what they think about it. This information is supposed to be true.

Increasingly, the administration's new policy -- along with the steps senior commanders are taking to implement it -- blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other. And, while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate.

The birth of an American tyranny
Chris Floyd, Counterpunch, November 23, 2002

We've said it before, and we'll keep on saying it: A country whose leader has the power to imprison any citizen whatsoever, on his order alone, and hold them indefinitely, in military custody, without access to the courts, without a lawyer, without any charges, their fate determined solely by the leader's arbitrary whim--that country is a tyranny, not a democracy, not a republic, not a union of free citizens.

Now it may be that it is still a tyranny in utero, a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem--or in this case, Washington--to be born, and not yet the full-blown monster, fangs bared and back plated with bristling armored scales. But the tyranny has been conceived, it's taken root in the womb, gained definite form and is clawing, tearing its way toward the light.

Is China reason for U.S. obsession with Iraq?
Patrick Seale, Gulf News, November 22, 2002

...before the devastating events of September 11, America's main strategic preoccupation was not with Iraq, or terrorism, or Islamic radicalism, but with the rise of China as a rival superpower. After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet "empire" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, American strategists identified China as the only credible long-term "enemy", the only power that might eventually challenge America's global hegemony. It was argued then that China was America's "strategic adversary" and that, of all the world's trouble spots, the Taiwan Straits was likely to provide the flashpoint for a Third World War.

The secret war
Raymond Whitacker, The Independent, November 24, 2002

British and American warplanes are attacking Iraq's air defences almost daily, and making practice runs on other targets. US special forces are reported to be on the ground in western and northern Iraq, and military engineers are preparing and upgrading airfields in the Kurdish zone. In many ways, the war on Iraq has already begun.

Unilateral power -- by any other name
Norman Solomon, FAIR, November 21, 2002

Ever since the U.N. Security Council adopted its resolution about Iraq on Nov. 8, American politicians and journalists have been hailing the unanimous vote as a huge victory for international cooperation instead of unilateral action.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was close to ecstatic. "For a brief, shining moment last Friday," he wrote, "the world didn't seem like such a crazy place." The United Nations had proven its worth -- by proving its value to Washington. Among the benefits: "The Bush team discovered that the best way to legitimize its overwhelming might -- in a war of choice -- was not by simply imposing it, but by channeling it through the U.N."

But if the United Nations, serving as a conduit of American power, is now worthwhile because it offers the best way for the United States to "legitimize its overwhelming might," how different is that from unilateralism?

After war, humanitarian disaster?
Paul Rogers, Open Democracy, November 21, 2002

Even as the weapons inspection process unfolds, the timetable for US war with Iraq by January is on course. Three recent reports predict that military conflict could entail devastating humanitarian consequences. Are the proponents of war listening?

Wrong fight against terrorism
William Pfaff, Boston Globe, November 21, 2002

NATO was supposed to have been recast this week to meet the threat of terrorism, but no one has yet offered a clear explanation of what NATO can do to prevent new attacks on Western targets by highly motivated individuals or bands of Islamic militants, determined to punish Westerners for what history has done to the Muslim world.

I do not say ''history'' to imply fatalism. The situation of the Islamic states today has much to do with the world wars and Cold War, Zionism, imperialism, and American and British oil politics.

Israel's choice
Neve Gordon, The Nation, December 9, 2002

Returning to Israel after an extended absence can be a disturbing experience. On the way back from the airport to my Jerusalem apartment, I noticed new posters tacked onto utility poles and bridges along the highway. They read: Transfer= Peace and Security. The meaning was unambiguous: Israel must expel the 3 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories--and perhaps even its own Palestinian citizens--in order to achieve peace and security.

While racist slogans have become pervasive in Israel, it was this particular message - the notion of expulsion as a political solution - that unhinged me. One does not need to be a Holocaust survivor to recognize the phrase's lethal implications. The slogan, however, does not merely underscore the moral bankruptcy of certain elements in Israeli society; it also helps uncover some of the inherent contradictions underlying Israel's policies in the occupied territories.

Bush-Putin meeting
Leaders may skirt Chechnya issues

David Filipov, Boston Globe, November 22, 2002

Advocates of a peace process in Chechnya say that the United States is too focused on its war on terrorism and too unwilling to alienate Putin to put pressure on the Kremlin. They also say the West is ignoring Putin's harsh domestic policies aimed at curbing dissent at home, and his inability or unwillingness to rein in the military in Chechnya.

"We see a silent deal between the United States and its president and Russia and its president: 'You support us in the antiterrorist operation and sanctions against Iraq, and we'll close our eyes to what's going on in Chechnya,'" said Ivan Rybkin, former head of Russia's Security Council, who has unsuccessfully tried to restart talks with Chechen rebels.

Security act to pervade daily lives
Gail Russell Chaddock, Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 2002

When you board a plane in the next year, your pilot may be armed. Make a call from a pay phone at the ballpark, and it may be tapped. Pay for a sandwich with a credit card, and the transaction may wind up in an electronic file with your tax returns, travel history, and speeding tickets.

These are some of the ways that the biggest reorganization of the federal government in half a century could trickle down into the minutiae of the daily life of Americans.

The Homeland Security Act that President Bush is poised to sign is sweeping in scope and will have big consequences, intended and unintended, on everything from civil liberties of Americans to due process for immigrants.

Some have little to do with homeland security, but emerged out of the intensive, last-minute bargaining that shaped this effort to refocus the nation's resources to defeat terrorism. As votes on the historic bill wrapped up this week, most lawmakers were still rifling through its 484 pages to find out what's there.

"The statute is elephantine," says Allen Weinstein, president of the Center for Democracy in Washington. "It means we're probably going to have to deal with a law of unintended consequences."

Businesses gun for Homeland funds
Sharon Theimer, Associated Press, November 21, 2002

The ink is barely dry on the new Homeland Security Department legislation, but corporate lobbyists are already chasing the pot of gold it offers.

One German-based contractor has started a political action committee and recruited budget experts to help its pitch for U.S. anti-terror money. Microsoft has hired a former Coast Guard commander to oversee its homeland bidding.

And several firms are creating special units to help companies compete for billions in new national security spending.

A useful - often forgotten - analogy to Iraq
Neta C. Crawford, Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 2002

The Bush administration likes to use analogies to describe the threats the US faces and to explain the new US strategy of preemption. They raise Pearl Harbor and the Cuban missile crisis frequently to emphasize the dangers of waiting and the wisdom of taking confrontation to adversaries before they move first.
But the administration's favorite analogy may be the equation of Saddam Hussein and Hitler. Iraq, like Nazi Germany, is supposed to be a dangerous rogue nation, bent on acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has repressed its own people, and is certainly far from democratic.

But there are other analogies. Indeed, we have seen the kind of threat that Iraq is said to pose before. Yet, preemption was not the international reaction.

Kabul orphanage still has needs
Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, November 15, 2002

When the Taliban collapsed last year, reports of the grim conditions at the orphanage brought help from international and local aid agencies. But a year later, most of the aid workers are gone and the children remain -- their numbers rising.

"For a while everyone was coming and wanting to give, bringing clothes and blankets," said Mohammed Yunus, a gray-bearded man in charge of the dormitories. "But not anymore."

A war that can't be won
The west isn't just losing the fight against terrorism - it is fuelling it across the globe

Seumas Milne, The Guardian, November 21, 2002

This time last year, supporters of George Bush's war on terror were in euphoric mood. As one Taliban stronghold after another fell to the US-backed Northern Alliance, they hailed the advance as a decisive blow to the authors of the September 11 atrocities. The critics and doom-mongers had been confounded, cheerleaders crowed. Kites were flying again, music was playing and women were throwing off their burkas with joyful abandon.

As the US president demanded Osama bin Laden "dead or alive", government officials on both sides of the Atlantic whispered that they were less than 48 hours from laying hands on the al-Qaida leader. By destroying the terrorist network's Afghan bases and its Taliban sponsors, supporters of the war argued, the Americans and their friends had ripped the heart out of the beast. Washington would now begin to address Muslim and Arab grievances by fast-tracking the establishment of a Palestinian state. Downing Street even published a rollcall of shame of journalists they claimed had been proved wrong by a hundred days of triumph. And in parliament, Jack Straw ridiculed Labour MPs for suggesting that the US and Britain might still be fighting in Afghanistan 12 months down the line.

One year on, the crowing has long since faded away; reality has sunk in. After six months of multiplying Islamist attacks on US, Australian and European targets, civilian and military - in Tunisia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Russia, Jordan, Yemen, the US and Indonesia - western politicians are having to face the fact that they are losing their war on terror. In Britain, the prime minister has taken to warning of the "painful price" that the country will have to pay to defeat those who are "inimical to all we stand for", while leaks about the risk of chemical or biological attacks have become ever more lurid. After a year of US military operations in Afghanistan and around the world, the CIA director George Tenet had to concede that the threat from al-Qaida and associated jihadist groups was as serious as before September 11. "They've reconstituted, they are coming after us," he said.

In other words, the global US onslaught had been a complete failure - at least as far as dealing with non-state terrorism was concerned.

Neither consent nor dissent
Bush's uncontested war

Benjamin R. Barber, The American Prospect, November 4, 2002

As President Bush rushes headlong into war with Iraq, there are endless reasons for concern; but the one that is most disturbing has been least remarked on. The president can be faulted for waiting so long to consult Congress, the United Nations, America's allies and the Middle Eastern nations likely to be affected (Jordan, Turkey, Iran). And he certainly can be faulted for rashness, impetuosity, arrogance and an impressive indifference to the rule of law -- even if, in the end, he is compelled to play by the UN rules that, ironically, he himself invoked. But accountability is a two-way street, and Americans should be equally concerned with their -- make that our -- dramatic failure to register in politically relevant terms the unease (if polls are to be believed) that we putatively feel about an Iraq invasion.

Dare call it an empire
Alexander Cockburn, WorkingForChange, November 20, 2002

"Who can doubt that the United States is an imperial power?" Thus writes James Chace in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books. "Empire is back," comes the echo from Professor Alan Wolfe. Suddenly, the word "empire" is everywhere, scattered through the opinion columns like rose petals before a conquering hero.

Of course the United States has been an imperial power for many, many decades, but when Teddy Roosevelt used to blare out the summons to imperial duty like a Roman matron admonishing youth, there was a certain embarrassment at his bluff speech. Congressmen bridled at the thought of ladling out too much gravy to the Army and Navy. Woodrow Wilson substituted more palatable Presbyterian pieties about burdens and duties. Then, FDR founded an even more appealing rhetoric with which to cloak imperial expansion: fighting other empires, a mission that conveniently brought an ever-burgeoning but unacknowledged empire in its wake, some of the most valuable oil-yielding portions ruthlessly excised from the British imperial cadaver after World War II.

Making enemies or protecting Americans
Doug Bandow, Cato Institute, November 18, 2002

As crises erupt around the globe, al-Qaeda obviously is alive and deadly, if not well. Yet President George W. Bush remains fixated on Baghdad; Saddam is "a dangerous man," he declared in his weekly radio address. True, but irrelevant. The administration must decide whether to protect Americans by focusing on the fight against terrorism or risk Americans' lives by setting the globe further aflame with an unnecessary war against Iraq.

What if Bush were as eager to control guns as WMD?
Jonathan D. Tepperman and Avi S. Gesser, Christian Science Monitor, November 20, 2002

By maintaining the country's awe-inspiring strength, Bush's logic runs, Washington can discourage anyone from competing with it. Predominant power will make America the new global sheriff, with an effective monopoly on military might.

Of course, whether it is actually possible to monopolize force internationally and dissuade military competition remains to be seen.

In any event, the Bush doctrine would make much more sense were it applied in the one place Washington has refused to consider it: at home.

After Saddam
John W Dower, The Guardian, November 20, 2002

In their immediate response to the shock of September 11, journalists and pundits across America evoked, almost as one, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier. Stories dwelled on similarities (and differences) between the holy war fanaticism of the Islamic terrorists and that of the Japanese - and, of course, on the dismal failure of American intelligence to anticipate either attack.

Now, with the Bush administration promoting the virtue of pre-emptive strikes, Japan has emerged as possibly offering a very different sort of historical precedent. Does America's successful occupation of Japan after the second world war provide a model for a constructive American role in a post- Saddam Hussein Iraq?

The short answer is no.

U.S. watch list has 'taken on life of its own,' FBI says
Kelli Arena, CNN, November 20, 2002

FBI officials said Tuesday they have "lost control" of an agency-created watch list of people wanted for questioning after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Additionally, agency officials acknowledged that the list, which has gone through several manifestations, has "taken on a life of its own" and has shown up on several Web sites and contains names of people who have been cleared of any possible connection to last year's attacks.

Nuclear study, given go-ahead, rouses fears about a new 'bunker buster' weapon
James Dao, New York Times, November 17, 2002

Buried in the $393 billion defense authorization bill that Congress approved this week was an obscure item that has raised concerns that the administration is gradually moving toward creating new kinds of nuclear weapons.

The item authorizes the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the nation's nuclear stockpile, to spend $15 million to study modifying nuclear weapons so they can be used to destroy underground factories or laboratories.

The United States produced a "bunker buster" weapon in 1997 by repackaging a hydrogen bomb into a hardened case. But Pentagon planners contend that such a weapon would not be effective against the deeply buried and fortified installations that some countries, including Iraq and North Korea, are thought to use for producing and storing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Advocates of the study contend that the administration is not yet proposing to create a new weapon and is simply looking at solutions to an increasingly significant problem.

But critics argue that the study is a first step toward producing weapons that would require a resumption of nuclear testing, which the United States suspended in 1992.

Iraqis 'staggered' by exhaustive list of demands from UN inspectors
Kim Sengupta, The Independent, November 20, 2002

The dinner between one of Saddam Hussein's closest aides and Hans Blix was meant to smooth the thorny path for the renewed United Nations weapons inspections.

But the Iraqis were bemused to find sponge mattresses and slippers on the menu. Factories producing such items were just two of the examples of the array of sites the UN chief weapons inspector said his team intended to search in its efforts to discover whether Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction.

Such is the scale of information the UN is demanding, Iraqi officials told Mr Blix's team they may have difficulties meeting the 8 December deadline by which they must submit a detailed report.

McCarthyism watch
The Progressive, November 15, 2002

Richard Abdoo is the CEO of Wisconsin Energy Corp., based in Milwaukee. Earlier this fall, Abdoo sent a $250 check to the peace group Not in Our Name (notinourname.net).

As a result, his name was listed as one of the 30,000 endorsers of the group's "Statement of Conscience Against War and Repression." And he was identified as "Chairman of the Board, president and CEO, Wisconsin Energy Corp." Abdoo said the donation was strictly a personal one.

Early in the workweek of November 11-15, rightwing talk radio hosts in Milwaukee got wind of Abdoo's endorsement and pilloried him for it.

As arms inspectors arrive, row erupts over US smears
Helena Smith and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, November 19, 2002

The United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, yesterday accused hawks in Washington, who are bent on going to war with Iraq, of conducting a smear campaign against him.

The extent of the tension between Mr Blix and elements of the US administration burst into the open on the day that he led UN weapons inspectors back to Baghdad for the first time in four years to renew their search for chemical, biological and nuclear-related weapons.

CND legal threat over Iraq war
BBC News, November 19, 2002

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is threatening legal action against the UK government over the threat of war with Iraq.

CND is demanding a written guarantee the UK will not invade Iraq without explicit United Nations backing.

It claims a UN resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to disarm or face "serious consequences" can not be used to justify an invasion.

The campaign has obtained a legal opinion from a top QC from human rights firm Matrix Chambers, of which Cherie Blair [Tony Blair's wife] is a member, backing its stance.

Power to spy on citizens expanded
Shannon McCaffrey, San Jose Mercury News, November 19, 2002

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Justice Department has broad powers to use wiretaps and other means to combat terrorism -- a decision that will greatly expand the government's authority to eavesdrop on Americans.

A special three-judge panel overturned a decision by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in May that certain surveillance provisions in the USA Patriot Act infringed on citizens' privacy.

Monday's decision means the government will face fewer hurdles when it seeks to listen to telephone conversations and read the e-mail of people who are suspected of espionage or terrorism. Intelligence agents and criminal prosecutors also will be able to share information more freely.

The special appeals court, which consisted of three federal appellate judges named by William Rehnquist, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, ruled Monday that the expanded powers sought in the Patriot Act are "constitutional because the surveillances it authorizes are reasonable."

Attorney General John Ashcroft called the decision "a victory for liberty, safety and the security of the American people." He said it "revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts."

Israeli dove tipped to lead Labour in election
Ross Dunn, The Age, November 20, 2002

A former army commander with dovish views, Amram Mitzna is today expected to emerge as the candidate of the left-leaning Labour Party for prime minister in Israel's next elections.

Opinion polls indicated that Mr Mitzna, 57, would win yesterday's ballot by a huge margin, ousting current leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defence minister.

Mr Mitzna has come from relative obscurity to a place in the national scene. He is Mayor of Haifa, the Israeli city with the largest Arab population and a district with a reputation for tolerance. His message is that peace with the Palestinians is possible and worth pursuing.

The perfect system
Matthew Engel, The Guardian, November 19, 2002

The elite American press prides itself on its old-fashioned inaccessibility: grey type, don't-read-me layout, and, on a bad day, totally impenetrable prose. Perhaps the Washington Post has already revealed that Osama bin Laden is working in an attorney's office in downtown DC, but none of us have managed to get to page A27 to read the story.

Thousands mourn executed Pakistani
BBC News, November 19, 2002

Huge crowds in the Pakistani city of Quetta have been attending the funeral of Aimal Khan Kansi, who was executed in the United States on Friday.
Kansi, who is from Quetta, was executed for the murder of two US secret service officials outside the CIA headquarters near Washington in 1993.

Many in the crowd chanted anti-American slogans and proclaimed Kansi a martyr.

New world disorder
Brian Awehali, LiP Magazine, November 18, 2002

What's wrong with this picture? The world's lone superpower, fearful of being attacked by one of many real or perceived enemies, sets out to solve the problem by increasing weapon sales and military aid to the world, but not just to existing allies. Indeed, in the wake of Sept. 11, the race is on to arm governments formerly considered unstable or otherwise "off-limits" due to gross human rights violations, on grounds that these nations are assisting in the sweeping "war against terrorism."

Back in business
Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, Newsweek, November 25, 2002

Al Qaeda is once again training terrorists inside Afghanistan. The camps are much smaller and more transient now, but there are said to be at least a dozen, and their new graduates, mostly from inside the country, are believed to number in the hundreds. Their goal, as unlikely as it may seem, is to turn Afghanistan back into a global base for Osama bin Laden’s followers.

U.S. fears prosecution of President in World Court
Reuters, November 15, 2002

A senior U.S. official said a principal motive for U.S. opposition to the newly created International Criminal Court was fear that the court might prosecute the president or other civilian or military leaders.

"Our concern goes beyond the possibility that the prosecutor will target for indictment the isolated U.S. soldier. ... Our principal concern is for our country's top civilian and military leaders, those responsible for our defense and foreign policy," Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in a speech released on Friday.

"A fair reading of the treaty (setting up the court) leaves one unable to answer with confidence whether the United States would now be accused of war crimes for legitimate but controversial uses of force to protect world peace," Bolton told the Federalist Society in Washington on Thursday.

Who needs the U.N. Security Council?
James Traub, New York Times, November 17, 2002

The campaign against Al Qaeda represented one of those rare moments when the Security Council swings quickly behind American aims. The U.N. itself felt implicated in the terrorist attack: its headquarters was evacuated both that day and the next, and there was brief talk of holding a Security Council meeting in a local coffee shop. But the moment of solidarity couldn't last. For the Security Council, Afghanistan was a momentary departure from a tradition of conflict resolution; for the Bush Administration, it was the first battle in a global war.

It is not only the United States but also the United Nations that has become a different place after 9/11. Only yesterday, it seems, the great issue was getting an increasingly disengaged United States to pay its back dues and pay attention; now the problem is keeping an aroused America from sallying off on what virtually every other member of the Security Council considers a reckless crusade.

U.S. turns its back on Afghans, again
Despite lofty talk, aid is nowhere to be seen outside Kabul

Andrew Lawler, Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2002

The governor of Ghazni, an Afghan province south of Kabul, is just the kind of leader Washington should like. He's young, educated and progressive. Haji Hassadullah Khalid studied political science before the Taliban shut down Kabul University, speaks passable English and dreams of studying in the United States.

He is a striking contrast to the warlords, such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, recently implicated in the deaths of Taliban prisoners, or Ismail Khan, who pays little heed to Kabul's diktats.

But Khalid gets no help from the U.S. One year after coming to power, he says his people still must walk an average of three miles just to get drinking water. He has no tax money to pay teachers. And there is little support from the central government in Kabul.

"This job is very difficult," he said, taking a break from the endless stream of supplicants who come to his reception room.

What about support from the United States? He shakes his head, sighs and lights up another cigarette. "We've talked to USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], but we haven't received any help yet."

The Bush administration pledged this month to try to do more to rebuild Afghanistan, but help so far has been too little and too late.

Losing Control?
The U.S. concedes it has lost momentum in Afghanistan, while its enemies grow bolder

Tim McGirk and Michale Ware, Times, November 11, 2002

If the U.S. has won the war in Afghanistan, maybe somebody should tell the enemy it's time to surrender. The bad guys are still out there, undetectable in the rocky, umber hills of eastern Afghanistan — until they strike, which they do with growing frequency, accuracy and brazenness. These days American forward bases are coming under rocket or mortar fire three times a week on average. Apache pilots sometimes see angry red arcing lines of tracer bullets rising toward their choppers from unseen gunners hidden in Afghanistan's saw-blade ridges. Roads frequented by special forces are often mined with remote-controlled explosives, a new tactic al-Qaeda fighters picked up from their Chechen comrades fighting the Russians. With phantom enemy fighters stepping up attacks and U.S. forces making little headway against them, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt compelled to acknowledge last week, "We've lost a little momentum there, to be frank."

Is Afghanistan slipping out of America's control?

War without death
The Pentagon promotes a vision of combat as bloodless and antiseptic

Patrick J. Sloyan, San Francisco Chronicle, November 17, 2002

Leon Daniel, like others who reported from Vietnam during the 1960s, knew about war and death. So he was puzzled by the lack of corpses at the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on Feb. 25, 1991.

Clearly there had been plenty of killing. The 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) had smashed through the defensive front line of Saddam Hussein's army the day before, Feb. 24, the opening of the Desert Storm ground war to retake Kuwait. Daniel, representing United Press International, was part of a press pool held back from witnessing the assault on 8,000 Iraqi defenders.

"They wouldn't let us see anything," said Daniel, who had seen about everything as a combat correspondent.

The artillery barrage alone was enough to cause a slaughter. The attack began with a 30-minute bombardment by howitzers and multiple-launch rockets scattering thousands of tiny bomblets, followed by a wave of 8,400 American soldiers riding in 3,000 battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles.

It wasn't until late in the afternoon of Feb. 25 that the press pool was permitted to see where the attack occurred. There were groups of Iraqi prisoners. About 2,000 had surrendered. But there were no bodies, no stench of feces, no blood stains, no bits of human beings.

American voices of dissent
Soheir Morsy, Al-Ahram, November 14, 2002

Inspired by the anti-globalisation slogan -- Another World is Possible -- activists of different political persuasions around the world have demonstrated their resolve to dismantle what South African President Thabo Mbeki described as the "global system of apartheid". Over the past year international solidarity with Palestinian resistance to US-subsidised Zionist settler colonialism and apartheid, as well as opposition to Washington's protracted war on Iraq, have become integral to the growing movement against corporate-led globalisation. The internationalisation of the Palestinian cause has developed to the point that a recent comment in Ha'aretz raised the question: "Who would have believed that... [Israel]... would be denounced by the world, that its products would be boycotted, its generals accused of crimes against humanity and its citizens advised not to speak Hebrew when traveling abroad?"

In the US the Bush administration's relentless campaign of intimidation has proved effective in silencing many, though others have not been deterred from speaking their conscience. Even in these times when US foreign policy has been purposefully reduced to an expression of Orwellian logic ("you are either with us or against us") many honourable Americans have resisted the pitiful "patriotic" daze inflicted on the country by the Republican administration's campaign of fear, misinformation, and McCarthyean blacklisting of intellectuals.

Inspectors' mission faces long odds
Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont, The Observer, November 17, 2002

In their rooms at the Flamingo Hotel in Cyprus the first team of UN weapons inspectors are making preparations for their flight to Baghdad tomorrow.

As they receive their final briefings and pack their bags they will know two things.

First, that they will be embarking on the most important mission ever undertaken by UN weapons inspectors, a mission which will determine whether the world faces a devastating war against Iraq or an imperfect and difficult peace.

Second, they will be aware that there are many senior officials in the US administration desperate for them to fail so they can start their war to depose Saddam Hussein.

Bin Laden is alive. There can be no doubt about it. But the questions remain: where on earth is he, and why has he resurfaced now?
Robert Fisk, The Independent, November 14, 2002

The Middle East is entering a new and ever more tragic phase of its history, torn apart by the war between Israelis and Palestinians and facing the incendiary effects of a possible Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden must have realised the need to address once more the Arab world – and his audiotape, despite the direct threats to Britain and other Western countries, is primarily directed towards his most important audience, Arab Muslims. His silence at this moment in Middle East history would have been inexcusable in Bin Laden's eyes.

And just to counter the predictable counter-claims that his tape could be old, he energetically listed the blows struck at Western powers since his presumed "death". The bombings of French submarine technicians in Karachi, the synagogue in Tunisia, Bali, the Chechen theatre siege in Moscow, even the killing of the US diplomat in Jordan. Yes, he is saying, I know about all these things. He is saying he approves. He is telling us he is still here. Arabs may deplore this violence, but few will not feel some pull of emotions. Amid Israel's brutality towards Palestinians and America's threats towards Iraq, at least one Arab is prepared to hit back. That is his message to Arabs.

Iraqi army is tougher than US believes
Toby Dodge, The Guardian, November 16, 2002

With just two days to go before the UN weapons inspectors arrive in Baghdad, George Bush's administration is still beating the war drum. On Thursday night, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, confidently predicted that, should a war erupt, the Iraqi army would soon surrender in the face of overwhelming US force. He noted that in the first Gulf war, when allied forces pushed Iraq out of Kuwait, ground combat had lasted only 100 hours.

"I can't say if the use of force would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that," he said. "It won't be a world war three."

You have always got to hope for minimum loss of life in any war, but Mr Rumsfeld's prognosis about the speed of an Iraqi army collapse is ideologically driven and strategically ill-informed.

Iraq: The economic consequences of war
William D. Nordhaus, New York Review of Books, December 5, 2002

The United States is marching, two steps forward and one step backward, toward war with Iraq. The Bush administration has articulated its reasons for war, but has produced no official estimates of the costs. Although cost estimates are often ignored when war is debated, most people recognize that the costs in dollars, and especially in blood, are acceptable only as long as they are low. If the estimates of American casualties mount to the thousands, if the costs to the economy are major tax increases or a deep recession, or if the United States becomes a pariah in the world because of callous attacks on civilian populations, then decision-makers in the White House and the Congress might not post so expeditiously to battle.

In views of the salience of cost, it is surprising that there have been no systematic public analyses of the economics of a military conflict in Iraq. This essay attempts to fill the gap.

Where first strikes are far from the last resort
Aluf Benn, Washington Post, November 10, 2002

This week, a senior Israeli delegation will travel to Washington for a periodic "strategic dialogue." The "day after Iraq" scenarios will top the agenda. For the Israelis, it will be another moment of sweet vindication, because the "day before" is not a matter of dispute between Washington and Jerusalem. The Bush administration has embraced Israel's broader strategic approach of preemption. The administration has shown a willingness to hunt down terrorists, attack nascent programs to develop weapons of mass destruction in other countries, and even invade nations to change their governments and deny safe havens to terrorists and other enemies, much as Israel has done for over 50 years.

Afghanistan adrift politically, economically
Tom Squitieri, USA Today, November 14, 2002

U.S. and other Western officials like to point to Jamila Mujahed as a symbol of how successful the liberation of Afghanistan has been.

Within hours of the Taliban's leaving Kabul a year ago this week, Mujahed was one of the first Afghans to go on national radio and television — without the head-to-toe covering that the fundamentalist Islamic regime had required women to wear in public — to declare, "The Taliban are gone."

In February, she launched Afghanistan's first magazine for women. Foreign groups, applauding her efforts, have promised to provide support for her projects. Even so, Mujahed says the reality of her life is far different from the widely disseminated image. "I am in greater danger now than I was a year ago," says Mujahed, 39.

Match game
America prepares to light the Iraqi fuse, Middle Eastern powder keg prepares to explode

Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange, November 15, 2002

A year ago this week, the Taliban abandoned Kabul, and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance army entered Kabul. The Alliance, an ally of convenience for the combat-averse Americans, was a ragtag collection of warlords and former (and current) mass murderers whose entry into Kabul the Americans and British wished to avoid; they sensed, correctly, that giving Northern Alliance-affiliated warlords access to power in the first days of a post- Taliban occupation would make it nearly impossible to dislodge such people from power later. And thus it has been.

The U.S. media has largely ignored the Afghan anniversary, preferring to focus on the "drama" of Iraq's reluctant acceptance of a U.N. Security Council resolution whose provisions it had already said it would accept, and American officials' insistence that inspections won't work so why don't we just invade and get it over with. But the rest of the world has very much been paying attention; and what has happened in Afghanistan over the last year, and what is happening there and elsewhere in the region this week, underscore the treacheries awaiting any U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The guns of Opa-Locka: How US dealers arm the world
Jake Bergman and Julia Reynolds, The Nation, November 14, 2002

Law enforcement officials describe the United States as a one-stop shop for the guns sought by terrorists, mercenaries and international criminals of all stripes. And September 11 has not changed that in any significant way. In fact, Attorney General John Ashcroft has refused to permit the use of gun purchase records to track crimes, a practice that the FBI had previously used and that conceivably could help to identify terrorists. Nor did Ashcroft propose closing gun loopholes as part of the USA Patriot Act. The result of the lax US system, says McBride, is "an ongoing cycle" in which weapons bought here end up fueling violence abroad, and in which America is regarded as the firearms "shopping center for the world."

We have played straight into Bin Laden's hands
Adrian Hamilton, The Independent, November 15, 2002

We don't know how strong al-Qa'ida is, or indeed, how it is really run now. We don't even know for certain that Bin Laden, should he be alive (which we should probably assume he is), is in charge or capable of running a worldwide terror network.

What we do know is that Bin Laden would very much like to create an air of general fear in the West and that he would like to wrap up every local Muslim dissatisfaction in a general conflict between Islam and the West. He would also want America and Britain to invade Iraq and Israel to continue ever more violent "incursions" into Palestinian territory in order to prove his point.

He doesn't have to try too hard, the way we're behaving. It is astonishing that, having cornered Saddam Hussein and forced him to give in to a ferocious UN resolution, both Washington and London are saying that they don't believe him and that the war plans are still on, for all the world giving the impression that the object is forced regime change whatever he does. How do we think this goes down in a Muslim world that is already convinced that President Bush is pursuing a plan that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with oil?

Europe versus America
Edward Said, Al-Ahram, November 14, 2002

If you sit in Washington and have some connection to the country's power elites, the rest of the world is spread out before you like a map, inviting intervention anywhere and at any time. The tone in Europe is not only more moderate and thoughtful: it is also less abstract, more human, more complex and subtle.

Certainly Europe generally and Britain in particular have a much larger and more demographically significant Muslim population, whose views are part of the debate about war in the Middle East and against terrorism. So discussion of the upcoming war against Iraq tends to reflect their opinions and their reservations a great deal more than in America, where Muslims and Arabs are already considered to be on the "other side", whatever that may mean. And being on the other side means no less than supporting Saddam Hussein and being "un-American". Both of these ideas are abhorrent to Arab and Muslim-Americans, but the idea that to be an Arab or Muslim means blind support of Saddam and Al-Qa'eda persists nonetheless. (Incidentally, I know no other country where the adjective "un" is used with the nationality as a way of designating the common enemy. No one says unSpanish or unChinese: these are uniquely American confections that claim to prove that we all "love" our country. How can one actually "love" something so abstract and imponderable as a country anyway?).

Go ahead Saddam, make Bush's day ...
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, November 14, 2002

It is entirely possible that [UN weapons inspector, Hans] Blix will report back to the council after 60 days, as mandated, and say that he has reached no firm conclusions and needs more time to pursue his inquiries. If the P5 [UN Security Council permanent five members] accept that assessment, bang goes the Pentagon's war schedule. Suddenly, there will be a rather large number of heavily-armed Americans sitting in and around the Gulf with not a lot to do except sunbathe.

Naturally, the Pentagon and perhaps the White House will be disinclined to accept such an outcome. It is also possible, though hopefully this will not happen, that US hardliners will use those parts of 1441 that do not relate entirely to inspections, to find other grounds for claiming a "material breach".

Such a trigger can be found in 1441s operational paragraph eight that states: "Iraq shall not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of the United Nations or of any member state taking action to uphold any council resolution". The ruling applies principally to the safety of the inspectors. It could also quite properly be read as prohibiting any Iraqi anti-aircraft or missile battery action, defensive or otherwise, against US or British aircraft currently patrolling the no-fly zones and mandated to do so by previous UN resolutions.

Incidents involving the two sides in the zones have been taking place on a regular basis in recent weeks. Now, if the Iraqis so much as illuminate an allied plane with their radar, this could be claimed by the US hawks as a cause for starting a war that may otherwise be slipping from their grasp.

Have no doubt: terrorist leader is very much alive and more dangerous than ever
Abdel Bari Atwan, The Guardian, November 14, 2002

The recorded voice message from Osama bin Laden which was broadcast by al-Jazeera TV satellite channel confirms two highly important facts. The first is that he was not killed in the US bombing of the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan. The second is that the American-led war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere has not achieved the aspired success of eliminating al-Qaida and bringing to justice its leaders such as Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

Ashcroft's Law West -- and East -- of the Pecos
He is arbitrarily deciding who can be tried where

Jonathan Turley, Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2002

If there is one legal principle that seems to guide Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, it is this: Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

In holding citizens and noncitizens, Ashcroft has claimed unilateral authority to dictate how and where they will be tried and, most important, executed.

In the last few weeks, he has taken this control to a new level, defying states and judges who do not conform to his demands for speedy justice.

Is U.S. ready for Islamic democracy in Mideast?
Ian Urbina, Houston Chronicle, November 13, 2002

Those in favor of an Iraq invasion argue that a regime change will be the first step in bringing democracy to the Middle East. But unnoticed in all the recent national focus on Iraq, recent elections in Morocco, Bahrain, Turkey and Pakistan indicate that democracy, albeit in small increments, has already begun arriving in that region and parts of Islamic South Asia.

The question is whether we are prepared for what those elections may bring.

You are a suspect
William Safire, New York Times, November 14, 2002

If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

Sounds of slumber from Washington
Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, November 11, 2002

There is one essential difference between Washington 1992 and Washington 2002, and this difference will have a decisive influence on the elections in Israel and on the fate of the country in the years to come.

Ten years ago, then U.S. president George Bush Snr. forced the Shamir government to decide which it deemed more important - the expansion of its settler citizens or the welfare of its weaker ones; close ties with the White House or with the Yesha Council of Jewish Settlements of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District.

The cry that this was an intervention in Israel's internal affairs was of no help to the Likud leaders. The plethora of rabbis and party bureaucrats who flocked to Capitol Hill were also unable to budge the president from his position that Israel can no longer eat the territory cake and keep its relations with (and aid from) the United States whole.

This sharp message helped tens of thousands of voters to drift into Rabin's arms. A harsh grating of this kind on the Jerusalem-Washington axis was enough to return the Labor Party to power.

Today, not only is the United States not even bothering to voice discontent with the outposts, the Bush administration is speaking to the settlement government about an increase in financial aid. No one in Washington kicked up much of a fuss on hearing Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement concerning the freezing of the "road map." In fact, the father of the map, Secretary of State Colin Powell himself, was quick to bestow his wishes for success on Israel's new foreign minister.

A call to arms by an enemy of war against Iraq
Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, November 13, 2002

Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine and former U.N. arms inspector, peppered his Veterans Day talk at the University of Maryland with the kinds of questions and challenges that are known to fire up an audience.

"The average age of a lance corporal is 20," Ritter said. "The average age of a college student is 20." Calling the students in the audience "just kids," he asked who among them could wake up the next morning, look in the mirror and honestly say that "what's going on in Iraq is worthy of my life."

At the same time, did the students really know enough about Iraq to sit back silently while others go off to die for them? And did they really understand that war is not the Nintendo game that we see on television, that it is, in fact, about "terminating life" and nothing more?

Hundreds of people had filled a ballroom inside the Stamp Student Union to hear Ritter, a military man turned anti-war advocate who has been denounced by hawks as unpatriotic for his views. He was invited to speak by a campus organization, and his appearance drew a wide range of students from dozens of countries.

'The Quiet American' should have a voice
Brett Dakin, International Herald Tribune, November 13, 2002

So you're a big movie producer and I'm a struggling screenwriter. Here's my pitch: The U.S. government sends a young, fresh-faced American to a far-off land in the midst of political turmoil. His mission: Make sure the good guys win. He can't speak the language, hasn't studied the culture. In fact, he hasn't really asked the people what they want. But he knows that America is right. So he gives money and weapons to the good guys and tries to help them remake the country in America's image. Before long, the U.S. military is deeply involved. American soldiers are dying, and Americans begin to question why the young man was ever sent there in the first place.

This is perfect, you say. With the United States mired in Afghanistan and about to go to war with Iraq, this story touches on everything Americans are worried about today. Why hasn't someone made this movie already?

In fact, someone has. The Australian director Phillip Noyce's film adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel, "The Quiet American," is set in Saigon during the early years of America's involvement in Vietnam. Starring Brendan Fraser as a young American intelligence officer, the film critically examines the U.S. role in Vietnam's civil war. Ultimately, the title character is implicated in acts of terrorism that result in the deaths of innocent Vietnamese; under the guise of a U.S. medical aid program, he imports the plastics used to make the bombs. "The Quiet American" has been finished for more than a year, and it was a hit at the Toronto Film Festival. Critics at home and abroad have raved.

But Americans still can't see it.

Tricked and bamboozled into war
The west's warlords will get their invasion, in spite of global opinion

Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, November 13, 2002

Casualty lists are usually compiled after the battle. But since the coming war in Iraq has been so heavily trailed, it is possible to identify its victims in advance - or pre-emptively, to use one of George Bush's favourite words.

The casualties of Desert Storm II, physical and figurative, will include Iraqi civilians and combatants on both sides; the people of Israel and of sidelined Palestine; Kurdish hopes of self-rule; Iran's pro-western civil reform movement; the entire region's security, living standards and environment if chemical or biological weapons are used; the Arab and Muslim world's already strained relationship with "Christendom"; state sovereignty as defined in international law; and democracy.

Of these, the more lasting damage may be to democracy for it is in that cause, and under that supposedly liberating banner, that this war of "disarmament" will ultimately be fought. Yet it is dysfunctional democracy of the bowdlerised variety currently practised in the US, Britain, the UN and elsewhere that has brought the world to the brink.

The war's protagonists will claim a mandate that in truth they have not secured by either vote or argument. They will say their policy, debated and discussed, has moral and constitutional force. In fact they have manipulated the democratic machinery and simply rejected opposing views.

War games
Ed Halter, Village Voice, November 13, 2002

The military isn't just about high-tech warfare anymore. It's also investing millions of dollars in high-tech entertainment. One national theater chain recently showcased a big-budget military promotional film, beamed in via satellite, to boost national morale. Now, the army is courting new recruits through state-of-the-art war-based video games. Post-bust, it looks like new media is quickly finding its place in the New World Order. Get ready for the next generation of wartime propaganda.
For about a month beginning in mid September, attendees of Regal Cinemas chains in Los Angeles, Denver, Knoxville, and New York (local venues included the UAs at Union Square and 64th and Second) were treated to a bit of unabashedly patriotic agitprop, courtesy of the U.S. military. Sporting the blockbuster title Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter, the five-minute short is the first military-produced promotional film to hit commercial theaters since World War II.

Cut with TV-commercial rhythm and set to a symphonic score that veers from ominous to schmaltzy, this mini-movie flies through a ratta-tat-tat barrage of images from the world-spanning war on terror. Jointly financed by the marines and the navy with a $1.2 million budget, Enduring Freedom follows the actions of anti-terrorist squads stationed in the Indian Ocean and Kabul, Afghanistan, as well as soldiers on domestic bases. Thanks to director Klaus Obermeyer Jr. and the rebelliously named, Santa Monica-based production company American Rogue Films, Enduring Freedom rocks guy-friendly extreme-pop attitude. But there's a soft side too: Images of teary-eyed, flag-waving military moms evoke vintage early-'90s support-our-troops yellow-ribbonism. The only overtly violent footage is an opening clip of a jet ramming into a WTC tower—home video blown up to create a mocking low-resolution echo of Hollywood blockbusters—shamelessly used to renew fear and thereby justify everything else seen in the film.

UN inspection team 'cannot prevent war'
Ewen MacAskill and Edward Pilkington, The Guardian, November 13, 2002

A key foreign affairs adviser to the Bush administration expressed serious doubts last night about the ability of the United Nations inspection team to hunt down Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and thus avert an war.

Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and a close associate of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, said in an interview with the Guardian that the inspectors had only a slim chance of competing against Saddam Hussein. He criticised the chief arms inspector, Hans Blix, saying he was an unsuitable candidate for such a crucial task, and warned that the inspection team would be outnumbered and outwitted.

With less than one week to go before Unmovic (UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission) reaches Baghdad, the sharp criticisms of such an influential voice on Iraq reveal the depth of scepticism within Washington about the ability of the UN to avoid war.

Pre-emption: Should USA punch first?
Alan J. Kuperman, USA Today, November 12, 2002

Imagine: National security officials tell the president that our adversary possesses rudimentary weapons of mass destruction and is fast developing more sophisticated ones. The enemy already has used military force to occupy neighboring countries. Moreover, he has ruthlessly killed millions of his own people to wipe out domestic opposition.

Hawkish advisers say the only way to stop him from becoming an even greater threat is to attack now -- preventively.

I hate to ruin the suspense, but the outcome is already known. The case does not involve Saddam Hussein or George W. Bush. Rather, the adversary was the Soviet Union of the late 1940s. The dictator was Josef Stalin, who occupied Eastern Europe, perpetrated massive purges and ethnic cleansing and was on the verge of adding nuclear weapons. The president contemplating a first strike was Harry Truman.

Fortunately, by rejecting that option, Truman averted World War III. Instead, the USA pursued containment and deterrence policies that protected us until the Soviet's flawed government imploded.

A half million in Florence
Where was the US press?

Maria Tomchick, November 12, 2002

The atmosphere was "like a carnival," an Associated Press reporter wrote, "with food stands, exhibits, and street theater along with the discussion of free trade and war."

Over half a million people turned out in the streets of Florence, Italy to protest globalization and the impending war between the U.S. and Iraq. The massive, peaceful street demonstration on November 9th was an unexpected climax to the four-day European Social Forum, sister to the World Social Forum held earlier this year in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Press from all over Europe and the world gathered to cover the event ... but the U.S. press fumbled the ball.

Iraq invasion will trigger 'human catastrophe,' report warns
George Edmonson, Toronto Sun, November 12, 2002

A report to be released today predicts that an invasion of Iraq could lead to a "human catastrophe" with casualties as high as 250,000 within the first three months.

"Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq" was prepared largely by Medact, the British affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The U.S. affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility, also was involved. Most of the estimated casualties would be Iraqi civilians caught in the bombing, said Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman in Massachusetts for the International Physicians organization. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for what the committee called its "considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.''

The study also looks at the impact of an invasion on the public health system and necessities such as agriculture, water and energy, he said.

"We're saying that there'll be a very large short-term impact and an even more profound longer-term impact," Schaeffer said. "The report uses the word `human catastrophe' even if it does not escalate to the level of poison gas, civil war or nuclear weapons.''

The estimates of casualties, he said, range from a low of 50,000 up to 250,000.

See also Collateral Damage: the health and environmental costs of war on Iraq

Officials question FBI terror readiness
Dana Priest and Dan Eggen, Washington Post, November 12, 2002

With intelligence agencies predicting that Iraq and sympathetic Islamic extremists will attempt to launch terrorist attacks against the United States in the event of war, many government officials are growing concerned that the FBI is dangerously unprepared to detect or thwart strikes on U.S. soil.

Fourteen months after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, the FBI does not have a detailed understanding of domestic terrorist networks that could fund, prepare and launch revenge attacks, said administration and congressional officials and outside experts.

Everybody loves Arik
Yoel Marcus, Ha'aretz, November 12, 2002

During Sharon's 20 months in office, the country has skidded downhill in every possible sphere: The economy is six-feet under. More Israelis have been killed in Mr. Security's day than under any other prime minister. The man has never come up with a peace initiative. We've been turned into untouchables in the eyes of just about the whole world.

And despite it all, everybody still loves Arik.

According to all the polls and all the data, and that includes gut feelings, Sharon will clobber Bibi and Labor combined, and climb back into the prime minister's seat. We could add another line to an old refrain: Those who didn't want Sharon as prime minister once will get him as prime minister twice.

Most of the public doesn't seem to connect the bungles and the terrible plight of this country with Sharon. It's as if he has nothing to do with any of it, as if none of the screw-ups were his fault. The terror, the intifada, the lack of a partner for dialogue - all of it simply fell on him out of the blue.

The intrigue behind the drone strike
Philip Smucker, Christian Science Monitor, November 12, 2002

The attack fits Washington's new vision of preemptive strikes on terrorists, but it infuriated Yemeni officials.

They are angry over the way the US ambassador handled both the intelligence-gathering phase of the operation and after the fact, when senior US officials, including Assistant Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, violated a secrecy agreement by taking credit for the Hellfire strike.

Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans
John Markoff, New York Times, November 9, 2002

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter [who received criminal indictments in 1988 in the Iran-Contra scandal], has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

The war on academic freedom
Kristine McNeil, The Nation, November 11, 2002

The year since Congress passed the USA Patriot Act has brought an ever-growing enemies list from our nation's thought police. First there was Senator Joseph Lieberman and Lynne Cheney's American Council of Trustees and Alumni report unveiled last November--"Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." The forty-three-page document purports to advocate the preservation of academic freedom and dissent while being all about suppressing both when the views expressed conflict with blind support for US foreign policy.

Star Wars spending spree
Billions for Missile Defense, peanuts for anti-terrorism

Fred Kaplan, Slate, November 7, 2002

With all the concern about dirty bombs, bioterrorism, and suicide bombers smashing airplanes into power plants, the public has pretty much forgotten about the Pentagon's ballistic-missile-defense program. (Wasn't that some nutty dream of Ronald Reagan's?) So, it may come as a shock to learn that President Bush will spend $7.4 billion on R&D for missile defenses next year. That's twice the sum that Reagan spent on "star wars" in his final year of office—and for a system that remains sketchily defined and technologically dubious, against an unlikely threat that lies years, if not decades, off. Meanwhile, to defend against "weapons of mass destruction" that we all fear might blow up on American streets next week, the administration is spending—well, not quite zip, but far, far less than would be needed for a minimally serious effort, on technology that exists right now.

No thank you, Mr. Bush
Sinan Antoon, Foreign Policy in Focus, November 11, 2002

If one learns anything from living under a totalitarian system it is how to decipher the news and sift through official propaganda. Iraqis like myself have been doing that for almost three decades. Most of us listen to Arabic-language foreign radio stations like the BBC and Voice Of America, and follow the international news on a daily basis. So the painful experiences of dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, two devastating wars, and over a decade of the harshest sanctions in human history have showed us, time and again, the gap between words and deeds among those who proclaim to be our champions and potential liberators.

Sovereignty takes a contract hit
Jim Lobe, Asia Times, November 12, 2002

Almost lost in President George W Bush's twin triumphs in last week's Congressional elections and at the United Nations Security Council were two events that offer a glimpse into the new world imperial order being built by the administration.

While senior officials have long insisted that they want to rejuvenate a global system of strong nation states that exercise full sovereignty over their borders as the preferred alternative to "global government", the two incidents help illustrate how far Washington will go in interfering with that sovereignty to further its own interests.

After Iraq, Bush will attack his real target
Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun, November 10, 2002

President George Bush wrapped himself in the American flag and won a major victory last week as U.S. voters gave control of both houses of Congress to the Republican party. In mid-term elections, the party in power almost always fares badly, but this year an electorate, gripped by fear of terrorism, and whipped into war fever by high-voltage propaganda, voted Republican. Thank you Osama and Saddam.

One poignant photo said it all: Georgia's defeated Democratic senator, Max Cleland, sitting in a wheelchair, missing both legs and an arm lost in combat in Vietnam. This highly decorated hero was defeated by a Vietnam war draft-dodger who had the audacity to accuse Cleland of being "unpatriotic" after the senator courageously voted against giving Bush unlimited war-related powers. I do not recall a more shameful moment in American politics.

Bush's victory is clearly a mandate to proceed with his crusade against Iraq. Preparations for war are in an advanced stage. The U.S. has been quietly moving heavy armour and mechanized units from Europe to the Mideast. Three division equivalents and a Marine heavy brigade are now in theatre. An armada of U.S. warplanes is assembling around Iraq, which is bombed almost daily. U.S. special forces are operating in northern Iraq, and, along with Israeli scout units, in Iraq's western desert near the important H2 airbase. The war could begin as early as mid-December if there is no coup against Saddam Hussein.

But for all the propaganda about wicked Saddam, Iraq is not the main objective for the small but powerful coterie of Pentagon hardliners driving the Bush administration's national security policy. Nor is it for their intellectual and emotional peers in Israel's right-wing Likud party. The real target of the coming war is Iran, which Israel views as its principal and most dangerous enemy. Iraq merely serves as a pretext to whip America into a war frenzy and to justify insertion of large numbers of U.S. troops into Mesopotamia.

Building a war: As some argue, supply lines fill up
William M. Arkin, Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2002

In all the to-and-fro of debate over whether the United States should or will wage war against Iraq, almost no one was paying attention to Maj. Gen. Kenneth Privratsky. Outside the tight little world of the Military Traffic Management Command, almost no one had even heard of him. Yet Privratsky's former assignment may tell us more about the true intent and direction of the Bush administration than all the diplomatic pronouncements, political maneuvers and United Nations debates put together.

Privratsky was busy shipping thousands of tons of military equipment and supplies to the network of new U.S. bases that have sprung up like dragon's teeth across Central Asia and the Middle East. Among the resources he was using was the Russian railway system.

"I never imagined that I would be involved in shipping cargo through Russia," the former Traffic Command chief says, seeming a little awed to have found himself running Army supply trains through the heartland of his former Cold War enemy.

An army marches on its stomach, Napoleon famously observed. There is no more voracious military stomach than the U.S. armed forces. And since the war on terrorism began with Americans fighting in Afghanistan, the Defense Department has moved with notable agility to extend its globe-girdling capacity to march. It is this massive buildup of military capabilities -- and the way it ropes in reluctant partners, sometimes publicly and sometimes privately -- that shows where senior officials in the Bush administration are headed.

Some analysts have suggested that U.N. weapons inspections may reduce the likelihood of war. That is not how senior White House and Pentagon officials see it. None believes Saddam Hussein will permit effective inspections, but they see the U.N. effort as a win-win situation: The inspections process will improve the political climate for eventual action and buy time for the Pentagon to get ready. The war that Bush and his team think is necessary and inevitable will thus come with the approval of both Congress and the U.N. Meanwhile, one of the main practical obstacles to war with Iraq will have been dealt with: The enormous infrastructure needed to supply and sustain today's armed forces against Iraq is being constructed on the foundations of the system created for the war in Afghanistan.

U.N. Security Council split on meaning of Iraq vote
Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service, November 8, 2002

Despite unanimously supporting a U.S. resolution on arms inspections in Iraq, permanent members of the United Nations Security Council still appeared split Friday on the possible outcomes of the move.

At Navy school in Monterey, voices of skepticism about Iraq war
Robert Collier, San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 2002

When former Secretary of the Navy James Webb gave a speech last Thursday at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey slamming the Bush administration's threatened war with Iraq, an outsider might have expected the officers assembled there to give him a frosty reception.

In fact, the opposite occurred. The respectful, admiring welcome he received gave an unusual, somewhat counterintuitive glimpse into the often- closed world of the U.S. military. Among the Naval Postgraduate School's students and faculty, at least, it seems that independent, critical thinking is alive and well.

Granted, Webb is no outsider. A much-decorated former Marines officer, he became assistant defense secretary and secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration -- quitting the latter job in 1988 to protest budget cutbacks in the Navy's fleet expansion program.

In recent months, Webb has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, calling it, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, a distraction from the fight against al Qaeda.

See also Do we really want to occupy Iraq for the next 30 years?

Florence engulfed by world's biggest protest against Iraq war
Peter Popham, The Independent, November 10, 2002

The biggest demonstration in the world so far against war in Iraq engulfed Florence yesterday, at least doubling the city's population of 350,000 and turning the city's inner ring-road into a mighty river of protest. The organisers claimed that more than 400,000 people took part.

Rumours of violence planted by Italy's right-wing parties over recent months persuaded most city businesses to close for the day and many Florentines to leave the city. But the enormous march was resoundingly good humoured. Some participants carried signs reading "We love you Florence"; citizens responded by hanging white banners of peace out of their windows and throwing confetti on to the marchers.

"This is the first all-Europe demonstration against the war on Iraq," Vittorio Agnoletto, the Italian organiser, told The Independent on Sunday. "But it won't be the last: tomorrow we are meeting to plan future protests. We are Italy's real opposition – more than 300 different Italian organisations are taking part. And I am sure there will be no violence. Look, we are laughing. We cannot change the world with our anger, only by building consensus."

Half-a-million march in anti-war rally in Italy
Luke Baker, Reuters, November 9, 2002

More than half a million anti-war protesters from across Europe marched through this Italian Renaissance city on Saturday in a loud and colorful demonstration denouncing any possible U.S. attack on Iraq.

Brimming with anti-American feelings and riled by a tough new U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq, young and old activists from as far afield as Russia and Portugal joined forces for the carnival-like rally, singing Communist anthems and 1970s peace songs.

The unbearable costs of empire
James K. Galbraith, The American Prospect, November 18, 2002

Talk in Washington these days is of Rome and its imperial responsibilities. But George W. Bush is no Julius Caesar. France under Napoleon may be the better precedent. Like Bush, Napoleon came to power in a coup. Like Bush, he fought off a foreign threat, then took advantage to convert the republic into an empire. Like Bush, he built up an army. Like Bush, he could not resist the temptation to use it. But unlike Caesar's, Napoleon's imperial pretensions did not last.

Analogy is cheap but the point remains. Empire is not necessarily destined to endure, least of all in the undisturbed, vapid decadence to which our emperors so evidently aspire. True, in recent times the British Empire lasted for a century (or perhaps two, depending on how you count). The Soviet Union held up for seven decades. Napoleon was finished in just 15 years.

Florence braced for anti-war protest
BBC News, November 9, 2002

Thousands of protesters are gathering in the Italian city of Florence for what promises to be the biggest demonstration in Europe so far against any war on Iraq.

The march is the climax of the first meeting of the European Social Forum, which has brought together anti-globalisation campaigners from across the continent for five days of debates, conferences and concerts.

The face of power, the raw, real power of Bush's America
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, November 9, 2002

In the space of a few minutes yesterday, two starkly contrasting faces of power were on view: diplomatic power, clothed in the formulaic rites of the United Nations Security Council, and raw, real power as brandished by President George Bush in the Rose Garden of the White House.

For a moment, surveying the placid scene at the Security Council, or reading the nuanced legalistic language of Resolution 1441, you could believe the vote was the unqualified opinion of 15 like-minded nations, rather than what it really was: a document, amended a little to be sure, but conceived and driven through by the US to permit Washington to take military action against Saddam Hussein should it unilaterally decide to do so.

Afghan war faltering, military leader says
Myers cites Al Qaeda's ability to adapt

Thomas E. Ricks and Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, November 8, 2002

The U.S. military is losing momentum in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan because the remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban have proven more successful in adapting to U.S. tactics than the U.S. military has to theirs, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said this week.

Gen. Richard B. Myers also said there is a debate taking place within the Pentagon about whether the United States needs to change its priorities in Afghanistan and de-emphasize military operations in favor of more support for reconstruction efforts.

"I think in a sense we've lost a little momentum there, to be frank," Myers said in after-dinner comments Monday night at the Brookings Institution. "They've made lots of adaptations to our tactics, and we've got to continue to think and try to out-think them and to be faster at it."

Myers, the nation's top military officer, suggested it may be time for the military to "flip" its priorities from combat operations aimed at hunting down al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to "the reconstruction piece in Afghanistan," a notable shift in priorities for an a Pentagon that has eschewed nation-building exercises.

President, commander-in-chief, judge, jury, and executioner
Editorial, The War in Context, November 8, 2002

Transferring the power of judging any person who is under the protection of the laws, from the courts to the President of the United States, is against the article of the Constitution which provides that 'the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in courts, the judges of which shall hold their offices during good behavior.' -- Thomas Jefferson

The war on terrorism, as George Bush and his cohorts like to remind us, is "a different kind of war." It should have come as no surprise then that when asked for an explanation about the killing of six suspected terrorists in Yemen, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer's first recourse was to trot out the same old line - this is a different kind of war.

What is different is that through the use of radio-controlled unmanned aircraft, the United States can now eliminate its enemies from the comfort of offices in Virginia. But the elimination of enemies - that's as old as history. Whether it is an enemy of the state being eliminated by state defense forces, or the opponents of a tyrant being tracked down by death squads, those who seek the swiftest "justice" have little time for legal process.

New champions of the war cause
Jim Lobe, Asia Times, November 6, 2002

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which is setting up its office on Capitol Hill this week, plans to announce its formal launch next week, according to its president, Randy Scheunemann, a veteran Republican Senate foreign policy staffer who until recently worked as a consultant to Rumsfeld on Iraq policy.

The committee appears to be a spin-off of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a front group consisting mainly of neo-conservative Jews and heavy-hitters from the Christian right, whose public recommendations on fighting the war against terrorism and US backing for Israel in the conflict in the occupied territories have anticipated to a remarkable degree the administration's own policy course.

Partnering with Pakistan
Bill Berkowitz, WorkingForChange, November 5, 2002

It's tough for even the best public relations outfits to spin really bad news. Recent examples like the surprisingly good showing of Islamic fundamentalists in current elections, a New York Times story claiming Pakistan sold equipment to North Korea enhancing its nuclear weapons capabilities, and reports that al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are now operating out of Pakistan, are either: a) a PR firm's biggest nightmare, b) a welcome and challenging task, c) financially rewarding, or d) all of the above. Whether there's bad news to spin or good news to promote, you can depend on a well-paid PR firm to step up to the plate.

Dan Pero, a founding partner in the newly established Sterling International Consulting Corporation, which recently inked a month-by-month media relations contract with Pakistan, told me he was "excited about the possibilities" and "anxious to tell" Pakistan's story." As Pero sees it, the story is about how a "key ally of the U.S. in the war against terrorism" is moving closer toward democracy.

Project for the New American Century's Present Danger serves as blueprint for Bush Doctrine
Tom Barry, Foreign Policy in Focus, October 31, 2002

"Warlike intervention by civilized powers would contribute directly to the peace of the world."

This type of bellicose formulation of U.S. foreign policy could have easily come from any member of Bush's foreign policy team. One thinks first of the hawks like Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, or Richard Perle. But it could just as easily have been a statement by the president himself or by the moderate conservatives like Colin Powell or Richard Armitrage when referring to U.S. plans to wage war on Iraq.

This "war for peace" doctrine, however, came from the U.S. president whom neoconservatives honor as America's model of an "internationalist" president: Teddy Roosevelt--the hero who led the famous charge up "San Juan Hill" in Cuba and championed the Spanish-American War of 1898, which made the U.S. an imperial power with territorial possessions around the world. Here was a man who was unapologetic about power and its uses. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races," boasted Roosevelt, "And no triumph of peace is quite so great as the triumphs of war."

This is moral clarity?
Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post, November 5, 2002

Thank goodness for moral clarity. President Bush's black-and-white picture of the war on terror has apparently made sense of Russia's complicated struggle with the Chechens. The White House offered its wholehearted support to President Vladimir Putin in the aftermath of the Moscow theater siege, despite accounts of a heavy-handed Russian operation that had little regard for the lives of the hostages or the terrorists. (The latter were shot dead despite being unconscious.) But that's all understandable. Russia is, after all, fighting terrorism.

Drones of death
Bush takes the law into his own hands

Lead Editorial, The Guardian, November 6, 2002

Zap! Pow! The bad guys are dead. And they never knew what hit them. Living his presidency like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, George Bush etched another notch in his gun butt this week, blowing away six "terrorists" in Yemen's desert. Their car was incinerated by a Hellfire missile, fired by a CIA unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone. Dealing out death via remote-controlled flying robots could be the spooks' salvation after the September 11 and Afghan intelligence flops. It makes the agency look useful. It is quick and bodybag-free. It is new wave hi-tech, a 21st century equivalent of James Bond's Aston Martin. And the hit had full authority, right from the top, judging by Mr Bush's comments. The president is keen on hunting down America's foes, on the ugly old premise that the only good Injun is a dead Injun. For redskin, read al-Qaida. It is part, he says, of his anti-terrorist war-without-end. All the world's a battlefield for Mr Bush. The United States of America, 001: licensed to kill.

Zap! Ping! Even as the bullets ricochet, it should be said there are some problems with this approach to international peacekeeping. For a start, it is illegal.

The secret war
Frustrated by intelligence failures, the Defense Department is dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert operations

William M. Arkin, Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2002

In what may well be the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces since the Vietnam era, the Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "black world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror and monitoring the "axis of evil."

The increasingly dominant role of the military, Pentagon officials say, reflects frustration at the highest levels of government with the performance of the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and much of the burgeoning homeland security apparatus. It also reflects the desire of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror.

The purpose of the war
James Carroll, Boston Globe, November 5, 2002

Confusion still reigns over America's war aim, and this week's home-stretch debate at the UN Security Council shows it. Does the Bush administration want ''regime change'' or disarmament? Despite President Bush's callow equation last month that disarmament is regime change, the two purposes are not only different; they can work against each other. Such confusion is typical of the careless Bush mind, but in this circumstance it is dangerous. Perhaps there is something to learn from another time when public and private perceptions of America's war purpose became confused at the crucial moment - with tragic results.

How the world sees Americans
Suzy Hansen, Salon, November 6, 2002

There's a wonderful moment in Mark Hertsgaard's new book, "The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World," when foreigners' complex feelings about the United States --- why they hate us, why they love us and why it usually isn't either/or -- come into startling focus. A 32-year-old Capetown bus driver happily informs Hertsgaard that every township in South Africa has two street gangs named the Young Americans and the Ugly Americans. The difference? "The Young Americans dress like Americans," the driver, named Malcolm, explained. "The Ugly Americans shoot like Americans."

Of course, those are street gangs. Still, the scene gets to the heart of Hertsgaard's argument: The rest of the world maintains multifaceted and sophisticated perceptions of the world's lone superpower. They readily distinguish between the official face of the American government (who they tend to disagree with and fear) and American people, pop culture and values (which they tend to adore and emulate). Obviously, those who despise the United States make appearances in "The Eagle's Shadow," such as a trio of Egyptian ex-terrorists who will hardly speak to Hertsgaard. Unless it's to sing the praises of Kirk Douglas, that is.

It's the world's superpower, Hertsgaard stresses, that has a childlike understanding of everyone else.

US braces for retaliation after Yemen assassination
Greg Miller, Sydney Morning Herald, November 7, 2002

The CIA's assassination in Yemen of alleged al-Qaeda operatives has triggered outrage in some quarters and forced United States officials into the difficult position of defending a tactic it has criticised Israel for using.

For years, a debate raged within the CIA: should the US hunt down and kill its terrorist foes or would Israeli-style "targeted killings" only invite retribution and feed an endless cycle of violence?

The debate ended on Sunday when the CIA incinerated an alleged al-Qaeda leader, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, and five other alleged operatives with a laser-guided Hellfire missile, fired from an unmanned drone aircraft.

Even those who applauded the strike said it was sure to inflame militant Muslims, including those belonging to the al-Qaeda network, and expose US diplomats and other overseas officials to possible retaliation. On Tuesday the US said it was closing its embassy in Yemen to the public indefinitely amid fears it might become a target for an attack to retaliate for the killings.

Should we go to war just because we can?
Andrew Cockburn, Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2002

Faced with Saddam Hussein, the former teenage hit man from Tikrit, our government appears to feel the need to talk as tough as any Tikriti. Ari Fleischer, speaking from the White House briefing room, calls for "one bullet" to take care of the Iraqi leader; George Bush talks blithely of "taking him out"; and Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, recently, according to Ha'aretz, assured a visiting Israeli lawmaker: "We'll be rid of the bastard soon enough, and in his place we'll install a pro-Western dictator, who will be good for us and for you."

Such violent sentiments are not necessarily a reaction to Hussein's well-documented cruelty. We can, after all, be understanding about such foibles among our friends. The gassing of the Kurds was greeted with barely more than a bleat of protest from Washington, as was his earlier use of chemical weapons in the war with Iran, but we were allies then. It took Hussein's apparent bid for control of the world oil market by invading Kuwait to turn him into "Hitler," capable, as was faithfully reported in the propaganda buildup to the last Gulf War, of tossing Kuwaiti babies out of hospital incubators. That myth, dreamed up by the PR firm Hill and Knowlton, was exposed soon after it had served its purpose. Others, such as the notion that Hussein is both ready and able to unleash some super-weapon on the United States, have proved more enduring.

The cost of war
Bill Moyers, Now (PBS), October 18, 2002

Our Secretary of Defense has a plaque on his desk that says, "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." I don't think so.

To launch an armada against Hussein's own hostages, a people who have not fired a shot at us in anger, seems a crude and poor alternative to shrewd, disciplined diplomacy.

The great divide: Reservoirs of hate
David Grossman, Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2002

Israel is worse off than at any time in the last 35 years. Its security, economy and national mood are in decline. Yet Sharon, its failure of a prime minister, remains an overwhelmingly popular man in the country, even after the collapse last week of his coalition government. There's a simple explanation. He has succeeded -- with no little help from Palestinian terrorism -- in getting the Israeli people to restrict their view of their complex conflict with the Palestinians to a single question. Israelis now think solely about their personal security. It's certainly an issue of decisive importance, especially in the current state of affairs. Yet Sharon's political cunning is such that he has succeeded in reducing it to a single dimension, so that the only answer to the great and complicated question, "How does Israel make itself secure?" is: "By force."

That is the field of Sharon's expertise. Force, more force and only force. The result is that any time some small spark of a chance appears, every time there is a decline in violence, Sharon rushes to carry out another "targeted liquidation" of another Palestinian commander, and the fire flares again. Any time that Palestinian representatives declare their willingness to renew negotiations and halt violence, the response from Sharon's office is dismissal and derision.

Sharon has loyal allies -- the extremists among the Palestinians, who are also quick to incite the street and send more and more suicide bombers to Israel's cities each time there seems to be a respite. Each side is thus playing on the fears and despair of the other, each chasing the other around the familiar vicious circle: The more violence increases, the less chance there is of persuading people on either side that there is any chance of an accommodation, and that makes the violence spiral up to an even higher level.

Back door to Bush
Jackson Diehl, Washington Post, November 4, 2002

Which foreign leader has had the maximum Oval Office access to George W. Bush? Yes, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin have had plenty of face time, but when it comes to crossing the White House threshold, the undisputed champion is Ariel Sharon. In 17 months, Israel's prime minister has made the trip to Washington no fewer than seven times. [...]

"As far as I can remember -- I can look back for many years now -- I think we have never had such relations with any president of the United States as we have with you," he told Bush before the assembled media. "We never had such a cooperation in everything as we have had with the current administration."

Attack Iran the day Iraq war ends, demands Israel
Stephen Farrell, Robert Thomson and Danielle Haas, The Times, November 5, 2002

Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called on the international community to target Iran as soon as the imminent conflict with Iraq is complete.

In an interview with The Times , Mr Sharon insisted that Tehran — one of the "axis of evil" powers identified by President Bush — should be put under pressure "the day after" action against Baghdad ends because of its role as a "centre of world terror". He also issued his clearest warning yet that Israel would strike back if attacked by Iraqi chemical or biological weapons, no matter how much Washington sought to keep its controversial Middle Eastern ally out of any war in Iraq.

See also Interview with Sharon

Turkey's voters have delivered the 'wrong' result
Robert Fisk, The Independent, November 5, 2002

After the Taliban's chums enter the Pakistan parliament, the Islamists are back in Turkey. Who said that fundamentalism is dead? No, the victory of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is not a specifically anti-American vote – corruption and economic collapse produced its 350 seats in the 540-seat Turkish parliament. But opposition to corruption and economic collapse lay behind the Pakistani vote, too. Indeed, it is the foundation for almost every Islamist opposition vote in the Middle East, the desire to destroy the cancer which infects almost every pro-American regime in the region.

Moving in for the kill
The Allies' war machine is pushing inexorably towards Iraq

Peter Beaumont and Gaby Hinsliff, The Observer, November 3, 2002

According to defence sources and independent analysts, all the evidence points to US forces being readied for war by mid-December at the latest.

'There are a lot of very active preparations for war under way,' said one defence official. 'Everything is being moved rapidly into place so that the US and its allies can strike almost immediately should Bush decide that time has run out for the UN and its inspectors.'

Allies find no links between Iraq, Al Qaeda
Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2002

As the Bush administration prepares for a possible military attack on Iraq that it describes as the next logical step in its war on terror, some of its strongest front-line allies in that war dispute Washington's allegations that the Baghdad regime has significant ties to Al Qaeda.

In recent interviews, top investigative magistrates, prosecutors, police and intelligence officials who have been fighting Al Qaeda in Europe said they are concerned about attempts by President Bush and his aides to link Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden's terror network.

"We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda," said Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the French judge who is the dean of the region's investigators after two decades fighting Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorists. "And we are working on 50 cases involving Al Qaeda or radical Islamic cells. I think if there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever."

Even in Britain, a loyal U.S. partner in the campaign against Iraq, it's hard to find anyone in the government making the case that Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime are close allies. In fact, European counter-terrorist veterans who are working with American counterparts worry that an attack on Iraq, especially a unilateral U.S. invasion, would worsen the threat of radical Islamic terrorism worldwide and impede their work.

Israel quietly helping U.S. prepare for war with Iraq
John Diamond, USA Today, November 4, 2002

Israel is secretly playing a key role in U.S. preparations for possible war with Iraq, helping train soldiers and Marines for urban warfare, conducting clandestine surveillance missions in the western Iraqi desert and allowing the United States to place combat supplies in Israel, according to U.S. Defense and intelligence officials.

The activities are designed to help shorten any U.S.-led war with Iraq and reduce the risk that Israel would be attacked during such a conflict. Israel's involvement is highly sensitive. The perception that the United States is working with the Jewish state to wage war against a Muslim country could undercut the already shaky support for an invasion among friendly Arab states.

15,000 protest attack on Iraq
Michele Kurtz, Globe Staff and Benjamin Gedan, Boston Globe, November 4, 2002

An estimated 15,000 protesters converged on Boston Common yesterday for a three-hour rally to demonstrate against a possible US war with Iraq. The turnout, estimated by police, rivaled any Boston peace rally since the Gulf War, organizers said.

Group drums up Iraq war support
Seeks to reverse decline in support for attacking Iraq

Peter Slevin, Washington Post, November 4, 2002

The administration is determined to avoid a repeat of August when they ceded the stage to opponents of military action in Iraq and found themselves racing to announce their case against Hussein. Cheney delivered a public indictment of Hussein at the end of August, while Bush presented a bill of particulars to the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly two weeks later.

"There's going to be a huge need in the post-election vacuum to make sure that what happened in August doesn't happen in November and December," said Randy Scheunemann, executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He said Capitol Hill offices have been "getting a lot of calls against and not many for." The White House declined to release its call records.

John Pilger interview
David Barsamian, The Progressive, November, 2002

Q: In your new book, you talk about the group around Bush that is essentially forming war policy, people like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. You single out Richard Perle, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense in Reagan's Pentagon. You highlighted his comment "This is total war."

Pilger: I interviewed Perle when he was buzzing around the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, and I was struck by how truly fanatical this man was. He was then voicing the views of total war. All of Bush's extremism comes from the Reagan years. That's why people like Perle, Wolfowitz, and other refugees from that period have found favor again. I singled out Perle in the book because I thought he rather eloquently described the policies of the Bush regime. September 11 has given these people, this clique, an opportunity from heaven. They never really believed they would have the legitimacy to do what they are doing. They don't, of course, have legitimacy because most of the world is opposed to what they are doing. But they believe it has given them if not a legitimacy then a constituency in the United States.

Israel committed war crimes in West Bank, rights group says
John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, November 4, 2002

There is "clear evidence" that Israeli soldiers and their commanders committed war crimes against Palestinian civilians -- including unlawful killings and torture -- during a three-month campaign last spring in two Palestinian cities in the West Bank, the human rights group Amnesty International charges in a report to be released Monday.

In a study of Israeli army operations in the cities of Jenin and Nablus from April to June, the human rights group cites the killing of Palestinian women and children, the "wanton" destruction of houses, the torture of Palestinian prisoners and the use of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers as "human shields" during military operations. The group says in the report these constitute violations of the Geneva Conventions.

See also Israeli Defence Force war crimes must be investigated by Amnesty International.

No road from Munich to Iraq
Gerhard L. Weinberg, Washington Post, November 3, 2002

For those intent on waging war against Iraq, the word "Munich" is shorthand for "appeasement." It has been brandished against those -- be they European governments, leading congressional Democrats, or cautious Republicans and State Department officials -- who are not fervently committed to a U.S.-led battle to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Yet those who talk of Munich -- site of France and Britain's attempt at pacifying Nazi Germany before World War II -- in the context of today do little justice either to the dilemma of those who negotiated with Adolf Hitler then or to those who must weigh the need for military action today. Rather than adding depth to our debate, this historical analogy has been deployed in a shallow way to intimidate political foes as much as the enemies who mean us actual harm.

What is the real meaning of Munich, and what does it have to do with current questions of war and peace?

The making of an activist
Lisa Pollak, Baltimore Sun, November 2, 2002

Last weekend's anti-war rally in Washington is being called the largest since the Vietnam era, and the familiar faces were well-represented: Quakers and Greens, socialists and anarchists. There were boa-wearing roller skaters, an Uncle Sam on stilts, dreadlocked college students playing bongos.

But Laura Brodie - mother, English professor, wife of VMI's band director - was there, too, and so were plenty of people who looked just like her. She didn't join the chants of "Drop Bush, Not Bombs!" but her cries of "No War!" were as loud as anyone's. Maybe louder. Hers is the voice of the newly awakened activist, resolute and hopeful. She believes in the process, in her ability to make a difference. While others may grow cynical in the face of defeat, she finds inspiration in the smallest victories, in the increasing number of like-minded voices stepping up to be heard.

Distant voices tell of life for Britons caged in Camp Delta
Letters to families reveal hunger strikes and suicides in US jail for terror suspects

Paul Harris and Burhan Wazir, The Observer, November 3, 2002

Nearly all the prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan by American soldiers and spies. But there is a growing belief that many of the 620 inmates are not terrorists. Some were pressganged into fighting for the Taliban; others were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At night arc lights shine on the complex. But, despite the 24-hour light, the prison is hidden from the outside world. It lies on an American naval base and the only viewing point is 100 metres away. Held within are men from 38 nations. Some are in their seventies, one is only 15. Each man spends 30 minutes a week showering and exercising; the rest of the time he is alone in a cell measuring 8ft by 6ft 8in.

A prisoner raising his voice is sent to 'the cooler': a metal box just big enough to move in. An isolation wing houses 80 prisoners. In the main wings, prisoners move cell every few weeks to prevent them forming relationships with other inmates. Any trips to the camp's clinic involve the prisoner being shackled to a trolley and wheeled out of his cell. He is then chained to the hospital bed. Prisoners are exercised, shackled at the ankles, waist and hands. Guards hold each man's arms as he walks.

Tinker, banker, neoCon, spy
Ahmed Chalabi's long and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad

Robert Dreyfuss, The American Prospect, November 14, 2002

If T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") had been a 21st-century neoconservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he'd be Ahmed Chalabi's best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neoconservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put American troops -- and American oil companies -- in full control of the Persian Gulf's reserves and use the Gulf as a fulcrum for enhancing America's global strategic hegemony. Just as Lawrence's escapades in World War I-era Arabia helped Britain remake the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the U.S. sponsors of Chalabi's INC hope to do their own nation building.

"The removal of [Saddam Hussein] presents the United States in particular with a historic opportunity that I believe is going to prove to be as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the entry of British troops into Iraq in 1917," says Kanan Makiya, an INC strategist and author of Republic of Fear.

Chalabi would hand over Iraq's oil to U.S. multinationals, and his allies in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Even more broadly, once an occupying U.S. army seizes Baghdad, Chalabi's INC and its American backers are spinning scenarios about dismantling Saudi Arabia, seizing its oil and collapsing the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It's a breathtaking agenda, one that goes far beyond "regime change" and on to the start of a New New World Order.

UK finance minister warns defence chiefs war on Iraq is 'too expensive'
Michael Smith, The Telegraph, November 2, 2002

Gordon Brown has told the Ministry of Defence that Britain cannot afford to send ground troops to the Gulf to take part in a war against Iraq.

The Treasury has ordered military planners to come up with new strategies after it worked out that the contribution to a US-led war would cost 3 billion pounds, about 0.5 billion pounds more than the British deployment in 1991.

Bush's Iraq adventure is bound to backfire
Youssef M. Ibrahim, International Herald Tribune, November 1, 2002

Let us not be fooled: The upcoming war against Iraq has nothing to do with the war against terror.

President George W. Bush's war is fueled by two things: bolstering the president's popularity as he attempts to ride on the natural wave of American patriotism unleashed by the criminal attacks of Sept. 11; and a misguided temptation to get more oil out of the Middle East by turning a ''friendly" Iraq into a private American oil pumping station.

Both will backfire and may indeed cost this president and his warmongering cabinet their sought-after second term.

Rally in Washington is said to invigorate the antiwar movement
Kate Zernike, New York Times, October 30, 2002

Emboldened by a weekend antiwar protest in Washington that organizers called the biggest since the days of the Vietnam War, groups opposed to military action in Iraq said they were preparing a wave of new demonstrations across the country in the next few weeks.

The demonstration on Saturday in Washington drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers. They expected 30 buses, and were surprised by about 650, coming from as far as Nebraska and Florida.

A companion demonstration in San Francisco attracted 42,000 protesters, city police there said, and smaller groups demonstrated in other cities, including about 800 in Austin, Tex., and 2,500 in Augusta, Me.
See also Did New York Times Blow Coverage of Antiwar March?

Dirty war
How America's friends really fight terrorism

Peter Maass, New Republic, October 31, 2002

If you happen to believe the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist, you are quite possibly a member of the U.S. government. I realized this while visiting the home of a U.S. official in Pakistan one Sunday afternoon. Security guards are always stationed outside his residence. When he ventures beyond his front door he does so in an armored car, with bodyguards at his side, and another vehicle follows his--lest he end up like Laurence Foley, the American diplomat who was killed outside his home in Amman, Jordan, on October 28.

We drank coffee and nibbled biscuits in his living room and chatted about the best place to buy handwoven carpets, which are plentiful in Pakistan, at prices that coincide with the sum the salesman believes he can extract from your American wallet. Our conversation then moved to the crackdown on religious extremists by Pakistan's military leader, General Pervez Musharraf. I assumed the official wanted every actual or potential terrorist thrown in jail. He shook his head; I didn't get it at all.

"We don't want them arrested," the official said. "We want them e--."

He interrupted himself. He was reconsidering his choice of words.

"Were you going to say, 'exterminated'?" I asked.

He smiled uncomfortably.

"No. I was going to say, 'eliminated.'"

I cannot disclose his name or the city where we met, but I can add one detail about my host: He was telling the truth. It is impolitic for U.S. officials to give their blessing on the record to regimes that skip judicial niceties and go directly to the gallows, but that is the reality of America's war on terrorism. Due process is a rarity in most Muslim nations; police and courts are rotten with ineptness, corruption, torture, and meddling by political and religious authorities. When the White House urges a crackdown, as it frequently does in public statements and private meetings, it knows--and does not mind--that terrorism suspects are far more likely to face summary executions than fair trials.

Publicly, the administration pretends this isn't true. "In the context of our counterterrorism efforts," Secretary of State Colin Powell said after meeting his Asian and Pacific Rim counterparts at the end of July, "I made the point to all my interlocutors that we still believe strongly in human rights and that in everything we do we have to be consistent with the universal standards of human rights." The next day Powell added, "The United States feels strongly about these sorts of issues and believes that if we are really going to prevail over this plague on the face of mankind, then we have to do it in a way that respects human dignity."

Powell, who is a smart man, knows this is nonsense. Earlier this year, in a report titled "Rights at Risk," Amnesty International warned that "the `war on terror' may be degenerating into a global `dirty war' of torture, detentions, and executions." In a statement accompanying the report, which cited a pattern of abuses in Egypt, China, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere, Amnesty International said, "A number of states have introduced new laws that violate human rights standards while others have used existing measures to crack down on opposition." Says Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, "The U.S. is facilitating these countries in committing torture to further its aims in the war on terror."

Human rights body: suicide bombers guilty of 'war crimes'
Justin Huggler, The Independent, November 1, 2002

In a searing report published today, Human Rights Watch (HRW) condemns Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians as crimes against humanity and war crimes, and calls for the prosecution of those responsible, including the political leadership of militant groups such as Hamas.

In an exhaustive 160-page report, the organisation found no evidence to support Israeli government accusations that Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority ordered suicide bombings and attacks on civilians. But the report does accuse Mr Arafat of not doing enough to prevent attacks.
See also HRW report Suicide Bombers Commit Crimes Against Humanity

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