THE CREDIBILITY GAP
"For its part, the new government of Israel -- as the terror threat is removed and security improves -- will be expected to support the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- and to work as quickly as possible toward a final status agreement. As progress is made toward peace, settlement activity in the occupied territories must end." George W. Bush, addressing the American Enterprise Institute, February 26, 2003
Sharon in Palestine state u-turn
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, February 28, 2003
Ariel Sharon yesterday virtually ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state under his hawkish new government just a day after President Bush pledged to broker a peace deal once he has dealt with Iraq.
Hours before his cabinet was sworn in, the prime minister revealed to the knesset that he has backed away from his commitment to the Palestinian state envisioned by Washington's "road map" for a settlement, as part of the deal to put together his government.
Mr Sharon told the knesset that the road map is "a matter of controversy in the coalition" and had been dropped from the written agreement which drew far right, pro-settler and anti-religious parties into the administration.
The prime minister will also have frustrated his American friends by promising to expand Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
A Palestinian cabinet minister, Saeb Erekat, said Mr Sharon's speech killed any prospect of a peace process under the new government.
"He is saying there is no road map, no peace process. It's a government for the settlers, from the settlers and by the settlers," he said. "I think Sharon made it clear tonight that he wants the Palestinians to surrender to him. I hope President Bush will see the light."
America's costly new global role
Brad Knickerbocker and Faye Bowers, Christian Science Monitor, February 28, 2003
By tipping his cap to European and Arab friends and allies in a speech on Iraq's role in Middle East peace Wednesday, President Bush emphasized that he is listening to what the world has to say. But the vision of an almost serene president laying out the goals of war in terms of peace and human aspirations is likely to cause a certain amount of head-scratching both at home and around the world.
Bush has frequently dismissed global antiwar sentiment and said the US is ready for war with or without the United Nations. But now he's also promoting Arab, and specifically Palestinian, aspirations for democracy and prosperity as one more reason for that war.
Star witness on Iraq said weapons were destroyed
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, February 27, 2003
On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims.
Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced. But Newsweek's John Barry-- who has covered Iraqi weapons inspections for more than a decade-- obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM.
In London, war debate roars; Washington's whispers
Gail Russell Chaddock and Mark Rice-Oxley, Christian Science Monitor, February 28, 2003
In London, British lawmakers have been ripping into Prime Minister Tony Blair with Edwardian precision over the possible war in Iraq. In Washington, the US Congress is fulminating over a judicial nominee few Americans have ever heard of and debating the design of the US 5-cent coin.
Therein lies a tale of two legislative bodies that reveals striking differences, on the brink of war, between nations that have been breeding grounds and bulwarks of modern democracy.
Secret, scary plans
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, February 28, 2003
Some of the most secret and scariest work under way in the Pentagon these days is the planning for a possible military strike against nuclear sites in North Korea.
Officials say that so far these are no more than contingency plans. They cover a range of military options from surgical cruise missile strikes to sledgehammer bombing, and there is even talk of using tactical nuclear weapons to neutralize hardened artillery positions aimed at Seoul, the South Korean capital.
There's nothing wrong with planning, or with brandishing a stick to get Kim Jong Il's attention. But several factions in the administration are serious about a military strike if diplomacy fails, and since the White House is unwilling to try diplomacy in any meaningful way, it probably will fail. The upshot is a growing possibility that President Bush could reluctantly order such a strike this summer, risking another Korean war.
The blinding glare of his certainty
How Bush's faith shapes his approach to Iraq
Joe Klein, Time, February 18, 2003
George W. Bush lives at the intersection of faith and inexperience. This is not a reassuring address, especially in a time of trouble. His public utterances are often measured and elegant, but there are frequent and rather grating lapses too. There is a tendency to ricochet between piety and puerility, an odd juxtaposition that raises a discomforting theological question: What is it about the President's religious faith that makes him seem so jaunty as he faces the most fateful decision a President can make?
Slouching toward Baghdad…
Mike Davis, TomDispatch, February 26, 2003
Imperial Washington, like Berlin in the late 1930s, has become a psychedelic capital where one megalomaniacal hallucination succeeds another. Thus, in addition to creating a new geopolitical order in the Middle East, we are now told by the Pentagon's deepest thinkers that the invasion of Iraq will also inaugurate "the most important 'revolution in military affairs' (or RMA) in two hundred years."
According to Admiral William Owen, a chief theorist of the revolution, the first Gulf War was "not a new kind of war, but the last of the old ones." Likewise, the air wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan were only pale previews of the postmodern blitzkrieg that will be unleashed against the Baathist regime. Instead of old- fashioned sequential battles, we are promised nonlinear "shock and awe."
Although the news media will undoubtedly focus on the sci-fi gadgetry involved - thermobaric bombs, microwave weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), PackBot robots, Stryker fighting vehicles, and so on - the truly radical innovations (or so the war wonks claim) will be in the organization and, indeed, the very concept of the war.
In the bizarre argot of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation (the nerve center of the revolution), a new kind of "warfighting ecosystem" known as "network centric warfare" (or NCW) is slouching toward Baghdad to be born. Promoted by military futurists as a "minimalist" form of warfare that spares lives by replacing attrition with precision, NCW may in fact be the inevitable road to nuclear war.
The wrong war
Avishai Margalit, New York Review of Books, February 13, 2003
At this writing it seems certain that there will be a war in Iraq. It is the wrong war to fight. I am not waiting for the next report of Hans Blix: I already believe that Iraq is hiding chemical and biological weapons. I also believe that it is hiding a few dozen missiles in western Iraq. Yet, while holding these beliefs, I still maintain that this is the wrong war.
If you were to ask American officials after September 11 what the enemy is, you would hear three different answers: world terrorism, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of evildoers like Saddam Hussein, and radical Islam of the sort promoted by Osama bin Laden. I believe that the muddleheadedness in the American thinking about the war against Iraq comes from conflating these three answers as if somehow they were one and the same. In fact they are very different, with very different and incompatible practical implications.
Building a 'coalition of the coerced'?
Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service, February 26, 2003
While U.S. President George W. Bush insists that many countries are eager to join what he calls a ''coalition of the willing'', a more apt name may be ''coalition of the coerced'', according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank.
While some European lead ers appear genuinely committed to Washington's drive to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein despite massive public opposition, most of the 34 governments that Bush may be counting as coalition members appear less than enthusiastic at best, says the report.
''Almost all, by our count, join only through coercion, bullying, bribery, or the implied threat of U.S. action that would directly damage the interests of the country,'' adds the 13-page report. ''This 'coalition of the coerced' stands in direct conflict with democracy.''
Karzai pleads with US not to abandon Afghanistan
Phil Reeves, The Independent, February 28, 2003
There are deep fears in Mr Karzai's administration and among its supporters that an American invasion of Iraq will lead to a fall in international support for Afghanistan long before the task of establishing a strong central government, let alone securing peace and reconstructing the shattered country, is complete.
"Don't forget us if Iraq happens," Mr Karzai told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. "Whatever you do in Iraq should not reduce your attention on Afghanistan ... If you leave the whole thing to us, to fight again, it will be repeating the mistakes the US made during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan."
'We proceed in Iraq as hypocrites and cowards - and the world knows it'
Zadie Smith, The Guardian, February 27, 2003
The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause. The case against is clear. To begin war on Iraq would be to launch a pre-emptive strike on a country we fear will attack us on a future unspecified date, in a future unknown manner, with weapons we have not been able to find. It would be to set the most remarkable international precedent. It would be in contravention of international law and the UN charter. It would be to consolidate a feeling of injustice in the Middle East, the consequences of which we will reap for generations. It would be, simply, illegal.
Once bitten
Peter Beinart, New Republic, February 27, 2003
The Bush administration is good at punishing America's enemies. But it's far worse at rewarding America's friends. As Franklin Foer noted in these pages last year (see "Fabric Softener," March 4, 2002), the White House responded to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's crucial support against his former ally, the Taliban, by denying his request to lift U.S. tariffs on his country's textiles. More recently, it has ignored Hamid Karzai's pleas to extend international peacekeeping throughout Afghanistan. And it has stiffed Mexican President Vicente Fox's calls for a new immigration accord, embittering the pro-American president and undermining his domestic support.
Bush shares dream of Middle East democracy
Jim Lobe, Asia Times, February 28, 2003
The speech, the latest in an accelerating series of appearances by Bush and other senior members of his administration to drum up public support for war in Iraq with or without the United Nations Security Council's authorization, was notable as much for its venue as its content.
AEI, whose foreign policy "scholars" are closely identified with the most unilateralist and pro-Likud elements in the Bush administration, has acted as the hub of a network of neo-conservative activists and groups, including the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and several others that have agitated for war against Iraq and other Arab states that are believed to threaten Israel since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon near Washington, DC.
McGovern party's anti-war wing finds a voice
James P. Pinkerton, Newsday, February 27, 2003
The Democratic presidential hopeful was from a small state, but he had a big message. Not only was the incumbent Republican president wrong about the foreign war, the candidate said, but so were his chief rivals for the upcoming presidential nomination.
So the obscure politician from the dinky state emerged as the peace candidate, which gave him lots of buzz in Manhattan and Hollywood. And to the amazement of most observers, he won the Democratic nomination.
That's the scenario envisioned by Howard Dean, former Vermont governor. But it's also the history made by former Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota in 1972. The Dean-McGovern parallels aren't perfect, but they bear noting - and watching.
MEN OF PEACE AT WORK
While George Bush last night addressed the American Enterpirse Institute and pledged that he would be going to war for the sake of peace, his comrade in peaceful arms, Ariel Sharon, finalised the make-up of his cabinet. With a new cabinet widely recognized as having little interest in restarting the peace process with the Palestinians, the only "settlement" that Sharon is committed to dismantling is the one in his own cabinet occupied by his arch-rival Binyamin Netanyahu.
Sharon signs up far right but edges out Netanyahu
Justin Huggler, The Independent, February 27, 2003
The Prime Minister was expected to present his new government to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, today. With the addition of the National Union to his coalition, Mr Sharon will command 68 of the 120 seats – which should be a sufficient majority to push through most of his government's policies.
The question is what those policies will be. George Bush has called for a "two-state solution", a peace deal that would include the formation of a Palestinian state in part of the occupied territories. Mr Sharon says he is committed to President Bush's "vision" and will pursue it in this government.
But the government will now contain two parties whose most fundamental ideology opposes any Palestinian state in the occupied territories, which they want as Israeli land.
New US military bases:
Side effects or causes of war?
Zoltan Grossman, Counterpunch, February 2, 2003
Since the end of the Cold War a decade ago, the U.S. has gone to war in Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The interventions have been promoted as "humanitarian" deployments to stop aggression, to topple dictatorships, or to halt terrorism. After each U.S. intervention, the attention of supporters and critics alike has turned to speculate on which countries would be next. But largely ignored has been what the U.S. interventions left behind.
As the Cold War ended, the U.S. was confronted with competition from two emerging economic blocs in Europe and East Asia. Though it was considered the world's last military superpower, the United States was facing a decline of its economic strength relative to the European Union, and the East Asian economic bloc of Japan, China and the Asian "Four Tigers." The U.S. faced the prospect of being economically left out in much of the Eurasian land mass. The major U.S. interventions since 1990 should be viewed not only reactions to "ethnic cleansing" or Islamist militancy, but to this new geopolitical picture.
If not war then what?
The Guardian, February 27, 2003
In recent weeks, it has become the hawks' favourite riposte to mounting anti-war sentiment. But should critics of military action have to answer it? And, if so, can they offer any real alternative? The Guardian asked 30 high-profile opponents of the war to tackle the question.
The British House of Commons divided
Lead Editorial, The Guardian, February 27, 2003
Labour suffered its biggest revolt last night when 121 Labour MPs voted to amend the government's Iraq motion. Not everyone who failed to vote for the government is opposed to war in all circumstances. Not everyone who voted with the government on Iraq is in favour of war in all circumstances. It is even possible that yesterday was not the point of no return. But the overall result of a day of high drama and great seriousness at Westminster should not be mistaken or underestimated.
By accepting the government's motion last night, which MPs did by 434-124 votes, and by rejecting the amendment moved by Chris Smith, which they did by 393-199, the House of Commons has still backed the aggressive "last-chance" policy that is embodied in the draft security council resolution put forward this week by the United States and Britain. Last night may not now be Westminster's final word on the Iraq crisis - Jack Straw appeared to promise another vote before the start of military action - but it was a fateful moment all the same.
Though wounded, the Blair government will treat the result as a green light to go along with America's intention to attack Iraq at a moment of its own choosing. MPs had a choice, and they made the wrong one. The die has been cast for a war-enabling policy. It is one which Britain may rue for many years to come.
War remains the option of first resort - not last
The US is by no means alone in conniving at conflict with Iraq
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, February 27, 2003
The approaching Middle East convulsion is hardly an aberration. America has been fighting wars all our lifetimes, from Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf to Serbia, Afghanistan and now, again, in Iraq. Its wars have flared hot and brief, as in Libya in 1986, Panama in 1989, and Somalia in 1992. They have run cold and long, as in its 40-year global confrontation with the Soviet Union. They have been fought by proxy, as in Angola and Mozambique, or behind the scenes as in Lebanon and Cambodia. They have been waged covertly as in Chile and Cuba, Nicaragua and El Salvador; or by invitation, as in the current Colombian "war on drugs" and the Philippines leg of the "war on terror".
The degree of offensive action ranges from punitive strikes, as in the one-off cruise missile attack on Sudan in 1998 to massed, full-fig firepower, as in Kuwait in 1991. A new departure came last autumn with the CIA's unabashed, remote-controlled "hit" on alleged al-Qaida terrorists in Yemen. But grand-scale or low-key, up-front or underhand, the threat or fact of armed American intervention to reinforce its immense economic and political leverage, while never absent since 1945, is now omnipresent in today's unbalanced, unipolar world.
Goodbye to all that
How long will our allies put up with Bush?
John Prados, TomPaine.com, February 20, 2003
The present course of the Bush administration quite plainly threatens regime change. Not changes in Iraq's regime, although American military power may well bring that about, but a transformation of the entire pattern of the United States' relationships with the world. Americans have long been taught that international alliances and cooperation form the bedrock of our standing in the modern world. Global economics depends on that kind of cooperation; global politics builds on it. Talking about the United States as a "hyperpower" obscures the fact that we exist within an international system. That system required decades to craft, but now finds itself under threat after only two short years of the Bush administration. The juxtaposition of the current war on terrorism with a near-certain conflict in Iraq throws these developments into sharp relief. Americans need to pay attention to Bush administration demands on the international system, as these strains are triggering subtle changes that are not in our best interests.
Frontline: The war behind closed doors
PBS, February, 2003
Companion to a PBS Frontline broadcast including interviews with three of the war's leading proponents: Richard Perle, William Kristol, and Kenneth Pollack.
Bush to cast war as part of regional strategy
Peter Slevin, Washington Post, February 26, 2003
President Bush intends to outline his postwar vision for Iraq and the Middle East in a speech tonight designed in part to showcase the administration's belief that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's overthrow would be a significant step toward broad democratic change in the Arab world.
The planned address, to the American Enterprise Institute, is part of an intensive administration effort to defend a prospective invasion of Iraq. Bush will present an optimistic portrait of how events could unfold if he chooses war. The speech will emphasize a broader U.S. campaign -- part of what Bush calls a "battle for the future of the Muslim world" -- that will last far longer than military hostilities in Iraq and test the United States' already difficult relationships in the region.
Note - The American Enterprise Institute's prominent members include "The Prince of Darkness," Richard Perle, Samuel "clash of civilizations" P. Huntington, Lynne V. Cheney, Michael A. Ledeen, David "axis of evil" Frum, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and numerous other hardcore neo-conservatives.
The madness of empire
The War Party’s militarized strategy will unite the world against us
Scott McConnell, The American Conservative, February 24, 2003
Recently the novelist John le Carré wrote in the Times of London that the United States has entered a “period of madness” that dwarfs McCarthyism or the Vietnam intervention in intensity. One generally would not pay much attention to the cynical British spy-tale weaver, never especially friendly to America. But concern about America’s mental health is more broadly in the air, spreading well beyond the usual professional anti-Americans. It is now pervasive in Europe, and growing in Asia, and when Matt Drudge posted le Carré’s piece prominently on his website, it got passed around and talked about here in ways it never would have five years ago.
Old Arab friends turn away from U.S.
Policies toward Iraq and Palestinians alienate pro-American generation
Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, February 26, 2003
With the bitterness of betrayal, Said Naggar looks out at a region on the brink of war and sees the wreckage of ideals he cherished and principles he proclaimed.
The United States wants to partition Iraq, he argues in slow, deliberate tones, and covets the world's second-largest oil reserves. An invasion, he says, serves only Israel and a clique within the Bush administration "whose ignorance is matched only by their greed." A preemptive war, whose very premise he believes defies international law, signals the rebirth of colonialism and imperialism that seemed finished generations ago.
"I feel we have been deceived about the nature and character of the United States of America," he said.
Remarkably, these are the words of a friend. Naggar is a World Bank veteran who quotes the Declaration of Independence and whose son is a U.S. citizen. His library is stocked with works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and "all the great founders." He lived for 17 years in Washington, where he says he never felt like a foreigner, and still longs for the city's intellectual and artistic life and his favorite Asian restaurants.
Iraqi academics take sour view of U.S. policy
Samia Nakhoul, Reuters, February 26, 2003
As U.S.-British invasion forces gather, Muayad al-Wandawi, a modern history professor at Baghdad University, says Iraq has always been prey to Western ambitions.
Wandawi sees U.S. and British policies through a historical prism that refracts long-standing colonial impulses to control Iraq's land, people and vast oil resources.
He recalls how Britain, then ruling Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, installed a monarchy in 1921, when a British warship brought Faisal, a Hashemite son of the Hejaz, in what is now Saudi Arabia, to become king of the new country.
Wandawi tells his political science students that the United States now plans to install its own puppet ruler in Baghdad.
His colleague, Abdel-Kader Mohammad Fahmi, teaches political strategy, with an Iraqi perspective on U.S. thinking.
"I am teaching my students the principles of the Pentagon policy -- that America's concept of security has become unethical, invisible and with no boundaries," he said.
Iraq to 'outsource' counterattacks
Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 2003
Starting in October of last year, Iraq began preparing for war with the US by instructing agents in its embassies worldwide to organize terrorist-type attacks on American and allied targets, Filipino and US intelligence officials say.
Barzan Ibrahim El Hasan al Tikriti, a former head of Iraq's intelligence agency and senior adviser to Saddam Hussein, hatched a plan to dispatch a mole to Indonesia; suicide bombers to Amman, Jordan; and a woman agent to help with planned attacks in the Philippines, according to an Iraqi defector interviewed by US intelligence.
Iraqi officials also mulled suicide attacks on US ships in the Persian Gulf, according to the defector. If true, analysts say, the plans probably represent wishful thinking, since Iraq has rarely succeeded with such attempts in the past and has not been known to use suicide bombers.
But there is evidence that Iraq may be outsourcing. Intelligence officials are concerned that Iraq is seeking out Islamic militant groups that have little ideologically in common with Iraq's secular Baath regime, but find common cause against the US.
Decisions, decisions
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, February 26, 2003
...if this conflict's chief aim is what the new, second UN resolution claims it to be - the simple disarmament of Iraq - then any postwar settlement would be devised around that objective: perhaps a new, compliant dictator would do that job best. If the goal is the one touted by Tony Blair in recent days as the moral case - namely, liberation from tyranny - then only a fresh, democratic start will do.
If, however, the American victors insist on a much more robust level of US control - restructuring Iraq entirely, studding it with countless military bases - then we could start drawing rather different conclusions as to the true motive of this campaign. We might agree with those who detect in the Iraq adventure the opening move of a much grander American design: the establishing of US hegemony for the next 100 years.
Why Iraq?
John B. Judis, The American Prospect, March 1, 2003
When a country goes to war, one question that already should have been answered is "why?" But many people in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are genuinely perplexed about why the Bush administration is so determined, even at the cost of war, to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In their public statements, administration officials have, if anything, increased the puzzlement. They have portrayed their campaign against Iraq as a continuation of the war against terrorism. They have claimed to have evidence of close ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, but outside of a few scattered citations, they have failed to make a case that Hussein is an active ally of Osama bin Laden.
By offering an implausible rationale, the administration raises suspicion, particularly outside the United States, that it must have a secret agenda for ousting Hussein. Many people think that President George W. Bush wants to control Iraq's oil fields on behalf of U.S. companies. In mid-January, the German weekly Der Spiegel ran a cover story titled, "Blood for Oil." But anyone familiar with positions taken by American oil companies knows that this is implausible. In the late 1990s, oil companies lobbied to remove sanctions on Iraq. And most oil executives are extremely wary about the Bush policies toward Iraq, which they fear will destabilize the region.
What, then, explains the administration's Iraq policy? I offer here my own account, based on interviews with administration officials, press reports and, where necessary, speculation. It's not an explanation that will satisfy anyone looking for a single cause such as "blood for oil." Like many policy decisions, this one was the complicated and compromised product of different views and different factions within the administration. At any given point, it has contained contradictory aspects, wishful thinking and irrational fears, as well as the more conventional geopolitical calculations.
If antiwar protesters succeed
Anonymous, Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 2003
What if you antiwar protesters and politicians succeed in stopping a US-led war to change the regime in Baghdad? What then will you do?
Will you also demonstrate and demand "peaceful" actions to cure the abysmal human rights violations of the Iraqi people under the rule of Saddam Hussein?
Or, will you simply forget about us Iraqis once you discredit George W. Bush?
Attack not yet legal, says expert
Cynthia Banham, Sydney Morning Herald, February 27 2003
The latest United Nations Security Council draft resolution would not be sufficient to authorise a United States-led attack on Iraq under international law, an expert from one of the world's most prestigious international relations schools, Nicholas Wheeler, said yesterday.
Dr Wheeler's comments came as lawyers and academics around Australia called on the Howard Government to "observe the rule of law" in international law, and to publicly reveal any advice it had suggesting a pre-emptive strike against Iraq could be justified.
The call to reveal the legal advice came from the NSW Bar Association, and followed the publication of a letter from eminent legal experts in the Herald who claimed an invasion of Iraq could constitute a war crime.
Threats, promises and lies
Paul Krugman, New York Times, February 25, 2003
So it seems that Turkey wasn't really haggling about the price, it just wouldn't accept payment by check or credit card. In return for support of an Iraq invasion, Turkey wanted - and got - immediate aid, cash on the barrelhead, rather than mere assurances about future help. You'd almost think President Bush had a credibility problem.
And he does.
The funny thing is that this administration sets great store by credibility. As the justifications for invading Iraq come and go - Saddam is developing nuclear weapons; no, but he's in league with Osama; no, but he's really evil - the case for war has come increasingly to rest on credibility. You see, say the hawks, we've already put our soldiers in position, so we must attack or the world won't take us seriously.
But credibility isn't just about punishing people who cross you. It's also about honoring promises, and telling the truth. And those are areas where the Bush administration has problems.
Nuke lab can't keep snoops out
Noah Shachtman, Wired News, February 25, 2003
There are no armed guards to knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world's most important nuclear research facility, all you do is step over a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire.
I should know. On Saturday morning, I slipped into and out of a top-secret area of the lab while guards sat, unaware, less than a hundred yards away.
Despite the nation's heightened terror alert status, despite looming congressional hearings into the lab's mismanagement and slack-jawed security, an untrained person -- armed with only the vaguest sense of the facility's layout and slowed by a torn Achilles tendon -- was able to repeatedly gain access to the birthplace of the atom bomb.
Kurds brace for Turks
Cameron W. Barr, Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 2003
As the US and Turkey approach a deal that would allow the US to insert troops and equipment into northern Iraq across Turkey's border, Kurdish leaders are ratcheting up their opposition to a Turkish military role in the area.
"Any [Turkish] intervention under whatever pretext will lead to clashes," warns Hoshyar Zebari, a senior official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which administers the western portion of northern Iraq. "It would not be helpful," he adds with a touch of understatement, "for the image and reputation of the US, Britain, and many of these countries that want to help the Iraqi people to see two of their allies - Turkey and the Kurdish parties - at each other's throats."
Hitler on the Nile
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, February 25, 2003
There's so much chest-thumping, so many alarums about Iraqi menace, that I sometimes feel that the only patriotic thing to do is to invade Iraq and plow salt into its soil.
So it's useful to conjure a conservative war hero like Dwight Eisenhower and consider what he would do if he were president today. After his experience with Hitler, Ike would stand up to the lily-livered pussy-footing peaceniks and squish Saddam Hussein like a bug, right?
No, probably not.
Dial "P" for peace
Matt Wheeland, AlterNet, February 24, 2003
At 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 26, the telephones, faxes and email in-boxes of every Senator in Washington D.C. will start ringing, printing and beeping with messages from around the country in support of peace. The "Virtual March," organized by MoveOn.org and Win Without War, hopes to demonstrate to members of Congress the staggering levels of grassroots support for the inspections process.
How the news will be censored in this war
Robert Fisk, The Independent, February 25, 2003
Already, the American press is expressing its approval of the coverage of American forces which the US military intends to allow its reporters in the next Gulf war. The boys from CNN, CBS, ABC and The New York Times will be "embedded" among the US marines and infantry. The degree of censorship hasn't quite been worked out. But it doesn't matter how much the Pentagon cuts from the reporters' dispatches. A new CNN system of "script approval" – the iniquitous instruction to reporters that they have to send all their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure it is suitably sanitised – suggests that the Pentagon and the Department of State have nothing to worry about. Nor do the Israelis.
There must be cheering Iraqis on TV
Blair's gamble depends on a UN role in the post-war occupation
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, February 25, 2003
Tony Blair's efforts to keep George Bush on a UN route in Iraq are increasingly focusing on the aftermath of war. As lobbying starts for a new security council resolution, getting a powerful presence for the UN in Baghdad once Saddam Hussein's regime has fallen is seen as no less important than getting a UN mandate for military attack.
The prime minister's gamble in going to war in defiance of the British electorate depends heavily on ensuring quick victory and having the people of Iraq greet incoming US and British troops with flowers. Only if the TV cameras can demonstrate that Iraqis feel liberated will Blair be able to claim vindication.
The moaning minnies will be scattered to the winds, he calculates, just as he believes those who opposed the bombing of Afghanistan were silenced when the women of Kabul "threw off their burkas" once the Taliban were ousted. Never mind that most Afghan women still wear the burka and Osama bin Laden remains active. The first TV pictures after victory are what matter. Subsequent chaos and disappointment will not be widely reported.
A trigger for war? New axis of peace throws UN into chaos
Ewen MacAskill, Gary Younge, Ian Black, and John Hooper, The Guardian, February 25, 2003
The United Nations was in the throes of the biggest diplomatic confrontation for decades last night after the US and Britain tabled a new resolution paving the way for an assault on Iraq next month.
The resolution declares that Iraq has failed to grasp "the final opportunity" to avoid war.
But France and Germany, the leading opponents of war, immediately produced a powerful riposte by revealing that they had secured the support of Russia and China for an alternative, peaceful plan that would allow Iraq more time.
This formidable opposition alliance throws into doubt whether the resolution will be adopted, and threatens to wreck the US-British timetable for invasion.
Out of the wreckage
By tearing up the global rulebook, the US is in fact undermining its own imperial rule
George Monbiot, The Guardian, February 25, 2003
The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They came to power by means of national elections which possess, at least, the potential to represent the will of their people. Their citizens can dismiss them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation that, if enough people join in, they will be obliged to listen.
Internationally, they rule by brute force. They and the global institutions they run exercise greater economic and political control over the people of the poor world than its own governments do. But those people can no sooner challenge or replace them than the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out of office. Their global governance is, by all the classic political definitions, tyrannical.
But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny are limited, it seems to be creating some of the conditions for its own destruction. Over the past week, the US government has threatened to dismantle two of the institutions which have, until recently, best served its global interests.
Reshaping the Middle East
The new American colonialism
Joseph Cirincione, San Francisco Chronicle, February 23, 2003
Begrudgingly, senior administration officials are beginning to discuss prospects for post-war Iraq. While publicly they are as cheery about Iraq without Hussein as they are dire about the risks of leaving him in power, privately, they harbor grave doubts. As one senior official told a New York Times reporter, "We still do not know how U.S. forces will be received. Will it be cheers, jeers or shots? And the fact is, we won't know until we get there."
We should not be surprised at the uncertainty, for what they're planning is unprecedented in U.S. history. This will not just be our first pre-emptive war, but it will be followed by a massive, indefinite occupation. President Bush intends to send more than 200,000 American men and women to invade and occupy a large, complex nation of 24 million people half a world away. The last time any Western power did anything similar was before World War II. The last time any nation did this was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
As retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the former head of NATO forces, says, this war will "put us in a colonial position in the Middle East following Britain, following the Ottomans. It's a huge change for the American people and for what this country stands for."
Delaying war could winnow the willing
Foreign leaders who back the U.S. fear losing their hold on power as opposition grows
Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2003
As the Bush administration has moved steadily toward war with Iraq, critics from France to California have asked: What's the hurry? Why not give United Nations arms inspectors another month -- or three months, or six -- to look for weapons of mass destruction?
President Bush says the United States cannot afford to delay much longer, and argues that waiting only makes Iraqi President Saddam Hussein more dangerous.
"Denial and endless delay in the face of growing danger is not an option," Bush said last week.
But other officials, speaking less publicly, cited another practical reason for their sense of urgency: They are increasingly concerned that the tenuous coalition the administration has assembled in support of war may crumble if a military campaign is postponed.
The urge to help, the obligation not to
Ariel Dorfman, Washington Post, February 23, 2003
What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ouster of Saddam Hussein? Can those countless human rights activists who, a few years ago, celebrated the trial in London of Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet as a victory for all the victims on this Earth, now deny the world the joy of seeing the strongman of Iraq indicted and tried for crimes against humanity?
It is not fortuitous that I have brought the redoubtable Pinochet into the picture.
As a Chilean who fought against the general's pervasive terror for 17 years, I can understand the needs, the anguish, the urgency, of those Iraqis inside and outside their homeland who cannot wait, cannot accept any further delay, silently howl for deliverance. I have seen how Chile still suffers from Pinochet's legacy, 13 years after he left power, and can therefore comprehend how every week that passes with the despot in power poisons your collective fate.
Such sympathy for your cause does not exempt me, however, from asking a crucial question: Is that suffering sufficient to justify intervention from an outside power, a suffering that has been cited as a secondary but compelling reason for an invasion?
Turks remember losses from last war on Iraq
Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, February 23, 2003
Ask anyone in Turkey why the United States should not go to war in Iraq in the near future, and the answer will almost certainly focus on the recent past.
Turks speak of the economic devastation caused by the 1991 Persian Gulf War: how tourism revenue dried up, how a valuable oil pipeline from Iraq was shut down, how truckers who made their living on cross-border trade were idled -- or resorted to illegal smuggling. They speak of a surge in terrorism by ethnic Kurdish separatists in southeastern Turkey. And they recount Washington's promises to compensate Turkey for its losses, and how most of the cash was never delivered.
"Nobody wants war," said Lokman Altunel, 40, owner of the Murat restaurant, whose family comes from the eastern province of Siirt. "People are still suffering from the last war."
North Korea's need for electricity fuels its nuclear ambitions
James Brooke, New York Times, February 23, 2003
"The U.S. stands between us and electricity," said Kim Dae Sung, a 35-year-old park guide, voicing a government-approved view that most of North Korea's shortcomings are the fault of the United States. Bitter that she never knows whether she will watch television after work or read by candlelight, she said, "Why do the Americans keep making problems with electricity?"
To visit North Korea today is to visit a country that has regressed into a preindustrial past. [...]
"The country was fully electrified before the crisis began in the 1990's," said Timothy Savage, who surveyed North Korea's energy needs in 2000 for the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, a California-based group. "They have appliances, radios, televisions, and in some cases refrigerators."
But because of a lack of maintenance, North Korea's hydro and fuel oil plants were working at only 30 percent of capacity, and 30 percent of production was lost as a result of leakage, the Nautilus survey found.
The survey calculated that this nation of 22 million people was limping along on 2 gigawatts of energy, less than the amount of power consumed by an American city of one million people.
"Energy is at the root of all of North Korea's economic problems, including the famine," Mr. Savage continued, referring to severe food shortages in the mid-1990's that killed as many as two million people, or 10 percent of the population.
Without power, electric pumps could not irrigate fields, electric threshers could not thresh grain and factories could not make fertilizer or parts for North Korea's ancient fleet of tractors.
Marbury v. Madison v. Ashcroft
Anthony Lewis, New York Times, February 24, 2003
We are now headed for a profound test of our commitment to the Constitution in time of war: the war on terrorism, as President Bush has proclaimed it. His administration has taken steps that radically impinge on the right to counsel and other fundamental liberties. Will the courts, in the end the Supreme Court, subject those measures to real constitutional scrutiny, or give way to arguments of war emergency?
The war on terrorism is an especially dangerous occasion for judges to close their eyes to violations of our rights. In every other historical case of the courts yielding to wartime claims, the emergency ended before long and the country regretted the abandonment of constitutional values. It is extremely unlikely that the Supreme Court today would follow the Korematsu decision and uphold the internment of hundreds of thousands of Americans of a particular ethnic background.
But no one can imagine this war coming to an end any time soon. So every piece of judicial deference to the power of government in war may crimp the rights of citizens forever.
U.S. may attack even if France vetos
Associated Press, February 23, 2003
Even if France vetoes a new United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq, America would still wage war against Saddam Hussein, a top Pentagon adviser was quoted as saying Sunday.
Richard Perle, chairman of a group that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on policy issues, was quoted by the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper as saying Washington would not allow a French president to dictate U.S. policy.
U.S. vs. Europe: To each its own worldview
Régis Debray, New York Times, February 24, 2003
Eight out of 10 Europeans on the street agree with the French-German position, and the governments of Britain, Spain, Italy, et al., have cut themselves off from public opinion. In confronting that awkwardness, the United States has chosen France as its scapegoat. Not having any training as a satellite state, unlike the countries of Eastern Europe, France has assumed the right to judge for itself.
If the U.S. administration is intent on precipitating the war that is Osama bin Laden's fondest wish, if it wants to give fundamentalism a second chance, we can say only, so much the worse for you - while regretting that history's most constant law, the perverse effect, is not better known to the Pentagon. Provoking chaos in the name of order, and resentment instead of gratitude, is something to which all empires are accustomed. And thus it is that they coast, from military victory to victory, to their final decline.
Power and the new world order
A critque of Thomas Freidman's view of the "World of Order and the World of Disorder"
Henry C K Liu, Asia Times, February 25, 2003
The so-called World of Disorder has been constructed in large measure by half a century of US foreign and economic policies. Much of this World of Disorder lay in the US sphere of influence all through the Cold War. The memory of US support for Osama bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan and for Saddam Hussein's war against Iran is still fresh in the minds of the people of the world. And US policies of sanctions and embargoes have caused millions of deaths and starvation. Now the world is asked to join a new US crusade against this year's list of latest evils in the name of order and stability.
A stable world order cannot be constructed out of fear of precision bombs or tactical nuclear weapons, or with economic sanctions. It can only be constructed out of equality, equity and non-exploitative development - elements in short supply in globalization. The world is not just a marketplace; it is an organism in which disease and poverty in any of its parts adversely affect the health of the whole organism. It is hard to visualize how another war can put things right.
See also Order vs. disorder
DAWN OF THE AGE OF UNILATERALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION
The power of the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals used to reside in their ability to guarantee mutually assured destruction - a threat meant to assure that nuclear weapons would never be used. The rearming of a portion of America's ballistic missile arsenal with conventional warheads, may mark the dawn of a new era in which America both wields and uses a threat of unilaterally assured destruction anywhere it chooses.
U.S. considers conventional warheads on nuclear missiles
Eric Schmitt, New York Times, February 24, 2003
As the military girds for a protracted war against terrorists and the countries that support them, the Pentagon is considering converting some of its long-range, ground-based nuclear missiles into nonnuclear rockets that could be used to strike states like Iraq and North Korea on short notice.
The weapon would give the United States the ability to attack targets thousands of miles away with precision-guided, conventional high explosives in minutes, military officials said. Because of the missiles' speed, they would be able to pierce current air defenses and avoid putting American pilots at risk, they added.
Replacing nuclear warheads with conventional weapons on some of the nation's globe-girdling missiles is a proposal that is barely on the drawing board. The Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs will begin formally exploring the idea of converting some Minuteman III missiles this fall in a two-year review the military calls an "analysis of alternatives."
But senior Air Force and Pentagon officials are seriously weighing the proposal as part of a larger rethinking of the kind of deterrence and long-range attack weapons the military will need in the security environment that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"I'd be very, very surprised if 5, 10 years down the road, that we would not have a ballistic missile of some type with conventional munitions on board so that it could serve the nation's needs for a prompt global strike," said Maj. Gen. Timothy J. McMahon, commander of the 20th Air Force here, which runs and maintains the nation's silo-based arsenal of 500 long-range Minuteman III and 45 Peacekeeper nuclear missiles.
Feud between Kurdish clans creates its own war
C.J. Chivers, New York Times, February 24, 2003
One threat to stability in Iraq after any war to remove Saddam Hussein takes the form of a dapper 45-year old man, educated in the United States and fluent in English, who has a yen for cologne, pressed shirts and silk ties.
His name is Najat al-Sourchi. He is planning what would be a deeply destabilizing murder.
Mr. Sourchi wants to kill Massoud Barzani, an American ally and president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which has played host to Central Intelligence Agency teams in northern Iraq since last fall. [...]
Mr. Sourchi is consumed by a blood feud, and has sworn to avenge the death in 1996 of his uncle, Hussein Agha al-Sourchi, 65, for which he blames Mr. Barzani. It is one of several feuds that exist beneath the businesslike dialogue of changing Iraq, and is a worrisome indicator of the fragility of peace in a land where even people with common goals are intent on settling old scores.
Bush faces increasingly poor image overseas
Glenn Kessler and Mike Allen, Washington Post, February 24, 2003
The messages from U.S. embassies around the globe have become urgent and disturbing: Many people in the world increasingly think President Bush is a greater threat to world peace than Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
U.S. embassies are the eyes and ears of the U.S. government overseas, and their reports from the field are closely read at the State Department. The antiwar protests by millions of people Feb. 15 in the cities of major U.S. allies underscored a theme that the classified cables by U.S. embassies had been reporting for weeks.
"It is rather astonishing," said a senior U.S. official who has access to the reports. "There is an absence of any recognition that Hussein is the problem." One ambassador, who represents the United States in an allied nation, bluntly cabled that in that country, Bush has become the enemy.
Pentagon's recipe for propaganda
Carol Brightman, AlterNet, February 20, 2003
It’s time to take a close look at the Defense Department’s plan for managing the press during the impending invasion of Iraq. Called "embedding," it will position chosen reporters and photographers inside military units -- not for a week but for the duration of the war. "Embedding for life," is how deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Bryan Whitman, sees the program -- which appears to be viewed a bit differently by the military than by the media. [...]
The Pentagon’s goal is clear: Embedding is designed to focus public attention on the troops. As field commanders told CNN chief executive Walter Isaacson during his recent tour of the Gulf, "the best representatives to convey America’s intentions and capabilities are the soldiers and sailors in the field." American intentions and capabilities, of course, are in hot dispute, and no doubt will be as long as the U.S. pursues its Middle East interests by military means. So it’s not hard to follow Pentagon thinking.
Embedded reporters will develop the relationships, trust, and understanding of unit customs which are likely to produce savvy human interest stories. Embeds are more likely to play up acts of heroism than embarrass their units with negative stories, and risk losing access.
Deliver us from Ashcroft
Nat Hentoff, Washington Times, February 24, 2003
Attorney General John Ashcroft, with support from President Bush, has increasingly forgotten that the Constitution is ours — not just his. The Center for Public Integrity has now exposed Ashcroft's sequel to the Patriot Act for what it is: an assault on the Bill of Rights drafted without consultation with Congress.
In the New York Sun, a largely conservative newspaper, Errol Louis wrote on the Feb. 10 editorial page that "the 80-page document is a catalog of authoritarianism that runs counter to the basic tenets of modern democracy."
Islam deserves 'higher criticism,' not this
James P. Pinkerton, Newsday, February 20, 2003
Criticism must offer a balanced picture of the truth, grounded in scholarship. And that's where the [Christian Coaltion] symposium participants fell short. The leadoff speaker, Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, offered his own history of "militant Islam." In his telling, "militant Islam" emerged in the 1920s, propagated by Arab admirers of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. As Pipes put it, "Militant Islam is a modern phenomenon; one does better studying, not the Quran, but fascism or communism."
In other words, the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden were more influenced by Europeans in Berlin and Moscow than by their own Iranian and Arab forebears. Can this be true? Let's get a second opinion: "To view the changes in Islam in the 20th century without reference to colonialism or nationalism is inaccurate, to say the least," says Erika Schluntz, religion professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass.
Schluntz's point is that groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood were not emulators of European totalitarianism, but enemies of European colonialism. Arab radicalism was a reaction to the British and French, who, having urged Arabs to rise up against their Turkish overlords during World War I, then went back on their word, raising their own imperial flags over Arab capitals from Cairo to Baghdad. This little history lesson might be valuable to those trying to assess the impact of the impending American occupation of Iraq, aided by those same Turks.
Both the military and the spooks are opposed to war on Iraq
Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, February 24, 2003
Why now? The question is of course being asked by those opposed to a war against Iraq, and those who have not made up their minds. But it has also been asked by one of the most senior Whitehall officials at the centre of the fight against terrorism. The message was clear: the threat posed by Islamist extremists is much greater than that posed by Saddam Hussein. And it will get worse when the US and Britain attack Iraq.
Tony Blair may not want to admit it, but this is the common view throughout the higher reaches of government. As a leaked secret document from the defence intelligence staff puts it: "Al-Qaida will take advantage of the situation for its own aims but it will not be acting as a proxy group on behalf of the Iraqi regime." Osama bin Laden must be praying for a US assault on Iraq.
Bird brains
The wishful thinking of Bush's hawks
Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, February 20, 2003
President Bush's Iraq policy is frightening in its own right, but it is even more ominous as the first step in a new global grand design. The emerging Bush Doctrine goes something like this: The 9-11 attacks signaled a new kind of threat to America and all open societies. Unlike "mutually assured destruction," in which the United States and USSR essentially held each other's civilian population hostage, nuclear deterrence can't work against terrorists, since terrorists are both stateless and suicidal.
While it is necessary to increase border security, civil defense and intelligence efforts drastically, these are not sufficient. For terrorism is so far-flung, and so easily concealed, that a free society can never fully protect itself. What, then, to do?
Bush's strategists have an answer as audacious as it is grandiose: Just get rid of hostile regimes and societies. As Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann, a war to establish democracy in Iraq "might be inspirational for people throughout the Middle East." And what the administration can't achieve via inspiration, it will do by force.
Allies fear Iraq plotting 'scorched earth' war
Peter Beaumont, The Observer, February 23, 2003
American and British war planners fear that Saddam Hussein may be preparing a scorched-earth policy ahead of any US military attack, destroying roads, bridges and other infrastructure to slow up advancing forces before a final and potentially bloody battle for Baghdad.
The revelation of a series of worst-case military scenarios emerged as military briefers, who have for months been portraying a military operation to remove Iraq as a 'walkover', began to offer more gloomy scenarios of potential pitfalls ahead.
Military analysts on both sides of the Atlantic now believe that an Iraqi strategy is likely to focus on slowing down advancing coalition forces - possibly with the use of chemical weapons or nerve agents - before a final battle for Baghdad.
Iraq is a strategic issue for oil giants, too
Neela Banerjee, New York Times, February 22, 2003
Oil companies, industry executives and experts say, will be reluctant to invest in Iraq unless they have a wide range of guarantees. On the broadest level, foreign oil concerns question how stable Iraq would be after a war.
More to the point, executives and analysts say, oil companies worry about how the Iraqi oil industry would evolve. In what oil fields would the Iraqis want foreign involvement? What kinds of contractual terms would any new Iraqi government offer? What legal protections would companies working in Iraq have.
What is already apparent is that within the Iraqi oil bureaucracy, "there is close to unanimity" that "natural resources should remain under the sovereignty of the state," according to a recent paper presented at an energy conference in Houston by Issam A. R. al-Chalabi, a former Iraqi oil minister and now an independent consultant based in Amman, Jordan.
"Foreign oil companies are definitely interested in Iraq, but they agree that it will take a while to get there," Mr. Chalabi said in a telephone interview. "The current mood among oil companies is to wait and see. They're not in a hurry. Rather, they're waiting for the picture to become clearer. And I don't blame them."
International oil companies already understand that getting a piece of the most promising oil fields in the world, in places like Russia and the Middle East, is as easy as trying to dig out of prison with a spoon, and oil industry executives said they expected such difficulties in Iraq.
Iraqi Kurds warn Turkey
Jim Muir, BBC News, February 23, 2003
The Kurds of northern Iraq have warned that there will be clashes if troops from neighbouring Turkey cross the border.
Ankara is demanding that Turkish forces should enter the north of the country to secure Turkey's interests if the US and Britain go ahead with an attack on Iraq.
Kurdish spokesmen have said that their guerrillas who control the north will oppose any Turkish intervention.
Regional tensions are rising in advance of expected military action by the US and its allies and the atmosphere between two of those allies - the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds - is becoming increasingly embittered.
Iraq pins hopes on antiwar mood at U.N. and in streets around the world
Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, February 23, 2003
Iraq appears convinced that its best chance to forestall war, which is likely to come a step closer with the expected introduction within days of a new United Nations resolution authorizing force, lies in cultivating antiwar sentiment both at the Security Council and on the streets of world capitals.
"Clearly the object of the U.S. administration is to adopt a resolution that authorizes military aggression against Iraq," Muhammad Mehdi Saleh, the Iraqi trade minister, said at a news conference this week.
"This will meet a very hard position from other countries," he said. "The United States will not have support, due to the fact that those demonstrations took place, even in the United States and Britain."
Demonstrators from a week ago were still marching across Iraqi television screens last night. In a television interview, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan suggested that Iraq would do what it could to shore up the antiwar cause by cooperating with the United Nations arms inspectors. Newspaper articles and editorials reported all week in glowing terms that Iraq is winning hearts and minds globally.
Fortress America
Matthew Brzezinski, New York Times, February 23, 2003
It is commonly held that a country as big and confident in its freedoms as the United States could never fully protect itself against terrorists. The means available to them are too vast, the potentially deadly targets too plentiful. And there is a strong conviction in many quarters that there is a limit to which Americans will let their daily patterns be disturbed for security precautions. Discussing the possibility that we might all need to be equipped with our own gas masks, as Israelis are, Sergeant McClaskey of Baltimore assured me it would never happen. ''If it ever reaches the point where we all need gas masks,'' McClaskey said, shaking his head with disgust, ''then we have lost the war on terror because we are living in fear.''
What does it really mean, however, to ''lose the war on terror''? It's as ephemeral a concept as ''winning the war on terror.'' In what sense will it ever be possible to declare an end of any kind?
Destroying missiles would be to 'sign death warrant', says Iraq
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, February 23, 2003
An increasingly cornered Iraq complained yesterday it might be signing its own death warrant if it obeyed a United Nations order to destroy dozens of missiles at the moment the US is poised to lead an invasion.
"They want us to destroy them at a time when we are threatened daily," said Owayed Ahmed Ali, the director of the Ibn al-Haithem plant, which produces the al-Samoud missiles, after another visit by UN weapons inspectors.
The protest is the most specific reaction yet to the demand by Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, that Baghdad start destroying the missiles by Saturday, after they were found to exceed the 93-mile range permitted by existing arms restrictions on Iraq.
With the order coming barely a week after Mr Blix's relatively benign report on 14 February, US diplomats were delighted. Not only does it impose a de facto deadline for Iraqi compliance, it also fits in with the likely timetable for the Bush administration to go to war.
John Bolton in Jerusalem:
The new age of disarmament wars
Ian Williams, Foreign Policy in Focus, February 20, 2003
Much of the world is worried about the impending war with Iraq, and rightly so. But this may just the beginning of a new age of disarmament wars.
From the homeland of Armageddon this week came worrying signs that we should begin worrying about the even longer and harder wars to follow. John Bolton, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Disarmament Affairs and International Security, was in Israel this week, for meetings about "preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction."
It seems appropriate for the U.S. and Israel to meet about disarmament issues. After all, Israel is universally acknowledged by everyone--excepting the U.S. government--as a considerable nuclear power, and much of the world regards its prime minister as a profound threat to international security. However, we can be sure that neither item was on Bolton's agenda.
Powell speaks with forked tongue
Terry Jones, The Observer, February 23, 2003
It was interesting to hear Colin Powell accuse France and Germany of cowardice in not wanting to go to war. Or, as he put more succinctly, France and Germany 'are afraid of upholding their responsibility to impose the will of the international community'. Powell's speech brings up one of the most outrageous but least examined aspects of this whole war on Iraq business. I am speaking about the appalling collateral damage already being inflicted on the English language.
Perhaps the worst impact is on our vocabulary. 'Cowardice', according to Colin Powell, is the refusal to injure thousands of innocent civilians living in Baghdad in order to promote US oil interests in the Middle East. The corollary is that 'bravery' must be the ability to order the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis without wincing or bringing up your Caesar salad.
WAR AND BEYOND
While last weekend's demonstrations proved that the global anti-war movement is a force that cannot be ignored, the movement's influence may have been stronger in Baghdad than in Washington. The Iraqi regime's concessions to the inspections process slowed up, probably in response to a wait-and-see policy as the Iraqis watched to see how global opposition to war would affect both the Security Council and Turkey, one of the Bush administration's vital yet reluctant partners. To the extent that Saddam feels emboldened by the impression that the rest of the world is taking his side, ironically war is now closer than ever. The clincher was delivered yesterday by Hans Blix who now has no need to present the Security Council with a smoking gun. With or without American direction, he has engineered a fait accompli. Iraq has been ordered to destroy its al-Samoud 2 missiles because in flight tests they exceeded a UN-imposed 90 mile limit by 20 miles. Will Iraq place its faith in its own ability to avert war and now throw away one of the strategic assets that it would certainly use during a US invasion?
It's the empire, stupid!
Paul Woodward, Yellow Times, February 22, 2003
While the anti-war movement is now showing its collective strength, this is the time to remember that the effectiveness of this movement will depend not only on strength in numbers but clarity of purpose and the ability to endure. War is just as imminent now as it was last week. The movement needs to reflect on its goals beyond the onset of war and not merely as war approaches.
In the United States, much of the opposition to a war against Iraq has been couched in terms that avoid facing the fear that now weighs heavily on the rest of the world. That fear is the fear of America's imperial ambitions.
In the aftermath of September 11, nations and individuals outside America who expressed sympathy for grieving families and a wounded nation were neither offering America a license for vengeance, nor inviting the imposition of America's own conception of global security. Neither were critics of American foreign policy implicitly supporting terrorism. But rather than countenance the need for debate in a time of crisis, the self-appointed defenders of American freedom cast a shadow over their critics by suggesting that dissent at such a time amounted to lying down with the enemy.
This taboo on dissent, while it has since diminished, has yet to be fully shaken off. Fearful that criticism of government will be labeled "unpatriotic" or "anti-American," the language of dissent inside America has frequently been tailored so that it minimizes any risk of offense. Thus, it assumes sanitized forms through populist slogans such as "peace is patriotic" and "win without war." Rather than attempt a direct challenge against the full scope of U.S. foreign policy, many critics of war seem to favor speed bumps rather than a roadblock down the path to war. Instead of an unqualified and emphatic "No," the appeal has frequently been a tepid, "Not yet!"
As the world focuses on Iraq, the bodies pile up in Gaza
Justin Huggler, The Independent, February 22, 2003
The question hung over the concrete rubble and twisted iron support rods, the ruined buildings where Palestinians said three young men were killed when the Israeli army demolished them this week.
Is the Israeli military taking advantage of a time when the world is not paying attention to what is going on here, when media coverage is focusing on Iraq, to step up its campaign in the occupied territories?
In the past week, while the world's press focused on the UN security council and Baghdad, the violence has suddenly surged. In six days, at least 30 Palestinians have been killed in a series of Israeli operations, chiefly in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Nablus.
The dead have been a combination of unarmed civilians, armed militants, members of the legitimate Palestinian security forces and one a medic trying to reach a sick patient.
But this week's violence was not a response to a suicide bombing or an attack by Palestinian gunmen in Israel.
Inside Israel, the situation has been at its most calm for months. There have been no suicide bombings. Nobody has been killed in a militant attack.
Defiance on missiles could be war trigger
Brian Whitaker, Richard Norton-Taylor and Nick Paton Walsh, The Guardian, February 21, 2003
Iraqi intransigence over missiles that can travel 20 miles beyond a 94-mile limit set by the United Nations was rapidly emerging last night as a possible trigger for an American invasion.
As weapons inspectors prepared to order the rockets' destruction, President Saddam Hussein held a council of war with his military chiefs. The meeting came a day after the Iraqi leader vowed that peace "at any cost" was unacceptable. Several westerners who have been working privately to avert conflict expressed desperation yesterday at what they see as a hardening of Iraq's stance.
They point out that Baghdad has made no positive moves on disarmament since last Friday - which they fear is due to a misreading of the disarray in the UN security council and the anti-war demonstrations last weekend.
Troops take 19th-century 'Monroe Doctrine' global
U.S. troops appear suddenly to be deploying everywhere, and with very little notice
Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service, February 21, 2003
Perhaps it was a coincidence, but on the same week that one of the country's leading neo-conservative writers called explicitly for Washington to serve as "Globocop", the Pentagon announced it was sending 3,000 troops to the Philippines for joint operations against a minor Muslim guerrilla group.
Lighting the fuse
Freeing the Iraqi people to death
Peter Matthiessen, Orion, February, 2003
The country today is very much concerned about the young Americans in the military whose lives will be endangered in an attack upon Iraq. But in the event of that attack, who in the White House will take responsibility for the never-mentioned yet inevitable slaughter of Iraqi civilians whose sole offense was getting in the way of a regime change?
When U.S. foreign policy meets biblical prophecy
Paul S. Boyer, AlterNet, February 20, 2003
Does the Bible foretell regime change in Iraq? Did God establish Israel's boundaries millennia ago? Is the United Nations a forerunner of a satanic world order?
For millions of Americans, the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes. For many believers in biblical prophecy, the Bush administration's go-it-alone foreign policy, hands-off attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and proposed war on Iraq are not simply actions in the national self-interest or an extension of the war on terrorism, but part of an unfolding divine plan.
Bush: Iraq can be lesson to U.S. foes
Dana Milbank, Washington Post, February 21, 2003
President Bush today outlined an expansive vision of a postwar Iraq, speaking of toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a lesson to other American foes and of turning the country into a model of Middle East democracy and prosperity. [...]
At a time when the administration is facing nuclear challenges from North Korea and Iran, Bush spoke of using Hussein's undoing as an example to others. "By defeating this threat, we will show other dictators that the path of aggression will lead to their own ruin," he said. [...]
The White House scheduled today's appearance to showcase the administration's tax cut proposals, and Bush devoted a large chunk of his speech to reciting the package's details. But the Iraq situation drew the most intense reaction from the audience and from conservative supporters on Bush's motorcade route here in Newt Gingrich's Cobb County.
Among hundreds of flag-waving well-wishers, support for an Iraq invasion figured prominently. "Give War A Chance," proclaimed one poster, with a photo of Hussein on a map of Iraq in cross hairs. One of the few antiwar demonstrators along the route held a poster saying: "Stop the Terrorists Before They Start a War on Iraq." According to the local Marietta Daily Journal, students at Harrison High School, where Bush spoke, said "it has been made clear to them that protests against Bush and the impending war with Iraq will not be tolerated."
After Iraq, does U.S. have other targets?
Susan Taylor Martin, St. Petersburg Times, February 19, 2003
Given the enmity between Israel and its Arab neighbors, it's not surprising that many in the Arab world think attacking Iraq is just the first step in a U.S.-Israeli plot to control the entire Middle East.
What is surprising is that a senior U.S. official would fuel such an explosive idea at such a sensitive time. Yet that could well be the effect of recent remarks by John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
As reported in Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper, Bolton told Israeli officials Monday that he has "no doubt America will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterward."
Bolton made his comments in private talks -- reporters learned of them from other sources -- and it's not known if he elaborated on how America would "deal" with those nations. But there's little doubt his message, however incomplete, unsettled officials in Damascus, Tehran and Pyongyang.
Sharon says U.S. should also disarm Iran, Libya
and Syria
Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz, February 18, 2003
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq. "These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve," Sharon said to a visiting delegation of American congressmen.
Full U.S. control planned for Iraq
Karen DeYoung and Peter Slevin, Washington Post, February 21, 2003
The Bush administration plans to take complete, unilateral control of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, with an interim administration headed by a yet-to-be named American civilian who would direct the reconstruction of the country and the creation of a "representative" Iraqi government, according to a now-finalized blueprint described by U.S. officials and other sources.
Inspectors call U.S. tips 'garbage'
Mark Phillips, CBS News, February 20, 2003
While diplomatic maneuvering continues over Turkish bases and a new United Nations resolution, inside Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors are privately complaining about the quality of U.S. intelligence and accusing the United States of sending them on wild-goose chases.
The will of the world
Jonathan Schell, The Nation, February 20, 2003
February 15, 2003, the day 10 million or so people in hundreds of cities on every continent demonstrated against war in Iraq, will go down in history as the first time that the people of the world expressed their clear and concerted will in regard to a pressing global issue. Never before--not during the Vietnam War, not during the antinuclear demonstrations of the early 1980s--had they made known their will so forcefully by all the means at their disposal. On that day, history may one day record, global democracy was born.
A trap set for protesters
Michael Hardt, The Guardian, February 21, 2003
Washington's new anti-Europeanism is really an expression of their unilateralist project.
Corresponding in part to the new US anti-Europeanism, there is today in Europe and across the world a growing anti-Americanism. In particular, the coordinated protests last weekend against the war were animated by various kinds of anti-Americanism - and that is inevitable. The US government has left no doubt that it is the author of this war and so protest against the war must, inevitably, be also protest against the United States.
This anti-Americanism, however, although certainly justifiable, is a trap. The problem is, not only does it tend to create an overly unified and homogeneous view of the United States, obscuring the wide margins of dissent in the nation, but also that, mirroring the new US anti-Europeanism, it tends to reinforce the notion that our political alternatives rest on the major nations and power blocs. It contributes to the impression, for instance, that the leaders of Europe represent our primary political path - the moral, multilateralist alternative to the bellicose, unilateralist Americans. This anti-Americanism of the anti-war movements tends to close down the horizons of our political imagination and limit us to a bi-polar (or worse, nationalist) view of the world.
U.S. combat force of 1,700 is headed to the Philippines
Eric Schmitt, New York Times, February 21, 2003
The United States will send more than 1,700 troops to the Philippines in the next few weeks to fight Muslim extremists in the southern part of the country, opening a new front in the campaign against terrorism, Pentagon officials said today.
The first troops are to be deployed within days. Unlike a six-month mission last year that involved 1,300 American troops, it will not limit United States forces to an advisory role allowing them to fire only in self-defense, military officials said.
The operation will last as long as necessary "to disrupt and destroy" the estimated 250 members of the extremist group Abu Sayyaf, one official said. It steps up the battle against terrorism as the United States prepares for possible war with Iraq and continues to hunt Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The martial plan
Paul Krugman, New York Times, February 21, 2003
Some observers also point out that the administration has turned the regular foreign aid budget into a tool of war diplomacy. Small countries that currently have seats on the U.N. Security Council have suddenly received favorable treatment for aid requests, in an obvious attempt to influence their votes. Cynics say that the "coalition of the willing" President Bush spoke of turns out to be a "coalition of the bought off" instead.
But it's clear that the generosity will end as soon as Baghdad falls.
After all, look at our behavior in Afghanistan. In the beginning, money was no object; victory over the Taliban was as much a matter of bribes to warlords as it was of Special Forces and smart bombs. But President Bush promised that our interest wouldn't end once the war was won; this time we wouldn't forget about Afghanistan, we would stay to help rebuild the country and secure the peace. So how much money for Afghan reconstruction did the administration put in its 2004 budget?
None. The Bush team forgot about it. Embarrassed Congressional staff members had to write in $300 million to cover the lapse. You can see why the Turks, in addition to demanding even more money, want guarantees in writing. Administration officials are insulted when the Turks say that a personal assurance from Mr. Bush isn't enough. But the Turks know what happened in Afghanistan, and they also know that fine words about support for New York City, the firefighters and so on didn't translate into actual money once the cameras stopped rolling.
Sunshine, containment, war
The Korean options
Gavan McCormack, TomDispatch, February 20, 2003
We hardly grasp how fully we live inside an American, even a Washington-centered world. The East Asian scholar Gavan McCormack doesn't. (Perhaps it helps to be in Australia.) His long essay on the two Koreas, which begins below and was written for this weblog, is a rare attempt to bring us closer to another world -- that of the two Koreas. It turns out that whether you stand in Seoul or Pyongyang, you immediately see things quite differently.
The brutality and bizarreness of a North Korean regime presiding over a society in a state of exhaustion blinds us both to a history we know little about and to the simple, if also brutal, logic of its nuclear position -- but in this case the brutality is, in fact, an American one. McCormack offers us a way to re-imagine the Korean situation and so the situation of East Asia itself. And he poses a simple question: Why don't we attend more closely to the views of the neighbor nearest to North Korea which has the most to lose from its collapse, not to speak of a new war on the Korean peninsula? -- Tom Engelhardt
The French remember, but we don't
Molly Ivins, Abilene Reporter News, February 20, 2003
George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: "How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it’s never been tried." That was certainly amusing. One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren’t many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Hitler.
On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny. In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly.
Relying on the Maginot Line was one of the great military follies of modern history, but it does not reflect on the courage of those who died for France in 1940. For 18 months after that execrable defeat, the United States continued to have cordial diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany.
Short Iraq war would cost world $1 trillion
Reuters, February 20, 2003
A short war with Iraq could cost the world one percent of its economic output over the next few years and more than $1 trillion by 2010, Australian researchers said in a report Thursday.
A long war could more than triple the costs, they said.
The compounding effects of rising oil prices, extra budget spending and economic uncertainty could cut $173 billion from the world economy in 2003 alone, said the researchers, Reserve Bank of Australia board member Warwick McKibbin and Center for International Economics executive director Andrew Stoeckel.
Bush's war timetable unravelling
Owen Bowcott, Ewen MacAskill, Gary Younge and Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, February 20, 2003
The Bush administration's determination to keep to a tight timetable that would see its forces ready to go to war against Iraq by early March is in danger of coming unstuck.
Plans to open a northern front against Iraq - seen as vital to ensure a pincer movement against Baghdad - were looking shaky last night as Turkey resisted an ultimatum from Washington to accept US troop deployments or forfeit a multi-billion dollar compensation package.
Iraqis will not be pawns in Bush and Blair's war game
Kamil Mahdi, The Guardian, February 20, 2003
In [British] government comment about Iraq, the Iraqi people are treated as a collection of hapless victims without hope or dignity. At best, Iraqis are said to have parochial allegiances that render them incapable of political action without tutelage. This is utterly at variance with the history and reality of Iraq. Iraqis are proud of their diversity, the intricacies of their society and its deeply rooted urban culture.
Their turbulent recent history is not something that simply happened to Iraqis, but one in which they have been actors. Iraqis have a rich modern political tradition borne out of their struggle for independence from Britain and for political and social emancipation. A major explanation for the violence of recent Iraqi political history lies in the determination of people to challenge tyranny and bring about political change. Iraqis have not gone like lambs to the slaughter, but have fought political battles in which they suffered grievously. To assert that an American invasion is the only way to bring about political change in Iraq might suit Blair's propaganda fightback, but it is ignorant and disingenuous.
Muslim lands say war could bring havoc
Felicity Barringer, New York Times, February 19, 2003
A phalanx of Muslim nations, including two of the United States' closest allies and Iraq's closest neighbors, warned today that the Middle East could face a harvest of political, human and economic havoc in the event of an American-led war against Saddam Hussein.
Speaking during an open debate at the Security Council today, representatives of states from Morocco to Yemen echoed the words of the Iranian envoy, Javad Zarif, who said that "the extent of destabilization in the region and uncertainty in Iraq in the case of a war may go far beyond our imagination today."
Envoys from Iraq's neighbors Jordan and Turkey, both with close ties to the United States, said they were still suffering from the economic and human dislocations caused by the Persian Gulf war.
Turkish demand risks impeding war strategy
Amberin Zaman and Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2003
The Bush administration's plans to open a northern front in a war against Iraq appeared in jeopardy Tuesday after the Turkish government said it won't seek a parliamentary vote allowing U.S. troops in the country unless Washington greatly increases the size of a proposed aid package.
Facing strong resistance at home to a war, Turkish officials said they need far more than the $6 billion in grants and $20 billion in loans that the U.S. has offered before they will seek legislative approval for the troop movement.
President Bush and other top officials, who were expecting a final go-ahead from the Turks on Tuesday, instead were left fuming about the latest demands and weighing how to respond.
In Ankara, the Turkish capital, a senior Western official close to the talks said: "This is it — it could all be over.... Relations between Turkey and the United States are basically heading south."
The Western official insisted that the postponement of the parliamentary vote was an effort by the Turks to get the Bush administration to drop its plan to funnel troops through the country.
"The objective is to make the U.S. give up on the idea of a northern front," he said.
Is Saddam a menace or a nuisance?
Tony Karon, Time, February 19, 2003
...while for Blair and Bush the greatest danger is doing nothing about Saddam, their opponents see the remedy of a U.S.-led invasion and occupation as posing far more danger to the region and even, ultimately, the West than any threat currently posed by the regime in Baghdad.
What would you suggest?
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, February 19, 2003
Here's the question every opponent of the coming war on Iraq fears most: well, what would you do? We're comfortable enough announcing what we would not do, rattling off all the flaws, contradictions and hypocrisies of the war camp. We've got those arguments down pat, and apparently they're winning the day: witness not only the million-plus who marched last weekend but the clear majority polled by the Guardian yesterday against a military attack.
But what do we say when our opponents ask not for our criticisms but our alternative course of action? I don't mean our solution to Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. On that we can legitimately dispute the scale and urgency of the threat, citing other more pressing dangers. Nor do we have to find a response to the alleged links between Baghdad and al-Qaida: the evidence for those is so flimsy even Downing Street seems embarrassed by the claim.
No, we need an answer to the argument which has become Tony Blair's favourite in recent days: that war is needed to topple a cruel tyrant who has drowned his people in misery. In this view, the coming conflict is a war of liberation which will cost some Iraqi lives at first, to be sure, but which will save many more. It will be a moral war to remove an immoral regime. To oppose it is to keep Saddam in power.
Ashcroft readies new assault on civil rights
Jack M. Balkin, Newsday, February 18, 2003
Just as the Bush administration is preparing a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, its Justice Department has been preparing yet another pre-emptive strike - a new assault on our civil liberties.
Rising anti-American sentiment could slam the tech sector
David Kirkpatrick, Fortune, February 18, 2003
Every day we see new evidence of how technology is shrinking our globe. When we say "globalization" we really mean "technologization."
Dramatic evidence of our linked global society came last Saturday with the massive, coordinated worldwide demonstrations against a possible war in Iraq. News reports called it the largest protest movement in history, and that seemed likely. But how did it get so big so fast, and, as many reports pointed out with wonder, before a war even happened?
In a word, technology.
What made the protests in a reported 600 cities worldwide so potent was not only their size—up to six million in total—but their coordination. The Internet gives every potential protester information and, in many cases, encouragement. And e-mail allows protesters and organizers to communicate at no cost. I predict this is just the first in a new era of global coordinated protest. The issues may change, but the connected crowds will remain.
President Bush’s apparent rush to war may have another implication in this time of newly globalized technology—the U.S. industry’s already shaky vitality could be at risk. Anti-Americanism, driven by resistance to U.S. policies, is starting to affect sales of U.S. products around the world. Both Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble have seen sales in the Middle East affected. A small upstart brand called Mecca-Cola is gaining adherents in Europe and the Middle East. And a survey recently conducted by Euro RSCG Worldwide found that large majorities of the citizens of many countries—including Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—felt the "world is becoming too Americanized."
Imagine a Nigerian-style scam letter from Bush
Kaleem Omar, Balochistan Post, February 19, 2003
Imagine what might happen if the Nigerians were to teach George W. Bush how to write an email scam letter. Making allowances for Bush's peculiar brand of English, the result might go something like this.
Immediate Attention Needed: Highly Confidential
From: George Walker Bush
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am George Walker Bush, son of the former President of the United States of America George Herbert Walker Bush, and currently serving as President of the United States of America — the land of mom, apple pie and ethnic profiling.
This letter might surprise you because we have not met neither in person nor by correspondence. Those are the best kinds of meetings I always say. But don't tell Laura about this letter. She might get the wrong idea if you happen to be a woman.
I came to know of you in my search for a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential business transaction, which involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to an account requiring maximum confidence.
Iranian-backed forces cross into Iraq
Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Guy Dinmore, Financial Times, February 18, 2003
Iranian-backed Iraqi opposition forces have crossed into northern Iraq from Iran with the aim of securing the frontier in the event of war, according to senior Iranian officials.
The forces, numbering up to 5,000 troops, with some heavy equipment, are nominally under the command of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, a prominent Iraqi Shia Muslim opposition leader who has been based in Iran since 1980 and lives in Tehran.
A US State Department official said he was aware of reports that part of Ayatollah Hakim's Badr brigade had crossed into northern Iraq but declined further comment. Analysts close to the administration of President George W. Bush said the US was concerned about the intentions of this new element in an increasingly complicated patchwork of forces in northern Iraq.
Two war foes take steps on seeking presidency
David E. Rosenbaum, New York Times, February 19, 2003
Two strong opponents of war with Iraq, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, made plans today to take the first step toward running for the Democratic nomination for president.
Their lawyers were under instructions to file official papers today to form exploratory committees so the campaigns could begin raising money under federal election law. But most government offices here were closed because of the weekend snowstorm. Mr. Kucinich and Ms. Moseley-Braun said the papers would be filed the first day the Federal Election Commission was open for business.
Mr. Kucinich, 56, and Ms. Moseley-Braun, 55, clearly hope to wrest the most liberal elements of the Democratic Party away from the better known candidates in the race.
Americans abroad face anger at U.S.
Jane Perlez, New York Times, February 19, 2003
These are uneasy, tense times for Americans living abroad. As the possibility of war against Iraq rises, especially a war that the United States may fight virtually alone, so does anti-Americanism in the streets, newspapers and cafes of foreign cities.
Interviewed around the world, Americans expressed confidence that people nearly everywhere tried to distinguish between them and their government. But they acknowledged that anger over American policies — and resentment of American power — had translated into varying degrees of wariness, discomfort and even risk for Americans living in different parts of the world.
In some places, like Pakistan and Egypt, old pique at the United States is now fortified by fury at what many people see as the Bush administration's hostility to Islam.
Iraqi exiles cited by Blair are backed by Iran
Jeevan Vasagar and Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, February 19, 2003
From his lectern yesterday and his conference podium on Saturday, Tony Blair has flourished a succession of letters and emails from Iraqi exiles as proof that a war to remove Saddam is supported in at least one quarter.
Mr Blair took a personal interest in Iraqi human rights after meeting a group of seven Iraqi women at Downing Street last November, two of whom wept as they told him their stories. But he was criticised yesterday for selectively quoting from those Iraqis who share his views while ignoring other exiles who have written to No 10 opposing war.
Blast from the past
Matt Seaton, The Guardian, February 19, 2003
Politicians on both sides of the argument over Iraq have been busy rummaging through the history books. The pro-war camp constantly warn against repeating the mistakes of appeasement. The antis claim we are heading for another Suez. But which is the more plausible parallel? A dozen leading historians offer their perspectives.
Oil, empire, and influence in the new Eurasia
Raffi Khatchadourian, Village Voice, February, 2003
Deep beneath the waters of the Caspian Sea lie oil reserves rivaling those of the entire United States. Extracting the crude is one problem; finding a way to bring it to Western markets has been almost impossible. Backed by the U.S. government and a collective of 11 major oil firms, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline will cross mountains, desert wastes, and earthquake zones, while skirting potential battlefields and terrorist hideouts as it covers a distance equivalent to that from New York to Miami.
Construction will begin this spring, officials say, whether American troops invade neighboring Iraq or not. In this series, Raffi Khatchadourian explores the geography-political, economic, and social-of a conduit for coveted oil.
Part one: crude measures
Part two: code of the Kalashnikov
Three mystery ships are tracked over suspected 'weapons' cargo
Michael Harrison, The Independent, February 19, 2003
Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Each with a deadweight of 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes, the ships have been sailing around the world's oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law, say authoritative shipping industry sources.
The vessels left port in late November, just a few days after UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix began their search for the alleged Iraqi arsenal on their return to the country.
Uncovering such a deadly cargo on board would give George Bush and Tony Blair the much sought-after "smoking gun" needed to justify an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime, in the face of massive public opposition to war.
Oil and ethnic rivalries fuel fight for Iraqi border town
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, February 19, 2003
Abdul-Samat Ali Baram is the latest casualty of a prolonged campaign by the Baghdad government, stretching back decades, to reduce the Kurdish population of the oil province of Kirkuk and replace its people with Arabs.
The fate of Kirkuk, at the centre of Iraq's northern oilfields, will once again become a explosive issue in Iraqi politics if Saddam Hussein is overthrown. For years he has sought to change its demography, replacing Kurds and Turkomans, another of Iraq's multitude of minorities, with Arabs from southern Iraq.
But the looming war has rekindled the hopes of the Kurds that they will be able to reclaim their homes.
Flashback for the Kurds
Peter W. Galbraith, New York Times, February 19, 2003
As the Bush administration struggles to induce Turkey to support a war with Iraq, our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq are realizing that once again America is about to double-cross them.
Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, went to Ankara this month and told top Kurdish leaders to accept a large deployment of Turkish troops — supposedly for humanitarian relief — to enter northern Iraq after any American invasion. He also told the Kurds that they would have to give up plans for self-government, adding that hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes by Saddam Hussein would not be able to return to them.
For the Kurds, this brought bitter memories. They blame Henry Kissinger for encouraging them to rebel in the early 1970's and then acquiescing quietly as the shah of Iran made a deal with Iraq and stopped funneling American aid to them. (Mr. Kissinger's standing among Kurds was not helped by his explanation: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.")
After the Persian Gulf war, the first President Bush called on the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When the Kurds tried to do just that, the American military let the Iraqis send out helicopter gunships to annihilate them.
US plan for new nuclear arsenal
Julian Borger, The Guardian, February 19, 2003
The Bush administration is planning a secret meeting in August to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including "mini-nukes", "bunker-busters" and neutron bombs designed to destroy chemical or biological agents, according to a leaked Pentagon document.
The meeting of senior military officials and US nuclear scientists at the Omaha headquarters of the US Strategic Command would also decide whether to restart nuclear testing and how to convince the American public that the new weapons are necessary.
A tale of two crises
Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, February 17, 2003
Nobody can say for sure how long a war with Iraq might take, but one thing seems increasingly apparent: North Korea is moving to take full advantage of the United States' preoccupation with Saddam Hussein to build up its nuclear arsenal.
If there are any doubts on this score, they can be dispelled by examining the Worldwide Threat Briefing that C.I.A. Director George J. Tenet presented to Congress last week. That C.I.A. report did not receive as much attention as it deserved, possibly because it was unclassified and its conclusions were in plain view for all to see. Washington is fascinated by satellite photos, communications intercepts and top secret reports. It is the warnings in black and white that generally get ignored.
The report from the C.I.A contained a worrisome message. The die is all but cast. North Korea has decided it needs nuclear arms. It is likely to reprocess the spent fuel from its Yongbyon reactor. That means it could have enough fissile material for several more bombs in a matter of months.
It gets worse from there.
Bush's 'march of folly' in North Korea
Donald C. Hellmann, Seattle Times, February 18, 2003
Two decades ago, historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a brilliant book, "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam," cataloging the pursuit by governments, throughout history, of policies contrary to their own interests. No matter what its final outcome, the still unfolding American policy toward Korea (both North and South) has produced another candidate for that parade.
Her question, addressed to the ages, must be asked of the current Bush administration: Why do people in high office act contrary to what the available information, common sense, and experience suggest?
North Korea, a tyrannical, economically-failed, rogue state with the third largest army in the world, has long been an enigmatic international problem, especially since the end of the Cold War. Over the past decade, Pyongyang has twice opted to "go nuclear" in defiance of world opinion and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, while its economy has slid into total collapse. As a strategically-located pariah state, it poses a multidimensional threat to regional peace and a clear and present danger to South Korea.
In light of the preeminent place in our policy held by the "war on terror" and the related, imminent, pre-emptive war on Iraq, the fact that South Korea has a GNP roughly equal to the entire Middle East, and the U.S. has 37,000 troops deployed as a military tripwire on the border with North Korea, would lead one to expect that Korea as a matter of course would receive priority and careful consideration in United States strategy. Surprisingly and lamentably, this has not been the case, as just a partial inventory of the policies taken by Washington over the past year can demonstrate.
Fears grow in village U.S. cited as threat
Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2003
Those interviewed in the shadow of the mountains along the Iranian border are more suspicious of a possible U.S.-led war on Iraq than are most Kurds. In Mullah Marwan Ismail Hussein's yard, a conversation about the photograph Powell displayed [to the UN Security Council] led to criticism of what are seen here as the United States' global aspirations.
"There's not enough electricity and food for the people, so how can there be a chemical weapons factory?" Hussein asked. "The U.S. wants to monopolize the petrol of the Middle East. The U.S. wants the whole world to be one colony under itself.... Everyone knows Israel has nuclear and chemical weapons, and it's allowed to use them. It's just an American game."
As more village men gathered, Hussein had another thought.
"This issue for us is the globalization America calls for," he said. "It cannot do it in a peaceful way."
He added that Washington has shifting motives: "Why didn't the U.S. declare war on Iraq when Saddam bombed the Kurds with chemical weapons?"
U.S. war on Iraq to create more bin Laden recruits
Samia Nakhoul, Reuters, February 18, 2003
Would a U.S.-led war on Iraq make the world and the Middle East safer? Or is it more likely to unleash a wave of anti-American rage and create more recruits for Osama bin Laden?
The answer from the streets of the Middle East, official circles, analysts, academics and clerics is almost unanimous -- a U.S. invasion will most certainly provoke a backlash, and this could put the security of the world at risk.
Democratic mirage in the Middle East
Marina Ottaway, Thomas Carothers, Amy Hawthorne, and Daniel Brumberg, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The increasingly popular idea in Washington that the United States, by toppling Saddam Hussein, can rapidly democratize Iraq and unleash a democratic tsunami in the Middle East is a dangerous fantasy. The U.S. record of building democracy after invading other countries is mixed at best and the Bush administration's commitment to a massive reconstruction effort in Iraq is doubtful. The repercussions of an intervention in Iraq will be as likely to complicate the spread of democracy in the Middle East as promote it. The United States has an important role to play in fostering democracy in the region, but the task will be slow and difficult given the unpromising terrain and lack of U.S. leverage over key governments. (Complete policy brief in PDF document)
Risking a civil war
Turkey is demanding that it send 60,000 to 80,000 of its own troops into northern Iraq
Owen Matthews, Sami Kohen and John Barry, Newsweek, February 24, 2003
Turkey is raising its price for allowing U.S. forces to invade Iraq from its territory. In early negotiations with the United States, Ankara spoke of sending in Turkish troops to set up a “buffer zone” perhaps 15 miles deep along the Iraqi border. This would prevent a flood of Kurdish refugees from northern Iraq, the Turks said.
But now, Newsweek has learned, Turkey is demanding that it send 60,000 to 80,000 of its own troops into northern Iraq to establish “strategic positions” across a “security arc” as much as 140 to 170 miles deep in Iraq. That would take Turkish troops almost halfway to Baghdad. These troops would not be under U.S. command, according to Turkish sources, who say Turkey has agreed only to “coordination” between U.S. and Turkish forces. Ankara fears the Iraqi Kurds might use Saddam’s fall to declare independence. Kurdish leaders have not yet been told of this new plan, according to Kurdish spokesmen in Washington, who say the Kurds rejected even the earlier notion of a narrow buffer zone. Farhad Barzani, the U.S. representative of the main Kurdish party in Iraq, the KDP, says, “We have told them: American troops will come as liberators. But Turkish troops will be seen as invaders.”
Saudi Arabia hardens opposition to US war on Iraq
Omar Hasan, Middle East Online, February 18, 2003
Buoyed by worldwide anti-war sentiment, Saudi Arabia, the US key ally in the Gulf, has hardened opposition to a unilateral attack on Iraq, warning that no foreign troops will wage war on Baghdad from the kingdom.
Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal took the Saudi anti-war stance a step forward by declaring Monday that an attack by the United States on Iraq would be seen by many as an act of aggression.
Turkey makes U-turn against US
Head of Turkey's ruling party throws cold water on US war plans because of row over financial aid
Sibel Utku, Middle East Online, February 18, 2003
Turkey threw US war plans for Iraq into disarray on Tuesday, hinting it might stall the deployment of US troops because of a row over how much money Washington is prepared to offer to offset economic losses resulting from a possible conflict.
The head of Turkey's ruling party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Ankara's backing for a US-led war was subject to change if Washington did not meet its demands for billions of dollars in compensation to cover the impact on the fragile Turkish economy.
Behind the great divide
Paul Krugman, New York Times, February 18, 2003
There has been much speculation why Europe and the U.S. are suddenly at such odds. Is it about culture? About history? But I haven't seen much discussion of an obvious point: We have different views partly because we see different news.
Let's back up. Many Americans now blame France for the chill in U.S.-European relations. There is even talk of boycotting French products.
But France's attitude isn't exceptional. Last Saturday's huge demonstrations confirmed polls that show deep distrust of the Bush administration and skepticism about an Iraq war in all major European nations, whatever position their governments may take. In fact, the biggest demonstrations were in countries whose governments are supporting the Bush administration.
There were big demonstrations in America too. But distrust of the U.S. overseas has reached such a level, even among our British allies, that a recent British poll ranked the U.S. as the world's most dangerous nation — ahead of North Korea and Iraq.
So why don't other countries see the world the way we do? News coverage is a large part of the answer.
Jimmy Carter backs anti-war campaign
Alexandra Williams, Daily Mirror, February 18, 2003
Forever the diplomat, Carter was careful not to directly criticise President George Bush by name.
He said: "Some very embarrassing things have happened in this country.
"Time magazine in Europe did a public opinion poll on its website and over 350,000 people responded to the question, 'Which country poses the greatest threat to world peace?'
"North Korea received seven per cent of the votes, Iraq received eight per cent and the United States received 84 per cent.
"We have lost the ability apparently in our country to convince other nations to stand side by side with us."
Poodle power
Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, February 17, 2003
The real nature of the British-American relationship is certainly difficult for outsiders - and sometimes insiders too - to understand. But it's particularly important at the moment that Saddam Hussein does not misunderstand it, since it figures large in his calculations.
Iraq has made no secret of its view that Britain holds the key to avoiding war. It argues (rightly, I think) that, whatever unilateral action Mr Bush may threaten, he will not actually attack Iraq without British support. Iraq's goal, therefore, is to drive a wedge between Britain and the US. Mr Blair, in turn, is well aware of Iraq's goal and has made sure so far that no wedge can be driven.
War planners begin to speak of war's risks
David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, New York Times, February 18, 2003
Senior Bush administration officials are for the first time openly discussing a subject they have sidestepped during the buildup of forces around Iraq: what could go wrong, and not only during an attack but also in the aftermath of an invasion.
Don't start what you can't finish
The Economist, February 14, 2003
Afghanistan has been fought over by foreigners for centuries, and many Afghans have an understandable resentment of foreign influence. However, the government of President Hamid Karzai, installed after American-led forces kicked the Taliban out of Kabul at the end of 2001, knows that it needs all the foreign help it can get if it is to turn its country into a stable, coherent entity. In particular, Mr Karzai is keen that America fulfil its promise to help spread democracy and prosperity across a land that has been riven by war for more than two decades.
But if the world is watching America’s commitment to post-Taliban Afghanistan as a sign of what might happen in post-Saddam Iraq, it is likely to be disappointed. The consensus is that, having changed the Afghan regime, America has lost interest before finishing the job.
The smart way to be scared
Gregg Easterbrook, New York Times, February 16, 2003
A terrorist release of chemical weapons in an American city would probably have effects confined to a few blocks, making any one person's odds of harm far less than a million to one.
Your risk of dying in a car accident while driving to buy duct tape likely exceeds your risk of dying because you lacked duct tape.
Last week, a Washington talk radio host discussed what listeners should do if "a huge cloud of poison gas is drifting over the city." No nation's military has the technical ability to create a huge, lingering gas cloud: in outdoor use, chemical agents are lethal only for a few moments, because the wind quickly dilutes them. Chemical agents are deadly mainly in enclosed circumstances — subways, for example, or in building ventilation systems. The duct-taped room in a home is of little use in such a scenario.
A 1993 study by the Office of Technology Assessment found that one ton of perfectly delivered sarin, used against an unprotected city, could kill as many as 8,000. But the possession by terrorists of a ton of the most deadly gas seems reasonably unlikely, while perfect conditions for a gas attack — no wind, no sun (sunlight breaks down nerve agents), a low-flying plane that no one is shooting at — almost never happen. Even lights winds, the 1993 study projected, would drop the death toll to about 700.
Seven hundred dead would be horrible, but similar to the harm that might be inflicted in a crowded area by one ton of conventional explosives. Because these explosives are about as deadly as chemicals pound for pound, but far easier to obtain and use, terrorists may be more likely to try to blow things up. Almost all recent terrorist attacks around the world have involved conventional explosives.
Unrivaled military feels strains of unending war
Thomas E. Ricks and Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, February 16, 2003
Four times over the past 12 years -- in Iraq, in Haiti, in Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan -- U.S. forces have dispatched enemy forces in a matter of weeks. Today, on the eve of a possible new war against Iraq, those forces are exponentially more lethal, and their commanders, who have known little but victory over their careers, are confident almost to the point of cockiness.
"At no time in the history of modern warfare has a force been as well-trained, well-equipped and highly motivated as our Air Force is today," Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, said last month. Indeed, one of the Air Force's slogans is "Global Reach, Global Power."
That reach, say military commanders and other experts, may also prove to be an Achilles' heel: The more capable the U.S. military has become, the more it has been asked to do, and now strains are beginning to show. As the Bush administration prepares for war with Iraq, it is also sustaining peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, protecting South Korea from a newly aggressive North Korea and pursuing a war against terrorism that stretches from Afghanistan and the Caucasus to the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia.
This is a period characterized by what seems like continuous warfare, likened by military analyst Ralph Peters to the Thirty Years War that decimated Western Europe in the 17th century, and the effects are beginning to tell on the military's manpower, on its budget, on the nation's treasury, and on a conflict of priorities -- between the need to fight today's wars and the pursuit of means to dominate tomorrow's.
These tensions are partly the legacy of the nation's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but they will not dissipate any time soon: They are implicit in the administration's new national security strategy. That 33-page document, issued in September, commits the nation both to maintaining U.S. military hegemony and to attacking rogue or terrorist states before they can threaten the United States.
A new power in the streets
Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times, February 17, 2003
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
In his campaign to disarm Iraq, by war if necessary, President Bush appears to be eyeball to eyeball with a tenacious new adversary: millions of people who flooded the streets of New York and dozens of other world cities to say they are against war based on the evidence at hand.
Mr. Bush's advisers are telling him to ignore them and forge ahead, as are some leading pro-war Republicans. Senator John McCain, for one, said today that it was "foolish" for people to protest on behalf of the Iraqi people, because the Iraqis live under Saddam Hussein "and they will be far, far better off when they are liberated from his brutal, incredibly oppressive rule."
That may be true, but it fails to answer the question that France, Germany and other members of the Security Council have posed: What is the urgent rationale for war now if there is a chance that continued inspections under military pressure might accomplish the disarmament of Iraq peacefully?
Rabbi rift
Don Hazen, AlterNet, February 13, 2003
The truth depends on your perspective, but according to the antiwar groups involved, [Rabbi Michael] Lerner wasn't so much banned from speaking at the SF rally as he was simply never considered. The four groups co-sponsoring the SF march had agreed not to invite speakers who were critical of any of the groups.
This may not be the most principled decision -- and probably represents Answer's agenda since they have been the most criticized -- but it's understandable. These groups are trying to stop a war. They make compromises to be able to work together and get on with things.
Mitchell Plitnick of Jewish Voice for Peace, part of the United for Peace Coalition, says the whole affair has been blown out of proportion. He says the Tikkun community were part of a discussion about the speaker situation at a Feb. 4 meeting and were fine with it since other speakers would cover Lerner's concerns. "Then Lerner sent out an email press communication saying he was blackballed, never contacting anyone at United for Peace."
Forceful tactics catch up with U.S.
Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, February 16, 2003
Months of painstaking efforts by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to win international consensus for military action against Iraq have been complicated by a growing resentment over what many foreign diplomats regard as the Bush administration's heavy-handed and bullying tactics over the past two years.
Those tensions boiled over at the Security Council on Friday to a degree rarely seen in the U.N. chamber. Although Iraq's cooperation with weapons inspectors was the official subject at hand, U.S. behavior became an important subtext of the debate as the audience broke U.N. rules and applauded French and Russian demands that the rush to war be slowed down.
Put Sharon on trial - in Israel
David Forman, Ha'aretz, February 17, 2003
As someone who was a simple soldier in the war in Lebanon, it is clear to me that the collapse of the military ethic, including purity of arms, officially began during that war, in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla, when Ariel Sharon was defense minister. For Sharon, the contempt for the ethical dimension of warfare began much earlier, in Gaza and Kibyeh, but then his influence and methods were felt only at the platoon level. In the Lebanon War, as defense minister, his influence was universal. But the contempt he demonstrated then toward purity of arms took its own vengeance on him and he was fired from that job.
Twenty years have passed and Sharon is again in a position of power from which he can set the standards for Israeli fighting. Apparently, what guided Sharon during his military career and reached its shameful climax at Sabra and Chatilla, now dictates the way the IDF conducts its war against terror - with scorn for the moral standards at the heart of the Israeli Army since its establishment. And thus we are every day witness to the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians: not those caught in a cross-fire, but people like that 65-year-old woman [killed in one of the latest Israeli demolition operations].
Global demonstrations - Anti-war.com breaks down the numbers
The demise of the nuclear bomb hoax
Imad Khadduri, former Iraqi nuclear scientist, YellowTimes, February 16, 2003
On February 14, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), submitted, in accordance with U.N. Resolution 1441, his second report to the Security Council on Iraq's nuclear non-capability.
Much to the chagrin of President Bush and Colin Powell, the nuclear inspection chief's findings not only cleared the smoke from the imagined "smoking gun," but also dissipated the smog of misinformation with which the American government, hungry for war, has surrounded this issue.
The matters raised by ElBaradei merit further comment.
Peaceful S.F. crowd protests stance on Iraq
At S.F. rally, 200,000 seek alternative to U.S. war
Anastasia Hendrix, Pamela J. Podger, and Steve Rubenstein, San Francisco Chronicle, February 17, 2003
An estimated 200,000 people of nearly all ages spilled into lower Market Street on Sunday in San Francisco for a spirited but peaceful protest against U.S. plans to invade Iraq.
Ringing cowbells, banging temple drums, chanting, singing, dancing and waving colorful signs, puppets and placards, the marchers moved slowly up Market in a huge anti-war demonstration. While most simply walked the route, many pushed baby carriages, underscoring the argument that war would threaten the future of children most of all.
The march came one day after millions of people around the world demonstrated against the U.S. government's stance on Iraq. It coincided Sunday with an war protest in Sydney by about 200,000 people.
Europeans angry and disgusted with Bush
Feel insulted by comments, mistrust motives
Anna Badkhen, Veronique Mistiaen, Elizabeth Bryant, and Jody K. Biehl, San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 2003
With the clock ticking ever closer toward a possible war against Iraq, the gulf between the Bush administration and the public in Europe's most powerful nations continues to widen.
Interviews conducted over the past few days in England, France and Germany show mounting anger and disgust with the administration's perceived determination to push the Iraq crisis to a military conclusion regardless of world opinion.
We are the people
Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, February 17, 2003
There will be millions of people who will never forget Saturday February 15 2003. It was an extraordinary combination of the utterly prosaic and the deeply moving: a bursting bladder and the nearest toilets several hours' walk away in Hyde Park, an aching back and blisters, and then the remarkable sight of a heaving mass of people along the Embankment converging with crowds pouring across Waterloo bridge. Everywhere there were astonishing juxtapositions: the body-pierced peaceniks alongside the dignified Pakistani elder with white beard; the homemade placard "The only bush I trust is my own" drawing surreptitious giggles from a group of veiled Muslim women.
This was a day which confounded dozens of assumptions about our age. How much harder it is today than a week ago to speak of the apathy and selfish individualism of consumer society. Saturday brought the entire business of a capital city to a glorious full-stop. Not a car or bus moved in central London, the frenetic activities of shopping and spending halted across a wide swathe of the city; the streets became one vast vibrant civic space for an expression of national solidarity. Furthermore, unlike previous occasions when crowds have gathered, this was not to mark some royal pageantry, but to articulate an unfamiliar British sentiment - one of democratic entitlement: we are the people.
Blair's 'moral' case for war in Iraq is shot full of holes
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, February 17, 2003
Downing Street is at panic stations as the full implications of Hans Blix's inspections report sink in. The two main US-British arguments in favour of launching a war on Iraq next month - that Saddam currently possesses deployable weapons of mass destruction and poses an immediate or near-term threat to the region and to us - already had few takers before Friday's UN meeting. In his peculiarly dispassionate, persuasive way, Blix further undermined and, for many, destroyed the credibility of the Anglo-American case for an early, pre-emptive attack.
A third core argument, favoured by George Bush and blithely reiterated by him in Florida last week - that Saddam is in cahoots with al-Qaida and is somehow linked or even to blame for 9/11 - is not seen as convincing even by those who have espoused it. Downing Street now knows this argument, too, is a definitive non-runner.
Assailed on all sides by unprecedented popular protest, at odds with Europe, outnumbered in the security council, with the Pentagon's clock inexorably ticking, and rightly worried that an impatient Bush may reject the "UN route", dish his British ally and press on regardless, Tony Blair has now reached his bottom line: morality.
Sign of the times
Ultimate Flags, on online flag retailer based in Illinois, reports that their "patriotic peace" version of the US flag is now one of their top-selling flags:
Peace flags and not military flags are breaking sales records ahead of a possible war in Iraq at Ultimateflags.com, a major online flag seller.
"Before any military conflict we see an upsurge in the sales of Marines, Army, Air Force and Navy flags," said John Nesbit, founder of
Ultimateflags.com, "But this time, we are also being flooded with people wanting flags with peace symbols, especially our "Patriotic Peace"
design." (Ultimate Flags press release)
Antiwar rallies draw millions around world
The biggest protests take place in nations whose governments back U.S. policy toward Iraq
Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2003
Millions of protesters opposed to a U.S.-led war on Iraq demonstrated around the world Saturday as anger at the Bush administration moved from the United Nations to jampacked streets.
Protests in Europe included some of the largest antiwar demonstrations in decades, authorities said. And the biggest marches took place in nations that are strong U.S. allies and whose governments support President Bush's confrontation with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The sea of marchers was another sign that the Iraq crisis has not only embittered U.S. relations with Europe but driven a wedge between many Europeans and their leaders.
One US rule for Israel, another for Saddam
Henry Porter, The Observer, February 16, 2003
Britain and America may have to dilute their demands if they are to persuade the Security Council to consider a new resolution. Britain's Ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, talked of 'offering new language', an altogether less belligerent approach than the run-up to the meeting in November when resolution 1441 was adopted.
It seems likely that the US-UK strategy will rely on the threat in a paragraph at the end of 1441: 'The council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violation of its obligations.' All members of the council have already voted in favour of this.
Whatever the form of words eventually accepted, the US and UK are still certain to meet opposition from Europe and in turn the hawks in the US government will condemn those urging a veto of early action in Iraq. So it is a good moment to remember America's own record of vetoing resolutions critical of Israel.
To raise this at any time, but especially now, will inevitably be considered to be anti-American and anti-Israeli, possibly even anti-Semitic. But it is none of these things. There is long-term legal and political inconsistency between the treatment of Israel and other countries in the region, and the greatest weakness in America's case on Iraq is that it shows no signs of acknowledging its history of favouritism.
Switzerland hosts Iraq relief talks
Jonathan Fowler, Associated Press, February 15, 2003
Major countries--with the United States notably absent--met with officials from Iraq's neighbors and aid agencies Saturday to prepare for the relief work that will be needed if there is a war.
Neutral Switzerland invited 30 countries to take part in the closed-door conference, including all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, other major donor countries and Iraq's neighbors like Jordan and Turkey.
Four permanent Security Council members--Britain, France, Russia and China--are attending the two-day Geneva conference, which ends Sunday. But the United States refused, on grounds that U.N. agencies already have made extensive preparations and it is unclear how the meeting would help.
Our hopes betrayed
How a US blueprint for post-Saddam government quashed the hopes of democratic Iraqis
Kanan Makiya, The Observer, February 16, 2003
The United States is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities.
The plan, as dictated to the Iraqi opposition in Ankara last week by a United States-led delegation, further envisages the appointment by the US of an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government.
The plan reverses a decade-long moral and financial commitment by the US to the Iraqi opposition, and is guaranteed to turn that opposition from the close ally it has always been during the 1990s into an opponent of the United States on the streets of Baghdad the day after liberation.
America, a nation divided, with no bridges left to build
Robert Fisk, The Independent, February 16, 2003
Sometimes I rather suspect that the anti-war left in America likes being in a permanent minority. I mean no disrespect to the Noam Chomskys and Daniel Ellsbergs and Dennis Bernsteins; they fight, amid abuse and threats, to make their voices heard. Yet I have an uneasy feeling that many on the intellectual left are fearful that America will lose its next war amid massive casualties – but are even more fearful that America may win with minimal casualties.
Over a million march in Rome against war
Leonardo Sacchetti, Inter Press Service, February 15, 2003
”No War! No ifs, ands or buts!” was emblazoned across a banner in Italian, painted in white and red, opening the massive peace march Saturday in the Italian capital that drew some 1.5 million people.
Trains, buses and cars filled with people had been arriving in Rome since the wee hours of the morning. Italy turned out to be one of the hot spots of the international protest against the war that the United States is planning against Iraq, which it accuses of hiding weapons of mass destruction.
”We had expected a million people,” one of the organisers, marching amidst other pacifists, told IPS. ”But many more showed up.”
The march organisers, under the 'Fermiamo la guerra' (Let's stop the war) coalition, estimate that the demonstrators numbered around three million. The official police tally put the total at 950,000.
From New York to Melbourne, cries for peace
Robert D. McFadden, New York Times, February 16, 2003
Confronting America's countdown to war, throngs of chanting, placard-waving demonstrators converged on New York and scores of cities across the United States, Europe and Asia today in a global daisy chain of largely peaceful protests against the Bush administration's threatened invasion of Iraq.
Three years after vast crowds turned out around the world to celebrate the new millennium, millions gathered again today in a darker mood of impending conflict, forming a patchwork of demonstrations that together, organizers said, made up the largest, most diverse peace protest since the Vietnam War.
In London a million march against war
BBC News, February 15, 2003
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets of London to voice their opposition to military action against Iraq. Police said it was the UK's biggest ever demonstration with at least 750,000 taking part, although organisers put the figure closer to two million.
The Bush Administration's attacks on the United Nations
Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus, February 14, 2003
One would have to go to the annual convention of the John Birch Society to find as many invectives directed against the United Nations as have been spewed out in recent weeks by the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress and in the media. With the United States on the verge of launching an invasion of Iraq without approval of the United Nations Security Council, a concerted effort is underway, taking advantage of the lack of knowledge most Americans have of the United Nations' structures and procedures, to discredit the world body in the eyes of public opinion. This could prove pivotal, because currently a majority of Americans oppose an invasion of Iraq unless the UN Security Council authorizes the use of force.
Who's in charge?
A review of Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Chalmers Johnson, London Review of Books, February 6, 2003
The story of the Pentagon Papers raises at least three questions of considerable contemporary relevance. The first derives from Ellsberg's interest in the matter of Presidential lying. Was the problem then, as it is again today, that all American Presidents prefer to lie rather than to tell the public what it has a right to know? Ellsberg first approached this problem via the old idea that the President is innocent but deceived by sycophantic underlings: if only Kennedy - or Johnson, Nixon, the Pope, the King, the Tsar, Stalin etc - had known what was going on, he would have fixed things. Ellsberg calls this the standard 'quagmire school' approach to the Vietnam War, led by people like David Halberstam and Arthur Schlesinger. The problem is that a close scrutiny of classified documents will not bear it out: 'For Kennedy, as for Johnson, in fact, it was the President who was deceiving the public, not his subordinates who were deceiving him.'
Ellsberg came to understand that it isn't personality that makes Presidents habitual liars but 'an apparatus of secrecy, built on effective procedures, practices and career incentives, that permitted the President to arrive at and execute a secret foreign policy, to a degree that went far beyond what even relatively informed outsiders, including journalists and members of Congress, could imagine'. The imperial Presidency concentrates power in the executive branch, subverting the elaborate structure of checks and balances contained in the Constitution. Its political effect is to focus nearly all responsibility for policy 'failure' on one man, the President, who is thus at all times concerned not with doing the right thing but with the next election and whether his decisions are supplying the opposition with the weapons needed to unseat him.
All of this has only got worse since the days of Watergate. The current Administration is obsessed with secrecy. Forty per cent of the US defence budget and all of the intelligence budget is secret (in direct contravention of the constitutional stipulation that the public be honestly told how its tax dollars are being spent). The President revels in secrecy and has lied so often about the need for a pre-emptive war against Iraq that most people have stopped listening to him. But individual character hardly matters: what drives the need for official secrecy is imperialism and its indispensable handmaiden, militarism. That was true during the Vietnam War and is much more true today.
Millions join anti-war protests worldwide
BBC News, February 15, 2003
Millions of people worldwide are joining in demonstrations against a possible US-led war against Iraq.
Hundreds of rallies and marches are taking place in up to 60 countries this weekend.
Crowds have been gathering in London, where a rally culminating in Hyde Park is expected to draw more than half a million protesters.
A Bush-Sharon doctrine
Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI, February 10, 2003
Israel is asking the United States for $4 billion in additional military assistance --- in addition, that is, to the just under $3 billion a year a year it receives automatically --- plus $8 billion in commercial-loan guarantees. The $12 billion question about the $15 billion grant-and-loan package is "What is the quid pro quo?" Is it tied to a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum? The beginning of a dismantlement of 145 Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank? A freeze on new settlements? A timetable, however vague, for the establishment of a Palestinian state within five years?
None of the above. The strategic objectives of the United States and Israel in the Middle East have gradually merged into a now cohesive Bush-Sharon Doctrine. But this gets lost in the deafening cacophony of talking heads playing armchair generals in the coming war to change regimes in Baghdad. The Washington Post's Bob Kaiser finally broke through the sound barrier to document (Feb. 9) what has long been reported in encrypted diplomatic e-mails from foreign embassies to dozens of foreign governments: Washington's "Likudniks" --- Ariel Sharon's powerful backers in the Bush Administration -- have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since president Bush was sworn into office.
See also Robert G. Kaiser's article in the Washington Post, Bush and Sharon nearly identical on Mideast policy
A conflict driven by the self-interest of America
Robert Fisk, The Independent, February 15, 2003
Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included – though we play down the RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons – and many Americans – are a lot braver than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children.
The laws of war, US-style
Michael Byers, London Review of Books, February 20, 2003
International humanitarian law, the jus in bello, concerns the way wars may be fought. It is distinct from the law governing when wars may be fought (the jus ad bellum of self-defence and the UN Charter). Also known as the 'laws of war', international humanitarian law traces its origins to 1859, when the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino and initiated a movement that became the International Committee of the Red Cross. Today, the rules of international humanitarian law are found in the 1907 Hague Conventions, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their two Additional Protocols of 1977, as well as in a parallel body of unwritten customary international law that binds all countries, including those that have not ratified the Conventions and Protocols. A central principle prohibits the direct targeting of civilians, as well as attacks on military targets that could be expected to cause civilian suffering disproportionate to the specific military goals to be acheived. [...]
After decades of massive defence spending, the US is today assured of victory in any war it chooses to fight. High-tech weaponry has reduced the dangers to US personnel, making it easier to sell war to domestic constituencies. As a result, some US politicians have begun to think of war, not as the high-risk recourse of last resort, but as an attractive foreign policy option in times of domestic scandal or economic decline. This change in thinking has already led to a more cavalier approach to the jus ad bellum, as exemplified by the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence. It is beginning to have a similar effect with regard to the jus in bello. When war is seen as an ordinary tool of foreign policy - 'politics by other means' - political and financial considerations impinge on the balance between military necessity and humanitarian concerns. Soldiers are buried alive because the folks back home don't like body bags.
A monument to hypocrisy
Edward Said, Al-Ahram, February 13, 2003
It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN into going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in moral hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in Munich this past weekend went one step further than the bumbling Powell in unctuous sermonising and bullying derision. For the moment, I shall discount George Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with God, or if not God, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state and defence seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their words and activities.
Anti-war conservatives bash hawks on Iraq
Rene P. Ciria-Cruz, Pacific News Service, February 12, 2003
"Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there," booms the essay, "Terror on American soil is the price of American empire."
Another anti-war liberal waxing rhetorical? No, it's former presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan, editor of The American Conservative, bashing President Bush's Mideast military buildup.
There are indeed anti-war conservatives. Moreover, these big-government-hating, tax-loathing right-wingers reserve their sharpest barbs for the "neoconservative" hawks in the Bush administration. Some even predict that war in Iraq will widen fissures within the Right and cost the Republican Party in the voting booth.
Citizens decry leaders' decision on Iraq
Andrea Dudikova, Associated Press, February 13, 2003
University student Igor Kubicka doesn't mince words about Slovakia opening its airspace to U.S. military flights and deploying an anti-chemical warfare unit to the Persian Gulf.
"It's stupidity," he says.
Most Slovaks feel the same, and they're not alone. Across eastern Europe, opposition is developing in countries whose governments have joined the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing."
Handling of last alert spurs lawmaker's ire
Dana Priest and Michael Powell, Washington Post, February 14, 2003
As jittery residents of New York and Washington continued to prepare yesterday for a possible terrorist attack, Congress's senior intelligence committee member said there was "absolutely no reason" for panic and criticized the new Department of Homeland Security for not communicating better with the American public.
"Do not fall for hysteria and rumor," said Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), a former CIA officer and chairman of the House intelligence committee who was given classified updates of the threat last night. "There is no justification, there's no more specificity to the threat" than there was Feb. 7, when federal officials raised the national threat level to orange, indicating a "high risk" of a terrorist strike.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, also expressed concern about the administration's handling of the situation and called on President Bush to address the public on the matter. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge scheduled a news conference for today to update the public on the terrorist threat.
False alarm?
Terror alert partly based on fabricated information
Brian Ross, Len Tepper and Jill Rackmill, ABC News, February 13, 2003
A key piece of the information leading to recent terror alerts was fabricated, according to two senior law enforcement officials in Washington and New York.
The officials said that a claim made by a captured al Qaeda member that Washington, New York or Florida would be hit by a "dirty bomb" sometime this week had proven to be a product of his imagination.
A case for war? Yes, say US and Britain. No, say the majority
Julian Borger in Washington and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, February 15, 2003
The US and Britain's drive to gain international backing for a war with Iraq was in deep trouble last night in the face of unexpectedly upbeat reports by United Nations weapons inspectors.
American and British diplomats had hoped to circulate draft language as early as today for a new UN resolution authorising an invasion. But after yesterday's heated security council showdown, in which the overwhelming majority made clear their opposition to war, that strategy is in jeopardy.
Britain last night insisted it would press ahead with framing the resolution. An official said it was unlikely that a draft resolution would be circulated over the weekend. Instead, it would be pushed back until Tuesday at the earliest. "If you slap down a piece of paper right away, it doesn't look like you were listening."
See also Moving past scripts, envoys bring emotion to Iraq debate
A star with too many points?
Mike Allen and Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, February 15, 2003
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's cranky frankness made him a star in a bland administration, but now his periodic slaps at Europe are being blamed by some for adding to the administration's difficulties in recruiting a coalition to confront Iraq.
To the surprise of foreign policy specialists and even some White House officials, Rumsfeld has become a leading administration voice on diplomatic matters -- and is widely viewed abroad as the official who most closely reflects what President Bush really thinks.
Republic or empire?
Joseph Wilson, The Nation, February 13, 2003
As the senior American diplomat in Baghdad during Desert Shield, I advocated a muscular US response to Saddam's brutal annexation of Kuwait in flagrant violation of the United Nations charter. Only the credible threat of force could hope to reverse his invasion. Our in-your-face strategy secured the release of the 150 American "human shields"--hostages--but ultimately it took war to drive Iraq from Kuwait. I was disconsolate at the failure of diplomacy, but Desert Storm was necessitated by Saddam's intransigence, it was sanctioned by the UN and it was conducted with a broad international military coalition. The goal was explicit and focused; war was the last resort.
The upcoming military operation also has one objective, though different from the several offered by the Bush Administration. This war is not about weapons of mass destruction. The intrusive inspections are disrupting Saddam's programs, as even the Administration has acknowledged. Nor is it about terrorism. Virtually all agree war will spawn more terrorism, not less. It is not even about liberation of an oppressed people. Killing innocent Iraqi civilians in a full frontal assault is hardly the only or best way to liberate a people. The underlying objective of this war is the imposition of a Pax Americana on the region and installation of vassal regimes that will control restive populations.
CIA 'sabotaged inspections and hid weapons details'
Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, February 14, 2003
Senior democrats have accused the CIA of sabotaging weapons inspections in Iraq by refusing to co-operate fully with the UN and withholding crucial information about Saddam Hussein's arsenal.
Led by Senator Carl Levin, the Democrats accused the CIA of making an assessment that the inspections were unlikely to be a success and then ensuring they would not be. They have accused the CIA director of lying about what information on the suspected location of weapons of mass destruction had been passed on.
Defending the indefensible
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, February 14, 2003
The focus of this week's spectacular Nato row was the blocking by France, Germany and Belgium of an apparently innocuous, US-initiated request for alliance military assets to "defend" Turkey. But this request was far from the whole story.
The triple-veto caused a tremendous ruckus, with venomous insults whizzing back and forth across the Atlantic like so many rogue state missiles. After last weekend's verbal punch-up at the Munich security conference, it was enough to prompt serious predictions of Nato's demise.
The French and the others were betraying the alliance, some American officials fumed. Pugilistic Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld said their action was "beyond my comprehension". [...]
Here is the clue to the puzzle that Rumsfeld supposedly could not solve. On Turkey's behalf, the US requested surveillance planes, ground-to-air missile batteries and some chemical and biological warfare specialists from Nato. This request was part of an ongoing negotiation with Ankara concerning the use of Turkish bases by US invasion troops and warplanes destined for Iraq.
Other elements of this as yet unconcluded bilateral deal include billions of dollars' worth of US aid, loans and compensation to Turkey and a guarantee that the US will discourage Kurdish dreams of nationhood.
This Nato equipment was demanded not to "defend" Turkey but, rather, to help ensure Washington got what it wanted from the Turks. It is needed to provide back-up for the forthcoming US offensive in Iraq - and for a likely Turkish intervention across the border.
'Grim picture' seen for Iraqis
Maggie Farley, Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2003
The day before the Security Council begins discussions about whether force is required to disarm Iraq, Secretary-General Kofi Annan summoned the council's 15 ambassadors to his office for a private meeting Thursday about the humanitarian toll of war.
A "medium case" scenario would leave nearly half of Iraq's 22 million people in need of immediate food aid and without access to drinking water and sanitation, he told them. The U.N. is preparing for as many as 1.5 million refugees to stream out of the country, and 1 million more could become homeless inside the country. Millions of Iraqis already depend on the U.N. for food rations, and war could cut off that supply while drastically increasing the number of people who need food, shelter and medicine, Annan said.
And the U.N. doesn't have enough money to pay for it.
"It's a very grim picture," said a diplomat at the meeting. Annan has maintained a low profile since the beginning of negotiations over Iraq, but his discussion of "the morning after" on the day before a weapons inspectors' report that could lead to war was not an accident, a U.N. official said. Annan will begin a two-week European trip this weekend but wanted to keep the consequences of war on council members' minds, the official said.
A battle for the hearts and minds of America
Johanna Neuman, Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2003
As organizers prepare for Saturday's antiwar rallies in New York and throughout Europe, Vietnam-era peace activists and scholars who have studied pacifist influences on U.S. history marvel at how quickly the movement has galvanized its supporters to take to the streets. It took three years of ground combat in Vietnam, often televised, before activists could rally 250,000 in mass antiwar rallies in 1968. Saturday's organizers in New York hope to double that number — against a war that has not yet begun.
But with a majority of Americans supportive of war against Iraq — although the numbers drop if conflict comes without U.N. support or with heavy U.S. casualties — the battle for hearts and minds is very much a contest for the mainstream. Marshaling the middle class against a war in time to prevent it is all but impossible, scholars say.
"No major peace movement in modern American history has stopped a war," said Melvin Small, a historian at Wayne State University in Detroit and author of "Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds." But "they did affect the trajectory of war."
The current antiwar movement has not only assigned itself the historically unprecedented goal of stopping war in Iraq before it starts, but it has also signaled a willingness to stay in the streets for any U.S. mission involving the invasion of foreign countries in the name of fighting terrorism. Fear of terrorist attacks propels many Americans to support a war in Iraq, but activists believe their greatest argument is that war will only increase the risk.
City leaders carry message against war to President
Elizabeth Olson, New York Times, February 14, 2003
Leaders from some of the 90 city councils that have adopted resolutions opposing military action against Iraq warned today that the costs of war would devastate already crippled municipal budgets and deprive citizens of crucial services.
Carrying blue-and-white placards with the outline of a dove, representatives cities including Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore and Santa Fe, N.M., met here to urge President Bush to heed citizens' concerns about war, and to call on Congress to oppose any pre-emptive military strikes.
Poll shows most Americans want war delay
Patrick E. Tyler and Janet Elder, New York Times, February 14, 2003
Even after the administration's aggressive case for going to war soon in Iraq, a majority of Americans favor giving United Nations weapons inspectors more time to complete their work so that any military operation wins the support of the Security Council, the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll shows.
The public supports a war to remove Saddam Hussein. But Americans are split over whether the Bush administration and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have made a convincing case for going to war right now, even though much of the public is inclined to believe that Iraq and Al Qaeda are connected in terrorism.
The poll found that while the economy still commands the greatest concern among Americans, the prospect of combat in Iraq, fear of terrorism and the North Korean nuclear standoff are stirring additional anxieties.
These worries may be taking a toll on Mr. Bush's support. His overall job approval rating is down to 54 percent from 64 percent just a month ago, the lowest level since the summer before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Reckless administration may reap disastrous consequences
US Senator Robert Byrd, Senate Floor Speech, February 12, 2003
To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.
Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.
We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. Only on the editorial pages of our newspapers is there much substantive discussion of the prudence or imprudence of engaging in this particular war.
And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.
The case against war
Jonathan Schell, The Nation, February 13, 2003
Victory cannot be judged only by the outcome of battles. In the American Revolutionary War, for example, Edmund Burke, a leader of England's antiwar movement, said, "Our victories can only complete our ruin." Almost two centuries later, in Vietnam, the United States triumphed in almost every military engagement, yet lost the war. If the aim is lost, the war is lost, whatever happens on the battlefield. The novelty this time is that the defeat has preceded the inauguration of hostilities.
Defenders of close ties with Europe are now on the defensive in the U.S.
Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, February 14, 2003
American impatience with France and Germany, the powers at the heart of continental Europe, has reached a fever pitch.
All week, members of Congress have been denouncing France and Germany. A favored theme is their supposed ingratitude after being saved from disaster in World War II and defended by American troops throughout the cold war. There have been calls for boycotts of French products, including wines and cheeses.
The theme has echoed through editorial pages across the country. "The United States saved France's bacon in World War II," the Tulsa World editorialized on Wednesday. "The United States has long stood by and protected Europe. But this is not a question of payback. It's simply a matter of doing the right thing."
The Boston Herald wrote, "The graves of soldiers" should serve as "a timely reminder that there is no appeasing a tyrant, not then and not now."
Anti-Europeanism is almost certainly not as prevalent in the United States as anti-Americanism is in Europe. One reason is that while an all-powerful America looms large in the minds of Europeans, Americans do not think much about European military or economic activity at all. But the Iraq crisis appears to have prompted a growing view of a feckless Europe unready to make the tough choices that many Americans now see as necessary for the West's security.
A sense of fine qualities trampled and of something 'terribly wrong'
Sarah Lyall, New York Times, February 14, 2003
When asked what they think of the United States in these uncertain times, European intellectuals tend to draw a swift distinction between the American government and the American people.
But European anti-Americanism is more than just straightforward opposition to the policies of the current administration. There is a growing sense here, reflected in interviews with writers, cultural figures and other intellectual leaders in Western Europe, that many of America's most admirable qualities — its respect for its great cacophony of voices, its belief in freedom, its proud democratic principles — have been so trampled in the debate over war as to have been rendered toothless or even nonexistent.
Why we should march tomorrow
John Pilger, The Mirror, February 14, 2003
Tomorrow one of the most important public events in memory will take place in central London.
It is not possible to overstate the significance and urgency of the march and demonstration against an unprovoked British and American attack on Iraq, a nation with whom we have no quarrel and who offer us no threat.
The urgency is the saving of lives. First, let us stop calling it a "war". The last time "war" was used in the Gulf was in 1991 when the truth was buried with more than 200,000 people. Attacking a 70-mile line of trenches, three American brigades, operating at night, used 60-ton armoured earthmovers to bury alive teenage Iraqi conscripts, including the wounded and those surrendering and retreating. Survivors were slaughtered from the air. The helicopter gunship pilots called it a "turkey shoot".
Of the 148 Americans who died, a quarter of them were killed by Americans. Most of the British were killed by Americans. This was known as "friendly fire". The civilians who were killed, whose deaths were never recorded by the American military because it was "not policy", were "collateral damage".
No mandate to go to war
Andrew Murray, The Guardian, February 14, 2003
One man against the British people. In Britain, at least, this is Tony Blair's war now, and his alone. The people whose views he was elected to represent want none of it. The streets of London will tomorrow bear witness to that truth.
It seems certain that the rally against the impending attack on Iraq will be the largest political demonstration in British history. Perhaps it is less a demonstration, more an assembly of a people, rejecting senseless war. It will certainly be a rebuke to those who argue that no one cares any longer about politics. Against a background of the worst crisis in international relations for a generation, and a week in which the government did nothing to stem a mounting atmosphere of public tension, the demonstration also represents a refusal to be rendered powerless.
A Dreadful Act II
Jack M. Balkin, Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2003
Just as the Bush administration is preparing a preemptive strike on Iraq, its Justice Department has been preparing yet another preemptive strike -- a new assault on our civil liberties.
For months, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and his staff have been secretly drafting the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, designed to expand even further the new government powers for domestic surveillance created by the 2001 USA Patriot Act. Justice Department officials have repeatedly denied the existence of the draft bill, dubbed the "Patriot Act II," but a copy leaked out recently and has been posted on a Web site, www.public integrity.org.
In bin Laden's mind, a good start on goals
James P. Pinkerton, Newsday, February 13, 2003
My plan is working well. When I, Osama bin Laden, ordered the blessed events of Sept. 11, I hoped to provoke an apocalyptic conflict between the faithful and the infidels. And not only is that happening, but also the Americans and Europeans are breaking up their alliance.
Indeed, the Americans are so desperate to destroy Iraq - a country that had nothing to do with the righteous destruction of the World Trade Center - that they don't care if they antagonize the major countries of all Eurasia. Happy is the man who watches his enemies fight each other.
My audiotape, released Tuesday, has sealed the fate of that socialist apostate, Saddam Hussein. I see Colin Powell on CNN saying it proves a "nexus" between my al-Qaida and his Iraq. Hah. As I said on that tape, the only connection between me and my enemies is my swordpoint hitting their neck.
The Americans have never understood that it has always been my dream to rid the Muslim Ummah - our world - of those secular Arabs who strut around like colonialist colonels in their epaulets and berets, men who preen like women, like peacocks. Such evildoers are obstacles to Islamic purity, to a return to the blessed days of the Caliphate, when mosque and state were united in holiness. Now, thanks to the Americans, those red infidels will be gone, buried under smart bombs. Who says the Great Satan can't be made to do God's work?
Rift emerges among Iraqi opposition
Associated Press, February 12, 2003
The United States has told Iraq's opposition it plans to install a U.S.-military-run administration and keep many lower level officials of Saddam Hussein's party in their jobs after the Iraqi leadership falls, senior opposition officials said.
U.S. envoys unveiled the proposal during a meeting in Ankara, Turkey last week on a "take it and don't you dare leave it" basis, said Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor and a leading member of the Iraqi National Congress.
Not all conservatives on board on Iraq
Ralph Z. Hallow, Washington Times, February 12, 2003
Some conservatives remain wary — and are willing to say so publicly — about President Bush's threats of war against Iraq.
Most regard Mr. Bush as one of their own, and support his stated aim of forcibly disarming Saddam Hussein's regime, if necessary.
But some conservative critics are philosophically opposed to using the U.S. military as a force to transform dictatorships into democracies. "It is a traditional conservative position not to want the United States to be the policeman of the world," said Rep. John J. "Jimmy" Duncan Jr., Tennessee Republican. "It is also conservative to favor smaller government that is closer to the people, rather than world government."
Western publics can't stomach U.S. foreign policy
William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, February 13, 2003
The stalemate at NATO this week has been unnecessary and in basic respects irrelevant. By posing the argument in terms of defending Turkey in the event of a military intervention in Iraq that formally has yet to be decided, the United States was attempting to force the NATO allies to commit themselves to such an intervention.
The threat made by U.S. officials in the corridors of the annual Munich strategic seminar last weekend, to transfer U.S. NATO bases in Germany to "new Europe," meaning former Communist Europe, was also empty. Germany has no need of U.S. bases on its territory. The United States needs those bases. They are the logistical and operational foundation for the American strategic deployment in Europe, the Near and Middle East, the horn of Africa and Central Asia.
The United States could lease new bases in Poland, Bulgaria or Romania. But if forces stationed there were committed to operations that did not enjoy popular support in these countries, America would face the same problem it has now in "old Europe."
Special Operations units already in Iraq
Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, February 13, 2003
U.S. Special Operations troops are already operating in various parts of Iraq, hunting for weapons sites, establishing a communications network and seeking potential defectors from Iraqi military units in what amounts to the initial ground phase of a war, U.S. defense officials and experts familiar with Pentagon planning said.
The troops, comprising two Special Operations Task Forces with an undetermined number of personnel, have been in and out of Iraq for well over a month, said two military officials with direct knowledge of their activities. They are laying the groundwork for conventional U.S. forces that could quickly seize large portions of Iraq if President Bush gives a formal order to go to war, the officials said.
The ground operation points to a Pentagon war plan that is shaping up to be dramatically different than the one carried out by the United States and its allies in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Instead of beginning with a massive aerial bombardment, the plan envisions a series of preliminary ground actions to seize Iraqi territory and effectively encircle Baghdad before a large-scale air campaign hits the capital, defense officials and analysts said.
10 million join world protest rallies
John Vidal, The Guardian, February 13, 2003
Up to 10 million people on five continents are expected to demonstrate against the probable war in Iraq on Saturday, in some of the largest peace marches ever known.
Yesterday, up to 400 cities in 60 countries, from Antarctica to Pacific islands, confirmed that peace rallies, vigils and marches would take place. Of all major countries, only China is absent from the growing list which includes more than 300 cities in Europe and north America, 50 in Asia and Latin America, 10 in Africa and 20 in Australia and Oceania.
Many countries will witness the largest demonstrations against war they have ever seen.
The majority will be small but 500,000 people are expected in London and Barcelona, and more than 100,000 in Rome, Paris, Berlin and other European capitals. In the US, organisers were yesterday anticipating 200,000 marching in New York if permission is given. A further 100,000 are expected to march in 140 other American cities.
What is extraordinary, say the organisers, is the depth and breadth of opposition that the US and Britain are meeting across the world before a war has even started.
Federal bastion raises a peace flag
David Lamb, Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2003
One day when historians scour old newspaper clips to glean America's mood as war seemed to grow ever closer, the town meeting here to discuss the possible invasion of Iraq may escape unnoticed -- a minor event that made no news, changed few minds and maybe wasn't even representative of the nation as a whole.
But in an overflowing school auditorium Monday night, at a forum with their congressman, a two-star Marine general and an assistant secretary of Defense, the citizens of Alexandria spoke of overwhelming concerns about war with Iraq, and particularly its aftermath. Their antiwar sentiments sounded like those heard in France and Germany.
The message was surprising because Alexandria, across the Potomac River from Washington, is on the front lines of the war on terror.
The Pentagon is nearby, and the federal court where charges against some terrorists have been filed is located here. Six percent of Alexandria's 133,000 residents work for the Defense Department.
Bewildered Iraqis ask why U.S. wants war
John Daniszewski, Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2003
It was a sunny spring-like day in central Iraq, the second day of the Feast of the Sacrifice, and as they have for centuries on this holiday, devout Shiite Muslims repaired to the Shrine of Imam Hussein here with their families to pray and ask for blessings and good health.
On Wednesday, however, the talk was not only about religion and the prospects for a more prosperous year. Instead, the people here were also thinking about a war that they hope will not be, but which they are bracing for nevertheless.
And, to hear them speak, many of them seem simply bewildered that their country is about to be attacked by a much more powerful nation half a world away.
Kassim Hoony, a 53-year-old schoolteacher, articulated his confusion to a visiting American journalist he encountered in the courtyard of the spectacular shrine to the grandson of the prophet Muhammad.
"Why should they fly across all those oceans and seas to bomb our country? We don't hate America and England," he said. "In fact, we like Americans and the English. We don't know Osama bin Laden, and we have nothing to do with him."
ALL EYES ON LONDON
While the attention of the anti-war movement in the United States will be focused on New York this Saturday, the attention of the world should be focused on London. George Bush's "mandate" for war now rests on the strength of a "coalition of the willing." His staunchest ally has of course been Tony Blair. The prospect of as many as a million Britons protesting against war is one that Blair can only ignore at his political peril. Private citizen Blair will be of no use to President Bush. Much as they would both like to ignore the anti-war movement, they both now nervously watch to see its impact on the British Government.
Doves on the warpath: a million ordinary Britons prepare to demonstrate for peace
Terry Kirby, The Independent, February 13, 2003
They will be coming from every part of Britain representing bodies as diverse as the Peace Pledge Union, Britons vs Bush and the Woodcraft Folk. There will be people from dozens of small, newly formed anti-war groups from towns, villages, churches and colleges, many of whom have never been on a protest before. And Ms Dynamite will be there to sing.
The day after Hans Blix, the United Nations chief weapons inspector, is due to present his second and possibly decisive report to the UN Security Council, they will be taking part in what is being billed as the biggest and most important demonstration in British political history.
Denial of march cost antiwar protesters symbol and power, too
Janny Scott, New York Times, February 13, 2003
There have been marches that looked like rallies and rallies that looked like marches and demonstrations that were a little bit of both. But when a federal judge ruled this week that antiwar demonstrators could rally in Manhattan on Saturday but not march through the streets, she was drawing a distinction that historians and others say can have great symbolic weight.
In mass protest movements over the last two centuries, the act of marching has carried psychological and emotional power that scholars say stationary forms of protest do not. The simple act of moving forward in a group, made up of diverse contingents, has a visceral force that energizes not only participants but observers.
During the civil rights movement, marching was a specific form of political expression, a statement against segregation, a breaking out into a larger public realm. And it was effective. As historians see it, the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, for example, transformed the not yet widely noticed voting rights movement in Selma into a national force.
"Common action does something that common presence does not do," said Clark McCauley, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College who specializes in group dynamics. "It produces cohesion and power and maybe a greater sense of universality, that everybody is with us, that whatever it is we're marching for has all the power of all of us behind it."
The myth of the state and the reality of the annexation
Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, February 12, 2003
The conventional wisdom in Israel is that in 2000, the Palestinians rejected the "generous" Israeli offer for a permanent solution and its readiness for a Palestinian state, and then the Palestinians initiated the outbreak of the bloody conflict. According to that same belief, many Israelis continue to support the establishment of a Palestinian state, even now - but not before the Palestinians stop the terrorism.
That belief plays an important role in the media and political propaganda effort made by Israel - meaning the IDF - in the West Bank and Gaza, along the lines of: the Palestinians started it, so they can suffer.
Explosive ingredients
Lead Editorial, The Guardian, February 13, 2003
US plans to invade Iraq via Turkey, a key part of George Bush's war strategy, look increasingly likely to trigger a conflagration in Kurdish areas potentially involving Turkish, American, Kurdish, Iraqi and even Iranian forces. Turkey, which already maintains troops in northern Iraq, is moving heavy armour and reinforcements to its south-eastern border. Ankara says its aim is to protect ethnic Turkmens and stem a 1991-type refugee exodus. But it makes no secret of its intention to seize a large swath of Iraqi territory once war begins. Preventing Kurdish control of the oil centres of Mosul and Kirkuk is one objective. Another is discouraging any Kurdish bid for statehood. Ankara's insistence on having a free hand in Iraq and its refusal to place its forces under US command, are among several conditions placed on the urgent US request to deploy up to 40,000 American invasion troops. Turkey also wants billions in aid, loans and compensation. The US, keen to get Saddam at almost any cost and whatever the consequences for the Kurds, seems likely to agree.
Belgium asserts right to try Sharon
Ian Black, The Guardian, February 13, 2003
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, can be tried for genocide in Belgium once he has left office, the Belgian appeal court ruled last night.
The judgment opens the way for survivors of a 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut to press their case against the Likud leader when his retirement loses him his immunity from prosecution.
"International custom prevents heads of government being pursued by a foreign state," the court said.
But to Israel's dismay it ruled that an action against former general Amos Yaron, commander of Israeli forces in the Beirut area at the time of the massacre, could proceed.
No surrender monkeys
Jon Henley, The Guardian, February 12, 2003
France will come round, one strand of US logic runs, because if it plays no part in the international coalition it fears it'll play no part in the postwar petroleum bonanza. But oil industry experts say 20 to 40 companies are already lined up for the spoils, and since the international oil business could not function without cooperation, there is little chance of Total losing out entirely.
With neither side looking ready to concede, then, the hostilities are set to intensify rather than abate - something of an unpleasant irony for France given President Jacques Chirac's personal affection for America (he spent a year there as a student) and the fact that one of the major planks of his post-election foreign policy was to improve relations with Washington.
But France does not like being pushed around. There is in all this more than a shade of the Gaullist conviction that America needs allies that are not yes-men, and that a world whose order was determined by the United States of America would not be a world to everyone's tastes.
At times it seems as if the greater the pressure coming from America, the more determined Paris is to hold its line. The easy-going prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who rarely speaks about foreign policy, responded to George Bush's "the game is over" last week with a little-reported but perfectly effective: "It's not a game, it's not over."
The opponents of war on Iraq are not the appeasers
Seumas Milne, The Guardian, February 13, 2003
The split at the heart of Nato over George Bush's plans to invade Iraq has triggered an outpouring of charges of 1930s-style appeasement against those resisting the rush to war. A line of attack hitherto largely confined to US neo-conservatives has now been taken up by their increasingly desperate fellow travellers on this side of the Atlantic.
When stereotypes collide
Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, February 13, 2003
At first some were thinking - irony of ironies - that bin Laden himself had provided the smoking gun the administration of US President George W Bush is incapable of digging up: the lethal connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. But after attentively listening to the message on Al Jazeera - an activity obviously not pursued by Secretary of State Colin Powell's minions - everything is clear. Bin Laden exhorts Muslims to support the Iraqi population - not the Iraqi government. He calls again for a jihad against the United States. And he brands any Arab ruler who would support the US against Iraq as "an apostate whose blood should be spilled".
Bin Laden's latest propaganda coup - as far as the Arab world is concerned - contrasts with the de facto failure of Powell's presentation at the United Nations Security Council. The No 1 propaganda challenge for the Bush administration remains how to prove a connection between al-Qaeda and the need, right here, right now, not later, of regime change in Iraq. The awesome, relentless US propaganda machine may have swayed a great deal of domestic opinion, but the indisputable fact remains that the majority of world opinion is still not convinced about the evidence, the timing and the motives of the Bush administration - and suspects a hidden agenda.
Europe seems to lose value for Bush
Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times, February 12, 2003
Faced by a sharp trans-Atlantic rift that has split NATO, many officials here are wondering why the Bush administration has not tried harder to preserve what Senator John McCain last week described as "the greatest political military alliance in the history of mankind."
That question, senior administration officials said today, has not been answered within the circle of President Bush and his advisers, in part because there are divisions between them over how important old cold war allies like France and Germany are to the new war against terror.
One Bush administration official, obviously appalled by the growing vitriol between Paris and Washington, said, "We are just hoping that the whole edifice" of the Western alliance "does not come crashing down."
The widening Atlantic
Lead Editorial, The Guardian, February 11, 2003
It is now plain that Mr Bush and Tony Blair have largely failed to persuade Europe, the Arab world (and many Americans) that there is no alternative to the early use of pre-emptive force. It is evident that the objection of France, Germany, Russia and China to a premature aborting of UN inspections is but the tip, to use Hans Blix's metaphor, of an iceberg of popular opposition. It is condescending to imply, as Mr Blair seems to, that people have not understood what is at stake. They do. Nor is it convincing to suggest that other national leaders fail to appreciate the threat of terrorism and proliferation. In decrying a cure more dangerous than the disease, they are in part responding to informed public opinion in a way Mr Bush and Mr Blair have failed to do so far.
Congress bars use of Total Information Awareness on Americans
Adam Clymer, New York Times, February 12, 2003
House and Senate negotiators have agreed that a Pentagon project intended to detect terrorists by monitoring Internet e-mail and commercial databases for health, financial and travel information cannot be used against Americans.
The conferees also agreed to restrict further research on the program without extensive consultation with Congress.
House leaders agreed with Senate fears about the threat to personal privacy in the Pentagon program, known as Total Information Awareness. So they accepted a Senate provision in the omnibus spending bill passed last month, said Representative Jerry Lewis, the California Republican who heads the defense appropriations subcommittee.
Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the subcommittee, said of the program, "Jerry's against it, and I'm against it, so we kept the Senate amendment." Of the Pentagon, he said, "They've got some crazy people over there."
Pass the duct tape
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, February 12, 2003
Mr. Powell was so eager to publicize Osama's statements that he broke the news himself at a Senate Budget Committee hearing, hours before Al Jazeera even acknowledged it had the tape.
He said the tape showed that Osama was "in partnership with Iraq," and proved that the U.S. could not count simply on a beefed-up inspection force in Iraq.
In the past, Condi Rice has implored the networks not to broadcast the tapes outright, fearing he might be activating sleeper cells in code.
But this time the administration flacked the tape. And Fox, the official Bush news agency, rushed the entire tape onto the air.
So the Bushies no longer care if Osama sends a coded message to his thugs as long as he stays on message for the White House?
Baghdad back flip
Colin Powell's cynical reversal
William Saletan, Slate, February 11, 2003
If you want to know why people don't trust what the United States says about Iraq, get a load of what Secretary of State Colin Powell said this morning.
On Oct. 7, 2001, Arab TV superstation Al Jazeera aired a video in which Osama Bin Laden suggested that he was fighting for Iraq and Palestine. "One million Iraqi children have thus far died in Iraq although they did not do anything wrong," Bin Laden protested. "Israeli tanks and tracked vehicles also enter to wreak havoc in Palestine … and we hear no voices raised."
When Powell testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee later that month, he dismissed Bin Laden's claims. "We cannot let Usama bin Laden pretend that he is doing it in the name of helping the Iraqi people or the Palestinian people," said Powell. "He doesn't care one whit about them. He has never given a dollar toward them. He has never spoken out for them."
That was then; this is now. Tuesday morning, Powell testified before the Senate Budget Committee. He warned that Al Jazeera would soon air a new Bin Laden statement in which "once again he speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq. This nexus between terrorists and states that are developing weapons of mass destruction can no longer be looked away from and ignored."
FEEL-GOOD IMPERIALISM
Fouad Ajami, Professor and Director of Middle East Studies at John Hopkins University, provides an eloquent articulation of an American vision for the Middle East. He encourages the Bush administration to be undaunted by charges of unilateralism or imperialism and while his position may be heartfelt, it pays no more than lip service to acknowledging the flaw in the foundation of all such reformist zeal. Americans know little and care less about the rest of the world - including the Middle East. The ultimate challenge of all American imperialists and champions of global democracy is how they can sustain the attention of politicians and a public whose concerns are overwhelmingly domestic.
As for any protestations from Arabs themselves, Ajami sees no reason to exercise any caution and suggests that, like it or not, America has the responsibility to assert its beneficent power over a region that is incapable of helping itself.
Even (or perhaps especially) for readers who vehemently disagree with Fouad Ajami's position, this is essential reading.
Iraq and the Arabs' future
Fouad Ajami, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2003
There should be no illusions about the sort of Arab landscape that America is destined to find if, or when, it embarks on a war against the Iraqi regime. There would be no "hearts and minds" to be won in the Arab world, no public diplomacy that would convince the overwhelming majority of Arabs that this war would be a just war. An American expedition in the wake of thwarted UN inspections would be seen by the vast majority of Arabs as an imperial reach into their world, a favor to Israel, or a way for the United States to secure control over Iraq's oil. No hearing would be given to the great foreign power.
America ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal of this anti-Americanism as the "road rage" of a thwarted Arab world -- the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds. There is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region. Indeed, this is one of those settings where a reforming foreign power's simpler guidelines offer a better way than the region's age-old prohibitions and defects.
Oil plays starring role in plans for post-Hussein Iraq
David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor, February 11, 2003
It sounds simple enough: If America overthrows Saddam Hussein's Iraq, that nation's vast oil reserves could serve as a kind of bank account to fund rebuilding and humanitarian relief.
But that plan - the subject of ongoing White House discussion - faces a host of potential complications, from oil-field sabotage to wrangling by Iraqis and Western powers over stakes in the industry.
One thing is certain: Even if oil is not America's prime motive in confronting Iraq (as some Bush critics allege), the resource figures centrally in US plans.
Exiled
Janine Zacharia, New Republic, February 10, 2003
At 1,100 feet above sea level, in a Kurdish leader's compound in the town of Salahuddin, Iraq, Iraqi National Congress (INC) head Ahmed Chalabi and a group of fellow opposition leaders had hoped in January to declare themselves leaders of a government in exile. The White House appeared to have endorsed the conference via Special Envoy and Ambassador-at-Large for Free Iraqis Zalmay Khalilzad at a December conference in London. And the day before the January 15 Salahuddin meeting, opposition leaders were sitting with Khalilzad at his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, poring over logistics.
But the conference never happened. The opposition's official rationale for canceling was that the United States could not provide adequate security. American officials, however, say that's not true. The conference, now tentatively rescheduled for February 15, was in fact put off more for political reasons than security ones. And those political concerns are symptomatic of a more serious rift. Since December, the United States has grown disillusioned with the exiles and is increasingly shunting them off into relatively minor advisory tasks. Washington has already settled on a former American military figure--not an exile leader--who will probably run Iraq's civil administration for an indefinite period immediately after a war. In return, the exiles, who believe they should be in charge of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, are growing increasingly disillusioned with the United States.
Vulnerable but ignored: how catastrophe threatens the 12 million children of Iraq
Leonard Doyle, The Independent, February 12, 2003
"They come from above, from the air, and will kill us and destroy us. I can explain to you that we fear this every day and every night." – Shelma (Five years old)
It is not Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, but Iraq's 12 million children who will be most vulnerable to the massive use of force that the US plans to unleash against their country in the coming months. With or without UN Security Council backing, the looming war on Iraq will have immediate and devastating consequences for the country's children, more vulnerable now than before the 1991 Gulf War.
A team of international investigators – including two of the world's foremost psychologists – have conducted the first pre-conflict field research with children and concluded that Iraqi children are already suffering "significant psychological harm" from the threat of war.
The team was welcomed into the homes of more than 100 Iraqi families where they found the overwhelming message to be one of fear and the thought of being killed. Many live in a news void, with little information concerning the heightened threat of war.
The road better not taken
Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly, February 5, 2003
The imminent U.S. attack on Iraq will be the first war in our history in which success is as fearful a prospect as failure. When we "win," our troubles will just begin. How we win will determine their gravity.
U.N. urged to consider human cost in Iraq
Jill Lawless, Associated Press, February 11, 2003
Amnesty International urged the United Nations Tuesday to confront the human cost of war on Iraq and prepare for a humanitarian disaster that could be worse than during the 1991 conflict.
The group expressed concern a war could intensify Saddam Hussein's repression of the Iraqi people and endanger millions weakened by more than a decade of international sanctions.
"What we want to do is shine a light on the situation of the people in Iraq," Amnesty Secretary-General Irene Khan told reporters in London. "At the moment the discussion has been all about missiles and not about people."
The wimps of war
Paul Krugman, New York Times, February 11, 2003
George W. Bush's admirers often describe his stand against Saddam Hussein as "Churchillian." Yet his speeches about Iraq — and for that matter about everything else — have been notably lacking in promises of blood, toil, tears and sweat. Has there ever before been a leader who combined so much martial rhetoric with so few calls for sacrifice?
Or to put it a bit differently: Is Mr. Bush, for all his tough talk, unwilling to admit that going to war involves some hard choices? Unfortunately, that would be all too consistent with his governing style. And though you don't hear much about it in the U.S. media, a lack of faith in Mr. Bush's staying power — a fear that he will wimp out in the aftermath of war, that he won't do what is needed to rebuild Iraq — is a large factor in the growing rift between Europe and the United States.
Why might Europeans not trust Mr. Bush to follow through after an Iraq war? One answer is that they've been mightily unimpressed with his follow-through in Afghanistan. Another is that they've noticed that promises the Bush administration makes when it needs military allies tend to become inoperative once the shooting stops — just ask General Musharraf about Pakistan's textile exports.
The banning of Rabbi Lerner
David Corn, The Nation, February 10, 2003
War looms. Troops are moving into place. Administration officials refuse to discuss alternatives. And everyday George W. Bush has some new rhetorical device to turn up the heat. The game is over. The game is really over. I mean it: the game is really, really over. Americans opposed to (or skeptical about) this war are desperately trying to mount preemptive protests, as conquest--bombing, invasion and occupation--nears. Antiwar actions have been organized for the weekend of February 15 and 16, to coincide with protests around the world. In the United States, the main events will be demonstrations held in New York and San Francisco. This could be the last chance the antiwar warriors have before the cruise missiles fly. Yet the peaceniks pulling together the San Francisco march and rally may have tainted their efforts by allowing the banning of Rabbi Michael Lerner as a speaker.
Among Iraqi exiles, frustration with a tight-lipped US
Cameron W. Barr, Christian Science Monitor, February 10, 2003
An exiled leader of Iraq's majority Shiite community, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, is frustrated that US officials are not sharing their vision for Iraq after the fall of President Saddam Hussein.
"The problem is that they do not mention their intentions and they do not declare what they will do in the future as far as the Iraq issue is concerned. This is not only our problem; it's the problem of all the Iraqi opposition [and] the neighboring countries," asserts Mr. Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
DEMOCRACY FOR IRAQ
If Iraq is about to become the Bush administration's launch pad for the democratization of the Middle East, this plan appears to be based on a uniquely American conception of democracy: government of the people (of Iraq), by the people (approved by the US), for the people (of the US).
U.S. plans for two-year occupation of Iraq
Jonathan Wright, Reuters, February 11, 2003
"How this transition will take place is perhaps opaque at the moment. Hopefully there will be people who come up and want to be part of the government," Grossman [representing the State Department] said.
"There are enormous uncertainties," added [Under Secretary of Defense] Feith. "The most you can do in planning is develop concepts... That's our problem. We have been thinking this through as precisely as we can, given the uncertainties."
Some of the senators expressed incredulity at the state of the Bush administration's planning and several said they regretted Senate approval last year of military action.
"There is no informed consent. The American people have no notion of what we are about to undertake. They believe it will be swift and successful and largely bloodless," said Joseph Biden of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the committee.
"It's going to be expensive and it's going to take a long, long time. It's better to lay that out now," said Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.
The Republican chairman of the committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana, also faulted the administration for its belated and incomplete planning. "Oil will not go away until you make clear how you will manage the oilfields. It needs to be finalized urgently," he added. [...]
[Grossman] said the Iraqi opposition in exile would not be allowed to control decisions for all Iraqis. "While we are listening to what the Iraqis are telling us, the United States government will make its decisions based on what is in the national interest of the United States," he added.
We are punting for the coffin corner
Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle, February 11, 2003
Let me bring up an aspect of the proposed war against Iraq that has so far not gotten a lot of public notice: dead people.
The object of war is not dead people, but many people die anyway. Sometimes the winning side has more dead people than the losing side, leading one to consider what "winning" may mean in this context.
Colin Powell presented an effective case in the United Nations that Saddam Hussein is probably guilty of a lot of things, which is something we already knew. The quarrel was never there; the quarrel was with the construction "and therefore we must . . ."
After Iraq
The plan to remake the Middle East
Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker, February 10, 2003
Has a war ever been as elaborately justified in advance as the coming war with Iraq? Because this war is not being undertaken in direct response to a single shattering event (it's been nearly a year and a half since the September 11th attacks), and because the possibility of military action against Saddam Hussein has been Washington's main preoccupation for the better part of a year, the case for war has grown so large and variegated that its very multiplicity has become a part of the case against it. In his State of the Union address, President Bush offered at least four justifications, none of them overlapping: the cruelty of Saddam against his own people; his flouting of treaties and United Nations Security Council resolutions; the military threat that he poses to his neighbors; and his ties to terrorists in general and to Al Qaeda in particular. In addition, Bush hinted at the possibility that Saddam might attack the United States or enable someone else to do so. There are so many reasons for going to war floating around—at least some of which, taken alone, either are nothing new or do not seem to point to Iraq specifically as the obvious place to wage it—that those inclined to suspect the motives of the Administration have plenty of material with which to argue that it is being disingenuous. So, along with all the stated reasons, there is a brisk secondary traffic in "real" reasons, which are similarly numerous and do not overlap: the country is going to war because of a desire to control Iraqi oil, or to help Israel, or to avenge Saddam's 1993 assassination attempt on President George H. W. Bush.
Yet another argument for war, which has emerged during the last few months, is that removing Saddam could help bring about a wholesale change for the better in the political, cultural, and economic climate of the Arab Middle East. To give one of many possible examples, Fouad Ajami, an expert on the Arab world who is highly respected inside the Bush Administration, proposes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that the United States might lead "a reformist project that seeks to modernize and transform the Arab landscape. Iraq would be the starting point, and beyond Iraq lies an Arab political and economic tradition and a culture whose agonies have been on cruel display." The Administration's main public proponent of this view is Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who often speaks about the possibility that war in Iraq could help bring democracy to the Arab Middle East. President Bush appeared to be making the same point in the State of the Union address when he remarked that "all people have a right to choose their own government, and determine their own destiny—and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom."
Even those suffering from justification fatigue ought to pay special attention to this one, because it goes beyond the category of reasons offered in support of a course of action that has already been decided upon and set in motion. Unlike the other justifications, it is both a reason for war and a plan for the future. It also cries out for elaboration. Democracy is a wonderful idea, but none of the countries in the Middle East, except Israel and Turkey, resemble anything that would look like a democracy to Americans. Some Middle Eastern countries are now and have always been ruled by monarchs. Some are under the control of an ethnic or religious group that represents a minority of the population. Saudi Arabia and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan are the world's only major nations named after a single family, and in Saudi Arabia the royal family functions as, in effect, the country's owner. Most Middle Eastern countries don't even make the pretense of having freely elected parliaments; in Iran, for example, candidates have to be approved by the mullahs. And the very problem that democracy in the Middle East is meant to solve—rising Islamic radicalism, encouraged or tolerated by governments that see it as a way to propitiate their increasingly poorer and younger populations—makes the prospect of elections dangerous, because anti-American Islamists might win.
Sneers from across the Atlantic
Anti-Americanism moves to W. Europe's political mainstream
Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, February 11, 2003
It can be emotional, spontaneous and contradictory. It has no leader, no platform and no ideology. It varies from country to country in its roots and its manifestations. It doesn't even have an accepted name: Those most strongly identified with it indignantly deny they advocate or practice it.
Still, anti-Americanism, West European-style, is widespread, rising and migrating from its traditional home among left-wing intellectuals, academics and cafe society to the political mainstream, according to analysts, critics and public opinion polls. Countries such as France, Germany and Britain, which for more than five decades have been the closest allies of the United States, are beginning to drift away, propelled by a popular wave of concern, alarm and resentment. The immediate focus might be U.S. policy toward Iraq, but the larger emerging theme is an abiding sense of fear and loathing of American power, policies and motives.
Can we justify killing the children of Iraq?
Jonathan Glover, The Guardian, February 5, 2003
If a war is to be justified, at least two conditions have to be met. The war has to prevent horrors worse than it will cause. And, as a means of prevention, it has to be the last resort. Killing people should not be considered until all alternative means have been tried - and have failed.
Those supporting the proposed war on Iraq have claimed that it will avert the greater horror of terrorist use of biological or nuclear weapons. But this raises questions not properly answered. It is not yet clear whether Iraq even has these weapons, or whether their having them would be more of a threat than possession by other countries with equally horrible regimes, such as North Korea. No good evidence has been produced of any link to terrorist groups. Above all, there is no evidence of any serious exploration by the American or British governments of any means less terrible than war. Is it impossible to devise some combination of diplomacy and continuing inspection to deal with any possible threat? Is killing Iraqis really the only means left to us?
The question of oil is inevitable in Iraq
Marego Athans, Baltimore Sun, February 11, 2003
...even in the best-case scenario - a relatively short, bloodless war that leaves Iraq's 1,500 oil wells intact and replaces Saddam with a friendlier leader - Iraq's oil industry would be fraught with economic and political uncertainties that could even discourage investment, analysts say.
Foremost is the hurdle of rebuilding the country, estimated to cost from $200 billion to $400 billion, and the risk of doing so amid potential civil wars among ethnic groups. Rehabilitating Iraq's oil operations to bring production up to its projected potential of 6 million barrels a day - more than triple what it exported last year under a U.N.-sponsored "oil-for-food" program - would take about a decade and cost an additional $40 billion to $50 billion, analysts say.
In the short term, Iraq's wells are capable of pumping about 3 million barrels a day, which would generate from $12 billion to $15 billion in annual revenues, assuming oil prices remain strong. That is far short of the revenue needed to rebuild the country.
"You get the sense some people in Washington, particularly hawkish members of the administration, have spent Iraqi oil revenue 10 times over before they've even gotten in there," said Raad Alkadiri, an analyst at PFC Energy, an oil and gas consulting firm in Washington.
"There isn't that much Iraqi revenue to spend. To say you can rehabilitate the country, pay for an occupation and revive the economy all at the same time is ludicrous."
Saying no to war
James Carroll, Boston Globe, February 11, 2003
Don't be fooled by Colin Powell. With testimony before the UN Security Council last week, the secretary of state brought many formerly ambivalent politicians and pundits into the war party. But that is a measure of how callow the entire American debate over war against Iraq has been. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein is up to no good. Powell's indictment confirmed the Iraqi's malfeasance, although with no surprises and no demonstration of immediate threat. The question, rather, is what to do about Saddam's malevolence.
Don't be fooled by Donald Rumsfeld, either. The secretary of defense said in Munich on Saturday, ''The risks of war need to be balanced against the risks of doing nothing while Iraq pursues weapons of mass destruction.'' Just as Powell fudged on what the question is, Rumsfeld fudged on there being no alternative to war. Ongoing and ever more robust inspections, like those proposed by France and Germany, are an alternative to war. Containment is an alternative to war. And an aggressive application of the principles of international law is an alternative to war.
Powell's prosecutorial summary of the case against Saddam should have been prelude not to further warmongering but to a legal indictment of the Iraqi leader for crimes against humanity. In what court, you ask, and under what jurisdiction? America's imminent war takes on an absurd -- and also tragic -- character in the light of what else is happening right now. Last week the International Criminal Court was initiated with the formal election of judges. Next month the court will be official. Its purpose is exactly to deal with offenses like those of which Saddam stands accused. A forceful indictment in such a forum, followed by a trial, verdict, and world-enforced sentence, has an unprecedented potential for a laser-like release of transforming moral energy.
The court intends on the world scene what has already happened within nations -- the replacement of violent force with the force of law. A true alternative to war.
But the 139 nations that signed the agreement no longer include the United States, since George W. Bush ''unsigned'' that treaty early in his term. The US refusal to participate in the new world court makes it irrelevant to the present crisis, but that refusal also lays bare the world's gravest problem -- an American contempt for the creation of alternatives to war.
Lobbying for peace
Peter Dreier, The Nation, February 10, 2003
All social movements need an "outside" strategy and an "inside" strategy. The growing number of people participating in rallies and marches in opposition to President George W. Bush's plans to invade Iraq is heartening. The participants in protest events have included large numbers of ordinary Americans with no experience as activists and no ideological ax to grind. They think Bush's war plans are premature or reckless.
But most Americans who oppose Bush's war plans don't show up for these protests. Polls show that since last October, when--under the pressure of the November elections--Congress voted to give Bush the broad authority he asked for to use military force against Iraq, and to act alone if necessary, Americans have become more ambivalent, hesitant and skeptical about going to war with Iraq. In growing numbers, Americans now oppose giving a free hand to a President with an itchy trigger finger. Without an "inside" strategy that gives people more conventional ways to voice their dissent, however, the peace movement will appear smaller and more marginal than it really is.
I beg you, Mr Blair: listen to the world's women
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, February 10, 2003
The terrible things to come are in the hands of a war-lust gang of men once again, with the exception of Condoleezza Rice, who looks anything but warlike in her demure fashion.
But then such women are always on hand, albeit very few compared to the vast number of indomitable male warrior-leaders through history – Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Madeleine Albright were as ruthless as the worst of men. When the American journalist Lesley Stahl asked Ms Albright in 1996 what she felt about the fact that more Iraqi children appeared to have died as a result of sanctions than did in Hiroshima, the cold reply was: "This is a hard choice but the price, I think, is worth it."
So I won't make any simplistic assertions about man-unkind, women-kind. But a female view of this war does need to raise a scream, because we are nearly there and no rational arguments have dented the warlike ambitions of Mr Bush and Mr Blair. I wake up crying after frightful dreams, guilt too, that my nation is becoming such a bully in a volatile world where already too much misery and fear are present.
So I beg you Sirs, I plead: listen to the women in the Middle East, in Iraq, in the UK and the US. Look at your own families. (A black US congressman, Charlie Rangle, has just called for conscription into the US armed forces to be reintroduced after he discovered that only one national politician has a son in the army. These wars are easier to go into when you and yours are as safe as can be). Mrs Blair wept on camera in front of the nation because her oldest son was going to university an hour and a half away. She asked us to understand her feelings, how hard, how worrying it all is when our children leave home.
Today this mother, and feisty human-rights lawyer, sleeps with a man who cannot be thinking about the silent Iraqi homes where no children will be coming home during vacations or where they will howl as they watch the delivery of the bloodied bodies of their fathers (conscripts, none of them the sons of President Saddam or Tariq Aziz, the deputy leader, or any of the elite) and perhaps their mothers, uncles, cousins, neighbours.
Saudis plan to end U.S. presence
Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times, February 9, 2003
Saudi Arabia's leaders have made far-reaching decisions to prepare for an era of military disengagement from the United States, to enact what Saudi officials call the first significant democratic reforms at home, and to rein in the conservative clergy that has shared power in the kingdom.
Senior members of the royal family say the decisions, reached in the last month, are a result of a continuing debate over Saudi Arabia's future and have not yet been publicly announced. But these princes say Crown Prince Abdullah will ask President Bush to withdraw all American armed forces from the kingdom as soon as the campaign to disarm Iraq has concluded. A spokesman for the royal family said he could not comment.
Pentagon officials asked about the Saudi decisions said they had not heard of any plan so specific as a complete American withdrawal. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers involved were Saudis, members of both parties in Congress have urged broad reform in the conservative kingdom.
Why the U.S. fears Europe
William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, February 11, 2003
Despite Secretary of State Colin Powell's brief appearance center-stage last Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the Bush administration's star of the week, seeking the political destruction of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and regime change in Germany.
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This seems the real current priority of the Bush administration and its more ardent supporters in the press. Germany seems to Washington the vulnerable member of the resistance by "old Europe" to the Bush administration's Iraq policy. France is regarded as a hopeless case.
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President George W. Bush can hardly have been surprised that Schröder made opposition to an Iraq war part of his campaign platform in the parliamentary election last September: Bush, too, is a killer politician who knows a winning issue and how to use it. But he is shocked that Schröder has stuck with his promise to the electorate. The U.S. administration and its supporters believe that the precedent the chancellor set by running on an anti-American issue must not be allowed to stand. He must be humiliated as an example to others.
Food running out in Gaza as aid appeal fails
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, February 11, 2003
More than a million Palestinians, already suffering economic collapse, growing unemployment and malnutrition levels comparable to those in Congo, are threatened with food shortages because western governments have turned their backs on a UN appeal for funds.
The UN Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa says its plea for about £60m to feed 1.1m people in the occupied territories has fallen flat, even though the intifada and Israeli retaliation have driven Palestinians to new depths of poverty.
The people of Gaza, trapped behind barbed wire backed by Israeli guns, are the worst off. Unrwa says the warehouses will be empty within weeks.
Its commissioner general, Peter Hansen, said: "If we don't get money coming in soon we will have a rupture in the food distribution which will be very serious, as we already have malnutrition levels of 22% among children, and that is bound to rise if food aid stops."
Two years ago Unrwa fed about 11,000 people in the Gaza Strip, mostly widows and those with no means of support. Today it feeds 715,000: more than half the population.
Even so nearly one in four are malnourished, it says. The children's agency, Unicef, says child malnutrition is comparable to Congo and Zimbabwe.
War split puts Nato's future in jeopardy
Roger Boyes, Elaine Monaghan and Melissa Kite, The Times, February 10, 2003
An extraordinary schism opened up in the Western alliance yesterday as Washington flatly rejected a Franco-German plan to avert war by pouring UN weapons inspectors — and troops — into Iraq.
President Putin of Russia last night backed the plan to turn Iraq into a de facto UN protectorate, due to be published on Friday, but President Bush and his leading officials bluntly declared that the United States would go it alone if the United Nations Security Council refused to approve military action.
Later today the deepening transatlantic rift over Iraq is expected to plunge Nato into one of the deepest crises of its 54-year history when Belgium, France and probably Germany veto a decision to start contingency planning to defend Turkey in the event of a war.
Conflict with Iraq echoes Vietnam, yet no one hears
Sarah Fritz, St. Petersburg Times, February 10, 2003
The Vietnam War was a searing experience for this nation. For nearly a quarter-century after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saigon, we as a nation likened every potential conflict to the war in Vietnam. But now that we are on the verge of a war that has more similarities to Vietnam than anything since then, almost everyone seems reluctant to make the comparison. We seem bored with the Vietnam analogy.
One person who is not yet tired of thinking about Vietnam is Daniel Ellsberg, the former military officer who leaked the Pentagon Papers. In an interview published in the Jan. 27 issue of Editor & Publisher, Ellsberg accused the American press of failing to report dissent within the government to Bush's assertion that Hussein poses a threat to our security.
"There is as much lying going on (now) as in Vietnam, as in Iran-Contra, as in the Catholic Church sex scandal, as in Enron -- you can't have more lying than that, and that's how much we have," Ellsberg said.
"The first lie is: Saddam represents the No. 1 danger to U.S. security in the world. To allow the president and Rumsfeld to make that statement over and over is akin to them saying without being challenged from the press that they accept the flat-earth theory. . . . More dangerous than al-Qaida? North Korea? Russian nukes loose in the world? An India-Pakistan nuclear war?"
Revisit the Ellsberg interview
Sanity and justice slipping away
Ashcroft rolls over legal rights to pursue a demented terror suspect
Jonathan Turley, Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2003
From the beginning, however, there was doubt that Moussaoui was ever a part of the conspiracy, and there is growing agreement that he is a barking lunatic. Now the Justice Department is facing the prospect of losing all or part of its high-profile case to a hate-spewing, rug-chewing maniac. Worse still, the government's growing disaster is of its own making.
Lacking any meaningful evidence linking Moussaoui to the 9/11 plot, the government wrote an indictment that reads like a bad dime-store novel, describing shadowy figures and loosely imputing their actions to Moussaoui. A central character in this criminal novelette is alleged 9/11 mastermind Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who figures so prominently in the indictment that the government named him an unindicted co-conspirator.
That made Bin al-Shibh a material witness in the case, but the Justice Department was not concerned about his being called to confirm these facts because Bin al-Shibh was at large and believed to be possibly dead. That changed last September when a very much alive Bin al-Shibh was arrested in Pakistan.
Under interrogation, Bin al-Shibh has reportedly given the CIA some valuable information, but also one highly unwelcome tidbit: Al Qaeda thinks Moussaoui is as crazy as we do.
Making nuclear bombs 'usable'
Richard T. Cooper, Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2003
The Pentagon has launched a fast-track program to develop computers that would help decide when nuclear weapons might be used to destroy deep underground bunkers harboring weapons of mass destruction or other critical targets, documents show.
The program, described in unpublished Pentagon documents obtained by The Times, seeks to design an array of high-speed computers that could take in structural and other data on a prospective underground target, calculate the amount of force needed to destroy it, then determine whether a nuclear "bunker buster" would be required.
In addition, the system — supplemented by teams of experts — would assess the potential for killing nearby civilians and inflicting other collateral damage, including the spread of radioactive dust thrown into the air by the nuclear device and the dispersal of toxic chemicals from weapons in the bunker.
The $1.26-billion program is the latest step in a little-publicized campaign by some senior administration officials, members of Congress and their supporters in the defense community to press for a new generation of smaller nuclear weapons as an alternative to the huge but obsolescent strategic missiles of the Cold War.
The final means of persuasion...bribes
Marion McKeone, Sunday Herald, February 9, 2003
Last week the US stepped up its policy of talking tough while carrying a big cheque book. Even as Bush told the council to ''make up its mind soon'' over military action, or the US would sidestep the UN and launch an attack with a coalition of allies, diplomats were promising everything from increased economic and military aid to moderate Arab states, to a share of Iraq's oil reserves to fretful Europeans.
A citizen's response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America
Wendell Berry, Orion Magazine, March-April, 2003
The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation. Its central and most significant statement is this:
While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists... (p. 6)
A democratic citizen must deal here first of all with the question, Who is this "we"? It is not the "we" of the Declaration of Independence, which referred to a small group of signatories bound by the conviction that "governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed." And it is not the "we" of the Constitution, which refers to "the people [WB's emphasis] of the United States."
This "we" of the new strategy can refer only to the president. It is a royal "we". A head of state, preparing to act alone in starting a preemptive war, will need to justify his intention by secret information, and will need to plan in secret and execute his plan without forewarning. The idea of a government acting alone in preemptive war is inherently undemocratic, for it does not require or even permit the president to obtain the consent of the governed. As a policy, this new strategy depends on the acquiescence of a public kept fearful and ignorant, subject to manipulation by the executive power, and on the compliance of an intimidated and office dependent legislature. To the extent that a government is secret, it cannot be democratic or its people free. By this new doctrine, the president alone may start a war against any nation at any time, and with no more forewarning than preceded the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
War torn
Despite their hatred of Saddam Hussein, many Iraqis living in the U.S. oppose Bush's war
Peter Byrne, SF Weekly, February 5, 2003
As teams of FBI agents fan out across America looking for 50,000 Iraqis to question about their loyalties -- Saddam or Dubya?, you decide -- they are expected to concentrate their efforts in Michigan, Texas, and California. So at least some of the several thousand Iraqi people who live in the Bay Area -- many of whom fled their country after Saddam Hussein seized power -- will probably hear a knock on the door in the not-too-distant future.
Many Bay Area Iraqi émigrés are U.S. citizens, professionals educated in American universities who have established businesses, bought homes in affluent suburbs, and raised their children as middle-class Americans. Some belong to mosques, some to Christian churches. They are, like most Americans, divided by class, gender, age, and political preferences. And like the public at large, some favor invading Iraq, while others are strongly opposed.
Rome resists Bush's plea for a blessing on aggression
Ray Cassin, The Age, February 9, 2003
While US Secretary of State Colin Powell was telling the UN Security Council that it must either accept that it is time for war or consign itself to irrelevance, US diplomats around the world were busy trying to sell the Bush doctrine of preventive war as something other than what it is: an admission that the US will use military force as an instrument of policy.
One instance of this in the past week was the attempt by the US ambassador to Australia, Tom Schieffer, to stifle criticism of the Bush doctrine and its implications by Labor MPs. It was arrogant and clumsy, but at least the ambassador's antics let us know what Washington really thinks of the alliance. When a diplomat thinks it acceptable to suggest that certain subjects be off-limits in the parliamentary debates of the country to which he is accredited, he is behaving as an agent of empire.
But Australia is a very small part of the world stage, and the Bush Administration will not be greatly concerned about what is said here. Of far more importance, from Washington's point of view, is the line being taken in the capitals of Europe, a part of the world at which it likes to sneer but whose moral endorsement it continues to seek. "Old Europe" is the preferred tag when sneering.
Essentially, it refers to any part of Europe where government is either sceptical about US policy on Iraq or openly opposed to it; hence, it chiefly means France and Germany.
But the most intriguing, and most futile, part of the US diplomatic offensive is being directed at the oldest institution in Old Europe, the papacy. The Vatican has resolutely refused to endorse either the notion of preventive war in general or an invasion of Iraq in particular.
The American imperium
Robert Novak, Chicago Sun-Times, February 10, 2003
After pondering Powell's presentation during a sleepless night, one conservative Republican e-mailed a friend his concern about a U.S. strategy for ''remaking the entire Middle East.'' He added: ''It's not that I care one whit whether or not Iraq is a crummy little dictatorship, but I do care that once we cross the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, we may have started down the road to a Pax Americana through an American imperium from which there is no return.''
Weapons, rhetoric, and the looming war with Iraq
Scott Ritter, speech delivered in Tokyo, February, 2003
Despite repeated rhetoric concerning a "coalition of the willing", there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the looming war with Iraq is very much an American war, and decisions pertaining to this conflict are the sole purview of Washington, DC. The United Nations may fret and debate over issues of war and peace, and there still yet may be a role for the Security Council in providing a veil of legitimacy for any attack on Iraq through the passage of an authorizing resolution, but the trigger will be pulled by the White House. As such, the one-two punch delivered by Hans Blix and President Bush in the form of, respectively, the weapons inspection status report to the Security Council (January 27) and the State of the Union Address (January 28) is best evaluated in terms of its impact on American audiences, both domestic and political.
US fury at European peace plan
Ian Black, Richard Norton-Taylor and Julian Borger, The Guardian, February 10, 2003
The Bush administration reacted with rage last night to a Franco-German initiative to extend arms inspections in Iraq, portraying the plan as a thinly disguised attempt to derail the US timetable for war.
With relations between the three nations plummeting, leaders on both sides of the divide made no attempt to hide their growing contempt. Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, called on Paris and Berlin last night to study the UN resolution which they had backed. "What France has to do and what I think Germany has to do ... is read 1441 again."
The Franco-German plan, revealed at the weekend, would triple the number of UN weapons inspectors and back them up with surveillance flights. One unconfirmed report said thousands of UN troops would be sent into Iraq to support the inspectors.
The emergence of the plan just days before the US is expected to press the case for military action at the UN was greeted with unalloyed anger by the White House. To heighten the sense of irritation, Berlin said it would put the joint plan before the security council on Friday, just hours after the chief weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix, is to present his crucial report.
'Patriotism is not enough'
Christian conscience in a time of war
Peter J. Gomes, Sojourners Magazine, January-February, 2003
This fall I was in a large suburban Presbyterian church in Kansas City. I found that almost everyone in that large congregation had our present war fever on his or her heart and mind. These were not by any means your garden-variety leftists or pacifists, who form the usual list of suspects, and these were not Cambridge crunchies, by any means. This was Kansas, for heaven's sake—Alf Landon and Bob Dole country—and these were Presbyterians. They love their country, and they love their God; and what do you do when your country is headed where you think your faith and your God don't want you to go?
How can we have an intelligent conversation on the most dangerous policy topic of the day without being branded traitors, self-loathing Americans, anti-patriotic, or soft on democracy? That's a good question, especially when even the president of the United States questions the patriotism of those few in the U.S. Senate who question his policy or challenge his authority to wage war at will. Must the first casualty of patriotism always be dissent, debate, and discussion?
The Iraq Bush will build
Jason Burke, Gaby Hinsliff and Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, February 9, 2003
Every Thursday morning for many weeks the inner circle of President George Bush's administration - Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser; Colin Powell, the Secretary of State; Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary; senior figures from the CIA - have gathered in the White House's Oval Office for a progress meeting on the 'war on terror'. There was one question an increasingly frustrated Bush asked every week: once the allies had got rid of Saddam, 'what do we do with Iraq?'
He has been getting conflicting answers. Infighting within the administration continues. However, a scheme, finally, has been thrashed out.
The plan is in three stages: first, US-led military rule; second, a transitional phase with an American military governor ruling alongside a civilian leader appointed by (or at least acceptable to) the international community; and, finally, handover to a regime sympathetic to and nurtured by Washington.
Iraq disarmament plan gains support
BBC News, February 9, 2003
Russia has said it will support a Franco-German plan aimed at averting war with Iraq.
The plan reportedly calls for the tripling of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, banning Iraqi flights anywhere over the country and deploying UN peacekeepers.
German Defence Minister Peter Struck said the proposal would be presented to the United Nations Security Council on Friday - the same day the chief UN weapons inspectors present their second critical report on Iraqi co-operation.
The plan seems certain to deepen a growing rift between the United States and European countries over how to ensure Iraq disarms.
Small nations' last defense
Those threatened by U.S. preemption seek a shield in weapons of mass destruction
William M. LeoGrande and Kenneth E. Sharpe, Los Angeles Times, February 9, 2003
The world may be about to get even more dangerous.
President Bush believes that a preemptive military strike against Iraq will force other states to think twice before acquiring chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. It's more likely to have the opposite effect. Small powers will have a greater incentive to acquire weapons of mass destruction as their only deterrent against the whims of the world's only superpower.
Historically, one refuge for small powers has been international law. If great powers accepted an international legal framework, they might use military force less arbitrarily. For a time in the post-Cold War world, the United Nations offered hope of such an international order based on law, multilaterally enforced.
Small states have also tried to protect themselves by doing nothing to threaten great powers. Success depends on the goodwill and restraint of great powers, or at least the predictability of their actions. Finland's relationship with the former Soviet Union is a classic example.
The Bush administration's doctrine of military preemption has undercut these security strategies. Its willingness to wage war unilaterally means that small countries can no longer look to the international community to brake U.S. decisions to use force against them. If a small state isn't a U.S. ally, it's all the more likely to come under the gun of Washington. What's more, it doesn't even have to present a clear and present danger to U.S. security to warrant an attack. It need only have the potential to develop such a threat sometime in the future.
Powell doesn't know who he is up against
Jason Burke, The Observer, February 9, 2003
Al-Zarqawi is not an al-Qaeda operative. If there is a link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein he is not it. His story is the story of modern Islamic militancy. It is also the story of why the American-led 'war on terror' risks backfiring badly. Al-Zarqawi is not even, on close examination, an 'al-Qaeda associate', as Powell claimed. Primarily, al-Zarqawi is part of a broad movement of Islamic militancy that extends well beyond the influence and activities of any one man. This is a movement that is rooted in broad trends in the Middle East, in the economic, social and political failure of governments, both locally and in the West, to fulfil the aspirations of hundreds of millions of people. Islamic militancy is a multivalent, diverse and complex phenomenon. Focusing on individuals, even bin Laden, is a ludicrous oversimplification.
The missing link?
Jason Burke, The Observer, February 9, 2003
Shahab was arrested early in 2001 trying to cross from the Kurdish-controlled section of northern Iraq to Baghdad's territory. He was on his way from Iran. The pictures that the deputy chief of investigations had shown me had been printed from an undeveloped film found in his pocket. Shahab had confessed to being an Iraqi agent who had been sent to kill someone in the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the Baghdad-backed terrorist group operating within Iran. Quite who he had killed and why wasn't immediately clear to me. Nor apparently to his Kurdish captor's who were slightly vague about why he had been given a seven year prison sentence. However the contract killing was only part of his story.
For the first six months of his imprisonment he had kept the rest to himself. Then, in October 2001, he told a fellow prisoner who told the guards who told the deputy chief of investigations. When, in the early spring, a reporter from The New Yorker was in Sulamaniya Shahab told him too. The resulting story was published in March with the headline 'The Threat of Saddam' and announced that 'the Kurds may have evidence of [Saddam's] ties to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.' There were a number of possible links raised by the article but the main tie between al'Qaeda and Saddam was Shahab.
There were obvious reasons why hawks in Washington are keen to find such links. The joint FBI and CIA investigation into a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague reported last year by Czech intelligence had proved that Atta was almost certainly in the US at the time of the alleged meeting. The lack of evidence to inculpate Saddam was presenting a problem. It still is. The New Yorker's story thus caused some excitement and its author was interviewed by CNN.
Truth behind US 'poison factory' claim
Luke Harding, The Observer, February 9, 2003
If Colin Powell were to visit the shabby military compound at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain, he might be in for an unpleasant surprise. The US Secretary of State last week confidently described the compound in north-eastern Iraq - run by an Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam - as a 'terrorist chemicals and poisons factory.'
Yesterday, however, it emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind - more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere - only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.
US intelligence photo of "terrorist chemicals and poisons factory" (click on Slide 39 for larger image).
Starving North Korea pleads for aid amid nuclear standoff
Jonathan Watts, The Observer, February 9, 2003
North Korea is appealing to the outside world for assistance as aid workers and diplomats in Pyongyang warn that this impoverished state is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
In a rare direct entreaty to international public opinion, the top government official responsible for disaster prevention urged donors not to cut support because of the country's ongoing nuclear stand-off with the US.
'Please let the world know of the needs of our country,' said Yun Su-chang, head of the Flood Damage Rehabilitation Committee. 'Some countries, such as the United States, are trying to link food with politics. That is a flagrant violation of humanitarian principles.
'Our people are trying to overcome their problems, but we face a shortage of food. I sincerely hope that international humanitarian assistance will continue.'
The appeal, made during an exclusive interview with The Observer, is remarkable for a proudly defiant country that would usually rather starve than try to elicit sympathy.
That it came through the media - rather than quietly behind the scenes through the UN - underlines the desperate concern of the North Korean government as international donations of food have dried up since the start of the nuclear crisis.
MI6 and the CIA: The new enemy within
Raymond Whitacker, New Zealand Herald, February 9, 2003
Tony Blair and George Bush are encountering an unexpected obstacle in their campaign for war against Iraq - their own intelligence agencies.
Britain and America's spies believe that they are being politicised: that the intelligence they provide is being selectively applied to lead to the opposite conclusion from the one they have drawn, which is that Iraq is much less of a threat than their political masters claim.
Worse, when the intelligence agencies fail to do the job, the politicians will not stop at plagiarism to make their case, even "tweaking" the plagiarised material to ensure a better fit.
A just war or geopolitical strategy?
William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, February 8, 2003
The question implicitly asked of Secretary of State Powell at the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday was whether this war would be a just war.
It is the persisting question in the minds of people inside and outside the United States. Popular opinion may not know the criteria established for just war in the Middle Ages, as international law was struggling to be born. But common sense tells us whether or not a war makes sense.
The principles are that the war must have a grave cause and be the last resort, all peaceful solutions having been tried in vain. There is supposed to be convincing evidence that the war will do more good than harm. The "right intention" is supposed to exist: The country launching war is not supposed to be acting to serve its narrow political interests or for material profit.
Despite Powell's presentation, not only governments, but much of the public - certainly the Western, as well as Middle Eastern public - seems unconvinced that these conditions exist today.
Worst-case scenario in Iraq war nightmarish
Paul Koring, Toronto Globe and Mail, February 8, 2003
A Scud missile tipped with nerve gas slams into Jerusalem. Iraq's vast oil fields are ablaze, spawning an environmental catastrophe. U.S. troops suffer huge casualties in bitter street-to-street fighting in Baghdad. Millions of refugees destabilize Turkey and Iran.
Wars, even lopsided ones, rarely go according to plan. The nightmare scenarios if U.S. President George W. Bush launches an attack to oust Saddam Hussein range from the horrific but improbable -- a wider Middle East war that goes nuclear -- to a likely Iraqi scorched-desert retreat that could create huge problems for advancing U.S. troops.
US severs last ties with Iraq
Agence France Presse, February 9, 2003
The United States announced the closure of its Interests Section in the Polish Embassy in Baghdad and urged all US citizens to get out of the country, severing its final diplomatic link with Iraq in a move that normally precedes war.
The State Department late on Friday also issued a travel warning for Iraq "to reflect the temporary closure" of the interests section.
"No consular services are available to US citizens at this time in Iraq," said the warning.
"The US government continues to urge all citizens to avoid travel to Iraq. US citizens in Iraq should depart."
The State Department simultaneously moved to cut its diplomatic presence across the Middle East in countries and territories "within Scud missile range of Iraq".
Justice Dept. draft on wider powers draws quick criticism
Adam Clymer, New York Times, February 8, 2003
A storm of liberal criticism erupted today over a Justice Department draft of legislation to increase the law enforcement powers it won in 2001 in the U.S.A. Patriot Act.
Although a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Barbara Comstock, insisted that the draft represented nothing more than staff discussions, copies were sent to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and to Vice President Dick Cheney in his capacity as president of the Senate.
The 80-page draft, marked "Confidential — Not for Distribution Draft Jan. 9, 2003," was posted in midafternoon on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, www.publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/home.asp. It was quickly scrutinized and denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union and Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
Daily drills, nightly blackouts: North Korea is certain it's next on the US list
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, February 7, 2003
While the world has its eyes on the steady march to war in Iraq, the people of Pyongyang are also bracing for conflict.
Tension has been a fact of life in this country, the most militarised on the planet with an army of 1.1 million soldiers and vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.
But it reached a new pitch yesterday when the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, labelled the north a terrorist regime, raising fears here that this country will be next after Iraq in Washington's war on terror. Reports claim that the US aircraft carrier, Kittyhawk, has sailed into a "strike position" off the country's east coast. Certainly, Washington has put two dozen bombers on alert for deployment to the region.
War and wisdom
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, February 7, 2003
In the 1980's Libya was aggressively intervening abroad, trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, losing air battles with American warplanes and dabbling in terrorism. Its terrorists bombed a Berlin nightclub patronized by American soldiers and blew up a Pan Am airliner over Scotland. Libya was never a military power on the scale of Iraq but was more involved in terror; indeed, one could have made as good a case for invading Libya in the 1980's as for invading Iraq today.
But President Ronald Reagan wisely chose to contain Libya, not invade it — and this worked. Does anybody think we would be better off today if we had invaded Libya and occupied it, spending the last two decades with our troops being shot at by Bedouins in the desert?
The choice for Iraq's rag-tag army: be killed by the US or by Saddam
Luke Harding, The Guardian, February 8, 2003
For Private Abass Shomail the war in Iraq ended before it had even begun. Two days ago Abass slipped away from his sentry post and started running in darkness across the muddy frontline. He stumbled past the newly dug trenches designed to protect Iraq's conscript army from American bombardment.
He kept going. Eventually he found himself in a rolling landscape of green hills and pine trees, the Kurdish self-rule enclave in the north of Iraq. Abass was the first deserter from the Iraqi military to cross into Kurdistan for several months. Yesterday, in an interview with the Guardian, he gave a unique insight into the condition of the Iraqi army on the eve of an imminent and massive US attack.
US Jews feel rising heat of Israel debate
Jane Lampman, Christian Science Monitor, February 6, 2003
In the third year of the latest tragic phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, American Jews are beginning to renew their long debate over whether open discussion of Israeli and US policies contributes to a stronger Israel or threatens its survival.
The community has always been uncomfortable with the public airing of critical views of any Israeli government, Jewish leaders say. At a time of terrorist bombings, many see it as anathema.
"It is detrimental when American Jewish groups pressure Israel for concessions that could endanger its safety," says Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America.
But others feel strongly that failing to speak out on what they view as a slippage in democratic values and a devaluing of negotiations is no longer acceptable.
Pope and Germany stand together over Iraq
Claire Soares, Reuters, February 7, 2003
Pope John Paul and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer made a joint appeal for a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis on Friday after holding private talks at the Vatican.
"Both sides are very concerned about the threat of a war, the humanitarian consequences, the consequences for regional stability and the long-term consequences in the whole region," Fischer told reporters after meeting the 82-year-old Pontiff.
The Vatican, which gave its tacit backing to U.S. action in Afghanistan after September 11, considering it a case of "just war," said it remained resolutely against war on Iraq.
"The Holy See reiterated its position, expressed in numerous documents and interventions, in favor of peace and respecting international rights," Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said after the meeting. "The responsibility of all parties to avoid the emergence of a tragic conflict was also underlined."
The pope and the German government have openly opposed Washington's case for military action in Iraq.
See also Germany seethes over Rumsfeld jibe, protests planned
Tyranny of words and war
Antonia Zerbisias, Toronto Star, February 6, 2003
...despite its publication last November, there has been almost zero mention of one of the most considered post 9/11 books, Collateral Language: A User's Guide To America's New War (NYU Press). Several data base searches turned up nothing except two mentions by The Independent's Robert Fisk, a brave and brilliant journalist held in very low regard by those who will brook no criticism of the so-called "war on terror."
Collateral Language is no tribute to the Twin Towers dead, or a quickie look at the intelligence community. This is original stuff, the kind of book that should have received great notices and extensive publicity, if only for how it frames and defines our post-9/11 perceptions of the world.
Edited by St. Lawrence University's John Collins and Ross Glover, it is an anthology of 14 essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines.
What they do is examine the tyranny of the new vocabulary, asking exactly what 14 words and phrases such as evil, freedom, jihad, terrorism and the-war-against- (fill in the blank) have come to mean today. They also ask what the moral and ethical implications are of using these words in these new ways.
For more information about this book, go to Amazon.
Toting the casualties of war
Newsmaker interview, BusinessWeek Online, February 6, 2003
Beth Osborne Daponte was a 29-year-old Commerce Dept. demographer in 1992, when she publicly contradicted then-Defense Secretary Richard Cheney on the highly sensitive issue of Iraqi civilian casualties during the Gulf War. In short order, Daponte was told she was losing her job. She says her official report disappeared from her desk, and a new estimate, prepared by supervisors, greatly reduced the number of estimated civilian casualties.
Although Cheney said shortly after the 1991 Gulf War that "we have no way of knowing precisely how many casualties occurred" during the fighting "and may never know," Daponte had estimated otherwise: 13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid, and the water system, she calculated.
In all, 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict, she concluded, putting total Iraqi losses from the war and its aftermath at 158,000, including 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and 32,195 children.
Bush orders guidelines for cyber-warfare
Rules for attacking enemy computers prepared as U.S. weighs Iraq options
Bradley Graham, Washington Post, February 7, 2003
The current state of planning for cyber-warfare has frequently been likened to the early years following the invention of the atomic bomb more than a half-century ago, when thinking about how to wage nuclear war lagged the ability to launch one.
The full extent of the U.S. cyber-arsenal is among the most tightly held national security secrets, even more guarded than nuclear capabilities. Because of secrecy concerns, many of the programs remain known only to strictly compartmented groups, a situation that in the past has inhibited the drafting of general policy and specific rules of engagement.
In a first move last month to consult with experts from outside government, White House officials helped arrange a meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that attracted about 50 participants from academia and industry as well as government. But a number of participants expressed reservations about the United States engaging in cyber-attacks, arguing that the United States' own enormous dependence on computer networks makes it highly vulnerable to counterattack.
GEORGE, TONY, AND SADDAM - ALL PLAYING THE SAME GAME?
The US and British administrations poured scorn on the weapons report that Iraq presented to the UN in early December, accusing the Iraqis of recycling old information. Now the boot's on the other foot.
Blair's indictment of Saddam: Based on plagiarized student paper
Julian Rush, Channel 4 News (UK), February 6, 2003
The [British] government's carefully co-ordinated propaganda offensive took an embarrassing hit tonight after Downing Street was accused of plagiarism.
The target is an intelligence dossier released on Monday and heralded by none other than Colin Powell at the UN yesterday.
Channel Four News has learnt that the bulk of the nineteen page document was copied from three different articles - one written by a graduate student.
See also The Guardian's UK war dossier a sham, say experts
Is war now unstoppable?
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, February 7, 2003
Militarily and diplomatically, war on Iraq seems increasingly inevitable, perhaps within a month, barring the most unexpected events in Baghdad.
In a host of developments yesterday, the Pentagon said 113,000 US troops were in the Gulf, on course for the target of 150,000 the accepted minimum for a war by 15 February. An important unit, the 20,000-strong 101st Airborne Division, was ordered to the Gulf.
Geoff Hoon, the British Defence Secretary, told MPs that Britain was quadrupling its air strength in the Gulf to about 100 jets and 27 helicopters, roughly the same as in the 1991 war. Britain has already committed 35,000 troops, including a quarter of its army and its biggest naval task force in 20 years, for a possible conflict.
In Ankara, Turkish MPs permitted Washington to upgrade military bases and ports that could be used in a war on its neighbour. On 18 February it will hold a second vote, which is expected to approve the deployment of US troops. This in effect would allow a second invasion front to bear down on Baghdad from the north.
The timetable is becoming clear. Despite assurances that US forces, with their air power and night-fighting capabilities, could wage war in any season, the Pentagon would vastly prefer to fight in the relative cool of late winter or early spring.
And politically, a war cannot be delayed a year to early 2004. By then the presidential primaries will be in full swing. A war of self-defence is one thing. For George Bush to launch an unprovoked war months before he comes up for re-election is another. It is now or never.
Resist war and empire
Michael T. Klare, The Nation, February 6, 2003
With up to 200,000 American and British combat troops already stationed in or on their way to the Persian Gulf area, war with Iraq looks increasingly imminent. This war can still be stopped, but the antiwar movement should begin planning for what it must do if it is not. The next step is to expand the movement into a permanent opposition to the Administration's imperial design.
The nuclear bomb hoax
Imad Khadduri (former Iraqi nuclear scientist), Yellow Times, February 7, 2003
In his speech in front of the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, Colin Powell did not offer any viable new evidence concerning Iraq's nuclear weapon capability that Bush and his entourage continue to wave as a red flag in front of the eyes of the American people to incite them shamefully into an unjust war.
Funds in doubt for Pentagon's cyber-spy plan
Audrey Hudson, Washington Times, February 6, 2003
Privacy advocates from the political left and right are joining forces with Congress to stop funding of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a cyber-surveillance system labled by critics as a "supersnoop" system.
A measure blocking the program passed the Senate last month but must survive the House and Senate conference committee this week. The measure was added as an amendment to a 2003 omnibus spending bill.
"The folks behind this amendment aren't exactly a group that flocks together for every possible issue," said Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat and the amendment's sponsor.
"Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives are raising their voices and saying they don't want their government snooping on law-abiding Americans. The program amounts to unleashing virtual bloodhounds," Mr. Wyden said.
Why Hussein sees history on his side
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, February 6, 2003
Gambling yet again with his rule, his life, and the fate of one of the most powerful nations in the Middle East, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein appears unfazed by the rising pressure brought to bear by the United States.
Almost nightly on Iraqi television Mr. Hussein calmly waves a Cuban cigar, exhorts his generals to prepare for war, and denies the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Hussein is an inveterate survivor. Longtime Hussein watchers say hopeless odds to him are simply an opportunity to seal his place in history. "You could make the case that [Hussein] thinks he is protected by Providence, and to some extent there is evidence for that," says Andrew Krepinevich, a former US Army strategic planner who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "Saddam feels that he is a man on a mission, and that somehow he will be allowed to complete it."
A dove's guide: how to be an honest critic of the war
Matthew Parris, The Times, February 1, 2003
...a certain kind of doveish commentator's position can be summed-up thus: "I'm against war because I'm not convinced Iraq is harbouring weapons of mass destruction, but even if they are I'm against war because the UN has not authorised it, but if they do I'm against war because an invasion would prove a military fiasco, but even if it didn't I'm against war because toppling Saddam would destabilise Iraq, but even if it didn't I'm against war because it will antagonise moderate Arab opinion."
This will not do. It is not honest. As an avowed dove, let me warn of seven deadly pitfalls for fellow doves:
1) Don't kid yourself that Saddam might really have nothing to hide. Of course he does. He's a mass-murderer and an international gangster: a bad man running a wicked Goverment; the British Prime Minister and the US President are good men running good Governments.
2) Don't hide behind the UN. The organisation may in the end be browbeaten into "authorising" an attack. If it really is your judgment that an attack would be morally wrong or practically hazardous, how could UN endorsement make it wise?
3) Don't count on France, Germany or Russia to maintain their opposition to war. They may just be holding out for improved offers.
4) Don't attach yourself to predictions about the military outcome. If the Pentagon thinks an invasion could easily succeed, the Pentagon may be right.
5) Don't become an instant pundit on internal Iraqi politics, and how Shias, Kurds and Sunnis will be at each other's throats when Saddam falls. You do not know that.
6) Don't assume that moderate Arab opinion will be outraged. Moderate Arab opinion likes winners. America may be the winner.
7) Don't get tangled up in conspiracy theories about oil. It is insulting to many principled and intelligent people in the British and US administrations to say that this can be understood as an oil-grabbing plot. Besides, you drive a car, don't you? Is the security of our oil supplies not a consideration in foreign policy?
Mobilizing a theater of protest. Again.
Julie Salamon, New York Times, February 6, 2003
When Sam Hamill, a poet and founder of Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Wash., was invited to a poetry symposium by Laura Bush last month, his response was to send e-mail messages to 50 friends and colleagues asking them for antiwar poems to send to Mrs. Bush. In four days he received 1,500 responses.
"I didn't know there were 1,500 poets in America," he said. After learning of the protest, the White House postponed the symposium on the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Noelia Rodriguez, Ms. Bush's press secretary, said: "While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum."
For those opposing war with Iraq, the cancellation of the poetry symposium symbolizes the part the arts can play in politics. Hearing the drumbeat of a new war, through readings, concerts, art exhibitions and theater, artists are trying to recapture their place as catalysts for public debate and dissent.
You wanted to believe him – but it was like something out of Beckett
Robert Fisk, The Independent, February 6, 2003
Sources, foreign intelligence sources, "our sources," defectors, sources, sources, sources. Colin Powell's terror talk to the United Nations Security Council yesterday sounded like one of those government-inspired reports on the front page of The New York Times – where it will most certainly be treated with due reverence in this morning's edition. It was a bit like heating up old soup. Haven't we heard most of this stuff before? Should one trust the man? General Powell, I mean, not Saddam.
Powell's one good reason to bomb Iraq
David Corn, The Nation, February 6, 2003
Asuming all his assertions are true, Powell has provided cause to be concerned about an al Qaeda-Iraq alliance. But is the picture so clear that conquest and occupation is the only option? Does the United States want to assume control of a country because there were contacts between its security services and al Qaeda several years ago? But here's the first question that struck me after Powell's presentation: why hasn't the United States bombed the so-called Zarqawi camp shown in the slide? The administration obviously knows where it is, and Powell spoke of it in the present tense. If it is an outpost of chemical weapons and explosives development for al Qaeda, why not take it out, especially since it is situated within a part of Iraq uncontrolled by any national government? The United States has fighter jets patrolling the northern no-fly zone in Iraq. Cruise missiles could easily reach the area. This part of Powell's briefing reinforced a crucial point: al Qaeda is the pressing danger at the moment. The most direct way to strike al Qaeda would be to hit this camp, rather than invade Iraq. So bombs away, but only for this target--regardless of what the French might say.
Powell at the UN: Another step forward on the road to Baghdad
Ian Williams, Foreign Policy in Focus, February 5, 2003
Colin Powell's presentation did not immediately effect any road to Baghdad conversion in the UN Security Council, but it was not intended to. As advertised, the evidence contained no smoking guns, and since much of what Powell said was sourced to anonymous defectors, it lacked the dramatic conviction of a named and visible witness. However, it was more effective in reinforcing the existing suspicions of Security Council members that Iraq was hiding weapons programs from inspectors.
He was much less effective in persuading other members of Iraqi links with al Qaeda. Most of the speakers in the Security Council politely ignored that part of his presentation, presuming it was aimed for internal American consumption, since it clearly has strictly limited export potential. Even Tony Blair has been backpedaling on this version of "Six Degrees of Separation," since he seems to listen more to his own intelligence agencies than does President George W Bush--and he has to confront a skeptical House of Commons.
Ironically, Powell's speech certainly also convinced many members that the U.S. had been holding back information from the UN inspectors, leading to a gently implicit rebuke to Washington. Council members repeatedly called on "all countries" to share immediately any evidence they have with Messrs Blix and El Baradei. What they were asking in a timorously polite way was, "why did you not tell the inspectors?" After all Powell himself had said that they were "inspectors, not detectives," so why not provide the occasional clue?
Powell's dubious case for war
Phyllis Bennis, Foreign Policy in Focus, February 5, 2003
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5 wasn't likely to win over anyone not already on his side. He ignored the crucial fact that in the past several days (in Sunday's New York Times and in his February 4th briefing of UN journalists) Hans Blix denied key components of Powell's claims.
Blix, who directs the UN inspection team in Iraq, said the UNMOVIC inspectors have seen "no evidence" of mobile biological weapons labs, has "no persuasive indications" of Iraq-al Qaeda links, and no evidence of Iraq hiding and moving material used for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) either outside or inside Iraq. Dr. Blix also said there was no evidence of Iraq sending scientists out of the country, of Iraqi intelligence agents posing as scientists, of UNMOVIC conversations being monitored, or of UNMOVIC being penetrated.
Further, CIA and FBI officials still believe the Bush administration is "exaggerating" information to make their political case for war. Regarding the alleged Iraqi link with al Qaeda, U.S. intelligence officials told the New York Times, "we just don't think it's there."
Mixed message
George C. Wilson, National Journal, February 4, 2003
As President Bush stands on the knife-edge of launching America's first preventive war, a case can be made that he is spurring rather than discouraging the development of weapons of mass destruction—his stated casus belli for invading Iraq.
Just look at the words and actions of Bush and his lieutenants over the last two years through the eyes of Iraq and other "evil" countries.
N Korea threatens US with first strike
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, February 6, 2003
North Korea is entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike against the US rather than wait until the American military have finished with Iraq, the North's foreign ministry told the Guardian yesterday.
Warning that the current nuclear crisis is worse than that in 1994, when the peninsula stood on the brink of oblivion, a ministry spokesman called on Britain to use its influence with Washington to avert war.
"The United States says that after Iraq, we are next", said the deputy director Ri Pyong-gap, "but we have our own countermeasures. Pre-emptive attacks are not the exclusive right of the US."
Don't mention the war in Afghanistan
The near collapse of peace in this savage land is a narrative erased from the mind of Americans
Robert Fisk, The Independent, February 5, 2003
There's one sure bet about the statement to be made to the UN Security Council today by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell – or by General Colin Powell as he has now been mysteriously reassigned by the American press: he won't be talking about Afghanistan.
For since the Afghan war is the "successful" role model for America's forthcoming imperial adventure across the Middle East, the near-collapse of peace in this savage land and the steady erosion of US forces in Afghanistan – the nightly attacks on American and other international troops, the anarchy in the cities outside Kabul, the warlordism and drug trafficking and steadily increasing toll of murders – are unmentionables, a narrative constantly erased from the consciousness of Americans who are now sending their young men and women by the tens of thousands to stage another "success" story.
Ex-U.N. inspector sees attack on Iraq this month
Reuters, February 5, 2003
Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine who spent seven years as a weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, told journalists in Tokyo that a narrow, U.S.-led coalition would likely launch an attack on Iraq after failing to persuade the United Nations of the need for military action.
"I see a massive aerial bombardment beginning by the end of February," he said. "I see ground troops crossing into Iraq in significant numbers in early March, and I don't see this war finishing any time soon." [...]
An attack on Iraq might also alarm the isolated state of North Korea into a pre-emptive strike on U.S. troops and their allies in Asia, Ritter said.
"North Korea, having seen the United States eliminate Iraq in violation of international law, is not going to simply sit back and wait for the Americans to come," he said.
Richard Perle: France, "our erstwhile ally" must be contained
Martin Walker, UPI, February 5, 2003
France is no longer an ally of the United States and the NATO alliance "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance" the head of the Pentagon's top advisory board said in Washington Tuesday.
Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now chairman of the Pentagon's Policy Advisory Board, condemned French and German policy on Iraq in the strongest terms at a public seminar organized by a New York-based PR firm and attended by Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and security officials. [...]
"France is no longer the ally it once was," Perle said. And he went on to accuse French President Jacques Chirac of believing "deep in his soul that Saddam Hussein is preferable to any likely successor." [...]
Perle went on to question whether the United States should ever again seek the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council on a major issue of policy, stressing that "Iraq is going to be liberated, by the United States and whoever wants to join us, whether we get the approbation of the U.N. or any other institution."
"It is now reasonable to ask whether the United States should now or on any other occasion subordinate vital national interests to a show of hands by nations who do not share our interests," he added.
Powell aide promises talks with N. Korea
Under pressure from anxious senators, Armitage says for first time that a direct exchange will occur
Sonni Efron, Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2003
Facing a barrage of critical questions from senators about U.S. policy toward North Korea, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage promised for the first time Tuesday that the Bush administration would hold direct talks with the regime in Pyongyang.
"Of course we're going to have direct talks with the North Koreans. There's no question about it," Armitage told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Pyongyang has pressed for one-on-one talks, but the United States had insisted that the regime must first abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Senators from both parties raised sharp questions about why the administration is dealing with Iraq and North Korea so differently, why it waited so long to take action to stop North Korea's nuclear program, and how it intends to repair relations with South Korea, which have been frayed by the confrontation.
In doubt we trust
War talk deserves skepticism, not a blank check
Benjamin R. Barber, Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2003
The Bush administration is releasing small pieces of intelligence in dribs and drabs to make its circumstantial case for war with Iraq. Hints were dropped in the State of the Union message, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell promises more at the Security Council today.
In making the case for war, there is one thing on which President Bush and his critics agree: It's all about trust. The leaders of eight European countries who signed on to the war effort in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal and European papers last week didn't make a judgment on the evidence; they argued that history and the North Atlantic alliance demanded that Europe trust America.
But if the case for war rests on trust, there are good reasons why this president, like any powerful democratic leader, needs to be distrusted.
N. Korea's nuclear plans were no secret
U.S. stayed quiet as it built support on Iraq
Walter Pincus, Washington Post, February 1, 2003
In November 2001, when the Bush administration was absorbed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, intelligence analysts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory completed a highly classified report and sent it to Washington. The report concluded that North Korea had begun construction of a plant to enrich uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons, according to administration and congressional sources.
The findings meant that North Korea was secretly circumventing a 1994 agreement with the United States in which it promised to freeze a nuclear weapons program. Under that deal, the North stopped producing plutonium.
Now, however, there was evidence that the North was embarking on a hidden quest for nuclear weapons down another path, using enriched uranium.
Although the report was hand-delivered to senior Bush administration officials, "no one focused on it because of 9/11," according to an official at Livermore, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons laboratories. An informed member of Congress offered the same conclusion.
US goes soft on Iraqi link to al-Qaeda
Michael Smith and David Rennie, The Telegraph, February 4, 2003
It is the attempt by the White House and the Pentagon to make a definite link between al-Zarqawi [a "leading member" of al-Qaeda], Ansar al-Islam [Kurdish Islamic fundamentalist group] and Saddam Hussein that has infuriated many within the US intelligence community and left British colleagues in amazement.
"The intelligence is practically non-existent," one exasperated American intelligence source said. Most of the intelligence being used to support the idea of a link between al-Qaeda and Mr Saddam comes from Kurdish groups who are the bitter enemies of Ansar al-Islam, he said.
"It is impossible to support the bald conclusions being made by the White House and the Pentagon given the poor quantity and quality of the intelligence available.
"There is uproar within the intelligence community on all of these points, but the Bush White House has quashed dissent and written out those analysts who don't agree with their views," the source said.
False trails that lead to the al-Qaeda 'links'
Ed Vulliamy, Martin Bright, and Nick Pelham, The Observer, February 2, 2003
Since the aftermath of 11 September, it has been the Holy Grail of Bush administration hardliners: to link Iraq with al-Qaeda - and join up its war on terrorism with its policy of regime change in Baghdad.
Last week it was promised again, first by President George Bush in his State of the Union address and later by Tony Blair, who said he 'knew' of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. US Secretary of State Colin Powell says those links will be revealed this week. But with only weeks before the expected outbreak of war, sceptics are asking how real - and how new - the evidence of that link will be.
That Saddam Hussein has supported terrorism in the past, as claimed by Bush, is no revelation. It is well-documented and accepted at times even by Iraq. Iraq has played host to the Abu Nidal Organisation; it has publicly offered cash incentives to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and Saddam's intelligence agents were implicated in a plot to kill George Bush senior.
But the question that remains unresolved is whether there is any evidence that Saddam is in bed with al-Qaeda. The answer is likely to devolve to two lines of investigation - both of which, Bush administration officials will say, lead directly from Saddam to al-Qaeda.
WOLFOWITZ-PERLE NOMINEE TIPPED TO REPLACE SADDAM
Unfazed by charges that Ahmed Chalabi misused funds provided by the State Department for supporting an Iraqi opposition group or the fact that Chalabi was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in jail for fraud committed in Jordan, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have remained staunch supporters of the man now tipped to replace Saddam Hussein.
US chooses Saddam's successor
Tom Allard, Sydney Morning Herald, February 4, 2003
The United States has chosen a successor to Saddam Hussein from Iraq's notoriously fractious opposition groups, according to a former Iraqi diplomat who lives in Sydney.
Mohamed al-Jabiri, who has just returned from in talks with Washington, said the White House has given its "blessing" to the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, to lead a transitional coalition government in Iraq once Saddam has been deposed.
Dr al-Jabiri, who talked to Mr Chalabi over the phone last month, said: "He told me that he would take over. He has the blessing of the White House and the State Department."
See also Tinker, banker, neoCon, spy - Ahmed Chalabi's long and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad
Sen. Rockefeller questions Iraq focus
Ken Guggenheim, Associated Press, February 4, 2003
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee says he's concerned that the Bush administration's focus on Iraq is draining resources from the fight against terrorism.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he believes Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization remains a bigger danger to Americans than Iraq and that he hasn't seen information yet that would justify a war now against Saddam Hussein.
Former top Iraqi scientist says Iraq has no nukes
Jeffrey Hodgson, Reuters, February 3, 2003
A former high-level Iraqi nuclear scientist, now living in Canada, said on Monday there is no way Iraq could possess nuclear weapons and the United States is exaggerating the potential threat for its own purposes.
Dr. Imad Khadduri, who joined the Iraqi nuclear program in 1968 and was part of a team trying to develop a nuclear bomb in the 1980s, said Iraq's weapons program fell into shambles after the Gulf War and could not possibly have been resurrected.
"All we had after the war from that nuclear power program were ruins, memoirs, and reports of what we had done...on the nuclear weapon side I am more than definitely sure nothing has been done," he told Reuters in an interview.
See also Iraq's nuclear non-capability
To crush the poor
George Monbiot, The Guardian, February 4, 2003
The United States has been at war in Colombia for over 50 years. It has, however, hesitated to explain precisely who it is fighting. Officially, it is now involved there in a "war on terror". Before September 2001, it was a "war on drugs"; before that, a "war on communism". In essence, however, US intervention in Colombia is unchanged: this remains, as it has always been, a war on the poor.
There is little doubt that the Farc, the main leftwing rebel group, has been diverted from its original revolutionary purpose by power politics and the struggle for the control of drugs money. It finances itself partly through extortion and kidnap. Whether it could fairly be described as a terrorist network, though, is open to question. What is unequivocal is that the great majority of the country's political killings are committed not by Farc or the other rebels but by the rightwing paramilitaries working with the army. Their task is to terrorise the population into acquiesence with the government's programmes.
The purpose of this unending war is to secure those parts of the country that are rich in natural resources for Colombian landowners and foreign multinationals.
U.S. bombers on alert to deploy as warning to North Koreans
David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, New York Times, February 4, 2003
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has put 24 long-range bombers on alert for possible deployment within range of North Korea, both to deter "opportunism" at a moment when Washington is focused on Iraq and to give President Bush military options if diplomacy fails to halt North Korea's effort to produce nuclear weapons, officials said today.
The White House insisted today that Mr. Bush was still committed to a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Any decision to bolster the considerable American military presence near North Korea was simply what Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, called making "certain our contingencies are viable."
IMPERIAL AMBITIONS AND A SENSE OF PLACE
The flaw embedded in almost every imperial design is that the designers are casting their eyes across territory that they neither know nor can ever truly claim as their own. Attempting to govern places that the governers choose not to inhabit has always resulted in the creation of fabricated boundaries that dishonor people, their land and their history. One such imaginery boundary is the Durand Line, a British invention that was intended to exclude the unruly Afghans from British India. It is no accident that this is the location of the latest flashpoint in America's unfinished war in Afghanistan.
In wild mountains, the threat to G.I.'s rises
David Rhode, New York Times, February 2, 2003
The latest front in the war against terror revealed itself last week: Pashtunistan, the loosely defined and largely ungoverned mountain-tribesmen's land astride the Afghan-Pakistani border.
It was there that American soldiers, a few miles inside Afghanistan, abruptly found themselves in the fiercest fighting in 10 months. At least 18 Taliban fighters were killed near dozens of caves apparently used as a way station for smuggling Taliban arms and supplies from Pakistan.
As a war with Iraq looms, the discovery of the hidden depot may be an omen. While Americans have focused on Iraq, unchecked militancy in Pakistan, particularly in these border areas, has been growing as a threat to American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Also, revisit Robert Kaplan's The lawless frontier
On Iraq, chorus of criticism is loud but not clear
Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, February 3, 2003
As President Bush moves the nation closer to a military confrontation to force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction, an array of domestic opinion-makers have been raising their voices against war.
The past few days alone have seen a spate of critical speeches from politicians of both parties, protests from religious leaders, peace rallies in Washington and other cities, and advertising campaigns attacking the drift to war. A group of 40 American Nobel laureates, including several Pentagon consultants, joined corporate chiefs, academics and former military officials in issuing statements opposing a unilateral attack on Iraq by the United States.
The sound and fury on the streets and op-ed pages reflect deep divisions within the foreign policy establishment over the Bush administration's choice of Iraq as the next target of its war on terrorism. So far, however, there is little sign that the protests will coalesce into a cohesive antiwar movement with sufficient political power to force the administration to reverse or even seriously rethink its Iraq strategy.
Saddam's Arab 'brothers' desert Iraq
Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun, February 2, 2003
Never has the old maxim "hang together or be hanged separately" been more fitting than for the Arab states now quailing before U.S. President George W. Bush's evangelical crusade against Iraq.
The Arab world's startling weakness and subservience to the West has never been more evident than in its open or discreet co-operation with Bush's plans to invade "brother" Iraq. Though 99.99% of Arabs bitterly oppose an American-British attack on Iraq, their authoritarian regimes, which rely on the U.S. for protection from their own people and their neighbours, are quietly digging Iraq's grave.
'I talked myself into pacifism'
Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, February 3, 2003
Standing on the street corner watching the passing traffic is one of America's most wanted. She is an ex-con who served nine months in the forbidding maximum security prison in Lexington, Kentucky. Now she has been fined $10,000 and is facing a 12-year jail stretch. This morning Kathy Kelly is violating American law all over again.
Kelly, 50, is dressed in a plain dark suit and her thick, greying hair hangs down untidily over her shoulders. She clasps a satchel of papers under one arm. Today she is responsible for arranging a small street demonstration. Half a dozen of her friends are positioned further down the road, holding up placards condemning plans for a war in Iraq to passing motorists. "Speak truth to power," says one sign. "No War. Peace," says another.
Her crime? The demonstration is on the banks of the Tigris river in the heart of Baghdad, a city which it is now illegal for US citizens, except journalists, to visit.
The US government has spent a remarkable amount of time and money trying to shut Kelly up. Emboldened by their attempts, she is emerging as perhaps America's most eloquent and active anti-war campaigner. "I am a pacifist. I don't believe warfare is the answer," she says. "I think the world has a responsibility to find other means than reliance on coercion and force to resolve disputes that arise when one country doesn't cooperate with the desires of the world community."
Beginning of the end
The US is ignoring an important lesson from history - that an empire cannot survive on brute force alone
Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, February 3, 2003
With US imperialism openly discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, the debate centres on three critical questions: will the empire corrupt and/or bankrupt the republic; by what administrative techniques should it exercise power; and is it basically benign? The first prompts one of those defining moments in a nation's understanding of itself - what is the US will for imperial power, and what price is it prepared to pay in living standards and civil liberties? Guantanamo Bay, the debate over the use of torture, and growing government spending deficits are a foretaste of what lies ahead. But the key unknown is, can a consumer culture support empire?
The second question is about whether the empire is one of vassal states, propped up with subsidies and American arms (as in Saudi Arabia), or one of invasion and colonisation masquerading under nation-building (as in Afghanistan).
But it is the third question on which the debate hinges. This is where the gulf between the US and the European centre-left yawns widest. American faith in its good intentions remains remarkably undented by a half century of evidence that such simplicity is absurdly naïve (here's hoping the timely remake of The Quiet American will help jolt some strands of American public opinion). Beholden to some shadow of its puritan past, America earnestly hopes to woo the world with the promise of democracy in Baghdad, drinking water in Saddam city.
Europe? Frankly, America doesn't give a damn...
Todd Gitlin, The Guardian, February 3, 2003
Across the vast and tangled expanse of the United States of America, these days it isn't hard to spot disdain and contempt for that reputedly miasmic entity known in Washington as "Europe". Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brought these sentiments to a boil recently when he dismissed the anti-war climate of "Old Europe", meaning the French and German governments. "Old" in his lexicon means loser: not virile, not vigorous, incapable of defending itself against marauders. Old Europe is a museum of that wretched and bloody "history" which Francis Fukuyama famously declared to have "ended".
Rumsfeld's disdain is as old as America, an extension of Europe, which in a certain sense founded itself as the anti-Europe - democratic and neither royal nor aristocratic, vigorous and not effete, pragmatic and not committed to hidebound tradition. In one long strand of American opinion, Europe meant culture, while America meant either nature or God or a combination. But still, America needed Europe - its ideas, its investment, its markets, its unwanted "huddled masses yearning to breathe free", at times its cachet. Beneath the disdain sparkled the green-eyed monster.
Iraqi slum vows to fight U.S. but it couldn't be friendlier
Ian Fisher, New York Times, February 1, 2003
"I am ready to defend my land," said Abdullah Muhammad, 42, a flour merchant, who bent over to show a mangled zipper of a scar on the back of his neck that he said was inflicted by an American round during desert fighting in the Persian Gulf war. "Now it is different from 1991. Now all the world is with us, because we are in the right."
There is, in fact, a difference this time — and it may be the wild card for American soldiers who come here. Iraqi after Iraqi expressed it with a real feeling not always evident when they talk about Mr. Hussein himself: that in 1991, the Americans led a coalition against Iraqi troops who had invaded Kuwait.
This new attack will be a direct assault, perhaps with few allies, on an Iraq that is currently not at war. This nation where civilization stretches back thousands of years wonders why it falls to the United States to determine that their leader, whatever they think of him, must go.
"It is important to understand that in Iraqis' minds they have this conflict: `I want to change my life and I want my leader to go,' " a Western diplomat here said. "At the same time: `I am a nationalist. I am proud of my country. I am humiliated by American policy.' "
"It's a mixed feeling," added the diplomat, who does not believe in the end that Iraqis will fight on the streets. "They are waiting to be liberated, but they are not seeing the Americans as liberators."
Keeping Saddam Hussein in a box
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, New York Times, February 2, 2003
The United States faces a clear choice on Iraq: containment or preventive war. President Bush insists that containment has failed and we must prepare for war. In fact, war is not necessary. Containment has worked in the past and can work in the future, even when dealing with Saddam Hussein.
The case for preventive war rests on the claim that Mr. Hussein is a reckless expansionist bent on dominating the Middle East. Indeed, he is often compared to Adolf Hitler, modern history's exemplar of serial aggression. The facts, however, tell a different story.
Split at C.I.A. and F.B.I. on Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda
James Risen and David Johnson, New York Times, February 2, 2003
The Bush administration's efforts to build a case for war against Iraq using intelligence to link it to Al Qaeda and the development of prohibited weapons has created friction within United States intelligence agencies, government officials said.
Some analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency have complained that senior administration officials have exaggerated the significance of some intelligence reports about Iraq, particularly about its possible links to terrorism, in order to strengthen their political argument for war, government officials said.
At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some investigators said they were baffled by the Bush administration's insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network. "We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there," a government official said.
The economic consequences of war
Vincent Cable, The Observer, February 2, 2003
President Saddam Hussein of Iraq may have another weapon of mass destruction in his armoury - the economic effects of war. Changes in oil prices and the cost of conflict might just produce regime change in Saudi Arabia and recession for us all.
Critics of military intervention in Iraq sometimes allege that the dispute is really about oil. The response is usually defensive, along the lines that troops will be sent to risk their lives for more high-minded objectives like upholding the authority of the United Nations in relation to weapons of mass destruction and human rights.
Yet the potential conflict must be, in significant part, about oil and economics. It is neither irrational nor unworthy to put them at the centre of the debate. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has acknowledged as much. The futures of Iraq and its Gulf neighbours are important, because of oil, in a way that those of Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe and Peru are not.
U.S. arrogance comes home to roost
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, February 1, 2003
Does it matter that we've somehow morphed in public perception from the world's only superpower to the world's super-rogue state?
Of course it matters.
The macho notion that we'll do what we choose and if the world doesn't like it, it can go [insert expletive here] is both ludicrous and dangerous. We mustn't become slaves to foreign opinion, but neither should we glibly dismiss it as we prepare to launch a war that will hugely aggravate this distemper - which will nurture more terrorism.
One example: In 1991 the United States leaned on Saudi Arabia to let us keep military bases there after the Gulf War. We ignored its concerns about public opinion because the bases would improve U.S. security.
Wrong. In fact, the bases radicalized many young Saudis and persuaded Osama bin Laden to turn his sights on the United States. What seemed a shrewd move to improve our security ended up undermining our friends and strengthening our enemies.
Moreover, while the lack of allied support won't prevent us from getting into a war with Iraq, it may prevent us from getting out. The United States sees its role as the globe's SWAT team, but after we have ousted Saddam and whistled for the cleanup crew, it's not clear that the allies will want to help. Nor will they pay the bill for this Iraq war as they did the last one. Each time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insults Europe, it costs us another $20 billion.
It's also possible that if all your friends say you're making a mistake, they're not mendacious back-stabbers but simply right.
A Korean exit strategy for the US
A review of Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and US Disengagement
Sreeram Chaulia, Asia Times, February 1, 2003
Selig Harrison, one of America's finest journalists and foreign-policy analysts, has written on Korean politics for the past three decades. This book is a compendium of his thoughts on ending the convoluted 50-year regional standoff in Northeast Asia, and a reminder that the ball is in the US court to promote progress toward a unified, de-nuclearized and peaceful Korea.
Too often, Western commentators have taken a myopic view of North Korea as an irrational and belligerent "rogue state" that is the source of all troubles. Harrison presents an eagle-eyed historical and strategic sweep to demonstrate that the United States shares a large amount of blame for past tensions in the region and that US postures have to change to ease the path for North-South confederation and ultimate union.
See also U.S. commander seeks buildup in Pacific
The brains behind Bush's war
Todd S. Purdum, New York Times, February 1, 2003
Any history of the Bush administration's march toward war with Iraq will have to take account of long years of determined advocacy by a circle of defense policy intellectuals whose view that Saddam Hussein can no longer be tolerated or contained is now ascendant.
Like the national security experts who were the intellectual architects of the Vietnam War, men like McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow and others branded "The Best and the Brightest" in David Halberstam's ironic phrase, these theorists seem certain to be remembered, for better or worse, among the authors of the most salient evolution of American foreign policy since the end of the cold war: the pre-emptive attack.
Of intimidation and Israel
Jim Lobe, Asia Times, February 1, 2003
Intimidation underlies much of the hawks' rhetoric and comes across very strongly in the administration's National Security Strategy document published in September, which makes clear that the United States favors a uni-polar world in which its military power is unrivalled. In that respect, invading Iraq is meant above all as a "demonstration" of what will happen to "rogue states" with WMD, links to terrorism or anyone else, for that matter, who challenges US supremacy.
"The fastest way to impress one charter member of the axis of evil," argued the Wall Street Journal, a major cheerleader for the hawks, earlier this month, "is to depose another, and sooner rather than later."
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