posted 04-19-2003 03:40 PM            

Friday, April 18, 2003
It's True: 'Liberals' Wanted Saddam to Beat U.S.

Gary Kamiya, executive editor of the left-leaning Internet journal Salon, confirms what some Americans have suspected: Liberals were cheering for the enemy in Iraq, the Washington Times pointed out today in an item headlined "Cheering the enemy."

"I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong," Kamiya wrote. "Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings."

But surely, you object, these "serious, intelligent, morally sensitive" liberals couldn't possibly favor a mass-murdering, torture-loving dictator? Surely they couldn't agree with "Latino studies" assistant professor Nicholas De Genova, who told a cheering crowd of appeasement activists at Columbia University that he "would like to see a million Mogadishus." Think again.

More dead American troops would have been preferred to the "larger moral negative" of a victory that boosted President Bush's chances for re-election, according to the Salon big.

"Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people," Kamiya wrote. "But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative — four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

"Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world."

Thus goes the reasoning at Salon, which is moderate compared to the hateful rantings of some U.S. leftists.

posted 04-19-2003 04:35 PM            

That is the most hilarious Bull$#!+ I have heard to come out of your mouth yet Fastwalker.

It is typical of the NEO-CONS to constantly slander DISSENTERS to prop up FUHRER BU$H.

This war was wrong.

We were never attacked.

Iraq was not a threat to us.

No WMD were found.

Period.

IN CASE YOU FORGOT......

Never cheered on Saddam OR Bu$h.

BOTH are equally evil.

Doesn't require a war for profit to figure that out.

posted 04-19-2003 04:43 PM            

By Ann Talbot of wsws.org
April 19, 2003
http://www.gooff.com/NM/templates/Breaking_News.asp?articleid=842&zoneid=2

Avg. User Rating
Click Here To
Submit Your Review

wsws.org

As the full extent of the looting of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad emerges, it becomes clear that there was nothing accidental about it. Rather it was the result of a long planned project to plunder the artistic and historical treasures that are held in the museums of Iraq.

Had the National Museum of Iraq been looted by poor slum dwellers it would have been crime enough, and the responsibility would have rested with the American administration that refused, despite repeated warnings, to provide for the security of Baghdad’s cultural buildings.

Once the museum staff were able to communicate with the outside world, however, it became apparent that the looting was not random. It was the work of people who knew what they were looking for and came specially equipped for the job.

Dr. Dony George, head of the Baghdad Museum, said, “I believe they were people who knew what they wanted. They had passed by the gypsum copy of the Black Obelisk. This means that they must have been specialists. They did not touch those copies.”

Speaking on Britain’s Channel 4 News, he told Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum that among the artifacts that have been stolen are the sacred vase of Warka, a 5,000-year-old golden vessel found at Ur, an Akkadian statue base, and an Assyrian statue. It was, said Dr. Curtis, “Like stealing the Mona Lisa.”

It was only almost a week after the museum was originally looted that Dr. George was able to alert archaeologists worldwide to what had been stolen. The American military authorities had made no effort to prevent the objects leaving Baghdad or to put in process an international search for the stolen artifacts.

The US reluctance to act cannot be explained by any lack of warning. Professional archaeologists and art historians had told the Pentagon of the danger of looting beforehand. Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum told Channel 4 that the looting was “entirely predictable and could easily have been stopped.”

The museum was the victim of a carefully planned assault. The thieves who took the most valuable material came prepared with equipment to lift the heaviest objects, which the staff could not move from the galleries, and had keys to the vaults where the most valuable items were stored. Not since the Nazis systematically stripped the museums of Europe has such a crime been committed.

The US online publication of BusinessWeek magazine reiterated the theme of premeditation and conspiracy in the looting of Iraq’s museums in an April 17 article headlined “Were Baghdad’s Antiquity Thieves Ready?” The article carries the subtitle: “They may have known just what they were looking for because dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance.”

BusinessWeek writes: “It was almost as if the perpetrators were waiting for Baghdad to fall to make their move. Gil J. Stein, a professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago, which has been conducting digs in Iraq for 80 years, believes that dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance. ‘They were looking for very specific artifacts,’ he says. ‘They knew where to look.’”

Since the last Gulf War in 1991 Iraqi antiquities have flooded onto the market from the museums that were looted then and from archaeological sites that have been attacked with bulldozers. At such locations ancient statues have been sawed apart so they could be exported.

This plundering of Iraq’s cultural heritage has only whetted the appetite of collectors who are already responsible for looting Far Eastern, Latin American and Italian archaeological sites. With the collapse of global stock markets, works of art and antiquities have come to be regarded even more highly as a secure investment, fuelling an already huge underground market.

The illegal trade in antiquities is thought to be as lucrative as drugs trafficking, to which it is often linked. According to a report by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, “The Trade in illicit Antiquities: the Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage,” produced in 2001, London and New York are the main markets for this trade. Switzerland, which allows an art work that has been in the country for five years to be granted a legal title, is a key trans-shipment point.

Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, director of the McDonald Institute at Cambridge, told a press conference at the report’s launch that the trade continued because “The government is in the pocket of the art market, which wants to keep the flow of antiquities.” He added, “It’s a scandal.”

As news of the latest looting broke, the Labour government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair organised a hasty press conference in the British Museum, at which Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell promised official support to protect Iraqi antiquities.

Even as she spoke, the National Library of Iraq was being looted. Home to rare, centuries-old illuminated copies of the Koran and other examples of Islamic calligraphy, as well as irreplaceable historical documents from the Ottoman Empire, the building was set on fire, destroying an untold number of texts.

Reporter Robert Fisk, who saw the flames, ran to get US marines in an attempt to save some of the collection, but they refused to help. Fisk wrote in the Independent, “I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.”

After the fate of Baghdad museum, it can only be concluded that the generalised looting and arson at the library served to cover up a more systematic crime, in which select manuscripts were stolen for wealthy collectors. In the process they connived in the burning of books—another Nazi practice.

The role of the ACCP

In the aftermath of these two devastating attacks on culture, attention has focused on the activities of the American Council for Cultural Policy. Even the British press that works under some of the toughest libel laws in the world has been willing to suggest that the ACCP may have influenced US government policy on Iraqi cultural artifacts.

The ACCP was formed in 2001 by a group of wealthy art collectors to lobby against the Cultural Property Implementation Act, which attempts to regulate the art market and stop the flow of stolen goods into the US. It has defended New York art dealer Frederick Schultz, who was convicted under the National Stolen Property Act, and opposes the use of the 1977 US v. McClain decision as a legal precedent in cases concerning the handling of stolen art objects.

In the McClain case a US judge accepted that all pre-Columbian art or jewellery brought into the US without the express consent of the Mexican government was stolen property. Mexican law regards all archaeological artifacts as state property and bans their export. Mexico is one of a number of countries that has such legislation.

Ashton Hawkins, a leading art lawyer and founder of the ACCP, regards such legislation as “retentionist”. He has condemned the archaeologically rich “source” countries for attempting to protect their archaeological sites and museums by such measures, and has argued that under the Clinton administration such “retentionist” policies came to dominate US government policy.

Hawkins has his sights set on the great Middle Eastern museums. He has called for the Egyptian antiquities that are held in the Cairo Museum to be dispersed. “I would like to propose,” he said, “that the Cairo Museum offer museums around the world the opportunity to acquire up to 50 objects for their collections. In return, the museums would make a very substantial contribution for the construction of the new museum under the Giza plateau—$1 million each, for example.”

The ACCP’s inaugural meeting took place at the Fifth Avenue apartment of Guido Goldman, a collector of Uzbek textiles. Among those present were Arthur Houghton, the former curator of the Getty Museum at Malibu in California, which is notorious for displaying works of suspicious provenance. Hawkins himself retired in 2000 as vice president of the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an institution that, according to its own former director, Thomas Hoving, holds many artifacts looted from Etruscan tombs.

Before the war began, the ACCP met with Pentagon officials, declaring their great concern for Iraqi antiquities. What that concern means is evident from the remarks of William Pearlstein, the group’s treasurer, who also describes Iraqi laws on antiquities as “retentionist”. The ACCP deny that they want Iraqi laws changed, but the looting of the museum and library will effectively circumvent that problem if US law on stolen art objects and archaeological material can be changed.

Professor John Merryman of Stanford Law School and a member of the ACCP has called for a “selective international enforcement of export controls” in US courts. In other words, it should be perfectly legitimate to import the objects looted from Baghdad if a US court chooses not to recognise Iraqi legislation.

Merryman set out the organisation’s principles in a 1998 paper in which he argued that the fact that an art object had been stolen did not in itself bar it from lawful importation into the US.

He went on to claim, “The existence of a market preserves cultural objects that might otherwise be destroyed or neglected by providing them with a market value. In an open, legitimate trade cultural objects can move to the people and institutions that value them most and are therefore most likely to care for them” ( International Law and Politics, vol. 31: 1).

This is a self-justifying argument that reeks of hypocrisy. Wealthy collectors can now point to the chaos on the streets of Baghdad, the looting of the museum and the burning of the library as evidence that the Iraqis are unable or unwilling—too poor or too ignorant—to look after their treasures, which would be better housed in American museums or private collections.

The ACCP’s ideas represent the interests of particularly rapacious sections of the US ruling class, who operate on the principle that everything—even an object of priceless artistic or scientific value—is defined by its “market value”.

What they mean is price, since the real value of the objects stolen from the Museum of Baghdad and the Iraqi National Library is incalculable. These are quite literally people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The prescription for the market to determine possession of and access to works of art and archaeological material would place these artifacts in the hands of a rich minority and make public access to them depend on the good will of their wealthy owners. Despite the fact that many of the ACCP members have been associated with major public institutions, their agenda is profoundly opposed to the public dissemination of art and archaeology. They are not only trying to change the law in other countries, but are working against the most progressive traditions of American society, which has always prized its public museums.

A scientific tradition

The development of public museums went hand in hand with the development of a scientific understanding of archaeological artifacts and the societies that produced them. Publicly funded museums represented a break with the tradition of private treasure hunting. Their exhibits aimed to display the material artifacts of the past in a rational and scientific manner.

The accumulation of archaeological artifacts in private hands tends to disrupt scientific work, since material becomes scattered, is difficult to catalogue and much of it remains unknown to scholars working in the field. Public museums are public not only in their funding and because they open their galleries to visitors, but in the sense that they make knowledge available to all—something that has been recognised as a primary requisite of the scientific process since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

One of the effects of the looting of the Baghdad museum has been to destroy the card catalogue and computer records of the museum’s holdings. This has not only made tracking down its treasures more difficult, but has also undermined generations of patient archaeological work. To destroy such a catalogue is, both in a symbolic and practical sense, to make a collection private, because its contents become unknown to the outside world.

While the major objects are well known internationally, a museum’s records goes far beyond these spectacular works of art. It includes all the minor finds of archaeological excavations that, in themselves, are not eye-catching, but when studied together produce a picture of a society that cannot be gained from its art alone.

Archaeologists spend their time sifting the detritus of past civilisations, often literally. They may sieve tons of earth looking for beetle wing cases or seeds. Cess pits and rubbish heaps produce a wealth of knowledge. What is thrown away and discarded provides a context for the relics of great temples and palaces, or royal tombs.

Petr Charvat’s recent book Mesopotamia before History [1] contains lovingly photographed images of pieces of mud impressed with rush matting. This is not the stuff to grace a collector’s cabinet, but reveals vital information about the craft skills and way of life of ancient Mesopotamians.

A blow to world scholarship

The Baghdad museum was more than a place to display artifacts. All excavations carried out in Iraq by international teams of archaeologists were reported to it. The museum therefore possessed a database of knowledge that was accessible to researchers internationally, and was the hub of a vast cooperative endeavour. Its looting and the destruction of its records are a blow to world scholarship. It threatens to turn the clock back more than 150 years to the period before scientific archaeology in Mesopotamia.

Early excavations were by modern standards unscientific, as excavators were still learning their discipline by a process of trial and error. One of the most elementary lessons of that learning process was that context is everything in archaeology. An artifact can only tell its full story if its context is known.

By context, an archaeologist means the physical position of an artifact in the ground, its relationship to other artifacts and to the layers of earth around it. From this information it is possible to determine an artifact’s relative date and considerable information about its practical use and social significance. Ripped out of this context, it loses much of its meaning. Even the finest work of art can be better appreciated when its context and the social conditions of its creators are understood.

In its widest sense, understanding an artifact’s context means understanding its relationship to the entire archaeological site at which it was found, to other sites round about it, and to the historic landscape in which it belongs. While national feelings are often evoked to justify keeping archaeological artifacts in their country of origin, the more important scientific reason for doing so is that the context of the artifact is preserved by keeping it close to where it was found.

It is still possible to see in modern Iraq houses built by similar methods to those employed by ancient builders and to see boats built to similar designs. The full significance of Mesopotamian artifacts can only be appreciated by seeing them in the context of the extraordinary landscape of modern Iraq—a country where every hill that rises above the plain has been built up from layers of mud brick representing generations of occupation.

The American colonial administrator, retired general Jay Garner, tried to co-opt the emotional impact of that landscape for his own political purposes by holding his big tent meeting within view of the 4,000-year-old ziggurat of Ur, which was the temple platform for the moon god Nanna. But by allowing the museum of Baghdad to be looted, the US authorities have shown they have no regard for the real importance of Iraq to human history.

When the medieval European cartographers who drew the thirteenth century Hereford map of the world set out to represent the planet on which they lived, they put Asia at the top because to them it was the most important continent. There lay the lands of the Bible. Jerusalem was at the very centre of their world view, and beyond it lay Babylon, the scene of the Jewish captivity, the Tower of Babel and Abraham’s home in the city of Ur.

So deeply impressed on the European mind was the Biblical image of the world that the first excavators of ancient sites in this region were looking for confirmation of the Bible. Even in the twentieth century, Leonard Woolley referred to his excavations at Warka by the Biblical name of Ur of the Chaldees.

Yet the material that came out the excavations carried out by Woolley, and others such as Layard, Botta and Hormuzd Rassam, shook the Biblical view of the world. Not the least important discovery was that familiar Bible stories such as Noah and the Flood had their origin in Mesopotamia long before the Bible was written. As the cuneiform writing of thousands of clay tablets was deciphered, it was realised that numerous complex and highly developed civilisations had existed in Mesopotamia of an antiquity never before guessed.

The full extent of this history only became apparent as the technique of Carbon 14 dating and other scientific methods were refined. Only in the second half of the twentieth century was it realised that settled farming could be traced back to the mid-eleventh millennium BC in the Middle East.

The cradle of civilization

The earliest farming communities do not occur in the area that is present-day Iraq, but in the better watered highlands of the Zagros Mountains, Anatolia, the Levant and the Deh Luran Plain. Nevertheless, Iraq was the centre of the second phase of the protracted Neolithic Revolution that began with the domestication of animals and cereal crops.

In Iraq that revolution went a significant step further with the development of irrigation, a technique that vastly increased agricultural productivity. The surplus produced by irrigation allowed the first urban civilisation on the planet to emerge in the very region that the combined military forces of the US and the UK are reducing to a wasteland.

By 5800 BC, small farming communities were appearing along the Euphrates. Within a few centuries they had coalesced into dense urban settlements, each of several thousand people centred on a temple which was largely responsible for managing the irrigation system, distributing food, and importing stone, minerals and timber from the neighbouring highlands.

Over two millennia these Mesopotamian cities developed the art of copper smelting, alloying bronze and, most importantly, writing. Writing was essential to the administration of cities that depended on a largely artificial ecosystem created by irrigation, and which needed to import even the most vital raw materials.[2]

Writing enabled a dramatic intellectual development to take place. What began as a method of recording stores and deliveries became a medium for writing poetry, stories and history. Science and mathematics flourished.

Modern research has revealed evidence of multiplication tables, tables of reciprocals, squares, square roots, cubes and logarithms to bases 2 and 16. Other texts show volumes and areas, linear and quadratic equations. Babylonian mathematicians calculated the value of pi to 3.125, close to its true value. Astronomy was highly developed and if it was understood in terms of omens and prophecy, its predictions of eclipses and the movement of the planets were nonetheless accurate.[3]

The social and political structure of Mesopotamian society cannot be traced directly from its material remains, and archaeologists differ about its character and the course of its development, but Petr Charvat finds in Mesopotamian society to 3000 BC that “in all spheres of society the principle of universality and equality comes to the fore ... the material standard of living is equalised by redistribution ... people meet in assemblies to discuss and decide matters of common interest.... All receive the same treatment in life and death” ( Mesopotamia Before History, pp. 158-59).

From 3000 BC there is some evidence of social stratification and the emergence of a political elite or ruling class in the “royal burials” of Ur, but some archaeologists dispute this characterisation of those burials.

In this period two great civilisations emerge: in the south of present-day Iraq is the Sumerian civilization, and in the north the Akkadian, which are both based on a collection of city states that preserve many of the cultural traditions of the earlier period. Not until 2334 BC does the first empire appear under the rule of Sargon of Agade, who unites these two confederations.

Sargon’s short-lived empire was replaced by that of Ur Nammu in 2112 BC. The thousands of clay tablets that survive from this period testify to the careful management of resources that kept this empire alive until 1990 BC, when it was replaced by the Babylonian empire, which reached its high point under Hammurabi in 1792 BC.

The mid-fourteenth century BC saw the rise of the first Assyrian empire. The Assyrians were to dominate Mesopotamia again, and the whole region from the Gulf to the Mediterranean in the ninth century BC. In 612 BC the Babylonian empire was established. It most outstanding ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the double walls of the city, the great ziggurat and the processional way. He was responsible for sacking Jerusalem and taking many of the Jews into captivity.

This succession of empires and the Persian empire that followed were sustained by the immense productivity of the irrigation system and the complex system of administration that maintained it. The sophisticated concepts that had been developed in the process fed into the intellectual systems of later societies. Even the Greeks, from whom we derive the name for the land between the rivers, stood in awe of Mesopotamia’s achievements.

One of the ministries that has been systematically destroyed in the recent days of looting is the Ministry of Irrigation. We might say that by this act the US administration seeks to drive Iraq back to the dark ages, except that Iraq has never known a dark age in the sense that Europe has. Empires might rise and fall, but as long as the irrigation system continued to function the land between the rivers could produce more food than it needed. By attacking the irrigation system, the US administration is causing more damage in a few weeks than any other previous invader.

Iraq’s cultural significance did not end with the close of the Persian empire. Throughout the European dark ages it remained a haven of learning, preserving under the Caliphs of Baghdad classical texts lost in the West. Islamic scholarship was to prove vital to the re-emergence of Aristotelian philosophy in thirteenth century Europe and to the Renaissance.

The full extent of the losses in this respect will only become apparent when the looting at the National Library is itemised. That account is yet to come.

What is already clear is that a great crime has been committed against not only the Iraqi people, but against the whole of humanity, since it is the history of humanity that has been attacked. For this reason the sack of Baghdad marks a significant point on the trajectory of the Bush administration as it attempts to plunge the world into a new barbarism that would outstrip anything that history can show from the past.

Notes:
1. Petr Charvát, Mesopotamia before History, Routledge, 2002.
2. Brian M. Fagan, People of the Earth, Prentice Hall, 2001.
3. Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia, Equinox books, 1990

posted 04-19-2003 04:45 PM            

The US government should be "embarrassed" over the apparent failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main justification for going to war, retired intelligence officials said Thursday.

"It's going to be very embarrassing when it turns out they have nothing to declare," said former defense intelligence analyst Eugene Betit.

Another, former CIA station chief Ray Close, said: "I'm hoping they will be embarrassed into acknowledging a role for some independent body. And who could it be but the UN?"

As the "smoking gun" continued to elude US sleuths in Iraq, chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix called for experts to return to the country to determine whether the weapons allegations had any foundation.

Adding to the pressure, Russia, a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council, said it would not support the lifting of UN sanctions against Iraq unless UN inspectors confirmed the absence of weapons of mass destruction.

But Washington has so far rejected such calls, and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday sought to deflect concerns that evidence could be planted. "The (US search) teams have been trained in chain of control, really like a crime scene," Rumsfeld told Pentagon staff Thursday.

He said: "They will have people with them who will validate things, they will have the ability to take pictures, and to make sure that the control over any piece of evidence is as clear as it possibly can be."

Rumsfeld warned however: "That will not stop certain countries, and certain types of people from claiming, inaccurately, that it was planted."

Retired CIA intelligence analyst Ray McGovern told AFP: "Some of my colleagues are virtually certain that there will be some weapons of mass destruction found, even though they might have to be planted.

"I'm just as sure that some few will be found, but not in an amount that by any stretch would justify the charge of a threat against the US or anyone else."

He added: "Even if the planting was discovered by and by, they'll say, 'ok, the weapons were planted - fine.'"

McGovern said he was alluding to a remark by Secretary of State Colin Powell after it emerged that a letter purporting to show that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Niger - a key argument in the case for war and cited in President George W. Bush's January 28 State of the Union address - was a forgery.

Powell told NBC: "It was the information that we had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine."

McGovern and 24 other former intelligence officials in the CIA, State and Defense Departments, Army Intelligence and FBI formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

They made their first public statement on February 5, critiquing Powell's presentation before the UN Security Council.

CIA spokesman Tom Crispell, asked for comment on the former officials' remarks Thursday, said: "They're criticising policy, not intelligence."

posted 04-19-2003 05:23 PM            

Prove Iraqi guilt, MPs tell Blair
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,939516,00.html

Nicholas Watt, Michael White, James Meek in Baghdad and Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Saturday April 19, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair is facing the threat of a fresh rebellion from Labour backbenchers who are growing increasingly alarmed that the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will confirm that the war was illegal.

As a 1,000-strong Anglo-American task force of inspectors prepares to search hundreds of suspicious sites, Labour MPs are demanding an inquiry to establish whether MI6 misled ministers about Iraq's weapons programme.

Backbench Labour MPs who feel they were duped into backing the war on the basis of questionable intelligence want the cross-party Commons intelligence and security committee to carry out an investigation. One well-placed former minister said: "The intelligence committee is raring to challenge the veracity of what the security services told them about Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons. They were told what he had and where it was. There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this, but they don't seem to be able to find the stuff."

Britain and the US are so desperate to uncover a 'smoking gun' to justify the war against Iraq that they have drawn up a list of 146 sites to be inspected in Iraq. A team of civilian scientists and military forces, dubbed Usmovic because they are a US-led rival to the UN's Unmovic inspection force, will interview up 5,000 Iraqi scientists.

US forces have begun to interrogate General Amir al-Saadi, the head of Iraq's weapons programme, who surrendered last weekend. But General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces in the Gulf, attempted to lower expectations when he warned that it may take a year to uncover details of Iraq's arsenal.

Such comments are causing alarm in the Commons. Lindsay Hoyle, the Labour MP for Chorley, who voted in favour of war because of Mr Blair's chilling warnings about Iraq's banned weapons, said: "We were led to believe that the Iraqis could fire them within 45 minutes. If that was the case where have they vanished to? We were told there was hard evidence."

David Hinchliffe, chairman of the Commons health committee, said: "For many of us who talked to ministers there was an implication that more was known. Therefore a lot of people are anxious to establish the truth."

His remarks were echoed by the former defence minister Doug Henderson, who warned that the war would in retrospect be deemed illegal if no banned weapons were found, because the military action was taken under UN resolutions calling for Iraq to disarm.

"If by the turn of the year there is no WMD then the basis on which this was executed was illegal," he said.

MPs are also starting to ask questions about the conduct of the intelligence services. They want to see the evidence that persuaded members of the Commons intelligence committee to back government efforts to win round waverers before the war began. One MP is telling committee members: "You kept saying you wished you could tell us, so now will you tell us?"

Critics suspect that Downing Street may have hyped up the intelligence reports about Iraq's banned weapons. They point to last month's resignation speech by Robin Cook, in which the former foreign secretary said: "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term."

Such doubts were echoed yesterday by a three-star Iraqi general who told the Guardian in Baghdad that the country had purged itself completely of weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf war.

The general, who worked in the chemical weapons section of the Iraqi military for more than 30 years and asked not to be identified, insisted that gas masks, anti-contamination suits and atropine injectors had been intended to protect Iraqis rather than for offensive use. "We do not have any kind of forbidden weapons," he said.

Describing the use of chemical weapons by Iraq against Iran in the 1980s as "abnormal", he said the country had possessed weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent against its neighbours.

"If I have nerve gas and I know the Americans have a better version, it would be stupid of me to use it against them," he said. "The concept of having this kind of weapon was just to try to protect ourselves against others who had them, like the Israelis and the Iranians."

The doubts about Iraq's WMD programme mean that some Labour MPs will be sceptical even if a 'smoking gun' is uncovered. Mr Hinchliffe said there was a "cynical view" among Labour MPs that the coalition inspectors will doctor the evidence.

Britain wants to reassure critics by appointing an international body on the lines of the Northern Ireland disarmament commission to verify any weapons finds.

But the former cabinet minister Gavin Strang said the coalition should go all the way by allowing UN inspectors back into Iraq. "I do not understand why we have not been able to allow Hans Blix to go back in," he said.

posted 04-19-2003 10:00 PM            

quote:

---

If I were to copy anything, you’d delete my profile, and we’d have nothing to counter the leftist propaganda from Mech

---

posted 04-20-2003 02:00 AM            

U.S./ISRAELI WARHAWK FANGS DRIPPING OVER SYRIA...

Iraqi WMD 'possibly in Syria'

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1340941,00.html

Jerusalem - Iraqi chemical and biological weapons may be hidden in Syria, a senior Israeli intelligence officer told a parliamentary committee here on Monday, Israeli public radio said.

"It is possible Iraq transferred missiles and weapons of mass destruction into Syria," General Yossi Kupperwasser told the committee.

He said the transfer could be one explanation as to why US-led forces scouring suspect sites in western Iraq had found nothing so far, the radio said.

His remarks came as US Secretary of State Colin Powell warned both Syria and Iran to stop what he called their backing for terrorists.

States warned to steer clear of war

Last Friday US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned the two Arab states to steer clear of the Iraq war, saying that military supplies crossing from Syria were a "hostile act".

Rumsfeld said that equipment including night vision goggles had passed through Syria and that Tehran-backed Iraqi rebels had been seen crossing the border from Iraq.

In December, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he had information that Iraq had transferred weapons of mass destruction to Syria.

"There is information we are verifying. But we are certain that Iraq has recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria," he said.

posted 04-20-2003 02:21 AM            

lol...besides being abit anal...(smirk)...I think fastwalker has developed an overly strong sense of self worth....

posted 04-20-2003 02:30 AM            

Media Meltdown
By Dick Morris
April 16, 2003

ONE byproduct of war is often a major change in media and news reporting. In the Civil War, photography was born. In World War II, Edward R. Murrow brought radio into its own with his dramatic reports of the Nazi blitz on London. In Vietnam, television became pivotal as images of bloodshed soured American backing for the war. The Gulf War saw the growth of CNN as all-news television became essential.
In the Iraq War, the public may well have learned not to trust the broadcast networks or the establishment newspapers.

Never before have Americans had the chance to watch the establishment media while also seeing events unfold for themselves, live, on television. Our collective understanding of the dissonance between the two is breeding a distrust of the major news organs that will likely long outlast this war.

Those in professional politics take the media's distortions for granted, and even learn to play them through what has come to be called "spin." We know what's happening in Washington, the White House and Congress; each morning, when we read the version the media give to the public, we can't but help notice the difference.

But the average American rarely, if ever, gets that opportunity. In this war, they did - and their reaction to media news is likely never to be quite the same.

Each morning, we sat reading our copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times and ruminated on their prophecies of doom and quagmire. Then we looked up to see, on television, correspondents actually embedded with our troops reporting quick advances, one-sided firefights, melting opposition and, finally, welcoming crowds.

Then the TV would cut back to the anchors and military analysts far from the battlefield. There, with their pointers and maps, we heard all about how we had too few troops in Iraq and the war plan had misfired and that Bush's failure to enlist Turkish cooperation was likely to prove disastrous.

For months before the war started, we had read articles in the establishment media about how house-to-house fighting in Baghdad would consume our troops like a meat grinder. We heard dire TV predictions of poison gas, missile attacks on Israel and burning oil wells. None of it happened.

Then, as the war unfolded, it was obvious that minor mishaps would dominate the network and newspaper coverage. Friendly-fire casualties, accidental journalist deaths, temporary supply shortages, unavoidable killing of civilians - all were played with the same or greater gusto than was the news of the actual war itself.

Who can forget juxtapositions like this one: A joyous mob hauls down Saddam Hussein's 40-foot statue in a scene reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall - while ABC's Peter Jennings belittles the Iraqis as a "small crowd"?

The disjuncture between the reality and the reporting became obvious to anyone who had eyes and ears.

A few news organs, including this newspaper, featured reports that the established media felt were cheerleading in their optimism. But reality proved the "cheerleaders" right and the pessimists wrong.

The result has been a major shift in American media/news habits. While CBS viewership dropped 15 percent from pre-war totals, ABC fell 6 percent and NBC gained an anemic 3 percent, the Fox News Channel audience rose 236 percent while CNN and MSNBC (with smaller audiences) recorded similarly impressive gains.

On morning TV, the cable show Fox and Friends actually drew 2.9 million viewers, more than CBS' 2.8 million on its Early Show - the first time a cable news station has beaten a network news program in ratings (but not the last).

Among younger viewers (18-34), CBS Evening News fell 16 percent while Fox News Channel gained fivefold.

But the biggest loser was The New York Times, formerly the newspaper of record, but now reduced - in full public view - to a newspaper of the political opposition. Its readers got to see, in plain view, the paper's pessimism and bias against the Bush administration.

posted 04-20-2003 03:44 AM            

I have a very accurate sense of self worth....and don't give me any of your "anal" crap...

posted 04-20-2003 05:03 AM            

Thanks for citing some other real veterans, who also put America first.

Truth is the best weapon against PRopagandists' lies.

NYTimes led the charge against Clinton with 223 charges against the elected President;
222 of them false charges/ most on the front page.
source: Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick.
(Republican spokesblonde)

Questions:

Why do the followers of the deserter in the WH hate real veterans so much?

Will the PRopagandists' now post insults about Col Hackworth et al?

Will the PRopagandists' now boycott Capt. Kristofferson's music?

Will Wag the Gulf 2 distract US from loss of freedom at home, or silence us who ask:

"Were the stand down orders on 9/11 treason?"
Yes!& grounds for impeachment!

Will Wag the Gulf 2 prevent impeachment?

Was Wag the Gulf 2 art treasure looting a payback to the wealthy who bought the WH for the deserter?

Did the 2 identical PRopagandists unquestioningly support the President from 1993-2001?
Or is that slavish support only for whom Rush* tells them to support?

*(Rush Limbaugh, chief PRopagandist who dodged service in the Nam because of a boil on his fat ass.)

posted 04-20-2003 01:02 PM            

Roger that.

Some of us know better by now that we aren't fighting for the people of America any more...no, just a sick tiny small minority who have all the cards.

It's time we take America back from these monsters be it (R) or (D) who want to burn my Constitution and everything it stands for.

If you undertand what's going on behind the scenes in DC of course you won't support Bush's wars. Those who refuse to research the truth, naturally will lash out at others....claiming "I'm more patriotic than thou because I support George Bush."

posted 04-20-2003 03:28 PM            

fastwalker...perhaps you do not understand...your arguments are no different from the ones put forth by me. P/V and others 4 or 5 months ago...

if you think by some twist of fate your going to alter, with your long exhaustive diatribes a clearly determined mind like mechs to be anything other than incorrect on a daily basis...well you've got a lot to learn there chief...and you are sadly mistaken....

Listen to Tim Robbins Whine
By Michael Reagan
April 18, 2003

Poor Tim Robbins. He thinks his rights are being stripped away– that he can no longer speak out, that he’s being gagged by a president he despises- yet he managed to cry about this assault on his rights to free speech in front of the nation’s media, which gleefully broadcast his views.

He’s talking about his first amendment rights being violated, but where does he make this complaint that he’s being prevented from stating his views publicly? Why before the National Press Club in Washington, about the most public forum around. Moreover, that speech last Tuesday has been rebroadcast and rebroadcast all across the nation. Some gag.

He keeps whining about Clear Channel and talk radio spewing out hatred and the dangers of limiting free speech at the very time he’s threatening a correspondent from the Washington Post for having reported accurately that his live-in girlfriend’s mother had said that he and her daughter, Susan Sarandon, were brainwashing her grandchild.

Free speech is seems does not apply to Washington Post reporters who write stories he doesn’t like.

Robbins rails against the Iraq war – a war that was waged against a socialist regime. Could it be that he objected to an attack on fellow socialists?

Robbins’ main complaint is not that he’s being gagged – he can’t claim that when just about every word he speaks gets reported by the liberal media – but that the American people can’t be forced to pay attention to his ranting.

He’s angered because the Baseball Hall of Fame had cancelled a joint appearance with Sarandon to celebrate the anniversary of the movie "Bull Durham." He can’t understand that it is the right of any group to decide to whom they want to provide a forum – he is so blinded by his unique conviction that everybody everywhere must be forced to listen to his socialist drivel, that he denies that right to the Hall of Fame and other venues which have shown the good sense to shun him.

You can stand on my doorstep and spew hatred about my father, but I’m not going to invite you into my house to attack my dad. It’s my house. He’s complaining because baseball said he can’t come back to Cooperstown because he’s so political that they are fully aware that he will use the occasion for more of his vicious anti-American ranting.

He insists that America is bitterly divided on the Iraq war, implying that more than half the nation is opposed to it – but his arithmetic is somewhat faulty – fully 73 percent of Americans support President Bush and his decision to oust Saddam Hussein and his brutal socialist regime from power.

To listen to him you would think that Americans are cringing in fear, desperately afraid to speak out. It doesn’t occur to him that they are speaking out, and what they are saying is not what he wants to hear – that in overwhelming numbers they approve of the war and applaud the President’s deft handling of it.

He also rants about talk radio. He simmers with hatred for the one channel that gives the American people views opposed to those espoused by the dominant mainstream media awash in liberalism.

The American people listen to talk radio, to Rush and Sean Hannity and me because we discuss the values that unite most Americans. The reason why liberals can’t succeed in talk radio is that their twisted values are not only not shared by the majority of Americans, but are anathema to them.

posted 04-20-2003 04:34 PM            

quote:

---

fastwalker...perhaps you do not understand...your arguments are no different from the ones put forth by me. P/V and others 4 or 5 months ago...

if you think by some twist of fate your going to alter, with your long exhaustive diatribes a clearly determined mind like mechs to be anything other than incorrect on a daily basis...well you've got a lot to learn there chief...and you are sadly mistaken....

---

I understood fully boss...I was just taking a jab at some humor there (didn't work)

posted 04-20-2003 04:50 PM            

O woe is bush that some of US still think for our selves.

FW:
the rush PR playbook was followed fanatically by PV before you were assigned to back him up.
hatred of free speech./ hatred of our bill of rights/ contempt for our constitution/
everything bush stands for:
democracy replaced by a RW dictatorship
as you support also

posted 04-20-2003 07:04 PM            

quote:

---

no answers to my valid questions about
"Wag the Gulf/ PR bushwar 2"
is noticable...
Can't argue with what I say, so insult me with childish namcalling/ zieg heil back atcha!

---

To be honest with you...I didn't make it that far into reading your rant. You lost me at the first lies about Bush. I can't read something unless you show some level of rationality. “Wag the Gulf and PR Bushwar” are lies, right there, right off the bat. You can't expect an honest answer to questions based on false assumption lies and inuendo. In other words, they are not honest questions. In order to answer questions based on the false assumption, we must first deal with correcting the false assumption. For instance, you are making the allegation that this war is somehow a Bush PR campaign, and Wag the Dog? How so?

Oh and btw…yes I will admit that the US government screwed the VietNam vets, over, and if you are who you claim to be (a VietNam vet), then you have a right not to trust government…but these are different times….different politicians…different war, and our cause is just. The way we fought this one will be studied in military textbooks for years to come. Everything we did in Vietnam, was exactly how NOT to fight a war…I’m not talking about the soldiers mind you..they were the victims and the heroes, and politicians were very careless with those precious American lives. Politicians were running that war.

This one by contrast, was exactly how a war should be fought, and it was run by generals not politicians. It was for all the right reasons, ethically, morally, strategically, politically, and from a basic humanitarian necessity of removing evil from the world…..If Iraqi civilians got killed, it was because Saddam placed them in harm’s way and killed them, otherwise, this was probably the most humanitarian war with the greatest concern for the human rights of the enemy and civilian lives than any other war in human history. We were dropping food on the civillians at the same time we were dropping bombs on the regime that was responsible for the murder and torture of Iraqis….Name for me one country in human history who has done the same thing. Name for me one other country that helps rebuild the countries that it defeats in war.

posted 04-20-2003 07:36 PM            

Decide for YOURSELF if he is a so-called traitor...like the NEO-CONS want you to believe.

Watch C-Spans most popular bitstream.

Tim Robbins interview.

REAL PLAYER

posted 04-20-2003 09:05 PM            

Imagine it's six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam's rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq's oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence--talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn't the nightmare scenario. It's everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future."

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria--while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this--of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it's conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks' record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn't a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they're on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that's what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats' seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism's evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow's increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent "Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power," even raising the possibility that America's only options might be "surrender or war." We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive--both themselves and others--expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as "freedom fighters." The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz's son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush's father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks' policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn't believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it's okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.

What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam's regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally "pro-American" regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks--including Perle--even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own--advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest"--terrorism. Trying to "manage" this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks' grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq--assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam's. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they'll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they'll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi'a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan's pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We'd be in a much stronger position to do so since we'd no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons' plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, "That plan's just crazy enough to work."

But like a TV plot, the hawks' vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes' heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks' vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel's incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community's formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn't. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can't we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks' plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet "friendly" to the United States--specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "Mubarak is no great shakes," he quipped. "Surely we can do better than Mubarak." When I asked Perle's friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: "All the better if you ask me."

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help "liberate" Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we've ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won't get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that's a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks' other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. "We need to be more assertive," argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia." Hopefully, in Boot's view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States "occupying the Saudi's oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region."

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there's a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn't leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that's largely responsible for the region's current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi'a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs' days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran's border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they'll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran's brother Shi'a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks' whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy--that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can't really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn't quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the "physical analogy to Saddam Hussein's regime is a steel beam in compression." Give it one good hit, and you'll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it's unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can't live with--as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that's yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won't be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan's most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we're largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet's Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios--and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has--it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he--in some key ways--courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson's administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson's undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren't entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn't true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs--part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration's passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the United States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It's the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he's an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.

Ending Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets' nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources--Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty--might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it's just us and the hornets, we really won't have any choice.

Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Memo.

posted 04-20-2003 11:56 PM            

Despite US pledges that Iraq's oil reserves will benefit only the Iraqi people, people here are wary that US firms may reap a windfall in production revenues and service contracts.

As international petroleum companies eye Iraq's 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, Iraqis stress that the profits must go first and foremost to rebuilding the shattered country.

"If there is a need for foreign companies, there should be transparency in their contracts so that they don't arouse the suspicion of the Iraqi people," said economist Humam Shamaa.

US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have promised that Iraq's oil wealth would go to the country, but the people here are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

"The population is very sensitive on this issue, the oil sector is first priority for reconstruction" as it is Iraq's only guaranteed source of revenue, said Shamaa.

Iraqi exiles and US officials agreed earlier this month on the need for international companies to participate in rehabilitating and developing Iraq's oil production, as the country lacks the financial and technical means.

Delegates at that meeting in London said the most likely form of participation would come under production-sharing agreements allowing international companies to be reimbursed for their investment by taking part of the production of the oilfield they develop.

But Taleb Ali, editor of economic weekly Iqtissadi, said foreign firms should "provide consultancy services only" and not get involved in production.

"We can buy the technical equipment we need and we have inside Iraq and abroad competent people to run the sector," added Ali, whose publication stopped after the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq a month ago.

He said a new post-Saddam government in Iraq should use the country's oil wealth, the second largest in the world after Saudi Arabia, to maximise development and promote other sectors like tourism.

"The economy was not properly handled under the previous regime," he said. "Too much was spent on political issues, on things we knew nothing about, like armaments."

"The economy stopped growing in 1980" with the start of the eight-year war with Iran, Ali added. The conflict was followed by the invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, which triggered UN sanctions that are still in force.

Polling people in the street on the oil issue drew some angry reactions as the Iraqi capital recovered from the destruction and the looting that followed the collapse of the old regime on April 9.

"Oil? Is that all you think about? Look at us, we have nothing, no water, no electricity, no security, we can barely eat and you think about our oil?," said a woman, too angry to give her name.

"I tell you one thing: the oil of Iraq is for the Iraqis," said Kazem Abbas, a 50-year-old engineer.

Saddam Hussein played a major role in nationalising Iraq's oil wealth, in 1972, when he was vice-president.

He reopened the oil sector for foreign investment in the 1990s, signing provisional production sharing contracts with French and Russian companies as a means to enlist their governments' help to lift the sanctions.

These contracts were waiting for the sanctions to end in order to be implemented, and a question mark hangs over their fate.

US companies, kept at bay under Saddam, are now expected to claim a role commensurate with their country's leading contribution to the war and opposition groups have said previous contracts should be renegotiated.

Iraq's oilfields were seized almost intact by the US and British forces who said production can return to its pre-war level of 2.7 million barrels per day within a few months.

posted 04-21-2003 12:00 AM            

"Not Sunni. Not Shiite. Only One Islamic Nation," proclaimed a banner. "Iraq must be ruled by its people," read another.

Tens of thousands of Muslims, protesting against losing their position in Iraqi society staged their first public show of force Friday, April 18, 2003. They marched through the streets of Baghdad, protesting the U.S. military occupation, and demanded a Muslim state without distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.

After World War I, the British had set up postwar Iraq with Sunni Muslim Arabs, then about 20 percent of the population, who imposed their control on schools, then the army and later on the economy, thereby alienating the majority of Iraqis. Even years later, after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard crushed a Shiite rebellion in a campaign that killed tens of thousands.

Now, retired American Lieutenant General Jay Garner had been chosen by the Bush administration to be the top civil administrator of a conquored Iraq. The Bush plan is to split Iraq into three sectors: Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the center, and Shiite Muslims in the south. American officials will be in charge under Garner. Evidently, the plan is to keep the Kurds, Sunni and Shiites separate. But maybe it is already too late for Bush to impose the 19th century British colonial strategy of divide and conquor..

Following decades of mistrust and rivalry between the Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, a three week bombing campaign and massive U.S. military invasion has united the two rival Muslim groups against a common enemy: America. This may be Osama bin Laden's dream come true.

"No to sectarianism, one Islamic state," read another banner at the mosque. "No to America!"

The march began in the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Adamiy at one of Baghdad's largest Sunni mosques after Friday prayers. Chanting anti-US slogans, they demanded the U.S. troops leave quickly, and that a new Islamic government based on the Koran be established.

Announcements at other mosques drew thousands to the Abu Hanifa Mosque. They had listened to a sermon by Ahmed al-Kubeisi, a prominent Sunni cleric who had been a critic of Saddam Hussein. Shiites also showed up to join the mostly Sunni crowd after being urged to attend in the spirit of religious unity.

"You are the masters today," prayer leader al-Kubeisi said of America. "But I warn you against thinking of staying. Get out before we kick you out!" The congregates responded with a hardy cheer and they spilled out into the street. Then Sunnis and Shiites marched side by side through downtown Baghdad, chanting "No to Bush, No to Saddam, Yes to Islam" and "Leave our country, we want peace."

The marchers' demands reflected growing frustration with the pace of American aid and reconstruction programs in Iraq. The Sunni overtures to Shiite leaders who had demanded similar aid are indications that Islamic politics are starting to fill the political vacuum left by Saddam Hussein's downfall.

Signs claiming to represent the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamic activist movement in the Arab world, were carried by some of the marchers. The Brotherhood is a Muslim revivalist group that is banned in Egypt and Syria. This is the first time it had appeared on the streets of Iraq.

Many of the marchers said they had wanted Saddam's government to be overthrown by Iraqis, but they acknowledged that would have been unlikely. Some reluctantly admitted they welcomed the U.S. invasion. Now that Saddam is apparently gone, however, they said they want the U.S. troops to leave.

"We thank them, but now we want them to leave," said poet Rafeh Mohammed, 39. "We want to run our country."

So far, the dancing in the streets of Baghdad predicted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hasn't materialized. Rather, the Sunnis and Shiites put their decades old rivalries aside and united against American occupation of Iraq. The coming months will show whether the U.S. build a democratic Iraq faster than the Iraqi Muslims produce a theocracy like their next door neighbor Iran.

posted 04-21-2003 12:05 AM            

News As America descends in permanent war, an essay on veterans and their role in the antiwar movement.

By Michael Uhl
On Assignment for The Nation
4/14/03
http://www.vaiw.org/vet/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=77&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0&POSTNUKESID=55fbacfeac1e3d5716c00f555b7aa4a6

In recent weeks, segments of the peace movement earnestly debated throughout cyberspace the pros and cons of the slogan 'support our troops' -- however it might be modified by an explicit tag line of opposition to the war. Could the public clearly grasp a principled antiwar stance when it appeared to accommodate the welfare or sensibilities of those who were doing the actual fighting? How could we ensure that the public would distinguish between our support for the troops and that of the war's promoters?

Wasn't the call to silence criticism of the war -- even by some individuals, organizations, and institutions whose dissent quickly evaporated with the invasion -- being justified by appeals expressed in those very same words? Yet, suddenly support for the troops was being translated by opinion polls into support for the war. How might the movement coopt that mantra, and provide just enough cover for fellow citizens who occupy uncertain ground, doubting the war's merits, but unwilling to have their own patriotism subjected to challenge, to win them back to the forces of peace?

"Bring more vets to the forefront," proposed Leslie Cagan, an organizer with United For Peace and Justice in New York. "Let's march on the Pentagon," wrote one youth activist, "as long as the vets are in the lead."

Why the vets? "Because we have this credibility," explained Woody Powell, a Korean War veteran and Executive Director of Veterans For Peace (VFP). "Our words are no different from many others, but they seem to carry more weight." Since Vietnam, even for the most committed antiwar audiences, there's a certain comfort zone when a vet steps up to the podium and says, "if showing our support for the troops means silencing our public criticism of the war, that is not an option." Those words drew strong applause when David Cline, thrice wounded in Vietnam, and president of VFP, delivered them before an overflow teach-in at American University just days after the U.S. led coalition invaded Iraq. The teach-in had kicked off Operation Dire Distress, a weekend of protest and lobbying in the nation's capital (March 22-24), attended by hundreds of veterans who, repeatedly, in private comments and public displays, linked support for the troops in Iraq to a demand to stop the war and bring them home.

It is critical that veterans continue to communicate this message from the movement's national stages, even when the Bush Administration declares the war a victory and the occupation begun. But antiwar veterans, like GI resisters and military family members -- what Chomsky calls "authentic groups" -- are also uniquely effective over the long haul when addressing communities whose social origins are most similar to their own, where empathy, apart from fact-based or moral argumentation, is often the medium of persuasion. This, you might say, is the "identity politics" of the working class. In such settings, the love of country or personal courage -- core values in these communities -- of these vets, in particular those who have tasted the bitter fruit of the battlefield, are seldom called into question. Minimally, veterans who oppose warfare are given a respectful hearing by their Middle American landsmen, and are treated with equanimity in local media, even by the most hidebound provincials of the fourth estate.

The U.S. march toward war with Iraq has certainly stimulated recruitment in the ranks of antiwar veterans. Over the past six months, Veterans for Peace, open to veterans of all service eras, has virtually doubled its membership to 3000 ex-servicemen and women. The organization has a national office in St. Louis, which tends to its website and some of the national press, and also aids in planning for its yearly convention (August 2004 in San Francisco). But VFP's ninety-six chapters, distributed over thirty states from Maine to California, operate autonomously, and set their own activist agendas, much in the spirit of the movement's overall grassroots orientation.

Veterans For Peace was founded in Maine in 1985 [superceding an earlier post-World War II entity of the same name], and quickly spread to other states at a time "when low intensity warfare was raging in Central America under Reagan," recalled Tom Stutevant, who served in Korea. The Maine chapter, which Stutevant heads, is one of the nation's most militant, providing contingents for all the latest national mobilizations, while,at home, engaging in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience that recently led to the arrests of five members. As part of their community outreach, Maine VFP is frequently asked to visit middle and high school classrooms, where they have distributed thousands of bookcovers with a nonviolence theme, and have collaborated with the American Friends Service Committee in offering alternatives to military service.

Minneapolis has likewise reported "phenomenal growth," writes Walt Wittman by email, ticking off in comma-less shorthand his chapter's varied and overloaded activist schedule: "What an impossible task: signs speaking engagements forums church meetings letters legislative contacts city council hearings rallies vigils canoe raffles and merchandising plus keeping our sanity." From Washtenaw County, Michigan, Bob Krzewinski reports that he'd "been thinking of starting a chapter, but there didn't seem to be too many of us around." That all changed after February 8th, when the Ann Arbor Coalition for Peace "wanted a few veterans up front to lead the march ...and we had an almost constant stream of veterans coming up... we had 16 people show up at our first meeting."

Roughly seventy percent of VFP's members served during the Vietnam era, and many, like Dave Cline of Jersey City, have also been active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War since VVAW's heyday during the early nineteen seventies. VVAW "has kept its flag flying," says Cline, maintaining a presence in the progressive communities of the New York metro area -- with its original Clarence Fitch chapter -- Milwaukee, and Chicago, home of the national office. A VVAW newpapers appears regularly, and its reunions during anniversary years have drawn enthusiastic attendance. Many of VVAW's old guard have surfaced from their other lives, and "re-up'd" since the Iraq war began, expanding the group's network to 800 members nationwide.

For years since their return, Gulf War vets have concerned themselves primarily with a struggle to gain scientific recognition for a weird syndrome of battlefield induced health problems that has led the Veterans Administration to provide compensation for nearly a third of the 600,000 men and women who fought in the '91 conflict. But some Gulf War vets, like Charles Sheehan-Miles, were politicized by the traumas of combat, and when a re-run of war in the Persian Gulf first threatened, he helped form Veterans For Common Sense (VCS). But, he stresses that VCS, which has been contacted by over 2000 veterans, "is not an antiwar organization, per se. A majority of Americans don't identify with that point of view. Our group wants to occupy a middle ground, to address audiences about war's hidden costs, the treatment of casualties and compensation for the disabled. Care for Gulf War vets has already cost the nation $2 billion," he told me. "People should know what a war will cost, before they're called upon to support it."

Sheehan-Miles' group nonetheless joined with Vets For Peace and VVAW, along with Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), a support group for those with family members currently on active duty, in forming a coalition called Veterans Against Iraq War (VAIW) to organize Operation Dire Distress, strongly emphasizing the veteran character of the event. Of course, it's impossible to say what the turn-out would have been had the invasion not yet begun. And perhaps the presence of the several hundred vets who did attend, resplendent in remnants of their old service uniforms and bedecked with medals attesting to youthful valor, though receiving a decent amount of publicity, would have had an even greater impact if wedded to one of the movement's massive national demonstrations. But the reality is that, even overtly antiwar veterans covet a degree of independent action from the larger movement. The point, suggests VFP's Woody Powell, is to avoid being "discounted," especially in cases where the protest becomes "strident." It's a fine line, he argues, between "being seduced by our power and having it become diluted."

But it is the issue of their postwar entitlements, which Charles Sheehan-Miles recasts conceptually as a hidden cost of war, and Dave Cline frames in a demand for justice for all the war's victims, that unites all veterans across the spectrum of political views. During our rally in Washington, a number of speakers made bitter reference to the Congressional attacks spearheaded by Republican warmongers to cut billions from Veterans Administration health care over the next decade. The Veterans Against Iraq War website has collected the salty comments of scores of former service members, a surprisingly large number of whom served in World War II, that ridicule these politicians as "chickenhawks, those who demand sacrifice of their fellow citizens, but who have never served, and refuse to put their own lives or those of their children on the line.

It's not quite clear exactly what these dismantlers of government intend with this budget slashing message for the Department of Veterans Affairs, a form of managed care perhaps that taps more deeply into Medicare. Another story, but something is afoot here in a system that has extended its eligibility since 1996, and increased its enrollment from 2.9 to 6.8 millions veterans.

Most veterans I know remain proud of their service, because they feel they owed it to their country. A remarkably candid article in the New York Times ( "Military Mirrors Working Class," Mar. 30, 2003), reported that the demographics underlying such values place the actual burden of filling the ranks on blue collar communities, with men from backgrounds of affluence or other forms of privilege, routinely getting a pass. Clearly the formation of this belief in service is a social construction of some interest, another tangent of veteran culture worth exploring elsewhere. But the counterweight to reverence for service to one's nation is resistance, which in former days was aimed at conscription, and today at the so-called "poverty" or "economic" draft.

"Economic," is perhaps the better term since the U.S. armed forces now generally require all recruits to have a high school diploma, thus not only keeping many from the true underclass out of harm's way, as the cliche goes, but denying them access to the potential mobility of a stable military career -- admittedly for a minority -- with some of the perks that, among blue collar workers today, only civilian government employees and trade unionists typically enjoy. Many service veterans, on the other hand, have found that enticements offered them at the moment of recruitment, opportunities for a college education or skilled training transferable to the civilian job market, had been grossly exaggerated. Youth antiwar activists from communities of color, like Karim Lopez, with Uptown Youth for Peace and Justice in New York City, have found that a tactic of counter-recruitment around this pattern of misrepresentation is ideal, not just for warning potential service entrants of high school age about the inflated sales job by recruiters, but for "making a clear link between the cost of militarization, and an attack on young peoples' future," with the concomitant increases they will face in health care and higher education.

Resistance within the military also has it's honorable history, and, while only likely to become widespread in wars of long duration, like Vietnam, there have been some well publicized cases already during this period of militarization. Pacifist hotlines have been ringing off the hook with inquiries by active duty and reserve soldiers seeking information on how to apply for conscientious objector status. As recently as April 7th, one such applicant, Gabriel I. Johnson, was shipped out to Iraq from Ft. Hood, Texas, even though his case is pending, "a clear violation of the Army's own rules," said his attorney Tod Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier in New York. There have been other rumblings at the front, with three British troopers reportedly sent home for opposing the indiscriminate killings of Iraqi civilians.

The veterans peace movement has grown steadily in this time of threatened and now real, war with Iraq. But can it be sustained with a reasonable level of visibility and consistency when this current episode in the endless series of little wars promised by the Bush Doctrine recedes from public view? Or will the vets' movement ebb and flow in sync with the geopolitical tide? Veterans For Peace was kept afloat barely following a precipitous decline in membership after 1991, David Cline believes, by its humanitarian work on postwar issues of reconciliation and healing, and projects like Friendship Village in Vietnam and the Iraq Water Project, which went beyond a strictly antiwar orientation. VVAW also kept it programmatic hand-in by working on readjustment issues and homelessness in the veteran community.

But another idea was broached and discussed by a number of veterans in Washington during Operation Dire Distress. And that was to explore the viability of engineering a certain breath and volume in the vets' movement by giving it a global profile, forging links as widely as possible with those whose involvement in veterans and GI resistance issues in their own countries is of long standing. This strategy would create an transnational infrastructure capable of mobilizing an occasionally somnolent membership in every corner of the world to oppose on quick notice the next U.S. inspired military adventure, and the one after that, and so on. To prevent this apparatus from becoming top heavy or think tanked within our own sphere there is no better model than the chapter structure of Veterans For Peace, with its practice of grassroots autonomy. For every doctrine... an anti-doctrine....

Note: Michael Uhl is a writer living in Maine who served with the 11th Infantry in Vietnam.

posted 04-21-2003 12:11 AM            

By Anthony Violanti
Buffalo News
http://www.vaiw.org/vet/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=75&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0&POSTNUKESID=55fbacfeac1e3d5716c00f555b7aa4a6

"We have to look for solutions that can come about without military action," said Zinni, President Bush's peace envoy to the Middle East until this month. "We're applying military action to places where it isn't necessary. I don't think the American people will stand for a series of wars like this."

America may be on the threshold of military victory in Iraq, but that hasn't changed Anthony Zinni's feelings against the war.

"This is in fact the wrong war at the wrong time," the retired Marine general said Thursday night at Canisius College. Zinni was head of Central Command until Gen. Tommy Franks took over nearly three years ago.

Zinni had served as President Bush's peace envoy to the Middle East until this month, when he spoke out against the war. "I had grave reservations about this whole undertaking and expressed those," Zinni said. "That's one reason why I'm no longer the Middle East envoy.

"We have to look for solutions that can come about without military action," Zinni said during the William H. Fitzpatrick Lecture at Canisius. "We're applying military action to places where it isn't necessary. I don't think the American people will stand for a series of wars like this."
What happens in the coming days in Baghdad will play a huge role in determining the future of Iraq and the Arab world, he said.

"The endpoint of this war and how Baghdad goes down is going to be critical," Zinni said. "We have not won the hearts and minds of the people in Iraq. We're going to have to finish this in a way that does not create a lot of death and destruction but at the same time does not make us look weak.

"We cannot give Iraqi soldiers who are willing to die, a reason to fight on the streets of Baghdad for anything other than (President Saddam Hussein). If they suddenly find a cause like Arab pride, nationalism or standing up to the West, and they feel encouragement and support by others, then they may fight to the death. That would be a cost to both sides that would be disastrous to the region."

Understanding the Arab mind-set has been difficult for the United States.
The biggest mistake the United States made in the war, Zinni said, was speaking of "shock and awe." "That was a way to say: "Your fate is inevitable. We're going to crush you. The might of America will defeat you. Just surrender and throw down your arms.'

"You don't speak to Arab pride and Arab manhood in this way. That whole psychological business gave them another cause to fight for, more than they would have fought just for Saddam."

Zinni said everything in the Iraq war will climax in what he called "the moment."

"That moment will be when the region, the country and the world realizes Saddam is gone. It will be a moment of decision. There will be tremendous mixed emotions in the Islamic and Arab world," he said.

"On one hand, they will be glad we rid them of Saddam. On the other hand, there will be great apprehension about this world power that bullied its way in, ignored international arguments and has now decided to impose a form of government on this country.

"That moment could change everything and could give us a fresh start. That part of the world will be holding its breath and waiting for the next step."

Zinni said it will be "a monumental task" to transform Iraq into a democracy. "Whatever the outcome of that task is how this war of intervention will be judged," he said.

It is also vital, Zinni said, to deal with the Middle East peace process between the Palestinians and Israel.

"The people in this region are desperate for this problem to be gone," he said. "Only one organization, nation and entity in the world can broker this problem: the United States."

posted 04-21-2003 12:19 AM            

The next war. It is now fashionable to talk about "the day after".

Let's talk about the night after.

After the end of hostilities in Iraq, the world will be faced with two decisive facts:

First, the immense superiority of American arms can beat any people in the world, valiant as it may be.

Second, the small group that initiated this war - an alliance of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neo-conservatives - has won big, and from now on it will control Washington almost without limits.
The combination of these two facts constitutes a danger to the world, and especially to the Middle East, the Arab peoples and the future of Israel. Because this alliance is the enemy of peaceful solutions, the enemy of the Arab governments, the enemy of the Palestinian people and especially the enemy of the Israeli peace camp.

It does not dream only about an American empire, in the style of the Roman one, but also of an Israeli mini-empire, under the control of the extreme right and the settlers. It wants to change the regimes in all Arab countries. It will cause permanent chaos in the region, the consequences of which it is impossible to foresee.

Its mental world consists of a mixture of ideological fervor and crass material interests, an exaggerated American patriotism and right-wing ionism.

That is a dangerous mixture. There is in it something of the spirit of Ariel Sharon, a man who has always had grandiose plans for changing the region, consisting of a mixture of creative imagination, unbridled chauvinism and a primitive faith in brute force.

WHO are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers.

For many years, this was a marginal group that fostered a right-wing agenda in all fields. They fought against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and drugs. When Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel, they offered him advise on how to fight the Arabs.

Their big moment arrived with the collapse of the Twin Towers. The American public and politicians were in a state of shock, completely disoriented, unable to understand a world that had changed overnight. The neo-cons were the only group with a ready explanation and a solution. Only nine days after the outrage, William Kristol (the son of the group's founder, Irving Kristol) published an Open Letter to President Bush, asserting that it was not enough to annihilate the network of Osama bin Laden, but that it was also imperative to "remove Saddam Hussein from power" and to "retaliate" against Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbullah.

Following is a short list of the main characters. (If it bores you, skip to the next section).

The Open Letter was published in the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol with the money of ultra-right press mogul Rupert Murdoch, who donated $10 million to the cause. It was signed by 41 leading neo-cons, including Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish former leftist who has become an extreme right-wing icon, editor of the prestigious Encounter [Commentary] magazine, and his wife, Midge Decter, also a writer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Studies, Robert Kagan, also of the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, and, of course, Richard Perle.

Perle is a central character in this play. Until recently he was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board of the Defense Department, which also includes Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross. Perle is a director of the Jerusalem Post, now owned by extreme right-wing Zionists. In the past he was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, who led the fight against the Soviet Union on behalf of the Jews who wanted to leave. He is a leading member of the influential right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Lately he was obliged to resign from his Defense Department position, when it became known that a private corporation had promised to pay him almost a million dollars for the benefit of his influence in the administration.

That Open Letter was, in effect, the beginning of the Iraq war. It was eagerly received by the Bush administration, with members of the group already firmly established in some of its leading positions. Paul Wolfowitz, the father of the war, is No. 2 in the Defense Department, where another friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith, heads the Pentagon Planning Board. John Bolton is State Department Undersecretary. Eliot Abrams, responsible for the Middle East in the National Security Council, was connected with the Iran-Contra-Israel scandal. The main hero of the scandal, Oliver North, sits in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, together with Michael Ledeen, another hero of the scandal. He advocates total war not only against Iraq, but also against Israel's other enemies, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

Most of these people , together with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (right), are associated with the "Project for the New American Century", which published a White Paper in 2002, with the aim 'to preserve and enhance this 'American peace'" -- meaning American control of the world.

Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic new Israeli first name) is Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. She also writes for the Jerusalem Post and is co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute that is, according to the London Guardian, connected with Israeli Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the media and politicians with highly selective quotations from extreme Arab publications. Meyrav's husband, Davis Wurmser, is at Perle's American Enterprise Institute, heading Middle East Studies. Mention should also be made of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy of our old acquaintance, Dennis Ross, who for years was in charge of the "peace process" in the Middle East.

In all the important papers there are people close to the group, such as William Safire, a man hypnotized by Sharon, in the New York Times and Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Another Perle friend, Robert Bartley, is the editor of the Wall Street Journal.

If the speeches of Bush and Cheney often sound as if they came from the lips of Sharon, one of the reasons may be that their speechwriters, Joseph Shattan, Mathew Scully and John McConnell, are neo-cons, as is Cheneys Chief-of-Staff, Lewis Libby.

The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's RRepublican party. The founding fathers were Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, who once got a jet plane as a present from Menachem Begin, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network, which help to finance the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven, an outfit that supports the settlers and their right-wing allies.

Common to both groups is their adherence to the fanatical ideology of the extreme right in Israel. They see the Iraq war as a struggle between the Children of Light (America and Israel) and the Children of Darkness (the Arabs and Muslims).
By the way, none of these facts are secret. They have been published lately in dozens of articles, both in American and world media. The members of the group are proud of them.

The Zionist general. The man who symbolizes this victory is General Jay Garner, who has just been appointed chief of the civilian administration in Iraq.

He is no anonymous general who has been picked accidentally. Garner is the ideological partner of Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-cons.

Two years ago he signed, together with 26 other officers, a petition organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, lauding the Israeli Army for "remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority," which is certainly news to the Israeli peace forces. He also stated that "a strong Israel is an asset that American military planners and political eaders can rely on."

In the first Gulf War he praised the performance of the Patriot missiles, which had failed miserably. After leaving the army in 1997, he became, not surprisingly, a defense contractor specializing in missiles. It was alleged that he landed non-competitive Pentagon contracts. This year he obtained a defense contract for $1.5 billion, as well as a contract for building Patriot systems in Israel.

Therefore, there can be no better candidate for the job of chief of the civilian administration in Iraq, especially at a time when contracts for billions of dollars for reconstruction have to be handed out, to be paid for by Iraqi oil.

A new Balfour declaration. The ideology of this group, that calls for an American world-empire as well as for a Greater Israel, reminds one of bygone days.

The Balfour declaration of 1917, that promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, had two parents. The mother was Christian Zionism (among whose adherents were illustrious statesmen like Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury, long before the foundation of the Zionist movement), the father was British imperialism. The Zionist idea allowed the British to crowd out their French competitors and take possession of Palestine, which was needed to safeguard the Suez Canal and the shorter sea route to India.

Now the same thing is happening again. Last year Richard Perle organized a briefing in which a speaker proposed war not only on Iraq, but on Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well, in order to secure the world's oil heartland. Iraq, he asserted, was only the pivot. One of the justifications for this design is the need to defend Israel.

To bet on our life? Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power.

But this tendency troubles me. We are like a gambler, who bets all his money and his future on one horse. A good horse, a horse with no current competitor, but still one horse.

The neo-cons will cause a long period of chaos in the Arab and Muslim world. The Iraqi war has already shown that their understanding of Arab realities is shaky. Their political assumptions did not stand the test, only brute force saved their undertaking.
Some day the Americans will go home, but we shall remain here. We have to live with the Arab peoples. Chaos in the Arab world endangers our future.

Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about a democratic, liberal, Zionist and America-loving Middle East, but the result of their adventures may well turn out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist region that will threaten our very existence.

The partnership of the neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists may engender counter-forces in Washington. And if Bush is defeated in the next election, like his father after his victory in the first Gulf War, this whole gang will be thrown out.

The Bible tells us about the kings of Judea, who relied on the then world power, Egypt. They did not appreciate the rise of forces in the east, Assyria and Babylon. An Assyrian general told the king of Judea: "Behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it." (II Kings 18, 21).

Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not a bruised reed. Far from it, he is now a very strong reed. But should we bet our whole future on this?

posted 04-21-2003 12:23 AM            

21 April 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=399024

Hollywood is often depicted in the US media as a hotbed of anti-government dissent and left-wing politics but that is not how it feels to Ed Gernon.

Mr Gernon was, until recently, a television producer at CBS responsible for a four-part miniseries on Hitler's rise to power, which will be shown next month. He thought the timing was apt, and said so in an interview with TV Guide magazine. "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war," he said. "I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now."

That was far too strong for Leslie Moonves, CBS's chief executive, who promptly fired him. No reasons were given, although politics and a strong desire not to fall foul of the Bush administration apparently had plenty to do with it.

Another person who does not find Hollywood particularly liberal these days is the comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo, whose outspoken views on Iraq have made her the object of a vicious e-mail and telephone campaign that has intimidated ABC into pushing her new sitcom, Slice O'Life, into next year's mid-season. Again, the network's fear of losing viewers and advertisers seems rather stronger than its desire to defend one the freedom of speech of of its stars.

The clearly emerging pattern is that entertainment personalities who speak out on touchy political subjects – particularly Iraq – do so at their peril. The group intent on stringing up Ms Garofalo, Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits, has campaigned energetically against everyone from Martin Sheen, whose anti-war views led to a credit card commercial of his being scrapped, to Susan Sarandon, dropped as a speaker at a Florida branch of the umbrella charity group United Way, to Sarandon's husband, Tim Robbins, whose invitation to a 15th anniversary screening of the baseball movie Bull Durham at the National Baseball Hall of Fame was withdrawn because the Hall's president, a former Reagan administration press secretary, felt his very presence might undermine the efforts of American troops in Iraq.

Beyond the film world, powerful radio station chains with strong political ties to the Bush White House have been orchestrating boycotts and hate campaigns against several anti-war performers, most notably the Dixie Chicks, the Texas country trio now fearing for their safety – not to mention their plummeting record sales – after their singer, Natalie Maines, said at a concert in London last month that she was ashamed to hail from the same state as the President. One radio chain, Cumulus Media, responded by arranging for a tractor to crush Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes and videos in an episode that carried uncomfortable echoes of historical book-burnings and other cultural purges.

The venom behind these campaigns is disturbing enough but there is a second strand to the story. And that is that Hollywood might not be such a liberal place after all. As Robbins said in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington last week: "I am sick of hearing about Hollywood being against this war. Hollywood's heavy hitters, the real power brokers and cover-of-the- magazine stars, have been largely silent on this issue."

While several dozen prominent actors and musicians opposed to military action in Iraq signed up for a celebrity-led group called Artists United To Win Without War, recent experience suggests that they are in the minority. Nowhere was this more clearly illustrated than at the Oscars, when the most outspoken of the evening's war critics, Michael Moore, was roundly booed, and those who had suggested it might be distasteful to go ahead with the shameless glitz of the Academy Awards with the bombs falling on Baghdad were systematically ridiculed by the host, Steve Martin.

The wife of a prominent Hollywood entertainment lawyer who attended a high-powered pre-Oscar dinner party was shocked to find that most of the assembled company was in fact heavily pro-war. "Here they were, all these so-called Hollywood liberals, and they were making jokes about peace activists and cheering on the troops," she said.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Hollywood actors or executives being less liberal than their stereotype, but there is something troubling in the way in which their public image is manipulated, especially by the political spin doctors in Washington.

Hollywood has long been a favourite target of conservatives, who have repeatedly blamed the entertainment industry for gun violence, or drugs, or sexual promiscuity. Now there is an attempt to dismiss the anti-war celebrities in similar fashion –as morally irresponsible, overpaid know-nothings who would do better to keep their mouths shut.

Mike Farrell, one-time star of Mash who is now one of the industry's most prominent liberal activists, sees a distinct political strategy at work. "The suggestion that Hollywood speaks with one voice is of course silly," he said, "but the perspective articulated consistently in the media, courtesy of the right wing, is that celebrities are taking advantage of their forum to spew left-wing views. What this is really about is stifling dissent on a national scale. It does not matter a whit whether we are celebrities or not. What galls them so much is that we have access to the media."

The intimidation experienced by Ed Gernon, the CBS producer, or the Dixie Chicks, is certainly having its effect. In his speech to the National Press Club, Robbins cited an unnamed "famous middle-aged rock-and-roller" who thanked him for speaking out against the war but said he did not dare do the same himself because of the power of Clear Channel, the nation's largest radio station owner, which has an unabashed pro-Bush agenda. "They promote our concert appearances," the rocker said. "They own most of the stations that play our music. I can't come out against the war."

The Screen Actors Guild has likened the atmosphere to the McCarthy-era anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. It issued a statement saying that no performer should be denied work on the basis of his or her political beliefs. "Even a hint of the blacklist must never again be tolerated in this nation," it said.

Within three hours of that statement being posted, the guild was inundated with the by now familiar deluge of hate mail. Nevertheless, the statement remains steadfastly posted on the guild's website.

21 April 2003 02:27
Search this site:

Printable Story
independent portfolio
Indi_arts_card