Elite Spokesman Alarmed by Magnitude of Opposition to Iraq War
by John Spritzler, NewDemocracyWorld.org
A man named Les Gelb is complaining that Americans just don't buy President Bush's arguments for waging war on Iraq. Mr. Gelb says in a December 19, 2002 interview that he's been going around the country giving speeches advocating war on Iraq, and that, "I have encountered enormous opposition to my terribly persuasive arguments...80 to 90 percent of audience members were against an invasion." When anti-war individuals report this, one might figure it's a biased sample. What kind of people, after all, are going to come out to listen to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Robert Fisk or Michael Moore, all of whom have reported large attendance at their anti-war speeches, even in supposedly pro-Bush regions of the country. But Mr. Gelb is certainly not attracting a knee-jerk anti-establishment crowd. This is clear when one considers exactly who this man is and who he represents. Les Gelb is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the premiere elite policy-making organization in the United States. When foreign leaders visit the U.S. they appear before the CFR before addressing Congress. CFR members pass in and out of the top government positions routinely. Since 1940 every U.S. secretary of state but one, and every secretary of defense (or war) and most of the directors of the CIA have been CFR members. Dick Cheney, Al Gore and Bill Clinton are all CFRers. The business elite runs the CFR. David Rockefeller (of whom it has been said if he were elected President of the United States it would be a demotion) is a Chairman emeritus of the CFR. Most of America's largest corporations have their directors, chairman or CEO in the CFR.

Bushwhacked
By Matthew Engel, The Guardian, January 13, 2003
With war looming it is no good the American public looking to its newspapers for an independent voice. For the press have now become the president's men -- It is more than 30 years ago now, though it seems like yesterday. A Republican president, much derided by liberals, was in the White House and his opponents were being lashed by the rightwing attack dogs, led then by the vice-president, Spiro Agnew. The elite East Coast press, exemplified by the New York Times and the Washington Post, were the special targets of his scorn: "pointy-headed liberals," he called them, and "the nattering nabobs of negativism". But the press laughed last and longest. Agnew resigned in disgrace, to be followed by his president, Richard Nixon - forced out by the investigations of two Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, whose doggedness revealed Nixon's role in covering up the Watergate break-in and sundry other crimes. It remains one of the greatest - maybe the greatest - moment in the history of American journalism. Now there is a new Republican president, elected even more controversially and pursuing a far more divisive agenda. Where are the pointy-head liberals now? The change can be summed up in Woodward's own career. As the Watergate investigator, he not merely protected his sources, he glamorised them. Now, still on the Post staff, he functions as a semi-official court stenographer to the Bush White House. And it is notable that those who talk to him - such as the president himself - always play the heroic role in his stories.

Email from Saffuriya
By Jonathan Cook, The Guardian, January 13, 2003
It is a reflex question for Palestinians, always posed early in the Arab greeting ritual, to ask a stranger, even another Palestinian, "Where are you from?" before enquiring: "Where do you live?" Few Palestinians live where they feel they belong. Ziyad Awasie is no exception. He, like some 5 million other Palestinians, is a refugee, though not in the camps of Lebanon or Syria, or under military occupation in the West Bank or Gaza, or for that matter in the more pampered exile of Europe and the US. The 28-year-old physiotherapist is one of the million Palestinians who live today as citizens of Israel. To outsiders it is an assumption easily made that these Palestinians remained on their land - even if up to 800,000 others fled to neighbouring Arab states during the war that founded Israel in 1948. The assumption, however, is wrong.

U.S. Declares Open Season on UN Workers 
By Stephen Zunes, Common Dreams, January 10, 2003 
In yet another example of the Bush Administration’s contempt for international law, the United States vetoed an otherwise-unanimous UN Security Council resolution on December 20 that criticized the Israeli government for a series of attacks by its armed forces against United Nations workers and facilities in the occupied Palestinian territories. The first incident cited in the resolution was the November 21 slaying of Iain Hook, who was working for the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) inside a well-marked UN compound in a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern West Bank. A UN investigation revealed that, despite Israeli claims to the contrary, there was no gunfire from the compound where Hook was shot three times. In addition, Israeli forces initially blocked an ambulance and emergency medical team from coming to his aid in time to possibly saved him. Hook, who was British, had been the director of a project to rebuild homes of Palestinian civilians that had been destroyed by Israeli occupation forces during previous military operations. The second incident took place on December 1, when Israeli occupation forces destroyed a building in the Gaza Strip used by the World Food Program (WFP), another UN agency. The warehouse contained hundreds of tons of badly-needed food destined for Palestinian families. Malnutrition has skyrocketed in the occupied territories as multiple sieges by Israeli forces have brought agricultural activity to a virtual halt, leading most of the population to rely on the WFP and private voluntary organizations for basic necessities. According to officials from the WFP, Israeli occupation forces entered and searched the three-story structure and – despite the absence of any apparent military usage – planted a series of explosives, destroying the building and most of its contents minutes later.

Palestinian Solidarity Activists: Driving a Wedge in Consensus Reality
By David Bloom and Bill Weinberg
The editors of World War 3 Report talk to two Palestine Solidarity activists, Steve Quester from Jews Against the Occupation and Zaid Khalil, of Stop US Tax-Funded Aid to Israel Now (SUSTAIN), groups that calls for the full right of return for Palestinian refugees, and an end to all US aid to Israel. Quester and Khalil talk about their entry into solidarity work, their experiences in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement and the challenges currently facing Palestine activism.

The 'secular coalition' illusion
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, January 13, 2003
The "secular center coalition" is turning into the hottest merchandise in the political market. From the flag of rebellion raised by a marginal party, the "cabinet without ultra-Orthodox parties" has moved to the banner of some of Labor's leaders, including Shimon Peres. David Ben-Gurion set the rule, "No Herut or Communists," in the 1950s, calling to exclude those two parties from the legitimate political camp. His pupil, Shimon Peres, is calling to exclude the representatives of the ultra-Orthodox sector and bring the political descendants of Ben-Gurion back to the bosom of Herut's descendants. The Likud and Labor could have set up a coalition based only on secular parties after the previous elections. The reasons that have prevented such a move till now are, more or less, the same reasons such a coalition will not be formed after the next elections: More than 200,000 of the Likud's voters define themselves as traditional (masorti) to ultra-Orthodox Jews. A unilateral separation of the Likud from the religious parties could undermine the delicate balance between their national worldview and their religious belief.

Transfer, as an Israeli policy
By Fahed Fanek, Jordan Times, January 13, 2003
THESE DAYS, the highway between Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport and the city of Jerusalem is festooned with political placards and posters. One of them says: “Transfer means peace and security” — a slogan reminiscent of the Nazis. Yet, such overtly racist slogans are not being met with the derision they deserve from the Israeli public, neither do the authorities attempt to remove them. “Transfer” (of native Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to neighbouring Arab countries, chiefly Jordan) has gained respectability; it has become the stated policy of Israel's far right, while moderates are scared to speak out against it. Yet Israeli officials must realise that “transfer” is not a practical option; neither is the perpetuation of the current state of affairs with the Palestinians. The next Israeli government — whether led by Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon or Labour Party leader Amram Mitzna — must act radically to break out of the impasse. In order to do that, Israel has three options only: a two-state solution, annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, and “transfer”. The first option, that of an emasculated Palestinian state existing alongside Israel, means a return to the peace process and Israel's acceptance to withdraw totally from the West Bank and Gaza to the June 4, 1967, lines. This solution needs an Israeli “Charles de Gaulle” to carry it through; unfortunately, no such leader has yet appeared on Israel's political firmament. The second option, annexation, which means giving 3 million Palestinians Israeli citizenship, is gaining support from an increasing number of people in the occupied territories. But this option would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state, replacing it with a multiethnic state — a solution that the Israelis, both left and right, find unacceptable for obvious reasons.

The Burden
By Michael Ignatieff, MIFTAH, January 9, 2003 
In a speech to graduating cadets at West Point in June, President Bush declared, ''America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish.'' When he spoke to veterans assembled at the White House in November, he said: America has ''no territorial ambitions. We don't seek an empire. Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.'' Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but ''empire'' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires. A historian once remarked that Britain acquired its empire in ''a fit of absence of mind.'' If Americans have an empire, they have acquired it in a state of deep denial. But Sept. 11 was an awakening, a moment of reckoning with the extent of American power and the avenging hatreds it arouses. Americans may not have thought of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon as the symbolic headquarters of a world empire, but the men with the box cutters certainly did, and so do numberless millions who cheered their terrifying exercise in the propaganda of the deed.

I Am No Occupier, Full Stop!
By Uri Ya’acobi, Palestime Media Center, January 13, 2003
[Here follows a letter to the editor, published in all the main Israeli papers. Uri Ya'acobi (18) is one of the Shiministim who announced long in advance their refusal to serve in the army. Uri sent it the day before his enlistment, on August 15. He is since then in jail.]  -- In another two days I am not going to enlist. I will go the Soldiers House, and will board the bus together with all other conscription candidates, and after we get off the bus at the Induction Center in Tel Hashomer, I will, unlike the others, refuse to enlist, and I will almost certainly be sent to prison. In the prison I will meet two of the fellow signatories of "the letter of the high school pupils" — Yoni Yechezkel and Dror Boimel. Those two were imprisoned the last week — because of their own refusal to enlist. They, just like me, and as it turns out: like a lot of other Israelis, understand that this war which the state of Israel is conducting, in the territories that it occupied in '67, is not a war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness (not so different from many more wars which took place in the course of history). When we hear via foreign media of Israeli tanks rampaging in the streets of Palestinian cities (for some reason it's hardly ever on the news of the Israeli media), then we don't hear the whole truth. The sad truth is that what the Israeli army does in the territories is not limited to tanks rampaging in the streets and the destruction of the civilian infrastructure. The military actions are also not limited to delaying ambulances and pregnant women at roadblocks or just insensitivity towards Palestinian citizens. Our soldiers find themselves in difficult situations, and part of them do it by mistake, but they do kill children and old people who certainly are in no way connected to any act of terrorism. They destroy houses of whole families — and perpetrate other acts for which "terrorism" is the most fitting definition.

5 Reasons to Stop US Military Aid to Israel
Stop US Military Aid to Israel
"You must end the illegal occupation." -- Kofi Annan, addressing Israel in a meeting of the UN Security Council, March 12, 2002 

Arming for Armageddon
By John Stanton, Online Journal, January 9, 2003
US military-industrial complex reigns supreme -- January 9, 2003—In 2001, the US weapons industry controlled approximately 50 percent of the world arms market. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reports that for fiscal year 2001, the US government exported $12.2 billion in weapons and was awarded $13.1 billion in new foreign contracts through its Foreign Military Sales program. That excludes the $36 billion in direct commercial sales by US weapons manufacturers to foreign nations. FAS indicates that the weapons industry is second only to the US agriculture industry in its receipt of US taxpayer subsidies. Yet, the weapons industry still whines about export restrictions and pesky public disclosure requirements that actually make it somewhat accountable to the US Congress and the American people. So it's no surprise that in 2003, the weapons industry will be busy lobbying the US Congress and the American public for more subsidies, fewer restrictions on what can be sold and to whom, and exemptions from public accountability and long standing agreements. The weapons industry storyline will include appeals to 9–11 and patriotism, free markets, job creation and level-playing fields, and global democracy—US style. But the reality behind the phony proclamations is, of course, profits and free rides.