For Peace Movement, Optimism = Realism = Peace 
By Ira Chernus, Common Dreams, January 15, 2003
The man who may cast the deciding vote is the administration's political strategist and vote-counter-in-chief, Karl Rove. He reads the polls.  -- Mother nature will not wait for the Bush administration to make up its mind. She will bring summer to the desert sands of Iraq, right on schedule. If the Bushies don’t start their war by the end of February, it will be too hot to fight until late next autumn. Too many of my friends in the peace movement assume that war is inevitable. In fact, it is far from a done deal. Last summer, the hawks in the administration clearly had the upper hand. Since then, they have slowly but steadily lost their grip. For months now, the president has been backpedaling, in the face of a world-wide wall of opposition to war that just won’t budge. Even George W. no longer believes that America can do whatever it damn pleases. In Britain, organizers of the world-wide demonstrations on February 15 expect up to a million people to fill Trafalgar Square. This week, the German Green Party came out against war. That forced the German government to demand a second Security Council resolution before war can begin. The French and Russians remain sympathetic to that view. The five new members who just joined the Security Council are less likely than the old members to vote for war. Kofi Annan added another warning to his continuing string of cautionary statements. At the same time, the administration revealed its obvious double standard by agreeing to negotiate with North Korea (as long as it isn’t called “negotiation”). Bush pulled the rug out from under his own stated principle of going after dictators with weapons of mass destruction.

Do you talk to them?
By Annie Higgins, The Electronic Intifada, January 15, 2003
As I was walking from the house at the top of the hill, occupied by Israeli forces from beginning to end of the sixteen-day invasion of Jenin Refugee Camp in October/November, schoolboys on the road asked me this question. It is a refrain that punctuates my comings and goings, and it is one that leaves me tongue-tied. The question is not, "Do you talk to them?" because anybody can do that. What matters is if they respond with words rather than gunfire. The nature of the soldiers' response is a source of curiosity for people who are always in danger of being shot rather than spoken to. The initial question is often followed by "What do they say?" I had just come from the Abul-Hayja house, delivering fresh vegetables to the family. As I approached, I called out to let the hidden snipers know this was a humanitarian visit, and that I was not someone to fear and shoot at. They did not talk to me immediately, but after a short wait two armed guards appeared on the balcony. One asked me where I came from, and then said that his mother also lives in America, in New York. I told him I could have my mother call his mother to converse. The idea rattled him slightly and then found a responsive chord. Another armed guard opened the door and escorted me past another two guards before reaching the single room where the family was confined, whereupon the officer supervised my five-minute conversation from the threshold.

Terror as a natural phenomenon
By Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, January 15, 2003
A senior officer was asked last week if he thought the IDF could prevent a provocation by supporters of the "transfer" idea in the army and among the settlers of the West Bank, and foil any attempt at a mass expulsion of Palestinians. The officer offered the following as his answer. He gave as an example a mega-attack that the security forces would fail to prevent, like a car bomb in the heart of a busy Israeli city, or inside a building, with dozens or perhaps hundreds of casualties. A day after that happened, he assumed it would be possible that extremist Israelis might seek "an appropriate response" - for example, the expulsion of all the residents of the village where the terrorist planners lived. The officer admitted he had doubts whether the army could, or would even try, to prevent such an expulsion. "The army failed when it did not prevent the settlers from sabotaging the Palestinian olive harvest in the West Bank, or prevent the settlers from stealing the olives. The state failed, because as far as we know, those settlers who did sabotage the olive harvest have not been dealt with, although their identities are known to the authorities." The officer did not hide his sense that we are facing only escalation. Then along comes the Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, until recently the chief of staff, and reminds us "we are at the peak of a wave of terror." Every day between 5 and 20 Palestinians are arrested in the territories. Every few days the IDF invades some place and demolishes something. Every other day, in addition to armed Palestinians, and Palestinians plotting terror attacks being killed, Palestinian civilians are accidentally killed, including children and the elderly.

Political fence
Editorial, Ha'aretz, January 15, 2003 
Labor Party Chairman Amram Mitzna yesterday promised that he and his colleagues would not join a government headed by Ariel Sharon if the current prime minister forms the next government. "The dream of a unity government under the Likud is a nightmare. I will not join an a priori failure," Mitzna said. Mitzna's - and by extrapolation, Labor's - promise begins to draw the lines of proper political separation for a party that wants to provide an alternative to the political failure that characterized the outgoing Sharon government. The Labor Party joined the Sharon coalition on the basis of a number of assumptions and expectations that proved to be false. Labor ministers did not manage to persuade Sharon to advance a political process, to present a worthy program that could be fulfilled, or even to discuss various political initiatives proposed by others. The coalition agreement, which included a settlement freeze as a key article, was unceasingly abrogated, and the war against terror resulted in the reoccupation of the territories. Labor's representatives in the Sharon government, and its faction in the Knesset, were committed to coalition discipline, so they became a rubber stamp for Sharon's policies. Labor's policies, and its ideological platform, did not find any expression in that government.

The United States of America Has Gone Mad 
By John le Carrι, Common Dreams, January 15, 2003 
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press. The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions. But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost — because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people — in Iraqi lives?

A Lesson on Foreign Policy 
Editorial, Common Dreams, January 15, 2003
The Rev. Martin Luther king Jr., who would today have turned 74, is well remembered as the leading figure in the movement to end American apartheid. But, like so many visionary leaders, King did not limit himself to the single issue with which he was most identified. In the last years of his life, King was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and, more broadly, of U.S. military adventurism abroad. King explained that when the United States took the wrong side of fights in distant lands, this made Americans vulnerable to the resentments and the radical responses that are often directed toward superpowers that act out of arrogance and ignorance. This year, many of the people who will mark King's birthday - including the president and leading members of Congress - are at the same time arguing that the United States should flex her superpower muscles with abandon. Never before has the advocacy for unilateral intervention by the United States been more vocal and aggressive. There are even those who would suggest that it is somehow unpatriotic to discuss the prospect that U.S. interventions abroad might play a role in inspiring terrorist acts and threats directed at Americans. To counter the madness of the moment, it is appropriate to return to King's wise words. On April 4, 1967, one year before he was assassinated, King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City. The carefully chosen title of his address was, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." After detailing his opposition to the Vietnam War, King addressed broad questions of U.S. foreign policy and its impact on America. His words resonate with as much power today as they did in 1967:   "There is something seductively tempting about stopping (with a critique of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia) and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality... (the) words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

The New York Times' dynamic duo
By Matthew Riemer, YellowTimes, January 15, 2003
(YellowTimes.org) – Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman comprise a dynamic duo at America's favorite newspaper capable of the most amazing lies, half-truths, and historical dishonesty heard this side of the Arabian Peninsula. Their condescending mix of blue-collar common sense and off the cuff, guy-you'd-meet-at-the-local-bar editorials continually tow the state line of America and capitalism "good," everything else "bad." Their work is also consistent in its complete lack of any kind of serious analysis contextualized within historical fact. Far from being the scholarly centrists their publisher fancies them to be, they are instead right-wing ideologues of the first order. They, too, share the idea that one's international travels predispose one to be well informed about global ills and armed with solutions -- democracy, capitalism -- and always go out of their way to point out their worldliness. In his latest column ("Sealing the well"), Friedman opens with, "I attended Friday's noon prayers at Cairo's Al Azhar, the most important mosque in Islam." And later he observes, "But when you sit in a room at the U.S. ambassador's house with 30 bright young Egyptian entrepreneurs, mostly U.S.-educated, and this issue [Arab anger towards America] is practically all they want to talk about -- or you meet with American Studies students at Cairo University and they tell you that many students in their class refused to play a simulation game of the U.S. Congress for fear of being tainted -- you feel that there has to be something authentic in their anger about this open wound."

INS Special Registration: illegal, unconstitutional, racist and discriminatory
By Syed Adeeb, YellowTimes, January 13, 2003
(YellowTimes.org) – Three United States Congressmembers have strongly urged U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, a hard-line Talibanist-Christian, to "suspend further implementation of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) by the U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) until Congress and the Department conduct a complete and thorough review of this program." In their letter of 23 December 2002 to Attorney General Ashcroft -- which opposes, rejects and condemns the INS infamous "Special Registration" of selected non-immigrants in the United States -- U.S. Senator Russell D. Feingold (D-WI), U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and U.S. Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) wrote:  "We have grave doubts about whether the INS's implementation of NSEERS has struck the proper balance between securing our borders on the one hand and respecting the civil liberties of foreign students, businesspeople and visitors who have come to our nation legally on the other. Rather, this special registration program appears to be a component of a second wave of roundups and detentions of Arab and Muslim males disguised as a perfunctory registration requirement. Reports indicate that hundreds of individuals who have voluntarily appeared to register at INS offices around the country (but primarily in California) have been arrested and detained without reasonable justification. According to news reports, many of those detained have applications pending for adjustment of status on which the INS has not yet acted."

Where is the UN?
By Hasan Abu Nimah, Jordan Times, January 15, 2003
THERE IS the argument that since for the last fifty-seven years we have had a United Nations Organisation which has been entrusted with world peace and order, and with peaceful, or even forceful resolution of conflicts, world powers should refrain from acting individually in dealing with certain issues, even in protecting their “threatened” interests, and should instead refer every single issue to the UN for taking the appropriate action. In theory, such a situation would not only be fully compatible with the required international legality; it would be ideal as well. It would also, still in theory though, save the member states a lot of cost and trouble, while providing them with free, handy and easy service for their international needs. As a matter of fact, the charter affirms “the sovereign equality of all its members”, (Article 2), a principle that puts a superpower like the United States on the same level with, say, Micronesia or San Marino. It is also true that the UN Charter, by the same article, establishes other relevant principles, such as requiring all members to settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”. Yet, even if all the aforementioned is true, the reality on the international scene is entirely different, and not entirely incomprehensibly so. For, though perfectly legal, it is also perfectly impractical to expect the role and the behaviour of the major powers to be the same as that of the much smaller, and often powerless, nations.