Can Blair really hope to sway Bush?
By Julian Borger, Suzanne Goldenberg, and Michael White, The Guardian, January 16, 2003
Tony Blair's Camp David summit with George Bush at the end of the month could be the last time they look each other in the eye before plunging their alliance into a new war with Iraq. It will be a tense scene. The UN weapons inspectors will just have presented their report. If, against expectations, they provide persuasive evidence of clandestine Iraqi efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction, the die will be cast and the fast gathering US-led force in the Gulf will rumble towards invasion.
However, if no "smoking gun" is found in the Iraqi sand, as seems more likely, this encounter will be an essential test of repeated Whitehall claims that the prime minister really does wield influence over the world's superpower. To prove it, Mr Blair will have to fend off the dogs of war for a few weeks longer. There are powerful voices inside Mr Bush's administration who view the inspections as a farce choreographed by Saddam Hussein, and by the end of the month will be calling for them to be cut short so that battle can commence. As one British official closely involved with the transatlantic relationship admitted: "They will press their argument very, very hard."

The (sp)oils of war
By Guy Taylor, The Guardian, January 16, 2003
Bush and Blair should remember that regime change can start at home -- Tony Blair has got some distance to go before he weathers the Iraq crisis. The firefighters could hamper the war effort and the majority of the public oppose a war before its first official casualty. We are on the brink of organising the biggest political demonstration in British history. We know it will be big from the meeting the stewards had with the Hyde Park authorities. When it came to estimating turnout, a middle ranking official said he knew it will be massive, "because I'm going to be there".
There is much talk of numbers. There is no doubt our February 15 demo will beat the Countryside Alliance's fox killers. What the police and authorities announce is a different story. Saturday's Stop the War Coalition conference gives every reason for confidence. A good turnout, 800+ delegates, plenty of media attention and the realisation that we're in the middle of the biggest international movement in living memory. And London is the centre of it all. Last year's marches summed it up - from 20,000 in New York in February to a million in Florence in November. Since then, demos have been organised across the planet for February 15. Slapping stickers on lampposts and bus stops used to involve judging by looks alone whether people present would agree with or oppose you. Now it's a matter of making sure you've got plenty spare to hand out to people who want some for themselves.

Direct action may become a necessity
By Seumas Milne, The Guardian, January 16, 2003
The UN is being used as a fig leaf for war in the face of world opinion -- If anyone could sell George Bush's planned war of aggression against Iraq, surely it should be Tony Blair, a politician whose career has been built on his ability to smoothtalk his way out of a crisis. He has been straining every nerve to do just that for the past week. The latest sales drive began with the prime minister's attempt to link the alleged ricin find above a north London chemist's shop with "weapons of mass destruction". And it culminated on Monday with his imaginative effort to construct a link between "rogue states" such as Iraq and Islamist terrorism. But all the signs are that his spin offensive simply isn't working. Such tales may find more of an echo in the United States, where half the population believes Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11 attacks, according to some polls. But in Britain - and even more so in the rest of the world - most people are now convinced that the opposite is the case: that the best way to boost support for al-Qaida and Islamist attacks on western targets is precisely to launch an Anglo-American crusade to invade and occupy Arab, Muslim Iraq.

False witnesses
By Tim Llewellyn, The Guardian, January 16, 2003
ITC approval of John Pilger's documentary is a shot across the bows of mainstream Middle East coverage -- Since the creation of Israel in 1948, its supporters have been highly successful in ensuring that Israel's version of its and its neighbours' histories has been accepted as received truth. Dents have been made, notably by Israel's own historians as they have had greater access to official documents, in the Zionist myths. But they have usually been hammered out with alacrity, both by Israel and our domestic broadcasters. Whenever Israel has been exposed as an aggressor - in Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, or during the first intifada of the late 1980s - its media doldrums have been temporary. The efforts of its spin doctors, the US government and media, in conjunction with a weak Arab communications operation, have usually combined to make Israel's broad version of events prevail. These continue to give the impression of a struggle between equal forces: a beleaguered and misunderstood Israel, occasionally forced into excessive measures to clamp down on "terror", versus hordes of recalcitrant Palestinians careless of "western" values and endemically suicidal for obscure religious reasons. "Equivalence" is at the heart of Britain's misreporting of the crisis.

Save Iraq from the carnage
By Fawaz Turki, Arab News, January 16, 2003
Dear Mr. Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq:  I’m writing this urgent memo as per your request in the speech you recently gave calling on people in “the Arab nation” to ready themselves for a confrontation with “the sons of Satan.” These devils are poised, you stated, to invade your country, inflicting on its citizens potentially more suffering than the one visited upon them 12 years ago — incalculable suffering from which they yet have to recover to this day. Since I care about Iraq’s fate and its people’s welfare — not just because I happen to be an Arab, but also because of my concerns, being the liberal fool that I am, about the right of deprived folks in Third World nations to enjoy social justice and freedom, and to live prosperous, secure lives — I am urging you to drop the notion that of “l’etat, c’est mois,” and to contemplate what might be, in these dangerous times, the best answer to the very question that you yourself raised in your speech: How to deal with the imminent disaster that your country, and along with it the Arab nation, appears to be facing. Mr. Hussein, Sir, have you considered the possibility of resigning, leaving Iraq and living in exile where you could productively devote your time to writing your memoir?

The Fallout of the Suez Still Lingers: New Crisis, Old Lesson
by Robert Fisk, CounterPunch, January 15, 2003
There was secret collusion, a fraudulent attempt to use the United Nations as a fig leaf for war, a largely unsympathetic British public, journalists used as propagandists and our enemy----an Arab dictator previously regarded as a friend of the West--compared to the worst criminals of the Second World War. Sound familiar? Well, it happened almost half a century ago, not over oil but over a narrow man--made canal linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The Suez crisis has haunted British governments ever since 1956--it hung over Margaret Thatcher during the 1982 Falklands War, and its ghost now moves between the Foreign Office and Downing Street, between Jack Straw and Tony Blair. For Suez destroyed a British prime minister--along, almost, with the Anglo--American alliance--and symbolised the end of the British empire. It killed many civilians--all Egyptian, of course--and brought shame upon the allies when they turned out to have committed war crimes. It rested on a lie--that British and French troops should land in Egypt to "separate" the Egyptian and Israeli armies, even though the British and French had earlier connived at Israel's invasion. Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser was described by the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, as "the Mussolini of the Nile" even though, scarcely a year earlier, Eden had warmly shaken Nasser's hand in an exchange of congratulations over a new Anglo--Egyptian treaty--shades of Donald Rumsfeld's chummy meeting with the "Hitler of Baghdad" in 1983. In the end, British troops--poorly equipped and treating their Egyptian enemies with racial disdain--left in humiliation, digging up their dead comrades from their graves to freight back home lest the Egyptians defiled their bodies.

Jews, Israel, And The United States: Talking Points For Jewish Anti-War Activists
By Rachael Kamel, Dissident Voice, January 13, 2003
[Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published in various publications in the summer of 2002. We post it here because it remains crucially relevant] Talking to American Jews about cutting or suspending U.S. military aid to Israel is a daunting prospect. Within the Jewish community, this topic cannot even really be termed controversial - it would be better described as taboo. Attempts to open the discussion are most often met with the knee-jerk reaction that U.S. support is vital to guaranteeing Israel's safety, and with it the safety of the Jewish people worldwide. Anyone who argues otherwise is dismissed as either a traitor or a fool. Today, Israel's invasion and reoccupation of population centers in the Palestinian West Bank has prompted increasing numbers of Jewish (and non-Jewish) activists to begin publicly challenging U.S. support for Israel. More and more voices are calling for a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, as long as Israel's 35-year-old illegal occupation of Palestinian territory continues. Does the emergence of this issue represent a sea change in Jewish peace politics, or a transitory reaction to the current crisis?

The Bitter Ironies Of Propaganda
By David Edwards, Dissident Voice, January 15, 2003
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolate land in rags and hunger and thirst." (Mark Twain, The War Prayer. Quoted, Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War, Seven Stories Press, 2002, p.101) By mid-February 150,000 troops will be in place in the Gulf, supported by hundreds of bombers, fighter-bombers, tanks, a fleet of nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, cluster bombs, depleted uranium shells, and all the rest of it. They will be poised to attack a Third World Muslim country that has suffered more than a decade of murderous sanctions, and of smashed economic infrastructure destroyed by the equivalent of seven Hiroshima-size bombs dropped during the last Gulf War. According to a leaked UN report, the effects of this war could be even worse: "Unlike the progression of the military intervention in 1991, a future confrontation is expected to develop beyond the preparatory, and relatively short, aerial bombardment of infrastructure, towns, and cities into potentially a large scale and protracted ground offensive, supported by aerial and conventional bombardment. The resultant devastation would undoubtedly be great. Initially, access to those in need would either be denied by one or other of the protagonists or severely hampered by security or safety concerns. Additionally, logistics, particularly the ability to move with any degree of freedom, will be a major constraint." (Likely Humanitarian Scenarios, December 10, 2002)

A Note on MEMRI & Translations
By Leah Harris, CounterPunch, January 15, 2003
I received many responses to my article "It's the Occupation, Stupid: Why the Pro-Occupation Right is Running Scared" (December 28, 2002), and wish to thank Counterpunch readers for their engagement. It has come to my attention that I unintentionally misrepresented one aspect of MEMRI's work by asserting that the organization "undertakes the disingenuous practice of mistranslating excerpts of anti-occupation articles published in the Arabic press." After further investigation of this issue, I have discovered that the technical accuracy of MEMRI's translations has not been disputed. Thus I specifically retract my allegation that the organization's translations are questionable, and I apologize for my error. However, I do stand by my assertion that MEMRI engages in the practice of publishing selective and decontextualized excerpts of the Arabic press in ways that can present opponents of occupation as religious extremists or anti-Semites.

Monsters, Inc. - The Pentagon Plan to Create Mutant "Super-Soldiers"
By Chris Floyd, CounterPunch, January 13, 2003
The DARPA "war fighter enhancement" programs--an acceleration of bipartisan biotinkering that's been going on for years--will involve injecting young men and women with hormonal, neurological and genetic concoctions; implanting microchips and electrodes in their bodies to control their internal organs and brain functions; and plying them with drugs that deaden some of their normal human tendencies: the need for sleep, the fear of death, the reluctance to kill their fellow human beings. -- The great wizard, leader of the Wise, once known to all the world as a force for good, has turned bitter, fearful--and ambitious. Aping the ways of the evil he once fought--brutality, dominance, greed, terror--he descends to his secret laboratory, where, with black arts of alchemy and fiendish technology, he breeds a race of mutant warriors, "iron bodied and iron willed": fierce fighters who can attack day and night, without rest, their combat spirit kept soaring by spikes of lightning from the wizard's wand. A scene from Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, where the corrupted wizard Saruman fashions his monstrous Uruk-Hai to wage a relentless, remorseless war for dominion? No; unfortunately it's a very real scheme now being pursued by the Pentagon, whose dope wizards and gene splicers are working on the creation of the "Extended Performance War Fighter," the Daily Telegraph and Christian Science Monitor report.

Explosions, a headache from an unlikely source
By Diaa Hadid, The Electronic Intidfada, January 15, 2003
I have a headache today; I'm not the only one. The woman in the apartment building in Silwan, Jerusalem, where I was this morning also has a headache. So does her children. She told me herself. We all heard the same explosion you see; Israeli authorities attempting to explode a house in Silwan, as a collective punishment. One of the family members (in jail with multiple life sentences) was a part of a 'terror gang.'  His family wasn't though. It doesn't matter. While he is in jail, they are now homeless. Two others and I arrived in Silwan this morning. We thought we were smart. Stopping our taxi on a nearby street, we saw Israeli border police guarding the road. No worries, we said, we'll walk. The Israeli border police (IBP) didn't notice us going up the stairs, but we didn't realize the home was a good six kilometers away either. Bratty little boys kept telling us which direction to walk, and we did, eventually we were stopped by some more IBP.

The intifada is the economy
By Nehamia Strasler, Ha'aretz, January 16, 2003
Those who want to can continue calling Amram Mitzna political tyro. But he's still the political tyro who came out of nowhere to conquer the Labor Party, and he's the political tyro who this week forced the entire top ranks of the Labor Party to come out with a clear public commitment - it's either us, or Sharon. Mitzna understood the Labor Party had become a fig leaf both for Ariel Sharon and for Tommy Lapid. Sharon wanted the fig leaf so he could continue the exact same policy he has followed for the last two years with Benjamin Ben-Eliezer giving him a local alibi and Shimon Peres defending him in Europe and getting him guarantees in Washington. Lapid wants Mitzna in the government because Lapid's getting ants in his pants to get into the ministerial chair - and without Mitzna he can't join an extreme right-wing government with Shas where. Heaven forbid - he would suddenly become the left wing of the government. Therefore, both Sharon and Lapid are very angry at the political tyro who has pulled the rug out from under their dreams of the broad stable secular government they've been nurturing - a government that would continue to do nothing and initiate nothing.

There's still a crisis
Editorial, Ha'aretz, January 16, 2003
Amram Mitzna has made a public pledge not to take the Labor Party into a government led by Ariel Sharon. The situation, he says, requires giving the voters a clear choice between Labor and Likud - a choice between two different ways. Labor ministers from the former Sharon-led unity government lined up behind him at his news conference. However, the reaction of top businessmen who are worried by the economic situation is that Labor must not remain out of government. They say that without a national unity government, a worse economic crisis is inevitable. They believe a narrow government will lead to political instability, which means economic instability, and damage to Israel's stature in international financial markets. They believe Labor must not rule out joining a Sharon-led unity government with Likud. These same businessmen apparently fail to give full weight to the clear connection between Sharon's policies up to now and the present economic situation.

People and Politics: The PA casino - gambling on connections
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, January 16, 2003
It wasn't so long ago that 3,000 compulsive Israeli gamblers visited the casino in Jericho daily. The revenues reached tens of millions of dollars a year and the businessmen behind the casino began negotiating for a new casino in Ramallah. The intifada didn't stand in the way of the gamblers, nor the warnings from the Israel Defense Forces that they could lose a lot more than their money at the gambling hall. The government coordinator in the territories at the time, Mendy Orr, demanded that the political echelon order the casino closed. But the major general's powers were not enough against the connections of Jibril Rajoub and his partner Mohammed Rashid. Eventually, Orr found an opportunity to issue a statement that the casino provided hiding places for Palestinian snipers and was a source of financing for their terrorism. One of the senior investors in the casino is the Austrian-Jewish millionaire Martin Schlaff. His lawyer in Israel was attorney Dov Weisglass, currently Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's bureau chief. Schlaff's partner in the casino was Rashid, Arafat's economic adviser, as well as Rajoub and other top officials in the Palestinian Authority. Weisglass responded to Orr's statement with an official letter threatening to sue for libel if Orr did not retract his claims that the casino's profits were being used, among other things, to buy guns for Palestinian terror elements. (Now's the time to remember that a few months later, Weisglass was sitting next to Sharon in the Oval Office in Washington as the new prime minister explained to President Bush why it was necessary to freeze PA monies because it was being used to buy weapons for terrorist elements in the territories). Orr refused to retract his statement.

Destruction and The Wall
Palestine Monitor staff, Palestine Monitor, January 14, 2003
“I’ve got 4,000 innocent people here living in what amounts to an open air prison – with no one allowed to enter or leave. Now they are being told that their houses are going to be demolished. They come to me, asking for help. But what can I possibly do?” asks Ghasan Nayif Kaba’a, shaking his head in frustration. Kaba’a is the head of the village council of Barta’a ash Sharqiya, a medium-sized village in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The village is situated near Jenin. It is also, unfortunately, situated near the “Green Line” – the border separating Israel from the West Bank. Being so close to the Green Line has not always been a drawback. Barta’a ash Sharqiya’s proximity to Israel, which allows for frequent visits to local businesses by Palestinian Israeli customers and easy transportation of goods into Israel, has caused a boom for the village in recent times – particularly after the repeated Israeli army invasions and destruction in larger neighbouring towns like Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Qalqilya.  "When the current intifada began in September 2000, many transferred their businesses to Barta’a because of it’s proximity to the Green Line. Our village quickly grew and became a vibrant center for economic activity,” says Kaba’a, proudly. Kaba’a’s pride quickly turned to dismay, however, as the village became aware of Israel’s plans to build a new “Apartheid” wall – an eight-meter-high concrete wall surrounded by trenches and electrified fencing -- to physically separate Israel from its Palestinian neighbours…and that it would be only three km away from Barta’a.