Car wars
By Ian Roberts, The Guardian, January 18, 2003
The US economy needs oil like a junkie needs heroin - and Iraq will supply its next fix  -- War in Iraq is inevitable. That there would be war was decided by North American planners in the mid-1920s. That it would be in Iraq was decided much more recently. The architects of this war were not military planners but town planners. War is inevitable not because of weapons of mass destruction, as claimed by the political right, nor because of western imperialism, as claimed by the left. The cause of this war, and probably the one that will follow, is car dependence. The US has paved itself into a corner. Its physical and economic infrastructure is so highly car dependent that the US is pathologically addicted to oil. Without billions of barrels of precious black sludge being pumped into the veins of its economy every year, the nation would experience painful and damaging withdrawal.

War-protest news missing in action
By Tom Plate, San Francisco Chronicle, January 17, 2003
BEFORE HARDLY anyone in Washington or the mass media realize it, a protest may bloom on the West Coast that will remind people of the bad old days of Vietnam. On Jan. 11, tens of thousands participated in an anti-war protest in Los Angeles, and a similar turnout is expected in San Francisco on Saturday. Anti- war rallies are also to be held in Orange County, near the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and in Washington. The demographics of these events are telling. Showing up these days: Not just the usual kooky cadres of semi-professional protest junkies, anti- globalization crusaders and whacked-out conspiracy theorists but protesters from the solid middle class as well. It's time for Washington to start worrying. So should the U.S. media. They have been slow to pick up on the story -- as decades ago when the establishment media was late to comprehend the dimensions of the tumult and divisiveness prompted by the Vietnam War. In its just-out issue, CJR, the leading serious media journalism review that's published at prestigious Columbia University in New York, gives failing grades on this story to media outlets from the Washington Post and the New York Times to the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Voices for peace growing stronger
By Jules Witcover, Baltimore Sun, January 17, 2003
WASHINGTON - Even as President Bush tells the world how "sick and tired" he is of Saddam Hussein's stalling tactics and complains about U.N. inspector Hans Blix's insistence on continuing his search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, American anti-war voices are growing louder. Big protest marches and other demonstrations are planned for this weekend in Washington, San Francisco and elsewhere. The activities are being billed by an umbrella organization, United for Peace and Justice, as the largest protest ever mounted against a war that has not yet started. Tomorrow in Washington, a coalition called International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) will parade from the Capitol to the Washington Navy Yard, where a mock request will be made to inspect American weapons of mass destruction. On Sunday, another group, Iraq Pledge of Resistance, will court arrest by forming on the sidewalk in front of the White House, barred to protesters, as an act of nonviolent civil disobedience reminiscent of Vietnam War protest days. On Monday, still another band, Black Voices for Peace, will mark the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with a rally and church peace service.

Sharon's War Of Revenge
By Ze'ev Schiff, The Day, January 18, 2003
In the perception of many people, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is a strong leader who is the right person for war-time periods. However, what Israel really needs at the present strategic juncture is a statesman with a vision who will lead the country out of its complex conflict, and not a power-obsessed leader because of whom the national cart is sinking ever deeper into the mire. Israel needs a statesman who will be capable of exploiting new international circumstances to resolve the conflict before the entire Middle East is contaminated with nuclear and biological weapons. During his nearly two years as the country's leader of the country, Sharon has not even neared the status of a statesman who looks beyond war. The result is that under his leadership, Israel is sliding down a steep slope. A similar development has occurred on the Palestinian side, under their leader, PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, but that is no consolation. The downtrodden Palestinians are farther from realizing their national aspirations, but Israel has regressed in almost every sphere, and there is not a glimmer of light on the horizon. An analysis of Sharon's tenure as prime minister does not hold out any prospect that he will extricate Israel from the two intertwined crises - the economic crisis and the security crisis - in which the country finds itself. Israel is becoming poorer as are many of its citizens. Israel is finding it difficult to bankroll the war; even now the defense budget is being managed with a wink and is breaching the state budget.

America didn't seem to mind poison gas
By Joost R. Hiltermann, International Herald Tribune, January 17, 2003
AMMAN, Jordan: In calling for regime change in Iraq, George W. Bush has accused Saddam Hussein of being a man who gassed his own people. Bush is right, of course. The public record shows that Saddam's regime repeatedly spread poisonous gases on Kurdish villages in 1987 and 1988 in an attempt to put down a persistent rebellion. The biggest such attack was against Halabja in March 1988. According to local organizations providing relief to the survivors, some 6,800 Kurds were killed, the vast majority of them civilians. It is a good thing that Bush has highlighted these atrocities by a regime that is more brutal than most. Yet it is cynical to use them as a justification for American plans to terminate the regime. By any measure, the American record on Halabja is shameful. Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.

Conscientious Objectors Abused by the Israeli Military
By Yigal Bronner, CounterPunch, January 17, 2003
Jonathan Ben Artzi's (or Yoni as his friends know him) first experience with the Israeli justice system was a positive one. As a student at an elite Jerusalem prep school, he found that he could no longer bear the militaristic atmosphere or the overt role the military played in his education. When his class was bussed to a military training center for an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) orientation as part of his school program, Yoni refused to go. He also insisted that his parents be refunded for this "course," and that the fees be returned to his sole Arab classmate, who was literally taken off the military bus. Yoni simply felt that a school should prepare its students to be better citizens-- not soldiers. But this position, which for many may seem rather commonsensical, is considered extremely radical in Israel. The high school, for its part, retaliated by preventing Yoni from graduating and denying him his diploma. It took a year and half of an uphill legal battle for this decision to be overruled by an Israeli court. In a tiny and cramped courtroom, Yoni, by then a college freshman majoring in mathematics, finally had a graduation-ceremony of sorts. But this small victory is now a fading memory for Yoni, who has spent the last six months in a military prison. Yoni is a pacifist and has been one ever since he was twelve. He simply opposes wars. He cannot picture himself bearing arms. Furthermore, he is incensed by Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestine, by the atrocities and war crimes it commits, and by the endless cycle of violence its leaders market as a necessary component of life in Israel. Long before he was due to be drafted, it was clear to Yoni that he could not and would not participate in this march of folly; he would not join the military.

International Law or US Hegemony: From Chemical Weapons to Iraq
By Bob Rigg, Dissident Voice, January 17, 2003
A former official at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons describes how an effective international system to reduce the threat from weapons of mass destruction was sabotaged by the US government. Can the resulting ‘Darwinisation’ of international relations be halted? -- I worked with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague for nine years, ultimately as senior editor, inspired by the feeling that I was participating in a historically unique disarmament and non-proliferation venture. The essence of the OPCW resides in its verification regime, which gives the OPCW Secretariat far-reaching powers to verify whether each and every member state is complying with its undertaking to abolish all existing stockpiles of chemical weapons and not to develop new ones. (All previous international disarmament treaties and agreements had foundered on the fact that member states declared their opposition to weapons of mass destruction, and then proceeded to secretly develop them anyway.) In this context the Chemical Weapons Convention assigns central importance to the political independence of the OPCW Secretariat and all of its staff members, including the Director-General. The role of the Director-General could be compared to that of an auditor-general, who is appointed by the state to independently and critically monitor the propriety of its financial dealings. But whereas the political independence of auditors-general is guaranteed by legislation, which makes it virtually impossible to dismiss them, the wide-eyed idealists who drafted the text of the Chemical Weapons Convention made no specific provision for such a contingency – a fatal omission, as it turned out. It should also be noted that, since the inception of the OPCW, its member states agreed to take all decisions by consensus, in order to defend the universal and multilateral character of this unique treaty.

The Tea Party: Thinking a Revolutionary Vision
By Steven Higgs, CounterPunch, January 16, 2003
Before Linda Oblack, Chris Kupersmith, and Jeanne Leimkuhler could proceed with plans for a "journal of revolutionary thought," they had to decide just what the phrase means. Their conclusion was necessarily simple and powerful. "Our mission is revolutionary," Oblack writes in the introduction to the premier issue of Tea Party: A Journal of Revolutionary Thought. "Our mission is to make people think." Published twice a year by the Center for Sustainable Living and financed by contributions from area businesses and individuals, Tea Party is a collection of essays, poems, and musings from some of Southern Indiana's most thoughtful and revolutionary writers, thinkers, poets, and political activists. The premier issue - September 2002 ­ is indeed a revolutionary document, as envisioned by Oblack, Kupersmith, and Leimkuhler. Think about these words from "Give me liberty or give me debt" by James Alexander Thom: "He who is in debt is not free. He who is not in debt is free. He who fears the loss of his stuff is not free. He who has no such fear is free." Or these from "Funny Money, Anyone?" by Jen Weiss: "So how did it go so terribly wrong? How did we end up with a culture that is absolutely obsessed with acquiring money and material possessions? Is there any way out?" Or these from "Can Our Community Make Sound Environmental Decisions?" by Lynton K. Caldwell: "The challenge to this community, and others like it, is to discover the route to a sustainable future of desired quality and equity. This task requires an interchange of information and ideas, and an unbiased assessment of the most reliable evidence available."

George Bush’s Other Poodle
By John Pilger, Dissident Voice, January 17, 2003
Strange days in Australia. "Paranoia in the lucky country", say the headlines in Sydney, "Terror threat grips a nation". The government of John Howard has issued full-page advertisements calling on Australians to protect their "friendly, decent society" from terrorists within by spying on each other. More than a thousand people have used a hotline "to report things", causing grief to Muslim Australians. Asked if he thought it better that Muslim women made themselves "less conspicuous at this time" by not wearing their traditional headdress, Howard replied: "Obviously." Howard's is the only government in the world willing and eager to join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq, a faraway country that buys Australia's primary produce and with whom Australians have no quarrel. For those Australians yet to succumb to the amnesia of the times, this is all very familiar, evoking a melancholy history of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war, to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf. Some years ago, I interviewed an Australian warrant officer who had served on a CIA-run assassination team in Vietnam, and ruefully recalled to me the words of his American commander. "We really like using you guys," said the American. "It's like this: the British have the Gurkhas; we've got the Australians."

This looming war isn't about chemical warheads or human rights: it's about oil
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, January 18, 2003
Along with the concern for 'vital interests' in the Gulf, this war was concocted five years ago by oil men such as Dick Cheney -- I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house in the suburbs of Amman this week, stuffing into my mouth vast heaps of lamb and boiled rice soaked in melted butter. The elderly, bearded, robed men from Maan – the most Islamist and disobedient city in Jordan – sat around me, plunging their hands into the meat and soaked rice, urging me to eat more and more of the great pile until I felt constrained to point out that we Brits had eaten so much of the Middle East these past 100 years that we were no longer hungry. There was a muttering of prayers until an old man replied. "The Americans eat us now," he said. Through the open door, where rain splashed on the paving stones, a sharp east wind howled in from the east, from the Jordanian and Iraqi deserts. Every man in the room believed President Bush wanted Iraqi oil. Indeed, every Arab I've met in the past six months believes that this – and this alone – explains his enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Many Israelis think the same. So do I. Once an American regime is installed in Baghdad, our oil companies will have access to 112 billion barrels of oil. With unproven reserves, we might actually end up controlling almost a quarter of the world's total reserves. And this forthcoming war isn't about oil?

A Small Victory in Atil: Tractors can cross to the fields
By Drew Penland, IndyMedia/International Solidarity Movement - Vancouver, January 15, 2003
Another article that will soon join all the other unnewsworthy stories that I have written to date, and be forgotten. -- Two youths were murdered today in my town. The first, a boy of 17 named Mohi was shot crossing the street in the wee hours of the night at the mouth of Tulkarem refugee camp. Israeli soldiers riddled his body with bullets, shooting from an armoured personnel carrier (APC). He was pronounced dead on arrival at Tulkarem hospital. Then, this morning there was a lot of noise downtown as the occupation forces attempted to impose an illegal curfew. They tear gassed the schools and stopped people in the streets and told them to remove their clothes and lay down on the road. The Palestinians are a people without an army, but today the youth resisted valiantly - throwing rocks and molotov cocktails in an attempt to drive these war vehicles out of this populated area. On several occasions Israeli soldiers fired automatic weapons at the youth. At one point someone called out that someone had been shot. We rushed down an alley to a place where one youth was carrying another in his arms. The shot youth, Haza, was carried to a truck and brought to Tulkarem hospital. Haza, 16, had been shot in the heart. At the hospital I wanted to get a photo of this young boy as doctors struggled unsuccessfully to bring him back from the brink. But my digital camera had no remaining space. So, I went back through the camera's memory and was forced to delete some other photos. I deleted beautiful sunsets, children playing, kids learning at school. I filled the space with faces, the victims of the Israeli occupation. For Palestinians it is the same. Without an end to this brutal occupation life cannot be filled with happiness. The learning, the sunsets, the playing, all the joys of life are overshadowed by those faces.

Big Oil and James Baker target Western Sahara
By Wayne Madsen, Online Journal, January 16, 2003
January 16, 2003—In the midst of America's international campaign against terrorism, the Bush administration is permitting Big Oil to legitimize the illegal occupation of an invaded country–Western Sahara. Formerly known as Spanish Sahara and invaded by Morocco in 1975 (the same year Henry Kissinger acquiesced to Indonesia's invasion and annexation of East Timor and India's annexation of the Himalayan Kigdom of Sikkim)), Western Sahara's occupation by Morocco has neither been recognized by the United Nations nor the Organization of African Unity. The latter actually recognizes the independence of Western Sahara's exiled Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which is headquartered in remote and squalid desert refugee camps on the Algerian side of the Western Sahara-Algeria border. In the New World Order of the Bush family, the Western Saharans have little future. That is because the lifeblood of what it means to be a Bush—oil—has been discovered off the coast of Western Sahara. Although Morocco is the illegal occupier of Western Sahara, that did not stop the Oklahoma City-based Kerr-McGee Corporation (the company infamously portrayed in the movie "Silkwood") from signing an off-shore exploration deal with Morocco on September 25, 2001, just days after the terrorist attacks on the United States. The timing for Kerr-McGee could not have been better.