An Imprisoned Palestiian Village Goes to the Doctor
By Gideon Levy, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel/Ha'aretz, January 16, 2003
Your child has a high fever. Soon you're at the doctor. A few more minutes, and maybe you're at the emergency room. If you live far away, you have to drive a little more. Near or far, for Palestinian parents, such trips take hours. They can't always get to the hospital in the closest town. There are checkpoints that one can't even approach at night. Now imagine that a Palestinian child has a serious ailment, like a heart defect, cerebral palsy, a severe developmental disorder, a malignant tumor or acute anxiety attacks. There is virtually no chance that this child will receive the appropriate medical treatment. After 36 years of Israeli occupation, in the territories there isn't a single medical center worthy of the name, and the road to medical treatment in Israel is now almost completely closed. A visit to a medical clinic in Israel? You need an entry permit. Complicated surgery? Lengthy treatment? There's no one to pay for it.

France Rejects Any Slide Towards a War Logic
By Claire Trean, Le Monde, January 31, 2003
With respect to the information and intelligence that the United States will produce, France will insist that the Inspectors pursue their work in Iraq, that they verify, and when necessary, destroy what must be destroyed. France holds its line. Shortly after the State of the Union speech of George Bush, the French Foreign Affairs Minister made known on Wednesday January 29, that he found material in the speech over which to rejoice: France congratulates itself that the U.S. should have decided to produce its proofs on February 5. Dominique de Villepin specified that he will be in New York on that date and that he intends to compare American information to that of France. Mr. de Villepin had talked just before with his German counterpart, Joschka Fischer, who will preside over the Security Council in February. Neither the French nor the German administrations seem intimidated by the announcement of President Bush, nor prepared to cede to the "slide" Washington attempts to impose on the Council towards a war logic. With respect to the information and intelligence that the United States will produce, France will insist that the Inspectors pursue their work in Iraq, that they verify, and when necessary, destroy what must be destroyed. Furthermore, there is no question at the moment of France joining in on an ultimatum to Iraq that would start some sort of countdown on the basis of the idea: you have so much time to furnish proof that such a thing doesn't exist.

Our Nuclear Talk Gravely Imperils Us Notion of a First- Strike
By Edward M. Kennedy, Truthout/Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2003
Use in Iraq Carries The Seed of World Disaster  -- A dangerous world just grew more dangerous. Reports that the administration is contemplating the preemptive use of nuclear weapons in Iraq should set off alarm bells that this could not only be the wrong war at the wrong time, but it could quickly spin out of control. Initiating the use of nuclear weapons would make a conflict with Iraq potentially catastrophic. President Bush had an opportunity Tuesday night to explain why he believes such a radical departure from long-standing policy is justified or necessary. At the very minimum, a change of this magnitude should be brought to Congress for debate before the U.S. goes to war with Iraq. The reports of a preemptive nuclear strike are consistent with the extreme views outlined a year ago in President Bush's Nuclear Posture Review and with the administration's disdain for long-standing norms of international behavior. According to these reports, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has directed the U.S. Strategic Command to develop plans for employing nuclear weapons in a wide range of new missions, including possible use in Iraq to destroy underground bunkers. Using the nation's nuclear arsenal in this unprecedented way would be the most fateful decision since the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Even contemplating the first-strike use of nuclear weapons under current circumstances and against a nonnuclear nation dangerously blurs the crucial and historical distinction between conventional and nuclear arms. In the case of Iraq, it is preposterous.

Cut the strings
By Naomi Klein, The Guardian, February 1, 2003
The new grassroots politics needs more democracy - not more political strongmen  -- The key word at this year's World Social Forum, held this week in Porto Alegre, Brazil, was "big". Big attendance: more than 100,000 delegates in all. Big speeches: more than 15,000 crammed in to see Noam Chomsky. And most of all, big men. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the newly elected president of Brazil, came to the forum and addressed 75,000 adoring fans. Hugo Chavez, the controversial president of Venezuela, paid a "surprise" visit to announce that his embattled regime was part of the same movement as the forum itself. "The left in Latin America is being reborn," Chavez declared, as he pledged to vanquish his opponents at any cost. As evidence of this rebirth, he pointed to Lula's election in Brazil, Lucio Gutierrez's victory in Ecuador and Fidel Castro's tenacity in Cuba. But wait a minute: how on earth did a gathering that was supposed to be a showcase for new grassroots movements become a celebration of men with a penchant for three-hour speeches about smashing the oligarchy?

A War Crime or an Act of War?
By Stephen C. Pelletiere, Common Dreams/New York Times, January 31, 2003  
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. — It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured." The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein. But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story. I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

Unity is abnegation
Editorial, Ha'aretz, January 31, 2003
The Labor Party cannot allow itself to be tempted into another unity government, to serve once again as a fig leaf for Likud policies. -- The call for a national unity government was heard even before the ballot boxes were opened, and has been ringing ever louder since the results of the vote for the 16th Knesset were made known. Although the voter dramatically strengthened the parties of the outgoing coalition, the prime minister and his spokesmen have been reiterating their calls for Labor to rejoin the government. Even though Ariel Sharon can form a stable government, based on the Likud and the right-wing parties, his associates are issuing threats that if Labor rejects the offers for unity, it will be "punished" with a return to the ballot box. The pressure to join the Sharon government is also coming from Shinui, which is proposing a "secular unity government" (a formula the Likud utterly rejects). Its leader, Yosef Lapid, enlisted the expected war in Iraq to legitimize coalition negotiations with the Likud over an "emergency government." Lapid announced on Wednesday that the first missile to land in Israel will put his party at the government's table, alongside Shas ministers, and they'll remain there until the last day of the war.

Why Meretz fell
By Elia Leibowitz, January 31, 2003 
The reason for the crash of the Meretz party would seem to lie in the central message it conveyed to the Israeli public during the two terrible years of the government of Ariel Sharon. Meretz stated consistently and persistently that Israel must extend its hand in peace and go on looking for the hand being extended by the Palestinians. The leaders of Meretz and other left-wing figures assured the public that such a hand does exist on the other side and that they are capable of finding it. They added that they are in favor of dismantling the settlements and that when they are in power that is what they will do, immediately after the first handshake with the other side....The right wing in Israel says that Israel has unbounded strength in the Middle East. We can do whatever we like in the territories. There is no geographic, demographic or moral limit to our strength. In their reply to this contention of the right, Meretz and the left barely referred to the inherent folly of the right wing's boasting about Israel's strength. Nevertheless, that megalomaniac view is the foundation for the position of the right - and its major weakness.

Sartre, European intellectuals and Zionism
By Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, January 31, 2003
What is it about the nature of Zionism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left? Why have the Palestinians received so little sympathy from prominent leftist intellectuals such as Jean- Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault or only contingent sympathy from others like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Zizek? Edward Said wrote once about his encounters with Sartre and Foucault (who were anti-Palestinian) and with Gilles Deleuze (who was anti-Zionist) in this regard. The intellectual and political commitments inaugurated by a pro-Zionist Sartre and observed by Said, however, remain emblematic of many of the attitudes of leftist and liberal European intellectuals today.

War: It Already Started
By Paul de Rooij, Palestine Chronicle, January 31, 2003
(PalestineChronicle.com) - Many words in political discourse are used unquestioningly, as if they represented a black or white situation, e.g., war or no war. However, in many instances fuzzy political notions, like war and gradations of war, are often more appropriate and revealing. Last year at a social event in London, an American diplomat answered a question about the war on Iraq with a sneering “the war in Iraq already started” [1]. It was impossible to get this gentleman to clarify his remark, but it does suggest that some concepts used in everyday discourse may be misleading if used as black or white concepts instead of fuzzy ones. The US and UK, have continually bombed Iraq for the past ten years, imposed devastating sanctions under a UN guise, and so on. In ordinary discourse, it is generally understood that war in Iraq hasn’t broken out yet, but this is clearly deceptive. A more useful interpretation is to utilize a fuzzy war classification of the intensity of war on Iraq; during the past decade, it may be described as a “low intensity” war, and maybe ratcheting up to a “medium intensity” war in recent months. The importance of this distinction is that a low-level conflict may not register on the political or media radar screen in the US, but it certainly has devastating consequences in Iraq. For this very reason activists may not react as quickly as the situation merits to reduce the civilian suffering.