Bush Has Not Made the Case
By Bill Bradley, Washington Post, February 2, 2003
The State of the Union address was President Bush's opportunity to make the case for a unilateral invasion of Iraq. He failed to do so in a convincing manner. How we get rid of Saddam Hussein is as important in the long run as just getting rid of him. If we do it the wrong way, our action could seriously damage larger national interests. Among the speech's failings: 1. The president did not demonstrate that a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq will help in the fight against the ongoing, more serious, distributed threat of worldwide terrorism. To the contrary, it could well become a giant recruiting vehicle for al Qaeda and its imitators. Young Muslims around the world will see U.S. action without U.N. approval as neocolonialist, motivated more by a desire for Iraqi oil than Iraqi freedom. Many could become terrorists, striking at Americans anywhere in the world. If Americans are safe abroad only when they're accompanied by bodyguards, it will be difficult, among other things, for the United States to succeed in the world economy.

Spies, Lies & Iraq
By Mark Hosenball and Evan Thomas, Newsweek, February 4, 2003
The access is spotty. The defectors double-deal. The spooks and the generals can’t agree on whom to trust. No wonder it’s so hard to figure out what Saddam is up to. -- Feb. 10 issue —  The woman claimed to be Saddam Hussein’s former mistress. Last September, on ABC’s “Primetime Thursday,” she described the Iraqi strongman as a Viagra enthusiast who enjoyed listening to recordings of Frank Sinatra singing “Strangers in the Night,” as well as to tapes of torture victims crying for mercy. PARISOULA LAMPSOS, 54, a woman of Greek extraction who had lived in Baghdad most of her life, recounted watching Saddam preen in front of a mirror declaring, “I am Saddam. Heil Hitler!” She said that she had once seen Osama bin Laden at Saddam’s palace, and that, in the mid-1990s, Saddam had given money to the Qaeda terror chief. She recounted that Saddam had confessed to her that he tried to murder his own son Uday. After visiting Uday in the hospital, where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, Saddam supposedly told her, “I didn’t want it this way. I wanted him to die.” It was great TV. But was it good intelligence? At the Pentagon, the get-Saddam hard-liners thought so. CIA DOUBTS: They spread word that the woman’s story had largely checked out and boasted that Lampsos had passed a lie-detector test administered by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Central Intelligence Agency, however, was dubious. Saddam had never before taken a mistress of European descent, the CIA analysts noted. If Saddam had wanted to kill Uday, he would have succeeded, they argued. There was no independent evidence that bin Laden had ever visited Baghdad. Lampsos could have put together the story she told ABC by reading old newspaper clips, said the CIA. And intelligence sources deny that she passed a CIA lie-detector test.

A $12 Billion Question
By Joshua Hammer, Newsweek, February 4, 2003
Sharon wants a huge new aid package. Bush needs a viable Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Can they make a deal? -- Feb. 10 issue — A sense of urgency filled the meeting at the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. For four hours, a team of high-ranking Israeli officials sat with their counterparts from the State Department last month, pleading for cash. Citing Israel’s war-battered economy and mounting security costs, the visiting delegation asked for a whopping $4 billion in extra military assistance, plus $8 billion in commercial-loan guarantees.

Beginning of the end
By Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, February 3, 2003
The US is ignoring an important lesson from history - that an empire cannot survive on brute force alone -- There are plenty of things to keep Tony Blair awake at night these days, as his grey, haggard features after last week's diplo-marathon indicated. In his nightmares of the Pentagon cooking up new hare-brained schemes and dirty bombs on the underground, a new anxiety must have begun to niggle - those domestic commentators who have started being so horribly nice to him. He's a "great statesman" now, one of the "greatest prime ministers"; it's when things are getting really bad - you're dying, for instance - that people start being this nice. People are beginning to feel sorry for Blair - they don't buy his arguments on the necessity of war with Iraq, but they increasingly appreciate the enormous difficulty of his position. A pivotal moment in post-second world war British foreign policy has fallen to his watch. He has a fiendishly tricky hand to play in the global bid to contain two erratic, angry men, both of whom control quantities of lethal weapons and both of whom are making a mockery of the UN and any concept of international law - the one by flouting its repeated injunctions, and the other by bullying it with bribes and threats.

A society in the dark
By Lily Galili, Alternative Information Center, January 31, 2003 
About a million and a half poor people; 300,000 unemployed; the State Prosecutor investigating Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; 550,000 children below the poverty line; 12 women, one for each month, murdered during the past year by their partners; the Israel Police investigating Labor Party Chairman Amram Mitzna; some 15,000 families over the past year involved in eviction proceedings due to inability to pay their mortgages; about 150,000 eligible persons, including the elderly, disabled and new immigrants, waiting for public housing that has almost entirely ceased to be built inside the Green Line; rent support for the needy reduced during the past year, thereby forcing many to move to focal points of unemployment on the periphery or across the Green Line; the police investigating the primaries corruption scandal of Likud Member of Knesset Naomi Blumenthal; according to police reports, nearly 40 percent of new immigrant youth from the former Soviet Union using drugs; a special Knesset committee investigating the decline in the level of mathematics education in Israeli schools. This is the face of Israeli society in 2003.

Pre-state industry: It wasn’t all low-tech
By Dan Yachin, Globes, May 1, 2001
The kibbutz as an ideological startup: the seeds of Israel’s military industry; the founding of the Technion and Hebrew University -- ...The 1920s - The seeds of the defense industry. The roots of Israel’s defense industry were already in place by the 20s, as grenades and explosives were secretly manufactured in bakeries, laundries, and other places where clandestine weapons production traditionally takes place. In 1933, the Haganah [pre-State army] began consolidating a consistent system of operations, and weapons production became more institutionalized. In 1947, on the eve of the War of Independence, David Ben-Gurion sent the manager of the military industries to the U.S. to acquire machinery for weapons manufacture. The machinery, which was smuggled into Israel, enabled the manufacture of Sten guns and the Davidka cannon...

Political house demolitions
Editorial, Ha'aretz, February 4, 2003
Using the excuse of "routine enforcement against illegal construction," the Civil Administration in the territories justified the demolition on Sunday of 22 buildings owned by Arab residents in the Hebron area. But the Israel Defense Forces, as a matter of routine, do not usually deal with urban planning issues in the territories. The areas where the demolitions took place show that law enforcement was not at the top of the agenda of those who gave the order to demolish the buildings, but other goals. It was either a form of collective punishment or a way of getting rid of annoying obstructions on the path to territorial contiguity for Jewish settlement in the area. Either way the demolitions were a political act, and not a security one. Eighteen of the demolished buildings were close to the "Sheep Junction" in the southern part of the city, not far from where three IDF soldiers were killed in a shooting incident last week. According to the Hebron Agreement, the area is under Israeli security control but Hebron city hall is responsible for its administration, though it has not imposed its authority there since the intifada began. The four other buildings were on Givat Haharsina, near the area where Netanel Ozeri was killed three weeks ago. It is under Israeli control and described as being part of Kiryat Arba's jurisdiction. The buildings torn down there were on privately-owned Palestinian land.

People and Politics: Yassin's hudna, and the army's broken promises
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, February 4, 2003
From what Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told the Palestinian journal Al Manara, one learns that Ariel Sharon has succeeded in confusing the Palestinians. A week after Israeli voters defeated their peace camp and strengthened the right, the Hamas leader offered them a hudna, a truce. He proposes an end to attacks on Israeli civilians - not including the settlers - for 10 years, in exchange for what he calls an end "to the racist actions against the Palestinian people." A week ago, that declaration from Palestinian organizations might have added a few important Knesset seats to Labor and Meretz. Why did he take the hudna out of mothballs after Sharon's victory - and while there are alerts about a possible kidnapping of soldiers as hostages for a prisoner exchange? The answer might be found in his criticism of the Islamic attacks on September 11, 2001. "They acted on behalf of the West and the United States and against the interests of the Muslims," said the Islamic extremist from Gaza about Osama bin Laden's operations from Afghanistan. And, added Yassin, "the attacks intensified the Israeli pressure on the Palestinians."

FOX News: The Network America Trusts’ (To Pay ‘Saddam’)
By Jeremy Scahill, Common Dreams, February 3, 2003
There is a joke here that the major media outlets are now competing with oil smuggling as the number one money-maker for the Iraqi government.  -- BAGHDAD: The sat phones are lined up. The tents are in place. Dozens of languages fill the smoke filled atrium. Every kind of technical equipment imaginable is scattered about. The scene almost resembles an eerie version of the quick set up for a heavy metal concert. Welcome to the Press Center on the ground floor of the Iraqi Ministry of Information. Over the last several weeks, low-paid Iraqi construction workers have rubbed elbows with journalists from CNN, BBC, The New York Times and a slew of other media outlets. The workers are halfway through a sizable construction project to expand the Press Center to accommodate the influx of the proverbial herds waiting for the war. Inside the building, tiny 6’ x 6’ cubicles are now the hottest real estate on the Baghdad market. Officially, the space will cost you $500 a month. But space is limited and cash is flowing from the pockets of the major networks to Iraqi officials and the government to ensure access once the bombs start flying. But it is not just the cubicles. Under the government guidelines, journalists cough up a handsome sum of money to the government and individual officials. Here are the bare minimums for journalists operating in Baghdad..

Barbara Lee: Public enemy number one?
By Fergal Keane, The Independent, February 4, 2003
The key resolution enabling President Bush to launch his war on terror was opposed in Congress by only one person: Barbara Lee, the woman whose political stand has enraged a nation -- A quietly spoken, grandmotherly figure in her fifties, the Congress-woman from Oakland was nobody's picture of a revolutionary. Barbara Lee was best known as a woman who worked hard on House subcommittees looking out for the interests of a largely blue-collar constituency back in California's 9th Congressional district. She was active in African-American issues, but not in a high-profile Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton kind of way; no stunts or grand gestures. Congresswoman Lee was one of the quieter campaigners of American politics. As a member of the House subcommittee on Aids, she was an energetic champion of Africa's infected millions. She'd sponsored an education bill aimed at making young kids from the ghettos into better prospective parents. But a defiant figure? A woman to stand alone against the biggest Congressional majority in modern history? Few on Capitol Hill would have bet on it.

A victory for Israeli democracy
By Gabriel Ash, YellowTimes, February 4, 2003
(YellowTimes.org) – Last Tuesday, Israel went to the polls and gave Sharon a resounding victory: 38 MKs for Likud (Sharon), 19 for Labor, 15 for Shinui, 11 for Shas and 6 to Meretz. There is a sheer unreality to the elections, like watching someone jump from the top of a building. Ariel Sharon has been Israel's worst prime minister by any sane criterion. Israel faces today the worst security situation since 1973, but then at least it was up against the strongest Arab country and its superpower ally. Today, Israel is fighting, and not exactly winning, against children with homemade weapons. Israel's economy is shrinking and the negative growth figure is the worst since 1949. Unemployment exceeds 10 percent and there isn't much to which Israelis can look forward. Israel's international position has deteriorated significantly. Finally, under Sharon's command, organized crime has infiltrated the Likud party. Yet Sharon didn't merely win; he won a landslide, beat expectations, and, in doing so, scored some records. For example, he is the first Israeli prime minister to win a second term in 20 years and the first Israeli prime minister ever to call early elections and win them. There is, therefore, no escape from the conclusion that Israel loves Sharon. True, it was the least energetic election season ever, and it scored the lowest turnout (68 percent) in Israel's history. But the results couldn't be less ambiguous: Israel loves Sharon, for only love can be so forgiving. It is a pathological love, born of fear and resentment. It is a love without enthusiasm, depressed, resigned, lifeless and angry; a love like giving the world the finger, but love it is, nevertheless. It is, as is always the case in democratic politics, self-love.