Out of the straitjacket
By Alastair Hay, The Guardian, March 12, 2003
The US wants to use potentially lethal chemicals against Iraq - despite the fact that this would contravene international law -- The US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, recently argued that the military should again be allowed to use chemicals as weapons of war in Iraq - not the tonnes of lethal nerve gases, such as sarin or tabun, which the US possesses, or its supply of mustard gas, which causes severe injuries and sometimes kills; no, Rumsfeld wants to take advantage of the US's stockpile of the misleadingly named "non-lethal" chemical agents, particularly those used for riot control. These cause temporary incapacitation for the majority, but can be lethal in confined spaces. What Rumsfeld is proposing is illegal. The rules are set down by the chemical weapons convention (CWC), which became international law in 1997. It states that "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacition or permanent harm to humans or animals" is forbidden as a method of warfare. The US, along with some 140 other countries, including the UK, has signed this treaty and is pledged to uphold it. Rumsfeld, in his testimony to the House of Representatives armed services committee last month, referred to the CWC as a "straitjacket" limiting US options in war. What the US should be able to do, Rumsfeld claims, is resort to the use of non-lethal agents in combat situations when there are civilians present and there is a need to preserve life. He gave two examples. The first was "when transporting dangerous people in a confined space", such as an aircraft. The second was when "women and children" are trapped with enemy troops "in a cave".

The Day The War Starts
By James Brooks, Dissident Voice, March 4, 2003
The day the war starts, the lady at the coffee shop will wish me a nice day as she hands back my change. The kids will go to school. We'll drive to work listening to missiles hit Baghdad in SurroundSound. Wall Street will feel relief as investors are released from their "terrible uncertainty". The day the war starts, the usual gossip and laughs and little digs will course around the office. Lunchtime drivers will joust impatiently for position. The curious will tune in the news. They'll wish they could see it on TV. The night the war starts, we'll take a walk around the neighborhood. The snow will flicker green from infrared scenes of the bombing, glowing from darkened rooms. Quiet trills of patriotic satisfaction will rise in private hearts, relieved to be on a familiar path to national success. Down at the park, remnants of the opposition gather. Together we chant our small protest around the fire. The day after the war starts, a rash of strange and deadly highway accidents will sweep the country. Surviving drivers report swerving to avoid starving Arab refugees trudging down the roadside.

The Zev and Ari Show: Time for Full Disclosure
By William Hughes, CounterPunch, February 22, 2003
Professor Edward Said, a champion of the Palestinian cause, was roundly condemned by Zev Chafets, a columnist for the NY Daily News (02/19/03). Thank goodness, Said isn't living in the West Bank or Gaza. If he were in occupied Palestine, Ariel Sharon's goon squad would have probably bulldozed his home into a pile of rumble (and his relatives' homes, too, just for good measure). What got Chafets riled up was Said's brilliant commentary, entitled, "A Monument to Hypocrisy". It is a marvelous essay that deals with the pro-Israeli influence over the Bush-Cheney administration. It tells how wrongdoings similar to those of Saddam Hussein have actually been the "stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948. Ironically, since Chafets complained about the article so boorishly, more folks will now want to read it for themselves. Said also wrote, "President Bush and his advisers are slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fleischer (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen)". Well, Chafets thought that last line belonged in the conspiracy camp of the "Neo-Nazi and White Aryan Resistance" movements. For him, it was bad enough that Said had raised questions about "the Perles and Wolfowitzs" of this country, leading America into a war. But, by suggesting Fleischer was "a citizen of Sharonland," was just too much for him.

Prime minister of what?
By Meron Benvenisti, Haaretz, March 13, 2003
"After the Israelis have succeeded in bringing about the disintegration of most of the functions of the Palestinian Authority and in destroying its infrastructure, undermining the status of Chairman Yasser Arafat and turning the PA into a "terrorist organization" that must be fought to the bitter end - after all this, does anyone still think that the appointment of Abu Mazen as prime minister is likely to turn over a new leaf?" -- To judge by the interest being displayed in the appointment of Abu Mazen as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority [PA], this is an historic event, a crucial step on the way to implementing reforms essential to the functioning of the Palestinian government. Israel's president and prime minister welcomed the appointment - of course, adding a warning that the attitude toward Abu Mazen is conditional on his success in "wiping out terrorism" - whereas right-wing circles recycled accusations about his being a "Holocaust-denier" and an inciter "for the continuation of the armed struggle." The Palestinians - although they were well aware that the true aim of the revolution was to find favor in the eyes of the Americans - treated the appointment with profound seriousness, and argued as to whether to adopt the Egyptian, the Jordanian, or perhaps the Lebanese model.

Wolfowitz and His Successfully Evil Cabal
By Richard H. Curtiss, Palestine Chronicle, February 28, 2003
Whatever comes next in the battle against Saddam Hussein, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has achieved a life-long aim. He has diverted the search for a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem onto the back burner while turning up the heat on the problem of Saddam Hussein. Wolfowitz has a long history working for the government. After completing his university graduate work, he was a management intern in the Bureau of the Budget (1966-67), where he began his steady ascent up the bureaucratic ranks. As assistant secretary of defense in the current administration, however, Wolfowitz has come into his own. Some say he considers himself the administration’s resident intellectual. Whether that is true or not, Secretary of State Powell is his chief rival for influence in the White House. At least once in the Bush administration Powell has come down hard against Wolfowitz. But Wolfowitz indefatigably bounces right back from such upsets, all the while pursuing his own private agenda. That agenda is to deflect attention from the problem of Israel by finding Washington new enemies anywhere else in the world.

Anger and Tears - The Wound Which has Slashed Palestine to the Bone
By Anne Gwynne, Palestine Chronicle, March 13, 2003
Today the attempt to murder, destroy and to break the will of the people of this Mountain of Fire - Jabal An’nar - has escalated to an intolerable level, though we expect it to get much worse. Our lovely mountains are ringed with fire as in the past millennia, but now it is the bright searchlights and floods of the Israeli illegal settlements and their military camps which light up the night sky. We are completely encircled by them, and with their powerful American weapons they can see any one of us at any time and shoot us dead. And they do. My intention today was to go to Jenin with Munt’ser, who has had to wait nearly two weeks to start his new job there as the UPMRC Ambulance driver. The income is badly needed because their father was murdered by the Israelis in April so Munt’ser is alone, responsible for the four younger brothers and sisters in Jenin. He has never had a job – the unemployment here is over 80% - and it will take him one year to pay the rent, electricity and water owing since the Israeli destruction in April 2002. The sum is not great, some 700 US dollars, but it is more than his salary for a year. The closures have now intensified and the roads are closed to EVERYONE, not just men and women under 35 years. So we wait.

Miss Bell's lines in the sand
By James Buchan, The Guardian, March 12, 2003
She was an archaeologist, a linguist and the greatest woman mountaineer of her age. And in Baghdad in 1921 she drew the boundaries of the country that became Iraq. -- In British diplomatic group photographs of the early 20th-century Middle East, amid the plumes and uniforms and the calm paraphernalia of an empire going to hell in a bucket, there is often a solitary female. The woman is slim, with a head of luxuriant hair, and neatly dressed in billowing muslins or in the pencil silhouette and cloche hats of jazz-age Baghdad. The woman is Gertrude Bell, who is as responsible as anybody for the rickety national state first known as Mesopotamia, and now as Iraq. As a powerful official of the British administration in Baghdad after the first world war, Bell ensured that an Arab state was founded from the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, but one which was too weak to be independent of Britain. "I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq," she wrote to her father on December 4 1921.