George W. Queeg
By PAUL KRUGMAN
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, March 14, 2003
Aboard the U.S.S. Caine, it was the business with the strawberries that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with the captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush's quart of strawberries? Over the past few weeks there has been an epidemic of epiphanies. There's a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush's policy on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel with the goal; who wouldn't want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people than you would think — including a fair number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon — don't just question the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America's leadership has lost touch with reality. If that sounds harsh, consider the debacle of recent diplomacy — a debacle brought on by awesome arrogance and a vastly inflated sense of self-importance. Mr. Bush's inner circle seems amazed that the tactics that work so well on journalists and Democrats don't work on the rest of the world. They've made promises, oblivious to the fact that most countries don't trust their word. They've made threats. They've done the aura-of-inevitability thing — how many times now have administration officials claimed to have lined up the necessary votes in the Security Council? They've warned other countries that if they oppose America's will they are objectively pro-terrorist. Yet still the world balks. Wasn't someone at the State Department allowed to point out that in matters nonmilitary, the U.S. isn't all that dominant — that Russia and Turkey need the European market more than they need ours, that Europe gives more than twice as much foreign aid as we do and that in much of the world public opinion matters? Apparently not.

Protection does not apply
By Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 13 - 19 March 2003
Israel can demolish the homes of its Arab citizens and spray their crops with toxins because even the law does not recognise the rights of non-Jews.  -- In the struggle for what little is left of world attention when all eyes are on Iraq, one Palestinian's suffering must compete with another's, one tragedy overshadows the next. The pain of each is seen in isolation, a separate case crying out for more or less sympathy, with a stronger or weaker claim on our compassion. Some instances of such suffering are not even understood as Palestinian. Last week the media reported that the UN children's agency UNICEF had criticised the Israeli army for demolishing a home in Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on 3 March that led to a building collapsing on a pregnant 37-year-old woman, Noha Sabri Sweidan. The mother of 10 bled to death under the ruins. The men in military uniform who sent the explosives experts into the camp were doubtless driven by the same blinkered logic that the day before, 2 March, prompted other men, this time in suits, to send bulldozers into the village of Kafr Qassem to demolish 18 cinderblock houses, wrecking the lives of 18 families. The incident went almost entirely unnoticed.

Whose War?
By Patrick J. Buchanan, March 24, 2003, The American Conservative
A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest. -- The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?” Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so. Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around conservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)

Colin Powell and the Marketing of Uncle Sam
By Afnan Hussein Fatani, Arab News, March 15, 2003
And they will say (on the Day of Judgment): “Our Lord! Indeed we obeyed our leaders and our elders and they led us astray. Our Lord! Give them double the punishment and curse them a great curse.”  (The Qur’an: 33:66-68) Nelson Mandela was right. The bribing, bullying, horse-trading and warmongering we are witnessing in the world today are all because there’s a black man sitting at the helm of the United Nations. From Guinea, the poorest and smallest country in Africa, to Bush’s America, “the greatest nation, and the greatest people, on the face of the earth ” — no one seems to bother what the black secretary-general of the United Nations thinks or what he plans to do. He’s simply become inaudible and invisible. But Mandela forgot to add another pathetic figure to his list of black leaders who have distorted the shape of our world simply by being black. That man is Colin Powell, the US secretary of state.

Disobey
By John Pilger, Dissident Voice, March 13, 2003
How have we got to this point, where two western governments take us into an illegal and immoral war against a stricken nation with whom we have no quarrel and who offer us no threat: an act of aggression opposed by almost everybody and whose charade is transparent? How can they attack, in our name, a country already crushed by more than 12 years of an embargo aimed mostly at the civilian population, of whom 42 per cent are children - a medieval siege that has taken the lives of at least half a million children and is described as genocidal by the former United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq? How can those claiming to be "liberals" disguise their embarrassment, and shame, while justifying their support for George Bush's proposed launch of 800 missiles in two days as a "liberation"? How can they ignore two United Nations studies which reveal that some 500,000 people will be at risk? Do they not hear their own echo in the words of the American general who said famously of a Vietnamese town he had just levelled: "We had to destroy it in order to save it?" "Few of us," Arthur Miller once wrote, "can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Reaching for a road map
Editorial, The Guardian, March 15, 2003
Blair's efforts may be too little, too late -- Tony Blair tried hard yesterday to disassociate the new White House initiative on the Palestine-Israel conflict from the all-consuming Iraq crisis. But few people here or in the Middle East are likely to believe him. In similar vein, the announcement that the prime minister will join George Bush and Spain's Jose Maria Aznar for a brief weekend summit in the Azores does not inspire confidence that an acceptable diplomatic compromise over Iraq is in sight. On the contrary, there will be speculation that the three leaders, co-sponsors of the stalemated "second resolution", may decide to abandon the UN process altogether and agree some form of imminent war deadline or ultimatum for Saddam Hussein.  Mr Blair gave an effusive welcome to the US announcement that the long-awaited "road map" for a peace settlement between Palestine and Israel would finally be published, possibly next week. He has worked hard for this moment, leaning on Mr Bush to revive the process and facilitating talks in London despite Israeli objections. For that he deserves personal credit. Mr Blair said the move showed "even-handedness" in the west's dealing with the region and was a positive response to those in the Arab world who complain of double standards. But all the same, after so many bitter months of neglect, inactivity and bloodshed, many in the Middle East will view the timing with suspicion, wondering just how substantial a development it is.

A U.N. Alternative to War: “Uniting for Peace”
Center for Constitutional Rights, March 14, 2003
In the last few months, the Bush Administration has been unyielding in its march towards war, over the objections of some allies and despite the efforts of the United Nations. In response to France’s threat that it would veto efforts by the United States to obtain a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, President Bush said the United States would lead a “coalition of the willing to disarm Saddam Hussein.” Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that the United States and Britain reserved the right to use force against Iraq--- even if a Security Council member vetoed a resolution authorizing the use of force. It now seems obvious that the United States, with some other countries, may soon go to war despite a veto; or, alternatively, go to war without returning to the Security Council and risking a veto. But for people around the world terrified that a new war in Iraq is inevitable, there may yet be hope. And that hope lies in a little-discussed mechanism of the United Nations itself—which, although it seems marginalized by American power, has the potential to stop the war. The Charter gives the Security Council “the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” But the Security Council is currently unable to carry out this responsibility in light of U.S. plans to attack Iraq. The Council is stymied: The United States may bypass the Council entirely. And, if the Council tries to obtain passage of a resolution prohibiting the United States from using unauthorized force against Iraq, the United States or Britain will surely veto it. Long ago, the members of the United Nations recognized that such impasses would occur in the Security Council. They set up a procedure for insuring that such stalemates would not prevent the United Nations from carrying out its mission to “maintain international peace and security.” In 1950, the United Nations by an almost unanimous vote adopted Resolution 377, the wonderfully named “Uniting for Peace.” The United States played an important role in that resolutions adoption, concerned about the possibilities of vetoes by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.