US Signals Support for Iranian Group
By Tim Kennedy, Arab News, March 18, 2003
In a move that may signal a new direction in US support of exiled opposition groups, President George W. Bush’s spokesman took the unprecedented step last week of praising an anti-Iranian organization that the US State Department officially classifies as a “terrorist organization.” -- On the eve of a possible war with Iraq, the United States is making direct and indirect contact with expatriate Iraqis interested in ruling the country once Saddam Hussein is ousted. Seven “official” Iraqi opposition groups receive $92 million each year from the US State Department, including one Iran-based organization that maintains close ties to Tehran’s hard-line government. Additionally, the US government gives support to several groups close to the Turkish government and to military forces inside northern Iraq. Late last February a conference of these notoriously fractious opposition groups ended in chaos, with many group leaders disagreeing who should be seated on a new Opposition Leadership Committee.

Global Crisis
By Edward Said, Dissident Voice, March 18, 2003
A small news item reported that Prince Walid Ibn Talal of Saudi Arabia had donated $10m to the American University of Cairo to establish a centre of American studies. The young billionaire had offered an unsolicited $10m to New York City soon after 11 September 2001, with a letter that described the gift as a tribute to New York and suggested that the United States might reconsider its policy towards the Middle East. He had in mind the total, unquestioning US support for Israel, but his polite proposition seemed also to cover the general policy of denigrating, or at least showing disrespect for, Islam. In rage, Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York (which has the largest Jewish population of any city in the world), returned the cheque, with an extreme, and I would say racist, contempt, meant to be insulting. On behalf of a certain image of New York, he was upholding its bravery and principled resistance to outside interference. And pleasing, rather than trying to educate, a purportedly unified Jewish constituency. His behaviour was in accord with his refusal in 1995, well after the Oslo signings, to admit Yasser Arafat to Philharmonic Hall for a concert to which everyone at the United Nations had been invited. So what he did in response to the gift of the young Saudi Arabian was predictable. Although the money was intended, and greatly needed, for humanitarian aid in a city wounded by a terrible atrocity, the US political system and its actors put Israel ahead of everything, whether or not Israel's amply endowed and well-mobilised lobbyists would have done the same thing.

In Vain, I Looked For Signs of the Storm to Come. Baghdad is a City Sleepwalking to War
By Robert Fisk, Dissident Voice, March 18, 2003
For Baghdad, it is night number 1,001, the very last few hours of fantasy. As UN inspectors prepared to leave the city in the early hours of this morning, Saddam Hussein has appointed his own son, Qusay, to lead the defence of the city of the Caliphs against the American invasion. Yet at the Armed Forces club yesterday, I found the defenders playing football. Iraqi television prepares Baghdad people for the bombardment to come with music from the Hollywood film, Gladiator. But the Iraqis went on with their work of disarming the soon-to-be invaded nation, observing the destruction of two more Al-Samoud missiles. The UN inspectors, only hours from packing, even turned up to observe this very last bit of the disarmament which the Americans had so fervently demanded and in which they have now totally lost interest. With the inspectors gone, there is nothing to stop the Anglo-American air forces commencing their bombardment of the cities of Iraq. So is Baghdad to be Stalingrad, as Saddam tells us? It doesn't feel like it. The roads are open, checkpoints often unmanned, the city's soldiery dragging on cigarettes outside the United Nations headquarters. From the banks of the Tigris river – a muddy, warm sewage-swamped version of Stalingrad's Volga – I watched yesterday evening the fishermen casting their lines for the fish that Baghdadis eat after sunset. The Security Council resolution withdrawn? Tony Blair calls an emergency meeting of the Cabinet? George Bush to address the American people? Baghdad, it seems, is sleep-walking its way into history.

Honor Rachel, End House Demolitions
By Jeff Halper, The Electronic Intifada, March 18, 2003
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, together with the entire Israeli peace and human rights movement, mourns the death in Gaza of Rachel Corrie and extends its condolences to her family, friends and comrades in the International Solidarity Movement. Rachel was not the first person killed as a result of Israel's cruel policy of house demolitions. Less than two weeks ago Nuha Makadma Sweidan and her unborn child were also killed in Gaza when Israeli army sappers "accidentally" demolished their home when they blew up another home nearby. A few weeks before that an elderly woman and a disabled man died under the rubble of their Gazan homes when the soldiers "failed to notice" them. These were no mere accidents. Israel routinely demolishes Palestinian houses on top of all the families' possessions, and in their haste do not bother to follow prosaic rules of "safety." The vast majority of demolitions, it must be understood, have nothing to do with terrorism. According to UN figures, less than 600 of the 10,000 houses demolished since the Occupation began in 1967 involved security suspects. All the rest  94% -- were simply houses of ordinary people that were in Israel's way. That was the case of the home of Dr. Samir Nasrallah, which Rachel died protecting. Dr. Nasrallah had engaged in no hostile activities, had not been charged with anything. His house was demolished because, like dozens of others that have been bulldozed in that section of the dense refugee camp, it laid within a wide "security strip" that Israel wants to create along the border with Egypt.

The Thirty-Year Itch: Oil and Arms: An In-Depth Look 
By Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones, March/April 2003
Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance. -- If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration -- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate. In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy toward Iraq, the key to national security is global hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential rivals. To that end, the United States must not only be able to project its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also control key resources, chief among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have become more important over the years), but because it would allow the United States to maintain a lock on the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny access to its global competitors. The administration "believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States able to impose its will globally -- and that those who have the ability to shape events with power have the duty to do so. It's ideology."

The Europeans' hobby - and Moskowitz's
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, March 18, 2003
When the eyes of the world were turned to the Azores to hear when the war against Iraq would begin, Tony Blair found it appropriate to give some precious airtime to the peace process in the Middle East. Even Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, made sure to mention the road map. Who didn't? The American guest. President Bush, who only on Friday devoted a substantial part of his speech to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alongside the war in Iraq, left the work to the Europeans this time. That wasn't the work of a negligent speechwriter. Every word in the Bush statement at the press conference was measured a dozen times, if not more. The professional interpretation in Jerusalem of the road map's absence from the statement was that Bush's linkage on Friday between his Iraqi crisis and ours in the territories was the result of moderate physical pressure by Blair and Aznar, with the encouragement of Colin Powell. The president didn't enjoy it. All he wants is to get to the war in Iraq peacefully and then get home just as peacefully for his presidential campaign fight. Ariel Sharon can spoil both those battles for Bush....A test for Poraz: There's no better time than Purim for the Jews to have some fun in the name of Baruch "The Man" Goldstein, who massacred some 30 Palestinians praying at the Tomb of the Patriarch on Purim 1994 to try to stop the Oslo Accords signed only a few months earlier. There's no better place to provoke the evil Hamans than in the heart of an Arab neighborhood. And there's nobody better to swing the noisemaker than Dr. Irving Moskowitz. The bingo man from Florida was to prove today to his president, George Bush, what can be expected to happen to his road map. The patron of the Temple Mount tunnel, which claimed the lives of 15 soldiers and dozens of Palestinians, was slated today to celebrate the entrance of the first residents of the Jewish enclave in East Jerusalem's Ras el Amud.

Arab opinion of US hits all-time low
By James J. Zogby, Jordan Times, March 18, 2003
ARAB PUBLIC opinion towards the United States has dropped to dangerously low levels, even before an anticipated US-led attack on Iraq. Following are the findings of a recent Arab American Institute/Zogby International (AAI/ZI) poll of 2,600 individuals from key Arab countries. The poll was conducted in early March 2003 and had a margin of error of between ±3.8 to ±5.  The countries polled included Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In an earlier AAI/ZI poll, done in March of 2002, it was found that US favourable ratings were already quite low and that the factor that drove these negative opinions was the unbalanced US policy towards the Palestinians. It appears that this year's poll results have been impacted as well by the US' unilateralist approach towards Iraq. The most significant drops in US ratings occurred in Morocco and Jordan. In 2002, for example, 34 per cent of Jordanians had a positive view of the United States, as compared to 61 per cent who had a negative view. In 2003, only 10 per cent of Jordanians hold a positive view of the United States, while 81 per cent see the country in a negative light. Similarly, in Morocco, the favourable/unfavourable rating towards the United States in 2002 were 38 per cent to 61 per cent. Today they are 9 per cent favourable and 88 per cent unfavourable. The US' favourable/unfavourable ratings were already quite low in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They have remained low. In 2002, the ratings in Egypt were 15 per cent favourable to 76 per cent unfavourable. In 2003, Egyptians' ratings of the United States are 13 per cent favourable and 80 per cent unfavourable. In Saudi Arabia, 12 per cent viewed the United States favourably and 87 per cent unfavourably in 2002. Today, 3 per cent see it favourably and 97 per cent unfavourably. In the UAE, the ratio showed almost no change from an 11 per cent favourable/87 per cent unfavourable in 2002 to 11 per cent favourable/85 per cent unfavourable in 2003.