Iraq and Palestine
By Daoud Kuttab, Media Monitors Netwrok, March 29, 2003
I was 12 years old when the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights. Ever since then, I have known firsthand what military occupation is all about. The Iraqi people are now witnessing military occupation. There are similarities and differences. While in both cases the occupiers had claimed that their actions were preemptive and temporary, we have seen, from the Palestine example, that, intentionally or not, occupations have a way of lasting a long time. Of course, in the case of Israel, occupation was quickly followed by an active Jewish settlement activity which has put in doubt the state's motivations and claims about their real intentions. I am sure that the Americans and the British have no plans to bring Californians or Welsh to settle in Iraq; the real intentions of this war and the occupation have yet to be known. The 1967 war was clearly a much easier act than the one the Americans are witnessing in Iraq. Palestinians have since, and over the years, got their act together and built up a popular and later a military resistance campaign that is making the Israeli occupation very costly. In both cases, war and occupation show that what appears to be a shortcut to accomplish political results often turns out to be much different than first predicted. Also, and just as important, a foreign military occupation has a way like not other to help unite people who are at the end of the abuse of power. Palestinians have, for years, disagreed among themselves about the shape resistance should take - nonviolent resistance vs a violent revolt - but when the Israeli incursion began, all were amazingly united in their opposition vis-à-vis the invaders. The Arab saying that best applies both to Palestine and Iraq is this: my brother and I may be against our cousin, but we and our cousin are united against the foreign enemy.

Israelis trained US troops in Jenin-style urban warfare
By Justin Huggler, The Independent, March 29, 2003
"The Israeli army has also routinely used Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect them as they advance, a practice that has continued despite Israeli court rulings forbidding it. There was no word on whether Israeli officers had briefed American troops on this tactic." -- The American military has been asking the Israeli army for advice on fighting inside cities, and studying fighting in the West Bank city of Jenin last April, unnamed United States and Israeli sources have confirmed. Reports that US troops trained with Israeli forces for street-to-street fighting have been denied. If the US army believes the road to Baghdad lies through Jenin, there is reason for Iraqi civilians to be concerned. During fighting in the Jenin refugee camp last April, more than half the Palestinian dead were civilians. There was compelling evidence that Israeli soldiers targeted civilians, including Fadwa Jamma, a Palestinian nurse shot dead as she tried to treat a wounded man. A 14-year-old boy was killed by Israeli tank-fire in a crowded street after the curfew was lifted. A Palestinian in a wheelchair was shot dead, and his body was crushed by an Israeli tank. Israeli soldiers prevented ambulances from reaching the wounded and refused the Red Cross access. Using bulldozers, the Israeli army demolished an entire neighbourhood – home to 800 Palestinian families – reducing it to dust and rubble. Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history and strategy at Jerusalem's internationally respected Hebrew University, has told reporters that, following his advice to US Marines, the American military bought nine of the converted bulldozers used in the Jenin demolitions from Israel. Professor van Creveld said he gave advice to marines last year in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He said he was questioned about Israeli tactics in Jenin, and told them the giant D9 bulldozers, manufactured for civilian use in the US but fitted with armour-plating in Israel, were among the most useful weapons.

Bracing for the worst
By Omayma Abdel-Latif, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 27 March - 2 April 2003
The Iraqi opposition in exile may have been manipulating the expectations of their US patrons, Iraqi analysts say -- With the first week of the US-led military aggression on Iraq drawing to a close and unexpected challenges for invading forces, leading Iraqi figures speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly expressed fears that the continued Iraqi resistance might push the US to finish the war at any cost by unleashing forces of hi-tech terror from which the civilian population would be its first and foremost causality. "This is the most extremely worrying situation. The war is not going well for everybody," Dr Leith Kubba, a prominent Iraqi analyst at the Washington-based think-tank the National Endowment for Democracy, said in a telephone interview from Washington on Monday. Kubba, who is closely connected with the Iraqi opposition in exile, warned that fears were growing among Iraqis in exile that the civilian population may pay a heavy price for a war that has not gone as planned. Signs of this were beginning to show this week when the allied troops, after encountering stiff resistance in Basra, Iraq's second largest city with one million inhabitants, decided to make Basra a military target. While not doubting that the US could win the war militarily, Kubba believes that the US cannot continue with its current strategy. "The US has two options," Kubba said. It could proceed slowly and wait for the regime to collapse, which could mean that the war would drag on and a political backlash might ensue. Or, he said, "The second option, which frightens us, is that the US could abandon its policy of aiming at specific targets and instead rely on a heavy use of force, thus causing destruction to the country's infrastructure. In this case the civilians will pay the heaviest price." Kubba's fears were shared by other members of the Iraqi opposition, who also expressed concern over possible retaliatory actions by the US to avenge unexpected losses.

Between the wars
Graham Usher, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 27 March - 2 April 2003
Israelis and Palestinians spent the first days of war neither scurrying to bunkers nor taking to the streets. They were watching TV --As the first British and American cruise missiles lashed Baghdad on 20 March, Israelis opened their gas mask kits and sealed rooms, and Palestinians made one last rush to stockpile food, water and fuel. The first came in response to a government directive: the second did not (Palestinians have no gas masks to unpack nor, actually, a government to issue them). Both were reflexes from history. In the 1991 Gulf war Israel was hit with 39 Scud missiles, a last desperate throw by Saddam Hussein to draw an Israeli response and wreck the coalition ranged against him. Palestinians were penned in their homes in a curfew lasting six weeks, amid fears (palpable this time too) that Israel would use the war to solve the Palestinian "problem" once and for all by driving them out of the West Bank and Gaza. Mercifully those histories have not replayed themselves, though both Israelis and Palestinians are aware that they might. By Sunday, most Israelis had sent their children back to school and thousands were walking the Tel Aviv beach armed with dogs and transistor radios rather than anti-toxic syringes. Curfews were slapped on Jenin, Qalqiliya, Hebron and several West Bank villages. But these had more to do with the army's tidal arrest sweeps of Palestinians than any clampdown caused by Iraq.

Second Pillar
Editorial, Arab News, March 29, 2003
When, between World War I and the early 1950s, the British were the dominant power in the Middle East, they used the twin pillars of Cairo and Baghdad to control and cajole the region. Both were firmly under London’s thumb until the rise of modern Arab nationalism consigned Britain’s imperial pretensions in the region to oblivion, first with the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and then the Iraqi revolution of 1958. Today it is the US that exercises a domineering influence over so much of the Middle East — but since Sept. 11, that has not been enough for the Bush administration. It wants to reshape the Middle East to suit its own interests. It already has a Western pillar in Israel. This war is about raising a second pillar, an Iraqi pillar, on which to establish American power in the region. Officials in Washington are open about it. They talk about this being a war that starts to make the Middle East “safe for America”. They imagine that by introducing democracy to Iraq, it will turn it into a Middle Eastern version of the US, and that from there Western-style democracy will spread through the region and transform it. They are blind. The US may see this as a step forward; Arabs see it as rank imperialism. And so do the Iraqis. Little things like the Iraqi flag ripped down in places in southern Iraq and replaced with the Stars and Strips only convince them that once the war is over, they will be even less free than at present.

Bombing of phone system another little degradation
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, March 29, 2003
It's difficult to weep about a telephone exchange. True, the destruction of the local phone system in Baghdad is a miserable experience for tens of thousands of Iraqi families who want to keep in contact with their relatives during the long dark hours of bombing. But the shattered exchanges and umbilical wires and broken concrete of the Mimoun International Communications Centre scarcely equals the exposed bones and intestines and torn flesh of the civilian wounded of Baghdad. The point, of course, is that it represents another of those little degradations which we (as in "we, the West") routinely undertake when things aren't going our way in a war. Obviously, "we" hoped it wouldn't come to this. The Anglo-American armies wanted to maintain the infrastructure of Baghdad for themselves – after they had "liberated" the city under a hail of roses from its rejoicing people – because they would need working phone lines on their arrival. But after a night of massive explosions across the city, dawn yesterday brought the realisation that communications had been sacrificed. The huge Rashid telecommunications centre was struck by a cruise missile which penetrated the basement of the building. The exchange in Karada, where Baghdadis pay their phone bills, was ripped open. No more. Because "we" have decided to destroy the phones and all those "command and control" systems that may be included, dual use, into the network.

Bush's reinforcements cannot reach the front soon enough
By Christopher Bellamy, The Independent, March 29, 2003
The Pentagon signalled the most radical amendment to the strategic plan since the war started nine days ago, by announcing yesterday that an extra 100,000 troops would be sent to fight Iraq, in addition to the 30,000 from the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanised) already in the plan. They will join 250,000 Americans and 45,000 British in the Gulf. In Washington, there have been rumours of a split among former US generals, including the Gulf War victors Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, who always thought more troops would be needed, and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who hoped to move swiftly with fewer troops. If this is true, the generals were right. As soon as Iraqi resistance started proving tougher than expected, it was clear there might be a "density problem", not enough troops. The extra US forces will come from Texas, Colorado and the garrison in Germany. They will increase the overall number by 50 per cent but will probably double the number of frontline combat troops in Iraq. The 4th Division will be ready to deploy probably within a week. The additional 100,000 and all their equipment will take longer to arrive.

Whoever wins the war, the US has lost the peace
By Adrian Hamilton, The Independent, March 28, 2003
The propaganda war has now spread from the war to the diplomacy of post-war. To listen to British briefers you would think that Tony Blair had been leading a fully mechanised brigade over to the US to force Washington to admit the United Nations to the task of reconstructing Iraq, and to reverse its pro-Israeli stance. It's largely flim-flam, of course. Just as the Pentagon had prepared its war plans for nearly a year before this invasion, so it has prepared its peace plans for almost as long. In the same way that George Bush was prepared to go to the UN in the run-up to war so long as it backed his plans, so he is prepared to see the UN participate in relief and fundraising for reconstruction so long as it in no way dilutes US control. "He who holds the stick, owns the buffalo," as the old Indian saying has it. If Bush has been prepared to be rather more positive (although still not committed to a date) about publishing the "road-map" to Middle East peace, it is not so much because of Blair but more in answer to the demands of the Arab states providing facilities in this war that the US do something to appear more even-handed (if only to help them to pacify their populations). Whether Bush is actually prepared to face down Ariel Sharon depends partly on the course of war. If it ends in dramatic victory, the administration may be emboldened to push for real progress; if it doesn't go so well, Bush won't risk antagonising the domestic Jewish vote.

Bush is Acting Like a Judicially-Selected Dictator
By Ralph Nader, Palestine Media Center, March 29, 2003
Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country -- As this is written, the campaign known as "shock and awe" has begun over Iraq and the five million civilian inhabitants of Baghdad. Bombs indeed shock, but why the word "awe"? This is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's way of turning the Iraq bombardment against what he knows is a defenseless country, run by a brutal dictator, into a metaphor for the rest of the world. He wants the whole world in "awe" of the mighty military superpower in preparation for the next move against another country in or outside the "axis of evil". This is truly an extraordinary time in American history. A dozen men and one woman are making very risky consequential decisions sealed off from much muted dissent inside the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA and other agencies that have warned the President and his small band of ideological cohorts to think more deeply before they leap. They are launching our nation into winning a war which generates later battles that may not be winnable -- at least not without great economic and human costs to our country. But let's back up a moment. Our founding fathers most emphatically placed the warmaking power in the hands of Congress. They did not want some arrogant or brooding successor to King George III to plunge the country into war. They wanted a collegial body of many elected representatives to decide openly (Article I, section 8).