Bombs and biscuits
By Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, March 31, 2003
Every Iraqi child is now an unwitting participant in this obscene war. And every one of us is morally implicated. -- After the bombings, the ambushes and assaults, the newsreaders' voices lighten as they reach the humanitarian aid slot in the story running order. The images of bloodied limbs and bombed buildings are replaced by jostling crowds being roughly corralled by British troops distributing bottles of water. This is the battle for hearts and minds, we are repeatedly told. The crude attempt at manipulation beggars belief: whose heart and mind are won by such images of angry desperation? Certainly not the Iraqis, bewildered by the invader who has deprived them of the water in the first place, who kills their children and then throws them the paltry solace of one bottle - enough to last one person a couple of hours. Humanitarian experts believe the amount of aid needed to support the 16 million Iraqis dependent on aid is 32 times the pitiful cargo the Sir Galahad finally delivered last week. The enormity of this dwarfs the capacity of the one port of Umm Qasr, a tight funnel for both the huge military and humanitarian supplies now needed. The well-being of an entire population is now the legal responsibility of the Americans and the British, as Kofi Annan reminded them, and the prospect of them being able to meet it is fanciful. No, the real hearts and minds the Americans and the British are hoping to win by this grotesque charade are those of their domestic audiences at home, and then the global audience watching this war. The aim is to reassure supporters and dampen protests. So far, it seems at least to be having some success at home; British public opinion rallies behind its brave squaddies as they throw the boxes of water into the outreached hands.

Peace in the Middle East: getting real on the issue of Palestinian refugee property - Acrobat format
By Scott Leckie, Forced Migration Review, Issue 16
On October 2002, UNHCR issued a ‘Note on the Applicability of Article 1D of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to Palestinian Refugees’.1 This essentially re-affirmed the long-standing interpretation of the Convention that – with the exception of a select few who reside outside the immediate region – the five million Palestinian refugees are excluded from the benefits from the Convention, and thus of direct protection assistance by UNHCR. Justifying these views on the fact that the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) already provides ‘protection or assistance’ to the refugees, the international community has thus not only excluded the largest portion of the world’s refugee population from the protection that only UNHCR can give but has also excluded the global refugee protection agency from being a key player in finding solutions to one of the oldest unsettled refugee problems in the world. While it is understandable that some quarters may not wish UNHCR to take on the world’s most intractable refugee issue, it is a travesty of the truth to argue that the four million registered Palestinian refugees in the five UNRWA fields of operation (Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) receive adequate protection from the agency.

Morning After
By Gabriel Wildau, The American Prospect, March 31, 2003
Rumsfeld and Myers lower war expectations (retroactively); Baker masks his war ambivalence (badly). -- Lately public discourse has taken on a Hegelian structure: Thesis: The United States will triumph overwhelmingly in the war with Iraq. The conflict will be short. Iraqis will welcome us as liberators. Antithesis: The advance to Baghdad from the south has stalled. Resistance is stiffer than expected. Iraqis don't like us. In the old days, this dialectic might have taken months to unfold. Now it takes only days -- sometimes hours -- for trends in coverage to emerge, and for those in power to respond with carefully formulated spin. Administration officials and apologists fanned out on the Sunday talk shows yesterday to propose a synthesis: Synthesis: We've been prepared for the entire range of scenarios. We weren't overconfident. Everything is going according to plan. Trust us. Yesterday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers appeared on both Meet the Press and Face the Nation, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared on This Week to try to curb the growing sense that what was supposed to be a swift, surgically precise victory is shaping up to be a bloody, prolonged conflict -- in other words, a real war. The administration has replaced its cavalier assurance of a few weeks ago with a steadfast message of however-long-it-takes determination. On Face the Nation, Myers said, "Nobody ever promised a short war. . . . Nobody should have any illusions that this is going to be an easy victory." Instead, he predicted a "hard slog." On This Week, Rumsfeld tried to turn the widely held perception that the war is not going as well as expected into an opportunity to show the administration's resolve.

Oh, Bush, not everyone who mounts a steed is a horseman
By Danny Rubinstein, Haaretz, March 31, 2003 
The Palestinian street is proud of Saddam Hussein's staying power and points to the similarity between events in Iraq and the Palestinian struggle. The longer the fighting in Iraq goes on, and the more the Iraqi resistance shows itself to be tenacious, the greater the feeling of pride among the Palestinian public and the spite it feels for the Americans. As expected, there were mass demonstrations of support for the Iraqis in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on Friday, though it's difficult to draw an inference from this about the actual impact of the war on the Palestinian street - there were far larger and far stormier demonstrations elsewhere. Palestinian spokesmen are talking a great deal about the lesson they have drawn from the fighting so far. One of the most important subjects from the Palestinian point of view is what they call the Americans' psychological warfare. The Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, are very sensitive to mendacious reporting in the media. The full ugliness of the phenomenon was experienced nearly 36 years ago, in the first two days of the Six Day War.

Who Lied To Whom?
By Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003
Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program? -- Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President’s claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration’s advocacy of pre๋mptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace “a world in which states consider themselves subject to law” with “the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.” A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before Congress. According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee’s secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world’s largest producers. The uranium, known as “yellow cake,” can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons. Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger.)

Rumsfeld's hostage
Editorial, The Guardian, April 1, 2003
Blair has been outmanoeuvred -- With each day that passes, it becomes clearer that Tony Blair has made himself a hostage to Donald Rumsfeld. When and, above all, why Mr Blair decided to place his government - our government - in the unsympathetic hands of the US defence secretary is a complete mystery. What is not open to doubt is that this is now the fate of Mr Blair's misguided policy. As a result, the two men's fates are bound together willy-nilly. If Mr Rumsfeld has got it right about the need to attack Iraq and about the means by which it is to be done, then Mr Blair will probably end up in the clear. But if Mr Rumsfeld proves definitively to have got it wrong, then the collateral damage may include Mr Blair's premiership and perhaps even the Labour government itself. Mr Rumsfeld is the fountainhead of the policy which has left Britain as the exposed junior partner in the essentially American enterprise in Iraq. For years Mr Rumsfeld has regarded the ousting of Saddam Hussein as the defining move in the new and unilateralist US global policy of which he and vice-president Dick Cheney are the prime advocates. In the Clinton years he was a key promoter of the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change the official policy of the US. He and his coterie have always seen the forcible removal of Saddam as the embodiment of a foreign policy that is "not-Clinton". When George Bush sent him back to the Pentagon, Mr Rumsfeld began to prepare for military action against Iraq. On September 12 2001, the day after 9/11, he immediately argued that George Bush should "go against Iraq, not just al-Qaida". Ever since, he has aggressively pursued every chance of implicating Iraq in the war on terror, encouraging the Pentagon to second-guess both the CIA and the diplomats at every turn. Fourteen months ago the "axis of evil" speech gave him the green light he had sought for so long.

'And here's Tommy Franks, the children's entertainer...'
By Mark Steel, The Independent, March 27, 2003
We'll be told the town of Nasiriyah has been taken by the coalition to rescue a little girl's sick tortoise -- It does all make sense. We're flattening the place because we're committed to rebuilding it. To prove this another rebuilding contract was handed out yesterday, to Dick Cheney's old company. It's as if an arsonist burned your street down, then said: "The good news is my brother-in-law can put it back up at a very reasonable price. And sorry about your dead daughters, but my cousin's an undertaker so he'll sort you out a lovely urn at a competitive rate." And then went on television to announce: "For some reason they're not welcoming me as much as I predicted." We're shown round-the-clock pictures of our boys finding ways of getting clean water and medicine into Basra. I'm no military genius, but one way might have been not to impose sanctions for 12 years that prevented medicine getting into Basra. Maybe that's the cause of all this friendly fire. One lot's trying to take the stuff in while another lot fires at them because they haven't been told the rules have changed. But we won't know because instead of spoiling the jollity by doubting Pentagon briefings, the news shows us hours of footage of troops dishing out water to grateful Iraqi children. Soon the news will begin: "Marines enter Baghdad dressed as clowns in an effort to entertain Iraqi children," and we'll cross to Tommy Franks on a tank making a poodle out of bendy balloons. Then we'll be told the town of Nasiriyah has been taken by the coalition, in order to rescue a little girl's sick tortoise.

This War Is Not Working
By Peter Arnett, Palestine Chronicle, April 1, 2003
I am still in shock and awe at being fired. There is enormous sensitivity within the US government to reports coming out from Baghdad. They don't want credible news organisations reporting from here because it presents them with enormous problems. I reported on the original bombing for NBC and we were half a mile away from those massive explosions. Now I am really shocked that I am no longer reporting this story for the US and awed by the fact that it actually happened. That overnight my successful NBC reporting career was turned to ashes. And why? Because I stated the obvious to Iraqi television; that the US war timetable has fallen by the wayside. I have made those comments to television stations around the world and now I'm making them again in the Daily Mirror. I'm not angry. I'm not crying. But I'm also awed by this media phenomenon. The right-wing media and politicians are looking for any opportunity to be critical of the reporters who are here, whatever their nationality. I made the misjudgment which gave them the opportunity to do so. I gave an impromptu interview to Iraqi television feeling that after four months of interviewing hundreds of them it was only professional courtesy to give them a few comments. That was my Waterloo - bang! I have not yet decided what to do, whether to pack my bags and leave Baghdad or stay on. I'll decide what to do today, right now I'm chewing on what has happened to me. But whatever happens I will never stop reporting on the truth of this war whether I am in Baghdad or somewhere else in the Middle East - or even back in Washington.

Saddam's spin doctors keep up a war front but Iraq's main anger is trained on Saudi prince
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 2, 2003
It was a most peculiar day. Overnight, the Americans had pulverised a neo-Classical office block next to what was – before a previous pulverisation – the Iraqi government's Department of Air Armaments. Then, just before 10am yesterday, an aircraft could be heard diving high over Baghdad and a clap of sound from the other side of the Tigris, with the usual grey-black column of smoke, signalled the end of another annexe belonging to the sons of Saddam. Then came the bus trip. The Iraqis wanted to take the press to see another example of US and British "imperialist-racist violence" and so we were trucked off to the outskirts of the city, to the campus of what was described as a ladies education college. Campus it was, with agricultural blocks and plant testing fields and a perimeter of palm groves. And the crime against humanity to which we were taken? A large crater in the lawn beside a women's dormitory, a hundred smashed windows and some broken power lines. A hundred metres away, I found four black and white cows tethered in the grass and, perhaps 30 feet from the crater, a slit trench with sand-bags; surely, we told ourselves, an ordinary part of any college campus.