Pressure Cooker on a Steady Flame
By Raid Qusti, Arab News, April 8, 2003
Do we have domestic problems? You bet. Our per capita income has dropped from over $28,000 in the early 1980s — similar to what it was in the United States — to $7,000 now, the equivalent to Mexico. This has made ours the fastest-shrinking economy in the world. The new BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, and other fancy cars you find zooming down Tahlia Street in Riyadh and Jeddah do not represent the standard of living of most Saudis. The used and beat-up cars that are found in other areas of these cities as well as in Dammam, Makkah, Abha, Jizan and Tabuk do. Even though wire agencies and Western journalists continue to refer to our country as “oil-rich”, each time they mention it, the truth is that it is no longer appropriate. In fact, the majority of Saudi families are those who make a great effort at the end of every month to pay for the car installments, the rent, the electricity bill, the landline plus mobile phone bills, groceries, school supplies, the maid’s salary, and other expenses. And with the huge deficit in the government’s budget year after year and our population explosion, Saudi society is slowly starting to split in two categories: Rich and poor. Should we shy away from the fact that lots of Saudi families — which tend to be fairly large — are already broke by the middle of every month, counting the days slowly and waiting desperately for the pay check to come with the new month?

Foxa Americana
By Rogel Alper, Haaretz, April 9, 2003
America's Fox News network has been demonstrating since the start of the war in Iraq an amazing lesson in media hypocrisy. The anchors, reporters and commentators unceasingly emphasize that the war's goal is to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The frequency, consistence and passion with which they use that lame excuse, and the fact that nearly no other reasons are mentioned shows that this is the network's editorial policy. The American flag lies in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, while the logo accompanying the programming is Operation Iraqi Freedom, the official name given by the Pentagon. Fox journalists display what appears to be genuine happiness, innocent and sincere, brainwashed in nature, in the expectation for the wonderful day when the American army leads the Iraqi people from slavery to freedom. With effective, rapid and decisive rewriting of history, there is an impression that the network has erased past relations between Iraq and America. It is difficult to find any mention of the fact that the U.S. armed Iraq in its war against Iran in the 1980s, or that it turned a blind eye when Saddam Hussein brutally put down a 1991 uprising with chemical weapons after the first Gulf War. The argument about the connection between Saddam's regime and Al-Qaida and the attack on the Twin Towers has disappeared, and the "axis of evil," which also included Iran and North Korea, has evaporated. There's practically no mention of the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction and how they were hid from the UN inspectors as being the official reason for the war. There's no reference to the American economic interests in Iraqi oil wells. Every operation to take over the wells and prevent their sabotage was altruistic, for the sake of the Iraqi people and preservation of its assets and resources.

The invasion of Iraq: a road map for the "new" Middle East
By Majed Nassar/Health Work Committees, Nassar Ibrahim, Alternative Information Center, April 8, 2003
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal Government." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 17 January 1961   "What kind of peace do we seek? Not a 'Pax Americana' enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of a slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time." -- John F. Kennedy, 1963 -- On 20 March 2003, the United States and Britain launched a war against Iraq, with the help of a dubious “coalition” of various and sundry war partners. Even before the beginning of this war, disagreements within the international community overshadowed the usual and well-known attempts at diplomacy. Despite clear opposition from the international community at the United Nations, as well as innumerable protests from peoples and governments around the world, the US plowed ahead with its illegal and illegitimate war as Britain dutifully tagged along. This war is different in a number of ways:  1. Through the wonders of media technology, the war is being waged right in our living rooms as TV screens bring minute-to-minute news and images of the battlefield. War has become a daily reality for everyone.  2. A certain “objectivity” in reporting is available due to the multiplicity and variety of media stations. (Except in the United States where only Fox News and CNN are reporting in a censored form)  3. False information is rapidly and easily revealed.( except in the United States)  4. In contrast to the first Gulf War, there is not even a semblance of international consensus on the justification for or the implementation of this war.  5. The US clearly underestimated the Iraqi people and their army, and made a gross miscalculation regarding their inevitable revolt against their government.  6. The belief that Iraqi government officials would flee into exile or surrender is yet another US miscalculation.

Chemical Hypocrites
By George Monbiot, Common Dreams/The Guardian, April 8, 2003
As It Struggles to Justify Its Invasion, The US is Getting Ready to Use Banned Weapons in Iraq -- When Saddam Hussein so pig-headedly failed to shower US troops with chemical weapons as they entered Iraq, thus depriving them of a retrospective justification for this war, the American generals explained that he would do so as soon as they crossed the "red line" around Baghdad. Beyond that point, the desperate dictator would lash out with every weapon he possessed. Well, the line has been crossed and recrossed, and not a whiff of mustard gas or VX has so far been detected. This could mean one of three things: Saddam's command system may have broken down (he may be dead, or his troops might have failed to receive or respond to his orders); he is refraining, so far, from using chemical weapons; or he does not possess them. The special forces sent to seize Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have yet to find hard evidence at any of the 12 sites (identified by the Pentagon as the most likely places) they have examined so far. As Newsweek revealed in February, there may be a reason for this: in 1995, General Hussein Kamel, the defector whose evidence George Bush, Tony Blair and Colin Powell have cited as justification for their invasion, told the UN that the Iraqi armed forces, acting on his instructions, had destroyed the last of their banned munitions. But, whether Saddam is able to use such weapons or not, their deployment in Iraq appears to be imminent, for the Americans seem determined on it.

A different kind of despair
By Neve Gordon, National Catholic Reporter, April 11, 2003
Come to dinner when the war against Iraq ends,” Jamil said, as I opened the car door. He had just parked the sedan a short distance from the Bethlehem military checkpoint, the one closest to Jerusalem. “Is that what you call hospitality?” I asked. “What do you mean?” he queried. “Well, imagine I invited you to dinner, but told you to come only in the year 2008?” I retorted, with a smirk. “You’re right,” he said. “The 1967 war, which you Israelis call the Six Day War, is still going on 35 years after it began. Also, the Americans thought they would rapidly defeat the Vietnamese but ended up occupying the country for many years, killing 3 million people, not to mention the 58,000 American soldiers who died. “On second thought,” he continued, “perhaps you should come to dinner next week and not wait until the Iraqi debacle is over.” I stepped out of Jamil’s car and climbed into the waiting truck. It was about 5 p.m., and we had just finished delivering food to nine villages located on the southern outskirts of Bethlehem. We were now on our way back to Jerusalem. Earlier that day, Ta’ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership) activists had delivered 100 tons of food to small villages all over the West Bank, knowing that the Palestinian population had already begun suffering from the war against Iraq. I am not only referring to the media blackout concerning the 180 Palestinians who have been killed by the Israeli military since January. Just as important is the world’s failure to respond to the humanitarian crisis transpiring in the occupied territories -- a crisis that is deepening due to extended curfews and closures imposed following the outbreak of the war. The World Bank recently published a report showing that the effects of the Israeli military siege are ominous. Twenty-seven months after the eruption of the intifada, 60 percent of the population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under the international poverty line of $2 per day. The number of poor has tripled from 637,000 in September 2000 to nearly 2 million today (out of a total population of 3.5 million), with more than 50 percent of the work force unemployed. People cannot reach work or their fields, and it is said that over half a million Palestinians are now fully dependent on food aid. Per capita food consumption has declined by 30 percent in the past two years, and there is severe malnutrition in the Gaza Strip -- equivalent to levels found in some of the poorer sub-Saharan countries -- as revealed in a recent Johns Hopkins University study. It is this crisis that led Ta’ayush to embark on a food campaign. Yet the campaign is not only meant to provide humanitarian aid, but rather has a crucial political dimension as well.

Dick Cheney’s Song of America
By David Armstrong, Information Clearing House/Harper's
Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney’s masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan. The Plan was published in unclassified form most recently under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, (pdf) as Cheney ended his term as secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993, but it is, like “Leaves of Grass,” a perpetually evolving work. It was the controversial Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992 – from which Cheney, unconvincingly, tried to distance himself – and it was the somewhat less aggressive revised draft of that same year. This June it was a presidential lecture in the form of a commencement address at West Point, and in July it was leaked to the press as yet another Defense Planning Guidance (this time under the pen name of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld). It will take its ultimate form, though, as America’s new national security strategy – and Cheney et al. will experience what few writers have even dared dream: their words will become our reality. The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.

Will the Empire be Fascist?
By Richard Falk, Transnational Foundation, March 24, 2003
The United States is by circumstance and design an emergent global empire, the first in the history of the world. Prior empires have had frontiers and boundaries, although occupying large expanses of territory, and exerting control from a distant center that due to available technologies of communication and transportation were further away in time than is any part of the global from Washington. In purely temporal terms, the American Empire is thus smaller than earlier great empires associated with China, the Ottomans, the Persians, the Austro-Hungarian, and the overseas empires of the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. It is important to appreciate the consequences of an empire of global scope. Such an empire, to the extent that it is established and sustained without significant resistance, raise a special challenge to world order. Over the course of modern history, in particular, stability in international relations has been maintained primarily by reliance on countervailing power, often interpreted by reference to "the balance of power," and giving rise to various schools of "realist" thinking to explain the central ordering role of power. Such an international equilibrium was complemented in the Westphalia Era by "war," which served as a crude and cruel legislative substitute, introducing periodic changes in maps portraying the boundaries of territorial states. A third ordering instrument was by way of various forms of "hegemony" that established geographic zones of control, known as "spheres of influence," by which powerful states exerted control over the behavior of weaker states, as illustrated by such patterns as the Monroe Doctrine, the Soviet Bloc, and the Atlantic Alliance. The fourth and weakest, yet most promising ordering device in world politics, is associated with international law, especially as institutionalized within the United Nations. Such a framework of international law, the struggle to find an alternative to war in the setting of conflict and change has taken on a sense of urgency since the development of weaponry of mass destruction, but lacks the independent capabilities to ensure respect for its constraints by powerful states and by newly formidable non-state actors (the al Qaeda network)....This essay explores the implication of these trends as defining the American Empire, and specifically argues that the prospects associated with such a reality no longer support, if indeed they ever did, the school of benign imperialists who while acknowledging the imperial moment for the United States, insisted that it was a benevolent political configuration as compared to prior imperial projects, and provided the world with the global public good of security without oppression and exploitation.

From Soul Power '68 to Pirate Power '03
BlackCommentator.com, April 10, 2003
"To the extent that war is a contest of wills, psychology plays a tremendous role. Always does, always did. The problem with human psychology is it is exceedingly difficult to know what is going to elicit a certain type of behavior. You don't know how you are going to behave in a stressful situation. All the more so, you don't know how somebody operating from a different culture, a different mind-set, might react to stressful circumstances." - Lani Kass, professor, National War College  --  Bloody footprints to Baghdad and Basra mark the first tentative steps in the Bush men's apocalyptic adventure. They have embarked on a project to bring to heel a world that they hold in great contempt, but of which they have no understanding whatsoever. Products of a white American cultural bubble that glories in its transparency to the globe but sees only its own illusions staring back, the Pirates play at psychological warfare and succeed in psyching out only themselves. Let us be lucid, above the din of corporate media that serve only to further embed the fantasies that have inspired the mad and hopeless American lunge at global domination. There is only one fact that has been affirmed since American tanks crossed the Kuwaiti border in late March - and it is a redundant fact, already known to the people of the world: The U.S. military is awesomely powerful. It can destroy a developing nation's military and state structures. So, then what? In the minds and plans of the Pirates, the then follows as naturally as night follows day. Having seen the alternative in the wreckage of Saddam Hussein's army and capital, the international community will accommodate itself to American fiat. Like the Borg on the Star Trek Voyager television series, the Americans will have made their point to the rest of the planet: "Resistance is futile."

Defeat after occupation?
By Mohamed Hakki, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 3 - 9 April 2003
The real American defeat will come after the United States occupies Iraq -- Contrary to all speculations and analyses, the recent pause, if one can call it a pause, in the war against Iraq does not mean that basic United States military assumptions are being examined, nor that the faulty intelligence upon which they are based are being newly evaluated. On the contrary, the US may have been stunned at the minimal Iraqi resistance to their overwhelming military superiority, but they are still determined to go through with their plan until they occupy the whole of Iraq. The real American defeat will not and cannot be a military one. It can only come after the US captures Iraq. It is not true that Saddam Hussein was defying the United States or the United Nations. If anything, he was trying to avoid this war at any price -- apart from leaving Iraq and going into exile with his family. He not only opened all of Iraq for the UN inspectors unconditionally, but even started to destroy Al-Sumoud missiles, which were actually permitted under, and authorised by, the UN. People tend to forget in the fog of US propaganda that it was Iraq who notified the inspectors that one, and only one, of the Al-Sumoud missiles had exceeded the permissible range by a few kilometres, probably due to a lighter payload. Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector, said that this action constitutes a substantial measure of disarmament. "We're not watching the breaking of toothpicks here, lethal weapons are being destroyed," he said. The initial assumption, widely and foolishly touted by Vice-President Richard Cheney and a chorus of neo- conservatives in the administration, that the Iraqis would crumble and the whole country would implode with the first assault of three thousand cruise missiles, did not materialise. The first three weeks were not a "piece of cake" either and the "shock and awe" did not drive the Iraqi people to bellydance in the streets to greet their liberators.

A day that began with shellfire ended with a once-oppressed people walking like giants
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 10, 2003
The Americans "liberated" Baghdad yesterday, destroyed the centre of Saddam Hussein's quarter-century of brutal dictatorial power but brought behind them an army of looters who unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy. It was a day that began with shellfire and air strikes and blood-bloated hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator's statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for 25 years, had grovellingly obeyed Saddam's most humble secret policeman turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground. "It is the beginning of our new freedom," an Iraqi shopkeeper shouted at me. Then he paused, and asked: "What do the Americans want from us now?' The great Lebanese poet Kalil Gibran once wrote that he pitied the nation that welcomed its tyrants with trumpetings and dismissed them with hootings of derision. And the people of Baghdad performed this same deadly ritual yesterday, forgetting that they – or their parents – had behaved in identical fashion when the Arab Socialist Baath Party destroyed the previous dictatorship of Iraq's generals and princes. Forgetting, too, that the "liberators" were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq.