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Hulagu Bush
By Sadu Nanjundiah, Dissident Voice, April 18, 2003
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  -- George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905 / [S]ocieties that do not confront the past remain trapped …in a world whose most important truths are felt – then repressed – every day, a world where official lies are perpetuated by a vast bureaucracy.  -- Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, 2002  --- It has been said that wars are America’s way of learning about the geography (and history) of other parts of the world. The U.S -led “coalition of the willing” (i.e George Bush and his British butler) has been at “war” with Iraq since March 20. More correctly, the U.S bombing of Iraq never ceased since the end of Gulf War I. The present invasion had no international sanction other than the usual self-proclaimed ones. It is illegitimate and immoral. The United States of America has once again, in the time-honored American tradition, destroyed a country to “save” it. The smug and triumphant Bush administration (with a chortling Defense Secretary who is a scary mix of Jack the Ripper and Buck Turgidson from Kubrick’s epic movie Dr. Strangelove) has not yet claimed victory because it is already setting its sights on Syria and Iran. In this next phase of World War 1V (as several neo-conservative advisers and ideologues have proclaimed), the Bush administration has the exuberant support of the Sharon government in Israel. It is encouraged, no doubt, by the complicity or deafening silence at its occupation of Iraq from the Arab countries. The world at large has been stunned into inaction as well. A country of 270 million people with a per capita GDP of $ 36,000 has pummeled into submission a nation of 24 million with a GDP estimated at $2,500 per person. The most powerful and fearsome weapons that 300 billion dollars could buy were targeted relentlessly on a shattered nation, decimated through the severest economic sanctions ever imposed on a country. The U.S.A., the world’s richest country, has attacked with utmost ferocity an already devastated country that, only two decades ago, could justifiably claim to be the most advanced in the Arab world. A nation armed with a limitless supply of million $ cruise missiles, GPS guided cluster bombs and DU weapons has hurled them, from the safety of the open skies or the depths of the oceans, at a country unable to defend itself with a totally outmatched, ill-equipped army. The cradle of civilization has been reduced to rubble, its ancient, priceless artifacts and antiquities looted and destroyed.

Battle Over Spoils
Editorial, Arab News, April 18, 2003
Yesterday, EU leaders called for the UN to have “a central” role in rebuilding Iraq; in Belfast a few days ago, George Bush and Tony Blair talked about the UN having “a vital” role. Clearly the debate about the UN’s role is going to be bitterly contested. In the one corner France, Russia and plenty of others, including UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, insist that only the UN can give legitimacy to a postwar government in Iraq. In the other is Washington, insisting that it will run the show and that the UN’s role will be subordinate — simply helping with reconstruction. Between them, Tony Blair and others suggest that the UN and the US cooperate in rebuilding Iraq. The fact is that the UN is as much an outsider to Iraqis as the US, and the only legitimacy that counts can come from the Iraqis themselves. If a transitional government in Baghdad is seen to be accepted by the Iraqis, despite having come into being as a result of US action, then it will be as legitimate as anything the UN could organize. In any event, all the signs are that Iraqis do not want a UN-run administration as in Kosovo. They want an interim government that is an all-Iraqi affair — and they want it now, not in several months’ time, which is how long the UN will take to get its act on the road. What they want from the UN is practical help in reconstruction. They may be suspicious of US intentions, but it seems that they would prefer that the Americans remained for the time being to provide law and order while the country gets back on its feet, and then go. But the UN will have a role to play, whether the US likes it or not, because until the UN embargo is lifted, Iraqi oil cannot be sold openly on the international market to pay for the country’s reconstruction. If the US tries to sell the oil, they would find themselves facing court action from countries owed money by Iraq.

Jews Like Us
By Bruce Jackson, CounterPunch, April 18, 2003
This Much is True: We Remember -- They're spreading poison about American Jews. Many of the people spreading this poison are Jews themselves, a relatively small group that wants to convince everybody (or at least everybody in power) that the great bulk of us think the way they do, which we don't. Some non-Jews, like Pat Buchanan and other less-rabid but no less invidious bigots, but find it a good way to stereotype us: Jews all think alike, dontcha know. It's weird and freaky when militant right-wing Jews can hook up with old-fashioned anti-Semites to stereotype the rest of us, but these are weird and freaky times. The basic tenets of the present poison seem to be these: * American Jews support Israel's policies whatever they are; * American Jews believe the settlements in the Occupied territories are a God-given right; * American Jews believe Ariel Sharon has peace on his mind but can't get there only because evil Palestinians keep blowing themselves up and forcing him to respond by blowing up or driving tanks through their families' houses and orchards; * American Jews think all issues of world peace must be subsumed to Israel's security, as defined by the Israeli government; * American Jews favor current U.S. unilateralism and have contempt for the United Nations because it is full of mean little countries that don't like Israel. And most important of all: any American Jew who rejects the aforementioned is a "self-hating Jew."   SELF-HATING JEWS:  Could any goy have thought that one up? "You disagree with my politics, therefore you are a self-hating Jew. The problem, the ethical issues, the guilt are all yours." Freud would have danced all over it. You respond, "No, man, you're WRONG about all of it. Let's go over the facts." They listen, politely, or not, and at the end they say,"See? I told you, you're a self-hating Jew." True-believers of whatever stripe find ratification wherever they look. In the court where the conclusion is foregone, all facts serve only to convict. I first heard the phrase "self-hating Jew" in Greenwich Village in the 1980s when a group from the Jewish Defense League, Meyer Kahane's militant organization, stood in the street yelling it at William Kunstler's house. I looked out the window, saw the bared teeth and raised fists and thought that they looked and comported themselves very much like Hitler Jugend, missing only the armbands. Kunstler's comment on them was, "Pay them no mind. They don't know what they're talking about. That's the silliest thing to call me. I don't hate myself. Everybody knows I love myself."

Bush: It's Not Just His Doctrine That's Wrong 
By Howard Dean, Common Dreams, April 17, 2003
[Note: After reading a recent article that called into question my opposition to the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, I wanted to state my position clearly to set the record straight. I appreciate that the editors of Common Dreams have given me this opportunity.] -- When Congress approved the President’s authorization to go to war in Iraq – no matter how well-intentioned – it was giving the green light to the President to set his Doctrine of preemptive war in motion. It now appears that Iraq was just the first step. Already, the Bush Administration is apparently eyeing Syria and Iran as the next countries on its target list. The Bush Doctrine must be stopped here. Many in Congress who voted for this resolution should have known better. On September 23, 2002, Al Gore cautioned in his speech in San Francisco that “if the Congress approves the Iraq resolution just proposed by the Administration it is simultaneously creating the precedent for preemptive action anywhere, anytime this or any future president so decides.” And that is why it was such a big mistake for Congress to allow the president to set this dangerous precedent. Too much is at stake. We have taken decades of consensus on the conduct of foreign policy – bipartisan consensus in the United States and consensus among our allies in the world community – and turned it on its head. It could well take decades to repair the damage this President and his cohort of right-wing ideological advisors have done to our standing in the international community.

It Need Not Be This Way
By Kathleen and Bill Christison, CounterPunch, April 12, 2003
Final Thoughts from Palestine -- As we left East Jerusalem for Amman last week, on our way back home, we were struck by the cynicism of what appeared to be a concerted effort by the Israeli press and others in the media to justify, retrospectively, Israel's siege and destruction of Jenin a year ago because it is now clear that U.S. and British forces are doing the same thing in Iraq. Israeli papers and military columnists say, with evident satisfaction, that the coalition missile attacks on civilian marketplaces in Iraq should now make it easier for the U.S. to understand why Israel did what it did in Jenin. Fighting "terrorism," these papers suggest, is a messy business, and U.S. and British forces must now understand that this fight involves engaging with a civilian population and "getting your hands dirty," as one paper put it. Even a BBC television anchor, interviewing an Israeli military historian, made the comparison with Jenin, noting that when coalition forces enter Baghdad they may face the same kind of fighting that Israel did in Jenin. The Israeli had the decency to point out that what Israel did in Jenin was immoral, but the BBC interviewer persisted, discussing the difficulties of urban warfare and comparing the Jenin and the Baghdad situations as if the killing of civilians who get in the way of urban fighting is simply one of those unfortunate obstacles that military forces must cope with. In the effort to justify the military operations in each case, no one seems to focus on the dead civilians, the destroyed homes and buildings, the ruined lives, or the right of any population to defend itself from invading armies. It's unsettling, not to say enraging, to see the actions of one murderous army justified by invoking the murderous tactics of another. How can this be happening? These commentators must not have seen Jenin. Maybe you have to have seen the destruction in Jenin to care about civilians.

Bad Cop, Really Bad Cop
By James Brooks, Media Monitors Network, April 18, 2003
A Whitehall source recently confided to the British Guardian that the split over Syria between Prime Minister Blair and the Pentagon hawks is "a bit of a good cop, bad cop thing." He might well recognize it; Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is only the latest target of a passive-aggressive diplomacy used to confuse and co-opt domestic and international opposition. Mr. Blair also played good cop to Washington's bad cop in the ultimately futile effort to get accomplices for the war on Iraq. Though he failed to sway Europe, Blair's plumping for moral war seems to have hit a chord with disaffected America, where he outstrips Bush handily in the polls. To moderate Americans tired of Bush playing the southern sheriff, Blair's perfect, earnest diction and cherubic features suggest the genial, unarmed English bobby. In him they find relief, a sane voice making a logical case for an illegal "pre-emptive" war of occupation against a nation he is helping to starve. It's another disturbing sign that the cult of celebrity is destroying the deliberative capacity of the American body politic. Mr. Blair is also a handy foil in the Middle East "peace process", in which his main function is to fool moderates and liberals into thinking that someone in power is watching out for the Palestinians. Most think his efforts are sincere, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Mr. Blair's occasional statements have not and will not seriously affect even the "peace process", much less the fate of the Palestinians. When the sympathy and advocacy of the good cop are always trumped in the end by the caprice and aggression of the bad cop, sincerity becomes complicity. The latest wrinkle in Washington's good cop-bad cop repertoire appears to be the news that George Bush has "ruled out" military action against Syria. He is reported to have "cut off" discussion of yet another war, perhaps on the sensible grounds that even the Lord Himself rested on the seventh day. Reducing Afghanistan and Iraq to basket cases was enough for one week. We'll take a breather before returning to GWOT (God's War On Terror).

Who cares enough about democracy?
By Amos Schocken, Haaretz, April 19, 2003
If the Israeli public is losing interest in democracy, it is doubtful that the press will want or be able to fulfill its mission. It is said that one of the roles of the press is to act as the watchdog of democracy. Yet if we look more closely at that idea, we find that it is not self-evident. Without having researched the subject, I am ready to risk the generalization that in democracies, the press is organized as a commercial enterprise, for profit. There is one criterion for examining such an enterprise: profitability and growth over time. Defending democracy is not part of the criterion. Although economists will say that democracy creates a more congenial climate for doing business, we do not find business people who include the defense of democracy in their commercial goals. Businessmen may engage in the defense of democracy, but they will generally do so within philanthropic frameworks, such as the Israel Democracy Institute, not within business frameworks, which in the democratic world have become established as the preferred ones, or in any event the most successful and long-lasting ones for running the press. As the product of a commercial enterprise, the press, too, strives to please a constantly increasing number of clients and to meet the taste of as many people as possible. As such, it has a certain latitude in which to write about breakdowns in the machinery of government, about corruption and waste, about shortcomings and illogic in the distribution of public resources, about antidemocratic activity and many other subjects that are related to the way public affairs are conducted. Writing of this kind - which is by nature investigative and critical - is not popular with the authorities, who are the subjects of journalistic investigations and critiques. The damage wrought by that unpopularity, however, may sometimes be considered less than the benefit accruing to a newspaper from a public that still takes an interest in material of this kind. But the idea I want to propose here is that in Israel, there is an ongoing and developing decline in the standing of democracy. If this is in fact the case, if the public is losing interest in democracy, with some people even viewing it as an obstacle, then it is doubtful that the press will want or be able to fulfill its mission as the watchdog of something that is not especially valued.

Massacre in Sanctuary; Eyewitness
By Robert Fisk,  Robert Fisk site, April 19, 1996
Qana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong. In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child. "The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area," a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand... Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 - the youngest was a four- day-old baby - when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.

Fueling a Culture Clash
Editorial, Washingotn Post, April 19, 2003
MANY MUSLIMS received the news that the White House had nominated scholar Daniel Pipes to, of all places, the U.S. Institute of Peace as sort of a cruel joke. The institute is a quasi-governmental think tank dedicated to international "peace and conflict resolution"; one of its latest projects is the Special Initiative on the Muslim World, begun after Sept. 11, 2001, as a bridge between cultures. Mr. Pipes has long been regarded by Muslims as a destroyer of such bridges. And it takes only a glimpse at the latest column posted on his Web site to see why. The column, written for the New York Post, is about Hasan K. Akbar, the U.S. soldier in Kuwait charged with throwing a grenade at his fellow soldiers: "No one yet knows Akbar's motives, but ignoring that it fits into a sustained pattern of political violence by American Muslims amounts to willful self-deception. When will officialdom acknowledge what is staring it in the face?" Mr. Pipes denies charges by U.S. Muslim groups that he lumps them all together. He defended himself recently by saying, as he has before, that he has "always distinguished between moderate Islam and militant Islam." But then he talked about the "gray area: The source of this violence is militant Islam and only Muslims are supporters of militant Islam," he said. If we were hunting for rapists, he argued, we wouldn't look at everyone but focus on "certain attributes. Mosques are proved to be the planning grounds for militant Islam so this is where we should look. This is something people would rather overlook, but it's a matter of being frank." This gray area is a bit too large, implying as it does that any U.S. Muslim, no matter how outwardly assimilated, should be treated as a potential Akbar, a point Mr. Pipes argues in his New York Post column: "Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism," he writes. At best there seem to be two Mr. Pipeses, as a Washington Post review of one of his books pointed out: a "brilliant" analyst of Muslim intellectual history and a man who seems to harbor a "disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims."