Shunted aside in Iraq
Editorial, The Guardian, April 26, 2003
What happened to the UN's 'vital role'? -- Despite US assurances that it would play a "vital role" in post-war Iraq, the UN is being systematically sidelined by the Bush administration. This does not make good sense for Iraq. It sets a potentially disastrous precedent for the UN's authority. And it amounts to a humiliation for Tony Blair, who vowed at his April 8 summit with George Bush that, having been ignored over the war, the UN would not be marginalised in its aftermath. On present plans, the US will introduce a security council resolution next week that effectively sweeps away all UN authority over Iraq's future, legitimising de facto US control. Concerning the formation of an interim administration, Jay Garner, the Pentagon-selected Iraq viceroy, is expected to move ahead within days with the first political appointments, all under US auspices and of US choosing. Despite Mr Bush's Hillsborough pledge that the UN would be allowed to make "suggestions" about the composition of an interim body, it has in fact been excluded. The resolution as envisaged would consign the UN to a purely consultative future role. The US is meanwhile successfully blocking the return of UN weapons inspectors, insisting instead on pursuing its own investigations. It is talking about replacing US troops with a Nato-organised stabilisation or peacekeeping force, rather than a UN-led force including Muslim countries. And it continues to ignore calls by human rights groups for a UN-mandated international tribunal, like that for former Yugoslavia, to try regime figures accused of war crimes. Instead it suggests reformed Iraqi courts will prosecute such cases under US guidance. So far, the US has let the UN's oil-for-food programme continue. But that will not last beyond June, as Washington finalises plans to appoint its executives to manage Iraq's oil industry and take charge of oil revenue flows.

Peace among Palestinians is the first step on the road
By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, April 26, 2003
The split between Arafat and Abu Mazen is not the only faultline that must be overcome -- Not for the first time, the Palestinians have been forgotten. All the international angst over the road map to Middle East peace has focused on the other players in the drama, with diplomats and commentators frantically looking for clues in Washington and Jerusalem. They search between the lines of a newspaper interview with Ariel Sharon, they decode George Bush's every utterance. The latest Washington mutterings, for example, suggest there may be a new hurdle placed before US publication of the road map. Not only will the Palestinians have to ratify their new cabinet, hints one US administration source, they might have to issue an "unequivocal renunciation of terrorism and violence" - a whole new condition. In all these discussions the Palestinians are taken for granted. It is assumed that, so long as the US and Israel do the right thing, the Palestinians will play their part. Just give them the document, runs the thinking, and they'll sign on the dotted line. This week has shown why such presumptuousness may be dangerously off the mark. The Palestinians are not a parcel that can simply be delivered. They are as complex and fragmented as any other society, with at least three key faultlines - each of which makes the prospects for peace more frail.

Why the US needs Syria
By Sami Moubayed, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 24 - 30 April 2003
The "Syria-next" scenario has been avoided thanks to the efforts of President Bashar Al-Assad this week. -- The crisis between Damascus and Washington has apparently been solved without war, invasion, or United Nations inspectors. In Syria itself, even though nobody believed that war was in the horizon, people were worried nevertheless. The alarming part of the psychological war was an article published in The Guardian revealing that Donald Rumsfeld had asked his generals to draw up a military plan for war against Syria. This proposal was vetoed by President Bush, but the fact that it existed is alarming for Syria. Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar hurried to condemn the United States war of words on Damascus, forcing Colin Powell to declare, "There is no war plan right now to attack someone else." This shift in US rhetoric can be attributed to Al-Assad, who was described by Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, who met him this week in Damascus, as "a very responsible international player -- constructive and pragmatic". These are the traits that Saddam Hussein lacked. Syria is not Iraq and Bashar Al-Assad is not Saddam Hussein. Syria is not an isolated country and its government, unlike the former Iraqi one, is recognised and respected throughout the world. Syria supported the US war on terror and aided the FBI in tracking down Islamists throughout the world linked to Osama Bin Laden. Syria took part in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, fighting alongside the US, and also took part in peace talks at Madrid and in Washington, under the auspices of the US, and hosted American presidents like Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Bashar Al-Assad has hosted world leaders in Damascus, ranging from Fidel Castro, to Tony Blair and Pope John Paul II. He has also insisted on portraying his country as pro-West, though not pro-American, evidence of which is his friendship with France, his alliance with Russia, and the high profile visit he made to the United Kingdom shortly before the war on Iraq.

What is happening to the United States?
By Edward Said
[A longer version of "Give us back our democracy"] -- What is formidable about Iraq is its rich culture, its complex society, and its long-suffering people. These were all made invisible, the better to smash Iraq as if it were only a den of thieves and murderers. --  In a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate floor on 19 March, the day the war was launched against Iraq, Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and the most eloquent speaker in that chamber, asked "what is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?" No one bothered to answer him, but as the vast American military machine now planted in Iraq begins to stir restlessly in other directions in the name of the American people, their love of freedom, and their deep-seated values, these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption of democracy that we are living through. Let's examine first what US Middle East policy has wrought since George W. Bush came to power almost three years ago in an election decided finally by the Supreme Court, not by the popular vote. Even before the atrocities of 11 September, Bush's team had given Ariel Sharon's government a free hand to colonise the West Bank and Gaza, to kill, detain and expel people at will, to demolish their homes, expropriate their land, imprison them by curfew and hundreds of military blockades, make life for them generally speaking impossible; after 9/11, Sharon simply hitched his wagon to "the war on terrorism" and intensified his unilateral depredations against a defenseless civilian population, now under occupation for 36 years, despite literally tens of UN Security Council resolutions enjoining Israel to withdraw and otherwise desist from its war crimes and human rights abuses. Bush called Sharon a man of peace last June, and kept the five billion dollar subsidy coming without even the vaguest hint that it was at risk because of Israel's lawless brutality.

Kubaisi’s Return Raises Questions
By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, Arab News, April 26, 2003
The first strange scene: Arabs defend Iraqis who cursed their fallen leaders. And in the second scene, the emergence of Sheikh Ahmad Al-Kubaisi as the first to benefit from America’s victory, even though he was amongst the first to criticize America before the conflict began. His arrival at the Abu-Haneefa Mosque in Baghdad last Friday under American protection showed the change in politics. How did the Sheikh get from his studio in Dubai to the mosque? This is a question that has aroused considerable curiosity among both those who support and those oppose him. His supporters see in him an Iraqi national who has the right to go back to his home, preach at his mosque and lead his people. They praise his message and wish him success among the people of his sect. His anti-American stand is a brave one and must not be underestimated. As for his opponents, they can’t believe that the man that was warning against the war and its consequences is now the first to benefit from it. One person wondered at the Arab commentators who are denouncing Ahmed Chalabi for coming with the American forces. At least Chalabi was the one that pushed the Americans to battle Saddam and spent 10 years of his life preparing for the downfall of Saddam. Consequently he has the right to go back and share in the new government.

The Decline and Fall of American Journalism (Part LXV): the Case of Judy Miller
By Alexander Cockburn, Dissident Voice, April 26, 2003
The days passed, and each excited bellow of discovery of WMD caches on the road north from Kuwait yielded to disappointment. Then came Judith Miller's story in the New York Times. The smoking gun at last! Not exactly, as we shall see. But first a word about the reporter. If ever someone has an institutional interest in finding WMD in Iraq it's surely Miller, who down the years has established a corner in creaking Tales of Terrorism, most of them bottle-fed to her by Israeli and US intelligence. -- As a million Shi'ite pilgrims streamed toward Karbala earlier this week, shouting "No to America, no to Saddam, no to tyranny, no to Israel!" (slogans recorded by a reporter for Agence France Presse) can't you just imagine the plash of complacent 'I Told Him So's' from the lips of George Bush Sr., on the phone to Brent Scowcroft and other members of the old gang like Bush Sr.'s Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who recently took audible pleasure in telling the BBC that "If George Bush [Jr.] decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about fifteen minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can't get away with that sort of thing in this democracy." Until Judith Miller's piece showed up on the front page of the New York Times on April 21, I'd thought the distillation of disingenuous US press coverage of the invasion came with the images of Iraqis cheering US troops in the Baghdad square in front of the Palestine Hotel on April 9 as they hauled down Saddam's statue. I know the world has moved on, and now we're wondering if Saddam is putting up his Vargas girls with thumbtacks on some motel wall in Minsk, but let's make record for posterity that the April 9 Baghdad demonstration was a put-up job, a fake from start to finish. Remember, the photos of the statue going down, the flag on Saddam's face, the cheering Iraqis, were billed as the images that showed It Was All Worthwhile, up there in the pantheon with Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima and the news film of the Berlin wall going down. Obviously, there were plenty of Iraqis in Baghdad delighted at the realization that the Age of Saddam was drawing to a close (though it turns out Baghdad will probably be run by the same cops, the same bureaucrats, the same torturers, all now Ba'ath Party members who taken Saddam's picture off their office walls and are proclaiming their fealty to the free market). And probably there were some Iraqis prepared to wave at Saddam's conquerors riding in on their tanks. All the same, the clamorous masses in the square never existed.

Raiders of the Lost Ark  
By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz, April 26, 2003
The firemen manning the two fire trucks dispatched to the Western Wall on July 28, 1981 were still wondering what they were supposed to do there when they were suddenly told to return to the station. Yehuda Meir Getz, the rabbi of the Western Wall, had ordered the fire trucks and was also the one that hastily canceled the order after he discovered that all the firemen on the way to the Western Wall were Arabs. He feared that his plans - to dig under the foundations of the Dome of the Rock in order to find the site of the Holy of Holies, and the place where the Temple artifacts had been concealed - would be discovered too soon. The firemen had been assigned a secondary role in the project: to pump out hundreds of cubic meters of muddy water from the huge tunnel, chiseled eastward. Getz, along with workers from the Religious Affairs Ministry, had cleared the opening secretly during work aimed at uncovering the full length of the Western Wall. Rabbi Getz managed to keep the secret for only a few weeks. A violent confrontation broke out in the tunnel, which according to the Western Wall rabbi's calculations, led to Ein Itam: the spring through which impure priests went to immerse themselves on their way from Beit Hamoked on the Temple Mount outside the walls. The Muslims discovered the breach and dozens of them slid down through openings in the Temple Mount area to the tunnel located near the Western Wall plaza. Getz and the yeshiva students who were alerted to the site rushed to block the way of members of the Waqf (Muslim trust) with their bodies. At the end of a turbulent day, with the Temple Mount at the epicenter of international attention, then prime minister Menachem Begin, minister of police Yosef Burg and police commissioner Shlomo Ivstan ordered that the opening that had been made in the wall on the eastern side be resealed.

Armed with principles
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, April 22, 2003
In February, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Wash., wrote an e-mail from Gaza to her family back home. Corrie observed, "I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere." Corrie wanted to change those children's reality. On March 16, she was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian family's home. The Israeli army investigated itself and exonerated its personnel of any responsibility in Rachel Corrie's death. But photographs and eyewitness accounts show Corrie was clearly visible, wearing the bright red vest worn by all members of the International Solidarity Movement, the peace group that uses such non-violent means as positioning activists as "human shields" around the occupied territories to protect Palestinian civilians. On April 5, Israeli troops in the West Bank town of Jenin, shot Brian Avery, 24, of Albequerque. Avery suffered serious wounds to his head and face, from a heavy caliber machine gun, at a time when no clashes were reported in the area. And on April 11, Thomas Hurndall, 21, a British citizen, was shot by Israeli forces near Rafah, in Gaza, as he escorted a group of Palestinian children out of the line of fire. Hurndall is on life support in an Israeli hospital, with a gunshot wound to the head and there is almost no hope of recovery. Again, there was no fighting reported in the area, and like Corrie, photographs show that Hurndall wore a bright red vest. Many activists fear these shootings are part of a pattern, and that Israel is deliberately targeting internationals, so that it can carry out human-rights abuses unobserved. Whatever the truth, Americans and other foreign citizens are falling victim to Israeli tactics that have killed and injured thousands of Palestinians. A lack of accountability means that such incidents could increase.

The evil genius of empire: Will Iraq arise again?
By James Petras, Rebeliσn
Millions of US citizens protested before the war and when it was launched but as the US war machine proceeded to conquer Iraq, the movement declined, the number of protestors decreased to the thousands, and was mostly composed of committed activists. In its place, hundreds of thousands of US flags began to sprout from car antennae and housefronts. The polls indicated that close to three quarters of the population supported Bush's handling of the war. It is clear that the rapid military conquest and US destruction of Iraq produced a wave of irrational chauvinist support for Bush and the war. The bitch goddess of success - even "successful" genocide - has a multitude of worshippers in the United States. This raises many painful and difficult questions about the nature of the US anti-war movement and popular sentiments. It is clear that those intellectuals who eulogized the pre-war opposition as a "new moral force" on an upward ascent were wrong. Many antiwar dissidents turned and supported the war once it started. An even greater multitude came out waving their flags after Iraq was defeated, Iraqi society destroyed and the Iraqi people humiliated. The war did not heighten opposition, as some progressive intellectuals hoped, military success decreased protest and increased chauvinist sentiments. Moreover as Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al allowed looters and organized gangs to pillage the entire society, there was virtually no popular outrage - only a few professional archeologists and curators bemoaned the losses to humanity. What accounts for the demise of the US peace movement and even the embrace of war among some sectors of the protestors, particularly as the military pulverized and conquered Baghdad? The most important single factor was the turn from fear of a lethal "attack" by Iraq to the "security" of a US military conquest and occupation of Baghdad. In other words many US opponents of war were not motivated by moral principle or solidarity - they acted against the war because they feared that US society and soldiers might be adversely affected. Once it was clear that there was no chance for any significant retaliation within the US or Iraq ( Bush knew all along Iraq was effectively disarmed before invading), that the US military was in total control, they switched loyalties and joined in supporting the warlords.

Better a Jew 
By Nicky Blackburn, Haaretz, April 26, 2003
For the growing minority of non-Jews living in Israel, a sense of belonging can be impossible to achieve.  -- Just recently, former MK Michael Kleiner described non-Jewish immigrants to Israel as "dirty water." He applied the metaphor to Russian immigrants, but his racist statement was also aimed at me. The only difference is that I'm the dirty water that slopped in from England, not Russia. Kleiner's comments are not unusual in Israel. For years now I've been listening to politicians, public officials, even ordinary people spilling out bile toward the non-Jewish citizens of the country. Living in Israel as a gentile is not an easy experience. There is always someone out there to remind you that not only do you not belong, but that in some way you are polluting the purity of the country. During my early years in Israel, the first question people asked me was whether or not I was Jewish. It was like an obsession. In taxicabs, at bus stops, at interviews, at work, even in the supermarket, the question followed me everywhere and anywhere. "Are you Jewish?" I lied about it twice. The first time to a taxi driver. He eyed me suspiciously and then launched into a tirade about his brother who had married a goy and gone to live in America. "It's people like him who are destroying the Jewish race," he told me angrily, his eyes locked on mine in the mirror. "I cannot forgive him." The second time I was standing in a queue at a public toilet. I was six months pregnant and the toilet attendant, an elderly man with a stoop, shuffled over to me. "Where are you from?" he asked. "England, but I live here now," I replied in Hebrew. "Are you Jewish?" he asked. "Yes," I said, hoping to put the whole conversation to rest. Instead the man took my hand, and with tears in his eyes thanked me for moving to Israel, and for bearing this child here in the Jewish homeland. I never lied about it again.