No new Sharon
Editorial, Haaretz, May 14, 2003
Since he was elected prime minister in 2001, Ariel Sharon has wrapped his political positions in a fog of ambiguity. Over and over he has proclaimed his desire for peace and his readiness to make "painful concessions." Yet in his actions he has distanced himself from every political plan, sent the IDF into the cities of the West Bank to reoccupy them, and allowed the establishment of dozens of settler outposts. In an interview with Haaretz a month ago, Sharon went far - detailing for the first time the meaning of his "painful concessions" phrase. He spoke of "far-reaching" steps, of bidding farewell to "the cradle of the Jewish people" in places like Bethlehem, Shiloh, and Beit El. He promised "a genuine effort to reach a real arrangement" following the American victory in Iraq and the election of Abu Mazen as Palestinian prime minister. His statements inevitably sparked a public debate over his intentions. Would he use the power he has achieved through his landslide victory to achieve peace? Sharon's past, and especially his unceasing efforts to establish settlements in the territories, raised doubts about his sincerity. But the prime minister insisted that at his age he has no ambition other than to achieve security and peace. Yesterday it became clear the old Sharon has not gone away. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post he said Jews "will live in Beit El" under Israeli sovereignty. He said his statements in the previous interview were misunderstood and those places "are not candidates for evacuation." In his conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday, he also sent a double message. He promised Israel would "give what is necessary" when the time comes, if its security is preserved, but vehemently rejected the American demand for a freeze on "natural growth" in construction in the territories.

Strange Weather Lately
By Kurt Vonnegut, CommonDreams/In These Times, May 14, 2003  
'The following is adapted from a Clemens Lecture presented in April for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. -- First things first: I want it clearly understood that this mustache I’m wearing is my father’s mustache. I should have brought his photograph. My big brother Bernie, now dead, a physical chemist who discovered that silver iodide can sometimes make it snow or rain, he wore it, too. Speaking of weather: Mark Twain said some readers complained that there wasn’t enough weather in his stories. So he wrote some weather, which they could insert wherever they thought it would help some. Mark Twain was said to have shed a tear of gratitude and incredulousness when honored for his writing by Oxford University in England. And I should shed a tear, surely, having been asked at the age of 80, and because of what I myself have written, to speak under the auspices of the sacred Mark Twain House here in Hartford. What other American landmark is as sacred to me as the Mark Twain House? The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln were country boys from Middle America, and both of them made the American people laugh at themselves and appreciate really important, really moral jokes. I note that construction has stopped of a Mark Twain Museum here in Hartford —behind the carriage house of the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue. Work persons have been sent home from that site because American “conservatives,” as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy. Shock and awe. And now, having installed themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside, they have squandered our public treasury and then some. They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice. Shock and awe. What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one? Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.

From determination to wimpiness
By Gideon Samet, Haaretz, May 14, 2003
The Sharon government had an impressive diplomatic achievement this week. In the hands of the seemingly clumsy leader, actually a Speedy Gonzales, it appears the entire diplomatic structure built by the president of the American superpower with staunch pledges for peace is collapsing. One small sign of this was a weekend address when George Bush - still chewing the rhetorical gravel of the vision named for him - suddenly made no mention of the road map meant to fulfill his vision. But there is further evidence piling up from every direction showing that, even before Sharon opens his mouth, the administration has no appetite to eat the political stew that it had cooked up. And this is certainly the case after Sharon speaks, like in the interview he gave in yesterday's Jerusalem Post. With political rudeness, the minute Colin Powell left, the prime minister said Jews will continue living in Shiloh and Beit El under Israeli sovereignty. That, of course, was the absolute opposite of one of those supposedly moderate remarks that he tossed out in a Haaretz interview a month ago. In his conversations with Powell, Sharon did not feel any special need to explain his opposition to gestures. Hearing a polite reminder about a settlement freeze, Sharon asked, actually mocking Powell, if he was recommending abortions. The somewhat impressive step under these circumstances - removing a number of outposts - didn't even come up. The administration doesn't want to quarrel. Certainly not a secretary of state isolated at the conservative top. Because Powell knows what Sharon knows: In the thin atmosphere where the presidential vision is floating, there's no real desire to push for an Israeli-Palestinian deal. In their conversations, Powell spoke clearly, but well understood that the visit was an idle move before Sharon's trip to the White House. The secretary rejected Sharon's position that the gestures from both sides have to be "serial." They have to be parallel, without conditions. He tried to tempt Sharon on the matter of the right of return. If you make an announcement that Israel will not accept the right of return in any agreement, he told the prime minister, America will back you up. But mostly, he filled his mission with reiterated messages that the president is "determined" to move the process forward.

Iraqis See Americans as Occupiers
By James Zogby, Arab News, May 14, 2003
In March and then again this past week, I had the opportunity to host a televised dialogue between students in the United States and groups of Iraqis in Baghdad. Both efforts were programs that aired on Abu Dhabi TV and both, I believe, exemplify the positive role that television can play in promoting inter-civilization discourse. The first of these two sessions took place on March 12, just days before the beginning of the war. For over an hour, 150 students at Davidson College, one of the US’s premier liberal arts colleges, engaged in a lively give and take conversation with 100 students at the University of Baghdad. As informative as this conversation may have been, we were all acutely aware of two asymmetries that defined the interaction. On the one hand, the US students were free to have an open debate about their government and the impending war. The students in Iraq were not so free. On the other hand, the students in Baghdad were living with the imminent threat of a US bombardment, while the US students faced no such threat. When asked for a show of hands for or against the war, the overwhelming majority of the US students made clear their opposition to the Bush Administration’s war plans. For their part, the Iraqi students appeared to be surprised by this display of dissent. The US students, however, were troubled by the fact that the Iraqi students would not criticize their own government and its policies. After pursuing this subject through a number of questions, the American students were asked whether they believed that their Iraqi counterparts were being truthful in their expressions of support for the Baath regime. The vote was overwhelmingly negative.

Osama's Offspring
By Maureen Dowd, New York Times, May 14, 2003
Buried in the rubble of Riyadh are some of the Bush administration's basic assumptions: that Al Qaeda was finished, that invading Iraq would bring regional stability and that a show of American superpower against Saddam would cow terrorists. -- We've had our regime change in the Middle East. Now Qaeda terrorists want theirs. Even before Al Qaeda claimed credit for the explosions ripping through Riyadh on Monday night, the Saudi princes were frightened and seeking American help. They were scared that Al Qaeda, which they once used to deflect resentment away from their own corruption, had succeeded in infiltrating various levels of society, including the government. The problem with Saudi Arabia is that it is such an opaque society, you can never be sure what's going on there from the outside — and apparently it's not spectacularly transparent from the inside, either. U.S. intelligence analysts warned the Saudis that an attack on American interests in the kingdom was coming. The Saudis reacted the way they typically do, defensively. The anti-American chatter had become such a din in the last two weeks that the State Department had warned Americans not to travel there. The Saudi princes reluctantly began an investigation into the possible Qaeda plot. But even in such a repressed and repressive state, Saudi security forces couldn't stop the terrorists. They tried to seize an Islamic militant cell with links to radical clerics last Tuesday. The authorities found 800 pounds of explosives, but all 19 cell members — 17 Saudis, one Iraqi and one Yemeni — escaped. So, with a new Qaeda spokesman warning that "an attack against America is inevitable" and that "future missions have been entrusted" to a "new team . . . well protected against U.S. intelligence services," now we have to worry about 19 slippery Islamic terrorists coming at us from Saudi Arabia? Talk about a sickening sense of déjà vu. Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore." Members of the U.S. intelligence community bragged to reporters that the terrorist band was crippled, noting that it hadn't attacked during the assault on Iraq. "This was the big game for them — you put up or shut up, and they have failed," Cofer Black, who heads the State Department's counterterrorism office, told The Washington Post last week. Of course, the other way of looking at it is that Al Qaeda works at its own pace.

Galloway Campaign Reveals a Disturbing Trend in UK Politics
By Neil Berry, Arab News, May 13, 2003
LONDON, 13 May 2003 — George Galloway’s taste for power suits and tumescent cigars always seemed at odds with his left-wing politics, with his voluble championship of the underdog. But outraging conventional opinion is the raison d’etre of this headline-grabbing Scottish Labour MP: He takes particular pleasure in confounding expectations of what someone like himself ought to be. At times, the provocative Galloway has managed to alienate even those who share his socialist beliefs and fervent pro-Arab sympathies. What, many wondered, was he thinking of when he let himself be filmed praising the murderous Saddam Hussein to his face for his “courage and indefatigability?” When the Daily Telegraph claimed to have found “evidence” in the gutted Baghdad Foreign Ministry that Galloway was actually in the pay of the Iraqi dictator, the paper was probably only confirming what a section of the British public already half-suspected. Not for nothing has he enjoyed the sardonic soubriquet “the MP for Baghdad Central.” In some measure, George Galloway may be the author of his own misfortunes. But last week it began to seem as if his present unenviable predicament might require an altogether less straightforward explanation. For the sinister fact is that the maverick MP suddenly finds himself under concerted attack on just about every front....It must be said that the original source of Galloway’s troubles, the Telegraph’s discovery of “incriminating” documents, was an amazing piece of serendipity. How could it be that a file of papers detailing Galloway’s allegedly dishonorable conduct had somehow survived when so much else in the devastated Baghdad Foreign Ministry had been destroyed? There are shades here of the celebrated terrorist’s passport which was so conveniently found amid the rubble of the World Trade Center and which just happened to have survived intact when so much else had been burned to a cinder....In short, all the signs are that Galloway is the victim of organized vilification by the Intelligence Services...

Don’t Cry for Clare
By George Monbiot, Dissident Voice, May 13, 2003
Short’s Career as a Licensed Rebel Casts Light on Our Post-oppositional, Post-modern Politics -- Some of the Guardian's readers will, for all her faults, have shed a few tears at the departure of our development secretary. Clare Short may have failed, in March, to act upon her threat to resign over the war with Iraq. But even those who have turned against her will miss that splash of colour on the front benches, the Old Labour warrior who still spoke the language of feeling, and who, as if by magic, had somehow survived the control freaks and the little grey men for six vivid and tumultuous years. Westminster will be a bleaker and a colder place without her. Well, dry your eyes. Clare Short survived because she was useful. She was as much a creature of the control freaks as any of the weaker members of the front bench. To understand her role in government is to begin to understand the nature of our post-oppositional, post-modern political system. Short was a licensed rebel. She was permitted, to a greater degree than any other minister, to speak her mind about the business of other departments. She was able to do so because she presented no threat to them or to Blair's core political programme. Within her own department, where her decisions made a real impact on people's lives, she was more Blairite than Blair. She would emote with the wretched of the earth for the cameras, then crush them quietly with a departmental memo. She was useful to the government because she behaved like someone guided by impulse rather than calculation. As a result, she permitted it to suggest that it remained a broad church, and the Prime Minister a broad-shouldered man. Her outbursts allowed the control freaks to pretend that they were not control freaks. We have, in other words, been sold Short. Blair told us she had integrity, and, correctly interpreting her role, she acted as if she did. But she knew precisely where the limits lay, and when that "integrity" needed to be jettisoned. Her authenticity was prescribed. As a result she was, in some respects, a more dangerous figure than visibly ruthless ministers like Alan Milburn or John Reid. If you think this sounds harsh, you should examine her record.

Clash of the political titans
By Rupert Cornwell. The Independent, May 12, 2003
They're the heavyweights of US government. And at stake in their bruising power struggle is nothing less than the political future of the world. So who will emerge victorious, Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell? -- In one sense, it's just another of those government turf wars that Washington political junkies love, but which leave lesser mortals cold – a retired general and a former rough-charging chief executive officer struggling for influence and the ear of their presidential master. Only this turf war should leave no one indifferent. Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld are not merely Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense respectively under George W Bush. They are the two most dominating cabinet officers here since Henry Kissinger in his prime. After victory in Iraq, both enjoy approval ratings that outstrip even those of the President. Even had they been in perfect philosophical harmony, their towering reputations alone would probably have ensured that they clashed. And they have. Not personally, of course, for great figures of state do not stoop to such indignities. But the bureaucracies they head are at war over the future of American foreign policy, which in this era of one all-dominant superpower means something close to the future of the world. In a testosterone-fuelled Washington, giddy with battlefield triumph, this is the hour of the military, so Rumsfeld vs Powell appears something of a mismatch. There comes to mind the question sarcastically posed by Stalin: "How many divisions has the Pope?" Or as one veteran (and wisely anonymous) US diplomat told the Los Angeles Times: "I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup,' and then it all makes sense." Anyone who witnessed Rumsfeld's 15,300-mile victory trip to the Gulf and Afghanistan aboard his converted Boeing 757 with "The United States of America" emblazoned on its sides would understand what the diplomat meant. Like an impatient monarch, the Secretary of Defense travelled to seven countries in seven days. "This is diplomacy and I don't do diplomacy, you may have noticed," Rumsfeld told the troops, amid laughter, when he visited Baghdad. In fact "Rummy" does do diplomacy (albeit of the bull-in-a-china-shop variety), and more of it by the day. It was he who coined the phrase "old Europe" – the first signal of Washington's anger with France and Germany over Iraq. He brandished the threat of extending the war into Syria, and then of using force against North Korea. With his pre-war musings over the US going it alone in Iraq because of Tony Blair's domestic difficulties, he managed the feat of enraging America's best friend.

Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Michael Albert
The Irish Handstand/ZNet, May 2003
Nuclear Facilities, Israel, North Korea --  (1) Why did the U.S. invade Iraq, in your view? -- These are naturally speculations, and policy makers may have varying motives. But we can have a high degree of confidence about the answers given by Bush-Powell and the rest; these cannot possibly be taken seriously. They have gone out of their way to make sure we understand that, by a steady dose of self-contradiction ever since last September when the war drums began to beat. One day the "single question" is whether Iraq will disarm; in today's version (April 12): "We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction -- that is what this war was about and is about." That was the pretext throughout the whole UN-disarmament farce, though it was never easy to take seriously; UNMOVIC was doing a good job in virtually disarming Iraq, and could have continued, if that were the goal. But there is no need to discuss it, because after stating solemnly that this is the "single question," they went on the next day to announce that it wasn't the goal at all: even if there isn't a pocket knife anywhere in Iraq, the US will invade anyway, because it is committed to "regime change." The next day we hear that there's nothing to that either; thus at the Azores summit, where Bush-Blair issued their ultimatum to the UN, they made it clear that they would invade even if Saddam and his gang left the country. So "regime change" is not enough. The next day we hear that the goal is "democracy" in the world. Pretexts range over the lot, depending on audience and circumstances, which means that no sane person can take the charade seriously. The one constant is that the US must end up in control of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was authorized to suppress, brutally, a 1991 uprising that might have overthrown him because "the best of all worlds" for Washington would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" (by then an embarrassment), which would rule the country with an "iron fist" as Saddam had done with US support and approval (NYT chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman). The uprising would have left the country in the hands of Iraqis who might not have subordinated themselves sufficiently to Washington.

In the absence of will
By Ibrahim Nafie, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 8 - 14 May 2003
Inter-Arab cooperation, the role of the Arab League, the efficacy of Arab economic and security agreements: where are they heading? -- Following recent events in the region we hear the same refrains over and over again. Arab cooperation has failed. Now is the time to sort out the chronic obstacles that make our agreements hardly worth the paper they're written on. The Arab League is futile, incapable of containing and resolving the tensions that propel us from one crisis to the next. The Arabs have paid a heavy price for their failure to solve their problems within the framework of the "Arab house". The war in Iraq and its aftermath have made this poignantly clear, and suddenly Arab writers and politicians are rushing to offer recommendations for change. Some have suggested redrafting current agreements to render them more practical and realistic. Others have appealed for the amendment of the Arab League Charter in order to free that body from the demands of unanimous voting. A simple majority for routine matters and a two-thirds majority for more serious issues should give the League the flexibility it needs, they say. However important such remedies the problems lie far deeper. No regional framework for cooperation stands a chance of getting off the ground in the absence of both the collective will to make it work and the capacity to lay concrete foundations upon which to build. President Mubarak graphically underscored this need when addressing recent demands to put the Joint Arab Defence Treaty into effect and recent criticisms of the Arab League for its failure to forestall the war on Iraq. How can we speak of collective action among a group of nations whose volume of trade with one another amounts to barely eight per cent of the total, he asked. Without a doubt the collective Arab will and the concrete bases for cooperation lag far behind the principles and provisions of the many agreements Arabs have signed. In fact, I would wager that most Arab countries signed those agreements in the certainty that not a single article would be put into effect. Arab cooperation is something to be pulled out only in times of need, at which point they invoke this article or that from an agreement that had long remained lifeless. Vivid in my mind are the instances in which certain Arab leaders, experts in the old game of playing to their public, have called for the implementation of the Joint Arab Defence Pact, once to support the Palestinian Intifada and once again to support the regime of Saddam Hussein. Not only had these leaders never given a thought to this agreement beforehand, but they expected others -- Egypt in particular -- to bear the brunt of the action, without the slightest consideration to what they could contribute.

Empire economics: the US is hypocritical over trade
Editorial, The Guardian, May 12, 2003
George Bush's imperial ambition can be terrifying. But the president's speech last week outlining an offer of a US-Middle East free trade pact was a dramatic shift from the loud, bellicose rhetoric of military force to the siren words of economic progress. This is a startling and welcome change for a region where the Bush White House, partly thanks to its armed interventions, is more loathed than loved. The Arab world faces huge problems and, as Mr Bush correctly observed, it is "missing out on the economic progress of our time". The region, awash with oil and unburdened by a large population, has experienced the second lowest growth in income per head in the world over the past two decades. The combined gross domestic product of all the Arab nations is now smaller than Spain's. Mr Bush's speech is also an important acknowledgment that letting a few benefit while the many lose out in the 23-nation region creates the conditions for terrorism to flourish. Fairer trade arrangements would benefit the Arab world, which suffers from a poverty of job opportunities and where unemployment averages 15%. Being able more easily to export goods and services will help to generate income and jobs. The worry is that while Mr Bush has correctly identified many of the region's problems, recent history suggests that his administration views trade policy as another way of projecting power, not as a weapon of mass salvation. The Bush administration recently scuppered a deal to allow poor countries to import cheap drugs. It has also hiked agriculture subsidies to America's agribusinesses by more than $100bn - an act which will cut the incomes of some of the poorest people on the planet, who rely on selling farming produce to survive.

Pipes Nomination a Slap in the Face for Islam
By Helal Omeira and Arsalan Iftikhar, CommonDreams/San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 2003   
Set aside the fact that Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham and the man who said that Islam was "an evil and wicked religion," was the clergyman invited to deliver the Good Friday homily at the Pentagon. Forget that shortly after Sept. 11, President Bush gloriously stated that Americans were on a "crusade" in the war on terror. The most recent mystification to come from Pennsylvania Avenue is the nomination of Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a governmental think tank. Pipes has always had a troubling bigotry toward Arabs and Muslims. As early as 1983, an otherwise positive Washington Post book review noted that Pipes displays "a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims. . . . He professes respect for Muslims; but is frequently contemptuous of them." Pipes, said the reviewer, "is swayed by the writings of anti-Muslim writers" and the book "is marred by inconsistencies and evidence of hostility." Peter Rodgers, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, echoes a similar review of Pipes' work. In the mid-'90s, Rodgers was quoted in the Weekly Standard saying, sarcastically, that he wishes he "could be a polemicist [like Pipes]; then I'd never have to worry about accuracy and balance, about passing off egregious nonsense as alarming statement of fact, about repetition and self-contradiction. I, too, could trumpet mediocre fictions as insightful prophecies."