What Sharon Wants, Sharon Gets
By Kathleen Christison, CounterPunch, May 27, 2003
Same Old Shellgame -- The Israeli cabinet's highly qualified acceptance on Sunday of the "roadmap" to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is likely to mean the final derailment of this latest in a line of misbegotten peace plans. Just a random sampling of the Sunday morning talk shows demonstrates why this perverse reality is so. Reacting to the Israeli cabinet's twelve-seven vote (with four abstentions) in favor of the roadmap, but taking no note of the crippling preconditions imposed on Israel's adherence to the peace plan, Fox News Sunday host Tony Snow asked Senator Joseph Lieberman if he did not agree that the Bush administration should now ignore the other members of the Quartet altogether (the others being the European Union, the UN, and Russia) and go ahead with the roadmap in whatever way the administration saw fit; the U.S. should simply assert its prerogative as principal peace broker. "Well, yes," Lieberman responded, in a tone implying that the answer was so obvious the question need not have been asked. The Israelis mistrust the rest of the Quartet, Lieberman observed, and if we expect Israel to make peace we have to accommodate its concerns. Period. Whatever Sharon wants Sharon gets. Later, on Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition on CNN, Blitzer asked Representative Tom Lantos about the impact of the Israeli cabinet's rejection, as a condition for accepting the roadmap, of any consideration of a Palestinian right of return. With a figurative wave of his hand, Lantos dismissed the right of return as a spurious demand. The bulk of Palestinian refugees never lived in what is now Israel in the first place, he said; most of the refugees are descendants of the original refugees. And in any case, the right of return has never been considered a serious part of the negotiating process. At least not by Tom Lantos or the Israelis. Whatever Sharon wants Sharon gets.

US and them
By Nick Clegg, The Guardian, May 29, 2003
The machismo and moral certainty that have taken over Washington are seriously damaging for Europe -- America has changed. Last week, I went to see for myself. Three days of meetings, argument and idle chit chat with congressmen, policy wonks, journalists and diplomats within the Washington DC beltway is not an especially scientific way to gauge the American mood. But it was enough to tell me that something is afoot. Some of the changes are predictable enough. America considers itself to be at war, so it was little surprise to witness the pervasive grip of the Pentagon on foreign policy making. US foreign policy is now refracted through a military lens. It was easy to anticipate, too, that a president who scraped home in the last elections after some shilly-shallying in Florida should now subjugate all to his need to secure a more resounding mandate from the American electorate. Everything from punitive tariffs on European steel imports to hardline rhetoric against the old foe Fidel Castro is being deployed to maximum electoral effect, whether among the workers of America's rust belt or the Cuban community in Miami. Other changes, by contrast, are more subtle. The Bush administration's attitude towards Europe, for instance, among radical "neo-conservatives" and mainstream Republicans alike, has undergone a transformation. The full-blooded contempt for Jacques Chirac and "old Europe" has caught the headlines. It is impossible to exaggerate the unforgiving machismo of much of the administration's attitude to those parts of Europe deemed to have been disloyal during the Iraq conflict. But such juvenile vitriol obscures a more discreet, but important, change: not only is Europe condemned as weak and ineffective, there is now an emerging view that it might be in America's interests to keep Europe weak and effective.

The Next Great Import From West
By Amir Taheri, Arab News, May 29, 2003
While many people in the Middle East are asking “who is next?” the real question is: What is next? The “what” in this question refers to a great idea to serve as the matrix of new political thought, to mobilize our energies, to take us out of our historic impasse, and to turn our societies into makers, rather than objects of history. Before we speculate about what this great new idea might be, let us review some of its predecessors. We have to start from the late 19th and early 20th centuries if only because there were no truly independent Arab countries before that while Turkey and Iran were moribund empires with little control over their destiny. The first great idea to come to us from the West was that of creating a powerful state, with a standing army, a modern bureaucracy, and, in the cases of Turkey and Iran, adopting European-style clothes, at least for the elite. All that was accompanied by some symbols of Western industrialization such as railways, the telegraph, and, in the case of Tehran, Istanbul and Cairo, opera houses. The man most responsible for bringing that great idea to our neck of the wood was Jamaluddin (who disguised himself as Al-Afghani). What he did not realize was that the Western model was the fruit of centuries of development in which Europeans had first defined their national identity and, then, created modern states to express it. In our case, in the Middle East, we were putting the cart before the horse: Creating the state first and then looking for a nation. Soon, we realised that the “powerful” states we had created, often at the expense of what was left of our liberties, were not strong enough to resist the onslaught of Western powers. Some of our leaders acknowledged that a state not based on a nation was little more than a piece of dιcor. Their analysis led to another import from the West: Nationalism. Arabi Pasha in Egypt, Ataturk in Turkey, Reza Shah in Iran, and Rashid Ali Gilani in Iraq were some of the representatives of the new trend. They, too, were doomed to fail if only because there were no European-style nations in the Middle East. (Our countries were multiethnic remnants of broken empires.) Those who realised that no Middle Eastern nation could alone face the challenges of a world dominated by the West, began to espouse another import from Europe: Pan-ism. Zaki Arsuzi, Ali Nassereddin and Fatih Al-Husri developed the idea of pan-Arabism. The Young Turks advanced the cause of pan-Turkism. Kazemzadeh Iranshahr and Ahmad Kasrvai advocated pan-Iranism.

US dusts off nuclear card
By Ehsan Ahrari, Asia Times, May 29, 2003
The United States' strategy of "Shock and Awe" in Iraq ran into a sobering phase of "Shock of Pause" when Iraqis started to show the power of a fledgling democracy by demanding the establishment of an Iran-style Islamic government, an option that was nightmarish for the administration of President George W Bush and his neo-conservatives inside and outside the government. But this period of pause - a duration when the US was attempting to reconstitute its policy regarding regime change - had to come to an end. The rationale of regime change has to be reformulated for the next targets, or a determination has to be made whether regime change should be shelved indefinitely as the US attempts to bring stability to two countries - Afghanistan and Iraq - where regime change has brought no high promises of stability or legitimacy for what replaced the previous governments. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is gathering strength and the authority and legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai has remained under grave challenge. Iraq continues to pose an equally somber challenge in terms of establishing law and order. The US occupiers remain highly unpopular and demands for their ouster continue to echo in the streets of Baghdad, Faluja, Najaf and Karbala. The creation of an interim government appears to have been pushed back by a few more weeks or even months. But the Bush administration remains neither fazed nor disheartened. Washington is a world unto itself. Discussions of strategic realities in this city, more often than not, do not reflect the realities on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq or any other city that becomes the focal point of America's foreign policy at any given time.

Neo-cons move quickly on Iran
By Jim Lobe, Dissident Voice, May 29, 2003
WASHINGTON - Reports that top officials in the administration of President George W Bush will meet this week to discuss US policy toward Iran, including possible efforts to overthrow its government, mark a major advance in what has been an 18-month campaign by neo-conservatives in and out of the administration. Overshadowed until last month by their much louder drum-beating for war against Iraq, the neo-cons' efforts to now focus US attention on "regime change" in Iran have become much more intense since early May, and have already borne substantial fruit. A high-level, albeit unofficial, dialogue between both countries over Iraq, Afghanistan and other issues of mutual interest was abruptly broken off by Washington 10 days ago amid charges by senior Pentagon officials that al-Qaeda agents based in Iran had been involved in terrorist attacks against US and foreign targets in Saudi Arabia on May 12. Tehran strongly denied the charge. Now, according to reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times, the administration is considering permanently cutting off the dialogue - which included its senior envoy for both Iraq and Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad - and adopting a far more confrontational stance vis-a-vis Tehran that could include covert efforts to destabilize the government. Pentagon hawks, particularly Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, who have long been closely associated with neo-conservatives outside the administration centered at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), reportedly favor using the heavily armed, Iraq-based Iranian rebel group, the Mujahideen-e Khalq Organization, which surrendered to US forces in April, as the core of a possible opposition military force. They are also pursuing links with the Iranian exile community centered in southern California, which has rallied increasingly around Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah of Iran who was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution in 1979. According to a recent story in the U.S. Jewish newspaper, The Forward, Pahlavi has cultivated senior officials in Israel's Likud government with which the neoconservatives here--both in the administration and outside it--are closely allied.

A Cage for Palestinians: A 1,000-kilometer Fence Preempts the Road Map
By Jonathan Cook, CommonDreams/International Herald Tribune, May 27, 2003
JERUSALEM -- A humorous e-mail circulating on the Internet explains the "law of diminishing territorial returns" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first attempt at partitioning the land between Jews and Arabs, undertaken by the United Nations in 1947, resulted in the Palestinian majority being offered 47 percent of its historic homeland, with the rest allocated to a new Jewish state. The Palestinians rejected the plan and the ensuing war established Israel. The Palestinians had to wait 46 years for the next offer: Under the 1993 Oslo accords, the Palestinians were to receive 22 percent of their homeland - the territories of the West Bank and Gaza. They accepted the terms, but Israel never got around to returning most of the land. Then Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel decided to speed things up and negotiate a final agreement at Camp David in 2000, "generously" offering the Palestinians 80 percent of the 22 percent of the 100 percent of their original homeland. Yasser Arafat refused to sign and the second intifada began. The e-mail's payoff line is that Barak's successor, Ariel Sharon, has devised an even more miserly take-it-or-leave-it deal: the Palestinians can have a state on 42 percent of the 80 percent of the 22 percent of 100 percent of their original homeland. The funniest part is that it isn't a joke. Sharon is deadly serious. The proof is not to be found in the "road map," which is diverting attention from Sharon's real goal, which is to redraw the territorial contours of historic Palestine himself - in concrete and barbed wire.

The Bad Weather Over America 
By James Carroll, CommonDreams/Boston Globe, May 27, 2003  
WHEN WILL the bad weather end? Why the distance between what is and what ought to be? Where are Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? If he was such a threat, why did his army perform so poorly? Does it matter where he is? If the war in Iraq was not about oil, why does the United States insist on its indefinite control? If the war was, instead, about democracy, why are the Iraqi people, including Saddam's proven enemies, excluded from authority? Is Iraq to be like Afghanistan, where war lords rule and heroin thrives? Are there more suicide-bombers now than ever? Has the American war on terrorism advanced safety? How did relations between the United States and its European allies become so fragile? Will history recognize the 21st century Anglo-American combine as a mere continuation of the 19th century British Empire? What do good intentions count for if they cut a wake of wreckage? And is the bad weather the result of an atmospheric low that will not lift without the answers? Why are taxes being cut when teachers and librarians are being laid off? What happened to campaign finance reform? Why is the United States more divided by race than ever? When did its citizens ever decide to forgo privacy? How can low-income wage-earners support their families? How much longer will the middle class be able to afford health insurance? Why are Americans eating so much bad food? Does prime time television hold a mirror up to the nation? Who teaches children to bring guns to school? What happens to teenagers who fulfill every graduation requirement except the test they can't pass? How many more will fail that test because their teachers were laid off? Such impossible questions go a long way toward explaining the American mood. We cannot answer them, so we do not ask them, and the emotional weather is lousy. Thus, the patently false ebullience of George W. Bush -- the doubtless man -- is the perfect emblem of a nation so adrift that it dares not look twice at its real condition. Whatever the technical reasons for it, the economy that refuses to recover matches perfectly a broad psychological stagnation that precludes self-knowledge. Why are Americans incapable of looking directly at what we are doing and what we are becoming?

In Response to Senator Allan’s letter regarding the killing of Rachel Corrie
Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Palestine Monitor, May 29, 2003
Dear Sir/ Madam, On April 9th 2003, a US citizen wrote to her Senator - George Allan, protesting at the Israeli murder of US peace activist Rachel Corrie. On April 17th Senator Allen replied. However, he addressed his response to Rachel Corrie, even though by April 17 Rachel had been dead a month. He had obviously not read the letter as he was unaware of who had written it, and he clearly had no knowledge of the death of Rachel Corrie as he was addressing letters to her, even though she was dead. On March 16th 2003, Rachel Corrie (23) was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza, as she protested against Israeli house demolitions. Rachel was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – an organization engaging in non-violent action aimed at protecting Palestinian civilians. She, together with seven other ISM volunteers, was in Rafah trying to prevent the Israeli army from illegally destroying Palestinian homes and land. Present were two Israeli army bulldozers and a tank. The drivers of the bulldozers were fully aware of her presence, yet one of them deliberately began dropping debris over her, then pushed her to the ground, and then drove over her. Her arms, legs and skull were fractured. She died later in hospital. The Israeli army has failed to provide an adequate explanation for her death and has exonerated all blame. Rather than demonstrate any sympathy over the death of Rachel, Senator Allen instead chose to launch a full-scale defense of Israel. He claimed it a country that “shares our commitment to democracy and religious tolerance”. Obviously he had not read the Israel Democracy Institute’s recent study. Their research findings reveal that Israel’s humans rights record is very low; Israeli Arabs are discriminated against both politically and economically; the level of corruption in Israel has worsened over the last few years; Israel’s press has had decreasing levels of freedom; the number of prisoners has increased; there is a high degree of socio economic inequality in Israel; and freedom of religion is less than that found in other democracies studied.