A Summit of Peace or Pretense
By Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Ph.D., Palestine Chronicle, June 5, 2003
"The US government is based on a constitution that includes separation of Church and state, equality, and withholding support of brutal regimes. Yet, according to Amnesty International all countries represented at this summit violate human rights." The joke being told in Palestinian circles at home and in the Diaspora is that the only part of the speech of Prime Minister Abbas not scripted by the Israelis is the part that says "in the name of God the most merciful." To viewers around the world, he Summit in Jordan was appeared totally surreal. While supposedly intended to begin implementing a road map for peace, the other authors of the road map were not invited: the Europeans, Russia, and the United Nations. Of the Arab countries, only those dictatorial regimes towing the Bush line were invited. As expected, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon talked about Israeli but not Palestinian security. The Palestinian "Prime Minister" Abbas talked about Israeli security but not Palestinian security. This is ironic since Israel has the fourth strongest Army in the world and massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The decimated Palestinians who have not seen security in 55 years were not allowed to talk about security for their own people but only to talk of "improving humanitarian conditions." But then again that is what is expected in negotiations between a jailer and prisoners. King Abdullah of Jordan talked about his vision of "lets all get along." President Bush talked about the New World Order the same as he always does with minor but important changes. While he had problems saying the word "contiguous", he was not allowed to utter words such as sovereignty for Palestine, International law, human rights, equality, or non-discrimination. In fact, for the first time a US president supported a theocracy by stating than not only he supports Israel as a sovereign state but he supports a "Jewish state" (verbally emphasizing the word "Jewish"). No one mentioned UN resolutions or addressed whether the envisioned Palestinian State will be analogous to the Bantustans/Ghettos under Apartheid South Africa. No one mentioned the massive walls being built around Palestinian enclaves. No one mentioned Arafat, the elected and yet isolated leader of the Palestinians. Sharon promised to immediately "begin" to dismantle unauthorized settlement outposts. No one mentioned that all Israeli settlements in the areas occupied in 1967 are illegal per International law and the 4th Geneva Convention. Israel has not even agreed to abide by the provisions of the road map calling for freeze on settlement activities....

Banality, Bombast and Blood
By John Chuckman, Palestine Chronicle, June 4, 2003
"Rumsfeld's version of 'not being disagreeable' included declaring that the United States would heavily cut its involvement with the Paris Air Show .." -- The saga of America's Private Lynch, no matter what the details of her movie-set escape prove to be, adds only banality to needless bloodshed in Iraq. Another young American woman, Marla Ruzicka, went largely ignored. Ms. Ruzicka runs a non-profit organization that works to make accurate counts of a war's civilian dead. It is small wonder Ms. Ruzicka is not given the same coverage as Private Lynch, since, based upon detailed fieldwork in Iraq, she says that between five and ten thousand civilians were killed. Generally in wars, total casualties, which include wounded, crippled, and lost, are many times the number killed, often as high as ten times. I do not know what the appropriate ratio is for Iraq, but it's not hard to see that the United States killed and hurt a great many innocent people in a few weeks of "precision" war. Of military losses, poor boys drafted to defend their homes, we as yet have no good estimate. In the first Gulf War, between sixty and one hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers were slaughtered. With Iraq's population being less than ten percent that of the United States, such losses must be multiplied by ten to get some feel for their impact on the society. So while Americans, thirty years later, still weep at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington - a monument representing about sixty thousand deaths over ten years of war - they have inflicted on Iraq, in just three weeks, that same proportionate loss - all of them civilians. The one-sided slaughter of soldiers in the first Gulf War represented the equivalent of the U.S. having sustained between half a million and a million deaths just over a decade ago. No society recovers easily from such losses of its youth....

Sharon's Sword of Damocles hangs over the road map
By Issam Mufid Nashashibi, The Daily Star, June 4, 2003
On May 14, 2003, Israeli Public Security Minister, Tzachi Hanegbi, commented that Jews will soon be able to visit and pray at Islam's third holiest shrine, Jerusalem's Nobel Sanctuary or Haram al-Sharif, known to Jews as the Temple Mount. The director of the Muslim Trust that governs the site reacted immediately saying that non-Muslims are not welcome.  "There is no change in the decision of not allowing non-Muslims to enter the place," emphasized the Muslim official. That decision came shortly after September 28, 2000, when then-candidate for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, accompanied by over 1,000 Israeli police officers visited the holy site.  Ehud Barak, Israel's Prime Minster at the time rejected US urgings to prohibit Sharon from entering the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount stating that the visit was a domestic electioneering act directed against him by a political opponent.  Palestinians saw Sharon's visit as highly provocative. The following day a large number of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and a large Israeli police force confronted each other.  According to the US Department of State, "Palestinians held large demonstrations and threw stones at [the Israeli] police.  Police used rubber-coated metal bullets and live ammunition to disperse the demonstrators, killing 4 persons and injuring about 200."  Thus began what has become known as the current Palestinian uprising against Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and the demise of the Oslo peace process, which Sharon opposed all along. History tells that the Palestinian reaction to Sharon's incursion was predictable.  In August 1929, Sharon's political mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, had attempted to challenge the Muslim Trust's control over the Western Wall of the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount.  In the resulting riots, 133 Jewish Palestinians were killed and 330 injured while British governing forces also killed 116 Arabs and injured 232, thus igniting disharmony between Palestine's Jews and non-Jews. Such lessons of history are well understood by the Jordanians who will host today's meeting of President Bush with the Israeli and Palestinian Prime Ministers.  "The hectic campaign being waged, with backing from officials of the Israeli government, to open the Mosque to the Jews, is in fact tantamount to laying the foundation for a destructive religious war, the consequences of which nobody knows," said Abdullah Kana'an, the chairman of the Jordanian Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs....

Bomb and Switch
By Maureen Dowd, New York Times, June 5, 2003
Before 9/11, the administration had too little intelligence on Al Qaeda, badly coordinated by clashing officials. Before the Iraq invasion, the administration had too much intelligence on Saddam, torqued up by conspiring officials. As Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to make his case for invading Iraq to the U.N. on Feb. 5, a friend of his told me, he had to throw out a couple of hours' worth of sketchy intelligence other Bush officials were trying to stuff into his speech. U.S. News & World Report reveals this week that when Mr. Powell was rehearsing the case with two dozen officials, he became so frustrated by the dubious intelligence about Saddam that he tossed several pages in the air and declared: "I'm not reading this. This is $%&*#." First America has no intelligence. Then it has $%&*# intelligence. So this is progress? For the first time in history, America is searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over. As The Times's James Risen reports, a bedrock of the administration's weapons case — the National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nukes — is itself being reassessed. The document is at the center of a broad prewar-intelligence review, being conducted by the C.I.A. to see whether the weapons evidence was cooked. Conservatives are busily offering a bouquet of new justifications for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq that was sold as self-defense against Saddam's poised and thrumming weapons of mass destruction. Pressed by reporters about whether Tony Blair and President Bush were guilty of hyperbole — Mr. Blair's foreign secretary claimed Saddam could deploy chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes — Senator John McCain replied, "The American people support what the president  did, whether we find those weapons or not, and they did so the day they saw 9- and 10-year-old boys coming out of a prison in Baghdad." Senator Pete Domenici noted that experts thought that Saddam's overthrow might pave the way for the Middle East road map to work. "For those kind of experts to say that has changed the dynamics in the Middle East, sufficient that we might get peace, seems to me to outweigh all the questions about did we have every bit of evidence that we say we had or not," he said. In a Vanity Fair interview, Paul Wolfowitz said another "almost unnoticed but huge" reason for war was to promote Middle East peace by allowing the U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia — Osama's bκte noir. But it was after the U.S. announced it would pull its troops from Saudi Arabia that a resurgent Qaeda struck a Western compound, killing eight Americans....

The Road Map: Where next after Aqaba?
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, June 4, 2003
President Bush's two days of Middle East summitry are being hailed in the United States as a diplomatic and political triumph. And indeed even by bringing Arab and Israeli leaders to Sharm al-Sheikh and Aqaba, Bush did more than many people thought was possible. But the elation is likely to be short lived as the carefully crafted final statements by Bush, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinians' Mahmoud Abbas paper over the lop-sided concessions made by each side. Prior to the final declarations, the Israeli press was full of stories that Sharon would declare Israel's non-negotiable conditions for a peace settlement, including the requirement that Palestinians abandon the refugees' right of return. In the event, the US seems to have imposed on both sides an embargo against stating such preconditions explicitly. But Sharon found other ways to suggest that his sudden appearance of flexibility is nothing more than an illusion designed to deflect American pressure. Sharon committed himself in principle to a Palestinian "state" and sought to "reassure our Palestinian partners that we understand the importance of territorial contiguity in the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state." But this is far from reassuring. Every day, Israel works to consolidate its hold on Palestinian land through defacto annexation by the Apartheid wall, the razing of homes and agricultural land, and new Israeli settlements. This process of colonisation is the source of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Any "solution" that does not address and reverse this process is doomed. What the Palestinian people expect, and international law requires is a full Israeli withdrawal from all of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the removal of all the settlements. By talking about territorial contiguity "in" the West Bank, Sharon is making it clear that Israel has no intention of leaving completely. Obviously, if Israel were considering a full withdrawal, territorial contiguity would not be an issue. This formula is entirely consistent with Sharon's plan to restrict the Palestinians to a small 'canton' within the West Bank entirely surrounded by Israeli-annexed territory....

WMD Will Be On Blair's Political Headstone
By John Pilger, The Mirror, June 3, 2003
SUCH a high crime does not, and will not, melt away; the facts cannot be changed. Tony Blair took Britain to war against Iraq illegally. He mounted an unprovoked attack on a country that offered no threat, and he helped cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The judges at the Nuremberg Tribunal following world war two, who inspired much of international law, called this "the gravest of all war crimes". Blair had not the shred of a mandate from the British people to do what he did. On the contrary, on the eve of the attack, the majority of Britons clearly demanded he stop. His response was contemptuous of such an epic show of true democracy. He chose to listen only to the unelected leader of a foreign power, and to his court and his obsession. With his courtiers in and out of the media telling him he was "courageous" and even "moral" when he scored his "historic victory" over a defenceless, stricken and traumatised nation, almost half of them children, his propaganda managers staged a series of unctuous public relations stunts. The first stunt sought to elicit public sympathy with a story about him telling his children that he had "almost lost his job". The second stunt, which had the same objective, was a story about how his privileged childhood had really been "difficult" and "painful". The third and most outrageous stunt saw him in Basra, in southern Iraq last week, lifting an Iraqi child in his arms, in a school that had been renovated for his visit, in a city where education, like water and other basic services, are still a shambles following the British invasion and occupation....

We don't raze homes for no reason
By Amira Hass, Haaretz, June 5, 2003
BEIT HANUN, Gaza - Ahmed Za'anin's house now looks like some 1,200 other Palestinian homes: a pile of rubble. On May 18, at about 7 P.M., IDF bulldozers knocked down four houses, one partially, which belonged to the extended Za'anin family, in Ezbat Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip. Usually, the IDF Spokesman's Office reports why a house was demolished: It was the family of an arrested terrorist, a wanted terrorist, a dead terrorist, the house was used to shoot at soldiers, the neighborhood sheltered armed men or tunnels, the house was built without a permit. But this time, the IDF Spokesman's Office had no records of the demolition of the four houses, so it did not have any explanation for why the Za'anin homes were destroyed. "We don't demolish houses for no reason. Maybe there was shooting there, maybe there was involvement in terrorist activities," Haaretz was told. But the fact remains: The same force that sent a bulldozer or two and, as the homeowners watched, demolished their homes, did not find it necessary to report the action to the IDF Spokesman's Office. To the same extent, there was no record of the Za'anin family having heard a nearby explosion, in a street controlled by tanks and armored personnel carriers, at around 6 P.M. that day. About 20 minutes later the family, which was sitting in the living room, heard the noise of the churning bulldozers. "Suddenly we saw Jews in the house," said Amana Za'anin. An officer and soldiers entered through a breach they opened in the wall of the house. They aimed their weapons at the family, and ordered them out. According to the family, they were not allowed to take anything with them. Not even the mother's head covering. The student daughter cried she didn't want to leave without her books and notebooks. Her parents said that they had to drag her away from "under the bulldozer."  Yesterday, the IDF Spokesman's Office said "On May 18, there was an explosion caused by a jeep hitting a land mine. Anti-tank rockets were fired at the forces and then the unit shaved away the remains of a building that was already demolished, and was inhabited." The seemingly updated information was far from the truth that was evident to the naked eye on the scene....

US media and the Israeli PR
By Ahmed Bouzid, Jordan Times, June 5, 2003
THE BLARING headlines on May 25, 2003, were all about how Israel had “finally accepted” the Quartet-proposed roadmap for the creation of a Palestinian state in 2005 and the end of hostilities between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states. But anyone who has followed this conflict from any distance and possesses a minimum sense of history can only view the latest declarations from the Israeli government as nothing more than a stalling tactic necessary because of the circumstances. First is the basic fact that Israel has fought, every step of the way, the establishment of a truly sovereign Palestinian state, has pursued the relentless infiltration of Palestinian land by illegal settlements and, since the second Intifada started in September 2000, has consistently frustrated attempts at calming the situation down and getting back to real negotiations. Second is the basic fact that Ariel Sharon has never wavered in declaring that he sees the Palestinian territories as part of “the Land of Israel” and is willing, at best, to tolerate a token “state” in no more than 40 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza. And third, the last time an American president leaned “hard” on an Israeli prime minister — George Bush the father on Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir — we saw a reluctant Israel first drag its heels to the negotiating table and then pretend for a whole decade that it was willing to make peace while, at the same time, frantically doing everything to delay any real progress towards the establishment of a truly sovereign Palestinian state....

A long and tortuous road
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, June 6, 2003
So it was all about oil. As if the whole world didn't know it already. This past weekend, while addressing a security summit in Singapore, and asked why Kim Jong-il's nuclear, ultra-Stalinist regime in North Korea was getting preferential treatment compared to Iraq - where no weapons of mass destruction have been found - US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz went straight to the heart of the matter: "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." In a previous interview to Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz had already made clear that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction". Later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz's boss, when pressed about the annoying invisibility of such weapons, had no better excuse than to blame Saddam Hussein for having destroyed his arsenal before the war. Now, as accusations of practicing gangster capitalism swirl in the face of the Bush administration, and the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could lead to a major American political scandal, littered-with-unexploded-cluster-bombs-post-war-Iraq is swimming in chaos - American oil-pumping notwithstanding. In the right corner, we find the American occupation forces. In the left corner, at least 70 brand new Iraqi political parties. The man-in-charge is America's proconsul, Paul Bremer. And now steps into the ring someone who in theory could be the referee: Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, the new United Nations special representative in Iraq....