Resistance to occupation is growing
By Richard Norton-Taylor and Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, June 13, 2003
US and British troops are being sucked into an Iraqi quagmire -- While attention has focused on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, growing evidence that the war is far from over has been overlooked. Fighting with real weapons is on the increase. A sudden upsurge in violence in the past couple of weeks has killed at least 10 American soldiers and wounded more than 25 in a series of attacks against checkpoints and military convoys. Iraqi fighters yesterday brought down an Apache helicopter in the west of the country. Far more more numerous than these incidents is the unpublicised number of attacks on American positions that do not injure or kill soldiers. Attacks occur daily - more than a dozen every day in the past week, according to some accounts. Troops patrolling even the calmest neighbourhoods in Baghdad still wear bullet-proof jackets and Kevlar helmets and raise their rifles, finger on the trigger, whenever approached. Attack helicopters are flying low over Baghdad day and night without lights. The most experienced combat units from the 3rd Infantry, deployed away from home since September, have now been sent in to deal with Falluja, a town at the centre of a steadily growing resistance in the Sunni Muslim heartland just west of Baghdad. Hostile residents are not shy of threatening more attacks, insisting they are not Saddam loyalists but angry at the US military occupation. Aggressive house searches and the killing by US troops of 18 protesters in a demonstration last month have provoked fury. Soldiers on the ground say the attacks they are facing, mostly from rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, are disciplined and skilled, not the random shootings of angry civilians. American generals admit that though the attacks may be locally organised there is no evidence yet of a reformed Ba'ath party centrally coordinating the assaults. Their response has been to saturate problem areas with large numbers of combat troops. Even senior officers admit now that security in Iraq, more than two months after the fall of the regime, will get worse before it gets better.

The US Alone Can’t Bring Peace in the Middle East
By Adrian Hamilton, Arab News/The Independent. June 13, 2003
LONDON , 13 June 2003 — So where are the rest of the quartet, as the US forces the pace of implementation of the Middle East road map against a daily toll of bombings and assassinations meant to wreck it? The road map was designed to prevent extremists holding peace hostage by making the first moves take place in parallel and not contingent on each other. Yet barely has the new Palestinian leader Abu Mazen signed up to peace and the first Israeli settlements, or “outposts”, been dismantled than Palestinians killed four Israeli soldiers, Israel attempted to assassinate a political leader of Hamas, a Hamas suicide bomber blew up a bus killing more than a dozen civilians and Israel blasted Gaza with rockets in reply. So the spotlight turns back not just to the leaders of Israel and Palestine, but to the US and President Bush to see if Washington will still keep its shoulder to the wheel of a Middle East settlement or let the whole bloody cart roll back on its road of terror and hatred. But does it really make sense to pursue a process imposed entirely from outside? And does it make sense to put all the burden of hope on America? It was only a couple of months ago, after all, that the peace plan was being pushed hard by the Europeans, the United Nations and Russia (the other members of the Quartet), and America seemed to be the one holding back from publishing the road map. Yet now we have a process in which all the running is being made by the US president, a president, what’s more, who once promised that he’d never get involved in the nitty-gritty of the Middle East’s impossible politics. If Europe has any part, it is being cast as an obstructive one in its continued dealings with PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, the man whom Israel and Washington say cannot be countenanced. As for Russia and the UN, they are noticeable only by their silence. Even Britain, America’s ally in the Iraq war and a country with traditionally strong ties to the Arab states most directly involved in the process, doesn’t seem to have any part in the play.

Hans off the UN
By John O'Farrell, The Guardian, June 13, 2003
Hans Blix never planned to be a UN weapons inspector. But when he filled out one of those multiple-choice questionnaires at school, ticking all his interests and qualifications, that's just what came out of the computer. His sister got "nurse", his brother got "engine driver" and Hans got "UN weapons inspector". That'll teach him to tick all the boxes at random as a joke. Blix is stepping down from his controversial post at the UN but, just before he packs away his souvenir Baghdad shaky snow scene, he has broken with the usual niceties of diplomatic language to attack the US administration. Claiming that he was smeared by "bastards" within the Pentagon, he added that there are hawks within the Bush regime who would like to see the UN "sink into the East River". "I believe that there were consistent efforts to undermine me," he told reporters, as Donald Rumsfeld stood behind him tapping his forehead and miming that Blix had gone completely gaga. Blix's leaving card is already being passed around the Pentagon and one or two of the comments certainly reveal a slight hostility towards the retiring diplomat. "Sorry you are leaving the UN, Hans. THAT'S IF YOU CAN FIND THE GODDAMN DOOR TO YOUR OFFICE!" or "Hope you like your present, Hans, though I expect you'll get a bigger one from your buddy Saddam." Since he first went out to Iraq with his Observer's Book of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Blix found himself to be a target for both sides in the dispute. Republican hawks felt that Blix was not doing his job properly because he failed to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. If they'd had their way he would have gone into the Baghdad marketplace urging reporters to wear helmets and protective clothing before they approached the fruit and vegetable stall. "Look at this - a weapon of mass destruction cunningly disguised as a grapefruit. Plus anthrax cluster bombs in the shape of bananas. And look at these blackcurrants; if thrown at someone with sufficient force these could ruin a perfectly good white shirt."

Selective Paranoia: Racist Crackdown on Arab, Muslim Immigrants
Editorial, Daytona Beach News-Journal/CommonDreams, June 12, 2003 
In November 1919 and again in January 1920, America's greatest one-two punch of paranoia -- Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and just-hired sidekick J. Edgar Hoover -- led two raids in cities across the country that netted 16,000 arrests of suspected Bolsheviks. People were held without trial for months. No evidence was found that they were fomenting revolution. Almost all of them were released. But the "Red Scare" is one of those stains on the nation's history, when government failed to differentiate between caution and outright repression. The government's ongoing round-up and deportation of thousands of Arabs, Muslims and other people of allegedly suspicious descent isn't quite the Palmer raids. It's more subtle than that, at least in most cases (the Justice Department did round up and hold about 800 individuals a-la-Palmer in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, releasing most of them after netting zero evidence of terrorist ties). Between December and April, the Department of Homeland Security asked most Arab and Muslim immigrants 16 and older to register with the government. About 82,000 did, including several thousands who were either here illegally or whose legal papers had lapsed. Those registering thought they were doing their part to help the government. At least 13,000 of those have been ordered deported in what may prove to be the biggest forced exodus in the country's history. The deportation numbers don't account for a larger number of illegal immigrants who are leaving the country voluntarily for fear of being arrested and forcibly deported. The Pakistani Embassy in Washington told The New York Times that in the last two years more than 15,000 Pakistanis have left. The exodus is shaking up traditionally tight-knit communities of new immigrants and dislocating families, as many of the targeted individuals are parents, children or siblings of people who hold American citizenship, Green Cards or immigration papers in good order. The forced exodus is also a racist application of the nation's immigration laws.

There will be no Middle East peace without Hamas
By Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, June 13, 2003
Abu Mazen is never going to be able to deliver his people alone -- The worsening violence in Israel and the occupied territories could be taken to mean that the scheme for a settlement between the two peoples launched so recently is already doomed. The "road map", which the US and others have persuaded Israelis and Palestinians to endorse, does indeed lay out a route which is strewn with obstacles and which is only going to work with a lot of luck and a great deal of perseverance, above all on the part of the US. But it is not upset for ever because of one vicious round of hostilities between the Israelis and Hamas, and if the lessons of that confrontation can be learned the chances of success may improve. What the confrontation shows is that there has to be an understanding between Israel and the more extreme wing of the Palestinian movement, as well as one between Israel and Fatah (Yasser Arafat's political organisation) - or, rather, there has to be a triangular understanding between all three - if there is to be progress toward peace. This has been evident for a long time, but it has been pushed to one side because in the public worldview of both the Sharon and Bush governments there is no place for negotiations with those responsible for terror. The position of the Sharon government has been essentially that the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), will restrain and disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad as soon as he can - and that, until he can, the Israelis will do his job for him. That familiar line was heard again and again from Israeli spokesmen justifying the decision to try to kill the Hamas political leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi. What makes it unconvincing is that the road map is not the Oslo process and Abu Mazen is not the Yasser Arafat of years ago. Then the Palestinian Authority would arrest activists from Hamas and Jihad, and act, at least intermittently, as the Israelis wanted it to, as their policeman in the occupied territories. But Abu Mazen has made it abundantly clear to the Israelis - both by reiterating that he will not use force against Hamas and by refusing to take on early responsibility for security in some Palestinian towns and cities - that he is not going to be their policeman in that sense. Less certainly, he has probably tried to convey to the Israelis that, just as he cannot be their policeman, they cannot act as his. A Palestinian prime minister seen to be in any sense in systematic collusion with an Israel bent on wiping out all forces more extreme than Fatah could not last for long.

Muzzling the African American agenda with black help
By Bruce A. Dixon, Black Commentator, June 12, 2003
The DLC's corporate dollars of destruction -- "The sellout of progressive politics has been a total disgrace for the Democratic Party. Not only is it morally wrong and politically cheap, but it doesn't even work." - Rev. Al Sharpton / "We're gonna rebuild America's cities and we're gonna do it with America's steel .... Medicare for all, money pulled out of the Pentagon budget to pay for schools and other domestic programs, and total nuclear disarmament .... This war was wrong! This war was fraudulent! We must expose this administration!" - Rep. Dennis Kucinich:  These are the voices of the Democratic Party's base, the voices that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is sworn and determined to smother in a sea of corporate dollars. They are those voices that brought down the house at last week's Take Back America conference, in Washington, organized by the Campaign for America's Future. These are the messages that rocked the house of labor at AFSCME's Democratic presidential candidate forum in Des Moines, Iowa, last month, and have energized the party's core constituencies at gatherings across the nation. Words like these, and the struggles they evoke, are the reasons that blacks and progressives remain Democrats. The DLC's mission is to erase the last vestiges of social democracy from the Democratic Party, so that the corporate consensus will never again be challenged in the United States. Acting as a Republican Trojan Horse in the bowels of the Democratic machinery, the DLC claims the "real" party lives somewhere off to the right, where George Bush dwells, and that minorities, unionists, environmentalists, feminists, men and women of peace - virtually every branch of the party except corporatists - must be purged or muzzled. The Take Back America agenda, which would have seemed mild not so long ago, is too radical for the DLC: investment in sustainable economic growth / leaders who protect the environment / enforcement of civil rights for all / the right to join a union to be a civil right / women to get equal pay for equal work / everyone to be paid a living wage / help for American families and children / universal health care and retirement security for all / to revive our cities and end poverty / privacy and reproductive choice protected / an Apollo project for energy independence / America's young people to have a future / government to be on your side / American to be a force for peace and freedom in the world -- Rev. Jesse Jackson, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, and New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine endorsed the conference - but they are marginal figures, according to the DLC. Ascendant since the mid-Eighties, the once -"disgruntled," "rump faction" of endangered white southern Democrats - as Robert Dreyfuss describes the early DLC in an excellent 2001 article - dole out millions of dollars from Republican corporations to buy the party out from under its core constituents. In a now infamous May 15 memo titled, "The Real Soul of the Democratic Party," DLC founders Al From and Bruce Reed shamelessly steal the people's very language to advance the corporate cause...

Enough blame to go around
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, June 13, 2003
One week after the Aqaba summit, the Israeli-Palestinian death toll climbed to 30 with no sign of the violence slowing. Many US commentators blamed the carnage on the Palestinian attacks of June 8, which killed five Israeli occupation soldiers. In fact, there has not been a single day since the Sharm el-Sheikh and Aqaba summits that the Israeli Army stopped its attacks on Palestinians. For three days before and during the summits Israel attacked the Nablus and Balata refugee camps, wounding dozens of civilians, many of them children. The day after Aqaba, an Israeli death squad assassinated two Hamas activists in Tulkarm, and every day since the occupying forces have been destroying Palestinian homes  all this before the attacks on Israeli soldiers. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon used the June 8 attacks as an "opportunity" to try to accomplish with weapons what he had failed to achieve diplomatically. But when US President George W. Bush condemned Sharon's attempt to assasinate Hamas spokesman Abdel- Aziz Rantissi, Sharon found himself cornered. Most of the Israeli, Arab and international press, not to mention the Bush administration and other governments, united to condemn what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to undermine Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, and provoke a cycle of violence that would end the "road map" and save Sharon from the commitments he had been pressured to make by Washington. What made Sharon's strategy so transparent -- and therefore so infuriating to the US -- was that it came after Hamas had put out a statement declaring: "We will study Abu Mazen's (Mahmoud Abbas) call for a dialogue while bearing in mind the interests of our nation, its rights, the strengthening of national unity, and first and foremost the question of the prisoners, the right of return, Jerusalem and an end to the occupation." With the attacks on the soldiers, Hamas had lethally made the point that it would never accept Abbas' Aqaba concession equating attacks on the occupying army with "terrorism" against Israeli civilians. Having done so, a wise Hamas would have quickly agreed with Abbas to immediately stop attacks. This, it appears, is what Sharon feared most. With an effective cease-fire, he would no longer have any excuse to delay implementing the road map, most notably the required freeze on all colony construction.

American Jewry’s moment of truth is now
Editorial, Daily Star, June 13, 2003
The Israeli military has been ordered to “wipe out” Hamas, and the latter has warned foreigners to leave lest they be caught in the crossfire as its cells “transform the Zionist entity into blood and ruins.” These calls to arms will no doubt be heeded by their intended audiences, but it is the responsibility of everyone else to respond with just as much determination in hopes of reining in the extremists on both sides before they pull their peoples even deeper into the maelstrom. No one knows where, exactly, the “road map” will take Israelis and Palestinians. But any fool can see that the current course will only lead to an ever-expanding circle of hatred and violence. Since neither side can win a battlefield “victory” because the forces involved are so unequal, the short-term result might well be the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, a sickening project that would only increase the long-term likelihood that the “favor” might be returned. No sane person can look on such possibilities and do anything but cringe at the ease with which human societies can cast off the sheen of civilization and descend into a level of barbarism far beneath that of any wild animal. For a variety of reasons, the lone actor capable of restoring order by becoming a forceful and objective arbiter is the United States. That is disappointing to broad sections of the Arab world, but it is the undeniable truth. The reverse side of this slippery coin, though, is that the Bush administration cannot play its proper role in the Middle East so long as it fears being stabbed in the back at home. Only one party can provide the necessary cover to keep Capitol Hill and the American electoral system from punishing the president for trying to do the right thing: The American Jewish community has to be the quarter from which the call comes at last for Washington to put its foot down squarely in the middle.

The Palestinian leadership must stand firm on its principles
By Khatoun Haidar, Daily Star, June 13, 2003
The latest Israeli missile attack wounded Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz Rantissi and claimed 24 civilian casualties, confirming that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon isn’t about to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state in his lifetime. The day former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords, Sharon made it clear he would not rest before the agreement was reversed. Israeli radicals paved the road by assassinating Rabin in 1995, and his successor, Shimon Peres, lacked the credibility to deliver on the Oslo promises. Rabin was certainly not a saint, but he had agreed to discuss the matter of a Palestinian state on the land Israel occupied under his military leadership ­ Gaza and the West Bank. He had come to realize that it would have been impossible to maintain Israel as a purely Jewish state if the millions of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories were to be integrated into that society. With the start of the first intifada, it was becoming impossible to control the Palestinians, and world opinion rendered the notion of a transfer impossible. Sharon has always been known to be a hothead, and his military history is full of blunders. Today he is once again throwing Israel into yet another escapade that may prove damaging as well as dangerous. The Israeli premier got a free hand after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The new image of terrorism, which condemns resorting to violence even by an occupied population striving for freedom, provided Sharon with an opportunity to rule supreme and to rain havoc on the Palestinians for almost two years. Israel is in a deep economic crisis, and were it not for aid from the United States, it would be in a depression; however, today Sharon takes yet another shot at the “road map.” He is doing his best to undermine Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and to provoke militant Palestinian elements into retaliating against his affronts, political assassinations, attacks on civilian areas and the daily humiliation of Palestinian prisoners. The international political environment is supportive of his pursuits in the short term, but what will be next? Will he attempt to realize the Zionist dream of a bigger Israel, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, or rebuild the temple on the ruins of the Al-Aqsa Mosque? In order to achieve this, he has to make the expression: “A land without people for a people without a land,” a reality.

USS Liberty: How past relates to the future
By Linda S. Heard, Gulf News, June 10, 2003
USS Liberty Dead in the Water, BBC4's documentary broadcast on the 36th anniversary of Israel's attack on the unarmed American spy-ship the USS Liberty served as a chilling warning to all those lucky enough to be able to tune in, given its unsociable broadcast slot. Israel's claim that it attempted to sink the Liberty under the mistaken belief that it was El Queseir - a decrepit Egyptian coastal transport ship, less than half the size of the Liberty - is an old one, discredited by Liberty survivors. For decades survivors have accused the U.S. of covering up the real reasons the vessel was targeted, implying that successive American administrations have put Israel's interests before the truth. More than USS Liberty Dead in the Water's shocking suggestion that Israel may have pre-planned a deliberate bombardment of an American ship by air and sea - so as to bring the Americans onboard their cause, assuming they would believe that Egypt was behind the attack - we learned how close the Middle  East came to nuclear devastation on that warm June day. After Liberty's astonished crew managed to send out an SOS signal using a makeshift antenna, a U.S fleet of war some 500 miles away received an order to dispatch two nuclear-armed fighter jets to exact a terrible retribution on Cairo. These were recalled by the then U.S. Defence Secretary literally minutes before they could drop their deadly nuclear load. In usual American double-standard style when it comes to the Mid-East, Israel escaped coming under a similar threat when it was discovered to be the perpetrator. In fact, the case was closed by order of President Lyndon B. Johnson even though he personally doubted Israel's version of events. It is surely ironic that while the Bush administration puts out lurid warnings concerning the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea, America is the only nation, which has ever actually used them, and is abnormally silent when it comes to Israel's nuclear arsenal. Officially, Israel doesn't possess nuclear weapons and is, therefore, not compelled to allow IAEA inspectors around its Dimona site. In reality, it has one of the most advanced nuclear and missile launch capabilities on the planet. In June last year, the Israeli daily Haaretz quoted two top Israeli space experts, who both declared that Israel now has the capacity to fire missiles at targets anywhere on earth with the launch of its Ofek5 satellite.