Edited by author 04-15-2003 06:32 PM
Broke Allies Make for a Bankrupt War
By Gioconda Belli The Los Angeles Times April 9, 2003
The fact that Nicaragua is a member of the mismatched coalition supporting the U.S. war on Iraq has become an endless source of banter in my country.

A recent e-mail forwarded to me titled "Letter from President Enrique Bolanos to President Bush" outlined the plan that the highest authorities in Nicaragua, the poorest country in Latin America, after Haiti, would have devised to support the coalition forces:
"1. We will cut the water supply to our major cities to collect 100,000 barrels that the coalition will be able to use as chemical and biological weapons.

"2. We will support the air campaign by sending to Iraq 300 million mosquitoes, from our ample supply, to infect the Iraqi troops with malaria and dengue fever.

"3. We will infiltrate the Iraqi Cabinet with some of our financial advisors to starve the Iraqi army and Iraqi people to death."

Humor underscores the feeling most Nicaraguans have about our government's willingness to join the coalition put together by Bush: It is an empty gesture, a sort of political prostitution aimed at obtaining badly needed funds for our country. Bolanos is, in fact, meeting with President Bush in Washington this week, hoping to claim his reward: more than $500 million in aid from Washington.

In an article by Condoleezza Rice, published March 31 in Managua's local newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, she tries to glorify the status of the needy countries that make up most of this coalition by saying they represent 230 million people with a combined gross national product of $22 million.

The U.S. national security advisor goes on to mention the Estonian prime minister's support and mentions the Czech and Slovak brigades in Kuwait. She underlines the fact that, although some nations do not have the means to participate in the operations to free Iraq, they share a willingness to fight terrorism: "Together we are determined to do everything in our power to prevent Saddam Hussein or terrorists using Saddam's weapons to repeat what happened on Sept. 11 on a larger scale."

Good try, but considering the weight of self-interest in international politics, I doubt that Estonia, Poland, Nicaragua, Solomon Islands, Tonga or Bulgaria are worried about Al Qaeda's terrorists acts. What they share is their preoccupation that the United States would pull the plug on financial aid if they were to dissent from the Bush administration on Iraq.

So we could say this coalition, with a few exceptions, consists mainly of new and old "banana republics" that have nothing to lose in joining the U.S. but their self-respect, a commodity that is hard to maintain when financial survival is at stake.

One cannot help but be saddened to see the U.S. using this kind of economic pressure to rally international support for war.

A friend of mine, Andres Perez B, made a good point in a recent article. He compared Saddam Hussein with a rat and international law with the edifice that shelters the different nations of the world. "To neutralize a rat within the edifice of international law requires the same care you and I would have in dealing with a rat in our homes. Neither of us would choose to attack the rat with dynamite or hand grenades because we wouldn't be willing to endanger the foundations of our homes, or the life of our families."

I could not agree more. In building a coalition using the "carrot and stick" principle, the Bush administration has diminished not only the U.S. but the countries that see their participation as a business venture that eventually will pay off.

Our president has been asking people to volunteer to go to Iraq to, in his own words, "make a few bucks." Given Nicaragua's 60% unemployment rate, I am sure a few desperate Nicaraguans will end up dying in this war.

For 45 years, my country lived under a dynasty of tyrants supported, armed and financed by the United States. It seems ironic now that we should be participating in a coalition to get rid of this one. My country once had some pride. Now we have been forced by want to give this up too.

There surely won't be a better world as a result of this war.

Gioconda Belli is a Nicaraguan poet and novelist.

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Egypt, Jordan demand withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq
Yahoo News April 14, 2003
CAIRO (AFP) - Egypt and Jordan are calling for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq and the formation of a "representative Iraqi government", their respective foreign ministers Ahmed Maher and Marwan Moasher said.

They were speaking after talks between President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan on the situation in Iraq following the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime by US-led forces.

Maher urged "the withdrawal of the foreign forces and the formation of a government chosen by the Iraqi people."

"We want a government which will really represent the Iraqi people in all their components, and that will be the criteria by which we will judge any government which will be set up in Baghdad," he said.

"We want a credible Iraqi government representative of the Iraqi people largely from the inside", Moasher said, also calling for the withdrawal of foreign forces.

He did not say if he was against certain exiled Iraqi opposition such as Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Council, who has the backing of some figures within the US administration.

Moasher said Egypt and Jordan were working together to create "an effective Arab role which will help in setting up a government representative of the Iraqi people which can preserve the unity of Iraq."

In Amman, Moasher later said Jordan's King Abdullah II would travel to Bahrain and then on to Saudi Arabia Tuesday to discuss the situation in Iraq, the official Petra news agency reported.

Egypt and Jordan are both allies of the United States but strongly opposed the assault on Iraq, which aimed at overthrowing President Saddam Hussein and neutralising his alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Mubarak's office said earlier his talks with King Abdullah were focused on "the need to put a halt to the chaos in Iraq, to restore order and form an interim government."

Arab countries are concerned that the current unrest in post-Saddam Iraq could deteriorate into a full-fledged civil war and spread to other states in the Arab world.

The foreign ministers of countries neighbouring Iraq are to meet in Riyadh on Friday to review the fallout of the war, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said.

Amid the preparations, Prince Saud visited Damascus on Monday to discuss Iraqi security and sovereignty with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Referring to US allegations against Syria, claiming it has weapons of mass destruction and is aiding senior officials of Saddam Hussein's regime to escape, Maher said, "We are going to raise this question with our Arab brothers."

"What has happened must not happen again," he added, without elaborating.

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America targeted 14,000 sites. So where are the weapons of mass destruction?
By Andrew Gumbel The Independent April 13, 2003
They were the reason the United States and Britain were in such a hurry to go to war, the threat the rank-and-file troops feared most.

And yet, after three weeks of war, after the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – those weapons that President Bush, on the eve of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the United States – have still to be identified.

Many influential people – disarmament experts, present and former United Nations arms inspectors, our own Robin Cook – have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all.

The public surrender of a senior Iraqi scientist could yet backfire against the US and Britain. Lieutenant-General Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, who handed himself over to US forces yesterday, continued to proclaim that Iraq no longer holds any chemical or biological weapons. He should know: the British-educated chemical expert headed the Iraqi delegation at weapons talks with the United Nations.

The few "discoveries" trumpeted in the media – the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there – have not been on a scale that could reasonably justify the unprovoked military invasion of a sovereign country, and in most cases have been proven to been no more than rumour, or propaganda, or a mixture of the two.

It could still be that, as American forces advance on Tikrit, Saddam's home town, chemical or biological weapons may be discovered, or even deployed by diehard Iraqi troops. But if the casus belli pleaded by George Bush and Tony Blair turns out to be entirely hollow – and it should be stressed that we can't yet know that – what does it say about their motivations for going to war in the first place? How much deception was involved in talking up the Iraqi threat, and how much self-deception?

As Susan Wright, a disarmament expert at the University of Michigan, said last week: "This could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion." Even The Wall Street Journal, one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders, has warned of the "widespread scepticism" the White House can expect if it does not make significant, and undisputed, discoveries of forbidden weapons.

Before the war, American intelligence officials said that they had a list of 14,000 sites where, they suspected, chemical or biological agents had been harboured, as well as the delivery systems to deploy them. A substantial number of those sites have been inspected by the invading troops. Evidence to date of a "grave and gathering" threat: precisely zero.

Much of what has been unearthed points to something we knew about all along: the weapons programmes that Iraq ran before the 1991 Gulf War, before sanctions, before regular US and British bombing raids in the no-fly zones and before the UN weapons inspection regime that ran from 1991 to 1998.

US troops have discovered a few suspect barrels here, a sample bottle of nerve agent there, stacks of chemical suits and some drugs typically used to counteract the effects of a chemical attack, such as atropine and 2-pam chloride. According to many military experts, these finds suggest the vestiges of a weapons programme that has been dismantled, not one that is up and running. The US government argues that the weapons have been deliberately dispersed and hidden – a claim that would have more merit if there were any evidence of where the materials might have gone.

In his State of the Union address in early February, President Bush was quite specific about the materials he believed Saddam was hiding: 25,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas. These days, he does not mention weapons of mass destruction at all, focusing instead on the liberation of the Iraqi people – as if liberation, not disarmament, had been the project all along.

The administration has shown its embarrassment in other ways. On day two of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, said finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction was the invading force's number two priority after toppling Saddam Hussein – itself a reversal of the argument presented at the UN Security Council.

A week later, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, pushed the issue further down the list, behind capturing and evicting "terrorists sheltered in Iraq" and collecting intelligence on "terrorist networks". Now we are told that hunting for weapons is something we can expect once the fighting is over, and that it might go on for months before yielding significant results. "It's hard work," a plaintive Ms Clarke said last week.

Nonsense, say the disarmament experts. "It's clear there wasn't much," said Professor Wright, "otherwise they would have run into something by now. After all, they've taken Baghdad." Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector who spent four months badgering the United States and Britain in vain for reliable intelligence information about the whereabouts of lethal weapons, now says he believes the war was planned on entirely different criteria, well before his inspection teams went back into Iraq in December.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some [weapons]. I think they now believe less in that possibility," he told the Spanish daily El Pais. "You ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try to show that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger."

Anxious to find a "smoking gun", a team of US disarmament experts has been set up to question Iraqis involved in weapons programmes, while others comb sites and analyse samples in the field using mobile labs.

The move has alarmed the weapons inspectors at the UN, where Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, pointedly said last week: "I think they are the ones with the mandate to disarm Iraq, and when the situation permits they should go back to resume their work."

The US team has attempted to lure some of the inspectors, who are recognised as the sole legitimate international authority on Iraq's weapons programmes.

The latest theory being touted in Washington by the usual unnamed government sources is that the Iraqis have moved their weapons out of the country, very possibly into Syria. This claim appears to have originated with Israeli intelligence – which has every motivation for stirring up trouble for its hostile Arab neighbours – and has been bolstered by reports of fighting between Iraqi Special Republican Guard units and US special forces near the Syrian border.

Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.

But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock's films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.

If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.

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Rout proves anti-war point
By DAVID OLIVE Toronto Star April 13, 2003
Sometimes the United States and its allies are wrong, and the rest of the world is right.

The opponents of war in Iraq - France, Germany, Russia, China, Canada, Mexico, the Arab nations and the many others — were vindicated last week when Baghdad fell just 21 days after the U.S.-led invasion began.

The anti-war argument had always been that Saddam Hussein posed no significant threat to the U.S. or its neighbours because Iraq's military power was vastly degraded after Saddam's humiliation in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the subsequent dozen years of punitive United Nations-imposed sanctions.

And that any nuclear, chemical and biological weapons Iraq might still possess could be destroyed through the U.N. inspection process without resorting to a war that has cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis.

With an invasion force the U.S. itself now boasts was of relatively minimal strength, Saddam's regime was easily toppled. On that point, the neo-con war hawks were correct. Iraq was poised to fall like a house of cards.

By the second week of the conflict, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was saying he felt embarrassed by the Iraqis' poor fighting skills - or unwillingness to fight at all.

As the enormity of the rout was clear early last week, the Pentagon was dismissing the Iraqi forces as "a paper army."

Pushed to the wall, the Iraqi regime did not try to blunt the enemy advance by dipping into its vaunted stockpile of "weapons of mass destruction" - or perhaps that, too, was a paper inventory.

Of course, the outcome of this dubious contest between the world's lone superpower and a puny, impoverished adversary with no allies was never in doubt. The U.S. and its British ally were taking on an enemy that had not been able to obtain spare parts for its tanks for the past decade and proved unable to get its fighter jets airborne.

Still, Americans need to know they got their money's worth from this unprecedented adventure, which will cost U.S. taxpayers already suffering from a weak economy at least $200 billion (all figures U.S.) in war expenses and anticipated spending on Iraqi reconstruction.

And both Americans and future "rogue states" targeted by the Bush administration for discipline also need to know that the United States can effortlessly project its power across the globe. Hence last week's triumphalism by Bush officials.

"Saddam Hussein is now taking his place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators," said Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defence secretary.

Equating the regional bully Saddam with the savage imperialism of Hitler, who brought about the death of more than 40 million people, is dime-store sophistry. But it's essential in the bid to approximate Rumsfeld's genius as a military strategist with that of William Tecumseh Sherman or Dwight Eisenhower.

It's not that Rumsfeld's ego needs the boost. In exaggerating both the monstrosity of Saddam and the sagacity of his conqueror, Rumsfeld's civilian defence planners seek to justify regime change and validate their Iraq strategy of rapid, lightly armed strikes at an enemy.

Since the spectre of serial regime change is new, it is imperative, too, that Americans be comforted in knowing that "Rummy" has devised a new method of warfare for achieving it. Never mind that blitzkrieg wasn't new even when Hitler used it.

And that hubris from their early success with it led both Hitler and Douglas MacArthur to disaster in Russia and Korea, respectively.

Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice-president, also heaped praise on the new Rumsfeld doctrine last week, approvingly quoting historian Victor Davis Hanson's gushing tribute to the early phases of the Iraq campaign:

"By any standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, the Germans in the Ardennes in the spring of 1940 or Patton's romp in July of 1944, the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties."

That is pure bunk.

We'll never know how "light" the casualties were. For, as the New York Times reported last week, "powerful munitions used by American and British forces probably left hundreds or thousands of battlefield victims pulverized, burned or buried in rubble."

The Bush administration wants it known that it has achieved battlefield wizardry that can be safely deployed in future. But what the U.S. forces did in Iraq against a poorly trained, poorly motivated enemy on favourable terrain does not begin to compare with the 38 days it took the Wehrmacht to bring the Low Countries and France, one of the world's great military powers, under Nazi subjugation in the spring of 1940.

Against fierce resistance in 1944, U.S. Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army swept roughly 900 kilometres across northern France in two weeks - more than twice the distance traversed by U.S. forces between Kuwait and Baghdad. By war's end, Patton had inflicted 1.4 million casualties on the enemy.

But bold nonsense is to be expected of a Bush administration whose foreign policy has been marked by deception. This dates from its success in winning congressional approval for war in Iraq by grossly inflating the threat posed by Saddam and later its failure to win pro-war votes on the U.N. Security Council with documents about alleged Iraqi nuclear plans that were revealed as forgeries.

Not since Vietnam has mendacity so thoroughly characterized both the goals and methods of U.S. foreign policy.

Feigning diplomacy, the U.S. built up its forces in the Persian Gulf. Declaring itself committed first to the objective of Mideast security, then of destruction of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction," then of Saddam's ouster and finally of "liberating" a long-oppressed people, the Bush administration is only now revealed to be in apparent pursuit of something it dares not formally promulgate - the imposition of democracy, Western-style capitalism and a benign regard for Israel throughout the region.

Having come this far by prevarication, administration officials cannot now extricate themselves from their deceptions, indeed, self-deceptions.

Wedded of necessity to the concept of ad hoc coalitions as an alternative to the constraints of the U.N. and NATO, the Pentagon has come to believe what it says about its latest "coalition of the willing" - that it is one of the largest, if not the largest, such coalition in history.

Former U.S. allies can react only with disbelief at such revisionism.

How soon the U.S. forgets the significant military contributions by Europe, Pakistan, Egypt, Canada and others to the Persian Gulf War, and the more genuine multinationalism of the coalition to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban only a year and a half ago.

The prime minister of Solomon Islands, one of many Pacific microdots hastily recruited into the coalition of the willing by the U.S. State Department, was asked about his role in the Iraqi conflict. He could only express surprise. He was, he said, "completely unaware" of his country's involvement in Iraq.

Even the once-dovish Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, now in penance after U.S. failure to achieve the Security Council's blessing for war in Iraq, has begun to lose his grip on the truth.

Irritated by a German TV interviewer, Powell snapped that the U.S. would not, as many expect, abandon post-war Iraq to its own devices.

"And guess who will be the major contributor, who will pay the most money to help the Iraqi people to get back on their feet?" Powell said. "It will be the United States, as always."

As always? As chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Gulf War, Powell would very well know that America's allies paid $53 billion of the $63 billion cost of that war.

That about two-thirds of humanitarian and reconstruction work in the developing world is paid for by Europeans.

That European and Canadian forces, among others, cleaned up after the Americans in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Of the U.S. record in post-war Afghanistan, already in chaos as insurgent Taliban gangs terrorize civilians and aid workers, Powell said: "We are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We're very proud of it. It's been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again and again."

That claim is preposterous. After the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. returned Kuwait to its despotic emirs and left Saddam to murder thousands of dissidents.

In the aftermath of 1990s U.S. interventions in Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan, local autocrats and warlords lost no time re-imposing their violent rule.

In a must-read analysis of Bush war strategy in the current Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall writes that the administration's "preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda impossible not to pursue .... Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con."

On the economic front, the audacious Bush's tax cuts for the rich have swollen the deficit, which becomes the justification for slashing social programs - including a Bush-endorsed cut in veterans-affairs spending by $15 billion over the next decade. (Yes, at a time like this.)

On the war front, it means explaining that a buildup of military force in the Gulf is the only means of pressuring Saddam to comply with U.N. sanctions.

It means letting unofficial spokesmen like Henry Kissinger suggest that those forces must be unleashed for combat in Iraq because "if the United States marches 200,000 troops into the region and then marches them back out ... the credibility of American power ... will be gravely, perhaps irreparably impaired."

And it means orchestrating dire warnings from unnamed Pentagon sources that if an Iraqi assault didn't commence soon, it would bog down in seasonal sandstorms. (It was darkly amusing to watch one U.S. commander after another on CNN these past three weeks insisting that weather conditions had not, after all - and never would - stall the progress of an Abrams tank column for more than an afternoon.)

It is that cumulative duplicity, much of it almost comically transparent, that baffled and finally alienated so many world leaders over the past months.

These included Jacques Chirac, the most pro-American French president of modern times, who once operated a forklift at a Budweiser plant in St. Louis and was the first head of state to pay an official visit to the Bush White House.

That France had commercial interests in Saddam's Iraq might have had less to do with Chirac's war skepticism than his experience as a combat veteran in the Algerian desert.

For Chirac and his peers, so little of what came out of the Bush administration made any sense.

And they hardly grasp it now.

The neo-con theory behind the Iraq campaign is that a democratized Middle East will be a safer place, because democracies don't make unprovoked attacks on other countries.

It's an attractive idea. But when the world's most powerful democracy launched its invasion of Iraq last month, that theory failed its first test.

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How America Lost the War
By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Perspective April 14, 2003
Television news stations, along with newspapers from coast to coast, have been showing scenes of celebration in Baghdad. The dictator, Saddam Hussein, has been removed from power. News anchors have likened this event to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris by Allied forces during World War II. Never mind that the joyful crowds who tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last week numbered perhaps one hundred people, or that the entire event was a staged media scam. A wide angle shot of the square where this 'celebration' took place showed a deserted, ruined city with that one small clot of people. The true feelings of the Iraqi people in the aftermath of the invasion were best summed up by a woman who screamed at a reporter for the UK Independent: "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city."

The war against Iraq was proffered and pursued by the Bush administration with two clear goals on the table. 1) We were, first and foremost, there to capture and destroy any and all weapons of mass destruction; 2) We were there to 'liberate' the Iraqi people and plant a seedcorn of democracy. Enveloping this entire scenario was the Bush administration's premise that what we were doing was just and moral.

We need, first of all, to get our terms straight so as to achieve a sense of clarity regarding the issue of America's moral standing on the matter. Saddam Hussein was not defeated. He was not overthrown, bested, beaten or destroyed. Saddam Hussein was fired, relieved of his position by a nation that hired him for a dirty job way back in 1979.

When the Shah of Iran, another employee of the United States, was overthrown by fundamentalist revolutionaries controlled by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, America lost a staunch ally against the rise of Soviet influence in the Middle East. That same year saw Saddam Hussein take control of Iraq, and America immediately leaped into his corner so as to maintain the bulwark against the USSR. In short, he was hired. On September 22, 1980, Hussein attacked Iran ostensibly to gain strategically important territory along with the rich oil fields around Khuzestan. At bottom, however, Hussein was acting as an instrument of American policy and attempting to overthrow Khomeini, so as to dissolve a dangerous Iranian/Soviet alliance.

The relationship between Iraq and America bloomed throughout the Reagan administration in the 1980s. We provided intelligence data to Iraqi forces that described, in detail, the order of battle of Iranian forces. American government and private industry interests provided Iraq with the means to create all of the terrible weapons Hussein was so covetous of. We knew Iraq was using chemical weapons during their fight with Iran, and continued to give them this intelligence data. In fact, Iran in 1984 brought a draft resolution before the United Nations Security Council condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Iraq petitioned the United States several times to make sure the international response to their chemical attacks was muted, and that no specific country was named regarding Iran's petition. The Iraqi/American version of the resolution carried the day.

That same year saw a public American condemnation of the use of these weapons. However, that same condemnation carried within it the following language: "The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims." (Emphasis added)

The National Security Archive released a number of recently declassified documents in February of 2003 which further describe the intimate relationship the Reagan administration maintained with Saddam Hussein and Iraq. National Security Decision Directive 114 of November 26, 1983, "U.S. Policy toward the Iran-Iraq War," described American intentions: The ability to project military force in the Persian Gulf and to protect oil supplies. There was no reference made to chemical weapons or human rights concerns. National Security Decision Directive 139 of April 5, 1984, "Measures to Improve U.S. Posture and Readiness to Respond to Developments in the Iran-Iraq War," focused again on increased access for U.S. military forces in the Persian Gulf and enhanced intelligence-gathering capabilities. The directive ordered preparation of "a plan of action designed to avert an Iraqi collapse."

Saddam Hussein was such a valued employee that the Reagan administration sent a high level envoy to Iraq to ensure the relationship was on steady ground. That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld, who was filmed by CNN on September 20, 1983, warmly shaking hands with Hussein. Although Rumsfeld said during a September 21, 2002 CNN interview, "In that visit, I cautioned him about the use of chemical weapons, as a matter of fact, and discussed a host of other things," documents pertaining to that September 1983 meeting from the National Security Archive clearly demonstrate that there was no mention of chemical weapons between the two men.

Bush's bloviating sermons on morality in this matter fail in the face of the facts. Saddam Hussein would not have existed were it not for the energetic support of the United States. We didn't defeat Hussein. We fired him. The fact that he was a valued employee for so long, the fact that we averted our eyes as late as 1988 to his use of chemical weapons, the fact that we gave him vital intelligence data so he could more accurately and effectively use those weapons, and the fact that we gave material assistance via government and private institutions for the creation and promulgation of said weapons, all burst the bubble of righteousness the entire debate has been contained in. Bush can talk all he wants about the evil Saddam Hussein. There is little argument with the appellation of that adjective to that name. Yet it was America who allowed him to become so, and the moral arguments surrounding his firing are indelibly tainted by these sad facts. The Kurds in Halabja who were gassed to death in March of 1988 can level a damning finger of blame as much at America as at Hussein.

As for the location and destruction of these chemical weapons, it can be said at this point that the Bush administration has suffered an incredible array of embarrassments in this matter. American forces have investigated 14,000 suspected weapons sites during the Iraq invasion, and have not located so much as a teaspoon of prohibited weaponry. The Bush administration pointedly ignored the facts in this matter and whipped the American people into a fearful frenzy. According to Bush, Hussein had 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas - all nightmares that were just waiting to be used in New York or Los Angeles. The hood ornament on this push to war has been utterly discredited thus far, as not a speck of evidence backing these claims has been located.

We are supposed to forget about that now, because according to the new spin, the war was never about these weapons. It was about freeing the Iraqi people. It is clear by now that Iraq is no longer ruled by Saddam Hussein, but let us take a step further and analyze the newfound 'freedom' of the Iraqi people.

At this moment, the city of Baghdad is in utter chaos. The Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, repository of over 5,000 years worth of cultural and regional history, has been utterly destroyed. Mesopotamia and its people have lost an immeasurable portion of their history with this terrible act, one that could have been stopped by a few Marines outside the museum. That simple precaution never happened. Beyond that, the looting has had a darker social edge. The strata of society in Iraq has seen for years the minority Sunnis – who claim Saddam Hussein as their own – ruling over the majority Shia. The orgy of looting that has broken out in Iraq is, basically, the Shia robbing the Sunni. An ever-rising boil of gunplay between these two groups is putting a match to the fuse of religiously-based civil war, and the American troops have done nothing to stop it except recruit members of Hussein's feared police force to try and restore order. So much for regime change.

This is exactly the scenario that led to the attacks of September 11. America dared the Soviets to invade Afghanistan by sending mujeheddin guerillas against the communist Afghan government. The USSR did invade, falling into Zbignew Brzyzinski's "Afghan Trap," and smashed the country to flinders. In the devastated aftermath, America did absolutely nothing to heal that shattered nation, and the vacuum was eventually filled by the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The rest is a history that seems destined to be repeated as we pointedly ignore the rising tide of lawlessness and anarchy, caused directly by our actions, in yet another country.

Further exacerbating the tensions is the hard talk coming out of Washington regarding a coming attack on Syria. Baghdad has not yet stopped bleeding, and the hawks want to take on Damascus. Syria has its own downtrodden Shia segment within the society, and the Shia in Iraq will not take kindly to their kin across the border coming under siege. In the end, though, the Shia do not matter. Despite all the happy talk about democracy in Iraq, no such birth will take place there if the Bush administration has anything to say about it. Democracy, or majority rules in the western sense, would create a Shia fundamentalist regime rule. The Shia share cultural allegiance not only with a segment of Syria, but with the mullahs who rule Iran. A Shia Iraq would ally with Iran, creating a strategically untenable situation. The Bush administration knows this all too well, and has been lying with its bare face hanging out every time it speaks of democracy in that bruised country.

Instead of democracy, the Bush administration has a two-pronged leadership thrust in mind for Iraq. The first stage will see Iraq ruled by an American named Jay Garner, former weapons manufacturer and avowed proponent of the failed 'Star Wars' missile defense shield. Garner, a unilateralist hawk who shares a brain with Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, is also on record as supporting a number of the harsher measures Israel has taken against the Palestinians. Opinions on this matter vary, of course. It is all too clear, however one may feel on that matter, that in a part of the world where the Palestinians are seen as martyred victims, having a man like Garner running the show in Iraq gives the appearance that America believes the best way to deal with the Palestinians is with bulldozers and helicopter gunships. This will not sell in the Mideast marketplace.

After Garner will come Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi national Congress and Rumsfeld's first choice for final ruler of Iraq. Chalabi is an interesting pick. His Shia background makes a great many people in the State Department, the CIA and the Middle East nervous. The degree to which Chalabi will kowtow to American interests at the expense of the Iraqi people is also of concern; Chalabi, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz have been brothers in arms for years, and Chalabi seems all too likely to do their bidding instead of tending to the needs of Iraqis. Finally, there is Chalabi's dubious Enronesqe background. He was convicted of 31 counts of bank fraud in a Jordanian court and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison. Chalabi has not set foot in Iraq since 1956.

Raise your hand if you see democracy and liberation in all of this. There is little to see. To be sure, the murderous tyrant has been removed. In his absence, however, there is the complete breakdown of social order; there is the beginnings of a civil war; there is no thought whatsoever to instituting any form of representative government; there is not even the pretense of an attempt by American forces to do anything about the social catastrophes that are unfolding, except hire back the 'thugs' who were supposedly the cause of the war in the first place; there are thousands and thousands of Iraqis who are now dead or maimed, all of whom have families and friends, all of whom see this war for what it truly was. This is not freedom by any standard.

We lost the war.

We defeated the Iraqi military, to be sure, and we fired Saddam Hussein. We have lost the real war, the important war, the war against those who attacked us on September 11. We lost the war because we betrayed the international community, whose help we desperately need in this wider war, by lying to them about Iraq's weapons and by disregarding their legitimate concerns. We have lost the war because our actions have given aid and succor to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, whose agents were and are nowhere to be found in Iraq despite the avowed words of the Bush administration. We have lost the war because the Iraqi people themselves already understand that the 'liberation' they were promised is as false as the evidence we used to invade their country. We lost the war because our moral standing to make it in the first place was utterly bereft of substance. We lost the war because the rest of the world sees the American government for what it is – a mob of hyperactive right-wing extremists with an army to play with and a dream of global dominance glowing like coals in their eyes.

There is no victory here. We lost the war before the first shot was fired.

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U.S. May Have to Allow Others to Inspect Iraqi Arms
By WILLIAM J. BROAD The New York Times April 14, 2003
The Bush administration may be legally bound to let independent inspectors confirm any findings of unconventional weapons in Iraq, administration and independent arms experts said. But they added that the White House, which has resisted help from the United Nations in the search for weapons, may decide to ignore such legalities.
 
The administration is debating its obligations under arms control treaties that govern chemical, biological and nuclear arms, an official involved in the discussions said in an interview.

"If we gain control, then theoretically they're ours," the official said of Iraqi unconventional arms. "Someone could argue that because we now own them, we have to meet all the requirements" of the weapon treaties, which predate recent United Nations inspections of Iraq.

The official added that the Pentagon, which has responsibility for any discovered Iraqi arms, wants no outside help. "But people are thinking about that," he added. "Although the current guidance is not to plan to operate with an international organization, that doesn't mean that won't change."

Last week, when asked about possible doubts about chemical finds, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said measures had been put in place to diminish the chance that someone might tamper with battlefield evidence or exploit a murky situation to charge fraud, incompetence or self-deception. "We've got people who have been alerted to the importance of chain of custody," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters.

A White House official said the White House would have no public comment on the debate over independent inspectors.

Outside the government, weapon experts have argued for the United States to let international inspectors help identify and destroy any discovered unconventional weapons in Iraq. They say that independent confirmation would help convince skeptics that the war was just.

Washington cited the need to disarm Iraq as the main reason for the invasion. Yet, so far, no unambiguous evidence has come to light demonstrating that Iraq possessed such prohibited weapons.

"Bush's credibility is hanging in the balance," said Dr. Elisa D. Harris, a Clinton administration arms control official now at the University of Maryland.

For weeks, advancing troops have reported signs of chemical arms: gas masks, protective suits, nerve gas antidotes, training manuals, barrels of suspicious chemicals and a cache of mysterious shells. While the military has undertaken many tests and inspections, none of the chemicals have been proven to be warfare agents, rather than pesticides or other legitimate chemicals they can closely resemble.

Administration and private experts said one treaty that may require letting independent weapon inspectors into Iraq is the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, which 150 nations, including the United States, have signed.

The treaty bars the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical arms. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague and known as the O.P.C.W., polices the treaty around the globe and in the United States, which is slowly destroying its old stockpiles of chemical arms.

Though Iraq did not sign the treaty, several leading experts said the United States, by taking possession of Iraqi chemical arms, would fall under its provisions even though the treaty makes no explicit reference to the responsibilities of a victor in war.

"The spirit of the treaty is that the destruction of chemical weapons globally is up to the O.P.C.W. to verify," said Barry Kellman, director of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University in Chicago and co-author of a book on how states can meet treaty duties. "If we find chemical weapons, the O.P.C.W. should supervise their destruction."

Mary E. Hoinkes, general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Clinton administration, said the crucial issue was who determines the fate of captured chemical weapons. "If we're talking about destroying them after hostilities are over, collecting them and destroying them, that's when the obligations kick in," she said.

Experts said the reverse might also be argued. Under international law, some noted, obligations usually run to states rather than particular governments or controlling forces. The nuclear issue is clearer, legal experts agreed. That is because Iraq signed the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty, which aims to bar the spread of nuclear weapons. The treaty's enforcement arm, the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna and known as the I.A.E.A., has teams of inspectors that regularly checked Iraq's nuclear facilities before the war.

Thomas Graham Jr., general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations, said there was no question that the United States had to let in I.A.E.A. inspectors. "If we didn't," he said, "we'd be accessory to a violation."

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the I.A.E.A., has publicly called for the Bush administration to let his inspectors into Iraq when the fighting stops. Late last week, an agency spokesman in Vienna said it had so far received no reply.

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Feet force cars from city streets
By Joseph Kerr and agencies The Sydney Morning Herald April 14, 2003
About 10,000 protesters turned out in Sydney streets yesterday as part of another wave of anti-war rallies around the world at the weekend, again forcing traffic out of large parts of the city.

While protesters overseas were involved in more radical action, such as burning the US flag and throwing red paint at the US consulate in Brazil, the local action was relatively gentle, led by church leaders on Palm Sunday.

In London, as the first British troops started to return from the Gulf, thousands of people opposed to the war marched through the streets, and peace activists across 45 Canadian cities and towns also protested.

In Washington, rallies were held both for and against the war - thousands wanting to support US troops joined a "Rally for America" outside the US Congress.

In Sydney, police reported no trouble and no arrests. The local rally marched from Belmore Park, near Central, to the Domain without any significant incidents.

Religious leaders from a range of faiths - Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian - spoke to the pre-march rally at Belmore Park, where people sat quietly, listening to short speeches, prayers, chants and hymns.

"If only we can put as much effort into what makes for peace," said Father Claude Mostowik, the director of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart Justice and Peace Centre at Erskineville.

Walking far more placidly than during the huge pre-war protest of February 16, the diverse group of people moved up Elizabeth Street to Park Street. Crossing to College Street, they walked up Art Gallery Road to the Domain.

One of the key messages from several speakers was that while Saddam Hussein may have lost control of Baghdad, the war was far from over - and the troops should come home.

Church and union groups yesterday also published a "Beyond War" statement, calling on the United Nations to step in to manage postwar Iraq and describing the conflict as a "failure of both political will and our social contract and primary responsibility to protect human life and the wider environment".

"It's the first time in my life I've ever been ashamed to be Australian," said 71-year-old Mary Kenna, of Botany, who was with her husband, Jim. She said it was only the second protest she had ever been to, the first having been the mass protest on February 16 in which 250,000 people crammed onto Sydney's streets.

"That's how much it means to us," she said.

At the Domain, a woman who has returned from being a "human shield", Donna Mulhearn, joined the former Office of National Assessments analyst, Andrew Wilkie, who resigned in March in protest at Howard Government actions over the war, and ALP left-winger Carmen Lawrence to address the rally in Sydney.

"There will be a terrorist backlash, and we are now that bit closer to the so-called clash of civilisations," Mr Wilkie said.

"Why kill so many to remove one man?' I asked John Howard," said Dr Lawrence.

Leaving the rally about 3.30pm, 31-year-old Rachel Nelson, a teacher from Newtown, said it was "quite amazing" to see how many among the crowd were over 50.

"I wonder if it's wisdom," Ms Nelson said.

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United States Department of Defense
News Transcript
On the web: http://dod.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030413-secdef0101.html
Media contact: media@defenselink.mil or +1 (703) 697-5131
Public contact: public@defenselink.mil or +1 (703) 428-0711
 
Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld Sunday, April 13, 2003 - 10:30 a.m. EDT

Secretary Rumsfeld Interview on CBS Face the Nation
Interview on CBS Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer and and Tom Friedman, New York Times

Schieffer: And good morning again. The Secretary of Defense is in the studio with us this morning. He'll be here for the whole broadcast. Also here, Tom Friedman, just back from Iraq, the foreign affairs columnist from The New York Times. Well some very good news apparently, Mr. Secretary about these Americans. What can you tell us?

Rumsfeld: Well, it is correct that seven American service people have been located and they are in U.S. hands at the present time. I'm told they are all in good shape. There are two that have gunshot wounds, but they're in reasonably good shape, and that they are going to be brought into - probably into Kuwait and certainly their families are being notified at the present time. Needless to say, all of the loved ones of the people who are missing, or prisoners of war are anxious to know what's up, and worried about their loved ones.

Friedman: How did we find them?

Rumsfeld: What happened was, as I understand it, I was talking to Central Command this morning before I came here to your show. Some Iraqis told American military that there were seven American service people in the area. They told them where they were, and they were somewhere six, eight, ten kilometers south of Tikrit, as I understand it, and the service people went up and found them, and they rescued them and they're en route.

Schieffer: And as I understand it, you don't intend to give us any more detail than that, until these families are notified. Once they are, then you'll reveal who they are, and so forth.

Rumsfeld: Exactly. Their names and their units will be made public after the families have been notified, and that should - you never know how long that's going to take, but it's the proper way to handle it.

Schieffer: Tom?

Friedman: Mr. Secretary, how do you see the political structure now evolving in Iraq. The war is over, what happens next? Will it be -

Rumsfeld: The war isn't over Tom. There are still people being killed. We lost some people last night. There are pockets of resistance. There are Fedayeen Saddam people--the death squad people who are going out trying to kill people. We just found, I don't know, I think it was 80 vests filled with explosives and ball bearings. And the inventory list suggested there were another 30 that are not there. So there are people - suicide types who are out. There are a number of non-Iraqis who are in the country, particularly in Baghdad we find.

Friedman: Are these from Syria?

Rumsfeld: A lot from Syria, most from Syria it appears.

Friedman: There were actually Syrian soldiers, or nationals, how would you describe them?

Rumsfeld: Nationals.

Friedman: Syrian nationals.

Rumsfeld: That's what we're told.

Friedman: Involved in operations against American forces?

Rumsfeld: Absolutely. In a firefight, a lot of them got killed last night.

Schieffer: What would they be? Intelligence agents or are they people there with some official tie to the government, or just people who just wandered in there?

Rumsfeld: I have no idea. People were busy fighting them. They weren't asking their biographies.

Schieffer: I understand.

Rumsfeld: We did see busloads of people coming out of Syria into the country. Some were stopped. The ones we could find, turned them around and sent them back. And some we impounded and put in enemy prisoner of war camps. And others are getting killed.

Friedman: Are the Syrians going to pay a price for this?

Schieffer: The reason I ask that - I mean it seems to me that people wouldn't just be sitting around in Syria and saying, "Gosh let's go over to Iraq." These people must've been sent there with a mission and they must've had some connection would you assume, to the Syrian government?

Rumsfeld: On one of the buses, they found something like several hundred thousand dollars and a number of leaflets that suggested that people would be rewarded if they killed Americans, which is not surprising. Saddam Hussein's regime was paying 25 thousand dollars to people who blew up shopping malls in Israel - suicide bombers.

Friedman: Is the Syrian government going to pay a price for this?

Rumsfeld: I'm sure they already are if you think about it. I mean who in the world would want to invest in Syria? Who would want to go into tourism in Syria? The government's making a lot of bad mistakes, a lot of bad judgment calls in my view and they are associating with the wrong people and the affect of that hurts the Syrian people. It hurts the Syrian people because reasonable people don't want to be associated with a state that's on a terrorist list. They don't to be associated with a country that's engaged with Hezbollah and moving terrorists down and terrorist materials, equipment, and explosives, down to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. They don't want to be associated with a country that's still occupying their neighboring country of Lebanon.

Schieffer: But is that enough, Mr. Secretary, just to be on the terrorist list? I mean, should we take some other action or contemplate some other action?

Rumsfeld: Oh, that's for Presidents and countries to decide, not for me.

Schieffer: What if we find out that Saddam Hussein is in Syria? That if he is indeed still alive, that he's there?

Rumsfeld: Then I think Syria would've made an even bigger mistake.

Schieffer: What would we do about that?

Rumsfeld: The last thing I would do would be to discuss that.

Friedman: Mr. Secretary, I want to take you back to, when the war's over. Let me rephrase my question. How do you see, because obviously you've learned some things now by this engagement with Iraq, the way the country has fallen out since the war. What kind of political structure do you see evolving? That is -- where will Tommy Franks and Central Command be? What kind of Iraqi input into this do you see happening? What will be the first steps in terms of the political reconstruction of Iraq? What are you expecting?

Rumsfeld: I would think of it this way, that it will be a transition that will occur over a period of time. There will be a number of things occurring near simultaneously. The first thing that has to be done is that the war has to be won. We have to stamp out these pockets of resistance that exist. We have then a great deal of work to go out and look for weapons of mass destruction and explore these sites and to find terrorists and the terrorist areas that we know of. We have to find people who can help us find these things, and who can find the Ba'ath Party records and the intelligence service records. And hope they haven't all been burned and destroyed. We have to find the people on the war criminal list and we have to find people who would like to have a better life and therefore would like to be willing to cooperate with us. And we're actively looking. We're using rewards. We're using carrots and sticks both. And we're finding an awful lot of people starting to cooperate with us, which is a good thing. So all of that work has to go forward. We have second, see that we provide the humanitarian needs for the people of that country. It's just terribly important that they have the water and the food and the medicines.

And we've got an excellent group of people organized and assisting and the international community is participating. And it's not perfect, but I know that our folks - President Bush from well before this started, once he believed it might have to happen, said he wanted the humanitarian effort to be right in parallel with the military effort. As a result, our forces when they went in brought water, brought food, brought medical supplies for the people as they passed from the South up to the North. The other thing that has to happen is that the Iraqi people have to figure out how they want to have their government selected and what kind of a constitution they want to have and what kind of a pace they want to have for that. It's going to be their decisions, not ours. And Tom Franks, needless to say, will be there and will see that the security environment is such that these kinds of things can happen. But, there will begin to be meetings of Iraqis, and they'll begin to figure out a way to fashion an interim Iraqi authority. And then they will very likely figure out a way to fashion a new constitution. And then that constitution will have a mechanism to select their permanent government and leadership. And it will happen as soon as is possible we hope. The Iraqi people - some people are skeptical of whether or not the Iraqi people are capable of self-government. I'm not, I think it may not be perfect, and certainly there's going to be some bumps along the road, but the Afghan people are figuring out how to do that. And they had a process that was uniquely Afghan and I suspect that the Iraqis will figure out something out that's uniquely Iraqi.

Schieffer: Go ahead Tom.

Friedman: Do you see an Arab role in terms of--we're going to have a security structure there under General Franks. Do you see possibly bringing in NATO or certain friendly Arab countries to participate in that peacekeeping role, once the war is won?

Rumsfeld: Well, I was with, I'm going to guess 50 Ambassadors from countries that have been a part of this coalition. It's kind of amusing when you think back everyone said the United States was acting unilaterally, and going it alone. We weren't, we had some 50 plus countries that have been participating and I was with many of them last night. And as they walked in and shook hands, they - one after the other said, our country is ready to supply three thousand people for a peacekeeping force. Our country's ready to supply a medical unit. We're ready to assist with this. We're ready to assist with that. And that process has been going forward. And it is accelerating at this stage and I do anticipate - I have said from the beginning that we -

Friedman: You anticipate - finish that sentence.

Rumsfeld: That there will be a great many countries that will be part of this process. There already are. Another country, Spain, has some troops on the ground in the port city of Umm Qasr, where you were recently.

Schieffer: Including Arab countries?

Rumsfeld: Sure. Why not, and certainly Muslim countries. NATO I've suggested to the Secretary General that I thought that would be a good thing. If NATO wanted to do that obviously France would be opposed I'm told. They are opposed to a lot of things so that shouldn't be a problem, because you can do it at 18 instead of at 19 countries since they're not a member of the defense planning committee. So I would hope that NATO would play a role. Some of the United Nations is playing a role and been very helpful and we expect that that will grow.

Schieffer: What about Germany?

Rumsfeld: I can't speak for any country.

Schieffer: I mean would they be welcome if they wanted to help?

Rumsfeld: Oh look, the needs there are real. We've got to find people who are willing to assist and I'm certainly hopeful that a lot of countries will participate in various ways.

Friedman: You know the French Foreign Minister today said that the time is not right for the United States to put pressure on Syria, by accusing it of aiding Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime. Do these guys piss you off?

Rumsfeld: The French?

Friedman: Yeah.

Rumsfeld: Oh goodness. I think I'll leave diplomacy to Secretary Powell.

Friedman: Why? (Laughter.) Why start now? (Laughter.)

Rumsfeld: You know, I'm always a believer that people ought to - sovereign nations and individuals ought to have their own views. And they ought to argue them and debate them and discuss them. And I think that's good. That's healthy. And I like debate and discussion and competition of ideas. I think that's healthy. I think what is not healthy is when a - someone tries to define themselves by their opposition to others as opposed to what they're for or what they're doing. And the comment that you just sited, suggests that the truth doesn't have any value. And the truth does have value. And the fact of the matter is that Syria has been unhelpful and pretending that that's not the case it strikes me, is to deny the truth. And I don't think you can live a lie.

Schieffer: Let me shift just a minute from diplomacy to intelligence matters. David Martin of CBS News has learned that the - that we have in custody, I guess is the word, of the head of the Iraqi Nuclear Program. Can you tell us anything about that?

Rumsfeld: I'm sure there are a number of people who have been or were involved at senior levels of the Iraqi Nuclear Program and I have been told that one of those individuals may be in custody, but I wouldn't want to get into who it was.

Schieffer: Well the name we have been given is Jafar dhia Jafar.

Rumsfeld: I'll let the people who do this announce names. I don't do that.

Schieffer: All right. One of the things that apparently he has told U.S. officials is that the Iraqi Nuclear Program ended in 1991.

Rumsfeld: That's been the standard mantra from the Iraqis over a sustained period of time.

Schieffer: Do you believe that?

Rumsfeld: Did you believe the Minister of Information of Iraq when he said there were U.S. forces in Baghdad?

Schieffer: No.

Rumsfeld: There hasn't been much that they've said that is believable. Anyone who's watched them over the years knows that they're liars, skillful to be sure. And they've been able to get the world's press to carry their lies around as though they were true without saying, "Be on notice. Caution. These people lie repeatedly." And it wasn't until they had the split screen with the U.S. forces at the Baghdad Airport and the Minister of Information saying they weren't there. That people said, "Oh my goodness he's lying. Isn't that amazing."

Schieffer: Let's take a break right there. We'll come back in just a moment.

Schieffer: Back again with the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Mr. Secretary, what is the latest on Saddam Hussein? Do we believe he's dead? Do we have DNA that if we do turn up a body we'll be able to identify it? Just tell us what you can tell us about the whole business of where he is or if you think he's dead.

Rumsfeld: Well, there isn't a day that goes by that we aren't given intelligence information. When I say intelligence - I shouldn't say that, it's scraps of information and it's this report or that report. And if you add it all up and inhale it I think reasonable people come to the conclusion that we don't know, that there are people who think he's dead, there are people who think he was badly injured, there are people who think he may be alive. I don't chase those rabbits. My attitude is we'll find out and eventually he'll be through, but ---

Schieffer: Do you think we'll ever know?

Rumsfeld: Sure.

Schieffer: We will know?

Rumsfeld: I think so.

Friedman: Mr. Secretary, in the vacuum that was naturally created between the collapse of this regime and a new order, obviously, there's been a lot of chaos, we've seen looting in all the major cities now. What are you doing now to secure that situation now? Are you sending more troops, are you devoting different units to secure different ministries now? There was a report in the Washington Post today that the oil ministry had been secured but the national museum hadn't, people are raising questions about that. What are you doing to secure the situation?

Rumsfeld: People raise questions about everything. That's fair enough. There have been more troops arriving in the country every day for the past three weeks, ever since they went in, three weeks and two days ago, additional troops have been arriving. They've been going up, oh, anywhere from fifteen hundred to thirty-five hundred a day and - ours and some other countries as well. They are also able as the war was being won and is in the process of succeeding, the troops have been spreading all across the country. There are places where we have a control in a way that people can go out in the streets and do what they do and start rebuilding their lives. There are places where we do not have that kind of control at the present time. And we do find that everywhere we do, when our terrific young men and women in uniform go into a town and create that presence, the security and see that there isn't anarchy, there's not disorder and that people can safely go out into the street, people are coming in and volunteering. They're volunteering to engage in joint patrols with our people, the clerics are calling for people to not loot, not riot, the humanitarian assistance flows in and the beginning of a return to a more normal situation is occurring and it's a good thing. And they're doing that in the south and they're doing it now in the north. There are patrols -- Baghdad, to be quite honest, is a very big place and that is not the case yet and that's sad, it's unfortunate. But it will be the case in very short order and that's a good thing.

Schieffer: Mr. Secretary, you talked to us a minute ago about the Iraqi information minister and some of these statements that they're putting out. A lot of the Arab world, as you well know, the information they get about this comes from Al Jazeera, the Arab television network. What do you think about -

Rumsfeld: I wouldn't say "the Arab" -

Schieffer: Well, one of them, it's certainly the main one.

Rumsfeld: It is one of many -

Schieffer: Do you believe Al Jazeera is anything more than an Arab television network?

Rumsfeld: It puts out television images in Arabic, in Arabic language and I don't watch it carefully. People who do tell me that it has a pattern of being anti-U.S., anti-West and I've also seen pieces of information that suggests that they're influenced by people like Saddam Hussein's regime.

Schieffer: Do you have any information that would lead you to believe that it goes beyond being influenced, that perhaps they've been infiltrated by Saddam's people?

Rumsfeld: Oh, I've seen allegations to that effect, but I don't watch it so I can't speak from certain knowledge.

It's unfortunate that the people of the world don't see as open and accurate a set of images in Arabic as I think they might and anything that can be done about that is a good thing. I think the free press and free television and the opportunity for people to do things badly and to do things well and to gain supporters and listenership when they do it well, and lose it when they lie and don't have balance, I think that's the answer to it.

Schieffer: What lessons should North Korea and its leaders draw from what they are seeing on television in Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Oh, I think the circumstances are quite different. But the United States is attempting to see if there isn't a way to deal with this problem from a diplomatic standpoint. It's a terrible risk to the world that if North Korea does in fact go through the reprocessing of nuclear materials and end up with sufficient materials to make six or eight more weapons in three or four, five months, that would be not a good thing. If they started selling that material to countries around the world and we ended up with a large increase in the total number of nuclear powers in the world, that's not a happy place.

Schieffer: Would we stand for that?

Rumsfeld: That's up to other people.

But I think what the world needs to do is recognize that these weapons are enormously powerful -- biological weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, radiation weapons -- and that they can kill tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of human beings and that's a risk to the world.

And the idea that those things could get in the hands of additional terrorist states, terrorist networks is something that the world needs to grasp. And I think that the like-thinking countries in the world, free people need to -- international organizations and collectively -- recognize how serious that threat is and -

Schieffer: Are you still convinced we will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Oh my goodness, there's been so much intelligence, CIA material about what's been going on in that country that if we can find the right people who will tell us where they've located them then that's the way we're going to find them. Inspectors didn't find them and certainly we're not going to find them. It's not like a treasure hunt when you run around and dig down and see if there's a tunnel some place. You've got to find the people who dug the tunnels, the people who've worked in those operations.

Schieffer: And you think we will?

Rumsfeld: I do.

Schieffer: All right. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much.

Rumsfeld: Thank you.

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Rumsfeld cracks jokes, but Iraqis aren't laughing
Lawrence Smallman April 12, 2003
At a Pentagon briefing, the US defence secretary faced questions about the rapidly deteriorating security situation, amid calls by aid agencies to allow them to do their job.

"Stuff happens," came the Rumsfeld reply.

"It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," his adroit fingers this time pointing at no particular member of the press. Lawlessness, closed hospitals and fires burning in Baghdad and other cities are a freed people venting their frustrations, apparently.

If ever an Oscar was deserved for minimizing catastrophic reports coming out of Iraq with jocular "henny penny" disbelief, then Rumsfeld has a date with Hollywood.

"Television is merely running the same footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over," he joked, adding he didn't think there were that many vases in Iraq. The US may be the strongest nation in the world, but their history is incomparable to that of Iraq - a region that has been described as the cradle of civilization.

Flippant remarks cannot replace priceless artefacts that have disappeared from the National Museum in Baghdad, or the books of the University of Mosul - one of the oldest and best universities in the whole of the Middle East.

But Secretary Rumsfeld has "a lot of confidence in the American people" not to believe TV footage from Iraq. Widespread theft across Iraq, reported in every language on screens worldwide, is an acceptable expression of freedom and really just the same picture shown again and again, he claimed. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera correspondents in Tikrit, Mosul, Basra and Baghdad confirm that US troops are still just watching looters steal private property and destroy any feelings of public safety.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and World Health Organizations issued appeals today to the US and British military to restore order, as the Geneva Convention requires.

US and British commanders say they don't have the troops to do this, or play a policing role. President Bush reinforced Rumsfeld's view on Friday, saying that "out of chaos that takes place there now ... the Iraqi people will run their own country."

"I reminded them that war in Iraq is really about peace," said Bush. "This victory in Iraq, when it happens, will make the world more peaceful." Iraqis who have been starved by sanctions for 12 years, bombed for three weeks and now robbed for three days must be beginning to wonder when this peace will begin.

"Tommy tells us what is necessary to achieve the objective. We gave Tommy the tools necessary to win," said Bush. "And when Tommy says we've achieved our objectives, that's when we've achieved our objectives. The war will end when Tommy says we've achieved our objectives.'' Let’s hope Tommy decides to impose some law and order soon.

"Freedom is a gift from the Almighty God," President Bush added, failing to define what General Frank’s objectives were, when asked.

At the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld said the US does feel an obligation to assist in providing security: "We're looking for the police" in Iraqi towns and villages, he added. Concerns expressed before the war look likely to be fulfilled, those best able to police Iraq now might be those who have had the most experience - namely Ba’athists and supporters of the old regime. Calling into question, the logic of much of the war.

Appeals for quick solutions may exacerbate a terrible problem. US troops "should be doing something because (the chaos) destroys our image as the liberators and the people who are going to bring a new order to Iraq," foreign affairs analyst Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution in Washington. It’s not nice for Iraqi civilians either.

There has been some crucial action to bring peace. Central Command in Qatar said it was issuing decks of `Saddam regime' cards to troops to help them spot Saddam and his supporters - showing a US-blacklisted 55 personalities. The American military has also rushed to dispatch 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's oilfields, which will alleviate Turkish political concerns - though probably not aid Kurdish interests.

The Pentagon has also been busy, admitting yesterday that it had awarded - without competition - a contract worth up to $7 billion, to the subsidiary of a company run until three years ago by Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Democrat Representative Henry Waxman of California, from the government reform committee, called for an investigation into the deal with oil services giant Halliburton, saying he could understand the contract if it had been issued in an emergency.

"But it's harder to understand what the rationale would be for a sole-source contract that has a multi-year duration and multi-billion-dollar price tag," he said. --Al Jazeera

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Despite fall of Iraq regime, anti-war groups keep on marching
Yahoo News April 12, 2003
PARIS (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of opponents of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq held new anti-war protests across Europe and the Americas, arguing that the regime's collapse was no reason to let up the pressure.

Possibly the biggest European showing was half a million protesters on the streets of Rome, according to organisers, while a similar number turned out across Spain.

Even in central Washington thousands gathered to blast the US toppling of Iraq's Saddam Hussein as the first in a series of occupation wars.

"This is not about liberation, it's about the occupation of Iraq and the plundering of its natural resources," said Dustin Langley, a volunteer with the protest's sponsor, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, or ANSWER.

"We're calling to stop this series of endless wars, to stop this occupation of Iraq and the Middle East," he said, adding that the "axis of evil" fingered by US President George W. Bush more than a year ago was no more than a "list of targets."

In London, tens of thousands rallied even as the first British troops were set to pull out of the Gulf.

"It is clear the war is not over," said Andrew Murray, chairman of Britain's Stop the War Coalition: "There are still people being killed and we will also emphasize our opposition to occupation."

In Paris, more than 10,000 rallied behind a banner: "Iraq to the Iraqis".

In Rome, crowds swelled to half a million according to unofficial estimates.

"The war is over in its most obvious form as a classic means of destruction," said Fausto Bertinotti, Secretary-General of Italy's Refounded Communist Party (PRC):

"But it continues as low intensity conflict and a strategic hypothesis of world domination by means of preventive war as conceived by (US President George W.) Bush."

Italian pacifists with banners reading: "Stop Esso war," demonstrated peacefully at gas stations of the American ExxonMobil oil group in protest at it getting a 48 million-dollar contract to supply fuel to US military in Iraq.

One told Italian television: "We're glad the Saddam Hussein regime has fallen, but it wasn't necessary to impose this conflict and this humiliation on the Iraqis."

In Florence, three parties in Italy's government coalition paraded in support of US policy in line with government support for Washington, with banners reading: "The French are cowards."

France has strongly opposed intervention in Iraq.

In Paris, banners read: "Stop the occupation of Iraq" and "Yes to a democratic and independent Iraq." Protesters chanted "US go home!"

"We're very glad to be rid of Saddam, but we don't trust the Americans," said Mazin Yassine from Baghdad: "...We don't want a new dictator."

Three men were arrested for possessing anti-Semitic placards inciting to racial hatred, police said.

In the Spanish city of Barcelona, more than 200,000 people turned out.

They chanted "Aznar resign!" in protest at Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's support for the American line on Iraq despite its rejection by the vast majority of the Spanish public.

Some 200,000 took to the streets of the capital Madrid, organisers said.

Smaller demonstrations involving thousands were held in other cities.

In London protestors held a moment of silence in Parliament Square at the Houses of Parliament.

Organisers said 100,000 rallied against Prime Minister Tony Blair's support for the war, with the crowd chanting "Blair calls it liberation, it looks to us like occupation."

British film director Ken Loach said: "We have to stop the occupation. This is illegal. This is against international law."

Saturday's march was the third held in London in recent weeks over the Iraqi conflict. On February 15, more than one million people took to the streets and on March 22 between 200,000 and 700,000 protested.

In Berlin anti-war protesters carried a banner reading "Peace before occupation" to the Brandenburg Gate, once the symbol of the division of Germany and Europe.

Police put the turnout at some 15,000.

The scene was different in Kuwait City -- invaded by Saddam Hussein's troops in 1990 -- where demonstrators expressed gratitude for the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.

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Iraq National Museum Treasures Plundered
By HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press Writer Yahoo News April 12, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The famed Iraq National Museum, home of extraordinary Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections and rare Islamic texts, sat empty Saturday - except for shattered glass display cases and cracked pottery bowls that littered the floor.

In an unchecked frenzy of cultural theft, looters who pillaged government buildings and businesses after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime also targeted the museum. Gone were irreplaceable archaeological treasures from the Cradle of Civilization.

Everything that could be carried out has disappeared from the museum - gold bowls and drinking cups, ritual masks worn in funerals, elaborately wrought headdresses, lyres studded with jewels - priceless craftsmanship from ancient Mesopotamia.

"This is the property of this nation and the treasure of 7,000 years of civilization. What does this country think it is doing?" asked Ali Mahmoud, a museum employee, futility and frustration in his voice.

Much of the looting occurred Thursday, according to a security guard who stood by helplessly as hoards broke into the museum with wheelbarrows and carts and stole priceless jewelry, clay tablets and manuscripts.

Left behind were row upon row of empty glass cases - some smashed up, others left intact - heaps of crumbled pottery and hunks of broken statues scattered across the exhibit floors.

Sensing its treasures could be in peril, museum curators secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and placed them into storage vaults - but to no avail. The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything was taken, museum workers said. That lead one museum employee to suspect that others familiar with the museum may have participated in the theft.

"The fact that the vaults were opened suggests that employees of the museum may have been involved," said the employee, who declined to be identified. "To ordinarily people, these are just stones. Only the educated know the value of these pieces."

Gordon Newby, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said the museum's most famous holding may have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code - one of mankind's earliest codes of law. It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.

Other treasures believed to be housed at the museum - such as the Ram in the Thicket from Ur, a statue representing a deity from 2600 BC - are no doubt gone, perhaps forever, he said.

"This is just one of the most tragic things that could happen for our being able to understand the past," Newby said. The looting, he said, "is destroying the history of the very people that are there."

John Russell, a professor of art history and archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art, feared for the safety of the staff of Iraq's national antiquities department, also housed at the museum; for irreplaceable records of every archaeological expedition in Iraq since the 1930s; for perhaps hundreds of thousands of artifacts from 10,000 years of civilization, both on display and in storage.

Among them, he said, was the copper head of an Akkadian king, at least 4,300 years old. Its eyes were gouged out, nose flattened, ears and beard cut off, apparently by subjects who took their revenge on his image - much the same way as Iraqis mutilated statues of Saddam.

"These are the foundational cornerstones of Western civilization," Russell said, and are literally priceless - which he said will not prevent them from finding a price on the black market.

Some of the gold artifacts may be melted down, but most pieces will find their way into the hands of private collectors, he said.

The chances of recovery are slim; regional museums were looted after the 1991 Gulf War, and 4,000 pieces were lost.

"I understand three or four have been recovered," he said.

Samuel Paley, a professor of classics at the State University of New York, Buffalo, predicted whatever treasures aren't sold will be trashed.

The looters are "people trying to feed themselves," said Paley, who has spent years tracking Assyrian reliefs previously looted from Nimrud in Northern Iraq. "When they find there's no market, they'll throw them away. If there is a market, they'll go into the market."

Koichiro Matsuura, head of the U.N.'s cultural agency, UNESCO, on Saturday urged American officials to send troops to protect what was left of the museum's collection, and said the military should step in to stop looting and destruction at other key archaeological sites and museums.

The governments of Russia, Jordan and Greece also voiced deep concern about the looting. Jordan urged the United Nations to take steps to protect Iraq's historic sites, a "national treasure for the Iraqi people and an invaluable heritage for the Arab and Islamic worlds."

Some blamed the U.S. military, though coalition forces say they have taken great pains to avoid damage to cultural and historical sites.

A museum employee, reduced to tears after coming to the museum Saturday and finding her office and all administrative offices trashed by looters, said: "It is all the fault of the Americans. This is Iraq's civilization. And it's all gone now." She refused to give her name.

McGuire Gibson, a University of Chicago professor and president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, was infuriated. He said he had been in frequent and frantic touch with U.S. military officials since Wednesday, imploring them to send troops "in there and protect that building."

The Americans could have prevented the looting, agreed Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities.

"It was completely inexcusable and avoidable," she said.

The museum itself was battered. Its marble staircase was chipped, likely by looters using pushcarts or heavy slabs of wood to carry booty down from the second floor. The museum is in the Al-Salhiya neighborhood of Baghdad, with its back to a poor neighborhood.

Early Saturday, five armed men showed up at the gate: One was armed with a Kalashnikov, three carried pistols, one wielded an iron bar. The man with the assault rifle walked into the museum, accused journalists there of stealing artifacts and ordered them to leave.

He claimed to be there to protect the museum from plundering. One of the men said he was a member of the feared Fedayeen Saddam militia.

"You think Saddam is now gone, so you can do what you like," he raged.

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War planned 'long in advance'
News24.com April 9, 2003
Madrid - The invasion of Iraq was planned a long time in advance, and the United States and Britain are not primarily concerned with finding any banned weapons of mass destruction, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said in an interview on Wednesday.

"There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections," Blix told Spanish daily El Pais.

"I now believe that finding weapons of mass destruction has been relegated, I would say, to fourth place, which is why the United States and Britain are now waging war on Iraq.

Today the main aim is to change the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein," he said, according to the Spanish text of the interview.

Blix said US President George W Bush had told him in October 2002 that he backed the UN's work to verify US and British claims that Baghdad was developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Washington 'less convinced now'

But he said he knew at the time "there were people within the Bush administration who were sceptical and who were working on engineering regime change". By the start of March the hawks in both Washington and London were getting impatient, he added.

Blix said that he thought the US might initially have believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction - although its "fabrication" of evidence raised doubts about even that - but that Washington was now less convinced by its own claims.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some. I think they now believe less in that possibility.

But I don't know - you ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try and demonstrate that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger," he explained.

That was a reference to US allegations - later denied - that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from the west African state of Niger.

"I'm very curious to see if they do find any (weapons)," he said.

Blix said the war, which on Wednesday entered its 21st day, was "a very high price to pay in terms of human lives and the destruction of a country" when the threat of weapons proliferation could have been contained by UN inspections.

By attacking Iraq, Washington had sent the wrong message - that if a country did not possess biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, it risked being attacked.

US sending out the wrong signal

"The United States maintains that the war on Iraq is designed to send a signal to other countries to keep away from weapons of mass destruction.

But people are getting a different message.

Take the announcement North Korea has just made. It's tantamount to saying 'if you let in the inspectors, like Iraq did, you get attacked'.

North Korea accused the United States on Sunday of using a UN Security Council discussion of its nuclear programme as a "prelude to war" and warned that it would fully mobilise and strengthen its forces.

"It's an important problem," Blix continued.

"If a country perceives that its security is guaranteed, it won't need to consider weapons of mass destruction. This security guarantee is the first line of defence against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The 74-year-old Swede announced in March that he would step down from his post when his contract runs out in June.

Blix's reputation for independence and resisting political pressure was sorely tested as the Iraq crisis unfolded and US officials became exasperated with his measured reports on Iraqi cooperation with his inspection teams.

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Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after
The Independent April 11, 2003
Arson, anarchy, fear, hatred, hysteria, looting, revenge, savagery, suspicion and a suicide bombing
It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag - flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section - as a mob of middle-aged men, women in chadors and screaming children rifled through the consul's office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later.

At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of each other and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition across the floors.

The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty – seem to have a different idea of what liberation means.

American control of the city is, at best, tenuous - a fact underlined after several marines were killed last night by a suicide bomber close to the square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on Wednesday, in the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.

Throughout the day, American forces had fought gun battles with Saddam loyalists, said to be fighters from other Arab countries. And, for more than four hours, marines were in firefights at the Imam al-Adham mosque in the Aadhamiya district of central Baghdad after rumours, later proved untrue, that Saddam Hussein and senior members of his regime had taken flight there.

As the occupying power, America is responsible for protecting embassies and UN offices in their area of control but, yesterday, its troops were driving past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the front gate.

It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that American troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, I saw US Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters - two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators - blocked the highway beneath.

Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth visiting because "we've already taken everything". Understandably, the poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam's regime who have impoverished and destroyed their lives, sometimes quite literally, for more than two decades.

I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a former defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid - "Chemical" Ali who gassed the Kurds and was killed last week in Basra - and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys to make off with the contents of these massive villas.

It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the gutted home of one former minister of interior, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still lay dead at the wheel.

But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children were used to unscrew door hinges and - in the UN offices - to remove light fittings. One even stood on the ambassador's desk to take a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.

On the other side of the Saddam bridge, an even more surreal sight could be observed. A truck loaded down with chairs also had the two white hunting dogs that belonged to Saddam's son Qusay tethered by two white ropes, galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I caught a glimpse of four of Saddam's horses - including the white stallion he had used in some presidential portraits - being loaded on to a trailer. Tariq Aziz's villa was also looted, right down to the books in his library.

Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files, computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted? And what is one to make of the scene on the Hillah road yesterday where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate and armed attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks - doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown are 200 metres from a US Marine checkpoint.

And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army of occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers - in front of other civilians, including women - to prove they were not suicide bombers.

After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt – then shot and killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place.

Meanwhile, in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians - many of them killed by US troops in battle earlier in the week - lay rotting in their still-smouldering cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the "liberation" of Baghdad.

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The Iraqi killing fields
By Pepe Escobar Asia Times April 10, 2003
AMMAN - "We know we don't target journalists," said the US Central Command (CentCom) in Qatar. Contrary to CentCom's assertions, non-embedded journalists know that they have been targeted.

It was inevitable. When it finally happened, it was like clockwork. Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul was incinerated by four missiles in the 2001 ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan. True to CentCom form, al-Jazeera's office in Baghdad was hit by a Tomahawk this week in the invasion of Iraq - even though the Qatari network had offered its global positioning system (GPS) position to the Pentagon in late February.

Correspondent-producer Tariq Ayyoub, 35, Jordanian, father of an infant girl, was killed and a photographer was wounded. The Abu Dhabi TV office in Baghdad was hit by an Abrams tank - although they have been broadcasting from the same building for three years now. Another Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, near Tahir square: even Mesopotamian desert rats know that this is where virtually all the Western and Asian journalists in Baghdad stay: A Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters and a Spanish cameraman for Telecinco were killed, and four other journalists were wounded.

France 3 television broadcast footage of the turret of the Abrams tank, positioned on the west margin of the Tigris, at least 300 meters away from the Palestine, moving in the direction of the hotel and taking its time to aim and shoot. The official American version - that they were threatened by sniper fire coming from the hotel - was universally dismissed. Asia Times Online was among many to confirm that no journalists who were in the open doing live feeds for TV reported hearing any sniper fire or rocket launchers being fired from the hotel. As Sky TV's David Chater put it, the shell "was aimed directly at this hotel and directly at journalists. This wasn't an accident, it seems to be a very accurate shot."

There's a problem with the absolute majority of the journalists in Baghdad - surreptitiously betrayed by the rhetoric emanating from US CentCom in Qatar. They are non-embedded. "Unilaterals" - non-embedded journalists - may be mistaken for "legitimate" targets by the Pentagon: or rather "targets of opportunity". They can be bombed because of their annoying Thuraya satellite telephones with GPS. They can be beaten - like a group of Portuguese journalists in southern Iraq. They can be humiliated at will, just because they are able to think independently, or they are also reporting the Iraqi side, or they are not telling the official, sanitized, Pentagon-censored story of the carnage in Iraq.

Even diplomatic convoys are not immune. Alexander Minakov, a reporter for Russian TV who was involved in Sunday's incident when a Russian convoy with 10 diplomats and 10 journalists was trying to leave Baghdad towards Damascus, confirmed that they were targeted by M-16 rifles, standard equipment for American soldiers and marines. According to the Russian ambassador, Vladimir Titorenko, speaking to the Itar-Tass agency, "A column of American armored vehicles suddenly blocked our way. There were tanks, APCs and mobile gun mounts. Our convoy led by my car under the Russian flag stopped but they suddenly opened fire. All the attempts to leave the cars and explain the situation were thwarted by bursts from automatic weapons," said Titorenko. Several grenades were hurled at the cars. Four people were wounded and the ambassador's driver was seriously wounded in the stomach. American officials predictably denied any responsibility.

The attack on the Palestine hotel has been vehemently condemned all over the world. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) says that it is a possible war crime, or at least "a grave and serious violation of international law". IFJ general secretary Aidan White stressed that "the bombing of hotels where journalists are staying and targeting of Arab media are particularly shocking events in a war which is being fought in the name of democracy".

While Arab satellite channels are showing the tragic reality of war, American corporate media - also available by satellite all over the Middle East - all but totally ignores the suffering of the Iraqi people. Torrents of abuse in America are directed against Arab and European news outlets that publish and broadcast the real extent of the carnage and human suffering that is being inflicted on civilians.

In this context, the bombing of al-Jazeera could not but please the neoconservatives in Washington. Carnage it is. The American advance has been described as the "infernal column" by Yves Debay, a war correspondent for the military affairs magazine Raids who observed the US modus operandi at very close range: "They organize columns of 40 to 50 armored vehicles. Up front, M1 Abrams tanks, followed by Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees. They roll with two tanks up front, occupying the whole road. They shoot everything in sight, everything suspicious. It's 'fire at will'. They love shooting Saddam portraits with 25 mm cannons. They have no fire discipline. The initiative is left to the soldiers, 20-year-old kids. That's the reason why they also shoot civilians. An European army would never behave like this. By better controlling its troops, the British army kills considerably less civilians." Debay's observations are corroborated by what happened at the Palestine: crucial tactical decisions are left to low-level local tank commanders.

On his way to Baghdad from Mahmudiyah, Debay saw dozens of burning civilian vehicles, all of their passengers dead. He volunteers an explanation for the indiscriminate killing: "They [the Americans] have two problems. They are still taking revenge for September 11, and there are no sanctions when a soldier kills a civilian. Their objective is not to kill civilians, but they behave like cowboys. They even shoot cows ... I have the impression it's a way to mask their fear. They are very afraid. And it gets worse every time they sustain losses."

The American superiority in technology, mobility and firepower is overwhelming beyond comprehension - also considering that Iraq's military capability had been totally smashed in 1991, plus the 12 years of debilitating United Nations sanctions. The road to Baghdad for the advancing American troops was cleared by a devastating combination of B-52 carpet-bombing, artillery barrages and strafing by Apache helicopters. Initially, the killing in Baghdad had no military objective, or was not about taking or holding ground (CentCom briefing). Even after Monday's spectacular foray into the National Parade Ground and Saddam's palaces in Baghdad, the rhetoric remained the same.

Now territory in central Baghdad has indeed been taken: the Americans control large swaths of the west bank of the Tigris (echoes of Israel controlling large areas of the West Bank in Palestine). So the rhetoric has changed to "targets of opportunity". Like the bombing of houses of Iraqi Christians (at least eight civilians dead), or the blitz with four satellite-guided 900-kilogram bombs of the famous al-Sa'a restaurant in the al-Mansour residential district (at least 14 civilians dead) where Saddam Hussein and his sons "might" have been - according to a web of 37 American satellites plus "human intelligence" on the ground. The satellites and the intelligence failed. Behind the al-Sa'a there is now a huge crater 10 meters deep and 15 meters wide, and the families of residents Abdel Massyah and Salman Daoud are buried under the rubble.

Outside the five-star al-Rashid hotel, a Reuters photographer said that the marines on Monday were firing indiscriminately on civilians and militias: he has bullet holes in his car to prove it. "Human intelligence" on the ground in Baghdad has revealed to Asia Times Online that the rate of casualties in the city could be anywhere from 100 to 500 Iraqis to each American. Even though the resistance is now minimal, the carnage will go on because although the Americans have practically encircled Baghdad they don't have enough troops to control a sprawling city of 5 million-plus inhabitants.

The military plan is to divide the city in pockets and secure it pocket by pocket - with overwhelming support of F/A-18s, A-10 tankbusters and Apache helicopters, now flying very low because there's absolutely no air defense left in Baghdad to speak of. If it looks and sounds like a deadly video game, that's because it is: even American generals are describing it as an aerial form of house-to-house fighting. The main victims are, of course, Iraqi civilians.

Popular reaction has been graphic. The Bush administration, the Pentagon and the breathless, embedded cheerleaders of American corporate media are ecstatic. The whole planet is horrified. By watching those images of the proud cradle of human civilization reduced to Fourth World status, anybody that is not a military expert may understand that the only thing left for the "poor bastards" - as the marines call them - absolutely unable to resist overwhelming military force, is to resort to guerrilla and suicide attacks. History shows that this is how occupied lands and peoples have always reacted. Extraordinary footage by the Capa photo agency shows a group of ragged teenagers with rocket launchers trying to retake a bridge from Abrams tanks: the operation takes a few minutes, and half of the bunch is left soaking in pools of blood.

All over Baghdad, the city's five main hospitals simply cannot cope with an avalanche of civilian casualties. Doctors can't get to the hospitals because of the bombing. Dr Osama Saleh-al-Duleimi, at the al-Kindi hospital, confirms the absolute majority of patients are women and children, victims of bullets, shrapnel and most of all, fragments of cluster bombs: "They are all civilians," he says, "caught in aerial and artillery bombardment."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is in a state of almost desperation. Its spokesman, Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, contacted by satellite telephone, still mentions casualties arriving at hospitals at a rate of as many as 100 per hour and at least 100 per day. This correspondent has been to many Baghdad hospitals: after fighting 12 years of sanctions and a list of as many as 500-prohibited items, it's a miracle that they barely remained functional. In a city now with no regular phones, no electricity and practically no water, they are all operating on generators. One of the larger hospitals has no power and no water at all. Getting clean water for the patients remains a nightmare. Anaesthetics, antibiotics and insulin are almost gone. The hospitals are running out of blood, beds, everything.

The victims of the blitz are inevitably the young and the poor. How many? Even the ICRC cannot determine it yet: hospital doctors talk about hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded. Dr Sadek al-Mukhtar has seen it all in terms of death and destruction. He is adamant: "Before the war I did not regard America as my enemy. Now I do. There are military and there are civilians. War should be against the military. America is killing civilians." Fifty percent of Iraq's population of 24 million is under 15. Malnutrition is endemic. The majority of families depend on state food rations - the meager standard package of flour, rice, tea, cooking oil and soap - and rations should run out by next month.

A-10 tankbusters have fired the hungry, terrified Baghdadis with depleted uranium rounds - the surefire way to win their hearts and minds. There may be some scenes of jubilation with the marines coming to town - basically in the huge Shi'ite Saddam City slum, bursting with more than 2 million people who have been frustrated and oppressed for so long by the Sunni-dominated Saddam regime.
But these desperately poor and angry masses want food.They want water. They don't necessarily want to see marines in tanks for more than a day or two. Eastern Baghdad is in total anarchy. But there's still fighting. And people are not only scared - or involved in looting. They are suffering. One just needs to ask 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas. His father, his five-month-old pregnant mother, his brother, his aunt, three cousins and three other relatives were incinerated by a missile in Diala, eastern Baghdad. He is now an orphan, he is terribly burned and he has lost both his arms. He wants to be a doctor. "But how can I? I lost both hands." George W Bush can always say that at least he has been "liberated".

(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
#

US-backed militia terrorises town
By Charles Clover in Najaf Financial Times April 8, 2003
Hay Al Ansar, on the outskirts of Najaf in Iraq, was glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party government, when the city was seized by US forces last week.

But they appear to be just as terrified, if not more so, of their new rulers - a little-known Iraqi militia backed by the US special forces and headquartered in a compound nearby.

The Iraqi Coalition of National Unity (ICNU), which appeared in the city last week riding on US special forces vehicles, has taken to looting and terrorising their neighbourhood with impunity, according to most residents.

"They steal and steal," said a man living near the Medresa al Tayif school, calling himself Abu Zeinab. "They threaten us, saying: 'We are with the Americans, you can do nothing to us'."

Sa'ida al Hamed, another resident, said she witnessed looting by the ICNU and other armed gangs in the city, which lost its police force when the government fled last week. One man told a US army translator on Monday that he was taken out of his house and beaten by ICNU forces when he refused to give them his car. They took it anyway.

If true, the testimony of residents reveals a darker side to US policy in Iraq. In their distaste for peacekeeping and eagerness to hand the ruling of Iraq back to Iraqis, US forces are in danger of losing the peace as rapidly as they have won the war.

US special forces said they were looking into the complaints, which had been passed to them by US military sources. They declined, however, to discuss the formation of the group, how its members were chosen, or who they were.

The head of the ICNU, who says he is a former colonel in the Iraqi artillery forces who has been working with the underground opposition since 1996, announced on Tuesday that he was acting mayor of Najaf, and his group had taken over administration of the city.

Other Iraqi exiles, brought in by the CIA and US special forces to help assemble a local government over the next few days, say the militia is out of control.

"They are nobody, and nobody has ever heard of them, all they have is US backing," said an Arab journalist.

Abu Zeinab said the ICNU "has no basis in this city, we don't know who they are". He said the residents, who are predominantly Shia Muslims, followed only Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, leader of much of the Shia world, who lives in the city.

Ayatollah Sistani has so far refused to meet representatives of US forces and has made no public pronouncements on co-operating with the US military. Associates say he is "waiting for the situation to become clearer".

Hassan Mussawi, a Shia cleric who helps lead the ICNU, said reports of looting by his group were untrue - fabricated by religious extremists to discredit his movement.

He said his group was seeking to arrest former Iraqi government officials and "collaborators" with Mr Hussein's regime.

"If they do not resist arrest we hand them over to the Americans. If they resist then we take measures accordingly."

The allegations against the ICNU threaten to undermine much of the goodwill built up by US forces among the citizens of Najaf, who still cheer troops driving through the city. In an effort to curb rampant looting, US forces have begun to patrol at night.

They will not be undertaking police functions, but "if we come upon looting, we will try to control the situation and disperse those doing the looting," said Lt Col Marcus De Oliveira, of the 101st Airborne Division.

The city's political rivalries appear to be affecting humanitarian assistance. US special forces have objected to certain Shia leaders distributing food aid, for fear of their ties to Iran.

Sixteen truckloads of food from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society is being distributed according to a ration plan drawn up by the Iraqi Ministry of Commerce for the United Nation's oil for food programme.

US forces are also trying to get running water and power returned to the city, by bringing in a 2.5MW generator from Kuwait to restart the city's power plant, which was shut off by Iraqi forces.

Hussein Chilabi, father of a family of six in Chilabat, on the outskirts of Najaf, said that until running water was restored, his family would have to drink from canals. "The children are sick in their stomachs from drinking this water. We need running water more than food, more than anything right now."

#

Descent into a charnel-house hospital hell
The Sydney Morning Herald April 10, 2003
A searing visit to a trauma ward has Paul McGeough questioning the very essence of humanity.
  
There's a man who goes up to his roof terrace every time the fighting starts. Often in his underwear, he watches with his hands spread nonchalantly on the parapet wall.

In a vegetable patch down by the Tigris River, a family of gardeners always crane their necks to see what is happening as the F/A-18s, usually in pairs, wheel in from the south.

And now, a Vespa motor scooter is careering erratically down Abu Nuwas Street - its rider with his face turned to the sky as an Iraqi surface-to-air missile whistles off in pursuit of a United States fighter jet.

The plane is so low I can count the missiles clipped to its wings - five. The SAM seems to be catching up; the jet does an evasive belly roll, clears the area, takes a new bead on the high-rise that the pilot and his colleagues are trying to demolish, and fires. It's a direct hit.

Baghdad is gripped by a fatalism about life and death. People can't run, so sometimes they don't even bother to hide as the world's most ferocious firepower is turned on a sprawling city with a defenceless civilian population of five million.

The instinctive reaction of parents is to get their children out of the city. Some are even making them walk to the country. But Wael Sabah was stuck in Baladiyat, on the city's far eastern flank where, neighbours say, she thought her children were out of harm's way.

But their descent deep into hell starts the second the pilot in a low-flying F/A-18 pulled the trigger, unleashing a missile that rips apart their home and their lives.

Tiny 12-year-old Noor, her long black plait a tangle of blood and dust, is dead; in the next cubicle in the Kindi Hospital trauma ward, her younger brother, Abdel Khader, is dead; and across the way, their mother is dying in a sea of her own blood.

If it is possible to have a nightmare within a nightmare, Kindi Hospital is it. The horror of war in Baghdad is distressing, but it is not possible to walk into this hospital without questioning the very essence of humanity as we think we know it.

Kindi has too much death and too much pain. It doesn't have enough medical staff, drugs and equipment; it's running out of body bags and clean water is dependent on electricity in a city of day-long blackouts.

Patients facing emergency surgery can have only 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, the same amount an Australian doctor might prescribe for muscle pain, and there is a critical shortage of anaesthetics. They have resorted to making their own fracture-fixing frames with lengths of steel and moulding clay.

Hygiene is poor - the wards and emergency rooms are filthy and because its laundry has been forced to close by the blackouts, doctors are making do with torn gowns instead of towels and wipes.

Patients keep arriving in a procession of racing ambulances, muddied utilities and battered taxis. An army of exhausted, weepy support staff help them on to trolleys, scattering the flies that feed on the blood of the last patient.

And dozens of relatives stand in the shadows of the forecourt, consoling each other about the dead and waiting for news on the half-dead. Men cry openly, uncontrollably; women wail, clutching each other for support.

Anger at the West occasionally becomes violent. Guns have been cocked and punches thrown at foreign reporters seen to be intruding on Iraqi grief.

A woman drops to the floor in the waiting area, screaming her 12-year-old son's name: "Feran! Feran! Tell me where he is!" Another son tries to console her, assuring her that he is merely wounded after an air strike on their neighbourhood, and that he's going to be fine.

But Feran had just been declared dead on arrival at Kindi.

A utility races in - lights on, horn blaring. On the back, an old man sobs broken-heartedly. He cradles a small boy who seems lifeless, his eyes peering blankly from pools of his own blood; the rose-coloured stain on his white shirt is getting bigger and his tongue hangs from his mouth in a foamy mess.

His head is split open but there is no time to learn his story. He is wheeled into the hospital. A medical team takes one look at him, decides he needs services they can't provide and he is wheeled back out; into an ambulance that screeches off through the hospital gates, to another medical centre.

The utility gives chase, with the man on the back still in tears. And nobody has time for the two corpses next to him which have been locked in an intimate embrace by the movement of the vehicle.

Kindi's 12 operating theatres are in use around the clock. A haggard and tearful Dr Tarib Al Saddi stands outside the hospital, trying to have a break, hoping to compose himself as the wind whips at his soiled white coat.

"I have done 12 operations today - crushings, fractures and amputations. You see that these Americans are hitting civilians - their homes, their streets, their cars and even those who walk about. They hit anyone. One of the ambulance drivers says they have struck Al Yarmuk Hospital, so now we worry about a strike here."

Lips quivering and cheeks stained by his own tears, Dr Al Saddi goes on: "Everyone is anxious and angry, maybe I'm the only calm one here."

He locks onto a disconsolate woman in black, slumped against a wall. He makes me look at her beautiful face, into her tragic eyes, and says: "She was driving in the car with her 23-year-old son. They put a bullet in the head because he failed to stop at an American check-point."

The woman cuts in: "He was innocent. We were on our way home. Why do the Americans do this? God forgive them!"

Dr Al Saadi asks: "How can anyone who comes to liberate a country do this - lacerate and destroy our people? Do they really think that somehow after a few days this woman will love them?"

There is little talk of Saddam Hussein here.

Hazem Mohammed Jabeel, 37, feels the need to prompt his wounded seven-year-old son, Ayman, to give reporters a V-for-victory sign. And despite the fact that his wounded foot will be keeping him here for some time, Haroot Manouk, a 32-year-old fighter, wants to soldier on: "We'll show them, you'll see, all of you will see."

Surgeon Mohamed Kamil says there has been a marked change in the nature of Kindi's workload since the arrival of US troops in Baghdad at the weekend. "We're now getting not just shrapnel wounds, but pieces of people," he says. "These are wounds from missiles and rockets. They are amputations. They require more urgent surgery."

The numbers have been rising steadily at the hospital - today it received more than 200 injuries and 35 corpses. Six other hospitals serving the city report similar figures and now they are having the overflow from Iraq's hard-pressed military hospitals foisted on them.

Nothing prepares a visitor for the scene at the hospital morgue. I've been into several in Iraq now and I think I know what to expect - the bodies are always mangled, frequently burnt beyond recognition, but usually treated with as much dignity as each having its own cold metal tray allows.

But when the double refrigeration doors are opened on one of several buildings out the back at Kindi, there is just a pile on the floor - maybe 20 or 25 corpses; it is impossible to tell.

Some of the faces are scorched black. Some have their clothes ripped off, their intestine hanging out. Limbs protrude from the pile, lying across other corpses and it is impossible to tell who is who in this Dalian drama.

The traffic to and from the morgue is pitiable. Hospital orderlies wheel the dead in and families bring makeshift coffins to take the dead out.

And when a group of foreign cameraman moves in to film the scene, the four men charged with moving the bodies in and out of the morgue react badly, angrily chasing them away.

"Why are you taking photos? For Bush?" one of them yells, waving his arms. "Tell him to go to hell."

#

Edited by author 04-10-2003 02:27 AM
CASUALTY LIST
The Sydney Morning Herald April 10, 2003
  
US
• Dead (in combat) - 81**
• Wounded - 172
• Missing - 10
• Dead (non-combat) - 15
UK
• Dead (in combat) - 8
• Wounded - 74
• Dead (non-combat) - 22
IRAQ
• Dead (military) - 2,320#
• Dead (civilian) - 1,252*
• Wounded (civilian) - 5,103*
NOTE: These casualties were announced by US, British and Iraqi authorities or independently confirmed by Reuters correspondents.
* = Minimum Iraqi estimates as of April 3
** = Figure does not include unconfirmed toll from US bombing of convoy south of Mosul on April 6
# = US military estimates relating only to fighting in or near Baghdad. No other figures available.
Non-combat is defined as accidents, US or British fire killing/wounding their own troops or other incidents unrelated to fighting.
 
#

BAGHDAD FALLS
By Paul McGeough, The Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Baghdad April 10, 2003
Jubilation and wholesale looting in Baghdad yesterday signalled the end of the regime of Saddam Hussein as thousands of United States troops met little or no resistance on their way into the heart of the city.

The US military declared that Saddam's rule over the capital had ended. Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks said at central command in Qatar: "The capital city is now one of those areas that has been added to the list of where the regime does not have control."

Marine tanks rolled into the heart of the city, greeted by people cheering, waving white flags and gesturing with V-for-victory signs. "We were nearly mobbed by people trying to shake our hands," said Major Andy Milburn of the 7th Marines.

Symbolically, the Americans stationed tanks and other military vehicles around the very heart of Baghdad - Tahrir Square on the east bank of the Tigris River.

There were wild scenes as residents - some in tears, others singing and dancing - crowded on to city freeways, showering the Americans who rode into town atop their tanks with flowers and the classic Iraqi greeting for foreigners: "Welcome! Welcome in Baghdad."

"Today Baghdad is like Berlin in 1945," an egg-seller told the Herald.

In scenes reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall, ropes and pulleys were attached to a six-metre statue of Saddam in central Baghdad and it was pulled down by a US tank.

The crowd stamped on the toppled dictator. Crowds of Iraqis yelled "Hello, hello" as the Americans advanced through traffic. "No more Saddam Hussein," chanted one group, waving to the troops. "We love you, we love you."


There was no sign of any arm of government. The Information Ministry, which has tried to keep the foreign press on a tight rein, was abandoned and none of the agencies that might maintain law and order was on the streets.

And while the people clearly felt that they had shaken off the Saddam yoke, US officers said there was still some resistance - small and disorganised, but fierce.

But the jubilation in Baghdad prompted the US military to say it believed the whole of Iraq had now reached a "tipping point" at which ordinary people began to realise that the Saddam administration was over.

There was no word on the fate of Saddam or his sons, Uday or Qusay, all of whom were targeted in a "bunker-buster" bombing attack on a residential area in Baghdad on Tuesday.

But presuming his era had ended, a white-haired man in the inner city took a poster of Saddam and beat it with his shoe - a traditional insult. Others gathered to spit on or kick the portrait.

"Come see, this is freedom," the man said. "This is the criminal, this is the infidel. This is the destiny of every traitor. He killed millions of us ... Oh people, this is freedom."

But another old man who has spent the past few weeks quietly telling the Herald how much he longed for this day, said simply: "Now we dance."

The looting was on such a scale that it caused traffic jams in the eastern suburbs as huge crowds ripped all that they could from government buildings - air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, hat-stands and anything else they could carry.

They brought trucks and packed their cars so high that much of the loot fell off as they drove away. With great high spirits, they hijacked police cars and motorcycles, full-length curtains and sports trophies.

The used wheeled office chairs to push their loot away into the suburbs while some guarded their booty on street corners, waiting for family vehicles to return to collect it.

One of them said: "This is our peace dividend."

When they had done with the Transport Ministry and the headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, a part of Uday Hussein's fiefdom, they torched the buildings. They stole dozens of Uday's thoroughbred horses from a nearby stables.

On Palestine Street, a favourite regime venue for rallies and shows of military and Ba'ath party support, Iraqis looted a Trade Ministry warehouse, emerging with air-conditioners, ceiling fans, refrigerators and TV sets.

Posters of Saddam were shredded, statues pushed over and many people chanted "Bush! Bush!" and "America! America!" as others tore up 250-dinar notes bearing the face of the dictator. Not far away a bare-chested young man danced in the middle of an intersection, madly swirling his shirt over his head.

In a central square a crowd of about 20 Iraqis threw their shoes at a statue of Saddam and ripped a metal plaque off the marble pedestal.

The crowds relished saying things that a few days ago would have had them tortured or imprisoned. They spat at portraits of Saddam and denounced him with great bitterness.

Murtha Odari, a 27-year-old army deserter, said: "He is a criminal - he killed so many of our people. He made us fight against Iran. He invaded Kuwait and now he makes us fight the world. Now we are so happy."

Asked why he had joined in the Saddam cheer squads over the years, he said: "We were scared. We did not have a choice."

Standing outside the blazing Olympic headquarters, 46-year-old Abu Mantazar condemned the looting. And while he celebrated the arrival of the Americans, he had a warning for them. "Before it was so bad for us - so this makes us happy. We look forward to having a new government and an end to this mess.

"Look, the US is welcome here - but not for long, just for a while to help the next Iraqi government get going. And after that they have no right to stay here; and while they are here they must see us as human beings and not as barrels of oil."

Streets in the centre of the city were virtually deserted. Small numbers of men in civilian clothing carried Kalashnikovs and local people said a group of militias still stationed at the eastern end of Synak Bridge were diehard Syrian volunteers.

US infantry units began pushing in from the east and the marines from the west on Tuesday night, planning to link up on central Tharir Square in the centre.

They claimed to have secured all routes into the capital as the last resistance they faced was put down early yesterday.

As his men set up checkpoints at an intersection about three kilometres from the city, marine Lieutenant Geoff Orazem said: "I love being in Baghdad." But one of his men was confused, asking: "Hey man, what city is this?"

Iraqi tanks and armoured personnel carriers were abandoned across the suburbs with articles of military clothing scattered around - apparently those of fighters who had changed into civilian clothing for their getaway.

The US military cordoned off with tanks the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, where international media crews have been based.

When a motorist approached one of the tanks and failed to slow down, one of the soldiers opened fire on him.

US commanders are now focusing on targets to the north - Saddam's home town of Tikrit, still a stronghold of loyalist troops, and the northern city of Mosul.

Brigadier-General Brooks said of the scenes in Baghdad: "That's a very important point in the operation. Militarily, however, we proceed on a plan that says there is more to follow. All of the regime is not gone, there's still regime appendages in a variety of places. There's still capability."

Amid the jubilation, some Baghdad citizens remained indoors, still wary of the advancing troops and not yet certain that Saddam's influence has disappeared. Baghdad radio could be heard faintly transmitting patriotic songs.

Late yesterday, the International Committee of the Red Cross temporarily suspended its operations in the city after one of rescue convoys came under fire, leaving at least one person seriously injured.

with Reuters, Press Association

#

Edited by author 04-10-2003 02:21 AM
The Reason Why
by George McGovern The Nation April 21, 2003
Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die.
   Alfred, Lord Tennyson "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (in the Crimean War)

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.

He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly. This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)

The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address. War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.

Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others. My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration. For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.

During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider." As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him." In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not." This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.

As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.

Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.

I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.

W e hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.

During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.

I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.

The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?

It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen." Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated." The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never comtemplated."

I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.

The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.

But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.

#

Bunker busters probably missed Saddam: reports
The Sydney Morning Herald April 9, 2003
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein likely survived a US airstrike - aimed at killing him and his two sons with four massive bombs - which destroyed three houses and killed up to 14 people in a residential area, according to British intelligence sources quoted today.

"He was probably not in the building when it was bombed (on Monday)," The Guardian quoted a source as saying.

The Times said Britain's foreign intelligence service, MI6, told the US Central Intelligence Agency that it believed Saddam left the targeted building in Baghdad just before it was bombed.

"We think he left the same way he arrived in the area, either by a tunnel system or by car, we're not sure," the paper quoted a British intelligence source as saying.

A US B-1 bomber struck the building in the al Mansour residential area in response to intelligence that Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qusay, were meeting inside with senior Iraqi intelligence officials.

The bomber struck the building with four 900 kg guided bombs, two of them bunker busters, US officials said.

Major General Stanley McChrystal, vice director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Washington press briefing that the airstrike had been "very, very effective", but it was not known if the targets were still alive.

"What we have for battle damage assessment right now is essentially a hole in the ground, a site of destruction where we wanted it to be, where we believe high value targets were," McChrystal said yesterday.

"We do not have a hard and fast assessment of what individual or individuals were on site," he added.

After the attack, a US source said the target was a restaurant. But US officials later said the intended objective was 100 metres from the only restaurant in the neighbourhood, and that it was hit.

Al-Saa'a restaurant, a popular Baghdad eatery that serves grilled fare, appeared intact yesterday, except for blown-out windows and doors.

Three houses were reduced to rubble and at least 20 houses and nearly two dozen nearby shops were damaged, some seriously, from the force of the blast, which left a 500 metre radius of debris and a massive crater.

"It felt like a strong earthquake," said Nahid Abdullah, 26, who lives in the neighbourhood.

Strewn over surrounding streets were everything from doorknobs or ceiling beams to bits of wooden furniture and light fixtures. The bombs uprooted three orange trees that once stood outside the houses and left a palm tree in one backyard completely charred.

The body of an elderly man was found on Monday night. Today, rescuers using a bulldozer and their bare hands dug out the body of a small boy and the decapitated body of a 20-year-old woman. The bodies were placed in blankets and quilts and put aside on the footpath.

Neighbours said as many as 14 people, including at least seven children, may have been killed. Scores have been injured in adjacent homes and shops, where the debris and shrapnel blew out doors and windows.

Scores of Iraqis have been killed and hundreds injured in the US-led air campaign on the capital. Civilian casualties have increased dramatically since US forces arrived in the capital last week, with neighbourhoods close to where fighting take place suffering the most.

Taleb Saadi, a doctor at Baghdad's al-Kindi hospital, said between 30 and 35 bodies arrived at the hospital yesterday, and as many as 300 injured people were treated at its emergency ward.

The streets were quiet yesterday, with most Baghdad residents sheltering in their homes.

North of the capital, thousands were fleeing in buses, trucks, vans and light trucks packed with food, clothes, blankets and cooking supplies.

While rescue workers searched for more bodies in al-Mansour with the help of neighbours and volunteers, relatives squatted on a footpath across the road. Some wept; others buried their faces in their hands.

When the body of the young woman was brought out, torso first and then her severed head, her mother started crying uncontrollably. She later collapsed and was helped into a car.

A US official said the Pentagon was confident that Saddam and his sons were in al-Saa'a restaurant before it was bombed.

"Our intelligence was solid," the official said. He did not elaborate on the source of the intelligence.

He said Saddam was known to frequent the restaurant, apparently believing coalition forces would not target him so close to a civilian centre.

On April 4, state Iraqi television showed lengthy footage of Saddam, or at least a man who looked exactly like him, on a walkabout of several Baghdad districts, including al-Mansour, when al-Saa'a appeared in the background.

Those close to Saddam say the Iraqi leader is so obsessed with security that very few people know about his movements. He maintains dozens of residences and uses doubles to keep people guessing.

Coalition strikes have aimed at top Iraqi leaders from the very start of the war.

On the opening day of the war on March 20, US President George W Bush authorised a strike on a suburban Baghdad compound where Saddam and his sons were thought to be staying. But US intelligence officials suspect Saddam survived.

Yesterday, reporters were allowed to visit al-Saa'a. Not a single policeman was in sight.

AFP and AP

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Amid the fragments of lives, new enemies are made
The Sydney Morning Herald April 9, 2003
The American bombs that shattered a middle-class neighbourhood vaporised more than houses and people, writes Paul McGeough in Baghdad.

Looking deep into the Baghdad blackout, I can see the tiniest pinprick of red light - but this light casts a beam that is as enormous as it is confronting.

It's on the levee that stops the Tigris River from flooding into what was Saddam Hussein's presidential compound. Tonight the leader's sprawling complex is the forward base for the US thrust into Iraq, and the red light marks the bivouac of a US infantry unit.

Tonight those turbid Tigris waters separate more than me and the US soldiers.

I'm on the east side of the city; just back in my room at the Sheraton after a dash to the middle-class suburb of Mansour.

Along the way it seems most of the armed men who have been behind sandbags, guarding government buildings, are gone. The Foreign Ministry, the Information Ministry and the Planning Ministry stand naked to US attacks.

But there is still one guard near the inter-city bus station, and he seems to be there for the long haul. He cradles a grenade launcher as he sits by his pavement post in a brown, crushed-velvet armchair.

There are signs of the morning's progress through the city of the US armoured column that took the compound. The road near the bus station is cratered, its perimeter wall has been blasted and an incinerated police car lies off to the side of the road.

On Sadoun Street a man dressed in black jeans, black open-necked shirt and a black leather vest approaches and tells me: "Three thousand today". I think he is talking about the war's death toll, but it turns out that he's a currency dealer, offering 3000 Iraqi dinars to the US dollar.

We speed past al-Zawra Park, where Iraqi forces are hiding cannons and truckloads of ammunition in the shadow of the gum trees; and past another public garden, from which four Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles streak westwards into the setting sun.

Then we lurch around a traffic island adorned with a jowly bust of the caliph al-Mansour. It was he who built the ancient round city of Baghdad in AD762.

He had traits in common with today's leader - he had an edifice complex and he was a security paranoid. But not even he could have had the high-tech, high-powered US 3rd Infantry in mind when he mused about how the trade-route Tigris, as he did centuries ago, would bring the world to the city that had yet to become the setting for the tales of The Thousand and One Nights.

I've broken away from observing the battle for the presidential compound to look at a gaping hole in the ground in Mansour, but it is the second visit of the day to this neighbourhood for the silver-haired Sabah, who is more than a driver to us.

He comes behind us, cleaning up our mess; arriving at the door early each morning with a flask of Madame Sabah's excellent Turkish coffee or, late at night, with a couple of cans of Red Bull when he thinks we need an energy hit; he produces a meal from nothing when all the restaurants are closed; and he looks out for us in the daily war of attrition with the rest of Baghdad - fast-thinking currency bandits, slow-thinking information bureaucrats and the like.

Earlier, Sabah walked out of Mansour's al-Saha restaurant - with our take-out lunch - only minutes before a huge explosion made shards of its windows, lacerating customers and freaking the neighbourhood. But that is nothing compared with the real damage a block away.

Four or five houses have disappeared and in their place is a crater maybe 30-40 metres wide and 15-20 metres deep.

Some of the photographers use a chilling term they picked up from the US military in Afghanistan to describe what might have happened to a dozen or more people thought to have died in this missile attack. They have become "pink mist".

The smouldering crater is littered with the artefacts of ordinary middle-class life in Baghdad - a crunched Passat sedan, a wrought-iron front gate, the armrest of a chair upholstered in green brocade and a broken bedhead.

The top floors of surrounding buildings are sheared off. Mud thrown by the force of the blast cakes what is left of them, and the nearby date palms are decapitated. Bulldozers and rescue crews work frantically, peeling back the rubble in the hope of finding survivors.

Neighbours and relatives of the home-owners weep openly in the street, some embracing to ease the pain and all of them wondering why such a powerful missile was dumped on them after the US has stated its heavy bombing campaign is over.

But this is an opportunistic strike. Four bunker-busters - 2000-pound JDAM bombs - are dropped on the house in which the US "believes" Saddam, his sons and other top officials "might" have been meeting.

Anonymous US officials are quoted saying that on Monday they had received intelligence of a high-level meeting in Mansour of Iraqi intelligence officials and, "possibly", Saddam and his two sons, Qusay and Uday.

But that cuts no ice with the neighbours. The nearest house has stood for 43 years but now it is on the verge of collapse and the adult children of the blood-splattered engineer Fadel al-Imam, aged 75, are working to convince him he must leave.

With his back to the door of his wrecked library, where floor-to-ceiling shelves bulge with a lifetime's collection of engineering texts and there is a shattered photo of his policeman father in the service of the last Western occupiers of Iraq, the British, he says: "I reserve the right not to obey any government.

"This will create more enemies for the Americans. Even those who were feeling good about the arrival of the Americans will want to fight now."

We can only guess at what will happen next.

Washington is in a hurry to show Iraqis and the world that it has come here as a force for its version of good. But even as it pulls down statues of Saddam, desperate to satisfy its hope for a legitimising and "spontaneous" revolt, the people of Baghdad are reluctant to respond.

And probably more so after any future opportunistic strikes.

All they see is the nightmare around them - the vandalism of their telephone system; the terror of the blackouts; the trauma of overburdened, ill-equipped hospitals struggling to cope with the dead and injured; and an imminent health crisis as millions go without clean water.

Donald Rumsfeld seems to recognise some of this. Despite the capture of the compound, he says: "I can't say we are at a tipping point."

And showing that they remember none of their own history here, Britain's top commander, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, wants civilian Iraqis to do the heavy lifting. "What we are looking for is the effect on the people of Iraq. Once they say this regime no longer exists in our psyche, then we have reached it."

How much more firepower will they apply to make the people do their bidding?

The next step for the Americans is likely to be an advance on the east of the city on several fronts. And it is when they get into the labyrinthine suburbs on this side, as opposed to the parkland they now hold on the west bank, that we will have a sense of the extent of the street fighting to come.

So far the military engagement in Baghdad has been conventional. There will be no street-fighting, no guerilla tactics until small US units make targets of themselves as they patrol the exposed streets and alleys of the east.

We can't reckon yet on how many in the Republican Guard and Saddam's fedayeen will look over their shoulder and see the consolidating grip of the US-led invasion force on the rest of the country or at the ravaged presidential compound now in US hands, and conclude that it is time to shed their uniforms and join their families.

As evening set in, I could see a couple of Americans sitting on the levee wall, dangling their legs as they took the last of the sun after an at-times ferocious, day-long battle to wrest control of the compound from the Republican Guards who stayed to fight.

And on the internet I was able to look at pictures, taken by my colleagues with US forces, of other US soldiers tramping through Saddam's trashed ballroom, sitting back in his armchairs and rifling his desk.

Now it is 5am, pre-dawn. The pinprick of light is gone and Iraqi fighters are lobbing countless missiles at the compound. There is the crackle of intense small-arms fire. This will probably prove to be no more than an irritant in the overall scheme of things, but it does confirm that this is not the "tipping point".

This is Day Two of the US occupation of the presidential compound, but it is the Iraqi flag that still flies on the Republican Palace.

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Journalists die in US attacks
The Sydney Morning Herald April 9, 2003
Tareq Ayub, a correspondent for the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite television station, died of his injuries after a US missile strike on the station's Baghdad offices, the Arabic news channel reported.

A cameraman, Zuheir al-Iraqi, was hit in the neck by shrapnel in the blast, which the network said was a deliberate strike.

Ayub had been seriously injured and the station aired footage of him being taken away for treatment in a car belonging to rival Abu Dhabi satellite television.

A Jordanian of Palestinian origin, Ayub, 34, was married with two children and had been in Baghdad for less than a week after leaving his normal base in Jordan.

Al-Jazeera's presenter accused the US military of deliberately targeting its offices and recalled that the station's Kabul bureau had been hit in November 2001 during the US-led assault on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The television station's offices are on the road between the Mansur Hotel and the planning ministry, not far from the Republican Palace compound where fierce fighting raged between US and Iraqi troops early yesterday.

Abu Dhabi TV announced its Baghdad bureau had also been hit and broadcast a live report showing its camera position under attack.

As they filmed the arrival of two US tanks on a major bridge in central Baghdad close to their offices overlooking the river, what appeared to be Iraqi machine-gun fire clattered out from just beneath the camera position.

Several incoming blasts boomed out, engulfing the area in smoke and Abu Dhabi TV said it had lost contact with its correspondent.

In a separate incident, a cameraman of British news agency Reuters was killed and three other staff members were wounded when a US tank fired a shell at Baghdad's main media hotel during fighting across the capital.

US commanders said their troops fired a single tank shell at the Palestine Hotel after being shot at from an upper floor.

But European Union officials said they intended to make representations to the United States to provide greater protection to journalists covering the conflict.

Reuters named the dead man as Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian national.

"Taras's death, and the injuries sustained by the others, were so unnecessary," said Reuters' editor in chief Geert Linnebank.

He called into question the "judgement of advancing US troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad".

Jose Couso, a cameraman with the Spanish television channel Telecinco, was also killed after suffering wounds in the leg and jaw in the incident, Telecinco announced during a morning current affairs program.

Reuters has its offices on the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel, which houses most of the foreign media covering the Iraq war.

The 15th and 17th floors of the hotel were struck, blowing out windows as fierce exchanges raged on the 20th day of the US-led war. The 14th floor was also damaged.

A hole was knocked in the hotel facade, laying bare the metal structure of a column running past a balcony.

Dubai's Al-Arabiya television channel said its bureau on the 17th floor also suffered damage. General Buford Blount, commander of the US 3rd Infantry Division said a US tank was "receiving fire from the hotel, RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and small-arms fire, and engaged with one tank round. The firing stopped."

But in Greece, the current president of the European Union, government spokesman Christos Protopapas described the strike as repugnant.

Following is a chronology of reporters' casualties during the war:

April 7

Christian Liebig, a correspondent with Germany weekly Focus, and Julio Anguita Parrado from Spanish daily El Mundo are killed after a missile attack on a US operations centre.

Al-Jazeera accuses US forces of firing on one of its vehicles near Baghdad and says its office in the southern city of Basra "was the direct target of shelling" on April 2.

April 6

US NBC television journalist David Bloom, 39, "embedded" with US troops in Iraq dies near Baghdad, apparently of natural causes.

Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, a 25-year-old Kurdish translator working with the BBC, dies after a US plane bombs a Kurdish-US convoy in northern Iraq in a "friendly-fire" attack.

April 4

Washington Post editorial columnist Michael Kelly is killed when the Humvee vehicle in which he is travelling with US troops plunges into a canal while evading Iraqi fire on the approach to Baghdad's main airport.

April 2

Kaveh Golestan, 52, a prize-winning Iranian photographer working as a cameraman with the BBC, dies when he steps out of his car onto a landmine in Kifri, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

March 30

Gaby Rado, 48, covering the war for British television network ITV, is killed when he falls from the roof of the Abu Sanaa hotel in Sulaymaniya, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. The circumstances of his death are not known.

March 22

Australian cameraman Paul Moran, 39, on assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, is killed in a suicide bombing in the northern Iraqi town of Khurmal, under Kurdish control.

ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd, 50, is believed to have been killed by US-British fire near Basra. Lloyd's French cameraman 43-year-old Fred Nerac and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman are still missing.

AFP

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Injured overwhelm hospitals
The Sydney Morning Herald April 9, 2003
Health organisations have warned that hospitals in Baghdad have been swamped with casualties now that fierce urban combat has erupted across the city, with supplies dwindling and medical personnel caught in the crossfire and unable to report to work.

The World Health Organisation in Geneva reported that the city's hospitals were seeing 100 combat casualties an hour after a column of United States tanks made an initial thrust into the city.

The WHO said amputations were being performed without sufficient anaesthesia or morphine. A WHO spokesman, Ian Simpson, said doctors and nurses who managed to report for duty at hospitals were finding conditions untenable, with stocks of medicine and supplies vanishing in the crush of civilian and military casualties.

A shortage of fresh water in the city was also threatening the ability of hospitals to carry out operations and depriving the population of sanitation, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned from London. At least one hospital in the southern suburb of Mahmudiya had been overwhelmed by the number of civilian and military casualties, it said.

Water supplies stopped last Thursday because mains electricity, which powers the pumps, had been knocked out by the fighting. Red Cross teams have kept generators running and set up water treatment centres, but moving about was difficult as sporadic fighting spread across the capital.

As the death toll climbs and human misery increases, so does concern that the US military may be alienating the populace it says it is liberating, and fuelling anger in Arab countries and elsewhere.

Defence Department officials have been reluctant to estimate the total number of Iraqi military dead.

But one senior Pentagon official estimated that between 2000 and 4000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed in Baghdad since Saturday.

Walid Murad was one of the Special Republican Guard soldiers whose job it was to stop the US advance into Baghdad. In an interview from the hospital where he was awaiting treatment for a leg wound, he gave a rare account of what it was like to be on the receiving end of US firepower.

"This was the first time that I saw the Americans not as planes, but as men," he said.

"They kept us under heavy bombardment for about an hour."

After the battle, many wounded soldiers like him were taken to Kindi hospital, one of the city's two main trauma centres.

Dazed relatives, their clothing soaked in blood, watched helplessly as the nurses pushed their relatives up the ramp into the receiving ward. Then the trolleys would be returned to the car park, hosed down and readied for the next.

Next to the overflowing morgue, six bodies wrapped in black polyurethane corpse bags tied closed with white string lay unattended on the sand-and-oil covered pavement while flies flew around them. The bags were unmarked except for one with a driver's licence attached with string and bearing the man's name, Hamash Hussein Mohammed. His photo showed the face of a clean-cut man of about 30.

The Washington Post, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times

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U.S. Finds No Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq
Yahoo News April 6, 2003
AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Sunday it had not yet found any weapons of mass destruction and it believed there was a diminishing threat that Iraq might use them as U.S.-led troops take over more territory.

"The places it's most likely to be found we haven't even gotten to them yet," Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told a briefing at Central Command in Qatar.

Brooks said the farther the U.S.-led forces moved into Iraq, the less opportunity there was for Iraq to use any weapons of mass destruction it might have. Washington launched a war against Iraq on March 20, vowing to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction that Baghdad denies it has.

"The closer we get ... there are fewer and fewer options on what can be used to deliver weapons of mass destruction."

"As we continue to advance more areas are taken away. We are pleased that it hasn't been used to date but not satisfied that the threat has gone," Brooks said.

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Red Cross: Iraq Wounded Too High to Count
The Guardian April 6, 2003
GENEVA (AP) - The number of casualties in Baghdad is so high that hospitals have stopped counting the number of people treated, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday.

``No one is able to keep accurate statistics of the admitted and transferred war wounded any longer as one emergency arrival follows the other in the hospitals of Baghdad,'' the ICRC said in a statement.

``Ambulances are picking up the wounded and running them to the triage areas and on to hospitals,'' it said. ``Some of the wounded try to reach the nearest hospitals by foot.''

The neutral Swiss-run organization - the main aid agency left in Iraq - gave no estimates on the number of deaths and did not confirm U.S. Central Command estimates that between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqi fighters were killed in Saturday's foray into Baghdad by American armored vehicles.

``All of the hospitals are under pressure and the medical staff is working without respite,'' said the ICRC statement. ``Despite the intense and desperate activity, hospital staff is still managing the situation.''

But it said that hospitals urgently needed more water supplies. Given the general power outage in Baghdad, most hospitals and water installations are now being powered by backup generators. It said it was getting many requests for service kits, spare parts and repairs for water plants.

The ICRC said that Red Cross delegates who reached the southern city of Basra reported that the medical situation was generally under control and that there were no signs of epidemics. But it said it feared the worst for other hospitals outside Baghdad and Basra.

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Britain admits there may be no WMD's in Iraq
Ruben Bannerjee Al Jazeera April 5, 2003
Well into the war that was supposed to rid Iraq of its alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, a senior British official admitted on Saturday that no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction may after all be found.

Making the startling confession in a radio interview, British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, added in the same breath that he would in any case rejoice the "fall" of Saddam Hussein and his regime - regardless of whether any weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq or not.

The confession reconfirms the worst fears of opponents of the war that "weapons of mass destruction" is only a ruse for the US and the British to go to war against Iraq.

At the very least the admission certainly deals a serious blow to the moral legitimacy that the US and the British have been seeking in prosecuting the war.

Critics of the war across the world have been accusing the US and the British of aiming for regime change in Baghdad under the guise of "unearthing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

There have been constant accusations that the US and the British are eyeing Iraq’s huge oil wealth, promoting Israeli interests, and that its campaign against "weapons of mass destruction" is only a convenient cover-up.

Even countries like Germany, Russia and France had been less than impressed with the US-led war against Iraq saying all along that the task of unearthing weapons of mass destruction, if any, is better left to UN weapons' inspectors.

In making the confession in an interview with BBC radio, the British Home Secretary however admitted that the non-discovery of any weapons of mass destruction would "lead to a very interesting debate" about the war.

"We will obviously have a very interesting debate if there are no biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons or facilities to produce them found anywhere in Iraq once Iraq is free," the home secretary added.

The US-led forces stand to face a huge global uproar if no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq.

US-led forces moving across the Iraqi deserts have been under pressure since the start of the war to find evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But instead of solid evidence, the they have so far raised only false alarms.

From time to time, the US-forces have claimed to have unearthed "suspicious" substances. And each time, the claim has turned out to be without substance.

Today Saturday 5 April, US Marines were reported to be digging up a suspected chemical weapons hiding place in the courtyard of a school in the southeast of Baghdad.

Western media reported that the US Marines were digging after being tipped off by an Iraqi informer. "We don’t have a clue now but we are going to dig it up and check," said General James Mattis, the commander of the Marine division at the scene.

Iraq has always insisted that it does not possess any weapons of mass destruction.

UN weapons inspectors, who scoured the country for several months until the US asked them to leave last month, had repeatedly certified that they had found no credible evidence of Iraq possessing any weapons of mass destruction. -- Al Jazeera

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Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians
CTV, Canada April 3, 2003
Canadian Press

OTTAWA - Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw "incredible" levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad.

Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad.

"There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla," Huguenin said in a interview by satellite telephone.

"We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening."

Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village of Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy fighting between American troops and Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the result of "bombs, projectiles."

"At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at that place . . . but it was definitely a different pattern from what we had seen in Basra or Baghdad.

"There will be investigations I am sure."

Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the flow of wounded, said Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100 wounded a day.

Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered superficial shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he said.

But the pattern in Hilla was completely different.

"In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror."

At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two days, he said -- far beyond its capacity.

"Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had to manage, that was all."

The city is no longer accessible, he added.

Red Cross staff are also concerned about what may be happening in other smaller centres south of Baghdad.

"We do not know what is going on in Najaf and Kabala. It has become physically impossible for us to reach out to those cities because the major road has become a zone of combat."

The Red Cross was able to claim one significant success this week: it played a key role in re-establishing water supplies at Basra.

Power for a water-pumping station had been accidentally knocked out in the attack on the city, leaving about a million people without water. Iraqi technicians couldn't reach the station to repair it because it was under coalition control.

The Red Cross was able to negotiate safe passage for a group of Iraqi engineers who crossed the fire line and made repairs. Basra now has 90 per cent of its normal water supply, said Huguenin.

Huguenin, a Swiss, is one of six international Red Cross workers still in Baghdad. The team includes two Canadians, Vatche Arslanian of Oromocto, N.B., and Kassandra Vartell of Calgary.

The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling for donations to help cope. The Red Cross Web site is: www.redcross.ca

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Iraq Is A Trial Run
Frontline India Volume 20 - Issue 07, March 29 - April 11, 2003
Noam Chomsky, University Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder of the modern science of linguistics and political activist, is a powerhouse of anti-imperialist activism in the United States today. On March 21, a crowded and typical - and uniquely Chomskyan - day of political protest and scientific academic research, he spoke from his office for half an hour to V. K. Ramachandran on the current attack on Iraq.

V. K. Ramachandran : Does the present aggression on Iraq represent a continuation of United States' international policy in recent years or a qualitatively new stage in that policy?

Noam Chomsky: It represents a significantly new phase. It is not without precedent, but significantly new nevertheless.

This should be seen as a trial run. Iraq is seen as an extremely easy and totally defenceless target. It is assumed, probably correctly, that the society will collapse, that the soldiers will go in and that the U.S. will be in control, and will establish the regime of its choice and military bases. They will then go on to the harder cases that will follow. The next case could be the Andean region, it could be Iran, it could be others.

The trial run is to try and establish what the U.S. calls a "new norm" in international relations. The new norm is "preventive war." Notice that new norms are established only by the United States. So, for example, when India invaded East Pakistan to terminate horrendous massacres, it did not establish a new norm of humanitarian intervention, because India is the wrong country, and besides, the U.S. was strenuously opposed to that action.

This is not pre-emptive war; there is a crucial difference. Pre-emptive war has a meaning, it means that, for example, if planes are flying across the Atlantic to bomb the United States, the United States is permitted to shoot them down even before they bomb and may be permitted to attack the air bases from which they came. Pre-emptive war is a response to ongoing or imminent attack.

The doctrine of preventive war is totally different; it holds that the United States - alone, since nobody else has this right - has the right to attack any country that it claims to be a potential challenge to it. So if the United States claims, on whatever grounds, that someone may sometime threaten it, then it can attack them.

The doctrine of preventive war was announced explicitly in the National Security Strategy last September. It sent shudders around the world, including through the U.S. establishment, where, I might say, opposition to the war is unusually high. The Security Strategy said, in effect, that the U.S. will rule the world by force, which is the dimension - the only dimension - in which it is supreme. Furthermore, it will do so for the indefinite future, because if any potential challenge arises to U.S. domination, the U.S. will destroy it before it becomes a challenge.

This is the first exercise of that doctrine. If it succeeds on these terms, as it presumably will, because the target is so defenceless, then international lawyers and Western intellectuals and others will begin to talk about a new norm in international affairs. It is important to establish such a norm if you expect to rule the world by force for the foreseeable future.

This is not without precedent, but it is extremely unusual. I shall mention one precedent, just to show how narrow the spectrum is. In 1963, Dean Acheson, who was a much respected elder statesman and senior Adviser of the Kennedy Administration, gave an important talk to the American Society of International Law, in which he justified the U. S. attacks against Cuba. The attack by the Kennedy Administration on Cuba was large-scale international terrorism and economic warfare. The timing was interesting - it was right after the Missile Crisis, when the world was very close to a terminal nuclear war. In his speech, Acheson said that no "legal issue" arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its "power, position, or prestige", or words approximating that.

That is also a statement of the Bush doctrine. Although Acheson was an important figure, what he said had not been official government policy in the post-War period. It now stands as official policy and this is the first illustration of it. It is intended to provide a precedent for the future.

Such "norms" are established only when a Western power does something, not when others do. That is part of the deep racism of Western culture, going back through centuries of imperialism and so deep that it is unconscious.

So I think this war is an important new step, and is intended to be.

Ramachandran :Is it also a new phase in that the U. S. has not been able to carry others with it?

Chomsky: That is not new. In the case of the Vietnam War, for example, the United States did not even try to get international support. Nevertheless, you are right in that this is unusual. This is a case in which the United States was compelled for political reasons to try to force the world to accept its position and was not able to, which is quite unusual. Usually, the world succumbs.

Ramachandran: So does it represent a "failure of diplomacy" or a redefinition of diplomacy itself?

Chomsky: I wouldn't call it diplomacy at all - it's a failure of coercion.

Compare it with the first Gulf War. In the first Gulf War, the U.S. coerced the Security Council into accepting its position, although much of the world opposed it. NATO went along, and the one country in the Security Council that did not - Yemen - was immediately and severely punished.

In any legal system that you take seriously, coerced judgments are considered invalid, but in the international affairs conducted by the powerful, coerced judgments are fine - they are called diplomacy.

What is interesting about this case is that the coercion did not work. There were countries - in fact, most of them - who stubbornly maintained the position of the vast majority of their populations.

The most dramatic case is Turkey. Turkey is a vulnerable country, vulnerable to U.S. punishment and inducements. Nevertheless, the new government, I think to everyone's surprise, did maintain the position of about 90 per cent of its population. Turkey is bitterly condemned for that here, just as France and Germany are bitterly condemned because they took the position of the overwhelming majority of their populations. The countries that are praised are countries like Italy and Spain, whose leaders agreed to follow orders from Washington over the opposition of maybe 90 per cent of their populations.

That is another new step. I cannot think of another case where hatred and contempt for democracy have so openly been proclaimed, not just by the government, but also by liberal commentators and others. There is now a whole literature trying to explain why France, Germany, the so-called "old Europe", and Turkey and others are trying to undermine the United States. It is inconceivable to the pundits that they are doing so because they take democracy seriously and they think that when the overwhelming majority of a population has an opinion, a government ought to follow it.

That is real contempt for democracy, just as what has happened at the United Nations is total contempt for the international system. In fact there are now calls - from The Wall Street Journal ,people in Government and others - to disband the United Nations.

Fear of the United States around the world is extraordinary. It is so extreme that it is even being discussed in the mainstream media. The cover story of the upcoming issue of Newsweek is about why the world is so afraid of the United States. The Post had a cover story about this a few weeks ago.

Of course this is considered to be the world's fault, that there is something wrong with the world with which we have to deal somehow, but also something that has to be recognised.

Ramachandran: The idea that Iraq represents any kind of clear and present danger is, of course, without any substance at all.

Chomsky: Nobody pays any attention to that accusation, except, interestingly, the population of the United States.

In the last few months, there has been a spectacular achievement of government-media propaganda, very visible in the polls. The international polls show that support for the war is higher in the United States than in other countries. That is, however, quite misleading, because if you look a little closer, you find that the United States is also different in another respect from the rest of the world. Since September 2002, the United States is the only country in the world where 60 per cent of the population believes that Iraq is an imminent threat - something that people do not believe even in Kuwait or Iran.

Furthermore, about 50 per cent of the population now believes that Iraq was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. This has happened since September 2002. In fact, after the September 11 attack, the figure was about 3 per cent. Government-media propaganda has managed to raise that to about 50 per cent. Now if people genuinely believe that Iraq has carried out major terrorist attacks against the United States and is planning to do so again, well, in that case people will support the war.

This has happened, as I said, after September 2002. September 2002 is when the government-media campaign began and also when the mid-term election campaign began. The Bush Administration would have been smashed in the election if social and economic issues had been in the forefront, but it managed to suppress those issues in favour of security issues - and people huddle under the umbrella of power.

This is exactly the way the country was run in the 1980s. Remember that these are almost the same people as in the Reagan and the senior Bush Administrations. Right through the 1980s they carried out domestic policies that were harmful to the population and which, as we know from extensive polls, the people opposed. But they managed to maintain control by frightening the people. So the Nicaraguan Army was two days' march from Texas, and the airbase in Grenada was one from which the Russians would bomb us. It was one thing after another, every year, every one of them ludicrous. The Reagan Administration actually declared a National Emergency in 1985 because of the threat to the security of the United States posed by the Government of Nicaragua.

If somebody were watching this from Mars, they would not know whether to laugh or to cry.

They are doing exactly the same thing now, and will probably do something similar for the presidential campaign. There will have to be a new dragon to slay, because if the Administration lets domestic issues prevail, it is in deep trouble.

Ramachandran: You have written that this war of aggression has dangerous consequences with respect to international terrorism and the threat of nuclear war.

Chomsky: I cannot claim any originality for that opinion. I am just quoting the CIA and other intelligence agencies and virtually every specialist in international affairs and terrorism. Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy , the study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the high-level Hart-Rudman Commission on terrorist threats to the United States all agree that it is likely to increase terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The reason is simple: partly for revenge, but partly just for self-defence.

There is no other way to protect oneself from U.S. attack. In fact, the United States is making the point very clearly, and is teaching the world an extremely ugly lesson.

Compare North Korea and Iraq. Iraq is defenceless and weak; in fact, the weakest regime in the region. While there is a horrible monster running it, it does not pose a threat to anyone else. North Korea, on the other hand, does pose a threat. North Korea, however, is not attacked for a very simple reason: it has a deterrent. It has a massed artillery aimed at Seoul, and if the United States attacks it, it can wipe out a large part of South Korea.

So the United States is telling the countries of the world: if you are defenceless, we are going to attack you when we want, but if you have a deterrent, we will back off, because we only attack defenceless targets. In other words, it is telling countries that they had better develop a terrorist network and weapons of mass destruction or some other credible deterrent; if not, they are vulnerable to "preventive war".

For that reason alone, this war is likely to lead to the proliferation of both terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Ramachandran: How do you think the U.S. will manage the human - and humanitarian - consequences of the war?

Chomsky: No one knows, of course. That is why honest and decent people do not resort to violence - because one simply does not know.

The aid agencies and medical groups that work in Iraq have pointed out that the consequences can be very severe. Everyone hopes not, but it could affect up to millions of people. To undertake violence when there is even such a possibility is criminal.

There is already - that is, even before the war - a humanitarian catastrophe. By conservative estimates, ten years of sanctions have killed hundreds of thousands of people. If there were any honesty, the U.S. would pay reparations just for the sanctions.

The situation is similar to the bombing of Afghanistan, of which you and I spoke when the bombing there was in its early stages. It was obvious the United States was never going to investigate the consequences.

Ramachandran: Or invest the kind of money that was needed.

Chomsky: Oh no. First, the question is not asked, so no one has an idea of what the consequences of the bombing were for most of the country. Then almost nothing comes in. Finally, it is out of the news, and no one remembers it any more.

In Iraq, the United States will make a show of humanitarian reconstruction and will put in a regime that it will call democratic, which means that it follows Washington's orders. Then it will forget about what happens later, and will go on to the next one.

Ramachandran: How have the media lived up to their propaganda-model reputation this time?

Chomsky : Right now it is cheerleading for the home team. Look at CNN, which is disgusting - and it is the same everywhere. That is to be expected in wartime; the media are worshipful of power.

More interesting is what happened in the build-up to war. The fact that government-media propaganda was able to convince the people that Iraq is an imminent threat and that Iraq was responsible for

September 11 is a spectacular achievement and, as I said, was accomplished in about four months. If you ask people in the media about this, they will say, "Well, we never said that," and it is true, they did not. There was never a statement that Iraq is going to invade the United States or that it carried out the World Trade Centre attack. It was just insinuated, hint after hint, until they finally got people to believe it.

Ramachandran: Look at the resistance, though. Despite the propaganda, despite the denigration of the United Nations, they haven't quite carried the day.

Chomsky: You never know. The United Nations is in a very hazardous position.

The United States might move to dismantle it. I don't really expect that, but at least to diminish it, because when it isn't following orders, of what use is it?

Ramachandran: Noam, you have seen movements of resistance to imperialism over a long period - Vietnam, Central America, Gulf War I. What are your impressions of the character, sweep and depth of the present resistance to U.S. aggression? We take great heart in the extraordinary mobilisations all over the world.

Chomsky: Oh, that is correct; there is just nothing like it. Opposition throughout the world is enormous and unprecedented, and the same is true of the United States. Yesterday, for example, I was in demonstrations in downtown Boston, right around the Boston Common. It is not the first time I have been there. The first time I participated in a demonstration there at which I was to speak was in October 1965. That was four years after the United States had started bombing South Vietnam. Half of South Vietnam had been destroyed and the war had been extended to North Vietnam. We could not have a demonstration because it was physically attacked, mostly by students, with the support of the liberal press and radio, who denounced these people who were daring to protest against an American war.

On this occasion, however, there was a massive protest before the war was launched officially and once again on the day it was launched - with no counter-demonstrators. That is a radical difference. And if it were not for the fear factor that I mentioned, there would be much more opposition.

The government knows that it cannot carry out long-term aggression and destruction as in Vietnam because the population will not tolerate it.

There is only one way to fight a war now. First of all, pick a much weaker enemy, one that is defenceless. Then build it up in the propaganda system as either about to commit aggression or as an imminent threat. Next, you need a lightning victory. An important leaked document of the first Bush Administration in 1989 described how the U.S. would have to fight war. It said that the U.S. had to fight much weaker enemies, and that victory must be rapid and decisive, as public support will quickly erode. It is no longer like the 1960s, when a war could be fought for years with no opposition at all.

In many ways, the activism of the 1960s and subsequent years has simply made a lot of the world, including this country, much more civilised in many domains.

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Kerry says US needs its own 'regime change'
By Glen Johnson, Globe Staff April 3, 2003
PETERBOROUGH, N.H. - Senator John F. Kerry said yesterday that President Bush committed a ''breach of trust'' in the eyes of many United Nations members by going to war with Iraq, creating a diplomatic chasm that will not be bridged as long as Bush remains in office.

''What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States,'' Kerry said in a speech at the Peterborough Town Library.

Despite pledging two weeks ago to cool his criticism of the administration once war began, Kerry unleashed a barrage of criticism as US troops fought within 25 miles of Baghdad.

By echoing the ''regime change'' line popular with hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters who have demonstrated across the nation in recent weeks, the Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential contender seemed to be reaching out to a newly invigorated constituency as rival Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, closes in on Kerry in opinion polls.

Kerry said that he had spoken with foreign diplomats and several world leaders as recently as Monday while fund-raising in New York and that they told him they felt betrayed when Bush resorted to war in Iraq before they believed diplomacy had run its course.

He said the leaders, whom he did not identify, believed that Bush wanted to ''end-run around the UN.''

''I don't think they're going to trust this president, no matter what,'' Kerry said. ''I believe it deeply, that it will take a new president of the United States, declaring a new day for our relationship with the world, to clear the air and turn a new page on American history.''

With a dig at Bush's previous lack of foreign policy experience, Kerry said he would usher in a new US foreign policy if he stood before the United Nations as president.

''I believe we can have a golden age of American diplomacy,'' he said, outlining his own foreign policy credentials in the speech. ''But it will take a new president who is prepared to lead, and who has, frankly, a little more experience than visiting the sum total of two countries'' before taking office.

The criticism appeared to contradict statements Kerry made on March 18, just a day before Bush authorized military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Kerry, who previously had been critical of Bush's efforts to reach out to the international community, was reluctant that day to answer when a television crew asked him whether the administration had handled its diplomatic efforts poorly.

''You know, we're beyond that now,'' the senator said after addressing the International Association of Fire Fighters. ''We have to come together as a country to get this done and heal the wounds.''

Kerry, a Navy veteran of Vietnam, said he strongly supported US troops. ''There will be plenty of time here to be critical about how we arrived here,'' he said at that time. In response to questions after his speech yesterday, Kerry reiterated his support for the troops.

He also joined the administration in blasting ''armchair generals'' who are criticizing the war plan.

''War is war,'' he said. ''It's tough, and I think there's a little too much armchair quarterbacking and Monday-morning reviewing going on. I think we need to trust in the process for a few days here. This is only [14] days old, and they've achieved quite a remarkable advance in that period of time.''

When asked to square his criticism with his pledge of restraint two weeks earlier, Kerry first said that he had tempered his criticism of the administration's diplomatic efforts.

Then he said: ''It is possible that the word `regime change' is too harsh. Perhaps it is.''

Finally, he said his overall criticism of the administration was part of ''the healthy democracy of the United States of America'' and no different from some of the war critiques published on the front page of major newspapers. ''Is that unpatriotic?'' he asked.

A top Republican strategist, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Kerry was ''free to express his beliefs, but if anyone should be aware of the sensitivities of how our leaders should be conducting themselves while we're at war, I would think Senator Kerry would.''

''The president doesn't have the luxury of a campaign timeline to address the crisis of terrorism and its manifestation in Saddam Hussein,'' the strategist said.

During his opening remarks and on several occasions as he answered questions from the audience of more than 100 people, Kerry said he was the most experienced candidate in either party in terms of foreign policy and national security background.

''We need a president of the United States who has a vision of the world that is very different from what these excessively ideological unilateralists want to thrust on us and the rest of the world,'' said the 18-year veteran of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Taking aim at Attorney General John D. Ashcroft at one point, the senator added: ''One of the reasons why I am running for president of the United States is that I look forward with pleasure and zeal for the opportunity to appoint an attorney general of the United States who believes and reads and abides by the Constitution.''

Kerry was equally critical of his rivals for the Democratic nomination.

''I believe that I have a better capacity than any other candidate running in the field to be able to stand up and address questions of national security and America's role in the world with credibility and history, and to be able to move us to those areas where we win, which is on the domestic agenda,'' he said.

Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/3/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Finding Saddam not needed for victory: US
The Age April 5, 2003
The White House said today it would consider military action in Iraq a success even if US forces failed to find President Saddam Hussein, whose appearance on Iraqi television could prove he survived a US bombing raid on the first night of the war.

While finding Saddam -- either dead or alive -- would be "helpful," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President George W Bush's "definition of victory" was removing the current government from power and eliminating the country's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Fleischer said newly-aired tapes of Saddam were being analysed by the United States and that it was too soon to draw "firm conclusions one way or another" about whether the Iraqi leader is alive or dead. "We don't know," he said.

If Saddam eludes US forces, he would join the ranks of America's most wanted, a list now topped by al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, whom Washington blames for the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Fleischer made the comments as Iraqi television broadcast a speech apparently by Saddam urging the people of Baghdad to "strike the enemy with force" and predicting victory over the invading US and British troops.

In the address, Saddam mentioned the shooting down of a US Apache helicopter by an Iraqi farmer in late March. The mention of the incident, originally reported by Iraqi officials on March 24, may be the first clear proof the Iraqi president survived a US bombing on Baghdad on March 20 that targeted him and his two sons.

Iraqi television later showed footage of what it said was Saddam, dressed in a military uniform, visiting residential areas of Baghdad today. But there was no way of verifying when the film was taped.

"What's important in the president's judgment is that the regime be disarmed and that the regime be changed so the Iraqi people can be free and liberated," Fleischer said.

"Certainly any clear resolution about Saddam Hussein's fate helps provide some clarity to that," Fleischer said. "But the definition of victory is those two factors that I cited, that the president has cited."

"In the bigger scheme of things, it really doesn't matter because whether it is him or whether it isn't him, the regime's days are numbered and are coming to an end," he added.

Fleischer said Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair would meet next Tuesday in Northern Ireland to discuss the Iraq war and reviving the Middle East peace process.

Though Fleischer said no dates have been set, Bush administration officials are considering quickly installing an interim Iraqi authority in areas under the control of US-led forces while the government in Baghdad is cut off from the rest of the country.

Several hundred US government officials are already encamped in Kuwait waiting on the word to go into Iraq to set up the post-war Iraq Interim Authority under the leadership for retired General Jay Garner.

A top contender to oversee Iraq's oil industry in the short-term is Phillip J Carroll, Royal Dutch/Shell Group's former chief executive in the United States, US officials said.

Carroll was chief executive of Shell Oil, the company's US subsidiary, from 1993-98. He then joined engineering and construction company Fluor Corp as chairman and CEO, retiring last year. Fluor is among the US companies being considered for post-war contracts in Iraq.

Timothy Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan, is preparing to run Iraq's Ministry of Industry, while Robin Raphel, former ambassador to Tunisia, has been penciled in to run the Ministry of Trade, the officials said.

Kenton Keith, a former ambassador to Qatar, would run the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, US officials said.

The US military and its war allies envision operating the Iraqi government for at least weeks, but probably longer, during the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war.

US officials, aware that they stand to suffer severe international criticism for running what would amount to a puppet government, said they want to involve Iraqis in the running of the government as soon as possible.

The hope is to quickly restart a number of nonpolitical agencies like agriculture and water and others that would not be stacked with Saddam loyalists.

The United States wants to assure the United Nations that it will have a role in the reconstruction of post-war Iraq but what role it would be and how quickly it would start has not yet been determined.

US officials want the UN oil-for-food program to continue in order to get urgent humanitarian aid to the people.

Fleischer declined to comment on any US plans to get the interim authority quickly up and running in southern Iraq, saying the shooting war was still under way.

"This is still a battlefield in many ways, in many places, and that remains the primary mission still is to win the war," Fleischer told reporters.

Fleischer said any interim governing body would be made up of both Iraqi exiles and Iraqis who still live in the country.

President George W Bush, who declared yesterday that "a vise is closing" around Baghdad, planned to meet at the White House later on Friday with a group of Shia, Sunni, and Christian Iraqis who now live in the United States.

- Reuters

#

British use of cluster bombs condemned
Weapons make battlefield safer, Hoon says
Richard Norton-Taylor and Owen Bowcott The Guardian April 4, 2003
British and American forces were accused yesterday of breaking international rules of war after admitting that they were using cluster bombs against targets in Iraq.
Presented with a storm of criticism, the Ministry of Defence admitted that Israeli-manufactured cluster shells had been fired by the Royal Artillery's long-range howitzers around Basra.

It also said that RAF Harrier jets had dropped RBL755 cluster bombs on targets in Iraq. The weapons, which scatter 147 "bomblets" over a wide area, have an estimated 10% failure rate, leaving unexploded munitions which humanitarian groups say are as dangerous as landmines. Yellow in colour and the size of soft-drink cans, they are attractive to children in particular.

British howitzers with a range of 30km have fired Israeli-made L20 cluster shells on targets described by the MoD as "in the open". Though they are designed to self-destruct if they fail to detonate, they contain 49 bomblets which are lethal over a large area and have a failure rate of up to 5%.

US forces, meanwhile, have been showering batteries of cluster weapons on Iraqi targets with multi-launch rocket systems.

Iraq's information minister accused US-led forces of dropping cluster bombs on Baghdad on Thursday, killing 14 people and wounding 66.

"This morning, these criminals dropped cluster bombs on the Douri residential area of Baghdad, and 14 people - men, women and children - were martyred and 66 were wounded," Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf told a news conference.

US and British commanders insist they would not drop cluster bombs in places where there are civilians present.

The chief doctor at the general teaching hospital in Hilla, six miles south of Baghdad, said this week that 33 civilians had been killed, and 100 injured, after a cluster bomb attack. The US central command in Qatar is investigating the report.

American military officials said yesterday that US B-52 bombers had for the first time dropped six new CBU-105 bombs - guided 500kg cluster bombs - on Iraqi tanks defending Baghdad.

Colin King, author of Jane's explosive ordnance disposal guide and a British army bomb disposal expert in the 1991 Gulf war, said yesterday: "Cluster bombs have a very bad reputation, which they deserve."

Richard Lloyd, director of the campaigning group Landmine Action said yesterday: "Dropping cluster bombs on Iraq contradicts any government claim to minimise civilian casualties. Cluster weapons are prone to missing their targets and killing civilians."

Alex Renton, overseeing Oxfam's aid work from Jordan, said the cluster shells could cause "unnecessary harm". The UN children's fund, Unicef, expressed concern that Iraqi children might confuse the yellow food packets being handed out by American forces with the bomblets, which had identical colouring.

In the Commons, the defence secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, accepted there were risks with cluster bombs.

He said that though the failure rate was "very small" they did leave a "continuing problem". Mr Hoon added: "Balanced against that you really have got to face up to the issue of whether you are going to allow coalition forces to be put at risk because we do not use this particular capability."

It would be necessary to use "far larger weapons" to deal with the same problem if cluster bombs were ruled out, he said.

Cluster weapons were used when it was "absolutely justified ... because it is making the battlefield safer for our armed forces", said Mr Hoon.

Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, has said in a written parliamentary reply that British Challenger 2 tanks in southern Iraq have fired depleted uranium shells. "The post-conflict administrators of Iraq will be responsible for monitoring DU levels in the environment and cordoning off and decontaminating sites of penetrator impacts," he told the Labour MP Llewellyn Smith.

Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Iraqi forces stored more than 150 landmines in a mosque containing the tombs of Kurdish martyrs in violation of humanitarian law. The stockpile of abandoned anti-personnel devices was discovered several days ago in northern Iraq by a team from the Mines Advisory Group, a British mine removal charity.

Although Iraq is not party to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, said Steve Goose, executive director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, "any use of anti-personnel mines by any armed force is prohibited by customary international humanitarian law, since they are inherently indiscriminate weapons."

#

U.N. International Aid Staff Return To Iraq
UN Wire April 4, 2003
Non-Iraqi U.N. aid workers returned to Iraq today for the first time since their withdrawal March 17. An 11-member team of staff members from the World Food Program, UNICEF and the U.N. Office for the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq began assessing aid needs in Umm Qasr, WFP emergency coordinator for Iraq Russell Ulrey told Agence France-Presse.

"We are assessing logistics, including the port, the hospital, water supplies and the market place," Ulrey said.

UNICEF spokesman Marc Vergara in Kuwait said that a three-person team of experts from Canada, Sudan and Algeria, members of UNICEF's Baghdad office, planned to speak to doctors about hospital conditions, medical supplies and sanitation. "At the moment they are just looking at the needs," he said. "They will be talking to people and will come back later today," he added (Chris Otton, AFP, April 4).

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IRAQ: Speed Up Relief Funds, U.N. Asks
UN Wire April 4, 2003
U.N. agencies called yesterday for a quicker and more significant response to a $2.2 billion humanitarian appeal for Iraq they issued last week.

At a daily briefing in Amman, Jordan, World Health Organization representative Fadela Chaib said children will die of diarrheal disease, women will die in childbirth and there will be a major shortage of medicine unless more funds are offered. Chaib said the WHO has received $3 million toward its $300 million appeal.

World Food Program spokesman Khaled Mansour welcomed $200 million from the United States but said the WFP has received $315 million in all, only about 24 percent of what it needs (U.N. release, April 3).

The U.N. Security Council said after a briefing yesterday by Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette that it is concerned about Iraqis' access to relief (U.N. release II, April 3).

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Letter from Mia Couto to President Bush in "Savana", March 21st
Pravda April 2, 2003
Letter to President Bush

Mr. President:

I'm a writer from a poor country. A country that was once in your black list. Millions of Mozambicans were unaware of what harm we had done to your country. We were small and poor: what threat could we pose? Our weapon of mass destruction was after all being used against us: it was famine and misery.

Some of us found it weird the criteria which led to our name being exposed while other nations were gaining from your sympathy. For instance, our neighbor - South Africa with their apartheid - blatantly violating human rights.

For decades we were victims of that regime's aggression. But the apartheid regime was worthy of a more lenient attitude called the "positive involvement".

The ANC was in your black list as well, as a "terrorist organization"! A weird criteria which years later led to the Taliban and Bin Laden to be called as "freedom fighters" by US strategists.

Well I - a poor writer from a poor country - had a dream. As Martin Luther King once had: that America was a country of all Americans. Well I dreamed that I was not a man but a country. A country that couldn't sleep because it lived terrified by terrible facts. And that terror made it proclaim a demand. A demand to you Dear President. And I demanded the United States of America to proceed to the destruction of their weapon of mass destruction.

Because of the terrible dangers I demanded more: that UN inspectors would be sent to your country. What terrible dangers was I afraid of? What did I fear from your country? Unfortunately it wasn't a dream. Facts were the reason for my fears.

The list was so big that I will just name a few:

- The United States were the only nation to drop nuclear bombs upon other nations;

- Your country was the only nation condemned for "illegitimate use of force" by the International Justice Tribunal;

- American forces trained and armed extremist islamic fundamentalists (including Bin Laden) under the pretext of overthrowing the Russian invaders in Afghanistan;

- Saddam Hussein's regime was being supported by the USA while committing the worst atrocities against Iraqis (including the gassing of kurds in 1988);

- As many other legitimate leaders, the African Patrice Lumumba was murdered by the CIA. After being arrested, tortured and shot in the head and his body dissolved in cloridric acid;

- As many other puppets, Mobutu Seseseko was one of your agents you put in a country in exchange for help for the American espionage: the CIA office in Zaire became the larger in Africa. The brutal dictatorship by this man was never condemned by the USA until he became inconvenient, in 1992;

- The invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian military was supported by the USA. When the atrocities were known, the Clinton administration's reply was "it's a matter of the Indonesian government's responsibility and we do not wish to take that responsibility away from them";

- Your country harbored criminals like Emmanuel Constant, one of Haiti's most blood thirsty leaders whose paramilitary slaughtered thousands of innocents. Constant was tried "in absentia" and the new authorities requested his extradition. The American government has so far declined the request;

- On August 1998 the USAF bombed a medicine factory in Sudan called Al-Shifa. A mistake? No, it was a retaliation for the bombings of Nairobi and Dar-es-Saalam;

- In December 1987, the United States were the only country (along with Israel) to vote against a motion condemning international terrorism. Still, the motion was accepted with the favorable vote of 153 countries;

- In 1953, the CIA helped preparing a coup against Iran following which thousands of communists from Tudeh were massacred. The list of CIA sponsored coups is quite long;

- Since World War Two the USA have bombed: China (1945-46), Korea and China (1950-53), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-1961), Guatemala (1960), Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1961-1973), Vietnam (1961-1973), Cambodia (1969-1970), Guatemala (1967-1973), Grenada (1983), Lebanon (1983-1984), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980), Nicaragua (1980), Iran (1987), Panama (1989), Iraq (1990-2001), Kuwait (1991), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1994-95), Sudan
(1998), Afghanistan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999);

- Biological and chemical terrorism was carried out by the USA: the orange agent in Vietnam, a plague virus in Cuba which for years devastated the pig production there;

- The Wall Street Journal published a report announcing that 500.000 Vietnamese children were born with deformations due to the chemical warfare carried out by the American troops.

I woke up from the nightmare of that dream to the nightmare of reality. The war you decided to start may get a dictator away from us.

But we will all become poorer. We will be facing bigger problems in our already volatile economies and we will have less hope in a future governed by righthood and moral. We will have less faith in the power of the United Nations and the international law. We will be more lonely and helpless.

Mr. President:

Iraq isn't Saddam. It's 22 millions of mothers and children and men who work and dream as any American. We worry about the horror of Saddam Hussein's regime which are quite real. But we forget the horrors of the pr evious gulf war in which over 150.000 people lost their lives. Saddam's weapons are not killing the Iraqi people, the sanctions are. It was the sanctions that led to a humanitarian crisis that was so serious that two UN coordinators (Dennis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck) resigned in protest.

Explaining the reason for his resignation Halliday wrote: "We are destroying a whole society. It is as simple and as terrible as that. And that is illegal and immoral".

Those sanctions have already killed half a million Iraqi children. But the war on Iraq isn't about to begin. It begun a long time ago. In the no fly zones there have been continuous bombings for the last 12 years. It is believed that 500 Iraqis were killed since 1999. The bombing included the massive use of depleted uranium (300 tons, 30 times more the amount used in Kosovo).

We will get rid of Saddam. But we will still be prisoners of this logic of war and arrogance. I don't want my children (or yours) to live dominated by fear or to think that in order to live in peace they will need to build a fortress and that they will only be safe when they spend a fortune in weapons.

Like your country, spending 270.000.000.000 (two hundred and seventy billion) dollars a year to keep the war arsenal. You know too well what that amount of money could do to change the miserable faith of millions of human beings.

The American bishop Robert Bowan wrote you a letter in the end of last year. It was called "Why the world hates the USA?". The bishop of the Florida Catholic Church is a Vietnam veteran. He knows what the war is like and he wrote:

"You claim the USA are the target of terrorism because we defend democracy, freedom and human rights. What an absurd Mr. President! We are the target of terrorists because in most places in the world our government supported dictatorship, slavery and exploitation. We are the target because we are hated.

And we are hated because our government has done hateful things. In how many countries did we use our agents to replace democratically elected leaders and replacing them for military dictators willing to to sell their own people to the American multinational corporations?"

And the bishop concludes by saying: "The Canadian people enjoys democracy, freedom and human rights as well as the people of Norway and Sweden. Have you ever heard of any attacks on Canadian, Norwegian or Swedish embassies? We are not hated for having democracy, freedom or human rights. We are hated because our government denies that to the people of the third world countries whose resources are wanted by our multinationals".

Mr. President:

Your Excellency don't seem to have the need for an international institution to legitimize your right to a military intervention. At least may we find moral and truth in your argumentation. Me and millions of other citizens were not convinced when we saw you justify this war. We would rather see you sign the Kyoto Convention to prevent the green house effect. We would rather have seen you at the Durban International Conference against Racism.

Don't worry Mr. President. We - the small nations of this world - do not intend to demand your resignation for the support provided to all those dictators. The larger menace lying over America is not the weaponry of any third party. It's the lies in the heads of your own citizens. The danger is not Saddam's regime or any other regime. But the sentiment of superiority your government seems to have. Your major enemy is not on the outside. It's within the USA.

And that war can only be won by the Americans themselves.

I would like to celebrate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And celebrate it with all Americans. But without hypocrisy or that argumentation for the mentally diminished. Because we, dear President Bush, the people of the smaller countries, we have a weapon of mass destruction: we can think.

MIA COUTO
--
Translation by Ralitsa Zaitseva

#

Edited by author 04-04-2003 04:33 PM
WAR BOYCOTTS: Multinational Firms Take StepsTo Avert Boycotts Over War
By GLENN R. SIMPSON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 4, 2003
"In Indonesia, where KFC Corp. is under siege by Muslim students protesting the Iraq war, the firm has responded by adding deeply discounted chicken balls to its menu."

As diplomatic tensions over Iraq peaked at the United Nations in late February and U.S. patriotic fervor swelled, the South Carolina state legislature took up a resolution calling for a boycott of French products.

By vowing to block a U.S.-backed measure on disarming Iraq at the U.N. Security Council, France gave "aid and comfort" to Saddam Hussein, the measure asserted. Under the circumstances, "it makes no sense to buy French products, goods and services." The resolution passed the state House, 90-9. The overwhelming vote in favor of a boycott wasn't surprising: South Carolina is a famously protectionist and patriotic bastion of American manufacturing.

If such a boycott gained consumer support, one of the biggest losers could have been Group Michelin SA. But then something most unexpected happened: Instead of deflating the French firm's famous Michelin Man, lawmakers abruptly backed down. The state Senate never took up the measure. Many of the Michelin tires sold in the U.S., it turned out, are made in factories across South Carolina.

WAR IN IRAQ

"The global economy is so interconnected today, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot," said South Carolina Commerce Secretary Bob Faith. "You might be putting your neighbor out of work."

Around the world, noisy boycotts and protests are targeting many multinational companies in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. In the U.S., those protests are aimed at the French and Germans, while opponents of the war are focusing on American companies.

In the Indian city of Calcutta, antiwar protesters attacked a shop owned by Nike Inc., while in Argentina, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. outlets are being picketed. In Bologna, Italy, police this week defused a bomb outside an office of International Business Machines Corp. One of the most concerted attacks has been against Coca-Cola Co., whose competitors in parts of the Arab world are seeking to paint Coke as the soft-drink of the infidel.

For all the noise, though, most companies and trade associations say the protests have yet to bring any significant dent in sales. The brief life of South Carolina's anti-French boycott is a potent example of how multinationals are working to keep a lid on the threat. Michelin produced a set of responses for its U.S. employees and managers, and other firms have quietly begun to mobilize lobbyists, pollsters and public-relations specialists. Multinational companies also are employing services that monitor the Internet for new attacks so they can be countered quickly.

More broadly, these companies are being aided by the new realities of globalization, which have reshaped the politics of consumer boycotts. Japanese and German auto manufacturers make cars in the U.S., employing thousands of workers. France's Sodexho supplies meal rations -- made in Maryland -- to the U.S. military. And even as firms on both sides of the Atlantic fear that politically motivated boycotts will spread, they are discovering that consumer support for them is shallow.

In a recent survey of American voters conducted for a group of foreign multinationals, Washington pollster Neil Newhouse found that nearly a third of boycott supporters said they would abandon their plans to spurn some "foreign" goods if they knew that those products were made by Americans in the U.S. Nudged a bit further, some 60% of those who said they were inclined toward boycotts agreed that "because many French and German products sold in the U.S. are made in this country by U.S. workers, the U.S. economy would suffer if Americans stopped buying these products."

In the new politics of boycotts, "a little information goes a long way in changing behavior," Mr. Newhouse said. "When you link this to jobs, given the state of the economy, it's a very powerful motivator."

In the U.S., Europe and Asia, there have been huge increases in foreign investment over the past two decades. In the late 1980s, multinationals greatly stepped up their efforts to buy or build manufacturing and sales facilities in foreign target markets. By 2000, foreign firms, excluding banks, employed 6.4 million U.S. workers with a payroll of some $330 billion, the Commerce Department says. Some 45% of all U.S. private investment abroad goes to the European Union, and the EU invests an equal proportion in the U.S. At the same time, sales by U.S. affiliates in 2000 totaled $236 billion in Germany and $137.5 billion in France, a Johns Hopkins study found.

In South Carolina, Michelin has invested more than $2 billion in factories and offices, employing 6,000. Bayerische Motoren Werke AG of Germany is another major South Carolina employer.

If political passion overwhelms reasoned appeals to economic self-interest, one U.S.-based fast-food giant is using an old-fashioned tactic: a big sale. In Indonesia, where KFC Corp. is under siege by Muslim students protesting the Iraq war, the firm has responded by adding deeply discounted chicken balls to its menu.

"No matter what, at the end of the day, customers here look at price," said Mario Ledres, general manager of finance at PT Fastfood Indonesia, the local franchisee of KFC, itself a unit of Yum Brands Inc. of Louisville, Ky.

Like other American fast-food chains in Asia, KFC has always strived to highlight its local ties. It has long served rice with its meals, which Indonesians prefer to mashed potatoes, and all of its food is prepared according to strict Islamic dietary laws.

Wal-Mart has seen antiwar activities at its stores in numerous countries, including Germany, Argentina and Mexico. At some outlets, protestors plaster leaflets on cars in parking lots saying: "Don't Buy American." In Germany, activists have taken the idea of a walkout a step further. They fill shopping carts with merchandise, stand in line and then once a cashier scans the items, they walk out, leaving the products behind and chanting antiwar slogans.

Wal-Mart hasn't taken any steps to counter such tactics, a spokesman said. And despite the disruptions, the demonstrations haven't hurt sales, the retailer said. "It's antiwar sentiments, not anti-Wal-Mart," said John Menzer, chief executive of Wal-Mart International.

Multinational companies also are banding together to protect themselves. The chief trade association in Washington for foreign firms, the Organization for International Investment, is working to assemble an antiboycott coalition with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and other U.S. business groups, and it recently commissioned Mr. Newhouse's political research firm, Public Opinion Strategies, to track consumer sentiment.

Todd Malan, the foreign multinational group's executive director, said that Americans' anger toward the French is understandable, but punishing French companies simply isn't effective.

U.S. executives are just as worried as their European counterparts. "They are aghast that the economic waters are being roiled by some political actions that clearly haven't been thought through," said Willard Workman, an international-trade specialist at the U.S. Chamber. Mr. Workman has distributed "talking points" that help U.S. firms seeking to calm angry war opponents by disavowing any influence over President Bush. Boycotts targeted at foreign companies, the chamber says, "historically have never changed their governments' policies."

Michelin's experience suggests such a message may work. After the firm began to be targeted by angry politicians and consumers in February, it quickly drew up a response. "A boycott of Michelin products in the U.S. wouldn't be a boycott of French products," the firm's North America division told inquiring consumers. "It would be a boycott against American products, made in 17 U.S. factories, located in seven states."

-- Cris Prystay, Ann Zimmerman and Erin White contributed to this article.

Write to Glenn R. Simpson at glenn.simpson@wsj.com5
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http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104940909953735600,00.html

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#

White House Divided Over Reconstruction
By Robin Wright, Staff WriterLA Times April 2, 2003
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is deeply riven by disputes over postwar Iraq, particularly on three key issues - the role of the United Nations, who will lead the country and which elements of the U.S. government will oversee its reconstruction, administration officials say.

The fight, those involved say, is about whether Iraq is transformed through an international effort under U.N. supervision, as the State Department prefers, or through a process designed and controlled largely by the United States and designated Iraqis, as the Pentagon prefers.

So far, the Pentagon's approach is prevailing, producing intense squabbling both in Washington and at the Hilton Hotel in Kuwait, where many U.S. officials are drafting plans and preparing to head to Baghdad when the war ends.

At a meeting scheduled Thursday in Brussels, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plans to tell his European and NATO counterparts that the Bush administration wants United Nations assistance with humanitarian and reconstruction projects, and possibly a stabilization force, but seeks no help in re-creating Iraq politically, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon has championed this approach.

"His message is: There's still a role for the world to play, but there are limits to what's possible under this administration. There's room for a U.N. role, but not U.N. rule," said a well-placed U.S. official, who disagrees with this approach.

"We're on the verge of further alienating allies," said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "And it looks like we're going to do exactly what we promised we wouldn't - take small groups of exiles with limited influence in Iraq and bring them in as the bulk of a transition government."

Decisions being made now, U.S. officials said, could have an impact well beyond Iraq's borders and long after the U.S. finishes both its military and political missions in Iraq. They could affect everything from the extent of global cooperation the United States can expect in tackling security threats to U.S. alliances in the region.

"What was supposed to go the smoothest is proving to be the hardest part. Some of our worst fears about the postwar period are already coming true," said a senior administration official.

A Pentagon official insisted Tuesday that reports of interagency friction "are just exaggerated," adding that "there's a lot of people from a lot of different agencies that are working to fulfill the goal of providing necessary humanitarian support for the Iraqi people after the fall of the Iraqi regime."

The United States' insistence on a limited role for the United Nations could deepen tensions with key allies, who would prefer that the U.N. oversee the political transition to a democratically elected government in Baghdad. The allies also may be reluctant to provide funding for postwar Iraq if they have limited say in the decision-making process, U.S. officials conceded.

Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Washington's main ally in the war, stressed during talks in Washington last week the importance of turning over the administration of Iraq to the United Nations. Blair sees the move as critical to winning support from donor nations and to preventing a political backlash and new terrorism from an increasingly angry Arab world, U.S. and British officials say.

Congressional leaders also are warning the White House against going it alone.

By failing to engage the United Nations after the war, the United States would "miss an opportunity" to repair damage to the world body and to important U.S. alliances needed for the war on terrorism and other issues, said Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"By gaining U.N. approval, we would help political leaders around the world whose people oppose the war justify their participation - including financial participation - in building the peace," he said on the Senate floor last week.

On new postwar Iraqi leadership, the Pentagon is now making decisions that could virtually ensure that Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi National Congress leader who fled Iraq in 1958, becomes the transitional leader after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials say.

"Chalabi is the Pentagon's guy, and the Pentagon is in charge," an administration official said.

Pentagon strategists want to see a known ally in power in Iraq as part of an ambitious regional reshuffling of alliances, with Iraq emerging as a pillar of U.S. policy

in the region, the officials added.

Chalabi, a U.S.-educated former banker, is a charismatic Shiite Muslim but also a divisive figure with a checkered past. He was tried and convicted in absentia in Jordan for bank fraud and senior Arab officials say he would not be welcome in several Middle East countries.

The Pentagon favors Chalabi - a long-standing ally of Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and influential neo-conservative strategist Richard Perle - particularly after the failure of possible alternative Iraqi leaders to emerge.

"Originally, the argument for needing Chalabi and the INC was that the war would be over so quickly that the United States would need to have someone ready fast. Now the argument is just the reverse, that no one else is emerging, so we need Chalabi to play the leadership role," said the administration official.

The State Department has fought the Pentagon on Chalabi, because of to deep skepticism about his acceptability both at home and in the region.

"Iraq's future needs to be decided by the broadest possible grouping of Iraqis reflecting Iraq's diverse ethnic and religious makeup, and people from both inside and outside Iraq," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday when the exiled opposition announced plans to declare a provisional government once Baghdad is liberated.

Creating a government before liberation would disenfranchise the vast majority of Iraqis, Boucher warned. The mechanism for selecting an interim government will be determined only after the war, he added.

Yet Pentagon staff deployed in Kuwait, backed by Defense Department strategists in Washington, are already selecting Iraqi exiles to staff key ministries in Baghdad, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Kuwait. Most are aligned with Chalabi, potentially giving his Iraqi National Congress the dominant voice in the transition.

Tensions between the State Department and Pentagon are even playing out in the selection of U.S. personnel for duty in Iraq. The Defense Department has so far refused to approve the State Department's eight-person team to help run ministries.

The bickering over plans and personnel has particularly frustrated retired Gen. Jay M. Garner, the Pentagon-appointed head of the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, said U.S. officials in Washington and Kuwait. He has even told some associates that he contemplated quitting.

#

THE NAKED EMPEROR
By Achin Vanaik The Hindu April 1, 2003
The war is being fought for imperial purposes, no matter what Washington's official explanations are.
THE UNITED States' assault on Iraq marks a turning point in history. There are those, of course, who cynically ask, "so, what is new"? After all, they would say, throughout the ages great powers have invariably pursued their interests and indulged in hypocrisy to cover up their real motives. Moreover, other countries, for example India, must simply pursue their own interests always keeping in mind the need to adjust to the "realities of power", hence the value of the "middle path". Such voices have simply missed the crux. The worldwide popular revulsion to this war of a depth and scale not witnessed even during the Vietnam War means that the war has, in fact, the character of a profound revelation regardless of its eventual outcome. That the opposition should be so strong despite the dictatorial nature of the Saddam Hussein regime only reinforces the point.

The sheer brazenness of American behaviour has forced upon the international public's consciousness the recognition as never before that the U.S. is an emperor without clothes; that this war is being fought for imperial purposes, no matter what Washington's official explanations are. These are the claims that Iraq has accumulated sufficient WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to be a threat to the U.S. and the world, and that the invading forces are really "liberators", motivated by deep concern for ordinary Iraqis. No matter how dedicated a job the Western-dominated global media (as well as sections of our own) does to sell these justifications, the double standards involved are simply too stark.

Indeed, the longer the war drags on and the more obvious it becomes that the invading forces are not being popularly welcomed, the more the reality of U.S. empire-building as the primary purpose of the whole exercise gets exposed.

It is the widespread negative public reappraisal of America (outside of it) that is the decisively new and historic development. It is not as if previously many people were not aware of the U.S.' imperial ambitions. But there was always a widespread sense (outside of the Left) that the U.S. was a benevolent power, guilty sometimes in its foreign policy of overreaching itself and making mistakes that could cause great suffering to others, but nonetheless a power to generally support even if to specifically criticise. Furthermore, the existence of a seemingly enduring Cold War forced most people to take sides. Most liberals and the politically non-committed chose the West and the U.S. Most party-affiliated and party-influenced communists chose the side of the Soviet Union or China.

Only a small section, comprising for the most part the independent Left and the radical liberal, took the only morally honourable position of opposing both sides by attacking their respective "empire-building" and undemocratic proclivities, even as they reserved the right to qualify their criticism in specific cases or take sides on specific issues.

Victory for the West and the U.S. in the Cold War and the acceptance by the defeated side of the values and norms of the other side (a common enough historical occurrence) only reinforced the image of the U.S. as a benevolent power, basically liberal, not imperial or imperialist. The truth has always been very different.

There has always been a political disjunction of sorts in the U.S. It has been strongly democratic in its internal structures (though less so than the West European advanced, industrialised democracies) but brutally imperialist over a period of 150 years, first towards Central and South America, then towards the Pacific, and after the Second World War, towards Eurasia and Africa, though its foreign policy was cloaked in the mantle of "defending the free world".

However, it is not as if the current assault on Iraq is going to lead to quite this kind of radical reappraisal. It is simply that this imperialist behaviour is at such obvious odds with the generally accepted view of what the U.S. stands for, that a fundamental yet popular reappraisal of what the U.S. stands for today and in the future is now taking place on a scale previously unimaginable. This has greatly disturbed even those American conservatives and liberals who continue to believe in the myth of American foreign policy benevolence, including the general justice of waging a war on Iraq, but worry about whether a) this is the right way to wage war on Saddam Hussein's regime, and b) international opposition might not lead to a level of political isolation that bodes ill for the U.S.' future "benevolent" foreign policy ambitions and plans.

The stakes in this war are extremely high. The main issue is not what Iraq has done or not done. Nor is it what feeble "rewards" the Government of India might get from following the "middle path". It is whether one opposes or supports the unbridled expansion and consolidation of the American empire. Those who refuse to oppose, or advise the Indian Government not to genuinely or seriously oppose the U.S., are passively and indirectly supporting American plans. Washington understands the stakes clearly, knows it cannot take on every country and therefore expresses frustrated but essentially ineffectual anger against those diplomatic positions that weaken it by enhancing its political isolation. The opposition from Malaysia (which gets much more FDI than India), Greece, France, Germany (all NATO members) and others has left it seething, but Washington is comfortable with New Delhi's official position.

Today, we have the sorry spectacle of both the dominant ruling party, the BJP, and the main Opposition party, the Congress, separated on crucial terrains by tactical shades, not strategic differences. On neo-liberal economics, they are indistinguishable. On Hindutva, one is hard, the other soft.

Regarding the American imperium, both aim only at adjusting to whatever power realities might subsequently emerge. Neither wishes, however subtly on the diplomatic front, to help change power equations in ways benefiting all countries and peoples. This would come about from a taming of the U.S. and of it coming to realise that it cannot pursue aggressive unilateralism without paying an unacceptably high price.

The tragedy of the Indian Government's position lies not simply in refusing to recognise the true nature of the stakes involved but in pretending that this posture is in the "national" or "popular" or "global" interest when it is the reverse — the defeats that the U.S. might suffer in its expansionist plans — that can most promote such various collective interests.

This moral-political failing is made all the worse because the U.S. today can win the war on Iraq, yet lose the peace because it has aroused more collective hatred and political isolation towards it than ever before. The contrast between the posture of a world statesman such as Nelson Mandela and the pedestrian thinking of the "experts" who advise the BJP and the Congress could not be sharper.

The clarity of Mr. Mandela's opposition to the U.S. comes not just from a greater moral integrity but a greater political wisdom. He knows that, as in the struggle against apartheid, so in the struggle against American empire-building, you never compromise on the goal itself.

Flexibility and compromise on the means, including a Government's or a movement's diplomatic postures, is acceptable but must always be directed towards achieving that goal.

#

Subject: FW: Iraq
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 13:43:48 +1000
From: "Allison, Lyn (Senator)"

Transcript of AM broadcast at 08:00 AEST January 28th on the possibility of using nuclear weapons on Iraq

LINDA MOTTRAM: To the report this morning by a respected American nuclear weapons analyst that the Pentagon is preparing for the possible use against Iraq of nuclear weapons.

William Arkin is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Education, which is a branch of the Johns Hopkins University, and he has written the report which has been carried in the "Los Angeles Times".

It says that the US Strategic Command is compiling potential target lists, with planning said to be focussed on two possible roles for nuclear weapons, as bunker busters for underground Iraqi facilities and to stop an Iraqi chemical or biological attack.

In Washington our Correspondent, John Shovelan has been looking at the claims.

JOHN SHOVELAN: In his report, William Arkin says planning for the possible use of nuclear weapons is taking place at three sites, the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, in Washington, and at Vice-President Dick Cheney's undisclosed location in Pennsylvania.

He says the Bush Administration's decision to actively plan for possible pre-emptive use of such weapons, especially of so-called "bunker busters" against Iraq, represents a significant lowering of the nuclear threshold.

Asked about the report, White House Spokesman, Ari Fleischer repeated the Administration position that all military options are available.

ARI FLEISCHER: I think it's well known that the United States' longstanding policy about nuclear weapons is that we don't rule anything in and we don't rule anything out, and that remains our policy.

JOHN SHOVELAN: Previously the United States has reserved nuclear weapons for retaliation against nuclear attacks or immediate threats to national survival, a standard that's widely accepted around the world.

But Administration officials now believe that in some circumstances nuclear arms may offer the only way to destroy targets buried deep beneath the ground that contain chemical or biological weapons.

In the last year, US Government officials have made clear that they want to be better prepared to consider the nuclear option against the threat of unconventional weapons in the hands of terrorists or rogue nations.

ARI FLEISCHER: Questions about any type of munitions that would be used or wouldn't be used beyond the broad policy that I've already given you today, about not putting anything on the table or taking it off, any questions about operations need to be addressed to the Pentagon, not to the White House.

JOHN SHOVELAN: William Arkin also writes that the Pentagon has changed the bureaucratic oversight of nuclear weapons so that they are no longer treated as a special category of arms but are grouped with conventional military options.

In a policy statement issued only last month, the White House said the United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force, including through the resource to all of our options.

John Shovelan, Washington.

#

Edited by author 04-03-2003 06:31 PM
The New York Review of Books April 10, 2003
Letter
Iraq: A Letter of Resignation
By John Brady Kiesling
The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Mr. Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan.

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as political counselor in US Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a US diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars, and journalists, and to persuade them that US interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated al-Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to do to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?


-----------------------------------------------------------

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary US interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims are not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of postwar Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.

We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the US to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our president condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials? Has oderint dum metuant really become our motto?

I urge you to listen to America's friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system with the US and the EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?

Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America's ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current US administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.

#

Edited by author 04-03-2003 06:25 PM
USAID Defends Secret Bids
For Rebuilding Postwar Iraq
National Security Is Cited as Reason
Few Knew of $1.7 Billion in Contracts
By NEIL KING JR. Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 2, 2003
WASHINGTON -- Amid worries that preparations aren't moving as fast as hoped, a top procurement official defended the government's decision to approach only a handful of U.S. companies to help rebuild postwar Iraq.

The U.S. Agency for International Development chose to put out the bids in secret to a limited number of companies under an exception that allows agencies to bypass the usual competitive bidding for national security reasons, said Timothy Beans, the agency's chief of procurement.

"Anytime you are in a wartime condition you don't have the four or five months to go out on the street for the kind of competition you'd like," Mr. Beans said.

USAID began approaching preselected bidders for postwar Iraq work as early as late January, when the possibility of going to war with Iraq was still being hotly debated at the United Nations. Requests for proposals went out for four contracts in mid-February, with two more early last month. Altogether, the work -- including rebuilding highways and bridges and rehabilitating Iraq's school system -- is expected to cost at least $1.7 billion.

Similar exceptions were made for reconstruction after the recent antiterror campaign in Afghanistan and in the mid-1990s after the war in Bosnia, Mr. Beans said. He conceded that except for those three emergencies the restricted contracting procedures are unusual.

USAID officials said last week that as many as six contract awards would be announced soon, but final decisions may now be put off until next week. Some companies competing for the contracts say they are receiving conflicting signals over the length and ambitiousness of the work.

Plans last month outlined an aggressive rebuilding campaign, including sweeping changes to Iraq's education and health systems, that would nonetheless last only 12 months. Some U.S. officials now concede that any meaningful work will take much longer than a year, but others in the administration are wary of moving forward on anything that would suggest a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The uncertainty over how to proceed also reflects mounting unease over the U.S.-led military campaign, which has so far offered scant evidence that average Iraqis are ready to embrace American control of their country.

Reconstruction officials within the administration had planned to use the southern city of Basra as a test case for the U.S. rebuilding effort. Iraq's second-largest city has a dominant Shiite population that has long been at odds with Saddam Hussein. But continued fighting there, and signs that the local population might be less receptive than some predicted, have put those plans on hold.

Competition for the big infrastructure-rebuilding contract, valued at $600 million, was limited to seven large U.S. engineering companies, several of which have now either been dropped from the running or formed teams with other bidders. People involved in the bidding say the lead competitors are Bechtel Corp. and Parsons Corp, which has taken on Halliburton Co.'s Kellogg Brown & Root as a subcontractor. Halliburton announced Monday that its KBR division won't seek to be the prime contractor for rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, but "remains a potential subcontractor for this important work."

The administration's postwar plans for Iraq have stirred charges in Europe that all major rebuilding work will go to U.S. concerns. While none of the contracts will go to foreign companies, those companies will be eligible to fill in as subcontractors, Mr. Beans said.

Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com

#

Only in America
By Norman Mailer The New York Review of Books March 27, 2003
This article is based on Norman Mailer's Commonwealth Club speech in San Francisco on February 20, 2003. Mr. Mailer received the Club's Centennial Medallion, in honor of the organization's hundredth anniversary. An audio stream of the speech can be heard on commonwealthclub.org.

1.

It is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were minimal. Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other. From Saddam's point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon, a warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed.

The two were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world-bin Laden, conceivably, for the greater glory of Allah, and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days, in the nineteenth century, when the British had their empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each other. It was the old rule of many a Victorian crazy house: Let the madmen duke it out, then jump the one or two who are left.

Today, however, these aims are different. Security is considered insecure unless the martial results are absolute. So the first American reaction to September 11 was to plan to destroy bin Laden and al-Qaeda. When the campaign in Afghanistan failed, however, to capture the leading protagonist, even proved unable, indeed, to conclude whether he was alive or dead, the game had to shift. Our White House decided the real pea was under another shell. Not al-Qaeda, but Iraq.

Political leaders and statesmen are serious men even when they appear to be fools, and it is rare to find them acting without some deeper reason they can offer to themselves. It is those covert motives in the Bush administration upon which I would like to speculate here. I will attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.
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Let me begin with Colin Powell's presentation before the UN on February 5. Up to a point, it was well detailed and looked to prove that Saddam Hussein (to no one's dramatic surprise) was violating every rule of the inspectors that he could get away with. Saddam, after all, had a keen nose for the vagaries of history. He understood that the longer one could delay powerful statesmen, the more they might weary of the soul-deadening boredom of dealing with a consummate liar who was artfully free of all the bonds of obligation and cooperation. It is no small gift to be an absolute liar. If you never tell the truth, you are virtually as safe as an honest man who never utters an untruth. When informed that you just swore to the opposite today of what you avowed yesterday, you remark, "I never said that," or should the words be on record, you declare that you are grossly misinterpreted. Confusion is sown rich in permutations.

So, Saddam had managed to survive seven years of inspection from 1991 to 1998. He had made deals-most of them under the counter-with the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Jordanians; the list is long. He also knew how to play on the sympathies of the third world. He convinced many a good heart all over the world. The continuing cruelty of America was starving the Iraqi children. The Iraqi children were, in large part, seriously malnourished by the embargo Saddam had brought upon himself, but, indeed, if they had been healthy, he would have kept a score of six-year-olds starving long enough to dispatch a proper photograph around the world. He was no good and he could prove it. He did so well at the games he played that he succeeded in declaring the inspections at an end by 1998.

There had been talk before, and there was certainly talk then in the White House that we had to send troops into Iraq as our reply to such flouting of the agreement. Unfortunately, Clinton's adventure with Monica Lewinsky had left him a paralyzed warrior. In the midst of his public scandal, he could not afford to shed one drop of American blood. The proof was in Kosovo where no American infantry went in with NATO and our bombers never dropped their product from any height within range of Serbian antiaircraft. We did it all from 15,000 feet up. So, Iraq was out of the question. Al Gore was a hawk at the time, ready, doubtless, to improve his future campaign image and rise thereby from wonk to stud-a necessary qualification for the presidency-but Clinton's vulnerability stifled all that.

So, in 1998, Saddam Hussein got away with it. There had been no inspections since. Colin Powell's speech was full of righteous indignation at the bare-faced and heinous bravado of Saddam the Evil, but Powell was, of course, too intelligent a man to be surprised by these discoveries of malfeasance. The speech was an attempt to heat up America's readiness to go to war. By the measure of our polls, half of the citizenry were unready. And this part of his speech certainly succeeded. The proof was that a good many Democratic senators who had been on the fence declared that they were in on the venture now; yes, they, too, were ready for war, God bless us.
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The major weakness in Powell's presentation of the evidence was, however, the evidential link of Iraq to al-Qaeda. It was, given the powerful auspices of the occasion, more than a bit on the sparse side. With the exception of Great Britain, the states with veto power in the Security Council, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians, were obviously not eager to satisfy the Bush passion to go to war as soon as possible. They wanted time to intensify inspections. They looked to containment as a solution.

Not a week later, al-Jazeera offered a recorded broadcast by bin Laden that gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact, even though he called the "socialists" in Baghdad "infidels." But this last statement was in immediate contradiction to what he had just finished saying a moment earlier: "It does no hurt under these conditions [of attack by the West] that the interests of Muslims [will ultimately] contradict the interest of the socialists in the fight against the Crusaders."

Bin Laden may have chosen to be ambiguous and two-sided in his remarks, but the suggestion of a common interest, despite all, between al-Qaeda and Saddam was also there. Was it finally happening? Had the enemy of Saddam's enemy now become Saddam's friend? If so, that could prove a disaster. We might vanquish Iraq and still suffer from the catastrophe we claimed to be going to war to avert. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could yet belong to bin Laden.

Without those weapons, al-Qaeda would have to scrape and scratch. But if Saddam were to make transfer of even a sizable fraction of his bio-warfare and chemical stores, bin Laden would be considerably more dangerous.

The inner diktat of George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq as rapidly as possible now had to face the possibility that Saddam had come up with an exceptional countermove. Was he saying, in effect, "Allow me to string along the inspections, and you are still relatively safe. You may be certain I will not rush to give my very best stuff to Osama bin Laden so long as we can keep playing this inspection game back and forth, back and forth. Go to war with me, however, and Osama will smile. I may go down in flames, but he and his people will be happy. Be certain, he wants you to go to war with me."

Since the sequence of these kinds of moves was present from the beginning, it could be asked, as indeed more than a few Americans were now asking: How did we allow such choices in the first place-these hellish Hobson choices?
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Meanwhile, the world was reacting in horror to the Bush agenda for war. The European edition of Time magazine had been conducting a poll on its Web site: "Which country poses a greater danger to world peace in 2003?" With 318,000 votes cast so far, the responses were: North Korea, 7 percent; Iraq, 8 percent; the United States, 84 percent....

As John le Carré had put it to The Times of London: "America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember."

Harold Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:

...The American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.

Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's declaration -"We are not the doctors. We are the disease."

According to Reuters, on February 15 more than four million people "from Bangkok to Brussels, from Canberra to Calcutta...took to the streets to pillory Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger."

2.

A quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election that could best be described as legitimate/illegitimate. America had learned all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting. They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow's home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of teflon on their soul. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of course, their descendants won in Florida. The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are large enough.

If Bush's legitimacy was in question then from the start, his performance as president was arousing scorn. When he spoke extempore, he sounded simple. When more articulate subordinates wrote his speeches, he had trouble fitting himself to the words.

Then September 11 altered everything. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we had been watching maelstrom extravaganzas on the tube, and enjoying them. We were insulated. A hundredth part of ourselves could step into the box and live with the fear. Now, suddenly, the horror had shown itself to be real. Gods and demons were invading the US, coming right in off the TV screen. This may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after September 11. It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.

And, of course, we were not in shape to feel free of guilt about September 11. The manic money-grab excitement of the Nineties had never been altogether free of our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous but we still felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is a grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God didn't necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren't supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good Christian psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: beat everybody. One can offer a cruel, but conceivably accurate, remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don't consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.
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Even before September 11, many matters grew worse. America's spiritual architecture had been buttressed since World War II by our near-mythical institutions of security, of which the FBI and the Catholic Church were most prominent, equal in special if intangible stature to the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

Now, all that was taking its terrible whack. Old and new scandals of the FBI were brought into high focus by the Hanssen case which broke in February of 2001. An ultra-devout Catholic, Robert Hanssen had been a Soviet mole for fifteen years. No one in the FBI could believe it. He had seemed the purest of the pure anti-Communists. Then after September 11 came the pedophile lawsuits against the Catholic Church, and that opened an abyss of a wound in many a good Catholic home. It certainly injured the priesthood grievously. How could a young or middle-aged man wearing the collar walk down the street now without suffering from the averted eyes and false greetings of the parishioners he met along the way?

And then there was the stock market. It kept sinking. Slowly, steadily, unemployment rose. The CEO scandals of the corporations became more prominent.

America had been putting up with the ongoing expansion of the corporation into American life since the end of World War II. It had been the money cow to the United States. But it had also been a filthy cow that gave off foul gases of mendacity and manipulation by an extreme emphasis on advertising. Put less into the product but kowtow to its marketing. Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void; and, beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant's tactile senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor- only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.

Then came a more complete exposure of the economic chicanery and pollution of the corporations. Economic gluttony was thriving at the top. Criminal behavior was being revealed on the front pages of every business section. Without September 11, George W. Bush would have been living in the nonstop malaise of uglier and uglier media. It could even be said that America was taking a series of hits that were not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the Germans after World War I, when inflation wiped out the fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is likely that Hitler would never have come to power ten years later without that runaway inflation. By the same measure, September 11 had done something comparable to the American sense of security.

For that matter, conservatism was heading toward a divide. Old-line conservatives like Pat Buchanan believed that America should keep to itself and look to solve those of its problems that we were equipped to solve. Buchanan was the leader of what might be called old-value conservatives, who believe in family, country, faith, tradition, home, hard and honest labor, duty, allegiance, and a balanced budget. The ideas, notions, and predilections of George W. Bush had to be, for the most part, not compatible with Buchanan's conservatism.

Bush was different. The gap between his school of thought and that of old-value conservatives could yet produce a dichotomy on the right as clear-cut as the differences between Communists and socialists after World War I. "Flag conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Of course, as he sees it, he is doing it because he believes America is good. He certainly does, he believes this country is the only hope of the world. He also fears that the country is rapidly growing more dissolute, and the only solution may be-fell, mighty, and near-holy words-the only solution may be to strive for World Empire. Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Near East as a stepping stone to taking over the rest of the world.

That is a big statement, but I can offer this much immediately: At the root of flag conservatism is not madness, but an undisclosed logic. While I am hardly in accord, it is, nonetheless, logical if you accept its premises. From a militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten. The entertainment media are loose. Bare belly-buttons pop onto every TV screen, as open in their statement as wild animals' eyes. The kids are getting to the point where they can't read, but they sure can screw. So one perk for the White House, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of a luxury and will be put back into the closet again. Commitment, patriotism, and dedication will become all-pervasive national values once more (with all the hypocrisy attendant). Once we become a twenty-first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers are, of course, crazier than any average man when in and out of combat, but the overhead command is a major everyday pressure on soldiers and could become a species of most powerful censor over civilian life.

To flag conservatives, war now looks to be the best possible solution. Jesus and Evel Knievel might be able to bond together, after all. Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word fifteen times in every speech.

There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique to Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. Yes, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. We have our know-how, our can-do. We will dominate the obstacles. Flag conservatives truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must. Without a commitment to Empire, the country will go down the drain. This, I would opine, is the prime subtext beneath the Iraqi project, and the flag conservatives may not even be wholly aware of the scope of it, not all of them. Not yet.

Besides, Bush could count on a few other reliable sentiments that are very much present in our daily affairs. To begin with, a good part of American pride sits today on the tripod of big money, sports, and the Stars and Stripes. Something like a third of our major athletic stadiums and arenas are named after corporations-Gillette and FedEx are but two of twenty examples. The NFL Super Bowl could only commence this year after an American flag the size of a football field was removed from the turf. The US Air Force gave the groin-throb of a big vee overhead. Probably half of America has an unspoken desire to go to war. It satisfies our mythology. America, goes our logic, is the only force for good that can rectify the bad. George W. Bush is shrewd enough to work that equation out all by himself. He may even sense better than anyone how a war with Iraq will satisfy our addiction to living with adventure on TV. If this is facetious-so be it-the country is becoming more loutish every year. So, yes, war is also mighty TV entertainment.

3.

More directly (even if it is not at all direct) a war with Iraq will gratify our need to avenge September 11. It does not matter that Iraq is not the culprit. Bush needs only to ignore the evidence. Which he does with all the power of a man who has never been embarrassed by himself. Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher. September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.

The President can also satisfy the more serious polemical needs of a great many neocons in his administration who believe Islam will yet be Hitler Redux to Israel. Protection of Israel is OK to Bush, electorally speaking, but it is also obligatory, especially when he cannot count on giving orders to Sharon that will always be obeyed. Sharon, after all, has one firm hold on Bush. With the Mossad, Sharon has the finest intelligence service in the Near East if not in the world. The CIA, renowned by now for its paucity of Arab spies in the Muslim world, cannot afford to do without Sharon's services.

These are all good reasons Bush can find to go to war. As for oil, allow Ralph Nader a few statistics:

The United States currently consumes 19.5 million barrels a day, or 26% of daily global oil consumption.... The US [has to import] 9.8 million barrels a day, or more than half the oil we consume....

The surest way for the US to sustain its overwhelming dependence upon oil is to control the sixty-seven percent of the world's proven oil reserves that lie below the sands of the Persian Gulf. Iraq alone has proven reserves of 112.5 billion barrels, or 11% of the world's remaining supply.... Only Saudi Arabia has more.

I would add that once America occupies Iraq, it will also gain a choke-hold on Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Near East. One can also propose that we wish to go into Iraq for the water. To quote a piece by Stephen C. Pelletiere in The New York Times of January 31:

There was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.

So, yes, oil is a part of the motive, even if that can never be admitted. And water could prove a powerful tool to pacify a great many heated furies of the desert. The underlying motive, however, still remains George W. Bush's underlying dream: Empire!
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"What word but 'empire' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming?" wrote Michael Ignatieff on January 5 in The New York Times Magazine:

It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce, and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.

From Timothy Garton Ash in The New York Review of Books, February 13:

The United States is not just the world's only superpower; it is a hyperpower, whose military expenditures will soon equal that of the next fifteen most powerful states combined. The EU has not translated its comparable economic strength-fast approaching the US $10 trillion economy- into comparable military power or diplomatic influence.

Perhaps the most thorough explanation of this as yet unadmitted campaign toward Empire comes from the columnist Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Back on September 29, five months ago, he wrote:

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

Back in 1992, a year after the final fall of the Soviet Union, there were many on the right in America, early flag conservatives, who felt that an extraordinary opportunity was now present. America could now take over the world. The Defense Department drafted a document which, to quote Jay Bookman once more,

envisioned the United States as "a colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power. When leaked in its final draft form, however, the proposal drew so much criticism that it was hastily withdrawn and repudiated by the first President Bush....

The defense secretary in 1992 was Richard Cheney; the document was drafted by [Paul] Wolfowitz, who at the time was defense undersecretary for policy.

Now he is deputy defense secretary under Rumsfeld.

Afterward, from 1992 to 2000, this dream of world domination was not picked up by the Clinton administration, and that may help to account for the intense, even virulent hatred that so many on the right felt during those eight years. If it weren't for Clinton, America could be ruling the world.

Obviously that document, "Project for the New American Century," projected prematurely in 1992, had now, after September 11, become the policy of the Bush administration. The flag conservatives were triumphant. They could seek to take over the world. Iraq could be only the first step. Beyond, but very much on the historical horizon, are not only Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea, but China.

Of course, not every last country had to be subjugated. Some needed only to be dominated or brought into partnership. There could be firm and mutual understanding. To speak of China as existing in a symbiotic relationship with us is too exceptional a remark to make without some projection into possible reasons and causes. It is not inconceivable that some of the brighter neocons do see some fearful possibilities in our technological development. Iraq and the Near East can hardly be the end. Greater nonmilitary specters and perils loom for the future. A late January piece in The Boston Globe by Scott A. Bass sets it forth:

Research and development at American universities relies heavily on foreign students in the crucial fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM fields)....

If...trends continue, we will have too few domestic students earning advanced graduate degrees in the STEM fields to support our economic, strategic, and technological needs. The flow of young American scientists and engineers has been reduced to a trickle, with many other industrialized countries having a far greater proportion of students going into these fields.

While foreign students are attracted to STEM fields at US research universities, our own domestic students are not. Many have not been sufficiently encouraged, and others may have found the academic rigors of the STEM fields too challenging.

Between 1986 and 1996, foreign students earning STEM field PhDs increased at a rate nearly four times faster than domestic students. In 2000, 43 percent of physical science PhDs went to non-US citizens.

Flag conservatives may yet be hoping to send some message like this to China: "Hear ye! You Chinese are obviously bright. We can tell. We know! Your Asian students were born for technology. People who have led submerged lives love technology. They don't get much pleasure anyway, so they like the notion of cybernetic power right at their fingertips. Technology is ideal for them. We can go along with that. You fellows can have your technology, may it be great! But, China, you had better understand: We still have the military power. Your best bet, therefore, is to become Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well. You will be most important to us, eminently important. But don't look to rise above your future station in life. The best you can ever hope for, China, is to be our Greeks."

In the 1930s, you could be respected if you earned a living. In the Nineties, you had to demonstrate that you were a promising figure in the ranks of greed. It may be that empire depends on an obscenely wealthy upper-upper class who, given the in-built, never-ending threat to their wealth, are bound to feel no great allegiance in the pit of their heart for democracy. If this insight is true, then it can also be said that the disproportionate wealth which collected through the Nineties may have created an all-but-irresistible pressure at the top to move from democracy to empire. That would safeguard those great and quickly acquired gains. Can it be that George W. Bush knows what he's doing for the future of empire by awarding these huge tax credits to the rich?
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Of course, terrorism and instability are the reverse face of empire. If the Saudi rulers have been afraid of their mullahs for fear of their power to incite terrorists, what will the Muslim world be like once we, the Great Satan, are there to dominate the Near East in person?

Since the administration can hardly be unaware of the dangers, the answer comes down to the unhappy likelihood that Bush and Company are ready for a major terrorist attack. As well as any number of smaller ones. Either way, it will strengthen his hand. America will gather about him again. We can hear his words in advance: "Good Americans died today. Innocent victims of evil had to shed their blood. But we will prevail. We are one with God." Given such language, every loss is a win.

Yet, so long as terrorism continues, so will its subtext, and there is the horror to its nth power. What made deterrence possible in the cold war was not only that there was everything to lose for both sides, but also the inability of either side to be certain they could count on any human being to turn the apocalyptic switch. In that sense, no final plan could be counted on. How could either of the superpowers be certain that the wholly reliable human selected to push the button would actually prove reliable enough to destroy the other half of the world? A dark cloud might come over him at the last moment. He could fall to the ground before he could do the deed.

But this does not apply to a terrorist. If he is ready to kill himself, he can also be ready to destroy the world. The wars we have known until this era could, no matter how horrible, offer at least the knowledge that they would come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not interested in negotiation. Rather, it would insist on no termination short of victory. Since the terrorist cannot triumph, he cannot cease being a terrorist. They are a true enemy, far more basic, indeed, than third-world countries with nuclear capability who invariably appear on the scene prepared to live with deterrence and its in-built outcome-agreements after years or decades of passive confrontation and hard bargaining.

If much of what I have said so far is the novelistic projection of my notion of neocon mentality-and I can hardly argue with you-the opposite pole of the flag conservatives' campaign to invade Iraq is that it is does have liberal support. Part of the liberal media, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and some on The New York Times are joined with Senators Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein, Senator Joe Lieberman and Senator John Kerry in acceptance of the idea that perhaps we can bring democracy to Iraq by invasion. In a carefully measured appraisal of what the possibilities might be, Bill Keller speaks on The New York Times Op-Ed page on February 8 of a war that might go quickly and well:

Let's imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of Cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage. [Even so] a victory in Iraq will not resolve the great questions of what we intend to be in the world. It will lay them open.

[Is] our aim to promote secular democracy, or stability? Some, probably including some in Mr. Bush's cabinet, will argue that it was all about disarmament. Once that is done, they will say, once Saddam's Republican Guard is purged, we can turn the country over to a contingent of Sunni generals and bring our troops home in 18 months.

Or perhaps, argues Keller, we will fashion a real democracy in Iraq after all, and the Near East will benefit. It is as if these liberal voices have decided that Bush cannot be stopped and so he must be joined. To commit to a stand against fighting the war would guarantee the relative absence of Democrats at the administration tables that will work on the future of Iraq. It is an argument that can be sustained up to a point, but the point depends on many eventualities, the first of which is that the war is quick and not horrendous.

The old Bill Clinton version of overseas presumption is present. The argument that we succeeded in building democracy in Japan and Germany and therefore can build it anywhere does not necessarily hold. Japan and Germany were countries with a homogeneous population and a long existence as nations. They each were steeped in guilt at the depredations of their soldiers in other lands. They were near to totally destroyed but had the people and the skills to rebuild their cities. The Americans who worked to create their democracy were veterans of Roosevelt's New Deal and, mark of the period, were effective idealists.

Iraq, in contrast, was never a true nation. Put together by the British, it was a post-World War I patchwork of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and Turkomans, who, at best, distrusted one another intensely. A situation analogous to Afghanistan's divisions among its warlords could be the more likely outcome. No one will certainly declare with authority that democracy can be built there, yet the arrogance persists. There does not seem much comprehension that except for special circumstances, democracy is never there in us to create in another country by the force of our will. Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate structure. There's nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can't play with it. You can't assume we're going to go over to show them what a great system we have. This is monstrous arrogance.
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Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. I could, for example, be entirely wrong about the deeper motives of the administration. Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as in trying in true good faith to save the world. We can be certain Bush and his Bushites believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so powerfully that tears come to their eyes. Of course, it is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be loaded with love within, but our actions can turn into the opposite. Perversity is always ready to consort with human nature.

David Frum, who was a speech- writer for Bush (he coined the phrase "Axis of Evil"), recounts in The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush what happened at a meeting in the Oval Office last September. The President, when talking to a group of reverends from the major denominations, told them,

You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now, I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer.

That is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

"Our war with terror," says Bush, "begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end...until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." Plus, asks Eric Alterman in The Nation, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the process? "At some point, we may be the only ones left," Bush told his closest advisers, according to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. "That's OK with me. We are America."

It must by now be obvious that if the combined pressures of Security Council vetoes and the growing sense of world outrage, plus a partial collaboration of Saddam with the inspectors, result in long-term containment rather than war, if Bush has to turn away from an active invasion of Iraq, he will do so with great frustration. For he will have to live again with all the old insolubles! Deep down, he may fear that he will not have any answer then for restoring America's morale. Can it be that the prospect of bringing these troops home again will prove so unpalatable that he will have to go to war?
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Speaking to the Senate, Robert Byrd said,

Many of the pronouncements made by this administration are outrageous. There is no other word. Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq-a population, I might add, of which over 50 percent is under age fifteen-this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare-this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

We are truly "sleepwalking through history." In my heart of hearts I pray that this great na-tion and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.

...I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50 percent children is "in the highest moral traditions of our country." This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq.... Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.

If I were George W. Bush's karmic defense attorney, I would argue that his best chance to avoid conviction as a purveyor of false morality would be to pray for a hung jury in the afterworld.

For those of the rest of us who are not going to depend on the power of prayer, we will do well to find the rampart we can defend over what may be dire years to come. Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready to suffer, even perish for it, rather than readying ourselves to live in the lower existence of a monumental banana republic with a government always eager to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits.

-February 27, 2003
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The monster of Baghdad is now the hero of Arabia
This is now a nationalist war against the most obvious kind of imperial power
By Robert Fisk The Guardian April 1, 2003
So it's a "truly remarkable achievement'', is it? General Tommy Franks says so. Everything is going "according to plan'', according to the British. So it's an achievement that the British still have not "liberated" Basra. It is "according to plan" that the Iraqis should be able to launch a scud missile from the Faw peninsula – supposedly under "British control" for more than a week. It is an achievement, truly remarkable of course, that the Americans lose an Apache helicopter to the gun of an Iraqi peasant, spend four days trying to cross the river bridges at Nasiriyah and are then confronted by their first suicide bomber at Najaf.

One half of the entire Anglo-American force - still called 'the coalition' by journalists who like to pretend it includes 35 armies rather than two and a bit (the "bit" being the Australian special forces) - is now guarding and running the supply line through the desert. And Baghdad is bombed but not besieged.

The military "plan" is so secret, according to General Franks, that very few people have seen it all or understand it. But his plan he says, is "highly flexible''; it would have to be, to sustain the chaos of the past 12 days, and, of course, we hold the moral high ground. The Americans bomb a passenger bus close to the Syrian border and don't even apologise. An Iraqi soldier kills himself attacking US marines and it is an act of "terrorism''. And now Secretary of State Colin Powell announces - to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the largest Israeli lobby group in the US who of course support this illegal war - that Syria and Iran are "supporting terror groups'' and will have to "face the consequences''.

So what's the plan? Are we going to forget Baghdad for a few months and wheel our young soldiers west to surround Damascus? Where, for heaven's sake, is all this going? We were going to "liberate" Iraq. But the war could be "long and difficult'', Bush now tells us – he didn't tell us that before, did he? – and, according to Tony Blair, this is "only the beginning.'' Really?

Strange, isn't it, how all that fuss about chemical and biological warfare has been forgotten. The "secret" weapons, the gas masks, the anti-anthrax injections, the pills and chemical suits have been erased from the story - because bullets and rocket-propelled grenades are now the real danger to British and American forces in Iraq. Even the "siege of Baghdad" – a city that is 30 miles wide and might need a quarter of a million men to surround it - is fading from the diary.

Sitting in Baghdad, listening to the God-awful propaganda rhetoric of the Iraqis but watching the often promiscuous American and British air attacks, I have a suspicion that what's gone wrong has nothing to do with plans. Indeed, I suspect there is no real overall plan. Because I rather think that this war's foundations were based not on military planning but on ideology.

Long ago, as we know, the right wing pro-Israeli lobbyists around Bush planned the overthrow of Saddam. This would destroy the most powerful Arab state in the Middle East - Israel's chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, demanded that the war should start even earlier – and allow the map of the region to be changed forever. Powell stated just this a month ago. False intelligence information was mixed up with the desires of the corrupt and infiltrated Iraqi opposition.

Fantasies and illusions were given credibility by a kind of superpower moral overdrive. Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project - 11 September (oddly unmentioned now), links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden (unproven), weapons of mass destruction (hitherto unfound), human rights abuses (at which we originally connived when Saddam was our friend) and, finally, the most heroic project of all – the "liberation" of the people of Iraq.

Oil was not mentioned, although it is the dominating factor in this illegitimate conflict - no wonder General Franks admitted that his first concern, prior to the war, was the "protection'' of the southern Iraqi oil fields. So it was to be "liberation" and "democracy". How boldly we crossed the border. With what lordly aims we invaded Iraq.

Few Iraqis doubt - even the ministers in Baghdad speak about this - that the Americans could, ultimately, occupy the country. They have the force and they have the weapons to smash their way into every city and rule the land by martial law. But can they make Iraqis submit to that rule? Unless the masses rise up as Bush and Blair hope, this is now a nationalist war against the most obvious kind of imperial power. Without Iraqi support, how can General Franks run a military dictatorship or find Iraqis willing to serve him or run the oilfields? The Americans can win the war. But if their project fails they will have lost.

Yet there is one achievement we should note. The ghastly Saddam, the most revolting dictator in the Arab world, who does indeed use heinous torture and has indeed used gas, is now leading a country that is fighting the world's only superpower and that has done so for almost two weeks without surrendering. Yes, General Tommy Franks has accomplished one "truly remarkable achievement''. He has turned the monster of Baghdad into the hero of the Arab world and allowed Iraqis to teach every opponent of America how to fight their enemy.

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Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates
How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilisation

By Arundhati Roy The Guardian April 2, 2003
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said.

According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody's guess.

It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses.

But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more, does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn't need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.

President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear instructions: "Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people's bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And what a war it is.

After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the Willing"(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.

So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the "Allies". Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)

Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies" are at war, the extent to which the "Allies" and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their own objectives.

When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history - "Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?

After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed - a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! "They're using very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down."

If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?

When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's denounced as "emotive" Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies", as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the "Allies" look bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the "terrible beauty" of war.

When invading American soldiers (from the army "that's only here to help") are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and "exposes the evil at the heart of the regime". But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US Government officials don't deny that they're being being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of war"! They call them "unlawful combatants", implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.)

When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as "balanced" when their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists "embedded" with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-"embedded" journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people) are undermined even before they begin their reportage: "We have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities."

Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as "militia" (ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is "resistance" or worse still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating.

And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with very little food. We're still waiting for the legendary Shia "uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating" army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)

After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the "Allies" have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.

As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn't really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid - a minuscule fraction of what's actually needed (call it a script prop) - arrived on a British ship, the "Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?

Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began.

We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old tactics. They've been at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war: "Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled right - might ... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the conference table'."

Times haven't changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts and Minds".

So, here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared "disabled" by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn't stopped the "Allies" from continuing to use depleted uranium.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will.

Despite Blair's earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play no independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy "reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed to the international community not to "politicise" the issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.

Contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq we're told, in discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world economy. It's funny how the interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in "reconstruction" work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for "re-construction" are already being negotiated. The news doesn't hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?

As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, "We don't want your stinking wine." We've heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they're called now. There's news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's - government agencies such as USAID, the British department for international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

It's become clear that the war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case it's an IMF chequebook. In the other, cruise missiles.

Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)

In the fog of war - one thing's for sure - if Saddam 's regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas? Would it?

Excuse me while I laugh.

In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or - he simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.

So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried potatoes). When someone says "humanitarian aid" we automatically go looking for induced starvation. "Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find. It's what it sounds like. And what about "arsenal of tactics?" Nice!

In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which they say, "All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called.

Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being "anti-American" and "anti-west", find myself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain.

Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government and the "American way of life" comes from American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America's citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.

While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.

Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America's great cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.

At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them. (It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers".)

Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.

Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.

Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.

Bring on the spanners.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Edited by author 04-02-2003 10:09 PM
Turkey OKs Limited Cooperation With U.S.
By LOUIS MEIXLER, Associated Press Writer, Yahoo News April 2, 2003
ANKARA, Turkey - Turkish leaders and Secretary of State Colin Powell agreed Wednesday to have Ankara consult Washington if tensions heighten with Iraqi Kurds, an "early warning" system designed to prevent Turkey from sending forces into northern Iraq.
   
Washington fears friction between Turkey and the Kurds could disrupt the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein. Iraqi Kurds, who are fighting alongside U.S. troops, have warned of clashes if Turkish troops enter their autonomous region in northern Iraq.

"We have the situation under control," Powell said. "There is no need for movement of (Turkish) troops across the border."

Turkey has said it wants to send troops to block any independence bid by Iraq's Kurds, which Ankara fears would embolden Turkish Kurds fighting for autonomy in the southeast for 15 years.

Turkey also agreed Wednesday to let the United States send food, fuel and medicine - but not weapons - through its territory to U.S. soldiers in northern Iraq, another sign of limited cooperation from NATO's only Muslim member.

A convoy later Wednesday brought those items to American troops, as well as 40 pickup truck-style Defender 110 Land Rovers with poles in the open rear carriage that could apparently serve as mounts for machine guns. No weapons were seen in the shipment.

Powell's visit came amid tensions between Washington and Turkey, where polls show more than 90 percent of the people are against the Iraq war. About 500 protesters gathered outside Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office while Powell was inside, chanting "Yankee, go home."

Turkey's parliament last month rejected a motion that would have allowed in 62,000 U.S. ground troops to open a northern front against Iraq, a move that analysts said likely would have led to a shorter, quicker war.

The rebuff strained Turkish-U.S. ties. U.S. officials were angry the northern front was lost, and Turkish officials said Washington wanted democracy in Iraq but could not accept a "no" vote from one of the only democratic parliaments in the region.

Powell and Gul emphasized U.S.-Turkish cooperation, and both sides seemed keen to avoid deepening the rift. Washington cannot afford to alienate Turkey, and Turkey is slowly emerging from a financial crisis and needs U.S. support. President Bush has asked Congress for $1 billion in aid for Turkey.

"The visit of Secretary Powell has strengthened our relations and helped to dispel all issues with regard to relations between the two countries," Gul said.

Powell said the two sides discussed the U.S. need to supply troops fighting in northern Iraq, and Turkish officials said Turkey will allow food, fuel, medicine and "other humanitarian assistance" into Iraq for U.S. forces.

"We have solved all of the outstanding issues with respect to providing supplies through Turkey to those units that are doing such a wonderful job in northern Iraq," Powell said.

Gul said Turkey has been letting planes carrying wounded troops land in Turkey, and would continue to do so.

A supply corridor through Turkey could be essential if U.S. commanders decide to strike from the Western-protected Kurdish areas as troops press toward Baghdad from the south.

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Germany Now Backs Regime Change in Iraq
By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press Writer, Yahoo News April 2, 2003
BERLIN - German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Wednesday he hoped Saddam Hussein's government would collapse quickly, marking a stark turnaround from Germany's previous opposition to regime change as a goal of the U.S.-led war.
   
"We hope the regime will collapse as soon as possible and we'll have no further loss of life - civilians or soldiers," Fischer said before a meeting with his British counterpart, Jack Straw, at a hotel in Berlin's Grunewald suburb.

Both foreign ministers stressed common ground in Europe on Iraq - a position that would seem hard to stake out after the diplomatic rift over whether war should be waged to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

Germany firmly opposed the war, joining France and Russia in opposing a U.N. resolution that would have authorized force, on the grounds that peaceful means to disarm Iraq had not been exhausted. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has condemned regime change as a war aim.

Britain, Italy, Spain and several eastern European countries have stood firmly behind the United States' conviction that Iraq would never disarm voluntarily.

However, Straw said the divide over how to disarm Iraq "disguised a great deal of agreement."

Fischer grounded his wish for regime change in Iraq in the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Iraq - a similar argument to the one he laid out when he supported NATO-led campaigns to end the Bosnian war and the Kosovo conflict.

"The humanitarian situation is very alarming," Fischer told reporters.

France's government has made a string of official statements aimed at making sure its opposition to the war is not interpreted as support for the Iraqi dictator. Both the prime minister and foreign minister have insisted that France hopes the U.S.-led coalition wins the war.

"Naturally, we hope for the end of Saddam Hussein's regime," government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope told reporters Wednesday in Paris.

The U.S. ambassador to France, Howard H. Leach, also took a conciliatory tone, telling the newspaper Le Parisien on Wednesday that Washington and Paris should concentrate on the tasks ahead rather than the acrimony over the war.

"We need to turn the page and leave that problem behind us," Leach was quoted as saying. "Let's get down today to the problems of tomorrow: the reconstruction of Iraq, North Korea, the proliferation of banned weapons in Iran."

At the meeting near Berlin, Straw said Germany's sponsorship last week of a U.N. resolution to restart the oil-for-food program augured well for future cooperation among the anti-war and pro-war camps when it comes time to discuss rebuilding Iraq.

He said he could imagine U.N.-sponsored talks on rebuilding Iraq similar to talks on Afghanistan's political future held in Bonn in 2001.

"We're not there yet," Straw said. "We have to wait until the military action comes to a proper conclusion."

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Iraqis Delirious with Grief After Missile Attack
By Samia Nakhoul Reuters March 29 2003
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Almost every house in Baghdad's poor al-Shula neighborhood had a horror story to tell on Saturday after death rained from the night sky.

The United States said it was checking to see whether one of its missiles or bombs had caused the shattering explosion that killed at least 62 people on Friday evening in the heart of Baghdad.

To the traumatized residents of the Shi'ite Muslim neighborhood, the conclusions of that inquiry meant little.

At the house of Sumaya Abed, the scene was one of devastation. She was delirious with grief.

"Ali, Hussein and Mohammad are gone. My three boys are dead," a sobbing Abed repeated over and over again.

"Oh God! To whom shall we turn in our sorrow? Oh God! To whom shall we address our grief? We're just poor people who wanted to live in peace," said Abed, 53.

Dozens of black-garbed women relatives, friends and neighbors sat by her side, weeping and trying to comfort her. But words could do little.

The distraught mother said Ali, 20, Hussein, 18, and Mohammad, 11, were killed by pieces of shrapnel that cut though their chests and heads.

"My Mohammad was born in the first war and he died in the second war. Oh my God!," she cried. She was pregnant with the 11-year-old during the 1991 Gulf War.

"What is left for me to live for? My whole life has been destroyed. I nursed them all my life and they're gone now."

It is some irony that Iraq's Shi'ite majority is supposed to be one of beneficiaries of the U.S. drive to overthrow President Saddam Hussein, a member of the dominant Sunni Muslim minority.

Shacks at the crowded neighborhood's tiny market were torn into pieces of shattered wood and twisted metal. The smell from broken sewers mixed with the odor of rotting fruit and charred human remains.

People described horror scenes of dismembered bodies littering the streets.

"There was a big explosion and smoke. Nobody could see anything. People started running in panic and screaming. Nobody could tell who had died and who remained alive," said Karim Hmayed, 45, a merchant.

SORROW AND FURY

In another bereaved household nearby, Arouba Khodeir, 39, was wailing hysterically and hitting herself in the face and chest, as women around her were trying to calm her down.

Her son Karar, 11, died outside the house with his friends.

"My son had his head blown off," screamed Khodeir. "Why are they hitting the people? Why are they killing the children? Why are they doing his to us?

"Why are they attacking civilians? Didn't Bush say on TV that he won't attack civilians. But these people who died are all civilians? Is this a target?" she wailed, pointing at the dried blood of her son still splashed on the walls.

In Shula, sorrow at the loss of loved ones was mixed with fury at President Bush, who has promised to limit the loss of innocent civilian life. But many were also angry that Iraqi missile launchers and anti-aircraft guns were apparently sited in their residential neighborhood.

One harrowing story was told at the house of Hasna Shallum where women had gathered to mourn the death of her 20-year-old daughter Shaza.

Shaza was holding her baby and walking with two relatives when the explosion sent a shard of shrapnel through her neck.

Six-month-old Fatma was found alive in her dead mother's arms and brought by neighbors to her grandmother. The wails of the mourners drowned the cries of the hungry infant.

Survivors said most of those killed were so poor they had risked their lives to use a lull in the U.S.-British strikes to set up their stalls to try to make a living.

"We did not want war. This war was imposed on us by force. We are poor people who just want to live in peace," said one of the mourners, Hamdiya Abbas, 45, whose three sons are soldiers.

Television pictures of bodies and damage in Iraq have fueled Arab anger against the U.S.-led invasion which Washington says is not aimed at ordinary Iraqis but at Saddam.

Civilian casualties could further sap U.S. efforts to win Iraqi hearts and minds. At least 15 people died when a previous missile hit Baghdad's al-Shaab Shi'ite district on Wednesday. The U.S. military said it was not clear who was responsible.

Struck by the worst civilian casualty toll so far, Shula residents voiced despair and anger at the indifference of the world which they said has failed to stop the carnage.

"We are helpless people. It is all out of our hands. Why cannot the world find a solution?" said Zahra, 50. "The whole world is watching us die and is doing nothing to help us."

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'I saw the heads of my two little girls come off'
The Sydney Morning Herald April 2 2003
An Iraqi mother in a van fired on by US soldiers says she saw her two young daughters decapitated in the incident that also killed her son and eight other members of her family.

The children's father, who was also in the van, said US soldiers fired on them as they fled towards a checkpoint because they thought a leaflet dropped by US helicopters told them to "be safe", and they believed that meant getting out of their village to Karbala.

Bakhat Hassan - who lost his daughters, aged two and five, his three-year-old son, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces aged 12 and 15, in the incident - said US soldiers at an earlier checkpoint had waved them through.

As they approached another checkpoint 40km south of Karbala, they waved again at the American soldiers.

"We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe," Hassan said through an Army translator at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital set up at a vast Army support camp near Najaf.

The soldiers didn't wave back. They fired.

"I saw the heads of my two little girls come off," Hassan's heavily pregnant wife, Lamea, 36, said numbly.

She repeated herself in a flat, even voice: "My girls - I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead."

US officials originally gave the death toll from the incident as seven, but reporters at the scene placed it at 10. And Bakhat Hassan terrible toll was 11 members of his family.

Hassan's father died at the Army hospital later.

US officials said the soldiers at an Army checkpoint who opened fire were following orders not to let vehicles approach checkpoints.

On Saturday, a suicide bomber had killed four US soldiers outside Najaf.

Details emerging from interviews with survivors of yesterday's incident tell a distressing tale of a family fleeing towards what they thought would be safety, tragically misunderstanding instructions.

Hassan's father, in his 60s, wore his best clothes for the trip through the American lines: a pinstriped suit.

"To look American," Hassan said.

An Army report written last night cited "a miscommunication with civilians" as the cause of the incident.

Hassan, his wife and another of his brothers are in intensive care at the MASH unit.

Another brother, sister-in-law and a seven-year-old child were released to bury the dead.

The Shi'ite family of 17 was packed into a 1974 Land Rover, so crowded that Bakhat, 35, was outside on the rear bumper hanging on to the back door.

Everyone else was piled on one another's laps in three sets of seats.

They were fleeing their farm town southeast of Karbala, where US attack helicopters had fired missiles and rockets the day before.

Helicopters also had dropped leaflets on the town: a drawing of a family sitting at a table eating and smiling with a message written in Arabic.

Sergeant 1st Class Stephen Furbush, an Army intelligence analyst, said the message read: "To be safe, stay put."

But Hassan said he and his father thought it just said: "Be safe".

To them, that meant getting away from the helicopters firing rockets and missiles.

His father drove. They planned to go to Karbala. They stopped at an Army checkpoint on the northbound road near Sahara, about 40km south of Karbala, and were told to go on, Hassan said.

But "the Iraqi family misunderstood" what the soldiers were saying, Furbush said.

A few kilometres later, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle came into view. The family waved as it came closer. The soldiers opened fire.

Hassan remembers an Army medic at the scene of the killings speaking Arabic.

"He told us it was a mistake and the soldiers were sorry," Hassan said.

"They believed it was a van of suicide bombers," Furbush said.

Hassan, his wife, his father and a brother were airlifted to the MASH unit.

Three doctors and three nurses worked on the father for four hours but he died despite their efforts.

Today, Hassan and his wife remain at the unit. He has staples in his head. She has a mangled hand and shrapnel in her face and shoulder.

Major Scott McDannold, an anaesthesiologist, said Hassan's brother, lying nearby, wouldn't make it. He is on a respirator with a broken neck.

On March 16, Hassan and his family began to harvest tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions and eggplant. It was a healthy crop, and they expected a good year.

"We had hope," he said. "But then you Americans came to bring us democracy and our hope ended."

Lamea is nine months pregnant.

"It would be better not to have the baby," she said.

"Our lives are over."

KRT

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Jumpy troops trigger a nightmare on Highway 9
The Sydney Morning Herald April 2 2003
As an unidentified four-wheel-drive vehicle came barrelling towards an intersection held by troops of the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division, Captain Ronny Johnson grew increasingly alarmed.

From his position at the intersection, he was heard radioing to one of his forward platoons of M2 Bradley fighting vehicles to alert it to what he described as a potential threat.

"Fire a warning shot," he ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator.

"Stop [messing] around!" he yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice: "Stop him, Red 1, stop him."

That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard.

"Cease fire," Captain Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader: "You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough."

So it was that on a warm, hazy day in central Iraq, the fog of war descended on Bravo Company.

Fifteen civilians were inside the packed Toyota, it turned out, along with their possessions.

Ten of them, including five children who appeared to be under five years old, were killed on the spot when the high-explosive rounds slammed into their target, Captain Johnson's company reported. Of the five others, one man was so severely injured that medics said he was not expected to live.

"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and I hope I never see it again," Sergeant Mario Manzano, 26, a Bravo Company medic said.

One wounded woman had remained in the vehicle holding the bodies of two of her children. "She didn't want to get out of the car."

The tragedy cast a pall over the company as it sat in positions it occupied on Sunday on this key stretch of highway at the intersection of a road leading to the town of Hillah, about 22 kilometres to the east. The Toyota was coming from that direction when it was fired on.

Dealing with the gruesome scene was a new experience for many of the soldiers here, and they debated how it could have been avoided.

Several said they accepted the platoon leader's explanation to Captain Johnson on the radio that he had, in fact, fired two warning shots, but the driver failed to stop.

And everybody was edgy, they realised, since four US soldiers were blown up by a suicide bomber on Saturday at a checkpoint much like theirs just 32 kilometres to the south.

On a day of sporadic fighting on the roads and in the farms and wooded areas around the intersection, the soldiers of Bravo Company had their own reasons to be edgy.

The Bradley of the 3rd Battalion's operations officer, Major Roger Shuck, had been fired on by a rocket-propelled grenade a couple of kilometres south of Karbala.

No one in the vehicle was seriously injured, but the major had experienced breathing difficulties afterwards and had to be treated with oxygen, medics said.

That happened after a column of M-1 Abrams tanks headed north to Karbala in the early afternoon and returned a couple of hours later.

Throughout the day, Iraqis lobbed periodic mortar volleys at the Americans, and Iraqi militiamen and soldiers tried to penetrate their lines.

Later, multiple-launcher vehicles had fired rockets to try to take out the mortars, and AH-64 Apache helicopters swooped low over the arid terrain in search of other enemy guns emplacements.

It was in the late afternoon, after this day of defending their positions, that the men of Bravo Company saw the blue Toyota coming, and reacted.

After the shooting, medics evacuated the survivors to US lines south of here. One woman escaped without a scratch. Another, who had superficial head wounds, was flown by helicopter to a field hospital when it was learnt she was pregnant.

Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Twitty, the 3rd Battalion commander, gave permission for three of the survivors to return to the vehicle and recover the bodies of their loved ones.

"They wanted to bury them before the dogs got to them," said 28-year-old Corporal Brian Truenow.

Medics gave the group 10 body bags and US officials offered an unspecified amount of money as compensation.

In Washington, the Pentagon issued a statement saying that the vehicle had been fired on after the driver ignored shouted orders and warning shots. The shooting, it said, was being investigated.

The Pentagon account said the vehicle was a van carrying "13 women and children". Seven had been killed, two injured and four were unharmed. It did not mention any men.

Captain Johnson has now ordered that signs be posted in Arabic to warn people to stop well short of the Bradleys guarding the eastern approach to the intersection.

The Washington Post

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US prepared for very high casualties: command official
The Sydney Morning Herald April 2, 2003
The United States is prepared to pay a "very high price" in terms of casualties to capture Baghdad and oust President Saddam Hussein, a US central command official has said.

"We're prepared to pay a very high price because we are not going to do anything other than ensure that this regime goes away," the official said, adding that US casualties in the war had been "fairly" light.

"If that means there will be a lot of casualties, then there will be a lot of casualties," said the official, who spoke on condition that he not be named.

"There will come a time maybe when things are going to be much more shocking," he said, adding: "In World War II there would be nights when we'd lose 1000 people."

On the 13th day of the war 51 Americans and 26 Britons had been killed and 14 US troops were missing. Iraq said 589 civilians had been killed, and almost 5000 injured.

In the southern town of Shatra, US marines moved in to recover the body of a dead comrade hanged in the town square.

Hundreds of troops were dispatched on the operation after intelligence reports indicated the body of a dead American, who was killed in a firefight last week, had been paraded through the streets and hanged in public.

"We would like to retrieve the body of the marine but it is not our sole purpose," said Lieutenant-Colonel Pete Owen, of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

Military sources said another part of the operation was to arm local militias to fight against members of the ruling Ba'ath party loyal to Saddam.

Shatra is about 40 kilometres north of Nasiriyah, where Iraqi forces have been harassing US supply lines and putting up tough resistance for more than a week.

The US official said the hunt for chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs had been subordinated to the battle to oust Saddam and his associates.

"We are doing everything we can to look as we go but the primary mission is now to fight," he said. "And so our efforts are dedicated to doing the business that needs to be done to destroy the people that are fighting against us and get our forces where they need to get to."

The official, addressing reporters at the central command's forward headquarters in Qatar, said the net result of reporting by correspondents with the invasion force

created the impression of a much more difficult campaign than it was.

The official said there were "an awful lot of ominous signs" that Saddam had prepared his forces to use banned chemical weapons. He said chemical detection equipment, protection suits, new masks and atropine injectors, used to protect against nerve agents, had been found.

He predicted that Saddam would probably mount a "layered" defence of Baghdad, with his best-trained and best-equipped troops, the Republican Guard, arrayed on the outskirts of the city.

Agencies

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Edited by author 04-01-2003 06:22 PM
U.N. Syria Envoy Evokes Possible "Humanitarian Catastrophe"
UN Wire April 1, 2003
In an interview published today in Le Matin, the top U.N. official in Syria, Tawfiq ben Amara, said the situation in Iraq "could degenerate at any time into a humanitarian catastrophe."

"Changes can be expected in a few days. Everything will depend on the military operations, on the stock of foodstuffs and on the medical resources that are present in Iraqi territory," ben Amara said.

Although the United Nations is expecting about 20,000 refugees to flee Iraq, ben Amara said, Syria is planning for 100,000 refugees -- "estimates," ben Amara said, "that raise concerns and fears because of the absence of a contribution from the international community. Our appeals to head off a humanitarian catastrophe remain unanswered." The U.N. representative attributed the lack of significant refugee movements so far to "the inability of part of the population to undertake 900-kilometer trips" and to Iraqi government provision of food rations.

Asked about Iraq's rejection of a resolution the U.N. Security Council passed Friday authorizing Annan to use oil-for-food resources to provide wartime humanitarian aid to Iraqis, ben Amara said, "I go back always to international law, which demands that, on the basis of a contract, we deal with one of the parties to the conflict. Humanitarian aid must be delivered under the umbrella of one of the two parties. In this case, we must deal with Iraq" (Nadir Benseba, Le Matin, April 1, UN Wire translation).

Annan yesterday met with representatives of Arab countries to discuss the Iraq crisis. Annan said after the meeting that the countries expressed concern about civilians in Iraq and "are also anxious that assistance should get to the cities and to the people as soon as possible." He plans to meet with each of the world body's five regional groups -- Africa; Asia; Eastern Europe; Latin America and the Caribbean; and Western Europe and others, which includes the United States -- on Iraq (U.N. release II, March 31).

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Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), India
Press Release on April 1, 2003

STOP THE WAR!

The unjust, illegal and savage war on Iraq is being waged not to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), or 'liberate' its people, but to promote America's hegemonic interests and create a global empire. WMD are unacceptable, no matter who has them -- including the invading governments of the US and Britain with their huge arsenals, which they refuse to disarm.

The invaders are killing and maiming civilians and soldiers defending their homeland, after years of unjust sanctions that have killed nearly two million civilians. The Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) joins all peace and justice-loving peoples in condemning the US and its allies and demanding they immediately withdraw. They must fully indemnify Iraq's people for the destruction inflicted upon them and pay for humanitarian aid through an independent agency. They must not be allowed to reap the fruits of aggression through participation in post-war reconstruction.

The CNDP deplores the Indian government's ambivalent stand and demands it unequivocally condemn the US aggression. New Delhi lost it global moral stature after the 1998 nuclear tests and is trying to use the war to promote tensions in our region.

Kamal Chenoy, J Sri Raman, Amarjit Kaur, and others.
CNDP, India.

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Marines kill another unarmed civilian
The Sydney Morning Herals April 1 2003
US Marines say they've shot dead another unarmed Iraqi at a checkpoint, after earlier killing at least seven women and children in central Iraq after the van they were travelling in failed to stop at a roadblock.

The latest shooting was outside the southern town of Shatra near Nasiriyah after the man drove his truck at speed towards a US roadblock. Fearing a suicide attack, the US marines riddled his white truck with with bullets.

The man's passenger was badly wounded. Marines said the truck did not contain any explosives and neither of the men was in uniform or armed.

The troops have been nervous since a suicide car bomb attack on Saturday killed four American soldiers at a checkpoint near Najaf.

Earlier today, US troops shot and killed seven Iraqi civilians - including women and children - in a van at checkpoint in southern Iraq when the driver did not stop as ordered, US Central Command said.

However, an American journalist who was at the scene said 10 Iraqis were killed yesterday, including five young children.

The soldiers were from the 3rd Infantry Division, which lost four soldiers on Saturday at another checkpoint when an Iraqi soldier dressed as a civilian detonated a car bomb in a suicide attack.

The Central Command said initial reports from yesterday's confrontation indicated the soldiers followed the rules of engagement to protect themselves.

"In light of recent terrorist attacks by the Iraqi regime, the soldiers exercised considerable restraint to avoid the unnecessary loss of life," the statement said.

However, the deadly shootings are likely to stoke opposition to the US-led invasion among Iraqis in the Shi'ite Muslim region, where Washington had hoped for a popular uprising against President Saddam Hussein.

Instead, US forces have faced stubborn resistance by Saddam's forces in Najaf and other cities in southern Shi'ite strongholds.

According to an account by the Central Command, the van approached the US Army checkpoint yesterday afternoon.

Soldiers motioned for the driver to stop but were ignored. They then fired warning shots but the vehicle moving toward the checkpoint. Troops then shot into its engine. As a last resort, the military said, soldiers fired into the passenger compartment.

Two other civilians were wounded at the checkpoint on a highway near Karbala, according to a Pentagon official and Central Command. The military is investigating.

"They tried to warn the vehicle to stop, it did not stop," Marine Corps General Peter Pace said on PBS-TV's "The New Hour with Jim Leherer".

"And it was unusual that that vehicle would be full of only women and that the driver was a woman. So we need to find out why it was that they were acting the way they did."

The military statement said 13 women and children were in the van. But The Washington Post, whose reporter is embedded with the 3rd Infantry, said 15 people were in the vehicle and 10 were killed, including five children who appeared to be younger than age five.

One of the wounded was a man not expected to live, the Post reported on its Web site.

The newspaper described the vehicle as a four-wheel-drive Toyota crammed with the Iraqis' personal belongings.

In its description of the shooting, the Post quoted a 3rd Infantry Division captain as saying the checkpoint crew did not fire warning shots quickly enough.

The Post describes the captain watching through binoculars and ordering the soldiers by radio to fire a warning shot first and then shoot a 7.62 mm machine-gun round into the vehicle's radiator. When the vehicle kept coming, the captain ordered the soldiers to "stop him!"

About a dozen shots of 25 mm cannon fire were heard from one or more of the platoon's Bradley fighting vehicles, the Post said.

The captain then shouted over the radio at the platoon leader, "You just (expletive) killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!" according to the Post.

"It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, and I hope I never see it again," Sergeant Mario Manzano, 26, an Army medic with Bravo Company of the division's 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, told the Post.

US medics evacuated survivors of yesterday's shooting to allied lines south of Karbala, according to the Post. One woman was unhurt.

Another, who had superficial head wounds, was flown by helicopter to a US field hospital when it was learned she was pregnant, the Post said.

US troops gave three survivors permission to return to the vehicle and recover the bodies of their loved ones, the newspaper said.

Medics gave the group 10 body bags, the newspaper reported, and US officials offered an unspecified amount of money to compensate them.

AP

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The toll - killed, missing, captured
The Sydney Morning Herals April 1 2003
The number of estimated dead, missing and captured since the beginning of the Iraqi conflict:

- Casualties: Among US troops, 42 dead, seven captured, 17 missing, according to the Pentagon and family members. Among British troops, 25 dead, none missing or captured.

- Deployed: 290,000 coalition forces are deployed in support of combat operations. Close to 100,000 US troops are now in Iraq and 100,000 more forces on the way.

- Iraqi troops: estimated 350,000.

- Iraqi deaths: No estimate of military casualties. Iraq says at least 425 civilians have been killed since the war began.

- Iraqi prisoners of war: More than 4,500, according to the Pentagon. A British tribunal released 35 civilians who had been swept up among them.

- Oil: More than 600 oil wells and three oil refineries are under coalition control.

Sources include US Central Command, the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defence.

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From: "Kucinich Campaign" <info@kucinich.us>
Subject: Kucinich Calls for Immediate End to War
Date: Friday, March 28, 2003 8:59 PM

Today, at a press conference on Capitol Hill, Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH), who leads opposition to the war in Iraq, issued the following statement:

"This Administration has never made its case for war against Iraq. It is an unjustified war, which the Administration continues to misrepresent and exaggerate. The most recent example is the Administration's characterization of international coalition support for this war."

"This morning, President Bush once again exaggerated the extent of support for the war stating that the coalition of countries supporting this war is larger than the 1991 Gulf War. What Bush failed to mention was that back in 1991, all of the 34 coalition members offered military force, by contributing troops on the ground, aircraft, ships or medics. "

"This war involves the troops of only the U.S., Britain, Australia, Poland and Albania. Not even the three members of the Security Council that support the war, Spain, Italy, and Bulgaria are committing military support."

"This Bush Administration has been adding coalition member to their list based on statements of "moral" support. As the Washington Post reported last week, if this type of criteria was used back in 1991, the size of the coalition would likely have topped 100 countries."

"Further, the total cost of the Gulf War to the United States was around $4 billion dollars. This time, the President has come to Congress requesting a $75 billion bill, all of which will be paid by U. S. taxpayers. Clearly, military and economic support from countries is far more important than statements of 'well-wishes'."

"This war must end now. It was unjust when it started last week, and is still unjust today. The U.S. should get out now and try to save the lives of American troops and Iraqi citizens. Most importantly, ending the war now and resuming weapons inspections could salvage world opinion of the United States, which has been deteriorating since the talk of war began. After all, the greatest threat to the United States at this time is terrorism, which is breeding from this war."

Congressman Kucinich will issue daily statements on the war in Iraq. Please pass these statements on to your friends. Help empower America's leading spokesperson for peaceful resolution of international conflict. Please visit http://www.kucinich.us now to contribute to the presidential campaign. Your financial help will spread the message and enable a new vision for America to be brought forward.

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US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death
Mark Franchetti, Nasiriya The Times March 30, 2003
THE light was a strange yellowy grey and the wind was coming up, the beginnings of a sandstorm. The silence felt almost eerie after a night of shooting so intense it hurt the eardrums and shattered the nerves. My footsteps felt heavy on the hot, dusty asphalt as I walked slowly towards the bridge at Nasiriya. A horrific scene lay ahead.

Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan and a couple of trucks, blocked the road. They were riddled with bullet holes. Some had caught fire and turned into piles of black twisted metal. Others were still burning.

Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy artillery. Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to the coalition's supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young American marines with orders to shoot anything that moved. One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.

Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her father. Half his head was missing. Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman - perhaps the girl's mother - was dead, slumped in the back seat. A US Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.

This was not the only family who had taken what they thought was a last chance for safety. A father, baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave. On the bridge itself a dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a donkey. As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third child, Isabella, was born while he was on board ship en route to the Gulf, appeared beside me. "Did you see all that?" he asked, his eyes filled with tears. "Did you see that little baby girl? I carried her body and buried it as best I could but I had no time. It really gets to me to see children being killed like this, but we had no choice." Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter satisfaction of some of his fellow marines as they surveyed the scene. "The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy," said Corporal Ryan Dupre. "I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him."

Only a few days earlier these had still been the bright-eyed small-town boys with whom I crossed the border at the start of the operation. They had rolled towards Nasiriya, a strategic city beside the Euphrates, on a mission to secure a safe supply route for troops on the way to Baghdad. They had expected a welcome, or at least a swift surrender. Instead they had found themselves lured into a bloody battle, culminating in the worst coalition losses of the war - 16 dead, 12 wounded and two missing marines as well as five dead and 12 missing servicemen from an army convoy - and the humiliation of having prisoners paraded on Iraqi television.

There are three key bridges at Nasiriya. The feat of Martin, Dupre and their fellow marines in securing them under heavy fire was compared by armchair strategists last week to the seizure of the Remagen bridge over the Rhine, which significantly advanced victory over Germany in the second world war.

But it was also the turning point when the jovial band of brothers from America lost all their assumptions about the war and became jittery aggressors who talked of wanting to "nuke" the place. None of this was foreseen at Camp Shoup, one of the marines' tent encampments in northern Kuwait, where officers from the 1st and 2nd battalions of Task Force Tarawa, the 7,000-strong US Marines brigade, spent long evenings poring over maps and satellite imagery before the invasion. The plan seemed straightforward. The marines would speed unhindered over the 130 miles of desert up from the Kuwaiti border and approach Nasiriya from the southeast to secure a bridge over the Euphrates. They would then drive north through the outskirts of Nasiriya to a second bridge, over the Inahr al-Furbati canal. Finally, they would turn west and secure the third bridge, also over the canal. The marines would not enter the city proper, let alone attempt to take it.

The coalition could then start moving thousands of troops and logistical support units up highway 7, leading to Baghdad, 225 miles to the north. There was only one concern: "ambush alley", the road connecting the first two bridges. But intelligence suggested there would be little or no fighting as this eastern side of the city was mostly "pro-American".

I was with Alpha company. We reached the outskirts of Nasiriya at about breakfast time last Sunday. Some marines were disappointed to be carrying out a mission that seemed a sideshow to the main effort. But in an ominous sign of things to come, our battalion stopped in its tracks, three miles outside the city. Bad news filtered back. Earlier that morning a US Army convoy had been greeted by a group of Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes, apparently wanting to surrender. When the American soldiers stopped, the Iraqis pulled out AK-47s and sprayed the US trucks with gunfire.

Five wounded soldiers were rescued by our convoy, including one who had been shot four times. The attackers were believed to be members of the Fedayeen Saddam, a group of 15,000 fighters under the command of Saddam's psychopathic son Uday. Blown-up tyres, a pool of blood, spent ammunition and shards of glass from the bulletridden windscreen marked the spot where the ambush had taken place. Swiftly, our AAVs (23-ton amphibious assault vehicles) took up defensive positions. About 100 marines jumped out of their vehicles and took cover in ditches, pointing their sights at a mud-caked house. Was it harbouring gunmen? Small groups of marines approached, cautiously, to search for the enemy. A dozen terrified civilians, mainly women and children, emerged with their hands raised. "It's just a bunch of Hajis," said one gunner from his turret, using their nickname for Arabs. "Friggin' women and children, that's all."

Cobras and Huey attack helicopters began firing missiles at targets on the edge of the city. Plumes of smoke rose as heavy artillery shook the ground under our feet. Heavy machinegun fire echoed across the huge rubbish dump that marks the entrance to Nasiriya. Suddenly there was return fire from three large oil tanks at a refinery. The Cobras were called back, and within seconds they roared above our heads, firing off missiles in clouds of purple tracer fire. There were several loud explosions. Flames burst high into the sky from one of the oil tanks. The marines believed that what opposition there was had now been crushed. "We are going in, we are going in," shouted one of the officers.

More than 20 AAVs, several tanks and about 10 Hummers equipped with roof-mounted, anti-tank missile launchers prepared to move in. Crammed inside them were some 400 marines. Tension rose as they loaded their guns and stuck their heads over the side of the AAVs through the open roof, their M-16 pointed in all directions. As we set off towards the eastern city gate there was no sense of the mayhem awaiting us down the road. A few locals dressed in rags watched the awesome spectacle of America's war machine on the move. Nobody waved.

Slowly we approached the first bridge. Fires were raging on either side of the road; Cobras had destroyed an Iraqi military truck and a T55 tank positioned inside a dugout. Powerful explosions came from inside the bowels of the tank as its ammunition and heavy shells were set off by the fire. With each explosion a thick and perfect ring of black smoke ring puffed out of the turret. An Iraqi defence post lay abandoned. Cobras flew over an oasis of palm trees and deserted brick and mud-caked houses. We charged onto the bridge, and as we crossed the Euphrates, alarge mural of Saddam came into view. Some marines reached for their disposable cameras.

Suddenly, as we approached ambush alley on the far side of the bridge, the crackle of AK-47s broke out. Our AAVs began to zigzag to avoid being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). The road widened out to a square, with a mosque and the portrait of Saddam on the left-hand side. The vehicles wheeled round, took up a defensive position, back to back, and began taking fire. Pinned down, the marines fired back with 40mm automatic grenade launchers, a weapon so powerful it can go through thick brick walls and kill anyone within a 5-yard range of where the shell lands.

I was in AAV number A304, affectionately nicknamed the Desert Caddy. It shook as Keith Bernize, the gunner, fired off round after deafening round at sandbag positions shielding suspected Fedayeen fighters. His steel ammunition box clanged with the sound of smoking empty shells and cartridges. Bernize, who always carries a scan picture of his unborn baby daughter with him, shot at the targets from behind a turret, peering through narrow slits of reinforced glass. He shouted at his men to feed him more ammunition. Four marines, standing at the AAV's four corners, precariously perched on ammunition boxes, fired off their M-16s. Their faces covered in sweat, officers shouted commands into field radios, giving co-ordinates of enemy positions. Some 200 marines, fully exposed to enemy fire and slowed down by their heavy weapons, bulky ammunition packs and NBC suits, ran across the road, taking shelter behind a long brick wall and mounds of earth. A team of snipers appeared, yards from our vehicle.

The exchange of fire was relentless. We were pinned down for more than three hours as Iraqis hiding inside houses and a hospital and behind street corners fired a barrage of ammunition. Despite the marines' overwhelming firepower, hitting the Iraqis was not easy. The gunmen were not wearing uniforms and had planned their ambush well - stockpiling weapons in dozens of houses, between which they moved freely pretending to be civilians. "It's a bad situation," said First Sergeant James Thompson, who was running around with a 9mm pistol in his hand. "We don't know who is shooting at us. They are even using women as scouts. The women come out waving at us, or with their hands raised. We freeze, but the next minute we can see how she is looking at our positions and giving them away to the fighters hiding behind a street corner. It's very difficult to distinguish between the fighters and civilians."

Across the square, genuine civilians were running for their lives. Many, including some children, were gunned down in the crossfire. In a surreal scene, a father and mother stood out on a balcony with their children in their arms to give them a better view of the battle raging below. A few minutes later several US mortar shells landed in front of their house. In all probability, the family is dead.

The fighting intensified. An Iraqi fighter emerged from behind a wall of sandbags 500 yards away from our vehicle. Several times he managed to fire off an RPG at our positions. Bernize and other gunners fired dozens of rounds at his dugout, punching large holes into a house and lifting thick clouds of dust. Captain Mike Brooks, commander of Alpha company, pinned down in front of the mosque, called in tank support. Armed with only a 9mm pistol, he jumped out of the back of his AAV with a young marine carrying a field radio on his back.

Brooks, 34, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had been in command of 200 men for just over a year. He joined the marines when he was 19 because he felt that he was wasting his life. He needed direction, was a bit of a rebel and was impressed by the sense of pride in the corps. He is a soft-spoken man, fair but very firm. Brave too: I watched him sprint in front of enemy positions to brief some of his junior officers behind a wall. Behind us, two 68-ton Abrams tanks rolled up, crushing the barrier separating the lanes on the highway. The earth shook violently as one tank, Desert Knight, stopped in front of our row of AAVS and fired several 120mm shells into buildings. A few hundred yards down ambush alley there was carnage. An AAV from Charlie company was racing back towards the bridge to evacuate some wounded marines when it was hit by two RPGs. The heavy vehicle shook but withstood the explosions.

Then the Iraqis fired again. This time the rocket plunged into the vehicle through the open rooftop. The explosion was deadly, made 10 times more powerful by the ammunition stored in the back. The wreckage smouldered in the middle of the road. I jumped out from the rear hatch of our vehicle, briefly taking cover behind a wall. When I reached the stricken AAV, the scene was mayhem. The heavy, thick rear ramp had been blown open. There were pools of blood and bits of flesh everywhere. A severed leg, still wearing a desert boot, lay on what was left of the ramp among playing cards, a magazine, cans of Coke and a small bloodstained teddy bear.

"They are f****** dead, they are dead. Oh my God. Get in there. Get in there now and pull them out," shouted a gunner in a state verging on hysterical. There was panic and confusion as a group of young marines, shouting and cursing orders at one another, pulled out a maimed body. Two men struggled to lift the body on a stretcher and into the back of a Hummer, but it would not fit inside, so the stretcher remained almost upright, the dead man's leg, partly blown away, dangling in the air.

"We shouldn't be here," said Lieutenant Campbell Kane, 25, who was born in Northern Ireland. "We can't hold this. They are trying to suck us into the city and we haven't got enough ass up here to sustain this. We need more tanks, more helicopters." Closer to the destroyed AAV, another young marine was transfixed with fear and kept repeating: "Oh my God, I can't believe this. Did you see his leg? It was blown off. It was blown off."

Two CH-46 helicopters, nicknamed Frogs, landed a few hundred yards away in the middle of a firefight to take away the dead and wounded. If at first the marines felt constrained by orders to protect civilians, by now the battle had become so intense that there was little time for niceties. Cobra helicopters were ordered to fire at a row of houses closest to our positions. There were massive explosions but the return fire barely died down. Behind us, as many as four AAVs that had driven down along the banks of the Euphrates were stuck in deep mud and coming under fire.

About 1pm, after three hours of intense fighting, the order was given to regroup and try to head out of the city in convoy. Several marines who had lost their vehicles piled into the back of ours. We raced along ambush alley at full speed, close to a line of houses. "My driver got hit," said one of the marines who joined us, his face and uniform caked in mud. "I went to try to help him when he got hit by another RPG or a mortar. I don't even know how many friends I have lost. I don't care if they nuke that bloody city now. From one house they were waving while shooting at us with AKs from the next. It was insane."

There was relief when we finally crossed the second bridge to the northeast of the city in mid-afternoon. But there was more horror to come. Beside the smouldering wreckage of another AAV were the bodies of another four marines, laid out in the mud and covered with camouflage ponchos. There were body parts everywhere. One of the dead was Second Lieutenant Fred Pokorney, 31, a marine artillery officer from Washington state. He was a big guy, whose ill-fitting uniform was the butt of many jokes. It was supposed to have been a special day for Pokorney. After 13 years of service, he was to be promoted to first lieutenant. The men of Charlie company had agreed they would all shake hands with him to celebrate as soon as they crossed the second bridge, their mission accomplished. It didn't happen. Pokorney made it over the second bridge and a few hundred yards down a highway through dusty flatlands before his vehicle was ambushed. Pokorney and his men had no chance. Fully loaded with ammunition, their truck exploded in the middle of the road, its remains burning for hours. Pokorney was hit in the chest by an RPG. Another man who died was Fitzgerald Jordan, a staff sergeant from Texas. I felt numb when I heard this. I had met Jordan 10 days before we moved into Nasiriya. He was a character, always chewing tobacco and coming up to pat you on the back. He got me to fetch newspapers for him from Kuwait City. Later, we shared a bumpy ride across the desert in the back of a Humvee.

A decorated Gulf war veteran, he used to complain about having to come back to Iraq. "We should have gone all the way to Baghdad 12 years ago when we were here and had a real chance of removing Saddam." Now Pokorney, Jordan and their comrades lay among unspeakable carnage. An older marine walked by carrying a huge chunk of flesh, so maimed it was impossible to tell which body part it was. With tears in his eyes and blood splattered over his flak jacket, he held the remains of his friend in his arms until someone gave him a poncho to wrap them with.

Frantic medics did what they could to relieve horrific injuries, unti four helicopters landed in the middle of the highway to take the injured to a military hospital. Each wounded marine had a tag describing his injury. One had gunshot wounds to the face, another to the chest. Another simply lay on his side in the sand with a tag reading: "Urgent - surgery, buttock."

One young marine was assigned the job of keeping the flies at bay. Some of his comrades, exhausted, covered in blood, dirt and sweat walked around dazed. There were loud cheers as the sound of the heaviest artillery yet to pound Nasiriya shook the ground. Before last week the overwhelming majority of these young men had never been in combat. Few had even seen a dead body. Now, their faces had changed.

Anger and fear were fuelled by rumours that the bodies of American soldiers had been dragged through Nasiriya's streets. Some marines cried in the arms of friends, others sought comfort in the Bible. Next morning, the men of Alpha company talked about the fighting over MREs (meals ready to eat). They were jittery now and reacted nervously to any movement around their dugouts. They suspected that civilian cars, including taxis, had helped resupply the enemy inside the city. When cars were spotted speeding along two roads, frantic calls were made over the radio to get permission to "kill the vehicles". Twenty-four hours earlier it would almost certainly have been denied: now it was granted. Immediately, the level of force levelled at civilian vehicles was overwhelming. Tanks were placed on the road and AAVs lined along one side. Several taxis were destroyed by helicopter gunships as they drove down the road.

A lorry filled with sacks of wheat made the fatal mistake of driving through US lines. The order was given to fire. Several AAVs pounded it with a barrage of machinegun fire, riddling the windscreen with at least 20 holes. The driver was killed instantly. The lorry swerved off the road and into a ditch. Rumour spread that the driver had been armed and had fired at the marines. I walked up to the lorry, but could find no trace of a weapon. This was the start of day that claimed many civilian casualties. After the lorry a truck came down the road. Again the marines fired. Inside, four men were killed. They had been travelling with some 10 other civilians, mainly women and children who were evacuated, crying, their clothes splattered in blood. Hours later a dog belonging to the dead driver was still by his side. The marines moved west to take a military barracks and secure their third objective, the third bridge, which carried a road out of the city. At the barracks, the marines hung a US flag from a statue of Saddam, but Lieutenant-Colonel Rick Grabowski, the battalion commander, ordered it down. He toured barracks. There were stacks of Russian-made ammunition and hundreds of Iraqi army uniforms, some new, others left behind by fleeing Iraqi soldiers.

One room had a map of Nasiriya, showing its defences and two large cardboard arrows indicating the US plan of attack to take the two main bridges. Above the map were several murals praising Saddam. One, which sickened the Americans, showed two large civilian planes crashing into tall buildings. As night fell again there was great tension, the marines fearing an ambush. Two tanks and three AAVs were placed at the north end of the third bridge, their guns pointing down towards Nasiriya, and given orders to shoot at any vehicle that drove towards American positions. Though civilians on foot passed by safely, the policy was to shoot anything that moved on wheels. Inevitably, terrified civilians drove at speed to escape: marines took that speed to be a threat and hit out. During the night, our teeth on edge, we listened a dozen times as the AVVs' machineguns opened fire, cutting through cars and trucks like paper.

Next morning I saw the result of this order - the dead civilians, the little girl in the orange and gold dress. Suddenly, some of the young men who had crossed into Iraq with me reminded me now of their fathers' generation, the trigger-happy grunts of Vietnam. Covered in the mud from the violent storms, they were drained and dangerously aggressive. In the days afterwards, the marines consolidated their position and put a barrier of trucks across the bridge to stop anyone from driving across, so there were no more civilian deaths. They also ruminated on what they had done. Some rationalised it. "I was shooting down a street when suddenly a woman came out and casually began to cross the street with a child no older than 10," said Gunnery

Sergeant John Merriman, another Gulf war veteran. "At first I froze on seeing the civilian woman. She then crossed back again with the child and went behind a wall. Within less than a minute a guy with an RPG came out and fired at us from behind the same wall. This happened a second time so I thought, "Okay, I get it. Let her come out again". She did and this time I took her out with my M-16." Others were less sanguine.

Mike Brooks was one of the commanders who had given the order to shoot at civilian vehicles. It weighed on his mind, even though he felt he had no choice but to do everything to protect his marines from another ambush. On Friday, making coffee in the dust, he told me he had been writing a diary, partly for his wife Kelly, a nurse at home in Jacksonville, North Carolina, with their sons Colin, 6, and four-year-old twins Brian and Evan. When he came to jotting down the incident about the two babies getting killed by his men he couldn't do it. But he said he would tell her when he got home. I offered to let him call his wife on my satellite phone to tell her he was okay. He turned down the offer and had me write and send her an e-mail instead. He was too emotional. If she heard his voice, he said, she would know that something was wrong.

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Frontline report: What's gone wrong, and who's to blame
By Margo Kingston The Sydney Morning Herald March 31, 2003
International relations lecturer Scott Burchill: "This piece will give you a sense of why the battle plan has gone off the rails. What is significant is that scapegoating has begun, suggesting a lack of confidence in the eventual result which may well fall short of victory as it is commonly understood. One for the armchair strategists."
The piece was first published at Defense and the National Interest, a specialist United States military site with a motto coined by Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in The Art of War: Military action is important to the nation - it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it.
Army's race to Baghdad exposes risks in battle plan
By James Kitfield, National Journal, March 28, 2003
V CORPS FORWARD TACTICAL COMMAND, Central Iraq: The sound came with such suddenness and ferocity that all heads craned skyward as if in supplication: An Iraqi Scud missile was boring back through the atmosphere at terminal velocity. Just to the right of the 110-vehicle convoy, a Patriot anti-missile battery answered, with the sparkling contrails of two missiles clearly visible as they soared toward an impact point nearly six miles overhead.

Along the shoulder of the road, hundreds of soldiers scrambled to don chemical protection suits as a multiwheeled Fox detection vehicle ran down the column "sniffing" for lethal chemical agents. Within minutes, the Patriot battery reported a successful intercept and confirmed that the Scud would have hit the ground less than a third of a mile in front of the convoy.

In one of the convoy's three command vehicles, Lt. Col. Rick Nohmer, a tightly wound Army Ranger and West Pointer with the infantryman's ability to grow more calm as situations become increasingly tense, turned to check the occupants of his Humvee. "Well, I guess that will get everyone's head in the game," he said.

Only hours into the first day of the campaign, or "G-Day," the ground war for control of Iraq was joined.

As the convoy crested a ridge at dusk on March 20, the vista brought home the enormity of the endeavor ahead. Spread out on a high-desert bluff on the far western flank of U.S. forces in Kuwait were the 300-plus vehicles of the 3rd Infantry Division's main command headquarters. Clearly visible in attack position on the desert floor beyond was the "heavy metal"-M1-A2 tanks and armored Bradley fighting vehicles, all painted desert camouflage-part of the division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team.

Other 3rd Infantry elements and a Marine expeditionary force were assigned the objectives nearest to Kuwait in southeastern Iraq and encountered both the most fighting and the majority of the press coverage in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nevertheless, the secret battle plan always envisioned this western task force as the main effort and linchpin of the campaign.

V Corps commander Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the officer in charge of all Army maneuver forces and the one responsible for overseeing the battle for Baghdad, continually drums into his senior commanders that Iraqi Freedom is about regime change and liberation. The objective is Baghdad. From the earliest stages, planners identified the center of gravity in that fight as the Republican Guard's elite Medina Division, which is guarding the southern approaches to the Iraqi capital. If the Medina chooses to stand and fight, V Corps commanders planned not only to defeat it, but also to send a message by trying to bring the war to a rapid conclusion with the division's utter destruction.

"We always regarded Baghdad as the point where we would eventually have to apply pressure in this fight, and our judgment was that the quicker and more dynamically we applied that pressure, the better off we would be," Wallace told National Journal. "As for the Medina, it's important among the Republican Guard divisions by consequence of its position to the south. And I've told my soldiers and anyone else who would listen that we shouldn't underestimate the Republican Guard, or build our battle plan on the assumption that they might not fight. I'm expecting a tough fight from the Republican Guard."

The forces gathered in the westernmost attack positions on G-Day, including advance support elements of the 101st Airborne Division, were thus poised to conduct a three-day surprise march up the desert wastelands of western Iraq. Their goal was to bring the fight early and decisively to the Republican Guard camped at Baghdad's outskirts.

In terms of tempo, distances covered, and the difficulty of the terrain involved, the march would be the longest and most audacious movement toward an enemy for a U.S. Army corps since Gen. George Patton ranged North Africa stalking the vaunted Afrika Korps of German Gen. Erwin Rommel.

Sometime after nightfall on the first day of the war, the officers and senior sergeants of V Corps's Forward Tactical Command Centercalled a TACgathered on the bluff to witness the 3rd Infantry Division's expected artillery barrage of Iraqi border posts. The very fact that the tactical headquarters of a corps commanding nearly three divisions' worth of combat power would be exposing itself so close to the front line was a clear indication of the primacy put on synchronization and tempo in this campaign. Upon arriving south of Baghdad, the V Corps TAC would immediately begin managing the fight with the Medina.

Behind the decision to engage Iraq's elite forces on multiple fronts was the U.S. commanders' conviction that such relentless pressure might overwhelm Iraqi command-and-control capabilities and maximize chances that the enemy would quit the fight. Iraqi forces reeling from simultaneous onslaughts were also thought to be less likely to mount a coordinated attack with chemical or biological weapons. The greatest defense against such weapons, U.S. commanders reasoned, would be the rapid maneuvering of U.S. forces. Finally, and perhaps most important, keeping Iraqi forces continually on the defensive would mask vulnerabilities and risks inherent in the bold U.S. battle plan.

Right on time at 1700 "Zulu," or Greenwich Mean Time, the big guns and multiple-launch rocket systems of the 3rd Infantry Division artillery brigade opened up on Iraqi border posts. Muzzle blasts flashed across the dark desert floor, the thunderous impact sounding in the far distance like the approach of an agitated giant. For men on the eve of battle, the barrage elicited only quiet commentary. Everyone understood without saying so that, somewhere out there, real people were dying.

Standing on the bluff, Lt. Col. Rob Baker, field commander of the V Corps forward headquarters unit and the corps's deputy operations officer, wondered what daylight would reveal. "I don't think until you see the physical carnage of battlethe dead and bloated bodiesdoes the reality sink in of what this business is all about," said Baker, a West Point graduate who served as an infantry platoon leader during the 1983 invasion of Grenada. A man with the quiet air of natural command, and Wallace's designated eyes and ears for the battle to come, Baker had thought long and hard about what the next days would bring.

"My greatest concern in the early stages of this campaign will be getting all my personnel and equipment to our forward objective as fast as possible, because the move we're about to make will be unprecedented in terms of the pace of our operations and the distance covered," Baker said. "We'll be moving in a matter of days forces that would have taken months to advance during World War II. That's why it's so important that we keep the pressure on the Iraqi army nonstop with deep attack, with Air Force close-air support, and with our maneuver ground forces. We know we're superior technologically to the Iraqi army. The place we'll be taking risks is in stretching our logistics lines over 500 kilometers through territory that may not be that secure once our lead elements have passed."

Modern-Day Blitzkrieg

The genesis of the battle plan was a what-if session over beers among a handful of Army majors nearly 17 months ago. They were all students at the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies, known colloquially as SAMS, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where the Army's most promising planners take a graduate course in strategic campaigns. The young majors brainstormed about a march on Baghdad to dispose of Saddam Hussein. In its earliest versions, the plan envisioned a 125-day campaign by a U.S. force nearly twice the size of that now in Iraq.

Maj. Kevin Marcus, a SAMS graduate now attached to V Corps headquarters, helped develop the plan from a back-of-an-envelope exercise into a PowerPoint presentation that within days of being finished ended up on the desk of the president of the United States. Though any military campaign plan of the size of Iraqi Freedom has many midwivesand for this one, they include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself, who prodded planners to think outside the boxMarcus saw it develop from infancy to fruition.

From the very beginning, he says, the need to synchronize a rapid, combined-arms campaign to seize the initiative with "shock and awe"roughly the modern-day equivalent of armored blitzkrieg warfareleapt out at planners determined to limit the opportunity for Iraqi forces to employ chemical weapons, wreak environmental havoc, or organize a coordinated defense. In bullfighter parlance, they wanted to go for a quick kill before the bull learned the trick of the cape.

"The essence of this challenge was always our advantage in technology and mobility against the Iraqi forces' advantage in terrain, because they are occupying defensible terrain," said Marcus, who along with Lt. Col. E.J. Degen is responsible for constantly updating the battle plan at the mobile V Corps headquarters. "That means synchronization and operations tempo are critical to this battle plan. We need to do this fast, so that Iraqi forces can't tell from where they are being hit or how we are hitting them. That way, they can't effectively counter our attack."

From the plan's very inception, the emphasis on rapid movement, and the difficulty of the variable terrain between Kuwait and Baghdad, presented unique challenges. U.S. maneuver forces would be moving and fighting not only over the flat brown expanses of the vast Iraqi desert, but through the fertile and lush Euphrates River valley.

To take the fight quickly into Baghdada city of more than 5 million that dwarfs in size and population either Stalingrad or Berlin during World War IIthese forces would need to seize key bridges and make multiple river crossings with the help of combat engineers. The logistics train supplying critical fuel, ammunition, and food to front-line forces would stretch hundreds of miles. At one point, Army planners even looked at moving supplies by barge up the Euphrates to speed the supply chain, and a special Army railroad unit studied the feasibility of quickly repairing Iraq's north-south railroad line.

And right up until the launch of the war, the plan kept changing. Although every soldier knows that no plan survives the firing of the first shot, in truth the battle plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom barely survived the dawning of the war's first day. An intelligence intercept of Iraqi signals traffic prompted U.S. commanders to authorize a surprise cruise missile attack in the early hours of March 20. "We almost got the bastard," said an intelligence source at V Corps headquarters. The decision to launch that "decapitation strike" pushed the timelines for the ground offensive up 24 hours and threw off the air-tasking order that determined what aircraft were available to support forward ground troops.

Just days before the war began, U.S. commanders had also seriously considered changing the battle plan to allow for a strategic pause at the key southern crossroads city of An Nasiriya. Such a pause would give U.S. forces time to accept the expected surrender of the 11th Division of the regular Iraqi army that defends that city, and give Republican Guard forces near Baghdad an opportunity to capitulate as well. The plan was dropped at the last minute.

Likewise, the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division's inability to launch a northern front through Turkey, although played down to the media, was also a major setback, because it raised the risk of instability in the north and the possible freeing of the Republican Guard's Nebuchadnezzar Division north of Baghdad to reinforce its sister units ringing the city.

Scrapping the Plan

By far the most dramatic and disruptive change to the battle plan, however, was Rumsfeld's decision last November to slash Central Command's request for forces. This single decision essentially cut the size of the anticipated assault force in half in the final stages of planning, and it had a ripple effect on Central Command and Army planning that continues to color operations to this day.

Notably, the Pentagon scrapped the Time Phased Force Deployment Data, or "TipFid," by which regional commanders would identify forces needed for a specific campaign, and the individual armed services would manage their deployments by order of priority. The result has meant that even as Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks was launching the war, forces identified for the fight continued to pour off ships in the Kuwaiti port of Doha, and not necessarily in the order of first priority.

"A lot of people around here can get very emotional talking about the lack of a TipFid for this operation," said a knowledgeable source at V Corps headquarters. "It would also be awfully nice to have another division to secure the supply routes and cities between An Nasiriya in the south and Baghdad, because we assume a lot of risk [by] leaving that much territory largely unguarded."

The lack of a TipFid and the piecemeal nature of the deployment also necessitated this "rolling start" to the war. In essence, Central Command and V Corps commanders are focusing on fighting the forward battle while trying to manage the unloading and flow of additional forces into the rear. The extra strain this has placed on an already-stressed supply chain has been exacerbated by the fact that critical additional support forces were eliminated when the decision was made to cut the forces in half.

"We basically spent a year building a force package that included very robust command-and-control for our support elements," said Brig. Gen. Charles Fletcher, who heads the 3rd Corps Support Command, called COSCOM, which is responsible for supplying Army forces in the Iraq theater. "When the decision was made to only go with half our force, we only had a very short time to adjust" the shipping orders that would enable us to get the right forces to Kuwait. He continued: "So while that decision may have been smart from a strategic viewpoint, it has had a trickle-down impact on all our operations. I have never received my entire communications package, for instance, complicating secure communications over a supply chain stretching hundreds of kilometers."

The Pentagon's decision not to activate many transportation Reserve units before last Christmas also created personnel shortages. Meanwhile, COSCOM itself has only 150 heavy transport trucks for an operation that Army planners estimate requires 700.

"We're going to war not with what we need, but with what we have on the ground, so we threw away the doctrinal books on this operation a long time ago," said Fletcher, noting that his transport units also have far less maintenance support than normal. "I believe we will still make it all work, but I don't doubt that we face some hard choices in the coming days between supporting our soldiers forward with ammo, fuel, and equipment, and facilitating the continued offloading of ships in port and movement of forces forward."

Desert Dash

In the end, the tremendous synchronization that this rapid operation requires could be seen one night when two Army convoys suddenly converged on a lonely goat trail. The tempers of the convoys' officers were short, and the officers' reflexes were dulled by a more than 30-hour road march through the treacherous wadis and axle-deep sands of the western Iraqi desert.

With the 2nd Brigade's armor screening out front, V Corps's tactical headquarters convoy and its numerous combat support columns topped 1,000 vehiclesand all were jockeying for position throughout the night. At numerous clogged crossroads, senior officers from different units shouted and gestured at one another, trying to maintain the integrity of their convoys in a dust cloud and possibly gain a precious few hours in the march northward. Occasionally, cruise missiles, with their unearthly whine, would fly low overhead on their way to Baghdad.

At the first of three refuel-on-the-move sites, the convoys gathered around fuel trucks at an allotted Global Positioning System set of coordinates on a patch of featureless desert. Soldiers acting as refuelers appeared asleep on their feet, standing under arc lights in a cold rain as they topped off endless lines of vehicles with fuel for the next leg of the trip north. Over the next 18 hours, refuelers would service more than 1,500 vehicles. Nevertheless, before the road march was done after more than 50 hours, some of the convoys would stall in place for lack of fuel.

After the 30-hour mark of ceaseless desert travel, the accidents came in clusters. Riding herd on a convoy of massive machinery stretching eight miles over broken and treacherous terrain may seem simple, but it requires intricate orchestration. By midafternoon on the war's second day, glassy-eyed convoy commanders struggled even to remember their radio call signs, and the heads of many drivers drooped to their chests at each stop.

All along the route, overturned cargo vehicles, fuel trucks, and broken Humvees littered the landscape. Those vehicles that could not be immediately serviced were either left behind or hooked to massive tow trucks, lest a delay encourage the trailing convoy to try to jump the line. But after yet another accident, Baker decided to halt the convoy and let its weary members bed down for the night: A V Corps TAC soldier had fallen asleep at the wheel of a 5-ton transport truck and rear-ended a Humvee and trailer, destroying a generator and in turn being rear-ended by a tow truck, whose radiator was smashed.

Pulling into a "box formation" reminiscent of settlers circling the wagons in Indian territory, Baker placed military police vehicles on the perimeter to guard his soldiers and gave his charges a few hours of well-earned rest. A nine-person maintenance pit crew worked overtime to cannibalize parts and patch together broken vehicles for tomorrow's march. Under a brilliant star-studded sky, the lights of similar encampments were visible stretched across the desert flatlands.

Pointing out the belt of Orion, Sgt. 1st Class David Ball kept an ear to a shortwave radio broadcasting BBC war reports. News of the first American soldiers and marines killed in action came in over the airwaves. "You know, this whole operation is so similar to how we train, that in a way it's hard to grasp that it's real this time," said Ball, a 17-year veteran whose competence and indefatigable good cheer are typical of the noncommissioned officer corps, the backbone of the U.S. Army. "Hearing about those KIAs and casualties kind of makes it hit home," he said.

"Can you pick up any basketball on that radio?" asked Maj. Joe Samek, an engineer attached to the V Corps TAC. "I'm missing March Madness again. Then again, I guess we're having our own March Madness out here."

Stretched Thin

On the 50th anniversary commemorating the Battle of the Bulge, COSCOM commander Fletcher went to Europe and bicycled the same route between Cherbourg and Bastogne in France that Patton's 3rd Army had followed on its famous march to relieve Army forces surrounded by German troops during a last-ditch counteroffensive that began on December 16, 1944. In a desperate attempt to keep Patton from outrunning his supply lines, the Army launched the "Red Ball Express," a transportation bucket brigade that pushed supplies across France hurriedly in the 3rd Army's burning wake.

Fletcher sees strong similarities between that operation and the current effort to resupply V Corps along a 310-mile logistics trail stretching from Kuwait to Baghdad's outskirts. "The Red Ball Express was a defining moment in the establishment of the transportation corps, because it was really the first attempt at resupplying a mobile armored force on a breakout offensive," said Fletcher. "This operation is similar, because we've never operated on these long lines of supply before."

As the adage goes, armchair strategists talk forces while military professionals talk logistics. And the logistics of Iraqi Freedom break down to a set of daunting statistics. An armored or air-mobile division on the move consumes roughly 550,000 gallons of fuel a day. COSCOM, just to supply V Corps's forward forces with the requisite 1 million gallons of fuel, must have 3 million gallons in its pipeline. Each of the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in the Iraqi theater, meanwhile, consumes at least a liter of water an hour. The harder those units and soldiers fight, the higher their ammunition, fuel, and water requirements climb. The longer the logistics pipeline stretches, the greater the strain on inadequate transportation equipment.

Fletcher's COSCOM forces, which outnumber any U.S. fighting division in the theater, are attempting to fill those gaps in capability on the ground with technology and synchronization. "Doctrinally, we typically travel in large formations with short communications lines, so trucks without GPS, and radios with only a 30-kilometer range, are standard," Fletcher said. "With our logistics lines now stretching over 500 kilometers in some cases, we had to turn to satellite communications and other technology."

COSCOM purchased 400 commercial satellite trackers off the shelf so it could always locate its highest-priority vehicles, including many fuel trucks, ambulances, and MP command vehicles. Satellite phones were purchased for many drivers. High-priority cargo containers were labeled with radio-frequency tags that reveal their location and contents at a simple query from headquarters. An Army Movement Tracking System that uses technology similar to "E-ZPass" highway tollbooth cards identifies much of the other cargo. Movement-control teams armed with computer software that has analyzed optimum traffic flow and detours at every key crossroads and intersection on the road to Baghdad will also help manage traffic congestion. In the event all of that should fail, plans are in place to airdrop supplies to isolated units or those running dangerously low on critical supplies.

However, the capture and apparent execution of some members of a lost U.S. maintenance crew, as well as spot reports that some U.S. combat units at the front were running low on fuel and ammo, clearly reveal the substantial risks that U.S. commanders assumed by pushing combat forces so far on such short timelines while leaving hundreds of miles of Iraqi territory unsecured.

Despite the obvious strains on logistics forces, Fletcher pledged to write a new ending for the modern-day Red Ball Express by avoiding a repeat of every logistician's worst nightmare, as occurred in World War II: Patton's lead tank companies ran out of gas and stalled outside of Metz, France, where they became fodder for German Panzers.

"We've accepted some significant risks given the mission and our battle plan, which is all the more reason why we need to win this war quickly," said Fletcher. "But our forces are not going to run out of gas."

Final Dash

Soldiers of the V Corps TAC convoy were pulled reluctantly out of their sleeping bags at 0600 on March 23, and told to pack up and be ready to leave two hours ahead of schedule. Lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division had gotten into a firefight with two Iraqi battalions of loyalists called Fedayeen Saddam at the convoy's forward objective, and they needed the TAC to move forward and set up a "hot" zone in order to be able to call in Air Force close-air support. The MP detachment was warned to prepare to test-fire their weapons, and every soldier in the convoy locked magazines into their M-16 rifles and 9 mm sidearms.

At the oasis town of Al Salman, in the shadow of an old fortress on a hill, the empty western desert finally gave way to palm orchards and camel herds. Many of the villagers lined the sides of the street in flowing robes, with the children and teenagers waving American flags and shouting encouragement. The heady sense of liberation visibly lifted the spirits of American soldiers, most of whom were in a foreign country, uninvited, for the very first time.

"I volunteered for this operation because I only have one more year in the Army, and I wanted to do something with it," said Pfc. Eric Juarez, who was on loan from his normal artillery unit at Fort Sill, Okla. "Seeing these people wave American flags and shout at us, that makes me feel like we're doing something right."

Was the experience enough to make him consider re-enlisting?

"No," Juarez said. "I don't know where the next war will be, but I think I'll catch it on TV."

As the convoy approached its forward objective late that afternoon, the sights and sounds of nearby combat were everywhere. Broken-down M-1 tanks blocked a shoulder of the road, and three plumes of thick smoke marred the near horizon. Over the tactical radio network, lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division could be heard fighting the Fedayeen Saddam, the urgency of combat unmistakable in their voices. Somewhat to the surprise of U.S. commanders, the outgunned Iraqis had stood and held their ground, fighting to the death in some cases (an estimated 80 Iraqis were killed in action). Before another 48 hours had passed, the estimated death toll of Iraqis attempting to block the probing of U.S. forces near Baghdad would climb above 800.

"We all assumed there would be a higher degree of capitulation than we've seen, but intelligence indicates that Saddam has pushed these Fedayeen enforcers out of Baghdad and into the population centers, and they're stiffening resistance and preventing uprisings," Wallace said during an interview in the forward TAC. "The Iraqis are not fighting or holding back out of loyalty to the regime, but because they have a gun to their heads."

Despite the unexpectedly heavy resistance, a nearly corps-sized U.S. Army combat force had traveled 322 miles in 54 hours, over difficult and variable terrain, to strike a blow directly at the enemy's center of gravity. Among the dog-tired troops who made that journey, the knowledge that no other army in the world could have accomplished the task was a point of considerable pride. By nightfall on March 24, four days into the war, V Corps's "hot" TAC operations center was launching Apache attack helicopters from its 11th Aviation Brigade directly against elements of the Republican Guard's Medina Division.

Standing outside the TAC operations tent that night, Lt. Col. Eric Wagenaar, the deputy officer in charge of the V Corps Forward TAC, watched as a flock of Apaches roared past overhead, then became dark silhouettes against the twinkling lights of a distant city. Wagenaar is the affable offspring of Dutch immigrants whose love of their adopted country inspired all three sons to wear the uniform of the U.S. Army. Gazing at the Apaches, he expressed a sense of awe as well as anxiety at what the U.S. military was about to undertake.

"If you can't get a rise out of seeing those Apaches launch out into the night, then something is wrong with you," Wagenaar said, his voice rising to be heard above the backwash of the helicopter rotors. "I worry about those pilots, though. We're sending them against some really tough targets tonight."

A Strange Land

Within hours, Wagenaar's fears proved prophetic. One Apache did not return from the mission. Later in the day, its crew appeared as prisoners of war on Iraqi television. V Corps immediately called in an artillery strike that destroyed the downed Apache. Of the more than 30 aircraft that had taken off the night before, virtually all of the Apaches returned pocked and scarred by enemy fire.

In reviewing the gun-camera video, U.S. commanders noticed a queer thing. As the Apaches approached the outskirts of the urban area, all of the lights in the city appeared to flicker out for a moment, and then to come on again along with a curtain of anti-aircraft fire. It was as if the dimmed lights were a signal to Republican Guard gunners lying in wait.

"You may recall that we had contingency plans for a possible capitulation of Republican Guard forces," V Corps operations chief Col. Steve Hicks told his assembled commanders. "Well, I have a news flash for you. They aren't quitting."

In recent days, 3rd Infantry commanders have witnessed another disturbing phenomenon of this war. Family members of the hundreds of Fedayeen Saddam irregulars killed in recent battles approached U.S. security lines to collect their dead from the battlefield. According to U.S. soldiers who escorted the relatives, many of the Iraqis stood over the bodies of their loved ones and cursed them to Allah for dying in the name of Saddam Hussein. But they cursed the Americans, too.

Even as lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division cross the Euphrates River and seize key bridges in preparation for the final assault, positioning V Corps for what its planners have always envisioned as perhaps the key battle in this war, a freakish storm has blown across this strange land. On March 25, the rays of a late-day sun were trapped in a massive dust cloud, turning the entire landscape an unworldly shade of burnt red. No one can recall ever seeing something so eerie. Under the circumstances, the storm seems full of portent, although its meaning is any soldier's guess. Very soon now, the storm will lift, and the battle with the Medina Division will begin.

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British fury at 'cowboy' US pilot's deadly error
The Sydney Morning Herald March 31, 2003
British soldiers injured when an American "tankbuster" aircraft attacked their convoy, killing one of their comrades, hit out angrily at the "cowboy" pilot today.

Troops wounded in Friday's attack accused the A-10 Thunderbolt pilot of "incompetence and negligence" while others privately called for a manslaughter prosecution.

The comments came as America's most senior military official vowed to make it his quest to stop future "friendly fire" tragedies.

General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apologised for the deadly error by the A-10 in southern Iraq.

He told BBC1's Breakfast With Frost: "It's the absolute saddest tragedy that any of us can experience.

"I don't think we have to live with situations like that, and one of my jobs has to be to ensure that we get the resources and the technical means to ensure that in the future this never, never happens again."

But the crews of the two British forward reconnaissance Scimitars attacked by the A-10 could not contain their anger.

Lance Corporal of Horse Steven Gerrard, speaking from his bed on the RFA Argus in the Gulf, said: "I can command my vehicle. I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me."

LCoH Gerrard, the commander of the leading vehicle, described to Patrick Barkham of The Times how the deadly A-10 attack began. The pilot made two swoops.

"I will never forget that noise as long as I live. It is a noise I never want to hear again," he said.

"There was no gap between the bullets. I heard it and I froze. The next thing I knew the turret was erupting with white light everywhere, heat and smoke."

He added: "I'll never forget that A-10. He was about 50 metres off the ground. He circled, because he can turn on a 10-pence.

"He came back around. He was no more than 1,000 metres away when he started his attack run. He was about 500 metres away when he started firing."

There was a Union Jack on the back of one of the engineers' vehicles.

"It's about 18 inches wide by about 12 inches. For him to fire his weapons, I believe he had to look through his magnified optics. How he could not see that Union Jack I don't know."

Packed with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, as well as grenades, rifle rounds and flammable diesel fuel tanks, the front two Scimitars exploded into flames.

One of their comrades, Lance Corporal of Horse, Matty Hull, 25, was killed.

LCoH Gerrard also criticised the A-10 for shooting when there were civilians close by.

He said: "There was a boy of about 12 years old. He was no more than 20 metres away when the Yank opened up.

"He had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy. I'm curious about what's going to happen to the pilot.

"He's killed one of my friends and he's killed him on the second run."

Trooper Chris Finney, 18, added: "All the wagons have markings to say they are Coalition. I don't know why he shot a second time, he was that close.

"To be honest, I think they are just ignorant. I don't know if they haven't been trained or are just trigger happy."

Another of the injured, Lieutenant Alex MacEwen, 25, added: "A mistake has happened but too many things suggest it was down to pure incompetence and negligence."

Trooper Joe Woodgate, 19, the driver of the Scimitar in which gunner LCoH Hull was killed, walked away with holes in his bullet-proof vest and torn clothes.

He told The Guardian: "I don't suppose they have learned much from the first war. I can tell what an American tank looks like from every direction.

"How come somebody who is a top-notch Thunderbolt pilot can't tell what a British tank looks like?"

The Guardian reporter said some soldiers were also calling for the pilot to be prosecuted for manslaughter.

"I had a lot of time for Matty," said Trooper Woodgate.

"I respected him a lot and thought he was an awesome bloke. He was one of the nicest people I have ever met."

So far five British servicemen have been killed by friendly fire and four in combat with Iraqi forces.

On March 23 a Tornado aircraft was shot down by a US Patriot missile battery near the Kuwaiti border.

Another two British soldiers were killed when their Challenger 2 Main Battle tank was engaged by another British tank west of Basra.

PA

#

Edited by author 03-31-2003 02:16 AM
Mass opposition grows in Europe
The Sydney Morning Herald March 31, 2003
Spain's Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, the third man on the international stage beside the US President, George Bush, and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in the run-up to war, is staring at political disaster.

The most recently published poll on attitudes to war, by the state's own official pollsters, showed 91 per cent opposed.

Recent polls of voting intention show that, over two months, his People's Party has gone from running neck-and-neck with the anti-war Socialists to trailing them by six points. A clear majority of people now expect the Socialists to win next year's election.

The Government said that it was thinking "not of future elections but of future generations".

But Mr Aznar's one-time political mentor, Felix Pastor, a former party president who sits on its ruling committee, broke ranks to accuse him of destroying the years of work to creating a moderate, centre-right party.

"The idea of a moderate, humanitarian, Christian People's Party has been blown away," he told El Mundo newspaper. "The Spanish people have the right to expect their government to keep them away from all wars ... Bush's policies are so detestable that we should keep well away."

His words followed a trickle of resignations that include a former minister and several lower-ranking party members.

In Italy, the pro-US government faces political repercussions after 1000 US paratroopers landed in Iraq on Wednesday having set off from a US base at Vicenza. The Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had promised that Italy would not be used as a launching pad for attacks on Iraq.

The opposition has accused Mr Berlusconi of taking an "ambiguous" position; on the one hand assuring the US and Britain of his support, and on the other insisting - amid widespread public opposition to the war - international institutions be respected.

Opinion polls in France show that approval for President Jacques Chirac's anti-war policy has reached 90 per cent, the highest recorded rating for any government program since surveys started in 1938.

The rising support, which has united rival political parties and strengthened links between Christians and Muslims, follows Mr Chirac's public commitment to persuading Britain and the US to accept United Nations administration for postwar Iraq.

The main outspoken voices against France's refusal to join the coalition have come from the Jewish community.

The philosopher Andre Glucksmann and the popular actor Roger Hanin have led opposition to the Government at a time when the national human rights commission, CNCDH, reported "an explosion of anti-Semitic acts" linked to Middle East conflicts.

The report said violent anti-Semitism aimed at France's 600,000 Jews rose 60 per cent last year and the trend continued.

There has been a swing in support for Mr Chirac from the country's 5 million Muslims.

And Germany's centre-left Government signalled an initiative - outlined this week by the overseas development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul - to ensure that the coalition agreed to bear the cost of rebuilding Iraq.

"It cannot be the case that the Americans and the British bomb and 'old Europe' pays," she said, alluding to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's scathing reference to some anti-war nations.

In Russia, the Government is counting the cost of its decision to join France and Germany in opposing a US-backed resolution at the Security Council that would have given a UN stamp of approval for an attack on Iraq.

US officials suggest the chill is temporary and Mr Bush and Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, want to preserve and even enhance the partnership they established 18 months ago.

"The watchword is damage limitation," said a senior US diplomat. "We hope we can contain this disagreement."

But others worry that the sour turn will have a more lasting impact, especially if the rift over Iraq is followed by clashes over how to deal with Iran and North Korea.

"The partnership has not fallen apart yet," said Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute for USA and Canada Studies, a research organisation in Moscow. "But it is very fragile and may fall apart if the situation develops in a negative way."

The deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Centre, Dmitri Trenin, said that much of what Mr Putin had accomplished with his pro-Washington foreign policy had been sacrificed over the Iraq controversy.

He said he saw a possible "cooling of relations ... which deprives Russia of serious help in the matter of domestic modernisation and deprives the US of a serious potential partner" in a part of world where it needs support.

AAP and agencies

#

Anti-war protests extend from Seoul to Santiago
Banners in Germany read 'Stop America's Terror'; Yemeni women brand allied forces 'axis of evil'
By Geir Moulson, Associated Press Oakland Tribune March 30, 2003
BERLIN -- Anti-war demonstrators turned out in the thousands Saturday from South Korea to Chile, spattering streets with paint, jeering outside U.S. embassies and in one case forming a 31-mile human chain.

More than 100,000 people protested in strongly anti-war Germany, half of them at a rally in Berlin, where banners read "Stop America's Terror." About 30,000 people held hands along the 31 miles between the northwestern cities of Muenster and Osnabrueck -- a route used by negotiators who brought the Thirty Years War to an end in 1648.

Hundreds of women, some carrying placards declaring "the United States and Britain are the axis of evil," protested in San'a, Yemen. Elsewhere in the Arab world, 10,000 turned out at a rally organized by Egypt's ruling party in Port Said, and in Amman, Jordan, more than3,000 people demanded that the kingdom expel U.S. troops.

In Stuttgart, Germany, about 6,000 protesters encircled the U.S. military's European Command, releasing blue balloons adorned with white doves as they joined hands to form a chain.

Farther north, police detained 100 demonstrators at a sit-in outside Rhine-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, a key transit point for U.S. military traffic to the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.

Protesters in Rome hung black mourning banners from the city's bridges. At Vicenza, in northeastern Italy, demonstrators threw red paint and flares at the walls of a U.S. military base where hundreds of paratroopers now in northern Iraq had been based.

In Athens, Greece, 15,000 people chanting "We'll stop the war" marched to the U.S. Embassy. Protesters splashed red paint on the road outside the building and on the windows of a McDonald's restaurant.

Thousands in Canada and the United States rallied in support of the war.

About 4,000 Canadians angered by Prime Minister Jean Chretien's decision not to support a war without United Nations approval marched in front of the Parliament building in Ottawa, waving flags of the U.S. and allies Britain and Australia.

In the United States, up to 12,000 flag-waving war supporters packed the steps of the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. A rally in Cape Cod, Mass., supporting U.S. troops drew about 2,000, and in Miami, thousands of Cuban exiles and others marched to support the military and to oppose opening relations with communist Cuba.

In New York City, several hundred staged a Times Square anti-war rally while throwing in a wide array of other causes -- from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to abortion rights.

Barbed-wire roadblocks and riot police kept thousands of Bangladeshi protesters away from the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka. The demonstrators burned a U.S. flag and an effigy of President Bush.

Police in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, used tear gas to break up a protest outside the Australian Embassy, whose country has about 2,000 soldiers in the coalition.

Students in South Korea's capital, Seoul, scuffled with riot police as thousands marched down half of an eight-lane boulevard chanting "Stop the bombing! Stop the killing!"

The mood was more subdued in Britain, where public sentiment had been strongly against the government's participation in the U.S.-led coalition before the outbreak of fighting but appears to be swinging. A MORI poll released Friday put Prime Minister Tony Blair's popularity rating at its highest level in nine months.

Turnout out at a series of British rallies was a tiny fraction of protests before the war. Still, activists vowed to keep marching to demand Blair pull British troops out of Iraq.

"We didn't stop the war starting, but we can still stop its progress. I think this is going to become the next Vietnam," said Rebecca Mordan, 26, an actress who took part in a rally of about 100 people in London.

Poland, which committed up to 200 soldiers to the war, saw its largest demonstration yet. Two thousand mostly young people marched to the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, banging drums and chanting "No blood for oil." They called President Aleksander Kwasniewski and Prime Minister Leszek Miller "Bush's two dogs."

In Hungary, another nation whose government has supported the war, about 2,000 people whistled and jeered as they marched past the U.S. and British embassies in Budapest on their way to parliament.

A crowd estimated at 6,000 people demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

More than 10,000 people marched in Paris, watched by 5,000 police. The demonstration turned violent when about 20 youths attacked a couple angry about protesters carrying posters of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Both were treated for bruises by rescue workers.

Around 8,000 people marched in Dublin to criticize the Irish government's decision to let U.S. forces bound for Iraq use the country's Shannon Airport for refueling and stopovers.

In Santiago, Chile, more than 3,000 people staged a peaceful march, and in Caracas, Venezuela, about 100 people called for an end to the war.

"The war is illegal," said Jose Luis Lucena, 24, a student in Caracas. "Those wretched gringos decided to leapfrog the U.N.'s authority. The world told them no and they didn't listen. I hope they pay dearly."

#

Robert Fisk: Raw, devastating realities that expose the truth about Basra

The Independent 28 March 2003
Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway, a small Iraqi girl - victim of an Anglo American air strike - is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach, a terribly wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress.

An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq's second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape - filmed over the past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad - is raw, painful, devastating.

It is also proof that Basra - reportedly "captured'' and "secured'' by British troops last week - is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein's forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck.

A remarkable part of the tape shows fireballs blooming over western Basra and the explosion of incoming - and presumably British - shells. The short sequence of the dead British soldiers - over which Tony Blair voiced such horror yesterday - is little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past 12 years, pictures which never drew any condemnation from the Prime Minister.

The two Britons, still in uniform, are lying on a roadway, arms and legs apart, one of them apparently hit in the head, the other shot in the chest and abdomen.

Another sequence from the same tape shows crowds of Basra civilians and armed men in civilian clothes, kicking the soldiers' British Army Jeep and dancing on top of the vehicle. Other men can be seen kicking the overturned Ministry of Defence trailer, which the Jeep was towing when it was presumably ambushed.

Also to be observed on the unedited tape - which was driven up to Baghdad on the open road from Basra - is a British pilotless drone photo-reconnaissance aircraft, its red and blue roundels visible on one wing, shot down and lying overturned on a roadway. Marked "ARMY'' in capital letters, it carries the code sign ZJ300 on its tail and is attached to a large cylindrical pod which probably contains the plane's camera.

Far more terrible than the pictures of dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra's largest hospital that shows victims of the Anglo-American bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain.

A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A little girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl's guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a trail of blood leads from the impact of an incoming - presumably British - shell. Next to the crater is a pair of plastic slippers.

The al-Jazeera tapes, most of which have never been seen, are the first vivid proof that Basra remains totally outside British control. Not only is one of the city's main roads to Baghdad still open - this is how the three main tapes reached the Iraqi capital - but General Khaled Hatem is interviewed in a Basra street, surrounded by hundreds of his uniformed and armed troops, and telling al-Jazeera's reporter that his men will "never'' surrender to Iraq's enemies. Armed Baath Party militiamen can also be seen in the streets, where traffic cops are directing lorries and buses near the city's Sheraton Hotel.

Mohamed al-Abdullah, al-Jazeera's correspondent in Basra, must be the bravest journalist in Iraq right now. In the sequence of three tapes, he can be seen conducting interviews with families under fire and calmly reporting the incoming British artillery bombardment. One tape shows that the Sheraton Hotel on the banks of Shatt al-Arab river has sustained shell damage.

On the edge of the river - beside one of the huge statues of Iraq's 1980-88 war martyrs, each pointing an accusing finger across the waterway towards Iran - Basra residents can be seen filling jerry cans from the sewage-polluted river.

Five days ago the Iraqi government said 30 civilians had been killed in Basra and another 63 wounded. Yesterday, it claimed that more than 4,000 civilians had been wounded in Iraq since the war began and more than 350 killed.

But Mr Abdullah's tape shows at least seven more bodies brought to the Basra hospital mortuary over the past 36 hours. One, his head still pouring blood on to the mortuary floor, was identified as an Arab correspondent for a Western news agency.

Other harrowing scenes show the partially decapitated body of a little girl, her red scarf still wound round her neck. Another small girl was lying on a stretcher with her brain and left ear missing. Another dead child had its feet blown away. There was no indication whether American or British ordnance had killed these children. The tapes give no indication of Iraqi military casualties.

But at a time when the Iraqi authorities will not allow Western reporters to visit Basra, this is the nearest to independent evidence we have of continued resistance in the city and the failure of the British to capture it. For days the Iraqi have been denying optimistic reports from "embedded'' reporters - especially on the BBC - who gave the impression that Basra was "secured'' or otherwise in effect under British control. This the tape conclusively proves to be untrue.

There is also a sequence showing two men, both black, who are claimed by Iraqi troops to be US prisoners of war. No questions are asked of the men, who are dressed in identical black shirts and jackets. Both appear nervous and gaze at the camera crew and Iraqi troops crowded behind them.

Of course, it is still possible that some small-scale opposition to the Iraqi regime broke out in the city over the past few days, as British officers have claimed. But, seeing the tapes, it is hard to imagine that it amounted, if it existed at all, to anything more than a brief gun battle.

The unedited reports therefore provide damaging proof that Anglo-American spokesmen have not been telling the truth about the battle for Basra. And in the end this is far more devastating to the invading armies than the sight of two dead British soldiers or - since Iraqi lives are as sacred as British lives - than the pictures of dead Iraqi children.

#

Toymakers Study Troops, and Vice Versa
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON in The New York Times March 30, 2003
TWO days after the war with Iraq began, Jerry Whitaker, who works at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass., a military research organization, got an e-mail message from Hasbro, the nation's second-largest toy manufacturer.

Hasbro, which makes G.I. Joe and his accessorized worlds of war, including a "desert arena" collection introduced after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, wanted the latest information on chemical protection suits.

Mr. Whitaker wasn't particularly surprised. The Army and Hasbro have worked together for years.

The $20.3 billion toy industry is closely watching the Iraq war with an eye toward new product introductions for Christmas. And seated next to it at the television set, flipping through the same news weeklies and military enthusiast magazines, is the $10.3 billion video game industry.

The two industries know, from experience with Desert Storm, the raid of Mogadishu in Somalia and the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, that new battle tools will be showcased by the armed services, and they could be new battle toys by December.

The relationship is not a handoff, in fact, but a trade.

"The M-16 rifle is based on something Mattel did," said Glenn Flood, a spokesman for the Pentagon, which is looking to toys and electronic games for parts, prototypes and ideas that can be developed effectively and inexpensively as battlefield tools. Inspiration has come from model airplanes (reconnaissance drones), "supersoaker" water guns (quick-loading assault weapons), cheap cellular phones for teenagers (video-capable walkie-talkies) and gaming control panels (for unmanned robotic vehicles).

Because the newest generation of soldiers grew up playing with electronic toys and games, the symbiosis between them is nearly genetic. Today's troops received their basic training as children.

Durability and miniaturization are a toy's basic design briefs. It makes them, in an enhanced military version, eminently suitable for deployment in the field, where stresses and weight are key concerns in troop movement.

Though full development of a new toy takes months, toymakers and retailers, for their part, have been quick off the mark. Hasbro issued a desert Tactical Advisor figure, modeled after the Army's desert Delta Forces, in January. At Toys "R" Us at Times Square in New York, G.I. Joe's patrol jeeps and strike vehicles have taken positions front and center.

Small Blue Planet, a large independent toy retailer, introduced a series of "Special Forces: Showdown With Iraq" figures, assembled from parts of existing figures to duplicate as accurately as possible what was observed in the news media during the troop buildup in Kuwait. Two of the four models sold out immediately.

"We started work when the `Showdown' buzzword hit the airwaves," said Anthony Allen, Small Blue Planet's president. "There's fierce competition among manufacturers to get the new things out first."

Christian Borman, a president of Plan-B Toys - which makes military action figures based on the search for Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan, as well as a Delta Force sniper and a Marine Force Recon newly outfitted last month from television coverage in Kuwait - said, "If you know what you're looking for, you can see it on the screen."

At the American International Toy Fair in February, Mr. Borman had a piece of sales advice from a national buyer for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which operates stores on military bases and online.

"He told us we should wait until the war starts, and whatever logos we saw on CNN, to put that on our toys," Mr. Borman said. "He didn't want to consider them until they were specific to the war."

What the toy manufacturers can't see, they ask for. They have excellent contacts in the military and with its contractors, working with the armed services directly at research and development centers like Mr. Whitaker's in Natick or the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey, both set up by the military itself.

Though the current war has divided public opinion - consumer protests prompted Walgreens and Kmart to pull Easter baskets with military action figures off the shelves this month - the toy industry cannot afford to be ambivalent.

The military action figure has four basic "theaters of operation," Mr. Borman explained - desert, arctic, urban and jungle.

"If we leave out this war, that's 25 percent of our possibilities," he said. Mr. Borman's company, like several others including Hasbro, has hedged its bets by introducing "heroic" figures like firefighters that are not specifically military in aspect.

In addition to a Desert N.B.C. (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) Trooper, "Josh Simon," which Dragon Models, a leading military action figure manufacturer, rushed to market late last month, it sells an Army National Guard "Homeland Security Amy." Sales of heroic and military figures soared last year. G.I. Joe's business was up 46 percent from 2001.

Realistic detail is an important part of the excitement of a toy like an action figure, said Dr. Darlene M. Hammell, a physician and clinical professor in family medicine at the University of British Columbia, who studies children's play.

"They'd be thrilled if they had something like on the news," she explained. "The more realistic it looks, and the harder it is for a child to distinguish it from the fantasy of play — the greater the problem."
 
As younger children have embraced electronic toys, a significant part of the market for military figures and games is now adult collectors, many of them current or former armed-service personnel, who provide the toy industry with valuable access to the military.

"They help us, procuring uniforms or putting us in touch with the Defense Department," said Laurie Abel, a spokeswoman for Blue Box Toys. "We want to be up to the minute on this. We've actually gotten specs from defense contractors."

Because of expanding development costs and tighter budgets, military contractors are increasingly interested in commercial applications for products, including toys. Zodiac of North America, for example, which manufactures inflatable rafts used by the Navy Seals, licensed its name, logo and the design for the Zodiac F-470, a Special Forces boat, to Hasbro.

" `Transfer' is a key phrase in the defense industry," said Leona C. Bull, a senior writer at the Journal of Aerospace and Defense Industry News, a trade publication. "With budgets flat-lining, companies that used to rely on defense now have to reach outside the box."

The military itself is also reaching out to private industry.

The Institute for Creative Technologies, created by the Army in 1999, is a cooperation between the entertainment, video game and computer science industries and the Army to develop "immersive" training simulations. Immersion, or the degree of reality a player experiences, is a key sales attribute in the video game market, and vital in a military simulation. The Army now has its own game, America's Army, which can be downloaded without charge from its recruiting Web site, www .americasarmy.com, in a series of playing levels.

In addition to developing new technologies, an Army spokesman, Maj. Amy Hannah, said that "the gaming and entertainment industries have assisted in battle scenarios and story lines that have helped the Army understand what it might be facing in battle arenas or with terrorism." In other words, game designers' demonic "blue sky" thinking on what could happen in a war, especially urban combat, outpaces the military's experience with new enemies.

At the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, a 15-inch remote-controlled truck, the Dragon Runner, now close to deployment, is guided by a six-button keypad modeled after Sony's PlayStation 2 video game control, explained Maj. Greg Heines, because military designers felt confident that soldiers would be familiar with it, and by default, partially trained to use it.

Its flying partner, the Dragon Eye, a five-pound unmanned remote-controlled reconnaissance air vehicle — which was introduced in Afghanistan and is in the field with the First Marine Division in Iraq — can be launched with a bungee cord or a running throw, much like the model airplanes that inspired it. If eventually a toy is based on it, the Dragon Eye will have come full circle.

Mr. Whitaker at the U.S. Soldier Systems Center in Natick said that in several cases, the center has provided toy manufacturers with images of their future efforts. The Objective Force Warrior, the next generation of uniform and equipment for soldiers, with a helmet that integrates scopes and communication devices, has been shown to Hasbro. The Army might not have it until 2010.

"It's kind of cool to see this stuff being fielded by G.I. Joe," Mr. Whitaker said.

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Iran denies US charges of interference in Iraq
The Sydney Morning Herald March30, 2003
Tehran: Iran today strongly denied charges by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that it was interfering with the US-led war effort in neighbouring Iraq.

"We have stressed our policy of active neutrality time and again since before the war began," government spokesman Abdullah Ramezanzadeh told AFP.

Yesterday Rumsfeld accused Tehran of allowing hundreds of Iran-based fighters of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim opposition to cross the border in defiance of US calls for them to stay out of the conflict.

"To the extent that they interfere with (US commander) General (Tommy) Franks's activity, they would have to be considered combatants," he said.

"We will hold the Iranian government responsible for their actions and will view that activity inside Iraq as unhelpful."

"The Badr Corps is trained, equipped and directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and we will hold the Iranian government responsible for their actions and will view Badr Corps activity inside Iraq as unhelpful," said Rumsfeld.

The Badr Brigade is the armed wing of Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SAIRI), Iraq's Iranian-backed Shi'ite Muslim opposition.

But Ramezanzadeh insisted today that "the Islamic Revolutionary Guards have no military connection with the Badr Brigade and the Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution of Iraq".

Foreign diplomats in Tehran say the brigade numbers between 10,000 and 15,000.

A leading member of SAIRI, Mohsen Hakim, also denied today that the military arm of his party had any connections with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

"The Badr Brigade is 100 per cent Iraqi," he said.

Iran may profess neutrality in the Iraq conflict, but its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has denounced what he calls the new US "Hitlerism".

Iranian leaders are worried by the precedent the US-led campaign on Iraq might set and have repeatedly called on the United Nations to resolve the crisis.

Iran is on President George W Bush's "axis of evil" list with Iraq and North Korea.

Both Syria and Iran are on a US list of alleged terrorist-sponsoring nations.

AFP

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