'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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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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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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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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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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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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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
#

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

#

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?


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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.

#

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.

#

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.

#

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.

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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
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB104940909953735600,00.html

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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

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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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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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