The world needs a miracle. The Iraqi people need a miracle. There is a new plan to bring about this miracle and we need everyone’s help! We need to ask some very high profile people to go to Baghdad and stay there until the threat of war is withdrawn (meaning the troops leave the Persian Gulf).

Please e-mail, fax, or call Pope John Paul II (even if you’re not Catholic!) and ask him to go to Baghdad on behalf of the innocent Iraqi people who will suffer from a US military attack. Below is a letter from Dr. Helen Caldicott explaining this new anti-war campaign and some sample letters.

Thank you,

Sue Gray
webmaster@rfpeace.org.

An appeal from Dr. Helen Caldicott

I write this appeal for your help as a paediatri
cian, a mother and a grandmother — and I am writing about the lives of tens of thousands of children. Although the current administration has demonstrated it has no reservations about slaughtering up to 500,000 innocents in Iraq, there is one person whose life they absolutely will not risk.

That person is Pope John Paul II. While the Pope has already formally denounced the proposed war, calling it a defeat for humanity, as well as sent his top spokesperson to meet with Saddam Hussein, he now must take a historically unprecedented action of his own and travel to Baghdad.

The Pope’s physical presence in Iraq will act as the ultimate human shield, during which time leaders of the world’s nations can commit themselves to identifying and implementing a peaceful solution to this war that the world’s majority clearly does not support.

To persuade the Holy Father to take this unusual but potent action, he must hear from you and millions of others around the world who have already been inspired to stand up and speak out for peace. A mountain of e-mail, faxes and phone calls are our devices to inspire him. Please understand that your taking just a few minutes right now to communicate with him may ultimately spare the lives of thousands of innocent people who at this moment live in complete terror from the threat of an imminent U.S.-lead military strike on their homeland. So here is what you can do to be a part of this powerful final action to stop the march to war in Iraq.

At the close of the letter, type in your name, city and state—no need to include your address.

Suggested draft of letter:

Your Holiness,

It is out of a sense of great urgency that we are writing this letter. At this very moment the United States of America is on the verge of launching what may be the most cataclysmic war in history, using weapons of mass destruction upon the Iraqi people. Conservative estimates are that such a war will result in the death of 500,000 Iraqis; fifty per cent of their population are less than 15 years of age. It seems clear that, at this time, you are the only person on Earth who can stop this war.

Indeed, your physical presence in Baghdad, will prevent the impending slaughter of hundreds of thousands of human beings, and force the international community to find and implement a peaceful way to prevent this unprecedented, pre–emptive aggression.

We implore your Holiness to travel to Baghdad and to remain there until a peaceful solution to this crisis has been reached. The lives of the people of Iraq rest in your hands as does the fate of the world.

Signed.

(Email of Pope John Paul II:
accreditamenti@pressva.va)

Note: Please pass this original e-mail on to as many people you can so as to assure a critical mass is reached in this action.

Note that as you and others begin sending your letters, faxes and e-mails, there will be a simultaneous effort to alert the media of this action, so as to be sure it is publicly known throughout the world.

Thank you for participating in this formal request of the Pope. We just may stop this war in Iraq – and save these childrens’ lives.

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 7

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Bush vs. World

George W Bush may believe he has the mandate of heaven for what, as I write, is still the looming
war in Iraq, but he’s not doing very well on earth. Indeed, he’s all but unified the planet in opposition to the notion of a US-led pre-emptive war.

Governments that support the war do so at their own risk. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair is in danger of losing the support of his own party. In Spain, the Popular Party of Prime Minister José María Aznar has fallen behind the opposition Socialists for the first time in seven years. In Eastern Europe — a particularly pro-American part of the world where most governments back the US position on Iraq — huge majorities nonetheless reject the war: 75 per cent of Poles, 82 per cent of Hungarians, 76 per cent of Czechs.

These numbers directly reflect the failure of the administration to convince the world that Iraq poses the kind of imminent threat that justifies a preventive war. But plainly they also reflect a more fundamental rift than that, as the answers to an international Gallup Poll taken in January make clear. When respondents were asked whether American foreign policy had a positive or negative effect on their countries, what was stunning was the uniformity of their answers: In Spain, the margin was 57 per cent negative to 9 per cent positive; in Russia, the margin was 55 perc ent to 11 per cent; in Argentina, 58 per cent to 13 per cent; in Pakistan, 46 per cent to 8 per cent.

This global rejection is breathtaking, but not all that surprising. Under Bush, America has become a hegemon with a chip on its shoulder, at once belligerent and xenophobic. The United States has been seceding from a new world order of interdependence that, until recently, it had helped construct. At the very moment when the world’s peoples have recognised the need to build global institutions to deal with a global economy and environment, with globalised crime and weapons proliferation and stateless terrorism, the United States has arrogated to itself the right to ignore and undermine those parts of the emerging global architecture that fail to please its eye.

In Bush’s Washington, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is good so long as US investors don’t have profits diminished by onerous labour and environmental standards; the Kyoto Protocol on global warming posed such a threat and was rejected; the International Criminal Court was fine for deterring other nations’ war crimes but not our own; the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty threatened a new Pentagon programme and had to be scrapped. The United Nations — well, we’ll just have to see about that.

And then there’s the European Union, which is well on its way to becoming a supranational entity — more than a federation but not quite a state — that would be something new in the world. At first glance this convergence of America’s long-time allies might not seem threatening to the United States. But of all the entities aborning at the dawn of the 21st century, a unified Europe poses the greatest threat to the unholy alliance of neo-conservatives and xenophobes who dominate the Bush administration. For them the 21st century has already been stamped as American property. The one obstacle in their path is Europe — an emerging power bloc committed to a different kind of capitalism than ours and the primary champion of the very global institutions that impede the construction of an American-dominated order.

On the whole this is an assessment with which Europe — masses and elites alike — concurs. As Michael Emerson of the Centre for European Policy Studies has written, "Europe understands that the future governance of this world has to be some system of cosmopolitan democracy." And, he might have added, Europeans understand that such a system will never win the blessing of the Bush White House. (Indeed, it’s hard to say which of those notions troubles the administration more — a democratic world order or a cosmopolitan one.)

And so, at the outset of the 21st century, the battle between Europe and America for the power to shape the century, and on behalf of different models of social organisation, is already joined. And may I gently suggest that the best possible outcome for the American democratic republic — for the America of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt — would be an American (or more precisely, Bushian) defeat. But not an unconditional one.

Europe vs. America

I doubt that many, if any, European leaders at the time the Berlin Wall fell envisioned this clash. Though many took umbrage when Francis Fukuyama proclaimed history’s end, the idea that Europe would be so fundamentally opposed to the United States within a scant 14 years would have taken them by surprise. The European left, after all, had long since acclimated itself to capitalism; the socialists, social democrats and British Labourites were all heirs of Edward Bernstein, the fin de siècle meliorative socialist for whom the very idea of a final conflict was anathema.

In his new book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, which Stephen Holmes reviews elsewhere in this issue (see "Why We Need Europe," page 47 —see Link given below), Robert Kagan adduces some of the reasons for the rift that has opened up within the erstwhile Atlantic alliance. Kagan depicts a Europe enmeshed in unification (and the worlds of diplomacy and social harmonisation that attend such a project) and an America that has chosen instead to be the lone sentinel guarding against external threats and disorder. He omits, however, any discussion of the diverging economic visions and realities that increasingly separate the two great continental democracies. He especially omits any thought that the European model might be the more compelling.

When the Western alliance formed at the conclusion of World War II, it was unified by more than a common commitment to democracy and opposition to Soviet communism. Until roughly the early 1980s and the advent of Ronald Reagan, both Europe and America shared a commitment to a mixed economy in which unions, government regulations, a growing public sector and Keynesian economics all mitigated laissez-faire capitalism’s tendencies toward inequality and cycles of boom-and-bust. The US economy was never nearly as mixed as the European one — its unions were less powerful, its public sector smaller, its health insurance spotty, its family policy non-existent — but from FDR through Richard Nixon, the public sphere would, in fits and starts, expand.

Then the two economies began to diverge. While the welfare state continued to grow in Europe, its already smaller American version grew smaller still. Under constant attack from business, US unions went into steep decline, and the balance of power within the Democratic Party shifted sharply toward business and, more particularly, finance. Decent-paying blue-collar jobs vanished by the millions in the states, and inequality grew steeply here while continuing to decline in Europe. American firms elevated shareholder value above all other indices of success (including long-term profitability), European firms put more funding into research and development and capital investment, and the productivity rates of northern European nations surpassed ours. For better and worse, the economic lives of Europeans remained stable while Americans found themselves in an increasingly dynamic and Darwinian economy.

European egalitarianism existed between nations as well as within them. In the course of building a unified Europe, the wealthier nations of northern Europe transferred resources to their poorer cousins in the south: If they were to be in an open market with Portugal and Greece, the pay scales and educational standards of such nations would have to rise. Likewise, the nations of northern Europe were the world’s most generous when it came to providing aid to developing nations on other continents.

For its part, the United States never evinced much interest in the upward harmonisation of other nations, and the policies of the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) tended only to worsen recessions in the less developed world. And in the National Security Strategy that the Bush administration unveiled last summer, the United States created a new foreign-aid programme intended to remake the world more to its liking. Alongside its traditional foreign-aid programme, the White House announced a grant programme in which money would flow to those nations that embraced the administration’s economics (free markets, low marginal tax rates, not much regulation).

If the United States is a force for global laissez-faire, however, it would be a gross overstatement to say that Europe is a force for global social democracy. Such figures as Willy Brandt and Olof Palme, who provided crucial assistance for the African National Congress and who quietly initiated the steps that led to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, are gone from the scene, and of today’s generation of Euro leaders, only a few — most notably German foreign minister Joschka Fischer — show much concern for the world beyond Europe. The United States may dominate the IMF but it’s hard to find a European finance ministry that has taken issue with the fund’s draconian remedies for financially troubled developing nations.

Kagan argues that Europe is too inwardly focussed to pay heed to crises in distant lands that may require a resolution involving armed force, and that advocating force abroad while renouncing it at home seems beyond Europe’s inclinations — or capacities. But Europe’s inwardness has also led it to champion workers’ rights at home while effectively dismissing them abroad. Perhaps because European workers have been so much better protected than their American counterparts from the shocks of the world market, it is — at the level of national leadership at least — American liberals more than Europeans who have stood up for labour and environmental standards in the developing world. European governments have never insisted that workers’ rights be made a priority of the WTO, and it was in the United States, not Europe, that opposition emerged to China’s unconditional entry to the WTO. The idea of a variable international minimum wage is even now being advanced not by a Scandinavian socialist but by a Missourian Democrat (Dick Gephardt).

The European challenge to the American version of globalism, then, is a sometime thing. If Europe does not provide much resistance to the rule of American laissez-faire in global economics, however, it does provide in itself a model for a more humane form of capitalism. And when other nations go comparison shopping between the European and American models, Europe tends to do pretty well. When the iron curtain crumbled, the newly post-communist nations of Eastern Europe adopted Europe’s electoral and health systems rather than America’s money-dominated ones. All well and good for those repulsed by a society organised around the principle of one dollar-one vote. But if workers outside Europe are to experience the global economy as something other than a race to the bottom, Europe must do more to apply its principles beyond its borders.

EU and Whose Army?

On matters of military force, Europe needs to realise that it actually has conflicting principles. In late January, I met in Brussels with some leading members of the European Parliament, who explained why the notion of pre-emptive war was particularly repugnant to them. (As if anyone representing a continent that had experienced the pre-emptive wars of 1914 and 1939 needed to explain that.) "All our experience leads us to say, ‘Never again’ to war and holocaust," one legislator said. But holocausts are seldom averted absent the use of force, and Europe’s inability to block the massacres of Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo reveal the shortcomings of its non-military preferences when faced with a challenge to its own moral imperatives.

The policy of saying "no" to America’s unilateral use of pre-emptive force may be morally satisfying and strategically sound. But it has failed to deter the United States or to weaken Saddam Hussein’s resistance to inspections, which has eroded only under threat of imminent war. The alternative to this war is inspection and containment, in the manner laid out by former Clinton State Department official Morton H. Halperin in these pages last year (see "Deter and Contain," tap, Nov. 4, 2002 — see Link given below): an aggressive inspection regime, in control of all the skies over Iraq and with a mandate to destroy from the air all buildings from which inspectors are denied entry by Hussein’s government.

But both these kinds of interventions (Bosnia and Iraq), as well as more conventional conflicts, would require of Europe some things it does not have: a rapid reaction force and a will to use it. In the late 1990s, Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac called for establishing such a force, but Europe’s attention has been directed inward, and no such force as yet exists. What’s more telling is that the United States, for all its claims that it would like more allies, is dead set against such a force. Indeed, as the Cato Institute’s Christopher Layne has noted, the United States is arguing that each European nation should develop some niche military capability rather than have Europe develop an autonomous force. By the same token, the United States encouraged the European Union to expand eastward in hopes that the new nations would bring perspectives widely variant from those of the western states. It has also voiced concerns that in the preliminary plans for a European Constitution, individual nations will not be able to veto a foreign policy agreed upon by a majority vote. The White House’s ability to pick off a Blair here, a Berlusconi there, would be totally undermined.

In short, the United States has been conducting a pre-emptive war against a unified Europe for some time now.

And yet the Bush and neocon model of an America First century is either undesirable or unsustainable — or both. Even if we accept the wholly implausible thesis that a US overthrow of Hussein and subsequent occupation and reconstruction of Iraq would democratise the Middle East, for instance, the willingness of the American people to support such a project would run counter to the vision of a privatised America that the conservatives commend here at home. The generation of Americans who supported the Marshall Plan had themselves benefited from an activist government; they were accustomed to a government that undertook major public works and that put millions of Americans on public payrolls. Today, state and local governments are slashing basic services while the Bush administration is throwing money at the rich. Why, under these conditions, conservatives expect Americans to pay for the reconstruction of Iraq is anyone’s guess. The kind of solidaristic values and confidence in the public sphere needed to support such an ambitious, enlightened project can be found today, ironically, only in Europe.

Americans must hope that, in this era of global integration, we are not at the brink of the American century. If anything, the Europeans should take some time out from perfecting Europe to project their values more forcefully on the wider world. We need Europe to save us from ourselves.

(Courtesy: The American Prospect; vol. 14 no. 4, April 1, 2003).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Clash of Civilisation
 

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March 13, 2003

How have we got to this point, where two western governments take us into an illegal and immoral war against a stricken nation with whom we have no quarrel and who offer us no threat: an act of aggression opposed by almost everybody and whose charade is transparent?

How can they attack, in our name, a country already crushed by more than 12 years of an embargo aimed mostly at the civilian population, of whom 42 per cent are children — a medieval siege that has taken the lives of at least half a million children and is described as genocidal by the former United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq?

How can those claiming to be "liberals" disguise their embarrassment, and shame, while justifying their support for George Bush’s proposed launch of 800 missiles in two days as a "liberation"? How can they ignore two United Nations studies which reveal that some 5,00,000 people will be at risk? Do they not hear their own echo in the words of the American general who said famously of a Vietnamese town he had just levelled: "We had to destroy it in order to save it?"

"Few of us," Arthur Miller once wrote, "can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

These days, Miller’s astuteness applies to a minority of warmongers and apologists. Since 11 September 2001, the consciousness of the majority has soared. The word "imperialism" has been rescued from agitprop and returned to common usage. America’s and Britain’s planned theft of the Iraqi oilfields, following historical precedent, is well understood. The false choices of the cold war are redundant, and people are once again stirring in their millions. More and more of them now glimpse American power, as Mark Twain wrote, "with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other."

What is heartening is the apparent demise of "anti-Americanism" as a respectable means of stifling recognition and analysis of American Imperialism. Intellectual loyalty oaths, similar to those rife during the Third Reich, when the abusive "anti-German" was enough to silence dissent, no longer work. In America itself, there are too many anti-Americans filling the streets now: those whom Martha Gellhorn called "that life-saving minority who judge their government in moral terms, who are the people with a wakeful conscience and can be counted upon"

Perhaps for the first time since the late 1940s, Americanism as an ideology is being identified in the same terms as any rapacious power structure; and we can thank Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice for that, even though their acts of international violence have yet to exceed those of the "liberal" Bill Clinton.

"My guess," wrote Norman Mailer recently, "is that, like it or not, or want it or not, we are going to go to war because that is the only solution Bush and his people can see. The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in our lives. And, before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way . . . Indeed, democracy is the special condition that we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascist atmosphere in America already."

In the military plutocracy that is the American state, with its un-elected president, venal Supreme Court, silent Congress, gutted Bill of Rights and compliant media, Mailer’s "pre-fascist atmosphere" makes common sense. The dissident American writer William Rivers Pitt pursues this further. "Critics of the Bush administration," he wrote, "like to bandy about the word ‘fascist’ when speaking of George. The image that word conjures is of Nazi storm troopers marching in unison towards Hitler’s Final Solution. This does not at all fit. It is better, in this matter, to view the Bush administration through the eyes of Benito Mussolini. Dubbed ‘the father of fascism’, Mussolini defined the word in a far more pertinent fashion. ‘Fascism,’ he said, ‘should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.’"

Bush himself offered an understanding of this on 26 February when he addressed the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. He paid tribute to "some of the finest minds of our nation [who] are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds. I want to thank them for their service."

The "20 such minds" are crypto-fascists who fit the definition of William Pitt Rivers. The institute is America’s biggest, most important and wealthiest "think-tank". A typical member is John Bolton, under-secretary for arms control, the Bush official most responsible for dismantling the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, arguably the most important arms control agreement of the late 20th century. The institute’s strongest ties are with extreme Zionism and the regime of Ariel Sharon. Last month, Bolton was in Tel Aviv to hear Sharon’s view on which country in the region should be next after Iraq. For the expansionists running Israel, the prize is not so much the conquest of Iraq but Iran. A significant proportion of the Israeli air force is already based in Turkey with Iran in its sights, waiting for an American attack.

Richard Perle is the institute’s star. Perle is chairman of the powerful Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon, the author of the insane policies of "total war" and "creative destruction". The latter is designed to subjugate finally the Middle East, beginning with the $90bn invasion of Iraq.

Perle helped to set up another crypto-fascist group, the Project for the New American Century. Other founders include vice-president Cheney, the defence secretary Rumsfeld and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The institute’s "mission report", Rebuilding America’s Defences: strategy, forces and resources for a new century, is an unabashed blueprint for world conquest. Before Bush came to power, it recommended an increase in arms spending by $48bn so that America "can fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars". This has come true. It said that nuclear war-fighting should be given the priority it deserved. This has come true. It said that Iraq should be a primary target. And so it is. And it dismissed the issue of Saddam Hussein’s "weapons of mass destruction" as a convenient excuse, which it is.

Written by Wolfowitz, this guide to world domination puts the onus on the Pentagon to establish a "new order" in the Middle East under unchallenged US authority. A "liberated" Iraq, the centrepiece of the new order, will be divided and ruled, probably by three American generals; and after a horrific onslaught, known as Shock and Awe.

Vladimir Slipchenko, one of the world’s leading military analysts, says the testing of new weapons is a "main purpose" of the attack on Iraq. "Nobody is saying anything about it," he said last month. "In May 2001, in his first presidential address, Bush spoke about the need for preparation for future wars. He emphasised that the armed forces needed to be completely high-tech, capable of conducting hostilities by the no-contact method. After a series of live experiments — in Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan — many corporations achieved huge profits. Now the bottom line is $50-60bn a year."

He says that, apart from new types of cluster bombs and cruise missiles, the Americans will use their untested pulse bomb, known also as a microwave bomb. Each discharges two megawatts of radiation which instantly puts out of action all communications, computers, radios, even hearing aids and heart pacemakers. "Imagine, your heart explodes!" he said.

In the future, this Pax Americana will be policed with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons used "pre-emptively", even in conflicts that do not directly engage US interests. In August, the Bush administration will convene a secret meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including "mini nukes", "bunker busters" and neutron bombs. Generals, government officials and nuclear scientists will also discuss the appropriate propaganda to convince the American public that the new weapons are necessary.

Such is Mailer’s pre-fascist state. If appeasement has any meaning today, it has little to do with a regional dictator and everything to do with the demonstrably dangerous men in Washington. It is vitally important that we understand their goals and the degree of their ruthlessness. One example: General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani dictator, was last year deliberately allowed by Washington to come within an ace of starting a nuclear war with India — and to continue supplying North Korea with nuclear technology — because he agreed to hand over Al Qaeda operatives. The other day, John Howard, the Australian prime minister and Washington mouthpiece, praised Musharraf, the man who almost blew up west Asia, for his "personal courage and outstanding leadership".

In 1946, justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, said: "The very essence of the Nuremberg charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend national obligations of obedience imposed by the State."

With an attack on Iraq almost a certainty, the millions who filled London and other capitals on the weekend of 15–16 February, and the millions who cheered them on, now have these transcendent duties. The Bush gang, and Tony Blair, cannot be allowed to hold the rest of us captive to their obsessions and war plans. Speculation on Blair’s political future is trivia; he and the robotic Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon must be stopped now, for the reasons long argued in these pages and on hundreds of platforms.

And, incidentally, no one should be distracted by the latest opportunistic antics of Clare Short, whose routine hints of "rebellion", followed by her predictable inaction, have helped to give Blair the time he wants to subvert the UN.

There is only one form of opposition now: it is civil disobedience leading to what the police call civil unrest. The latter is feared by undemocratic governments of all stripes.

The revolt has already begun. In January, Scottish train drivers refused to move munitions. In Italy, people have been blocking dozens of trains carrying American weapons and personnel, and dockers have refused to load arms shipments. US military bases have been blockaded in Germany, and thousands have demonstrated at Shannon which, despite Ireland’s neutrality, is being used by the US military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq.

"We have become a threat, but can we deliver?" asked Jessica Azulay and Brian Dominick of the American resistance movement. "Policy-makers are debating right now whether or not they have to heed our dissent. Now we must make it clear to them that there will be political and economic consequences if they decide to ignore us."

My own view is that if the protest movement sees itself as a world power, as an expression of true internationalism, then success need not be a dream. That depends on how far people are prepared to go. The young female employee of the Gloucestershire-based top-secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), who was charged this month with leaking information about America’s dirty tricks operation on members of the Security Council, shows us the courage required.

In the meantime, the new Mussolinis are on their balconies, with their virtuoso rants and impassioned insincerity. Reduced to wagging their fingers in a futile attempt to silence us, they see millions of us for the first time, knowing and fearing that we cannot be silenced. 
(http://www.zmag.org/)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 14

The post Disobey appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The consequences could be catastrophic in Iraq and around the world. The United States may reap a whirlwind of terrorist retaliation – and step up the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and company are committed to an "imperial ambition," as G. John Ikenberry wrote in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs – "a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor" and in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector and enforcer."

That ambition surely includes much expanded control over Persian Gulf resources and military bases to impose a preferred form of order in the region.

Even before the administration began beating the war drums against Iraq, there were plenty of warnings that US adventurism would lead to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as terror, for deterrence or revenge.

Right now, Washington is teaching the world a dangerous lesson: If you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible threat. Otherwise we will demolish you.

There is good reason to believe that the war with Iraq is intended, in part, to demonstrate what lies ahead when the empire decides to strike a blow — though "war" is hardly the proper term, given the gross mismatch of forces.

A flood of propaganda warns that if we do not stop Saddam Hussein today he will destroy us tomorrow.

Last October, when Congress granted the president the authority to go to war, it was "to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

But no country in Iraq’s neighbourhood seems overly concerned about Saddam, much as they may hate the murderous tyrant.

Perhaps that is because the neighbours know that Iraq’s people are at the edge of survival. Iraq has become one of the weakest states in the region. As a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences points out, Iraq’s economy and military expenditures are ‘a fraction of some of its neighbours’.

Indeed, in recent years, countries nearby have sought to reintegrate Iraq into the region, including Iran and Kuwait, both invaded by Iraq.

Saddam benefited from US support through the war with Iran and beyond, up to the day of the invasion of Kuwait. Those responsible are largely back at the helm in Washington today.

President Ronald Reagan and the previous Bush administration provided aid to Saddam, along with the means to develop weapons of mass destruction, back when he was far more dangerous than he is now, and had already committed his worst crimes, like murdering thousands of Kurds with poison gas.

An end to Saddam’s rule would lift a horrible burden from the people of Iraq. There is good reason to believe that he would suffer the fate of Nicolae Ceausescu and other vicious tyrants if Iraqi society were not devastated by harsh sanctions that force the population to rely on Saddam for survival while strengthening him and his clique.

Saddam remains a terrible threat to those within his reach. Today, his reach does not extend beyond his own domains, though it is likely that US aggression could inspire a new generation of terrorists bent on revenge, and might induce Iraq to carry out terrorist actions suspected to be already in place.

Right now Saddam has every reason to keep under tight control any chemical and biological weapons that Iraq may have. He wouldn’t provide such weapons to the Osama bin Ladens of the world, who represent a terrible threat to Saddam himself.

And administration hawks understand that, except as a last resort if attacked, Iraq is highly unlikely to use any weapons of mass destruction that it has — and risk instant incineration.

Under attack, however, Iraqi society would collapse, including the controls over the weapons of mass destruction. These could be "privatised," as international security specialist Daniel Benjamin warns, and offered to the huge "market for unconventional weapons, where they will have no trouble finding buyers." That really is "a nightmare scenario," he says.

As for the fate of the people of Iraq in war, no one can predict with any confidence: not the CIA, not Rumsfeld, not those who claim to be experts on Iraq, no one.

But international relief agencies are preparing for the worst.

Studies by respected medical organisations estimate that the death toll could rise to the hundreds of thousands. Confidential UN documents warn that a war could trigger a "humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale" — including the possibility that 30 per cent of Iraqi children could die from malnutrition.

Today the administration doesn’t seem to be heeding the international relief agency warnings about an attack’s horrendous aftermath.

The potential disasters are among the many reasons why decent human beings do not contemplate the threat or use of violence, whether in personal life or international affairs, unless reasons have been offered that have overwhelming force. And surely nothing remotely like that justification has come forward.

(Courtesy International Tribune; March 17, 2003)(Noam Chomsky is a political activist, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the bestseller "9-11." He wrote this article for the New York Times Syndicate).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 13

The post No to war appeared first on SabrangIndia.

of the pro-war propaganda machine
 

IN THE former USSR, people knew that the country’s state-owned newspaper Pravda would peddle Moscow’s line, no matter how outrageous the lies. George W. Bush can’t boast that the Republican Party owns the country’s newspapers, television stations or radio networks. But he can still count on a press that’s nearly as obedient as Pravda.

No matter how many lies George Bush tells about Iraq’s "threat" to the US, the corporate media won’t ask him the hard questions. Bush and his administration know that they can count on the "patriotism" of the press — which will report on the coming war like a local sports reporter rooting for the home team. And Bush — unlike the rulers of the former USSR — won’t even have to issue any orders or appoint any news censors. That’s because the press in the US censors itself.

In May 2002, CBS news anchor Dan Rather acknowledged, "What we are talking about here —whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not — is a form of self-censorship. It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole… felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying: ‘I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.’"

Of course, Rather said this to Britain’s BBC — and didn’t have the courage to say it at home, where he had been leading the patriotic charge in the media after the attacks of September 11. Predictably, almost no outlet of the US mainstream media reported on Rather’s comments.

No one in Washington had to tell newspapers to bury them – just like no one had to tell the press to ignore reports, published in Britain’s Observer newspaper, that the Bush administration spied on United Nations (UN) Security Council members during the debate on a new resolution to authorise war on Iraq.

And few media outlets have focused on Newsweek magazine’s revelation that Iraqi Gen. Hussein Kamel, a prominent defector, testified in 1995 that Iraq had already been significantly disarmed. Bush and other administration officials have regularly cited Kamel’s testimony as evidence that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.

The fact is that the media will support this war, despite the restrictions that the government will place on their ability to report freely — and despite the administration’s open manipulation of information.

The image presented of the new Gulf War will be totally sanitised. During the US bombardment of Afghanistan, Walter Isaacson, the chief executive of CNN, told his staff that it was "perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan." And during the 1991 Gulf War, the media quickly buried images of the horrific slaughter carried out against retreating soldiers and civilians on the "Highway of Death" at the end of the war.

The media lines up with the government on fundamental matters not because of any conspiracy or backroom deals, but because the media themselves are huge corporations that share the same economic and political interests with the tiny elite that runs the US government. In some cases, they’re the same people.

It’s now common practice for the Big Three networks to put former military officials, politicians and government bureaucrats on the payroll. "The media has simply become a branch of the war effort," the Palestinian author Edward Said wrote recently. "What has entirely disappeared from television is anything remotely resembling a consistently dissenting voice." As if to underline the point, in February, the cable news network MSNBC cancelled Phil Donahue’s show – and announced that it was hiring Republican hack Dick Armey as a commentator.

Current and former government voices dominate the "debate" in the media about war and other questions of foreign policy. "Unnamed government sources," press spokespeople, Pentagon officers, White House officials, and ideologues close to the administration make up most of the "experts" and "reliable sources" that we hear from.

The corporations that dominate the media are getting more and more concentrated. Ben Bagdikian, author of Media Monopoly, estimates that six inter-linked corporations dominate the US media today. NBC is owned by major military contractor General Electric. But even news media that aren’t directly tied to the military-industrial complex have a stake in the system.

That’s because the media are in the business of making profits from selling advertising. Print, television and radio media all make their money by selling audiences to advertisers – and they know that their bottom line will suffer if they pursue stories that might damage advertisers.

The economics of reporting also shapes the news that we see. For example, rather than spend large sums to send an investigative reporter to uncover human rights abuses against detainees being tortured at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, for next to nothing, the media can cover the latest White House press conference denying the crimes.

That means independent media are a crucial source of information that the mainstream media won’t report – or will bury in a sea of pro-war coverage. We need to support independent media efforts where we can and build our own newspapers, like Socialist Worker, that will tell the truth about this war. But we also need to directly challenge the corporate media outlets – to force their hand and shame them into covering the stories that we know they would rather not touch.

After months of downplaying the size of demonstrations against the war on Iraq, major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post were forced to give front-page coverage to the massive February 15 international demonstrations against the war. The main reason was that the participation of more than 10 million people around the world meant the demonstrations were simply too big for editors to bury. But activists also directly targeted National Public Radio, the Times and other elite media — and shamed them into acknowledging that they had ignored the story of earlier protests.

February 15 showed the power of protest to reach millions of people who share our anger about this war – and who will be more likely to join us on the streets at the next demonstration. We can also look to the example of the Vietnam War to see this power. The media backed the brutal war against the people of Vietnam from the moment that the US began to send in its "advisers." But the anti-war movement forced the reality of the war into public consciousness – and pressured the US establishment, including the media, to open up the issue to debate.

Reporters were able to file stories that exposed the brutality of the war and challenged the government’s lies – a process that led millions of people to turn against the Vietnam War, and eventually helped bring it to an end.
 

Wag the media lapdog

Nothing exposed the Washington press corps as lapdogs as much as its gutless behaviour at George Bush’s White House press conference two weeks ago. Bush got away with mentioning September 11 eight times during the press conference — even though, to date, no one has offered any evidence that there’s any connection between Iraq and the hijackings.

But the media have given Bush a free pass to use September 11 as a pretext for a war against Iraq. "As a bogus rallying cry, ‘Remember 9/11’ ranks with ‘Remember the Maine’ of 1898 for war with Spain or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964," Nation journalist William Greider recently wrote.

Greider points out that, according to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. And 55 per cent believe that Saddam directly supports Al Qaeda, according to an ABC News poll.

There’s no evidence for either belief. But here’s one question that you won’t hear the media asking: How have we contributed to spreading these myths, which we then report as evidence of people’s support for war?

As veteran journalist Tom Wicker wrote recently, "Bush administration spokesmen have made several cases for waging war against Iraq, and the US press has tended to present all those cases to the public as if they were gospel." We are seeing, Wicker concluded, "an American press that seems sometimes to be playing on the administration team rather than pursuing the necessary search for truth, wherever it may lead."
 

‘Just tell me where I should line up’

Dan Rather is sometimes pointed out as an example of liberal bias in the media. It’s hard to understand why, though, when you look at what Rather has had to say about the "war on terrorism."

"George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where."

"Whatever arguments one may or may not have had with George Bush the younger before September 11, he is our commander in chief, he’s the man now. And we need unity, we need steadiness. I’m not preaching about it. We all know this."

"I would willingly die for my country at a moment’s notice and on the command of my president."

The ‘liberal bias’ hoax

Of the many myths about the US media, the two most common are that we have a "free press" and that we have a "liberal" media. In its ads for the aggressively right-wing Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman, sums up these two myths in a single quote: "America guarantees a free press… Freedom relies on a fair press."

The implication of Ailes’ idiotic statement is that Fox is providing a right-wing balance against the liberal bias of the mainstream press. But is there a liberal bias?

Nation columnist Eric Alterman recently did a study of newspaper articles and found that since 1992, the word "media" appeared close to the phrase "liberal bias" 469 times. The words "media" and "conservative bias" were linked only 17 times. As Alterman notes, "If people are disposed to believe that the media have a liberal bias, it’s because that’s what the media have been telling them all along."

Likewise, right-wing "watchdog" groups have orchestrated well-financed campaigns to squelch any deviation in the mainstream media. "We are training our guns on any media outlet or any reporter interfering with America’s war on terrorism or trying to undermine the authority of President Bush," said L Brent Bozell III, founder of the Media Research Center (MRC). Or, as the MRC’s director of media research Rick Noyes put it: "What we were looking for was home-team sports reporting."

The truth is that the media is far from "liberal"—and far from free. The press is free only for those who own the press — that is, individual billionaires and huge corporations. And those gatekeepers of who can and cannot appear on the news or in the editorial pages overwhelmingly share the assumptions of the tiny elite that runs this country.

Far from liberal, they share a narrow worldview that accepts the "right" of the US military and the free market to dominate people’s lives around the world – and this is what we see reflected in the corporate media. What "debate" we see in the media is overwhelmingly between people who agree on the fundamentals – but occasionally disagree on how best to sell their right-wing agenda.
 

Why Donahue got canned at MSNBC

Veteran television talk show host Phil Donahue had his show pulled by MSNBC in February. Why? A leaked internal report says that his show presented "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."

"He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and sceptical of the administration’s motives," the report said. Of course, you won’t see any leaked reports about how notorious right-wingers, such as Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume at Fox News, consistently present pro-war, pro-Bush voices.

The leaked NBC document describes Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace." In fact, Donahue’s show averaged more than 4,46,000 viewers and was the top-rated show on MSNBC, outperforming Hardball with Chris Matthews.

But NBC is in a race to the bottom with Fox – to see which network can wrap itself in the largest flag. Cutting out Donahue was part of NBC’s strategy for shedding anything that might make it seem like a "liberal" network. 

(Socialist Worker, March 19, 2003)
(http://www.zmag.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 12

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Why I had to leave the cabinet

ROBIN COOK

March 19, 2003

I have resigned from the cabinet because I believe that a fundamental principle of Labour’s foreign policy has been violated. If we believe in an international community based on binding rules and institutions, we cannot simply set them aside when they produce results that are inconvenient to us.

I cannot defend a war with neither international agreement nor domestic support. I applaud the determined efforts of the prime minister and foreign secretary to secure a second resolution. Now that those attempts have ended in failure, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.

In recent days, France has been at the receiving end of the most vitriolic criticism. However, it is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany is opposed to us. Russia is opposed to us. Indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum majority to carry a second resolution. We delude ourselves about the degree of international hostility to military action if we imagine that it is all the fault of President Chirac.

The harsh reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading member. Not NATO. Not the EU. And now not the Security Council.

To end up in such diplomatic isolation is a serious reverse. Only a year ago we and the US were part of a coalition against terrorism which was wider and more diverse than I would previously have thought possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.

Britain is not a superpower. Our interests are best protected, not by unilateral action, but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules. Yet, tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened. The European Union is divided. The Security Council is in stalemate. Those are heavy casualties of war without a single shot yet being fired.

The threshold for war should always be high. None of us can predict the death toll of civilians in the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq. But the US warning of a bombing campaign that will "shock and awe" makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at the very least in the thousands. Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate invasion. And some claim his forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in days.

We cannot base our military strategy on the basis that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a serious threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of that term — namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against strategic city targets. It probably does still have biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions. But it has had them since the Eighties when the US sold Saddam the anthrax agents and the then British government built his chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years and which we helped to create? And why is it necessary to resort to war this week while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is frustrated by the presence of UN inspectors?

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to disarm, and our patience is exhausted. Yet, it is over 30 years since Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply. What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops to action in Iraq.

I believe the prevailing mood of the British public is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator. But they are not persuaded he is a clear and present danger to Britain. They want the inspections to be given a chance. And they are suspicious that they are being pushed hurriedly into conflict by a US administration with an agenda of its own. Above all, they are uneasy at Britain taking part in a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies. It has been a favourite theme of commentators that the House of Commons has lost its central role in British politics. Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for Parliament to stop the commitment of British troops to a war that has neither international authority nor domestic support.

(The Guardian, UK)
(The writer is a former British foreign secretary and till March 17 was the leader 
of the House of Commons)

Anti-war official rocks Australian govt.

BOB BURTON

March 12, 2003

CANBERRA:The Australian government has been stunned by the resignation of one of its senior intelligence analysts who argues that, based on US and other intelligence information he has seen, there is currently no justification for a war on Iraq.

"I’m convinced a war against Iraq at this time would be wrong. For a start, Iraq does not pose a security threat to the US, or to the UK or Australia, or to any other country, at this point in time," former Office of National Assessments intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie said, announcing his resignation late on Wednesday evening.

"I just don’t believe that a war at this time would be worth the risk,’’ he said.

A critical factor behind Wilkie’s resignation was claims made by US secretary of state Colin Powell to the UN Security Council purporting that a link exists between Al Qaeda and Iraq. "As far as I’m aware there was no hard evidence and there is still no hard evidence that there is any active co-operation between Iraq and Al Qaeda,’’ Wilkie told Australia Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) television.

Three years ago, Wilkie, a 41-year-old career military officer, was seconded to the Office of National Assessments, which prepares briefings for the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from a wide range of intelligence sources.

Wilkie has worked on global terrorism and transnational issues including Afghanistan and the likely humanitarian consequences of a war on Iraq.

Wilkie describes his resignation as the "biggest decision I think I’ve ever made in my life’’ but felt compelled to act by what he thought is the prospect of a high risk of humanitarian crisis from any US-led attack on Iraq.

"I don’t believe I could stand by any longer and take no action as this coalition marches to war. I think the interests of the thousands of people, perhaps tens or even more, tens of thousands of people or even more who could be injured, displaced or killed in a war, I think their interests are more important,’’ he said.

The director general of the Office of National Assessments, Kim Jones, sought to downplay the significance of Wilkie’s resignation. "The officer concerned was a member of our transnational issues branch. He normally worked on illegal immigration issues. The transnational issues branch does not deal with issues related to Iraq,’’ Jones said, reading from a statement.

Speaking to journalists in Jakarta late Wednesday evening, minister of foreign affairs Alexander Downer, also sought to dismiss Wilkie’s resignation. "Mr Wilkie has come to the view that he doesn’t support the Australian government’s policy, and I think in those circumstances he’s done the honourable thing and resigned.’’

As one of the few ex-military officers that work at the Office of National Assessments, Wilkie was identified as one of the people who would work in the national intelligence watch office if a war in Iraq eventuated. In preparation for that role he had access to all intelligence information flowing into the agency on the topic.

Only hours before Wilkie’s resignation, Prime Minister John Howard sought to justify Australia’s support for the US war on Iraq on the basis of countering groups like Al Qaeda.

"To me, the ultimate nightmare of the modern world is that chemical and biological weapons will get into the hands of terrorists, and believe me, they will use them. They will not care about the cost (of what) they do to the countries against, or the peoples against which they are used,’’ Howard said in Sydney.

Wilkie believes that a war on Iraq may well turn out to be counter-productive. "In fact, a war is the exact course of action most likely to cause Saddam to do exactly what we’re trying to prevent. I believe it’s the course of action that is most likely to cause him to lash out recklessly, to use weapons of mass destruction and to possibly play a terrorism card,’’ he said.

Wilkie hopes that his actions will force Howard to rethink its unquestioning support for a unilateral strike against Iraq. "If my action today and over the next couple of days, can make the Australian government rethink its position, and maybe take a more sensible approach to developing its policy on Iraq, I think it’s been worthwhile,’’ he said.

In the wake of mass rallies in mid-February in which well over half a million citizens publicly demonstrated against the war, Wilkie’s resignation has demonstrated the depth of concern amongst the normally conservative ranks of the intelligence and foreign affairs establishment.

Former Office of National Assessments analyst and now the head of the Global Terrorism Center at Monash University, David Wright Neville, believes there is great concern about Howard’s policy in intelligence and military circles.

’’Speaking to former colleagues, former contacts both in the Office of National Assessments and other elements of the intelligence community, (there) are widespread concerns that are similar to Andrew’s about the direction in which the government is taking us,’’ he said.

With opposition to Australia’s deployment of 2,000 personnel to the Middle East growing, opposition political parties and the peace movement sense that Howard is now becoming electorally very vulnerable.

An opinion poll commissioned by the public relations company that works for the Labour Party and released on Wednesday revealed that 59 per cent of Australians oppose a unilateral attack on Iraq. However, a UN-endorsed attack was supported by 64 per cent of the 1,000 people surveyed.

According to opposition foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, Wilkie’s resignation ‘’torpedoes the credibility’’ of Howard. (Courtesy: IPS)

Second US diplomat resigns

March 10, 2003

A veteran US diplomat resigned today in protest over US policy toward Iraq, becoming the second career foreign service officer to do so in the past month.

John Brown, who joined the State Department in 1981, said he resigned because he could not support Washington’s Iraq policy, which he said was fomenting a massive rise in anti-US sentiment around the world.

In a resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Brown said he agreed with J Brady Kiesling, a diplomat at the US embassy in Athens who quit in February over President George W Bush’s apparent intent on fighting Iraq.

"I am joining my colleague John Brady Kiesling in submitting my resignation from the Foreign Service — effective immediately — because I cannot in good conscience support President Bush’s war plans against Iraq," he said.

"Throughout the globe the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force," Brown said in the letter, a copy of which he sent to AFP.

"The president’s disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century," he said.

"I joined the Foreign Service because I love our country," Brown said. "Respectfully, Mr Secretary, I am now bringing this calling to a close, with a heavy heart but for the same reason that I embraced it."

Two senior State Department officials confirmed that Powell had received the letter from Brown, who had served at the US embassies in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow before being assigned to be a diplomat-in-residence at Georgetown University in Washington. n

(Wire Services) (http://www.unitedforpeace.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 11

The post Cracks within appeared first on SabrangIndia.

March 17, 2003

I am finally ready to admit what for months I have kept hidden: I am terrified. I am more scared than I have ever been in my adult life. For weeks now I have felt a new kind of free-floating terror at what has been unfolding, as the Bush administration has made it clear that nothing would derail its mad rush to war. 

Until now, I have not spoken of it. In organising meetings or talks to community groups or rally speeches, I held back. The task was to build the antiwar movement, and I worried that talking too much about my fear might undermine that. People need to feel empowered, hopeful, I told myself; we should be talking about the potential of the movement. 

That hasn’t changed. We have to continue to build the movement, which has enormous potential over the long-term to turn this society away from war and profit, toward peace and the needs of people. We cannot abandon our commitment to the people of the world, the work of education and organising that we all must do if we are to make good on that commitment. 

But I no longer think we can build such a movement by suppressing or keeping quiet about this fear we feel. In the past few weeks I have seen this fear so clearly in the eyes of my friends, heard it in the nervous comments of strangers, and been surprised by it in the unease with which even many supporters of the war talked.

 I knew it when this past weekend my father — a conservative, Republican small-town businessman and World War II-era veteran — tried to convince me that Bush wouldn’t really start a war, that he was bluffing, just being cagey. Even my father was scared of the plans of the man he voted for. 

I think people all over the world whose capacity to feel has not been occluded by power or hate are feeling something like this. It is not a fear of terrorists or weapons of mass destruction or even necessarily of this particular war, as frightening as all those things may be. I believe it is a fear of something more difficult to pin down, a fear of the forces that will be unleashed when the United States defies the world and launches a war that — while couched in talk of protecting people from threats — is so obviously about projecting US power to achieve a kind of world domination that was never possible before. 

Bush and his advisers proudly announce that they have cast aside any commitment to collective security, real diplomacy, and international law. Will the United Nations survive? Will there be anything left of an international system when Bush and his gang are finished? Will there be any hope for the peaceful settlement of disputes? Of course none of these concepts has ever been fully implemented, and we all know that the international institutions have flaws. But will anyone feel safer in a world in which the law comes only from the blade of the American sword, permanently drawn? 

This fear I feel is not just of power-run-amok but of an empire with the most destructive military capacity that has ever existed — an empire with thermobaric bombs and cruise missiles, cluster bombs and nuclear "bunker busters." No matter how hard the government works to try to keep us from seeing the results of those weapons — and no matter how much the news media cooperate in that project — we understand how many civilians could die under the onslaught of these horrific weapons. They can censor the pictures, but not our imaginations. 

This fear I feel is not just of the unchecked power of the United States but of the fact that Bush and his advisers seem to think they understand their own power and can control it. It is the arrogance of virtually unlimited power married to lifelong privilege. It is hubris, and in a nuclear world there is no sin that is potentially more deadly. 

This is the fear that I feel, that I think so many of us feel. The Bush administration wants us to be afraid, but remain quiet about it. Our power will come not from denying the fear but in confronting, and overcoming, it. So, we must speak of it, not to scare others but to bring us closer together. Our only hope against the fear is in each other, in our organising, in our resistance. And if we can confront our fears, we can confront this empire. 

If you feel this fear and aren’t sure that, in the face of it, you can remain involved — or get involved for the first time — in the antiwar movement, all I can say is, "Where else will you go?" If we retreat into our private spaces, thinking we can hide, we will find out quickly that this fear will follow us everywhere. 

Our only way out is together, in public, facing not only our fears but the fears that others will project onto us, and inviting them to join us. It will be painful. It will carry with it certain risks. But it is the only way we can hang onto our own humanity.

 I am scared, and I need help. We all do. Let us pledge not to let each other down — for our own sake, and for the sake of the world. 

 (Robert Jensen is a founding member of the Nowar Collective (www.nowarcollective.com), a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 10

The post Facing our fears appeared first on SabrangIndia.

With the USA about to launch a war against Iraq any day now, what will trigger the war? Obviously, Colin Powell’s revelations before Congress didn’t set in motion an immediate attack. Americans sit and wait for convincing evidence. But maybe Hollywood knows…

I previously reported on Hollywood’s uncanny foreknowledge when production of war films began prior to Sept. 11, 2001. (www.lewrockwell.com Feb. 20 and June 4, 2002) Now there is talk that a TV series called "24" may provide clues to what might set off public sentiment to attack Iraq.

In the script for "24," Kiefer Sutherland plays the part of federal agent Jack Bauer who has been called back into service in a counter terrorism unit because of the threat of a nuclear bomb hidden somewhere in Los Angeles. According to the script, a Middle Eastern terrorist cell called the "Second Wave" places the dirty bomb in Los Angeles which would put 2.5 million residents at risk for casualties.

In the TV series, "the President vows to retaliate against an unnamed Middle Eastern country that has harboured the group in much the same fashion that President Bush has done with anyone giving shelter to those behind 9/11." (BBC News, Entertainment Section, Oct. 30, 2002) Mark Armstrong, writing for E! Online News, says the "24" series story line "hits a little bit too close to home for viewers." [E! Online News July 1, 2002]

The TV series has aired in the USA and is scheduled to air in Britain soon. Oddly, the entire series was sponsored on US television by Ford Motor Company, instead of multiple sponsors.

Even if a terrorist organisation had a "dirty nuclear bomb," it wouldn’t produce a mushroom cloud over Los Angeles or any other city. A "dirty bomb" is simply a regular explosive device that disperses radioactive material. So the TV series is inaccurate and spreads inordinate fear. The American Institute of Physics reports that radiation emitted from a "dirty bomb" is likely to be too low to calculate and that the greatest risk from such a weapon is panic. [American Institute of Physics, March 12, 2002] Furthermore, Iraq has no nuclear weapons of fissionable materials according to the UN nuclear inspection agency. [Toronto Sun, Sept. 15, 2002] So don’t look towards Iraq as a possible nuclear terrorist.

Whether Hollywood productions predict reality is of course open for discussion. Certainly Hollywood has been involved in producing war and propaganda films for decades if for nothing else than helping to recruit troops. Of course America didn’t witness the detonation of a "dirty nuclear bomb" at the recent Super Bowl in San Diego, even though this was the central theme in the movie The Sum Of All Fears (Paramount Pictures) based on a Tom Clancy novel.

But maybe Hollywood scripts that contain terrorist threats from foreign groups continue to keep American citizens on edge. There is already criticism that the White House is manufacturing terrorist alerts to keep the issue alive in the minds of voters and help elevate President Bush’s approval ratings. (Capitol Hill Blue, Jan. 3, 2003).

Of course the President hasn’t been waiting for any evidence, or even a "dirty bomb," to go to war. The Washington Post recently revealed that President George W. Bush planned to go to war against Iraq only days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. (Wash. Post Jan. 12, 2003) And why would Iraq sponsor a terrorist attack on the US knowing full well it would prompt horrific retaliation?

Last January, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about the lies that were told to get the US into its first war with Iraq over a decade ago, such as over-exaggerated claims of Iraqi troop strength and stories of Iraqi soldiers yanking new-born babies out of hospital incubators. (Jan. 5, 2003) Television news agencies certainly played a part in disseminating the misinformation leading up to the Gulf War and no American news agency today has ever apologised for airing the false "Iraqi incubator" story. Will the same kind of misinformation be used to get Americans behind this new war effort?

The White House needs something to get the stalled war effort off the ground. Time magazine recently conducted an online poll asking Americans which country, North Korea, Iraq or the USA, posed the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? Out of more than a quarter million votes cast, 83.4% picked the USA as the greatest threat to world peace. (Time magazine, Jan. 22, 2003).

Government sources continue to warn of an impending smallpox terrorist attack. But why wouldn’t a terrorist organisation have released such a terrible bio-weapon before the US had its vaccine ready? The mass vaccination programme promoted by federal authorities would offer little or no protection unless the exact strain of smallpox virus was known ahead of time. The federal government apparently had prior knowledge of the anthrax threat. The White House continues to dodge questions about its foreknowledge of an anthrax threat evidenced by administration of the antibiotic drug CIPRO to White House staff on the same day as the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. (World Net Daily, Jan. 11, 2003).

What does the federal government know about the alleged smallpox threat? The strain of anthrax used in US mail envelopes was traced back to the US army labs at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the same place where the only known stores of smallpox virus outside of Russia are housed. To date, US efforts to apprehend the anthrax terrorist appear to have dwindled. If that terrorist had access to bio-weapons at Ft. Detrick in the past, what would stop him now? 

(Courtesy Bill Sardi. Sardi is a health journalist who dabbles from time to time in current affairs. His website is www.askbillsardi.com).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 9

The post What does Hollywood know about the upcoming war with Iraq? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Dear Friends,

March 17, 2003

The fictional president of television’s The West Wing wants the respect of the American people. Martin Sheen wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times Monday that Hollywood celebrities opposed to the potential war with Iraq are not getting enough respect and are merely being taken to task because of their "celebrity status."

"Although my opinion is not any more valuable or relevant merely because I am an actor, that fact does not render it unimportant," Sheen wrote. "Some have suggested otherwise, trying to denigrate the validity of this opinion and those of my colleagues solely due to our celebrity status. This is insulting not only to us but to other people of conscience who love their country enough to risk its wrath by going against the grain of powerful government policy."

Sheen added, "Whether celebrity or diplomat, cabdriver or student, all deserve a turn at the podium."

The veteran actor and frequent protester’s piece ran next to an opinion piece by a woman whose family fled Iraq 11 years ago. She singled out Sheen, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Barbra Streisand as those she says don’t speak for the people of Iraq. Sheen – who formed the activist group Artists United to Win Without War in December – recently claimed that top executives at NBC fear his outspoken opposition to the war will hurt his show, The West Wing.

An NBC spokeswoman, however, responded that network executives have expressed no such concerns. The claim resulted in the Screen Actors Guild recently raising the spectre of the Hollywood Blacklist era of the 1950s, and issued a statement that warned the entertainment industry that it better not punish people who speak out against war with Iraq.

"It is the fundamental right of citizens to express their support or their fears and concerns," the SAG statement read. "While passionate disagreement is to be expected in such a debate, a disturbing trend has arisen in the dialogue."

(http://www.wral.com)

February 6, 2003

Double Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman on Wednes day accused US President George Bush’s administration of "manipulating the grief of the country" post-September 11 to win backing for a possible war with Iraq.

Hoffman, speaking as he picked up the life-time achievement prize at the Empire magazine film awards in central London, added that he believed America’s motives for going to war included power and oil.

He said, "I believe, though I may be wrong because I am no expert, that this war is about what most wars are about: hegemony, money, power and oil."

Other Hollywood stars who have already attacked President Bush over Iraq include Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and Susan Sarandon.

But actor Tom Cruise, who starred alongside Hoffman in Rain Man, has come out in support of the US president.

(http://www.channelnewsasia.com)

December 15, 2002

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP): UN inspectors hunted for
weapons of mass destruction at missile plants and nuclear complexes Sunday, while an unusual visitor — Hollywood star Sean Penn — spoke out in Baghdad against a US attack and in support of the Iraqi people caught up in an international crisis. Penn issued his comments at the end of a three-day visit to Iraq which was organised by the Institute for Public Accuracy, a research organisation based in San Francisco, California.

"Simply put, if there is a war or continued sanctions against Iraq, the blood of Americans and Iraqis alike will be on our (American) hands," Penn said at a news conference in the Iraqi capital Sunday.

October 8, 2002

As Washington rattles its sabre at Saddam Hussein,
a constellation of Hollywood megastars has come out to do public battle against President George W Bush’s policy towards Iraq.

In a town with a strong liberal tradition and long history of political activism, there is an increasing rumbling over Iraq coming from some top celebrities — although not all are opposed to war with Baghdad.

However, with their names alone able to generate headlines and huge press coverage, many have chosen to throw their weight into the political debate surrounding a possible US and British led war with Iraq.

Diva Barbra Streisand led the attack on Bush, telling a star-studded audience today that she found his administration "frightening" and slamming its alleged bellicose stance and failure to protect civil rights.

"I find bringing the country to the brink of war unilaterally five weeks before an election questionable — and very, very frightening," the singer and actress told the Democratic party fundraiser in Hollywood.

Streisand is the biggest Tinseltown personality to take aim at Bush’s eagerness to oust Saddam by force, but a growing list of stars is joining the movement.

On Friday, several hundred celebrities and intellectuals published a manifest entitled "Not in our Name" in the Los Angeles Times, a tract which urged Americans to resist their government’s policies.

We "call on the people of the US to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world," they wrote.

Among the signatories were JFK movie director Oliver Stone, Gosford Park filmmaker Robert Altman, British-born Terry Gilliam, actress Jane Fonda, Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon, star of Thelma and Louise.

Oscar-winning Sarandon and long-time partner Tim Robbins went even further during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, publicly voicing their fears about a war with Iraq and saying they were opposed to "military expansion."

"I don’t think that a military expansion of violence is the solution," she said. "No, I don’t think I would want to go to war against Iraq."

Tootsie star Jessica Lange weighed in while in Madrid last week, saying military action on Iraq was "wrong, immoral and basically illegal. "It makes me feel ashamed to come from the United States. It is humiliating."

But while many stars have come out against military action, some have backed it, creating something of an ideological divide in usually superficial Tinseltown.

Superstar Tom Cruise and movie magnate Steven Spielberg backed Bush’s stance during a publicity tour to Italy last month.

"If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government," Spielberg said, adding that Bush’s policies were "solid and rooted in reality."

Cruise also came down on Washington’s side, saying that he believed "Saddam has committed many crimes against humanity and against his own people."

The sudden re-emergence of the strident brand of "star activism" reminiscent of the Vietnam War era has caused some critics to question the competence of Hollywood movie stars and filmmakers to get involved in politics.

But political science professor Sherry Bebitch Jeffe disagreed, saying they were as entitled as anyone else to express themselves.

"Just because a person is a celebrity, he or she does not have to give up his or her first amendment rights, it’s as simple as that," she said.

"I think that actors have always been activists, there’s more attention paid to them," she said, adding that the tradition went back to the 1950s era of the McCarthy anti-communist "witch-hunts" and World War II.

However, the University of Southern California academic warned that stars’ power to influence policy may be more limited than people like Streisand would like to think.

"Hollywood does not have much influence on public opinion, but (Streisand) raises enough money for the Democratic Party that people have to at least listen to what she has to say." (AFP) 

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 8

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Barely three hours after the first cruise missiles slammed into Baghdad, a wave of demonstrations started in Asia and Australia and rolled swiftly across Europe and the Middle East toward the United States, where anti-war activists planned hundreds of protests later on Thursday.

In the Arab world, thousands of protesters vented their fury at the start of the war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, with demonstrators in Egypt and Syria demanding the expulsion of US ambassadors.

In Cairo, the Arab world’s biggest city, riot police used water cannon and batons against hundreds of rock-throwing protesters who tried to storm toward the US embassy.

"This war is a sin," said 43-year-old Cairo taxi driver Youssef, as religious music blared from his car radio. "It’s a sin because ordinary Iraqis will suffer. It’s not a sin because of Saddam, who was too stubborn. He’s got a head of stone."

In Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is one of Washington’s staunchest allies on Iraq, the three biggest trade unions staged a two-hour strike.

Italian cities were thrown into chaos as tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, in many cases blocking train stations and highways. The biggest demonstration was a march on the U.S. embassy in Rome.

In Germany, more than 80,000 schoolchildren, many with faces painted with "No War" or peace signs, protested in the capital Berlin and the cities of Stuttgart, Cologne, Munich and Hanover.

"Let’s bomb Texas, they’ve got oil too," read one banner.

In Berlin, people lay in pools of red paint outside the heavily guarded US embassy to symbolise civilian casualties.

Swiss police clashed with hundreds of protesters, mainly students, who marched on the US diplomatic mission in Geneva, firing tear gas into the air to disperse them.

Spanish police in riot gear fired rubber bullets at anti-war demonstrators, including well-known actors and celebrities, who gathered in central Madrid in protest at Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s support for the US-led attacks on Iraq.

Earlier they beat some demonstrators with batons in an attempt to move them on.

Violence also erupted in Calcutta, eastern India, when about 1,000 protesters waving banners reading "US warmongers go to hell" tried to storm a US cultural centre. At least 12 policemen and six demonstrators were injured when cane-wielding police drove them back, a senior police official told Reuters.

Thousands of British anti-war campaigners, enraged by the involvement of British troops in a war they see as an illegitimate grab for oil by Washington, blocked roads and scuffled with police as protests spread across Britain.

At the biggest rallying point in London’s Parliament Square, police hauled away demonstrators, including many schoolchildren, who were sitting in roads and blocking access points.

"We’re here for peace," said schoolgirl Tallulah Belly, 14, at Parliament Square. "We’ve walked out of school — we are the future generation and they should be listening to us."

The only reported clash outside a British embassy was in the Lebanese capital Beirut, where around 1,000 protesters were sprayed with water from a fire truck when they crossed barriers outside the mission. Witnesses said police beat several of them.

In France, more than 10,000 people, mostly students, surged through Paris chanting anti-war slogans, reflecting their government’s rigid anti-war stance which has infuriated Washington and split the international community into two camps.

Huge protests also took place in Greece, Spain and Austria.

In the Gaza Strip, about 1,000 Palestinian women and children marched in the Rafah refugee camp, holding Iraqi flags and posters of Saddam and setting fire to Israeli and US flags. About 150 people marched in Bethlehem in the West Bank.

On the other side of the planet, protesters brought Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne, to a standstill. Organisers put the crowd at 40,000, police said it numbered "tens of thousands." Australia is a staunch ally of the US and a supporter of the use of force to disarm Saddam.

Anti-US sentiment was also strong in Muslim Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan, where many saw the attack as the start of a US campaign to subjugate the Islamic world and seize oil.

In Pakistan there were scattered but peaceful rallies across the country against what some called "American terrorism," while in Indonesia some 2,000 people from a conservative Muslim party sang and chanted anti-American slogans outside the US embassy. 

(Courtesy: Reuters).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 1

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