By Andrew Gumbel
The 74-year-old Swede, who spoke so even-handedly about Iraqi compliance in the run-up to the US-led invasion, has not so much been shunted aside by the Americans as ritually humiliated. His team of inspectors, whose competence was constantly questioned by an impatient Bush administration, has been replaced lock, stock and barrel by a much larger US team which is showing no inclination even to seek his opinion.
Worse, the Americans have sought to poach several dozen of the UN's brightest inspectors from under his nose. The leader of the US team, called the Iraq Survey Group, is himself a former UN man, Charles Duelfer, who has been sharply critical of Mr Blix's leadership.
But Mr Blix has a trump card up his sleeve. To date, at least, the United States has been deeply embarrassed by its inability to find any significant trace of the Iraqi weapons programmes it went to war over. In other words, when Mr Blix told the world earlier this year that the Iraqis were co-operating with what promised to be a lengthy process, he was almost certainly telling it how it was.
And although Mr Blix probably won't be saying "I told you so" when he addresses the Security Council on Tuesday, he will at least speak with some authority when he urges the military victors in Iraq to let the UN back in and help certify that, post-Saddam, the country is indeed free of biological, chemical and nuclear arms.
"I think the world would like to have a credible report on the absence or eradication of the programme of weapons of mass destruction," he told the BBC last week. "We would be able not only to receive the reports of the Americans and the Brits of what they have found or not found, but we would be able to corroborate a good deal of this."
The United Nations has several ways it can take advantage of the growing controversy over Iraq's illegal weapons programmes – or lack of them. One is simply to reassert the authority of the inspection team and to point out its usefulness as an independent arbiter. The clear implication of Mr Blix's interview was that the US, on its own, cannot report credibly and should not have the right to dictate its terms. As he also said last week: "We're not dogs on a leash."
Another possible strategy stems from the wording of the Security Council resolution on economic sanctions on Iraq. The sanctions can only end, Resolution 687 says, if the UN certifies the country to be free of illegal weapons. Several countries, notably Russia, have suggested this clause could be used as leverage to give the UN a more significant role in post-war Iraq.
The Bush administration is busy looking for ways to end the sanctions without this UN imprimatur. The Iraqi people "have suffered enough", the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, argued – a line that is not without irony, since for years the United States insisted that sanctions were not responsible for Iraqi suffering, Saddam Hussein was.
One senses a certain enjoyment in UN circles as America squirms. Another former weapons inspector, David Albright, said: "They said the UN inspectors were bumbling idiots and can't find anything. Now these guys are looking like bumbling idiots that can't find anything."
The American search teams found nothing on the Iraqis' front-line defences during the assault on Baghdad – a logical place for chemical or biological weapons to be deployed if they existed. They found nothing in the prime locations pinpointed by their own intelligence agencies.
And they have come up empty even after capturing and questioning several of Saddam's top science advisers. The latest of these, a VX gas expert called Emad Husayn Abdullah al-Ani, gave himself up on Friday.
The BBC was the only mainstream news agency that had half a clue about how to harness the power of blogging during the Iraq war. Now, the BBC war reporters are shutting their blog down. Visit the site for their final impressions of what it was like to report on this war.
From reporter Jonathan Marcus:
There were two press operations going on at CentCom headquarters in Doha.The first was the over-arching American press operation, very much a public relations exercise.
Within that there was a much smaller British press operation, very different in tone but struggling to try to get some real information out because of the tutelage of the Americans over the whole thing.
This was the fascinating thing about this war: you had this absolute avalanche of material from our BBC colleagues in Baghdad and with the actual units in the field.
But in a strange sort of way a lot of it was like looking though a keyhole at a very small piece of the war.
At CentCom we were faced with the problem of deciphering all this information.
People wanted to know: "What does it all mean?", "Is it going wrong?", "Is it not going wrong?", "What does this particular bit of action mean?"
Pulling all that together proved dramatically difficult in this particular campaign, which is precisely what I think the Pentagon wanted.
They were prepared to allow this extraordinary vision of what modern warfare is like at grass-roots level, but I think they were very happy that journalists did have to struggle to put the pieces together.
And we did not even see most of what went on in Iraq; there were no embedded people out in the west, in much of the north, and so on.
Of course the military came away from the war thinking it was a jolly good system. The real test is when the war goes badly.
This war went very well for the coalition, and this highly intrusive press arrangement served them, because it was largely reporting on success - dramatic movement, collapsing Iraqi formations and so on.
If things had gone very differently, perhaps in Whitehall and in the Pentagon they would not have been quite so enamoured with this system.
Excellent article By Yahya Sadowski (an associate professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon) in Le Monde Diplomatique on the complexities of getting Iraq oil production running again ... and the mistake that the US government made in assuming that the expenses of the war could be easily paid for by tapping into oil revenues:
In January the Pentagon formed its own planning group, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, to study what it should do with Iraq's oil after the liberation of Baghdad. Within a month this group learned just enough about oil economics to retreat in horror from the neo-conservatives' earlier proposals. Initially, officials at the Pentagon and the White House assumed that they would be able to recoup the costs of the war by dipping into Iraq's oil revenues. If they needed more money, all they had to do was to open the pipeline taps.But when they did the maths, they made unpleasant discoveries. Expanding Iraq's production will not only take time, it will also be very expensive. Just rescuing Iraq's existing facilities (repairing wells and pipes about to fail and already doing long-term damage to reservoirs) will cost more than $1bn, even if Saddam does not deliberately destroy them as part of a scorched earth strategy. Raising oil production back to 3.5MBD will take at least three years and require $8bn investment in facilities and another $20bn of repairs to the ravaged electrical grid that powers the pumps and refineries. Increasing production to over 6MBD would cost $30bn more.
These are not small sums for a country only earning $15bn a year from oil exports. Yet they represent only a tiny fraction of the costs that the US had been hoping could be covered by Iraqi oil exports. No one knows exactly how much the invasion of Iraq will cost the Pentagon, but the Bush administration's own estimates begin at $100bn.
The US administration has cited many causes to justify its war against Iraq. Curbing weapons of mass destruction - so why not tackle nuclear North Korea? Combating terrorism - but Iraq is not even on the US State Department list of major terrorist supporters. Deterring threats to neighbouring states -well, the US cheered last time Saddam invaded Iran, and would probably do so again. Even liberating women - but Iraqi women are better represented in their government and military than US women. Most people suspect that the US has more material interests.
The popular slogan, "no war for oil", is closer to the truth than is Washington's propaganda. The Bush administration cares about Iraq (as it has never cared about Pakistan, an unstable dictatorship with nuclear weapons and a plenitude of terrorists) because Iraq is in the middle of two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. Baghdad is positioned to influence both the price and the availability of oil, the ultimate strategic commodity fuelling both the global economy and the US military.
Because of the "no war for oil" slogan, many people imagine a simplistic scenario, thinking that Washington has been acting to further the interests of US oil companies in grabbing Iraq's reserves. The reality is more complex, although not more charitable. The Bush circle does have close ties to the oil industry. But Bush and his advisers are linked to only a marginal subsection of that industry, and neither he nor his team actually know much about oil or its economics. Despite the months of planning military and political futures for Iraq, the US administration is only now beginning to grasp the most elementary facts about Iraq's potential role in the oil industry.
Within the Bush circle, those with the clearest vision for Iraqi oil are the same people who have led the drive for war against Iraq - the neo-conservative cabal of the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz; Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of state for defence; Lewis Libby, the secretary general to the vice president; and their friends. As part of their grand plan for using a "liberated" Iraq as a base from which to promote democracy and capitalism across the Middle East, they want Baghdad to explore for new reserves, rapidly increase production capacity and quickly flood the world market with Iraqi oil. They know that this would lead to an oil price crash, driving it to $15 a barrel or less. They hope that this collapse will stimulate economic growth in the US and the West, finally destroy Opec (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), wreck the economies of "rogue states" (Iran, Syria, Libya), and create more opportunities for "regime change" and democratisation.
At first glance, this storyline seems plausible. Iraq has proven oil reserves of 112bn barrels and, since many analysts believe this figure could be doubled using new exploration technologies, its reserves might prove comparable to those of Saudi Arabia (245bn barrels). What allows the Saudis to play swing producer, adjusting output to help enforce Opec prices, is not their reserves but their 10+MBD (million barrels per day) production capacity. Iraq's capacity today is barely 2.5MBD, and, even before the 1991 Gulf war and subsequent embargo crippled Iraqi facilities, it never produced more than 3.8MBD. But the US neo-conservative cabal believes that Baghdad could increase capacity by another 2MBD within three years, perhaps even reaching 6MBD by 2010, particularly if Iraq privatises its fields, turning them over to multinational companies with the technology and capital to expand production quickly.
Yet when the cabal touted this plan in autumn 2002, they were opposed worldwide. It threatened many of Washington's friends, including Mexico, Canada, Norway, Indonesia, Russia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials made it clear that they would defend Opec, if necessary by increasing their own production to the point where few firms would have any incentive to risk capital exploring for more Iraqi oil. Iraq's émigré opposition groups, including the neo-conservatives' allies in the Iraqi National Congress, also opposed the idea of privatising Iraqi oil. Regardless of their politics, they understand that oil is Iraq's only real asset and feel strongly that they should retain control of it.
Most surprisingly, there was also resistance from the Bush family itself, which has not always had happy experiences in the oil industry (Bush Junior's own firm, Arbusto Oil, went bankrupt). Bush Junior does have a network of personal ties, not to the multinational oil companies but to the independent businesses: dozens of small firms, many headquartered in Texas, that make their money pumping oil within the US or its continental shelf. These firms all need high oil prices to survive. The cost of producing a barrel of oil in Saudi Arabia may be as low as $1.50, but dredging a barrel out of the Gulf of Mexico may cost $13 or more. The last thing the independents want is a price collapse. Their demise, as their patriotic lobbyists are quick to point out, would leave the US overwhelmingly dependent on unreliable imports of foreign oil.
Multinational companies - giants such as Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, Shell, Total and Chevron-Texaco - have diversified sources of production and have less to fear from a price collapse. But the US administration does not listen to them (most are not even American). When Bush Junior was elected, they lobbied hard for a repeal of the Iran-Libya sanctions act and other embargos that curbed their expansion of holdings in the Middle East. The Bush team rebuffed their pleas and Vice-President Dick Cheney produced his 2001 national energy policy that focused on opening new areas within the US for energy exploration (1).
The key to this policy, the proposal to permit drilling in the Alaska national wildlife refuge, delighted the independents but did nothing for the multinationals, who felt that the public relations damage they would suffer from destroying the park would more than offset the value of its modest oil reserves. (Middle East oilfields, such as Iraq's Majnun field, typically contain 10+bn barrels; whereas Oil & Gas Journal estimates that the Alaskan refuge contains only 2.6bn barrels of recoverable oil.)
Economic reality finally rebutted the neo-conservative plan. In January the Pentagon formed its own planning group, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, to study what it should do with Iraq's oil after the liberation of Baghdad. Within a month this group learned just enough about oil economics to retreat in horror from the neo-conservatives' earlier proposals. Initially, officials at the Pentagon and the White House assumed that they would be able to recoup the costs of the war by dipping into Iraq's oil revenues. If they needed more money, all they had to do was to open the pipeline taps.
But when they did the maths, they made unpleasant discoveries. Expanding Iraq's production will not only take time, it will also be very expensive. Just rescuing Iraq's existing facilities (repairing wells and pipes about to fail and already doing long-term damage to reservoirs) will cost more than $1bn, even if Saddam does not deliberately destroy them as part of a scorched earth strategy. Raising oil production back to 3.5MBD will take at least three years and require $8bn investment in facilities and another $20bn of repairs to the ravaged electrical grid that powers the pumps and refineries. Increasing production to over 6MBD would cost $30bn more.
These are not small sums for a country only earning $15bn a year from oil exports. Yet they represent only a tiny fraction of the costs that the US had been hoping could be covered by Iraqi oil exports. No one knows exactly how much the invasion of Iraq will cost the Pentagon, but the Bush administration's own estimates begin at $100bn (see Iraq: misreading the vital signs). The Congressional Budget Office guesses that the price of maintaining US troops in Iraq will be between $12bn and $45bn annually. Iraq's outstanding foreign debts, which total over $110bn, would need $5-12bn a year to service. Once US officials discovered this, they began lobbying to have these debts, held largely by Arab states, Russia and France, forgiven after the war. Outstanding claims against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait total about $300bn, although the United Nations agency responsible for collecting them does not think Iraq will have to pay more than $40bn - again, because the US is beginning to lobby Kuwait to drop its indemnity (2). No one knows how much humanitarian assistance will cost - but even in peacetime Iraq imports $14.5bn of food and medicine each year.
Even in the most optimistic scenarios, these costs are far beyond Iraq's ability to pay. The US will have to fund much of the bill for war (including any payments that Turkey may extract for cooperation) and try to get its allies to share the costs of the rest. Driving down the price of oil only makes this task more daunting. So the neo-conservatives, and the Iraqi opposition, supported by independent oil price hawks and Pentagon planners, have now abandoned the idea of breaking Opec. Instead, they are searching for ways to maximise Iraq's future oil revenues.
Their first step has been a quiet agreement to keep the technocrats of Iraq's current oil ministry in place, rather than trying to de-Ba'athise them, and to delegate most policy matters to them. This means that the engineers who make the production decisions, and the negotiators who haggle the contracts, will be the people with the most experience and information, rather than Pentagon officials, who are hardly famous for their bargaining skills. This also means that Iraq's oil will not be privatised. Instead, Iraqi technocrats will try to maximise revenues in the same way their counterparts do in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait: by offering foreign oil firms just enough profit, in very stringent production-sharing contracts, to keep them interested in investing.
The Iraqis and their US proconsuls will want to encourage as much competition among the foreign oil firms as they can, since this is the key to good terms. The US has hinted that it might retaliate against states, particularly Russia and France, that did not support its policy by denying them access to Iraqi oil after the war. This is a hollow threat. The Russians have already made the biggest single investment in Iraqi oil precisely because they are willing to take on riskier ventures than Western firms. Their capital and enthusiasm may prove critical to increasing the profitability of Iraqi oil. Also, Total has invested more than the Russians, and is well positioned to expand Iraqi production. Shell also has a major stake; and British Petroleum, which used to dominate the country, is also eager for a stake.
The US will discover that opening the bidding for what oilmen call the "Iraqi Klondike" as wide as possible will not only maximise revenues but also defuse the charge that the US is just land-grabbing. This does not mean that US oil companies will lack a role. If the political situation stabilises quickly (that is a very big if), Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco will join the bidding, and even smaller firms, such as Conoco, may participate by joining consortia to spread the risk.
But the only sector in which the Americans are actually likely to dominate is in services subcontracts, where US firms such as Halliburton (which Cheney used to run) and Schlumberger already enjoy global pre-eminence for economic reasons. US firms will not monopolise Iraqi oil; it will be surprising if they eventually control more than half of the production.
Multinational oil companies, US and other, have plenty to be ashamed of, from their despoliation of the Niger Delta to their support for state terrorism in Indonesia. But they have not been pushing for a war against Iraq. The Bush administration planned its campaign against Baghdad without input from these companies, and apparently without a clue about the basics of oil economics.
Oil appears in Washington's calculations about Iraq as a strategic rather than an economic resource: the war against Saddam is about guaranteeing American hegemony rather than about increasing the profits of Exxon.
There's no need to manufacture Fark any more -- the media's already doing that for us too.
Smoking Gun posted the following on April 16:
While all news organizations prepare obituaries in advance of the deaths of famous individuals, the folks at CNN inadvertently gave the Internet-surfing public a chance to preview how the network's web site would note the demise of Vice President Dick Cheney [viewable on the Smoking Gun site], Ronald Reagan, and a few other prominent figures. Until earlier this afternoon, a CNN server housed mock-ups of web pages announcing the yet-to-happen deaths. The CNN pages, which were discovered by the intrepid folks at fark.com, were yanked about 20 minutes after being exposed (though TSG was able to grab a few of the pages for posterity's sake). The premature obituaries, housed in a publicly accessible area of the CNN server and searchable via Google, were apparently the work of Peter Rentz, a senior multimedia designer at CNN. The mock-ups are virtually identical to the obituary design currently used by CNN when a notable person dies. (Elements of the obit template that CNN used for the Queen Mum can be seen in the Cheney design.) In addition to Cheney and Reagan, CNN also prepped online farewells to Fidel Castro, Bob Hope, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and Gerald Ford.
From Richard Lloyd Parry in al-Nasiriyah
for The Times Online
THE rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, which inspired America during one of the most difficult periods of the war, was not the heroic Hollywood story told by the US military, but a staged operation that terrified patients and victimised the doctors who had struggled to save her life, according to Iraqi witnesses.
Doctors at al-Nasiriyah general hospital said that the airborne assault had met no resistance and was carried out a day after all the Iraqi forces and Baath leadership had fled the city.
Four doctors and two patients, one of whom was paralysed and on an intravenous drip, were bound and handcuffed as American soldiers rampaged through the wards, searching for departed members of the Saddam regime.
An ambulance driver who tried to carry Private Lynch to the American forces close to the city was shot at by US troops the day before their mission. Far from winning hearts and minds, the US operation has angered and hurt doctors who risked their lives treating both Private Lynch and Iraqi victims of the war. “What the Americans say is like the story of Sinbad the Sailor — it’s a myth,” said Harith al-Houssona, who saved Private Lynch’s life after she was brought to the hospital by Iraqi military intelligence.
“They said that there was no medical care in Iraq, and that there was a very strong defence of this hospital. But there was no one here apart from doctors and patients, and there was nobody to fire at them.”
Dr Harith was on duty when Private Lynch was brought to al-Nasiriyah general by Iraqi soldiers a few days after her capture on March 23. She was a member of a 15-member US Army maintenance company convoy that was ambushed after taking a wrong turn near the city.
At the time, she was suffering from a head injury, a broken leg and arm, a bullet wound to her leg, a pulmonary oedema and her breathing was failing. In a hospital inundated with war casualties with few drugs, her condition was stabilised and she regained consciousness.
“She was very frightened when she woke up,” Dr Harith, 24, a junior resident at the hospital, said. “She kept saying: ‘Please don’t hurt me, don’t touch me.’ I told her that she was safe, she was in a hospital and that I was a doctor, and I never hurt a patient.”
Private Lynch’s military guards would allow no other doctor to tend to her and Dr Harith formed a friendship with her. She talked to him about her family, including her arguments about money with her father, and about her boyfriend, a Hispanic soldier named Ruben.
Dr Harith went outside the hospital during the bombing to get supplies of Private Lynch’s favourite drink, orange juice, and struggled to persuade her to eat.
“I told her she needed to eat to recover, and I brought her crackers, but her stomach was upset. She said as a joke: ‘I want to be slim.’
“I see (many) patients, but she was special. She’s a very simple person, a soldier, not well-educated. But she was very, very nice, with a lovely face and blonde hair.”
The Iraqi intelligence officers told the hospital that Private Lynch would soon be transferred to Baghdad, a prospect that terrified her.
After her condition stabilised, they ordered Dr Harith to transfer Jessica to another hospital.
Instead he told the ambulance driver to deliver her to one of the American outposts that had already been established on the ouskirts of the city.
“But when he reached their checkpoint, the Americans fired at him,” he said.
On April 1 the local Baathists fled al-Nasiriyah for Baghdad and arrived at the hospital looking for their prize captive. Dr Harith moved her to another part of the hospital, and other doctors told the soldiers that he was away.
“They said that they thought Jessica had died, and they didn’t know where she was,” he said. In their haste and confusion the soldiers left, leaving behind only a few critically injured soldiers.
The American “rescue” operation came on the night of April 2. The hospital was bombarded and soldiers arrived in helicopters and, according to the hospital doctors, in tanks that pulled up outside the hospital.
Most of the doctors fled to the shelter of the radiology department on the first floor.
“We heard them firing and shouting: ‘Go! Go! Go! Go!’ ” Dr Harith said. One group of soldiers dug up the graves of dead US soldiers outside the hospital, while another interrogated doctors about Ali Hassan al-Majid, the senior Baath party figure known as Chemical Ali, who had never been seen there. A third group looked for Private Lynch.
US soldiers videotaped the rescue, but among the many scenes not shown to the press at US Central Command in Doha was one of four doctors who were handcuffed and interrogated, along with two civilian patients, one of whom was immobile and connected to a drip. “They were doctors, with stethoscopes round their necks,” Dr Harith said.
“Even in war, a doctor should not be treated like that.”
Unluckiest of all was Abdul Razaq, one of the hospital administrators, who took shelter from the bombardment in Private Lynch’s room, believing that he would be safe.
He was seized and taken with the US soldiers on their helicopter to their base, where he was held for three days in an open-air prison camp.
“When he left his skin was the colour of yours,” another doctor, Mahmud, said. “When he came back, he was black.”
Bizarrely, the rescuers cut open a special bed, designed for patients with bed sores, which had been provided for Private Lynch’s use.
“They took samples of sand out of it,” Dr Harith said. “It was the only bed like it that we have, the only one in the governorate.”
Today, the hospital struggles on without adequate supplies of drugs and without running water or mains electricity.
“There are two faces to Americans,” Dr Harith said. “One is freedom and democracy, and giving kids sweets. The other is killing and hating my people. So I am very confused. I feel sad because I will never see Jessica again, and I feel happy because she is happy and has gone back to her life. If I could speak to her I would say: ‘Congratulations!’”
by MICHEL GUERRIN
for Le Monde
Translated for CounterPunch by NORMAN MADARASZ
Laurent Van der Stockt, a photographer working for the Gamma agency and under contract for the New York Times Magazine, followed the advance of the 3/4 Marines (3rd battalion, 4th regiment) for three weeks, up to the taking of Baghdad on April 9. He was accompanied by New York Times Magazine editor, Peter Maas. Born in Belgium in 1964, Laurent Van der Stockt mainly works in conflict zones: the first Gulf War, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Africa and the Occupied Territories. This is his eyewitness account of the Marines' march to Baghdad:
"Everything began at the Kuwait/Iraq border. I forced my way into the country and arrived at Safwan. American soldiers had seized the opportunity to tear up portraits of Saddam Hussein on the main street. They were doing this right in front of the local inhabitants, whose elation quickly vanished. The soldiers obviously didn't imagine that it was up to the Iraqis to be doing this, or that it was humiliating for them. These were the same soldiers who would topple down Saddam's statue in Baghdad three weeks later...
I understood that the Marines' general strategy was to not waste any time. In the cities they crossed, the Marines had to make a show of force. Then they would resume their advance by going as fast as possible up by the east through the desert, and avoid any contact with the population. It takes an effort to picture what an army looks like as it advances through the sands. It's an anthill. It's more than a city on the march. It's a world whose extremities are never seen. It's a cutting edge, mechanical version of Julius Caesar's army.
During the first few days, with colleagues from the New York Times and Newsweek, I tried to follow the convoys in a SUV by playing hide-and-seek. We were spending a lot of time then with the 1 500 Marines of the 3/4, commanded by Colonel Bryan P. McCoy. His troops gave us water, gas and food. In exchange for their tolerance, we respected the rules to not pass the convoy and to camp at such and such a place. We were just barely tolerated. The colonel could see that the 'few jokers were behaving well'. He knew we had experienced more wars than his own troops.
For McCoy, we were obviously interesting right from the start. We were the ones who could tell his story. Trust settled in between us. He let us drive at the head of the convoy. The Marines are generally less privileged than the army. They're trained to do the dirty work, the less honorary jobs. They have the oldest tanks, and the least up-to-date M16 rifles. They themselves translate 'USMC' (United States Marine Corps) by United States Misgodded Children, i.e. the US' forgotten children, forgotten by God.
Their motto is 'Search and Kill'. The 'Kilo' unit is nicknamed 'Killer Kilo'. The words 'Carnivore' or 'Blind Killer' are painted on their tanks. McCoy could snap with a 'Shame on You' -- a smile flashing across his face -- to the sniper who had just finished telling him: 'I've got eight, Sir, but only five'. Literally meaning: I've shot eight, but only five of them are dead.
I've never seen a war with so few 'returns'. The Iraqi army was like a ghost. It barely existed. Over the three weeks, I only saw the adversary fire a few short-range rockets and a few shots. I saw deserted trenches, a dead Iraqi soldier lying next to a piece of bread and some old equipment. Nothing that really made you feel that there was a real confrontation going on, nothing comparable to the massiveness of the means at the Americans' disposal.
On April 6, we were at the outskirts of Baghdad, facing a strategic bridge the Americans called 'the Baghdad Highway Bridge'. Residential zones were now much greater in number. American snipers got the order to kill anything coming in their direction. That night a teenager who was crossing the bridge was killed.
On the morning of April 7, the Marines decided to cross the bridge. A shell fell onto an armored personnel carrier. Two marines were killed. The crossing took on a tragic aspect. The soldiers were stressed, febrile. They were shouting. The risk didn't appear to be that great, so I followed their advance. They were howling, shouting orders and positions to each other. It sounded like something in-between a phantasm, mythology and conditioning. The operation was transformed into crossing the bridge over the River Kwai.
Later, there was some open terrain. The Marines were advancing and taking up position, hiding behind mounds of earth. They were still really tense. A small blue van was moving towards the convoy. Three not-very-accurate warning shots were fired. The shots were supposed to make the van stop. The van kept on driving, made a U-turn, took shelter and then returned slowly. The Marines opened fire. All hell broke loose. They were firing all over the place. You could hear 'Stop firing' being shouted. The silence that set in was overwhelming. Two men and a woman had just been riddled with bullets. So this was the enemy, the threat.
A second vehicle drove up. The same scenario was repeated. Its passengers were killed on the spot. A grandfather was walking slowly with a cane on the sidewalk. They killed him too (SEE PHOTO IN LE MONDE). As with the old man, the Marines fired on a SUV driving along the river bank that was getting too close to them. Riddled with bullets, the vehicle rolled over. Two women and a child got out, miraculously still alive. They sought refuge in the wreckage. A few seconds later, it flew into bits as a tank lobbed a terse shot into it.
Marines are conditioned to reach their target at any cost, by staying alive and facing any type of enemy. They abusively make use of disproportionate firepower. These hardened troops, followed by tons of equipment, supported by extraordinary artillery power, protected by fighter jets and cutting-edge helicopters, were shooting on local inhabitants who understood absolutely nothing of what was going on.
With my own eyes I saw about fifteen civilians killed in two days. I've gone through enough wars to know that it's always dirty, that civilians are always the first victims. But the way it was happening here, it was insane.
At the roughest moment, the most humane of the troops was called Doug. He gave real warning shots. From 800 yards he could hit a tire and, if that wasn't enough, then the motor. He saved ten lives in two hours by driving back civilians who were coming towards us.
Distraught soldiers were saying: 'I ain't prepared for this, I didn't come here to shoot civilians.' The colonel countered that the Iraqis were using inhabitants to kill marines, that 'soldiers were being disguised as civilians, and that ambulances were perpetrating terrorist attacks.'
I drove away a girl who had had her humerus pierced by a bullet. Enrico was holding her in his arms. In the rear, the girl's father was protecting his young son, wounded in the torso and losing consciousness. The man spoke in gestures to the doctor at the back of the lines, pleading: "I don't understand, I was walking and holding my children's hands. Why didn't you shoot in the air? Or at least shoot me?"
In Baghdad, McCoy sped up the march. He stopped taking the time to search houses one-by-one. He wanted to get to Paradise Place as soon as possible. The Marines were not firing on the thickening population. The course ended with Saddam's statue being toppled. There were more journalists at the scene than Baghdadis. Its five million inhabitants stayed at home."
Interviewed by Michel Guerrin for LE MONDE, April 12, 2003.
Translated for CounterPunch by Norman Madarasz (nmphdiol@yahoo.ca).
[from Commondreams: A transcript of the speech given by actor Tim Robbins to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2003. ]
TIM ROBBINS: Thank you. And thanks for the invitation. I had originally been asked here to talk about the war and our current political situation, but I have instead chosen to hijack this opportunity and talk about baseball and show business. (Laughter.) Just kidding. Sort of.
I can't tell you how moved I have been at the overwhelming support I have received from newspapers throughout the country in these past few days. I hold no illusions that all of these journalists agree with me on my views against the war. While the journalists' outrage at the cancellation of our appearance in Cooperstown is not about my views, it is about my right to express these views. I am extremely grateful that there are those of you out there still with a fierce belief in constitutionally guaranteed rights. We need you, the press, now more than ever. This is a crucial moment for all of us.
For all of the ugliness and tragedy of 9-11, there was a brief period afterward where I held a great hope, in the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as we worked at Ground Zero, in the midst of my children's terror at being so close to this crime against humanity, in the midst of all this, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something good could come out of it.
I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can't, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn.
And then came the speech: You are either with us or against us. And the bombing began. And the old paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us to show our patriotism by shopping and by volunteering to join groups that would turn in their neighbor for any suspicious behavior.
In the 19 months since 9-11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A unified American public has grown bitterly divided, and a world population that had profound sympathy and support for us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing us as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state.
This past weekend, Susan and I and the three kids went to Florida for a family reunion of sorts. Amidst the alcohol and the dancing, sugar-rushing children, there was, of course, talk of the war. And the most frightening thing about the weekend was the amount of times we were thanked for speaking out against the war because that individual speaking thought it unsafe to do so in their own community, in their own life. Keep talking, they said; I haven't been able to open my mouth.
A relative tells me that a history teacher tells his 11-year-old son, my nephew, that Susan Sarandon is endangering the troops by her opposition to the war. Another teacher in a different school asks our niece if we are coming to the school play. They're not welcome here, said the molder of young minds.
Another relative tells me of a school board decision to cancel a civics event that was proposing to have a moment of silence for those who have died in the war because the students were including dead Iraqi civilians in their silent prayer.
A teacher in another nephew's school is fired for wearing a T- shirt with a peace sign on it. And a friend of the family tells of listening to the radio down South as the talk radio host calls for the murder of a prominent anti-war activist. Death threats have appeared on other prominent anti-war activists' doorsteps for their views. Relatives of ours have received threatening e-mails and phone calls. And my 13-year-old boy, who has done nothing to anybody, has recently been embarrassed and humiliated by a sadistic creep who writes -- or, rather, scratches his column with his fingernails in dirt.
Susan and I have been listed as traitors, as supporters of Saddam, and various other epithets by the Aussie gossip rags masquerading as newspapers, and by their fair and balanced electronic media cousins, 19th Century Fox. (Laughter.) Apologies to Gore Vidal. (Applause.)
Two weeks ago, the United Way canceled Susan's appearance at a conference on women's leadership. And both of us last week were told that both we and the First Amendment were not welcome at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
A famous middle-aged rock-and-roller called me last week to thank me for speaking out against the war, only to go on to tell me that he could not speak himself because he fears repercussions from Clear Channel. "They promote our concert appearances," he said. "They own most of the stations that play our music. I can't come out against this war."
And here in Washington, Helen Thomas finds herself banished to the back of the room and uncalled on after asking Ari Fleischer whether our showing prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay on television violated the Geneva Convention.
A chill wind is blowing in this nation. A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown. If you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications.
Every day, the air waves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the public, like so many relatives and friends that I saw this weekend, sit in mute opposition and fear.
I am sick of hearing about Hollywood being against this war. Hollywood's heavy hitters, the real power brokers and cover-of-the- magazine stars, have been largely silent on this issue. But Hollywood, the concept, has always been a popular target.
I remember when the Columbine High School shootings happened. President Clinton criticized Hollywood for contributing to this terrible tragedy -- this, as we were dropping bombs over Kosovo. Could the violent actions of our leaders contribute somewhat to the violent fantasies of our teenagers? Or is it all just Hollywood and rock and roll?
I remember reading at the time that one of the shooters had tried to enlist to fight the real war a week before he acted out his war in real life at Columbine. I talked about this in the press at the time. And curiously, no one accused me of being unpatriotic for criticizing Clinton. In fact, the same radio patriots that call us traitors today engaged in daily personal attacks on their president during the war in Kosovo.
Today, prominent politicians who have decried violence in movies -- the "Blame Hollywooders," if you will -- recently voted to give our current president the power to unleash real violence in our current war. They want us to stop the fictional violence but are okay with the real kind.
And these same people that tolerate the real violence of war don't want to see the result of it on the nightly news. Unlike the rest of the world, our news coverage of this war remains sanitized, without a glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers or the women and children in Iraq. Violence as a concept, an abstraction -- it's very strange.
As we applaud the hard-edged realism of the opening battle scene of "Saving Private Ryan," we cringe at the thought of seeing the same on the nightly news. We are told it would be pornographic. We want no part of reality in real life. We demand that war be painstakingly realized on the screen, but that war remain imagined and conceptualized in real life.
And in the midst of all this madness, where is the political opposition? Where have all the Democrats gone? Long time passing, long time ago. (Applause.) With apologies to Robert Byrd, I have to say it is pretty embarrassing to live in a country where a five-foot- one comedian has more guts than most politicians. (Applause.) We need leaders, not pragmatists that cower before the spin zones of former entertainment journalists. We need leaders who can understand the Constitution, congressman who don't in a moment of fear abdicate their most important power, the right to declare war to the executive branch. And, please, can we please stop the congressional sing-a- longs? (Laughter.)
In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom, when an administration official releases an attack ad questioning the patriotism of a legless Vietnam veteran running for Congress, when people all over the country fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech, it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce. And it doesn't take much to shift the tide. My 11-year-old nephew, mentioned earlier, a shy kid who never talks in class, stood up to his history teacher who was questioning Susan's patriotism. "That's my aunt you're talking about. Stop it." And the stunned teacher backtracks and began stammering compliments in embarrassment.
Sportswriters across the country reacted with such overwhelming fury at the Hall of Fame that the president of the Hall admitted he made a mistake and Major League Baseball disavowed any connection to the actions of the Hall's president. A bully can be stopped, and so can a mob. It takes one person with the courage and a resolute voice.
The journalists in this country can battle back at those who would rewrite our Constitution in Patriot Act II, or "Patriot, The Sequel," as we would call it in Hollywood. We are counting on you to star in that movie. Journalists can insist that they not be used as publicists by this administration. (Applause.) The next White House correspondent to be called on by Ari Fleischer should defer their question to the back of the room, to the banished journalist du jour. (Applause.) And any instance of intimidation to free speech should be battled against. Any acquiescence or intimidation at this point will only lead to more intimidation. You have, whether you like it or not, an awesome responsibility and an awesome power: the fate of discourse, the health of this republic is in your hands, whether you write on the left or the right. This is your time, and the destiny you have chosen.
We lay the continuance of our democracy on your desks, and count on your pens to be mightier. Millions are watching and waiting in mute frustration and hope - hoping for someone to defend the spirit and letter of our Constitution, and to defy the intimidation that is visited upon us daily in the name of national security and warped notions of patriotism.
Our ability to disagree, and our inherent right to question our leaders and criticize their actions define who we are. To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the news media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our democracy's defeat. These are challenging times. There is a wave of hate that seeks to divide us -- right and left, pro-war and anti-war. In the name of my 11-year-old nephew, and all the other unreported victims of this hostile and unproductive environment of fear, let us try to find our common ground as a nation. Let us celebrate this grand and glorious experiment that has survived for 227 years. To do so we must honor and fight vigilantly for the things that unite us -- like freedom, the First Amendment and, yes, baseball. (Applause.)
While the loss of life, and potentially disastrous political ramifications,
from the current US action in Iraq are horrifying enough, the wholesale loss
of the collections of Baghdad's National Library and Archive, of the library
of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment and of the cuneiform clay
tablet archive in Baghdad's National Museum (see articles below) are an
intellectual extinction at the scale of the human species that beggars the
imagination.
As poets, we should resurrect the ghost of Charles Olson and unleash him on
the White House, Pentagon and CIA with a month's supply of benzedrine, Jim
Beam and cigarettes till they beg for mercy on their bloodied knees. And
then send in Ezra Pound and HD with typewriter bombs and lethal incantations
to finish them off.
Let us take some note of this major cultural catastrophe and direct hit to
poets--it's like we just lost our mother, kids. Mnemosyne, mother of the
muses. She who rocked the cradle of our civilization.
More proof that cultural and species extinction go hand in hand, in this
predatory epoch. The murderers have just blown a gap in the cultural record
to rival the great unconformities geologists and evolutionists will forever
scratch their heads over. For this we will be remembered, if there are any
heads to scratch a few hundred years from now.
In the meantime, I lay this huge crime squarely at the feet of the
destroyers-in-my-name who, in a charitable interpretation, knew not what
they wrought--- but who, in a more cynical light, knew exactly what they
were up to. Who blew open the doors to the archives while they barricaded
the Ministry of Oil.
Why waste time killing individuals? If you want to destroy a people, you
wipe out their memory, their history, their imagination. This is genocide,
ethnocide, matricide, a "crime against humanity" on a massive scale, if
those words have any meaning left to wring.
As poets we should, collectively, lodge a FORMAL PROTEST and expression of
outrage, demanding a full investigation and that Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney,
Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rove and Co. be tried for their matricidal
crimes against humanity.
As poets, can we find words to answer this deep and mortal blow? What bits
of Sumerian wisdom can you offer in this dark moment, friends?
Something more, I hope, than "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust . . . ?"
As poets, we should resurrect the ghost of Charles Olson and unleash him on
the White House, Pentagon and CIA with a month's supply of benzedrine, Jim
Beam and cigarettes till they beg for mercy on their bloodied knees. And
then send in Ezra Pound and HD with typewriter bombs and lethal incantations
to finish them off.
As poets, ultimately at fault for this destruction, as Robert Kocik has
intelligently and provocatively claimed, should we not be doing our own
collective penance?
Then again, as meek "postmoderns" I suppose we don't need to mourn the loss
of "origins." Should we take any consolation in Derrida's claim that poetry
is, by definition, what "survives the archive"?
SHAME ON US, Destroyers of Civilization!
In ignominy,
JS
*
Here's some of what we know:
Looters May Have Destroyed Priceless Cuneiform Archive
By Buy Gugliotta, Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 18, 2003; Page
A23
Looters at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities pillaged and, perhaps,
destroyed an archive of more than 100,000 cuneiform clay tablets -- a unique
and priceless trove of ancient Mesopotamian writings that included the
"Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original
shelves.
Experts described the archive as the world's least-studied large collection
of cuneiform -- the oldest known writing on Earth -- a record that covers
every aspect of Mesopotamian life over more than 3,000 years. The texts
resided in numbered boxes each containing as many as 400 3-inch-by-2-inch
tablets.
The Sippar Library, discovered in 1986 at a well-known neo-Babylonian site
near Baghdad, was one of the archive's crown jewels. Dating from the sixth
century B.C., it comprised only about 800 tablets, but it included hymns,
prayers, lamentations, bits of epics, glossaries, astronomical and
scientific texts, missing pieces of a flood legend that closely parallels
the biblical story of Noah, and the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi, the
ancient Babylonian lawgiver.
"This is the kind of discovery that one waits 100 years to see," said Yale's
Benjamin Foster, curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. "And now we'll
never have another chance. It's a tragedy of the first order." Foster said
only about two dozen of the Sippar Library tablets have been fully analyzed
and published.
UCLA Assyriologist Robert Englund noted that while some of the Sippar
material was similar, at least in part, to works in earlier finds, "the vast
majority of at least 100,000 texts in the archive are unique, very poorly
documented and barely studied, if at all. I'm more fearful for these
losses."
More at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48178-2003Apr17.html
*
April 15, 2003
The Sacking of Baghdad: Burning the History of Iraq by ROBERT FISK
Baghdad.
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the
arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National
Library and Archives, a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents,
including the old royal archives of Iraq, were turned to ashes in 3,000
degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious
Endowment was set ablaze.
I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of
Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history,
I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters
between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt
against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters
of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for
troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in
delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last
Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero;
with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on
Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic
library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these
fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning--flames 100 feet high
were bursting from the windows--I raced to the offices of the occupying
power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a
colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I
gave the map location, the precise name--in Arabic and English. I said the
smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five
minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the
scene--and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo,
printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad.
In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the Caliphate,
but even the dark years of the country's modern history, handwritten
accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and
military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to
the early 1900s. But the older files and archives were on the upper floors
of the library where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to
the building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards
and the concrete stairs that I climbedhad been cracked.
The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or
writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, standing
in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: why? So,
as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from the
shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind,
written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul or to
the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed
themselves "your slave". There was a request to protect a camel convoy of
tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul
Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request for perfume and
advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of Sharif Hussein to Baghdad
to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to give you our advice for
which you will be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If you don't take our
advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The
date was 1912.
Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and
artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the
opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz--soon to be Saudi
Arabia--while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan,
the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his
interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and
later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of recommendation for a
merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and
who works with the [Ottoman] government." This, in other words, was the
tapestry of Arab history--all that is left of it, which fell into The
Independent's hands as the mass of documents crackled in the immense heat of
the ruins.
King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose staff are the authors of
many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. His son Faisel
became king of Iraq--Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after the French
threw him out of Damascus--and his brother Abdullah became the first king of
Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the grandfather of the present-day
Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab
world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan's
grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris
river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of
thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq.
Why?
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/
(A sign of our blinkered times that this item should go under the heading
"argument" rather than news.)
*
From Reuters:
U.S. Culture Advisers Resign Over Iraq Museum Looting Fri Apr 18, 2:24 By
Niala Boodhoo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two cultural advisers to the Bush administration have
resigned in protest over the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale
looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum.
Martin Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural
Property for eight years, and panel member Gary Vikan said they resigned
because the U.S. military had had advance warning of the danger to Iraq's
historical treasures.
"We certainly know the value of oil but we certainly don't know the value of
historical artifacts," Vikan, director of the Walters Art Gallery in
Baltimore, told Reuters on Thursday.
At the start of the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq, military forces quickly
secured valuable oil fields.
Baghdad's museums, galleries and libraries are empty shells, destroyed in a
wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended Saddam Hussein's rule
last week, although antiquities experts have said they were given assurances
months ago from U.S. military planners that Iraq's historic artifacts and
sites would be protected by occupying forces.
"It didn't have to happen," Sullivan told Reuters. "In a pre-emptive war
that's the kind of thing you should have planned for." Sullivan sent his
letter of resignation earlier this week.
The Iraqi National Museum held rare artifacts documenting the development of
mankind in ancient Mesopotamia, one of the world's earliest civilizations.
Among the museum collection were more than 80,000 cuneiform tablets, some of
which had yet to be translated.
Professional art thieves may have been behind some of the looting, said
leading archeologists gathered in Paris on Thursday to seek ways to rescue
Iraq's cultural heritage.
Among the priceless treasures missing are the 5,000-year-old Vase of Uruk
and the Harp of Ur. The bronze Statue of Basitki from the Akkadian kingdom
is also gone, somehow hauled out of the museum despite its huge weight.
The White House repeated on Thursday that the looting was unfortunate but
the U.S. military had worked hard to preserve the infrastructure of Iraq.
"It is unfortunate that there was looting and damage done to the museum and
we have offered rewards, as Secretary Rumsfeld has said, for individuals who
may have taken items from the museum to bring those back," White House
spokeswoman Claire Buchan said in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush is
spending a long Easter break.
FBI Director Robert Mueller added that the bureau was sending agents to Iraq
to assist with criminal investigations and had issued Interpol alerts to all
member nations regarding the potential sale of stolen artifacts.
"We recognize the importance of these treasures to the Iraqi people and as
well to the world as a whole," Mueller said. "And we are firmly committed to
doing whatever we can in order to secure the return of these treasures to
the people of Iraq."
The president appoints the 11-member advisory committee, which works through
the State Department to advise the executive office on the 1970 UNESCO
Convention on international protection of cultural objects.
*
And the following came by way of George Quasha, before news of the library
burnings had even hit:
"USA Encouraged Ransacking"
This is a translation of an article from April 11 from Dagens Nyheter,
Sweden’s largest newspaper, based in Stockholm. The article was written by
Ole Rothenborg and translated by Joe Valasek. Khaled Bayomi, has taught and
researched on Middle Eastern conflicts for ten years at the University of
Lund where he is also working on his doctorate. He has given his permission
for this interview to be widely disseminated.
Khaled Bayomi looks surprised when the American officer on TV complains that
they don’t have the resources to stop the plundering in Baghdad. "I happened
to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the
plundering."
Khaled Bayomi traveled from Europe to Baghdad to be a human shield and
arrived on the same day that the war began. About this he can tell many
stories but the most interesting is certainly his eyewitness account of the
wave of plundering.
"I had gone to see some friends who live near a dilapidated area just past
Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris. It was the 8th of April and the
fighting was so intense that I was unable to return to the other side of the
river. In the afternoon it became perfectly quiet and four American tanks
took places on the edge of the slum area. The soldiers shot two Sudanese
guards who stood at their posts outside a local administration building on
the other side of Haifa Avenue. Then they blasted apart the doors to the
building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to
come close to them. "
"The entire morning, everyone who had tried to cross the road had been shot.
But in the strange silence after all the shooting, people gradually became
curious. After 45 minutes, the first Baghdad citizens dared to come out.
Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they
wanted in the building."
"The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only
300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank
crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring
building, and the plundering continued there".
"I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not
partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of
shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern
Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds
there, one that plundered and one with watched with disgust."
"Are you saying that it was US troops who initiated the plundering?’
"Absolutely. The lack of jubilant scenes meant that the American troops
needed pictures of Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated hatred for
Saddam’s regime."
"The people pulled down a large statue of Saddam?"
"Did they? It was an American tank that did that, right beside the hotel
where all the journalists stay. Until lunchtime on April 9, I did not see
one destroyed Saddam portrait. If people had wanted to pull down statues
they could have taken down some of the small ones without any help from
American tanks. If it had been a political upheaval, the people would have
pulled down statues first and then plundered."
"Isn’t it good that Saddam is gone?"
"He’s not gone. He has broken his army down into very small groups. That’s
why there hasn’t been a large battle. About the official state, you could
say that Saddam dissolved that already in 1992 and he’s built a parallel
tribal structure that is totally decisive in Iraq. When the US began the
war, Saddam abandoned the state completely and now depends on the tribal
structure. That was why he abandoned the large cities without a fight."
"Now the US is compelled to do everything themselves because there’s no
political body within the country which will challenge the existing
structure. The two who came in from outside the country were annihilated at
once. (The reference here is to General Nazar al-Khazraji, who returned from
Denmark and the Shiite Muslim leader, Abdul Majid al-Khoei.) They were cut
to pieces with swords and knives by a furious crowd in Najaf because they
were thought to be American puppets. According to the Danish newspaper BT,
al-Khazraji was brought from Denmark to Iraq by the CIA."
"Now we have an occupying power in place in Iraq that has not said how long
it intends to remain, has not given any plan for civilian rule and no date
for general elections. Enormous chaos is now to be expected."
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1435&a=129852
After an amazing people's poetry gathering here in New York City over the past weekend, "poets for Peace" is energized to continue bringing poems against the war and poems for peace directly to the people.
We will plan our next public reading for Friday April 25th from 1-3pm on the steps of the main branch of The New York Public Library at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue near the southmost lion. Rain or shine. All poets are invited to attend and read their own or other's poems.
Also please note that Poets Against The War (www.poetsagainstthewar.org) is calling for a day of special events on the first of May. We will plan a reading for that day as well -details to follow later.
If you have any suggestions for this or future events please feel free to email me at your convenience.
peace,
Nathaniel A. Siegel
poets for Peace
poets against the war
POETRY IS NEWS
"do one thing a day to make your heart dance." yoko ono from Peace Event for
John Lennon
(Gothic News Service, 04/16) They gather daily now, in contingents of 81,
dressed in black gowns each bearing 9 thin vertical gold stripes - gold
caps and veils over half of their white chalked faces, each with a thick,
black greased arc under the one exposed left eye. On the Washington Mall,
between high noon and six o¹clock, in neatly defined rows and columns 9
across and 9 deep the figures move in a silent, uniform procession,
walking in diagonals across the Mall from one Museum to the next, starting
from the National Gallery of Art, moving back and forth to the National Air
& Space Museum, American History, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery,
Natural History, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, American History, and the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum. The procession stops momentarily at the porch or
entrance of each Museum, makes a slight, speechless bow, before turning
around in unison to slowly proceed across the grass to the next one, moving
from one end of the Mall to the other, turning around at the Holocaust
Museum, and retracing its steps to again momentarily bow before each Museum.
For many on-lookers, most of whom join the apparent ritual out of sympathy
or curiosity, the meaning of the procession becomes more clear when they
notice a discrete image of a golden harp that is sewn into the upper sleeve
of each gown. "Sumeria, National Museum, Iraq, the solid gold harp, 3500 BC,
stolen or smashed to pieces," several whisper. "Nine strings on the harp,
nine gold stripes on the gowns, nine lines in procession. It¹s a mourning, a
grieving."
"The oldest song - a ballad - in the world," one kind scholarly man offered,
"was probably first played on the Sumerian harp. The tone of each string was
connected to the movement and mythical powers of the moon, the planets and
the stars. This stolen or destroyed harp is at the origin of all western
music." Like a bunch of ancient Greeks, the mourners stay mute, as if
with the exception of the procession's color and movement - yet unable to
rise above the trauma of cultural loss.
A few if the on-lookers were less kind. "Get over it," one young person
yelled from the Holocaust Museum entrance. "Fragmentation defined the
Twentieth century and its going to define this one and probably the next.
The job of the artist and poet is to pick up the rubble and either weld it
into something beautiful or frame and enjoy the resonance of pieces in the
ruin." After pausing for a moment probably because many listening were
shocked he added, "And don¹t you worry, if American generals and soldiers
permitted it in Iraq, if it¹s in the Government¹s interest, they can do the
same thing here. The barbarians are always at the gates."
Not everybody bought into his paranoid vision which was followed by a
demonic laugh - but it provided a curious juxtaposition to today¹s
procession on the Mall. This week it¹s been reported that several similar
mute processions have formed in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Athens,
Istanbul, Cairo, and Damascus each of them representing the destroyed or
stolen treasures of Arts and Letters from Baghdad¹s Museums and Libraries.
(c) Gothics News Service
Please feel free to distribute through out the Web
Cable's War Coverage Suggests a New 'Fox Effect' on Television
by Jim Rutenberg
The two commentators were gleeful as they skewered the news media and antiwar protesters in Hollywood.
"They are absolutely committing sedition, or treason," one commentator, Michael Savage, said of the protesters one recent night.
His colleague, Joe Scarborough, responded: "These leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass. Isn't it time to make them stand up and be counted for their views?"
The conversation did not take place on A.M. radio, in an Internet chat room or even on the Fox News Channel. Rather, Mr. Savage, a longtime radio talk-show host, and Mr. Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, were speaking during prime time on MSNBC, the cable news network owned by Microsoft and General Electric and overseen by G.E.'s NBC News division.
For those of you who like to be amazed, you can preview the collected
political science writings of Language poet Bruce Andrews at:
www.arras.net/andrews_poli_sci.htm
An introduction by Jeff Derksen and interview with Andrews are forthcoming after the long hot summer. But for now, the titles, all downloadable for free at the above link:
poli sci 01: social rules and the state as a social actor (1975)
poli sci 02: explaining and understanding state action (1976)
poli sci 03: public constraint and american policy in vietnam (1976)
poli sci 04: representation & irresponsibility in foreign policy (1977)
poli sci 05: the piecing together of humpty dumpty: graduate education in
international political economy (1978)
poli sci 06: economic diplomacy & the new international order: rhetorical
questions (1979)
poli sci 07: the language of state action (1979)
poli sci 08: privacy and the protection of national security (1980)
poli sci 09: surplus security & the domestic paradigm (1980)
poli sci 10: criticizing economic democracy (1980)
poli sci 11: the political economy of world capitalism: theory and practice
(1982)
poli sci 12: the prison-house of the capitalist world system (1982)
poli sci 13: the domestic content of international desire (1984)
I spent a lot of time try to make this thing hot clickable, but or some reason it won't work in the blog. So you have to click the dollars below, a new window will open up, and you can click through to the various web sites embedded therein.
... from The Onion, of course.
An open letter from Ellison Horne:
To All:
I'm urgently calling for an investigation of the broadcast by CNN and CNN Headline News's reporting of Michael Moore's acceptance speech last month at the Academy Awards.
CNN and CNN Headline News aired a significantly different audio response to Mr. Moore's speech than was orginally broadcasted on ABC.
It seems that someone has manipulated the audio to give the impression there was constant loud "booing" throughout Moore's speech, when in reality, there was only marginal booing often overridden with cheers and applause.
This needs to be fully investigated.
As you may well know it is not easy to demonstrate how the corporate media influences mass opinion, but here we have a clear and shocking example of unethical behavior through manipulation of a historic event.
Let's help the public to better understand corporate media bias by making CNN and CNN Headline News face the REAL story.
Sincerely,
Ellison Horne
Horne and his friend Lisa Rein have built a web page housing digital clips of both ABC's live audio and CNN's rebroadcast, along with a waveform analysis of both clips. Decide for yourself.
Why should we listen to Hans Blix
and all those other foreign pricks:
the faggot French who swallow snails
and kiss the cheeks of other males:
the Germans with their Nazi past
and leather pants and cars that last
longer than ours: the ungrateful Chinks
we let make all our clothes; those finks
should back us in whatever task--
we shouldn't even have to ask:
and as for creepy munchkin Putin...
a slimy asshole-- no disputing!?
We saved those Russians from the reds--
they owe support. Those wimpish heads
of tiny states without the power
to have a radio in the shower
should fall in line behind George Bush
and join with him and Blair to push
the sword of truth through Saddam's guts
(no need for any ifs or buts)
we'll even do it without the backing
of UN cowards and their quacking--
remember how we thrashed the Nips
and fried them like potato chips?
God's on our side, he's white and Yankee
he'd drop the bombs, he'd drive a tank: we
know he's stronger than their Allah
as is our righteousness and valor!
We'll clip Mohammed's ears and pecker
And then move on to napalm Mecca.
Tom Raworth is a British poet. His most recent book of poems is Tottering State. He submitted Listen Up to the PoetsfortheWar.org website, hoping to sneak it past the censors. To date, they have not published the poem. However, late word comes that the site's proprietor, Charles Weatherford, has offered him a position as an "organizer" in their movement. (Counterpunch)
If W ain't the Ace of Spades... then who is???
Remember--it's not conspiracy, it's collusion. And it's not a theory...
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Cast your vote today!
http://www.greatusaflags.com/product_info.php?products_id=94&aff_id=15&aff_sub_id=1
From Boing Boing:
"The March 2, 1998 issue of Time ran a piece by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft titled, "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam."
Here's an excerpt from the article:
We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.
As America invades, judges and acts without regard to world opinion it exposes more clearly the dire need to hold the President accountable to world opinion for re-election. Change America from with-in and from with-out. End geopolitical barriers to justice.
The final two candidates that America produces will be voted on by every country that has a legitimatized voting system. Each foreign vote will count 1/8th the American citizen's vote.
Cars passing their messages along country crossroads
to populaces cement-networked on flatness,
giant white mist on earth
and a Wichita Eagle-Beacon headlines
"Kennedy Urges Cong Get Chair in Negotiations"
The War is gone,
Language emerging on the motel news stand,
the right magic
Formula, the language known
in the back of the mind before, now in black print
daily consciousness
Eagle News Services Saigon-
Headline Surrounded Vietcong Charge Into Fire Fight
the suffering not yet ended
for others
The last spasms of the dragon of pain
shoot thru the muscles
a crackling around the eyeballs
of a sensitive yellow boy by a muddy wall
Continued from page one area
after the Marines killed 256 Vietcong captured 31
ten day operation Harvest Moon last December
Language language
U.S. Military Spokesmen
Language language
Cong death toll
has soared to 100 in First Air Cavalry
Division's Sector of
Language language
Operation White Wing near Bong Son
Some of the
Language language
Communist
Language language soldiers
charged so desperately
they were struck with six or seven bullets before they fell
Language Language M 60 Machine Guns
Language language in La Drang Valley
the terrain is rougher infested with leeches and scorpions
The war was over several hours ago!
Oh at last again the radio opens
blue Invitations!
Angelic Dylan singing across the nation
"When all your children start to resent you
Won't you come see me, O~een Jane?"
His youthful voice making glad
the brown endless meadows
His tenderness penetrating aether,
soft prayer on the airwaves,
Language language, and sweet music too
even unto thee,
hairy flatness!
even unto thee
despairing Burns!
Future speeding on swift wheels
straight to the heart of Wichita!
Now radio voices cry population hunger world
of unhappy people
waiting for Man to be born
O man in America!
you certainly smell good
the radio says
passing mysterious families of winking towers
grouped round a quonset-hut on a hillock-
feed storage or military fear factory here?
Sensitive City, Ooh! Hamburger & Skelley's Gas
lights feed man and machine,
Kansas Electric Substation aluminum robot
signals thru thin antennae towers
above the empty football field
at Sunday dusk
to a solitary derrick that pumps oil from the unconscious
working night & day
& factory gas-flares edge a huge golf course
where tired businessmen can come and play-
Cloverleaf, Merging Traffic East Wichita turnoff
McConnell Airforce Base
nourishing the city-
Lights rising in the suburbs
Supermarket Texaco brilliance starred
over streetlamp vertebrae on Kellogg,
green jeweled traffic lights
confronting the windshield,
Centertown ganglion entered!
Crowds of autos moving with their lightshine,
signbulbs winking in the driver's eyeball-
The human nest collected, neon lit,
and sunburst signed
for business as usual, except on the Lord's Day-
Redeemer Lutheran's three crosses lit on the lawn
reminder of our sins
and Titsworth offers insurance on Hydraulic
by De Voors Guard's Mortuary for outmoded bodies
of the human vehicle
which no Titsworth of insurance will customize for resale-
So home, traveler, past the newspaper language factory
under Union Station railroad bridge on Douglas
to the center of the Vortex, calmly returned
to Hotel Eaton-
Carry Nation began the war on Vietnam here
with an angry smashing ax
attacking Wine-
Here fifty years ago, by her violence
began a vortex of hatred that defoliated the Mekong Delta-
Proud Wichita! vain Wichita
cast the first stone!-
That murdered my mother
who died of the communist anticommunist psychosis
in the madhouse one decade long ago
complaining about wires of masscommunication in her head
and phantom political voices in the air
besmirching her girlish character.
Many another has suffered death and madness
in the Vortex from Hydraulic
to the end of 17th-enough!
The war is over now-
Except for the souls
held prisoner in Niggertown
still pining for love of your tender white bodies O children of Wichita!
February 14, 1966
By Ruth Conniff
Dennis Kucinich is clearly holding down the left end of the bench of Democratic Presidential contenders for 2004. The co-chair of the Progressive Caucus in Congress, an advocate of nonviolence who has proposed that the U.S. government create a Department of Peace, a vegan because he believes in "the sacredness of all species," and a pro-labor environmentalist who marched in the streets of Seattle and Washington, D.C., Kucinich is, without a doubt, the progressive candidate. The argument for his candidacy, unlikely though it may be, is that it represents a point of view the Democrats should be forced to deal with.
The former "boy mayor" of Cleveland, now fifty-six, is the most vocal opponent of war with Iraq in the House of Representatives. A year ago, he began making impassioned speeches on the subject, and lately he's showing up on the talk show circuit as a lonely voice for peace. Meet the Press, Crossfire, Hardball, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, among others, have had him on to debate the Bush Administration's Iraq policy – though the Washington establishment is not taking his Presidential bid seriously. (The New York Times ranks him somewhere below Al Sharpton as a "viable candidate," and his February announcement in Iowa that he was running was greeted with a resounding shrug by most of the mainstream media.)
Kucinich thinks the pundits are in for a surprise. "They try to make it appear that the positions I'm taking are way out, but they're not," he told me on the phone recently. "As the war effort continues, I think you'll see that more and more people will join in and want to be involved with the campaign."
Steve Cobble agrees. A longtime progressive political strategist who worked for Jesse Jackson, Cobble compares Kucinich to Jackson in 1988. He thinks he could do much better than expected, thanks to the support of people the politicos in Washington don't notice.
"The people who are dismissing Kucinich out of hand are the same people who are shocked by this big anti-war movement that has had such growth in so short a time," says Cobble, who is an adviser to the candidate. Like the late Senator Paul Wellstone, Kucinich is long on big ideas and short on glitz. He is neither tall nor telegenic, neither wealthy nor well connected. And, of course, there's his minimal national name recognition.
But no one voted Ralph Nader "Mr. Charisma" five years ago, Cobble points out, and Nader became a pop star on college campuses during the 2000 campaign. "Young people responded to Nader in 2000," says Cobble. "It was the ideas and the sense of integrity, not blowing in the wind. Dennis is going to give the same vibes."
That's where the comparison to Nader ends, however. "I have no interest in a third party candidacy. None," says Kucinich. "I want to do it the other way – bring third party candidates into the [Democratic] Party and get support in the primaries." Taking much of Nader's message into the Democratic Party may be a worthy goal. But how far will it get Kucinich?
If a lot of progressives have a hangover from the last Presidential election and are feeling down, Kucinich and his campaign staff are energized by the massive anti-war and anti-globalization demonstrations around the world and by the feeling that a newly active grass-roots movement is rising up and making itself heard.
Kucinich, who opposes NAFTA, is the only candidate proudly giving voice to the fair trade movement. And his opposition to weapons in space and civil liberties violations under the Patriot Act are welcome among a Democratic base eager for a strong opposition to Bush.
"Whereas everyone else says, 'Gee, I'd have used a different airplane, or maybe we should use this missile instead of that one,' he'll be a clarion call for peace," says progressive Wisconsin Democrat and labor lawyer Ed Garvey. Now a supporter of Kucinich, Garvey was moved by the experience of hearing him speak out early against the Iraq war. "The passion and intellectual depth of his speech was really impressive."
Certainly, Kucinich, who quotes long passages of poetry and has a deeply thoughtful, almost starry-eyed quality, is not your usual politician. So is Kucinich the peace movement candidate, as Eugene McCarthy was in 1968?
"This movement precedes a war. The 1968 movement happened years after war began," Kucinich says. His campaign takes on not only war but also a complex array of domestic and international concerns.
Kucinich denounces the Bush Administration's whole political philosophy of "projecting aggression into the world." The issues of his campaign are empire versus democracy, globalization versus equality, war versus peace, a private health insurance system that leaves seventy-five million people intermittently uncovered versus national health care, the Patriot Act versus the Bill of Rights. Get him going, and he'll blow your ears back with a litany of calamitous news.
"People are fearful," Kucinich says. "My candidacy steps forward and says, 'Hey, stop! Hold it!' We're losing what's dear to our country. We have a foreign policy that's setting the stage for new wars. We're talking about first use of nuclear weapons. We still have chemical and biological weapons, which disqualifies us from the chemical and biological weapons treaty. The polar ice caps are still melting. Islands in the Pacific are seeing the water rising. Meteorological changes suggest that global climate change is here to stay. The Kyoto climate change treaty is urgent. The U.S. has to recognize the interconnectedness, interdependence, of the world. We're not doing it. I'm looking at the entire structure of our society and saying, how can government be relevant?"
Whoa! That's Kucinich. Passion and intellectual depth? Yes. Glib pol? Not exactly.
Kucinich has one big problem with a grass-roots, progressive base: His position on abortion. Until last year, he maintained a nearly perfect voting record according to National Right to Life, and scored an absolute zero in the vote tally kept by the National Abortion Rights Action League. Since then, he says, his position has evolved, and he has broken ranks with his former colleagues on anti-abortion legislation.
"I withheld my support on a number of bills in the last year," he says, adding that the aggressive Republican effort to overturn Roe v. Wade persuaded him to help protect women's fundamental constitutional right to abortion.
"I don't believe in abortion, but I do believe in choice," he says.
How does that work?
"I don't believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned," he says. "I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the way the choices are framed in the House of Representatives." He says the Republican assault on Roe v. Wade has become an assault on the Constitution. He now sees the issue as "a question of equality – whether a woman was going to be equal in society and have constitutional protections. Women will not be equal to men if that constitutionally protected right is denied. Criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional."
Kucinich says he wants to overcome the us-and-them nature of the abortion debate by supporting a kind of nurturing environment for women and children, including full employment, a living wage, universal health care, and affordable and high quality child care. He wants abortion to be legal but rare.
"It's not wrong to support life, and it's not wrong to support a woman's right to choose," he says. "We have to permit both points of view to have expression. But there is a point at which the Constitution cannot be undermined. I've never advocated a constitutional amendment to repeal Roe v. Wade."
Kucinich thinks he can radically change politics in America. He cites his successes as the nation's youngest mayor, standing up to the privatization of Cleveland's public utilities, as well as coming to the aid of its steel industry and its hospitals when they were about to be shut down. "We changed the outcome," he says. "Government presents opportunities for profound creativity."
Cobble cites Barry Goldwater and George McGovern – dark horse candidates who didn't win the Presidency but transformed politics. "It's worth taking this burgeoning peace movement into the party, whether or not a candidate who voted for the war resolution wins," says Cobble. "We have a group of people in the White House that overtly put empire, first strike, and the occupation of other countries on the table," he adds. "We need a widespread discussion of this, and not many people are volunteering for the job."
Even former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who is running another anti-war candidacy, is not taking on the big picture the way Kucinich is.
"We need someone like Dennis, who has the guts to carry this case," Cobble says.
Says Kucinich: "If I'm able to win some early primaries I'll be able to move these domestic concerns right to the top of the campaign concerns for the party. . . . FDR said in '33 we have nothing to fear but fear itself. We can create a new world. It's possible."
Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives - a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq - were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.
I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning - flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows - I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name - in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene - and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the Caliphate, but even the dark years of the country's modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs that I climbed had been cracked.
The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: why?
So, as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul or to the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed themselves "your slave". There was a request to protect a camel convoy of tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a request for perfume and advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of Sharif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If you don't take our advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.
Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz - soon to be Saudi Arabia - while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government." This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history - all that is left of it, which fell into The Independent's hands as the mass of documents crackled in the immense heat of the ruins.
King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose staff are the authors of many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. His son Faisel became king of Iraq - Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after the French threw him out of Damascus - and his brother Abdullah became the first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the grandfather of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan's grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?
by Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert
April 13, 2003
(1) Why did the U.S. invade Iraq, in your view?
These are naturally speculations, and policy makers may have varying motives. But we can have a high degree of confidence about the answers given by Bush-Powell and the rest; these cannot possibly be taken seriously. They have gone out of their way to make sure we understand that, by a steady dose of self-contradiction ever since last September when the war drums began to beat. One day the "single question" is whether Iraq will disarm; in today's version (April 12): "We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction -- that is what this war was about and is about." That was the pretext throughout the whole UN-disarmament farce, though it was never easy to take seriously; UNMOVIC was doing a good job in virtually disarming Iraq, and could have continued, if that were the goal. But there is no need to discuss it, because after stating solemnly that this is the "single question," they went on the next day to announce that it wasn't the goal at all: even if there isn't a pocket knife anywhere in Iraq, the US will invade anyway, because it is committed to "regime change." The next day we hear that there's nothing to that either; thus at the Azores summit, where Bush-Blair issued their ultimatum to the UN, they made it clear that they would invade even if Saddam and his gang left the country. So "regime change" is not enough. The next day we hear that the goal is "democracy" in the world. Pretexts range over the lot, depending on audience and circumstances, which means that no sane person can take the charade seriously.
The one constant is that the US must end up in control of Iraq.
Saddam Hussein was authorized to suppress, brutally, a 1991 uprising that might have overthrown him because "the best of all worlds" for Washington would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" (by then an embarrassment), which would rule the country with an "iron fist" as Saddam had done with US support and approval (NYT chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman). The uprising would have left the country in the hands of Iraqis who might not have subordinated themselves sufficiently to Washington. The murderous sanctions regime of the following years devastated the society, strengthened the tyrant, and compelled the population to rely for survival on his (highly efficient) system for distributing basic goods. The sanctions thus undercut the possibility of the kind of popular revolt that had overthrown an impressive series of other monsters who had been strongly supported by the current incumbents in Washington up to the very end of their bloody rule: Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, Mobutu, Suharto, and a long list of others, some of them easily as tyrannical and barbaric as Saddam. Had it not been for the sanctions, Saddam probably would have gone the same way, as has been pointed out for years by the Westerners who know Iraq best, Denis Halliday and Hans van Sponeck (though one has to go to Canada, England, or elsewhere to find their writings). But overthrow of the regime from within would not be acceptable either, because it would leave Iraqis in charge. The Azores summit merely reiterated that stand.
The question of who rules Iraq remains the prime issue of contention. The US-backed opposition demands that the UN play a vital role in post-war Iraq and rejects US control of reconstruction or government (Leith Kubba, one of the most respected secular voices in the West, connected with the National Endowment of Democracy). One of the leading Shi'ite opposition figures, Sayed Muhamed Baqer al-Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), just informed the press that "we understand this war to be about imposing US hegemony over Iraq," and perceive the US as "an occupying rather than a liberating force." He stressed that the UN must supervise elections, and called on "foreign troops to withdraw from Iraq" and leave Iraqis in charge.
US policy-makers have a radically different conception. They must impose a client regime in Iraq, following the practice elsewhere in the region, and most significantly, in the regions that have been under US domination for a century, Central America and the Caribbean. That too is well-understood. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to Bush I, just repeated the obvious: "What's going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take over."
The same holds throughout the region. Recent studies reveal that from Morocco to Lebanon to the Gulf, about 95% of the population want a greater role in government for Islamic religious figures, and the same percentage believe that the sole US interest in the region is to control its oil and strengthen Israel. Antagonism to Washington has reached unprecedented heights, and the idea that Washington would institute a radical change in policy and tolerate truly democratic elections, respecting the outcome, seems rather fanciful, to say the least.
Turning to the question, one reason for the invasion, surely, is to gain control over the world's second largest oil reserves, which will place the US in an even more powerful position of global domination, maintaining "a stranglehold on the global economy," as Michael Klare describes the long-term objective, which he regards as the primary motive for war. However, this cannot explain the timing. Why now?
The drumbeat for war began in September 2002, and the government-media propaganda campaign achieved a spectacular success. Very quickly, the majority of the population came to believe that Iraq posed an imminent threat to US security, even that Iraq was involved in 9-11 (up from 3% after 9-11) and was planning new attacks. Not surprisingly, these beliefs correlated closely with support for the planned war. The beliefs are unique to the US. Even in Kuwait and Iran, which were invaded by Saddam Hussein, he was not feared, though he was despised. They know perfectly well that Iraq was the weakest state in the region, and for years they had joined others in trying to reintegrate Iraq into the regional system, over strong US objections. But a highly effective propaganda assault drove the American population far off the spectrum of world opinion, a remarkable achievement.
The September propaganda assault coincided with two important events. One was the opening of the mid-term election campaign. Karl Rove, the administration's campaign manager, had already pointed out that Republicans have to "go to the country" on the issue of national security, because voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better job of...protecting America." One didn't have to be a political genius to realize that if social and economic issues dominated the election, the Bush administration did not have a chance. Accordingly, it was necessary to concoct a huge threat to our survival, which the powerful leader will manage to overcome, miraculously. For the elections, the strategy barely worked. Polls reveal that voters maintained their preferences, but suppressed concerns over jobs, pensions, benefits, etc., in favor of security. Something similar will be needed for the presidential campaign. All of this is second nature for the current incumbents. They are mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush administrations, and know that they were able to run the country for 12 years, carrying out domestic programs that the public largely opposed, by pushing the panic button regularly: Libyan attempting to "expel us from the world" (Reagan), an air base in Grenada from which the Russians would bomb us, Nicaragua only "two-days driving time from Harlingen Texas," waving their copies of Mein Kampf as they planned to take over the hemisphere, black criminals about to rape your sister (Willie Horton, the 1988 presidential campaign), Hispanic narcotraffickers about to destroy us, and on and on.
To maintain political power is an extremely important matter if the narrow sectors of power represented by the Bush administration hope to carry out their reactionary domestic program over strong popular opposition, if possible even to institutionalize them, so it will be hard to reconstruct what is being dismantled.
Something else happened in September 2002: the administration released its National Security Strategy, sending many shudders around the world, including the US foreign policy elite. The Strategy has many precedents, but does break new ground: for the first time in the post-war world, a powerful state announced, loud and clear, that it intends to rule the world by force, forever, crushing any potential challenge it might perceive. This is often called in the press a doctrine of "pre-emptive war." That is crucially wrong; it goes vastly beyond pre-emption. Sometimes it is called more accurately a doctrine of "preventive war." That too understates the doctrine. No military threat, however remote, need be "prevented"; challenges can be concocted at will, and may not involve any threat other than "defiance"; those who pay attention to history know that "successful defiance" has often been taken to be justification for resort to force in the past.
When a doctrine is announced, some action must be taken to demonstrate that it is seriously intended, so that it can become a new "norm in international relations," as commentators will soberly explain. What is needed is a war with an "exemplary quality," Harvard Middle East historian Roger Owen pointed out, discussing the reasons for the attack on Iraq. The exemplary action teaches a lesson that others must heed, or else.
Why Iraq? The experimental subject must have several important qualities. It must be defenseless, and it must be important; there's no point illustrating the doctrine by invading Burundi. Iraq qualified perfectly in both respects. The importance is obvious, and so is the required weakness. Iraq was not much of a military force to begin with, and had been largely disarmed through the 1990s while much of the society was driven to the edge of survival. Its military expenditures and economy were about one-third those of Kuwait, with 10% of its population, far below others in the region, and of course the regional superpower, Israel, by now virtually an offshore military base of the US. The invading force not only had utterly overwhelming military power, but also extensive information to guide its actions from satellite observation and overflights for many years, and more recently U-2 flights on the pretext of disarmament, surely sending data directly back to Washington.
Iraq was therefore a perfect choice for an "exemplary action" to establish the new doctrine of global rule by force as a "norm of international relations." A high official involved in drafting the National Security Strategy informed the press that its publication "was the signal that Iraq would be the first test, but not the last." "Iraq became the petri dish in which this experiment in pre-emptive policy grew," the New York Times reported -- misstating the policy in the usual way, but otherwise accurate.
All of these factors gave good reasons for war. And they also help explain why the planned war was so overwhelmingly opposed by the public worldwide (including the US, particularly when we extract the factor of fear, unique to the US). And also strongly opposed by a substantial part of economic and foreign policy elites, a very unusual development. They rightly fear that the adventurist posture may prove very costly to their own interests, even to survival. It is well-understood that these policies are driving others to develop a deterrent, which could be weapons of mass destruction, or credible threats of serious terror, or even conventional weapons, as in the case of North Korea, with artillery massed to destroy Seoul. With any remnants of some functioning system of world order torn to shreds, the Bush administration is instructing the world that nothing matters but force -- and they hold the mailed fist, though others are not likely to tolerate that for long. Including, one hopes, the American people, who are in by far the best position to counter and reverse these extremely ominous trends.
(2) There is some cheering in the streets of Iraqi cities. Does this
retrospectively undercut the logic of antiwar opposition?
I'm surprised that it was so limited and so long delayed. Every sensible person should welcome the overthrow of the tyrant, and the ending of the devastating sanctions, most certainly Iraqis. But the antiwar opposition, at least the part of it I know anything about, was always in favor of these ends. That's why it opposed the sanctions that were destroying the country and undermining the possibility of an internal revolt that would send Saddam the way of the other brutal killers supported by the present incumbents in Washington. The antiwar movement insisted that Iraqis, not the US government, must run the country. And it still does -- or should; it can have a substantial impact in this regard. Opponents of the war were also rightly appalled by the utter lack of concern for the possible humanitarian consequences of the attack, and by the ominous strategy for which it was the "test case." The basic issues remain: (1) Who will run Iraq, Iraqis or a clique in Crawford Texas? (2) Will the American people permit the narrow reactionary sectors that barely hold on to political power to implement their domestic and international agendas?
(3) There have been no wmd found. Does this retrospectively undercut
Bush's rationales for war?
Only if one takes the rationale seriously. The leadership still pretends to, as Fleischer's current remarks illustrate. If they can find something, which is not unlikely, that will be trumpeted as justification for the war. If they can't, the whole issue will be "disappeared" in the usual fashion.
(4) If wmd are now found, and verified, would that retrospecitvely
undercut antiwar opposition?
That's a logical impossibility. Policies and opinions about them are determined by what is known or plausibly believed, not by what is discovered afterwards. That should be elementary.
(5) Will there be democracy in Iraq, as a result of this invasion?
Depends on what one means by "democracy." I presume the Bush PR team will want to put into place some kind of formal democracy, as long as it has no substance. But it's hard to imagine that they would allow a real voice to the Shi'ite majority, which is likely to join the rest of the region in trying to establish closer relations with Iran, the last thing the Bushites want. Or that they would allow a real voice to the next largest component of the population, the Kurds, who are likely to seek some kind of autonomy within a federal structure that would be anathema to Turkey, a major base for US power in the region. One should not be misled by the recent hysterical reaction to the crime of the Turkish government in adopting the position of 95% of its population, another indication of the passionate hatred of democracy in elite circles here, and another reason why no sensible person can take the rhetoric seriously. Same throughout the region. Functioning democracy would have outcomes that are inconsistent with the goal of US hegemony, just as in our own "backyard" over a century.
(6) What message has been received by governments around the world, with what likely broad implications?
The message is that the Bush administration intends its National Security Strategy to be taken seriously, as the "test case" illustrates. It intends to dominate the world by force, the one dimension in which it rules supreme, and to do so permanently. A more specific message, illustrated dramatically by the Iraq-North Korea case, is that if you want to fend off a US attack, you had better have a credible deterrent. It's widely assumed in elite circles that the likely consequence is proliferation of WMD and terror, in various forms, based on fear and loathing for the US administration, which was regarded as the greatest threat to world peace even before the invasion. That's no small matter these days. Questions of peace shade quickly into questions of survival for the species, given the case of means of violence.
(7) What was the role of the American media establishment in paving the way for this war, and then rationalizing it, narrowing the terms of
discussion, etc.?
The media uncritically relayed government propaganda about the threat to US security posed by Iraq, its involvement in 9-11 and other terror, etc. Some amplified the message on their own. Others simply relayed it. The effects in the polls were striking, as often before. Discussion was, as usual, restricted to "pragmatic grounds": will the US government get away with its plans at a cost acceptable at home. Once the war began it became a shameful exercise of cheering for the home team, appalling much of the world.
(8) What is next on the agenda, broadly, for Bush and Co., if they are
able to pursue their preferred agendas?
They have publicly announced that the next targets could be Syria and Iran -- which would require a strong military base in Iraq, presumably; another reason why any meaningful democracy is unlikely. It has been reliably reported for some time that the US and its allies (Turkey, Israel, and some others) have been taking steps towards dismemberment of Iran. But there are other possible targets too. The Andean region qualifies. It has very substantial resources, including oil. It is in turmoil, with dangerous independent popular movements that are not under control. It is by now surrounded by US military bases with US forces already on the ground. And one can think of others.
(9) What obstacles now stand in the way of Bush and Co.'s doing as they prefer, and what obstacles might arise?
The prime obstacle is domestic. But that's up to us.
(10) What has been your impression of antiwar opposition and what ought to be its agenda now?
Antiwar opposition here has been completely without precedent in scale and commitment, something we've discussed before, and that is certainly obvious to anyone who has had any experience in these matters here for the past 40 years. Its agenda right now, I think, should be to work to ensure that Iraq is run by Iraqis, that the US provide massive reparations for what it has done to Iraq for 20 years (by supporting Saddam Hussein, by wars, by brutal sanctions which probably caused a great deal more damage and deaths than the wars); and if that is too much honesty to expect, then at least massive aid, to be used by Iraqis, as they decide, which will be something other than US taxpayer subsidies to Halliburton and Bechtel. Also high on the agenda should be putting a brake on the extremely dangerous policies announced in the Security Strategy, and carried out in the "petri dish." And related to that, there should be serious efforts to block the bonanza of arms sales that is happily anticipated as a consequence of the war, which will also contribute to making the world a more awful and dangerous place. But that's only the beginning. The antiwar movement is indissolubly linked to the global justice movements, which have much more far-reaching goals, properly.
(11) What do you think is the relationship between the invasion of Iraq
and corporate glboalization, and what should be the relation between the anticorproate globalization movement, and the peace movement?
The invasion of Iraq was strongly opposed by the main centers of corporate globalization. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, opposition was so strong that Powell was practically shouted down when he tried to present a case for the war -- announcing, pretty clearly, that the US would "lead" even if no one followed, except for the pathetic Blair. The global justice and peace movements are so closely linked in their objectives that there is nothing much to say. We should, however, recall that the planners do draw these links, as we should too, in our own different way. They predict that their version of "globalization" will proceed on course, leading to "chronic financial volatility" (meaning still slower growth, harming mostly the poor) "and a widening economic divide" (meaning less globalization in the technical sense of convergence). They predict further that "deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation will foster ethnic, ideological and religious extremism, along with violence," much of it directed against the US -- that is, more terror. Military planners make the same assumptions. That is a good part of the rationale for rapidly increasing military spending, including the plans for militarization of space that the entire world is trying to block, without much hope as long as the matter is kept from the sight of Americans, who have the prime responsibility to stop it. I presume that is why some of the major events of last October were not even reported, among them the US vote at the UN, alone (with Israel), against a resolution calling for reaffirmation of a 1925 Geneva convention banning biological weapons and another resolution strengthening the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to ban use of space for military purposes, including offensive weapons that may well do us all in.
The agenda, as always, begins with trying to find out what is happening in the world, and then doing something about it, as we can, better than anyone else. Few share our privilege, power, and freedom -- hence responsibility. That should be another truism.
ZNet/ Vision Strategy/ Noam Chomsky Interviewed
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1435&a=129852
"USA Encouraged Ransacking"
This is a translation of an article from April 11 from Dagens
Nyheter, Sweden’s largest newspaper, based in Stockholm. The
article was written by Ole Rothenborg and translated by Joe
Valasek. Khaled Bayomi, has taught and researched on Middle
Eastern conflicts for ten years at the University of Lund where
he is also working on his doctorate. He has given his permission
for this interview to be widely disseminated.
Khaled Bayomi looks surprised when the American officer on TV
complains that they don’t have the resources to stop the
plundering in Baghdad. "I happened to be right there just as the
American troops encouraged people to begin the plundering."
Khaled Bayomi traveled from Europe to Baghdad to be a human
shield and arrived on the same day that the war began. About
this he can tell many stories but the most interesting is
certainly his eyewitness account of the wave of plundering.
"I had gone to see some friends who live near a dilapidated area
just past Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris. It was
the 8th of April and the fighting was so intense that I was
unable to return to the other side of the river. In the
afternoon it became perfectly quiet and four American tanks took
places on the edge of the slum area. The soldiers shot two
Sudanese guards who stood at their posts outside a local
administration building on the other side of Haifa Avenue. Then
they blasted apart the doors to the building and from the tanks
came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to
them. "
"The entire morning, everyone who had tried to cross the road
had been shot. But in the strange silence after all the
shooting, people gradually became curious. After 45 minutes, the
first Baghdad citizens dared to come out. Arab interpreters in
the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the
building."
"The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was
standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were
murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the
Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the
plundering continued there".
"I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them.
They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to
interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next
morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a
quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there,
one that plundered and one with watched with disgust."
"Are you saying that it was US troops who initiated the
plundering?’
"Absolutely. The lack of jubilant scenes meant that the American
troops needed pictures of Iraqis who in different ways
demonstrated hatred for Saddam’s regime."
"The people pulled down a large statue of Saddam?"
"Did they? It was an American tank that did that, right beside
the hotel where all the journalists stay. Until lunchtime on
April 9, I did not see one destroyed Saddam portrait. If people
had wanted to pull down statues they could have taken down some
of the small ones without any help from American tanks. If it
had been a political upheaval, the people would have pulled down
statues first and then plundered."
"Isn’t it good that Saddam is gone?"
"He’s not gone. He has broken his army down into very small
groups. That’s why there hasn’t been a large battle. About the
official state, you could say that Saddam dissolved that already
in 1992 and he’s built a parallel tribal structure that is
totally decisive in Iraq. When the US began the war, Saddam
abandoned the state completely and now depends on the tribal
structure. That was why he abandoned the large cities without a
fight."
"Now the US is compelled to do everything themselves because
there’s no political body within the country which will
challenge the existing structure. The two who came in from
outside the country were annihilated at once. (The reference
here is to General Nazar al-Khazraji, who returned from Denmark
and the Shiite Muslim leader, Abdul Majid al-Khoei.) They were
cut to pieces with swords and knives by a furious crowd in Najaf
because they were thought to be American puppets. According to
the Danish newspaper BT, al-Khazraji was brought from Denmark to
Iraq by the CIA."
"Now we have an occupying power in place in Iraq that has not
said how long it intends to remain, has not given any plan for
civilian rule and no date for general elections. Enormous chaos
is now to be expected."
NEW MEXICO, USA - On March 17, the day of US President George Bush's
televised announcement of the imminent US military attack on Iraq, Green
Left Weekly writer Bill Nevins was suspended from his teaching job at Rio
Rancho New Mexico public high school. The student Poetry Slam Team/Write
Club, which Nevins organises and sponsors, was also barred from performing
their outspoken words in public.
The suspensions took place after an anti-war poem written by a Rio Rancho
New Mexico poetry team member read out a poem over the in-school closed
circuit TV system. Following the reading, the student's parent (also a
teacher at the school) was ordered by an assistant principal to go home and
search the student's room for a print copy of the poem. The parent declined
to do so. All members of the poetry team were individually interrogated by
the school administration. The charge against Nevins is that he permitted
students to perform at public poetry readings without approved "field trip"
forms being on file.
Nevins is fighting the suspension with the strong support of the New Mexico
teachers' union. The Slam Team/Write Club has achieved local fame for the
courageous way that multicultural youth from the school and the community
had put their words of anger and protest into fine-crafted poetry. They have
delivered these bursts of truth on local television, in print and at
frequent poetry open mikes throughout central New Mexico.
The team was planning to appear at the Taos State Wide Youth Poetry Slam on
March 21 but was told by the Rio Rancho High School administration on March
17 that they may be barred from going there by the school. Several students
vowed to go to Taos anyway and to speak out there against repression in the
USA, denial of free speech at their school and the suspension of Nevins.
Readers are asked to send protest letters to New Mexico governor Bill
Richardson from his web site at
http://www.governor.state.nm.us
::
Below is the poem that was read out:
::
REVOLUTION X
_____________
Bush said no child would be left behind
And yet kids from inner-city schools
Work on Central Avenue
Jingling cans that read
Please sir, may I have some more?
They hand out diplomas like toilet paper
And lower school standards
Because
Underpaid, unrespected teachers
Are afraid of losing their jobs
Funded by the standardised tests
That shows our competency
When I'm in detox.
This is the Land of the Free ...
Where the statute of limitations for rape is only five damn years!
And immigrants can't run for President.
Where Muslims are hunted because
Some suicidal men decided they didn't like
Our arrogant bid for modern imperialism.
This is the Land of the Free ...
You drive by a car whose
Bumper screams
God bless America!
Well, you can scratch out the B
And make it Godless
Because God left this country a long time ago.
The founding fathers made this nation
On a dream and now
Freedom of Speech
Lets Nazis burn crosses, but
Calls police to
Gay pride parades.
We somehow
Can afford war with Iraq
But we can't afford to pay the teachers
Who educate the young who hold the guns
Against the "Axis of Evil"
Land of the Free ...
This is the land
If you're politically assertive
They call you a traitor and
Damn you to ostracism.
Say good-bye to Johnny Walker Lindh
And his family.
Bye Bye.
American Pie.
So maybe
My ideas about this nation
Don't resolve around perfection
But at least I know
Education is more important
Than money.
Land of the Free . . .
If this was utopia
We'd have to see each other naked
Before we got married
But instead, we see each other naked all the time
Because the government has my social security number
And the name of my dog!
And then we make babies,
But don't worry, they won't be left behind
And they grow up saying
God bless America!
But they don't know who Bush is
Because they never learned the Presidents.
And they will ride the ship Amistad
To our dreamland shores
Bearing the same shackles as us.
I'm here to say that
Generation X
Is pissed and we are taking over,
Ripping down the American illusion of perfection
We are the future generation
I have my qualifications
I know it looks like Angel Soft paper,
But don't worry
It's a diploma
Do I look qualified?
You can take our toilet paper,
But you can't take our Revolution.
::
::
From Green Left Weekly, March 26, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page at:
http://www.greenleft.org.au
Canadian writer, filmmaker and journalist Gwynne Dyer (whose weekly column on international affairs appears in 175 newspapers worldwide and who is CBC-TV's principal commentator on the war) has written a new book, Ignorant Armies, an account of the strategy behind the September 11 attacks and the reasons for an American strike on Iraq.
From the back cover:
"Around the world thoughtful people are asking one vital question: How could an unspeakable terrorist act carried out by a small group of Islamist zealots, most of them Saudi Arabian, result in war being declared on Iraq, a country with a brutal but firmly secular government that had no known connection with 9/11? Is it a grotesque mistake, a sinister plot, or just the strategic equivalent of a highway pileup?Far too many politicians and journalists who should know better have swallowed the story that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the West, that his weapons of mass destruction are about to fall into the hands of suicidal terrorist fanatics, and that we must invade Iraq before the Beast of Baghdad eats us, hair and all. And too few observers have pointed out that the weapons are not very dangerous, that Saddam has been successfully contained for over a decade without a war, and that the emperor has no clothes."
The Introduction follows; specifics on the title are here.
If historical ingratitude were a crime, the chattering classes of the West would be facing life sentences at hard labour. The luckiest generation in history, the people who got their future back because World War Three was cancelled, think that the world has changed forever just because a few terrorists have chosen them as targets.
About three thousand human beings were killed in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. That makes “9/11” the worst single terrorist incident in history, and it all played out on live television, so the immediate shock and outrage was entirely understandable. But the actual loss of life on that day was on the same order as the monthly death toll from traffic accidents in the United States – and there was almost no follow-up to those terrorist attacks, whereas the other loss occurs every month.
Numbers do matter. At least half the American population would have died in a World War Three fought with nuclear weapons. Therefore World War Three was an awesome possibility, one that could actually have ended American history. Only one American in a hundred thousand died on September 11, and not one in a million has been killed in terrorist attacks since then, so the new terrorism, viewed in this context, is virtually a non-event.
It is the media coverage that gives terrorism such huge apparent importance, of course – modern terrorism is almost entirely a media phenomenon – but it is nevertheless astonishing how big it has made this event seem, and how long it has kept it inflated. Even in 2003, the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 still shape American and Western foreign policy – or at least they are still being used, without much dissent, as justification for policies that may in fact have other motives and goals. September 11 did not change the world, but it is being used in an attempt to change the world.
This is not 1939, when great moral and ideological issues were involved, or even 1914, when at least great armies were involved. For all its modern technological trappings, this feels more like one of the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century – say, the Spanish-American War of 1898, Washington’s first excursion into imperialism. The pretext for the American attack on the Spanish empire on that occasion was an explosion that sank the battleship Maine in Havana harbour, killing over a thousand Americans. There was actually no evidence to connect the Spanish government with the disaster (sound familiar?), but the war was popular with the American public because it was over quickly, cost little, and allowed the United States to control Cuba for quite a few years, the Philippines for half a century, and Puerto Rico and American Samoa for good.
But the Spanish-American War was really a side-show. The main event at the turn of the last century was the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, when Britain, the world’s greatest power, cooked up an unjustified war of aggression against the little Afrikaner republics of southern Africa, not because they were nasty – though they were, at least towards foreigners and blacks – but because they had one valuable resource that the imperial power craved: gold. Then, as now, everybody else disapproved of war, but chose not to lie down in front of the steamroller. Then – and maybe now – the war turned out to be a lot longer and harder than the planners calculated. And though Britain won it in the end, the war marked the beginning of a steep half-century decline that ended its superpower status. Could that happen to America too?
Almost certainly not: the United States today is far more dominant, relative to the other great powers, than Britain was in 1899. But there could be a modest silver lining if things get bad in Iraq, in the sense that if the Bush administration has a thoroughly miserable experience in the Middle East over the next year or so, the American right wing might be cured of its current fantasy that the United States can actually run the world. We should not wish for the lesson to be taught in this way, however, for the price would be too high, and sooner or later the unilateralist tide in the United States is bound to recede with or without disasters in the Middle East.
How bad could it get? The worst-case scenario is a bloody ground war in Iraq, perhaps followed by a lengthy and debilitating American occupation; the overthrow of existing, pro-Western regimes in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Pakistan by Islamist revolutionaries; the expulsion of the Palestinians from their remaining footholds west of the Jordan River (which would foreclose any hope of a general Arab-Israeli peace for the indefinite future); a large rise in oil prices and a prolonged global recession; and more and bigger terrorist attacks by Islamist groups on Western targets than has been the norm up to now. That is a lengthy tale of woe, but not all of it is likely to happen. Even if it did, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, or even of the Middle East. There have been bigger upheavals in the past half-century, and most of us are still here.
Nevertheless, the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 set in motion an avalanche of events, clearly connected in some senses though hugely different in character and motive. The largest of those events, it now appears, will be a war of considerable size in the Middle East, and it is worth the effort to try to understand the goals and strategies of the major players, American, Islamist, Israeli and Iraqi. What did the planners of al-Qaeda actually hope to achieve with their attacks on the United States, and how serious a threat to the status quo are they? How has American strategy responded and mutated in the months since then – and in particular, why did the subject change from al-Qaeda to Iraq? Has there really been a revolution in military affairs that now enables technologically advanced military powers to fight and win wars virtually without casualties, and could it be the foundation of a lasting Pax Americana? Is Saddam Hussein dangerous to anybody other than his immediate neighbours? Indeed, is he even dangerous to them any more?
I should mention that I do not oppose war in the right cause on principle. I supported using military force under United Nations authority to drive Saddam Hussein’s army out of occupied Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1990–91 because invading your neighbours is wrong. More recently I supported military action in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, because attempted genocide is also wrong. My unease about the motives and probable consequences of the Second Gulf War (as it will probably be called) are specific to this occasion.
To write a book about a war before it starts – without even being certain that it will start – is to give rather too many hostages to fortune. But it still seems worthwhile to try make sense of the recent past and present, especially as the near future may not make much sense at all.
TUES APRIL 15TH, 7 PM., ST. MARK'S CHURCH.-
KURT VONNEGUT - LIZA JESSIE PETERSON - GRANNY D
[click to enlarge]
THE STOP BOMBING GOSPEL CHOIR
Conducted by James Solomon Benn
and introducing Miranda Lee Reality Torn in
"The Baptism of Reality"
(daughter of Tony Torn and Lee Ann Brown)
Sainthood for "Village Anna" of the Coalition to Save the East Village
Tickets $10 -- at REVBILLY.COM
After the service we will go to the Post Office on 34th Street where we
will preach and sing to the late filers. Our tax resistance activities
are endorsed by the War Resisters League. Ed Hedemen and Ruth Benn,
authors of "War Tax Resistance" will be available for counseling
Press/ activist contact: The Church of Stop Shopping office, 212 226 8777
This event hosted by Father Julio Torres of St. Mark's Church, New York City
Lee Ann Brown
PO Box 13, Cooper Station
NYC 10003
646.734.4157
LA@tenderbuttons.net
WASHINGTON -- Congressional Republicans, working with the Bush administration, are maneuvering to make permanent the sweeping anti-terrorism powers granted to federal law enforcement agents after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said Tuesday.
The move is likely to touch off strong objections from many Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress who believe that the Patriot Act, as the legislation that grew out of the attacks is known, has already given the government too much power to spy on Americans.
The landmark legislation expanded the government's power to use eavesdropping, surveillance, access to financial and computer records and other tools to track terrorist suspects. When it passed in October 2001, moderates and civil libertarians in Congress agreed to support it only by making many critical provisions temporary. Those provisions will expire, or "sunset," at the end of 2005 unless Congress reauthorizes them.
But Republicans in the Senate in recent days have discussed a proposal, authored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that would repeal the so-called sunset provisions and make the expanded powers permanent, officials said. Republicans may seek to move on the proposal this week by trying to attach it to another anti-terrorism bill that would make it easier for the government to use secret surveillance warrants against "lone wolf" terrorism suspects.
Many Democrats have grown increasingly frustrated by what they see as a lack of information from the Justice Department on how its agents are using their newfound powers. The Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said Tuesday that without extensive review, he "would be very strongly opposed to any repeal" of the 2005 time limit. He predicted that Republicans did not have the votes to repeal the limits.
A senior Justice Department official on Tuesday said the Patriot Act has allowed the FBI to move faster and more flexibly to disrupt terrorists before they strike. "We don't want that to expire on us," the official said.
With the act's provisions not set to expire for more than 2 1/2 years, officials expected that the debate over its future would be many months away.
But political jockeying over separate, bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., appears to have given Hatch the chance to move on the issue much earlier than expected.
The Kyl-Schumer measure would eliminate the need for federal agents seeking secret surveillance warrants to show that a suspect is affiliated with a foreign power or agent, such as a terrorist group. Advocates say the measure would make it easier for agents to go after "lone wolf" terrorists who are not connected to a foreign group.
The proposal was approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Republicans were upset because several Democrats said that when the measure reaches the Senate floor for a full vote, perhaps this week or later in the month, they plan to offer amendments that would impose tougher restrictions on the use of secret warrants.
