( * FYI: A few good ones on
the current war.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49385-2003Mar29.html
Washington Post March 30,
2003
Special search
operations yield no banned weapons
By Barton
Gellman
Shortly before
the first bombs fell on Baghdad earlier this month, special
operations teams from the United
States,
Britain and
Australia swept low over
Iraq's western desert to seize
four targets of highest priority to the U.S. Central Command. The teams set down
at camouflaged structures believed to house chemical warheads, Scud missiles and
eight-wheeled transporter-erector launchers, known as TELs.
After short
firefights, the teams secured the sites, according to sources briefed on the
after-action reports. But the mission turned up nothing. There were "no
missiles, no TELs and no chemicals" where blueprints
and scale-model terrain tables had directed the teams to look, one knowledgeable
official said.
Ten days into a
war fought under the flag of disarmament, U.S.-led troops have found no
substantial sign of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In some ways, that is
unsurprising. The war is far from won, and most of
Iraq's covert arms production
and storage historically have taken place within a 60-mile radius of
Baghdad. That is roughly the
forward line of U.S. armored columns in their
thrust to the Iraqi capital.
At the same
time, U.S. forces have tested 10 of
their best intelligence leads, four that first day and another half-dozen since,
without result. There are nearly 300 sites in the top tier of a much larger list
that the Defense Intelligence Agency updated in the run-up to war, officials
said. The 10 sites reached by Friday were among the most urgent. If equipped as
suspected, they would have posed an immediate threat to
U.S. forces. "All the searches
have turned up negative," said a Joint Staff officer who is following field
reports. "The munitions that have been found have all been
conventional."
Two disarmament
planners said the Bush administration is determined to conduct the weapons hunt
without the U.N. agencies that hold Security Council mandates for the job.
Administration officials distrust the United Nations Monitoring, Verification
and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy
Agency.
Administration
officials are negotiating contracts with private companies for some of the work.
They have also begun to recruit inspectors -- the cohort, one official said,
will grow to as many as two dozen -- to break any remaining contracts with
UNMOVIC and join a parallel effort under U.S.
command.
The White House
will consider "a role for an international entity" to verify
U.S. discoveries after the fact,
two officials said, but that augurs another clash in the Security Council. Hans
Blix, UNMOVIC's executive
chairman, said in an interview Wednesday that the commission would not accept
"being led, as a dog" to sites that allied forces choose to
display.
Planners now
predict the "near term" of the weapons hunt could last eight months or more.
They are counting on help from Iraqi scientists and facility managers who will
no longer fear President Saddam Hussein, or who can be made to fear the
consequences of failure to cooperate after his
fall.
But U.S.
analysts have also said that layers of secrecy may have left the Iraqi
scientists unaware of how much was produced, to whose custody it was
transferred, where it was hidden, how it was transported and dispersed in
subsequent moves, and where it may be now.
Some
U.S. officials also caution that
Iraqi weaponeers could have competing motives for what
they say. Desperate for leniency, they may invent details to inflate their
importance. Others may try to conceal technology the can be sold for private
gain. And even a friendly successor government in
Iraq may try secretly to
preserve the means to reconstitute nonconventional
weapons, as a counterweight to regional rivals.
"The same
conditions that led Saddam to proliferate are going to apply to whoever's in
power, in terms of Iran holding [similar] weapons,
and Israel," said a State Department
official.
Bush
administration officials are acutely aware that their declared war aims call for
an early display of evidence. John S. Wolf, assistant secretary of state for
nonproliferation, recently said that the seventh floor of the State Department
-- where Secretary Colin L. Powell and other top political appointees work --
was keen on swift discovery of a "smoking gun," according to someone
present.
"The president
has made very clear that the reason why we are in
Iraq is to find weapons of mass
destruction," Wolf said in a telephone interview yesterday. He added, "The fact
that we haven't found them in seven or eight days doesn't faze me one little
bit. Very clearly, we need to find this stuff or people are going to be asking
questions."
In the fighting
thus far, U.S. forces have taken custody
of one potentially significant informant, a brigadier general who commanded an
ammunition depot at Najaf. "That's the first site that
showed any kind of promise," one senior official said, but "it was not anywhere
close to the top of the list." The general has not led
U.S. forces to forbidden
weapons, and "whether he was knowledgeable or a caretaker it's hard to tell"
from early debriefings, the official said.
Searchers from
the Army's 3rd Infantry Division "haven't seen anything there that would tell us
there are chemical or biological weapons," said a military officer who consulted
yesterday's updated reports. Asked about Iraqi chemical protection gear found at
Najaf and elsewhere, the officer and other officials
said there was no sign suggesting they were freshly issued, actually worn by
Iraqi troops or linked to orders to fire chemical munitions.
Some planners
said they foresaw laborious site surveys to update the nearly 1,000 conducted
since 1991 by U.N. inspectors. The broadest
U.S. intelligence list of
suspect facilities, officials said, numbers about 1,400. Najaf is one such site, and after a week the search is not
yet complete.
"If they're
working from a list of 1,400 sites, they are really suffering," said David
Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and
a former U.N. inspector. Albright said he still believed there was a hidden
nuclear weapons program to be found. "Even 200 or 300 is a lot. I think they are
struggling."
Increasingly
aware of their limited manpower and expertise, White House officials have backed
Defense Department efforts to create a substitute organization for UNMOVIC and
the Vienna-based IAEA.
"We're trying
to do something here that's never been done, and we're just trying to get the
mechanisms in place," said a senior Bush administration official.
Officials at
the two U.N. agencies said in interviews that the
United
States would not have
access to more than 1 million pages in their archives on
Iraq, although they acknowledged
that the U.S. government had obtained
some of the data informally.
State
Department officials are warning that the Security Council will resist
U.S. efforts to conduct
inspections on its own. This week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair urged
President Bush privately to let U.N. inspectors back in as soon as
possible.
The Security
Council debate is important because the
United
States wants to lift
economic sanctions on Iraq as soon as the current
government falls. But the council must vote to do that, and some members are
warning already that they will not support such a vote until U.N. weapons
inspectors -- not U.S. military forces -- certify
Iraq's disarmament.
Bush's top
advisers, those at the cabinet level and their immediate deputies, have not yet
met to resolve interagency disputes over who will pay for the disarmament
mission and what to do about U.N. inspectors. But two people familiar with the
working group now guiding U.S. policy said they foresaw "a role for an
international entity" that was limited to validating U.S. discoveries after the
fact.
To locate and
identify the forbidden weapons, the Pentagon has recruited four or five of the
most experienced U.N. inspectors to resign from UNMOVIC. They will take
unspecified roles in Kuwait at the Weapons of Mass
Destruction Intelligence Exploitation Base under Army Maj. Gen. James A.
Marks.
The recruits
must sign waivers acknowledging the perils of a war zone and must hold or obtain
a security clearance recognized under
U.S. intelligence-sharing
agreements. In practice that will limit the inspectors to those from closely
allied governments including Britain,
Australia and perhaps
Canada.
Charles Duelfer, the first and most senior of the recruits, told a
former colleague by e-mail last week that he had joined the weapons search, and
hoped others would too, because the government had few experts with personal
knowledge of Iraqi weaponeers and their records. He
did not reply to a request for comment.
Some associates
in New
York describe Blix as dispirited and angry about the talent raids. In an
interview Wednesday, Blix said three of his UNMOVIC
inspectors had come to him for advice about the recruitment effort, but "we have
not heard one word from Washington" directly. Blix said that he was attempting to "maintain operational
readiness" by keeping inspectors "available on the roster," but in general he
maintained a careful neutrality.
"They are free
individuals," Blix said. "If they want to terminate
their contracts, anyone can do that, including myself. . . . But they would not
be allowed to reveal anything that they have done here, because that is part of
their contract. They cannot take with them their files." Blix has previously said he did not intend to renew his
contract when it expired in June.
At the IAEA,
Director General Mohamed ElBaradei is described by two
associates as determined to regain primacy in verifying
Iraq's nuclear disarmament. "It
is clear that [the IAEA] mandate still exists, and the credibility of the
findings and the assessment will rely on that," one of them said. ElBaradei believes he has "full responsibility" under
compulsory U.N. Security Council resolutions dating from April 1991, and has "a
unanimous international community, minus one" to take the lead as soon as
fighting stops.
"We have a lot
of rights vis-a-vis the Iraqi government," Blix said. "We can go into any government office, we can ask
for any document, we can interview any person. . . . If we were to go in now,
could we go into the allied headquarters and ask for their files? If they had
got hold of some interesting Iraqi ammunition, could we ask General [Tommy R.]
Franks or somebody else for an interview? I can see important questions coming
up there, and they lead me to caution and to go to the Security
Council."
An interagency
and international team of scientists and engineers known as XTF 75, for
exploitation task force, intended as a mobile detective unit, is still in
Kuwait and has yet to deploy into
Iraq. Each large Army and Marine
combat unit has a small "site survey team," expected to summon the mobile task
force if fighting brings U.S. forces to a suspicious
site. But XTF 75, organized around an artillery headquarters company from
Fort
Sill,
Okla., needs transport
helicopters to carry a heavy burden of delicate equipment. Officials said these
helicopters can operate only in "a permissive
environment."
Presuming that
U.S. forces will find banned weapons stocks, the Defense Threat Reduction
Agency, or DTRA, is negotiating potentially costly contracts with multinational
companies to destroy them. One of the companies is KBR, formerly Kellogg, Brown
& Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Richard B. Cheney chaired until
his selection as George W. Bush's running mate in July
2000.
Wendy Hall, a
Halliburton spokeswoman, said the company "currently has two task orders" from
the defense agency, but "due to the sensitivity of the details KBR is not in a
position to elaborate at this time." A DTRA spokesman declined to
comment.
Blix, in a 90-minute
conversation, reiterated his disappointment with the outbreak of war but
acknowledged that an occupying power will have advantages in the weapons hunt --
above all the removal of a feared police state that may have inhibited
scientists from telling all they knew. He also said the Americans will need
every advantage they can get. Gaps in the known Iraqi record -- for instance,
10,000 liters of unaccounted-for growth media that could have been used to
manufacture anthrax -- are far from positive proof that the weapons exist, he
said.
The
United
States and
Britain have said "they should
deliver the anthrax, while we would say they should present any anthrax," Blix said. "Now that's a very basic difference in the
attitude to the evidence."
He added,
speaking of the U.S.-led search teams: "Good luck to them. We are also damned
interested in learning if they find something."
Staff researchers Robert
Thomason and Mary Lou White contributed to this
report.
The Independent
April 1, 2003
HEADLINE:
THE IRAQ CONFLICT: IT'S TRUE THAT BRITISH GRAVES FROM THE FIRST COLONIAL WAR LIE
ACROSS IRAQ'
BYLINE:
ROBERT
FISK IN BAGHDAD
AT DUSK last night, the
ground around the Baghdad North Gate War Cemetery shook with the vibration of
the bombs. The oil-grey sky was peppered with anti-aircraft fire.
And
below the clouds of smoke and the tiny star-like explosion of the shells,
Sergeant Frederick William Price of the Royal Garrison Artillery, Corporal A.D.
Adsetts of the York and Lancaster Regiment and
Aircraftman First Class P. Magee of the Royal Air Force slept on. An eerie place
to visit, perhaps, as the first of the night raids closed in on the capital of
Iraq yesterday. Not so.
For the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, spoke of these graves today and awoke the ghosts of
colonisers past. For No 1401979 Sergeant Price and No
4736364 Corporal Adsetts and No 210493 Aircraftman
Magee all died in Britain's first colonial
war in Iraq, in 1921.
And what was it that Mr Sabri, dressed in his
Baath party uniform said a few hours earlier? "British
soldiers already have their graveyards in
Iraq, from the 1920s and
from 1941 ... Now they will have other graveyards where they will be joined by
their friends, the Americans."
It's true that British graves lie across
Iraq. Among the saddest
is at Kut al-Amara - bombed
by the Americans and British but not yet occupied - where the dead of the great
and terrible Ottoman siege of the First World War lie amid the swollen sewers of
that scruffy city. There are thousands more at North Gate in
Baghdad, on the old road to
Mosul.
Private
Nicholson of the York and Lancaster Regiment was only 23 when he died on
12 August,
1921, Private Clark of
the Royal Army Service Corps was 38 when he was killed six days later.
This first guerrilla war against Iraqi nationalism is now to be refought, according to the Iraqi Baath party.
"We shall turn our desert into a big
graveyard for the American and British soldiers," Mr Sabri said.
"The American and British forces who do
not surrender will face nothing but death in the desert or else they will have
to flee back to their puppet regime of
Kuwait."
As the
missiles criss-crossed
Baghdad yesterday - one
swept over the Tigris at only 200 feet
above the ground to explode with a roar and a plume of grey smoke in a
presidential compound - the temperature of the language increased
proportionately. The new colonisers, according to the
Foreign Minister, were using the old British "golden rule" of "divide and
conquer" - we shall forget for a moment that "divide et impera" was originally a Roman rule - and would never break
the unity of the Iraqi people.
From the information minister, Mohammed
Saeed al-Sahaf, came claims
that the modern-day British Army had just destroyed a water purification plant
in Basra, capable of
providing water for 1.3 million people, while the same Army was busy bringing
into Iraq "mineral water from
Britain".
A
warehouse had been destroyed in the city, he added, in which 75,000 tons of food
supplies were stored. There was no way of checking these statements. Nor of
course was there any way of confirming his other claims for the past 36 hours:
13 American tanks, eight armoured personnel carriers,
six armoured vehicles, four Apache helicopters and a
number of pilotless reconnaissance drones destroyed.
It sounded as if Iraq believed it
deserved to have destroyed them, as an Egyptian commentator later explained his
exaggerations during the 1967 Middle
East war. But with Iraqi
television showing real video of a burning American Abrams tank and at least two
APCs - and with the Anglo-American authorities in
Qatar suffering from
their usual lockjaw - who can say for sure what casualties either side is
taking?
The Americans talk of hundreds of Iraqi dead, the Iraqis claim
43 American and British dead.
How much of the rhetoric, anyway, would be
abandoned if there was a way out of this war?
"Real diplomacy," Mr Sahaf announced, "is to kill them the Americans and British
on the battlefield so that they feel that their dreams have been foiled.
"We are not going to allow these dirty lackeys to remain on the
land of
Iraq."
Lackeys?
Didn't it used to be "lackeys and running dogs" when the
Soviet
Union existed? Are we
really reverting to colonialism? Since the Americans have not reneged on their
pledge of occupation and military government, it's hard to avoid the question.
Nor is it difficult to imagine what Aircraftman 1st Class Magee might think as
his grave vibrates to the explosion of bombs from the very same Royal Air Force
he long ago died for in Iraq.
The Guardian
(London)
April 2,
2003
SECTION: Guardian Features
Pages, Pg. 2
HEADLINE:
War in the Gulf: Mesopotamia.
Babylon. The
Tigris and
Euphrates. How many children,
in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the
past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling,
incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilisation.
BYLINE:
Arundhati
Roy
On the steel torsos of their missiles,
adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages
in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes
down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever
wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.
On March 21, the day
after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of
Iraq, an "embedded" CNN
correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said.
"I wanna take revenge for 9/11."
To be fair to
the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest
that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the
September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down
to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said.
According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42% of the American public
believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11
attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says
that 55% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of
America's armed forces
believe these fabrications is anybody's guess.
It is unlikely that
British and American troops fighting in
Iraq are aware that
their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially
through his worst excesses.
But why should poor AJ and his fellow
soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more, does it?
Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas
masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect
repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the move. The phenomenal
logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn't
need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.
President
George W Bush, commander in chief of the
US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear instructions:
"Iraq. Will. Be.
Liberated." (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people's bodies are killed,
their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the
supreme commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their
countries are at war. And what a war it is.
After using the "good
offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure
that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its
children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that
most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely
be unrivalled in history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the Willing"(better known
as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more like Operation
Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.
So far the Iraqi
army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has
somehow managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the "Allies". Faced with the richest,
best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen,
Iraq has shown
spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a
defence. A defence which the
Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then
deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to
guile and opportunism.)
Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the
"Allies" are at war, the extent to which the "Allies" and their media cohorts
are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to
their own objectives.
When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to
address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination
attempt in history - "Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence
secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed,
calling him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition
speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech?
Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?
After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on
Baghdad, when a marketplace
was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed - a
US army spokesman
implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! "They're using very old
stock. Their missiles go up and come down."
If so, may we ask how this
squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the
Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?
When the Arab TV station
al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's denounced as
"emotive" Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies",
as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the "Allies" look bad. Even
French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed,
breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles
arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the
"terrible beauty" of war.
When invading American soldiers (from the army
"that's only here to help") are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George
Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and "exposes the evil at the heart
of the regime". But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show
the hundreds of prisoners being held by the
US government in
Guantanamo
Bay, kneeling on the
ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and
with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural
deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US
Government officials don't deny that they're being being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of
war"! They call them "unlawful combatants", implying that their ill-treatment is
legitimate! (So what's the party line on the massacre of prisoners in
Mazar-e-Sharif,
Afghanistan? Forgive and
forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the
Bagram airforce base?
Doctors have formally called it homicide.)
When the "Allies" bombed the
Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva
convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV
had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow
against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to
advertise themselves as "balanced" when their propaganda has achieved
hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of
the western media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists
"embedded" with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the
frontlines of war. Non-"embedded" journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from
besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and
clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people)
are undermined even before they begin their reportage: "We have to tell you that
he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities."
Increasingly, on
British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as "militia"
(ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously
referred to them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence
is "resistance" or worse still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy
is deceit. (The US government bugging
the phone lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is
hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally acceptable
strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed
by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is
cheating.
And now we have the siege of
Basra. About a million
and a half people, 40% of them children. Without clean water, and with very
little food. We're still waiting for the legendary Shia "uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the
city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating"
army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television productions work to
tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will be
dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the
Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)
After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of
Basra, the "Allies" have
brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate people
flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. (The water we hear, is being
sold . To revitalise the dying economy, you
understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to
get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures
will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay
extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and
loaves.
As of July last year the delivery of Dollars 5.4bn worth of
supplies to Iraq was blocked by the
Bush/Blair Pair. It didn't really make the news. But now under the loving caress
of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid - a
minuscule fraction of what's actually needed (call it a script prop) - arrived
on a British ship, the "Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the
port of
Umm Qasr merited a whole day
of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?
Nick Guttmann, head of
emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that
it would take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to match the
amount of food Iraq was receiving
before the bombing began.
We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old
tactics. They've been at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John
McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during
the Vietnam war: "Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to
create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to
increase the risk of enlarging the war with
China or the
Soviet
Union. Destruction of
locks and dams, however - if handled right - might . . . offer promise. It
should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By
shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more
than a million?) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the
conference table'."
Times haven't changed very much. The technique has
evolved into a doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts and Minds".
So,
here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis
estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead
because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam
Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who
fought the 1991 war officially declared "disabled" by a disease called the Gulf
war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It
hasn't stopped the "Allies" from continuing to use depleted uranium.
And
now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl -
it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked
up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's
the world's janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning
lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from
Thailand, the Mexican
household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other peoples'
shit. She's used and abused at will.
Despite Blair's earnest
submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play
no independent part in the administration of postwar
Iraq. The
US will decide who
gets those juicy "reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed to the
international community not to "politicise" the issue
of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate
resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the UN
security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybody
agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed
Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led
war.
Contracts for the "reconstruction" of
Iraq we're told, in
discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world economy. It's funny
how the interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so
deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the
American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons
manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in "reconstruction" work
will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former
employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal.
Bush has already asked Congress for Dollars 75bn. Contracts for
"re-construction" are already being negotiated. The news doesn't hit the stands
because much of the US corporate media is
owned and managed by the same interests.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony
Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is,
returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like
Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps
Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps
US vice-president Dick
Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?
As
the rift between Europe and
America deepens, there are
signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN
reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, "We
don't want your stinking wine." We've heard about the re-baptism of French
fries. Freedom fries they're called now. There's news trickling in about
Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war
takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the
most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but
its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed
and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing
with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies
that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and
McDonald's - government agencies such as USAID, the British department for
international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill
Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and
companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find themselves under siege.
These lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They
could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but
growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of
corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than
a little evitable.
It's become clear that the war against terror is not
really about terror, and the war on
Iraq not only about oil.
It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy,
stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the people of
Argentina and
Iraq have both been
decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one
case it's an IMF chequebook. In the other, cruise
missiles.
Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of
mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)
In the fog of war -
one thing's for sure - if Saddam 's regime indeed has weapons of mass
destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint
in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi
troops were bombing New
York and
laying siege to Washington
DC) could we expect
the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in
their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks
of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas? Would it?
Excuse me while I laugh.
In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an
extremely responsible tyrant. Or - he simply does not possess weapons of mass
destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next,
Iraq comes out of the
argument smelling sweeter than the
US government.
So here's Iraq - rogue state,
grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's
Iraq, invaded, bombed,
besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers,
its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of us watching. CNN-BBC,
BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's all of us, enduring the horror of the war,
enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as
we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the
US, fried potatoes).
When someone says "humanitarian aid" we automatically go looking for induced
starvation. "Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find. It's what it sounds
like. And what about "arsenal of tactics?" Nice!
In most parts of the
world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a
racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that
it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets
the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of
thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the
US rising from the
ancient heart of the world. In Africa,
Latin
America,
Asia,
Europe,
Australia. I encounter it
every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers,
businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their
conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments
from people: America is a nation of
morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which
they say, "All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in the grotesque universe of
racist insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called.
Suddenly, I, who have
been vilified for being "anti-American" and "anti-west", find myself in the
extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain.
Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well
to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who
protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the
thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from
Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques
of the US government and the "American way of life" comes from American
citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime
minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember that right
now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets
protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of
governments, not people. More than one third of America's citizens have survived
the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many thousands are
actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that
prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her
homeland.
While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is
taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most
spectacular display of public morality ever seen.
Most courageous of
all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of
America's great cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact
is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the
American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge
responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support
those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our
allies, our friends.
At the end of it all, it remains to be said that
dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in
the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them
installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their
own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of
weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine
way of dealing with them. (It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as
utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to
war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most
entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers".)
Regardless of what
the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest
threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is
the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US
government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he
makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true that he is a dangerous, almost
suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man
himself.
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to
file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at
the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other
even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same
things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition.
Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen
belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He
has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for
decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working
parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.
Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has been
put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits
predicted.
Bring on the spanners.
The Mirror
April 1, 2003, Tuesday
SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 4,5
HEADLINE:
GULF WAR 2: SACKED REPORTER GIVES YOU STORY AS IT REALLY IS: THIS WAR'S NOT
WORKING
BYLINE:
PETER
ARNETT
HIGHLIGHT:
ANOTHER WAR: Arnett in Vietnam; OUTSPOKEN: Live from Baghdad
I AM still
in shock and awe at being fired. There is enormous sensitivity within the US
government to reports coming out from Baghdad.
They don't want credible
news organisations reporting from here because it
presents them with enormous problems.
I reported on the original bombing
for NBC and we were half a mile away from those massive explosions. Now I am
really shocked that I am no longer reporting this story for the US and awed by
the fact that it actually happened. That overnight my successful NBC reporting
career was turned to ashes. And why?
Because I stated the obvious to
Iraqi television; that the US war timetable has fallen by the wayside.
I
have made those comments to television stations around the world and now I'm
making them again in the Daily Mirror.
I'm not angry. I'm not crying.
But I'm also awed by this media phenomenon.
The right-wing media
and politicians are looking for any opportunity to be critical of the reporters
who are here, whatever their nationality. I made the misjudgment which gave them
the opportunity to do so.
I gave an impromptu interview to Iraqi
television feeling that after four months of interviewing hundreds of them it
was only professional courtesy to give them a few comments.
That was my
Waterloo - bang!
I have not yet decided what to do, whether to pack my
bags and leave Baghdad or stay on.
I'll decide what to do today, right
now I'm chewing on what has happened to me.
But whatever happens I will
never stop reporting on the truth of this war whether I am in Baghdad or
somewhere else in the Middle East - or even back in Washington.
I was
here in 1991 and the bombing is very similar to that conflict but the reality is
very different.
The US and British want to come here, take over the
city, upturn the government and take us through to a new era. The troops are in
the country and fighting there way up here. It creates a very different
atmosphere.
The Ba'ath party, currently led by
Saddam Hussein, has been in power for 34 years. Tariq
Aziz told me the US will have to brainwash 25 million
Iraqis because these people think exactly the same as Saddam does.
Maybe
he is wrong, maybe not.
For months, Iraqis have said officially and
privately: "We will fight the Americans, we will use guerrilla tactics, we will
surprise them."
BUT the Iraqi opposition has said: "This will be a
pushover, everyone wants to rebel against Saddam."
Now the reality is
being played out on the battlefield.
We have to watch the reality now
and some Iraqis are fighting and the government does seem very determined. For
me to see that and to be criticised for saying the
obvious is unfair.
But it has made me a target for my critics in the
States who accuse me of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
I don't
want to give aid and comfort to the enemy - I just want to be able to tell the
truth.
I came to Baghdad with my crew because the Iraqi side needs to be
heard too.
It is clear the original timetable that America would be in
Baghdad by the end of March has fallen by the wayside.
There is clearly
debate in the US about this, reinforcements are being sent in and there are
delays.
This doesn't mean it is going badly. Every casualty is a loss
but they have been in limited numbers so far.
Every night and every day
I hear the B-52s and the missiles hammering the defences Baghdad.
Just like in Afghanistan and
Vietnam, the US is bringing enormous firepower to bear which it believes will
grind the Iraqis down. I have seen it before and it has been enormously
effective. The US optimism is justified.
On the other hand, at what cost
to civilians ?
During the Tet Offensive in
Vietnam, I entered a US-held town which had been totally destroyed.
THE
Viet Cong had taken over and were threatening the commander's building so he
called down an artillery strike which killed many of his own men.
The
Major with us asked: "How could this happen?" A soldier replied: "Sir, we had to
destroy the town to save it."
The Bush and Blair administration does not
want that label stuck on this war, it is a liberation for them. But the problem
is US Marines at checkpoints are suspicious of every man, woman and child
because of the suicide bomb.
Already there is suspicion growing.
And in the south, there have not been popular rebellions and uprisings.
As the battle for Baghdad grows, the potential for civilian casualties grows.
This is the spectre rising as this war
continues. The US and Britain have to figure this out.
I don't think you
can tell how it will end, there are many scenarios. A siege of Baghdad... a
special operations strike on Saddam. Optimists in the Pentagon talk about an
internal coup.
Who would have had believed Umm Qasr would hold out for six days or US Marines directing
traffic would be killed by a suicide bomber? This is more like the West Bank and
Gaza and it could become like that in some areas.
The US and Britain
must avoid that scenario.
Forces come in, communities resist, then
suicide bombing and resistance from guerrillas.
Except the Iraqis will
be putting up a stiffer fight than the Palestinians because they are better
armed.
We know the world, including many Americans, is ambivalent about
this war and I think it is essential to be here.
I'm not here to be a
superstar. I have been there in 1991 and could never be bigger than that.
SOME reporters make judgements but that is not
my style. I present both sides and report what I see with my own eyes.
I
don't blame NBC for their decision because they came under great commercial
pressure from the outside.
And I certainly don't believe the White House
was responsible for my sacking.
But I want to tell the story as best as
I can, which makes it so disappointing to be fired. Tariq Aziz told me the US will
have to brainwash 25m Iraqis, because these people think exactly the same as
SaddamAmerican Marines at our checkpoints are
suspicious of every man, woman and child because of the suicide bomb As the
battle for Baghdad grows, so the potential for civilian casualties grows. This
is the spectre rising for the coalition as this war
continues Optimists in the Pentagon talk about an internal coup. But who would
have had believed Umm Qasr would hold out for six
days?
Newsday (New
York)
April 2, 2003 Wednesday
ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: VIEWPOINTS, Pg.
A37
HEADLINE: Arnett Paid a
Price for Being Truly Neutral
BYLINE: By Robert Jensen. Robert Jensen is a
journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream."
Peter
Arnett has an overblown sense of his own importance and lousy political
judgment. That's been true ever since he became a television "personality," and
he's hardly the only one with those traits.
But Arnett's pomposity and
hubris are not what got him fired by NBC and National Geographic this week after
giving a short interview to Iraqi state television. When the controversy first
emerged, NBC issued a statement of support, which evaporated as soon as the
political heat was turned up and questions about Arnett's patriotism got tossed
around. In short: Arnett was canned because he took seriously the notion that,
even in war, journalists should be neutral.
The assertion of neutrality
is central to the credibility of U.S. journalists, who say, "Trust us, we don't
take sides." Whether one believes journalists live up to that standard - or that
it's possible at all - it is the bedrock on which reporters build their claim to
special status.
Except, it seems, in time of war. In those situations,
many U.S. journalists do not hesitate to say they are on the American side. They
are quick to say that patriotism won't stop them for reporting critically about
the United States and its war effort, and the degree to which they make good on
that varies widely.
But the point remains: One can't be neutral and
aligned with one side at the same time.
Taking journalistic neutrality
seriously doesn't mean a simplistic he said/she said balancing of claims. It
means subjecting the claims of all sides to the same critical scrutiny. Arnett,
more than most journalists covering this war for American media, has a history
of doing that. His willingness to stay in Baghdad for CNN throughout the 1991
Gulf War, despite enormous political flak, was courageous and added to the range
and quality of information that Americans received.
By going on Iraqi
state television, which clearly is a propaganda vehicle for the regime, Arnett
opened himself up to being used. That was a miscalculation. But it's easy to
understand why a journalist might want to speak to the people of that nation,
who have access to so little independent information. If it were possible to
guarantee that an appearance wouldn't become propaganda, trying to reach the
Iraqi people, even in some limited way, could justify being
interviewed.
But instead of reflexive denunciations of Arnett's
patriotism, we might look at some of his comments and ask what we can learn not
only about his mistakes but about American journalism more generally.
A
problem arises immediately, when Arnett cites the "unfailing courtesy and
cooperation" of the Iraqi people and the Ministry of Information. It may be that
Iraqis in the ministry are courteous, but certainly Arnett knows that no foreign
reporter can travel in the country without an Iraqi government minder, hardly a
mark of cooperation. Arnett likely was just being obliging. But his sin is one
of degree; obsequiousness is common for reporters currying favor with
sources.
If such criticism of Arnett is appropriate, we should also ask
whether American journalists are overly deferential to U.S. officials. Consider
George W. Bush's March 6 news conference, when journalists played along in a
scripted television event and asked such softball questions as "How is your
faith guiding you?" Journalists that night were about as critical as Arnett was
with the Iraqis.
Such performances leave the rest of the world with the
impression that American journalists - especially those on television - are
sycophants, and Arnett's firing only reinforces that impression. That's why
before the end of the day he had a new job with the British tabloid The Mirror,
which described him as "the reporter sacked by American TV for telling the truth
about the war."
Arnett certainly hasn't cornered the market on truth, and
many U.S. reporters and photographers are doing fine work under dangerous
conditions.
But many other American journalists have abandoned any
pretense of neutrality and become de facto war boosters. All over the world,
viewers are seeing images of the effects of the war on the Iraqi population that
are largely absent from U.S. television. We shouldn't mistake the limited
critique of strategy and tactics - should the United States have unleashed a
harsher attack from the beginning, and should the invasion have waited until
more troops were in place? - for a serious challenge to the Bush
administration's spin on the war.
Arnett has long been a whipping boy for
pro-war forces in the United States who want to send the message that
journalists attempting independent reporting will pay a price. Arnett's judgment
was poor in this incident, but that shouldn't overshadow his contributions in
the past. And the controversy shouldn't be used to obscure the failures of U.S.
journalism in the present.
The Independent
April 3, 2003
HEADLINE: THE IRAQ CONFLICT:
WAILING CHILDREN, THE WOUNDED, THE DEAD: VICTIMS OF THE DAY CLUSTER BOMBS RAINED
ON BABYLON
BYLINE:
ROBERT
FISK IN HILLAH
THE WOUNDS are vicious and
deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of
shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards
of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that
something illegal - something quite outside the Geneva Conventions - occurred in
the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The wailing
children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the ten patients upon whom
doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of
the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster
bombs, the doctors say - and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of
Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows
that they are right.
Were they American or British aircraft that
showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare?
The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah
hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many
cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above
their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the
sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors
or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Rahed Hakem remembers that
it was 10.30am on Sunday when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked
out of the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour.
Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little
boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were
silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he
said. "If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he
said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our
home, unexploded."
Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had
some kind of wires attached to them - perhaps the metal "butterfly" that
contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and springs open to release them in
showers.
Some victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of
whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at
the back of the Hillah hospital. The teaching college
received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night - the 61 dead are only those
who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many
others are believed to have been buried in their home villages - and, of these,
doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians.
Soldiers there certainly
were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul
clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and
a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their
wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their
homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was
positioned in a nearby field - as they were along the highway north to Baghdad
yesterday? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if
they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in
these villages - even if aimed at military targets - thus crosses the boundaries
of international law.
So it was that 27-year old Asil Yamin came to receive those
awful round wounds in her back. And so five-year-old Zaman Abbais was hit in the legs
and 48-year-old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said the containers which
fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them.
It is like a grenade and they came into the houses," he said. "Some stayed on
the land, others exploded."
Heartbreaking is the only word to describe
10-year-old Maryam Nasr and
her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach
and thighs. I didn't realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her
mother carefully lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep
puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood
sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described
how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters
lying in their own blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and
hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try
to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience.
The Iraqi
authorities, of course, were all too ready to allow us journalists access to
these patients. But there was no way these children and often uneducated parents
could manufacture their stories of tragedy and pain. Nor could the Iraqis have
faked the scene in Nadr village where the remains of
the tiny bomblets littered the ground beside the
scorch marks. A crew from Sky Television even managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from Nadr with them, the wicked little metal balls that are
intended to puncture the human body still locked into their frame like cough
sweets in a metal sheath, They were of a black colour
which glinted silver when held against the light.
Again, were the
aircraft that dropped these terrible weapons American or British? The deputy
administrator of the hospital and one of his doctors told a confused tale of
military action around the city in recent days, of Apache helicopters that would
disgorge special forces on the road to Karbala; one of
their operations - if the hospital personnel are to be believed - went
spectacularly wrong one night recently when militiamen forced them to retreat.
Shortly afterwards, the cluster bomb raids began, although the villages that
were targeted appear to have been on the other side of Hillah to the reported abortive American attack.
One
thing was clear: there is no "front line" in the fighting around Babylon, that
US forces strike into land around the Tigris river by air and then withdraw and
Iraqi forces do much the same in the other direction. Only the Americans and
British, of course, have air superiority - indeed. there is no evidence a single
Iraqi aircraft has taken off since the start of the invasion - so even the US
and British officers back at Qatar headquarters can hardly claim the cluster
bombs were dropped by Iraq.
The most recent raid occurred on Tuesday
when 11 civilians were killed - two of them women and three of them children -
in a village called Hindiyeh. A man sent to collect
the corpses reported to the hospital the only living thing he found in the area
was a hen. Iraqi bomb disposal officers were ordered into the villages yesterday
afternoon to clear the unexploded ordnance.
Needless to say, it is not
the first time cluster bombs have been used against civilians. During Israel's
1982 siege of West Beirut, its air force dropped cluster bomblets manufactured for the US Navy across several areas,
especially in the Fakhani and Ouzai districts, causing civilians ferocious and deep wounds
identical to those I saw in Hillah yesterday. Angry at
the misuse of their weapons, which are designed for use against exclusively
military targets, the Reagan administration withheld a shipment of
fighter-bombers for Israel - then relented a few weeks later and sent the
aircraft anyway.
It is not easy to listen to Iraqi officials condemning
the use of illegal weapons when the Iraqi air force has itself dropped poison
gas on the Iranian army and on pro-Iranian Kurdish villages during the 1980-88
war against Iran. Outraged claims from Iraqi officials at the abuse of human
rights sound like a bell with a very hollow ring. But something terrible
happened around Hillah this week, something
unforgivable and something contrary to international law. One hesitates, as I
say, to talk of human rights in this land of torture but if the Americans and
British don't watch out, they are likely to find themselves condemned for what
they have always - and rightly - accused Iraq of: War crimes.
Ha?aretz
April 3,
2003
--------
Not open to
negotiation
By Israel Harel
Sure, at the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention they applauded Colin
Powell when he said that settlement activity should be stopped. It is natural
that among the 3,000 delegates there were a few hundred who oppose the
settlements - particularly at present, when things have to made easier for the
American
government,
which is already caught up in the conflict with the Arab world and with Europe.
But there were
many there - and these are the vast majority of the organization's activists, as
anyone who has attended a few AIPAC conventions knows - who really and truly
support the settlements. And even among them there were some who applauded. That
is how cultured people behave, even when they hear things they don't like.
Powell is
therefore advised not to be too impressed by that applause. When AIPAC decides
to fight the road map, even those who applauded in Washington will enlist. And
AIPAC should start now. After all, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is
certainly not one of Israel's enemies, and did not arbitrarily release a
semi-ultimatum - not to a lobby that can (almost) influence the outcome of the
elections - that the "demands [of the road map] are not open to negotiation."
And when such a resolute statement is made when the early cherry blossoms of the
primaries are already blooming in Washington, it is a sign that the lobby fell
asleep on its watch. The open rejoicing of a few left-wingers at the "news" that
the road map is about to be forced down our throats, perhaps even before the end
of the battles in Iraq, seems, therefore, to have some foundation.
The analysis of
a few main clauses in this map of dictates makes
one
ask: Why the
rejoicing? Because the implementation of the map includes two international
conferences? This means the internationalization of the conflict and that
Israel's bosom buddies - like the representatives of the Quartet - will act as
judge in the dispute between us and the Palestinians! After all, all Israeli
governments, including that of the late Yitzhak Rabin, which kept even the
United States away from the Oslo talks, felt that no good could come out of
international conferences.
Another such
clause is the Israeli parallel to the cessation of terror - the freezing of the
settlements: "The Israeli government will freeze all settlement activity,
including the natural growth of the communities." It turns out, therefore, that
even the U.S. has unfortunately been dragged into this outrageous and unethical
equation. It is possible to oppose the settlements for ideological or other
reasons, but for Jews in Israel to rejoice that a document is forced on us,
equating construction and productivity - even in a disputed location - with the
Palestinian terror that has murdered over 1,000 and injured thousands more in
the last 30 months alone?
The "security"
section of the document states that the supervising council, which includes the
U.S., Egypt and Jordan, will set up the forces of the Palestinian state. Can
Israel afford to repeat the bitter mistake, after the lessons of the
establishment of the Palestinian force following Oslo, of putting such a
critical matter in the hands of two countries that a priori and without
hesitation support every Palestinian position?
Even the
following words, according to Rice, are "not open
to
negotiation":
"The arrangement will take special consideration of the Saudi initiative that
was accepted at the Beirut summit." The two principles of that initiative are:
1. The full withdrawal of Israel to the 1967 lines, including from Jerusalem;
and 2. The return of the Palestinians to their residences in Israel in
accordance with United Nations Resolution 194. Those - the right of return and
the complete withdrawal from Jerusalem - are a cause for rejoicing?
Perhaps the
cause for celebration is the paragraph that calls all the territories liberated
in 1967 - including Jerusalem - "occupied territory"? (American spokesmen, for
instance, speak of all areas conquered in Iraq as "liberated territory," with
the ultimate goal being the "liberation of Baghdad.") And what about the fact
that all Israeli construction, including in Jerusalem, is an action that
"undermines trust"? Journalist David Bedein of the
Makor Rishon weekly magazine
wanted to know whether the renovation of the Hurva
synagogue (bombed by the Jordanians during the 1948 War of Independence) in
Jerusalem's Old City, for example, was included in that ban.
"Any building
activity in the Old City of Jerusalem," responded the American Embassy, "will be
considered illegal construction as conceived by U.S. foreign policy."
Another thing,
take note, which is stated in the road map: "All Israeli institutions will end
incitement against the Palestinians."
The morning
after the 1991 Gulf War, surely as a gesture to Israel's obedience and restraint
despite being bombarded with 39 Scud missiles, then-secretary of state James
Baker came to Israel and forced then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to accept an international conference, the Madrid
conference that led to the Oslo disaster and to this murderous war of terror
that has no end.
Unlike its
predecessor, which was hostile to Israel, the current administration, which is
considered friendly to Israel is for some reason in a hurry to get moving and
has unsheathed its claws at the height of the war. Now Israel must respond
resolutely: The milestones that are marked on this "follow the rules without
question" road map are liable to lead the Jewish state into a trap that will
endanger its existence. From Israel's perspective, and not that of the U.S.,
Rice is
correct: This road map
cannot be open to negotiation.