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Feb 10, 2003 Opinion Editorials http://www.aljazeerah.info |
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General Powell at the UN: Spiel,
Stunts and Special Effects By Linda Heard Al-Jazeerah, 2/10/03 -
In reality, Powell's presentation, although professionally delivered, highlighted the fact that America's claims are 'long on volume but short on fact'. The eagerly awaited presentation was a mishmash of hearsay, dubious communications intercepts, mysterious sources and secondhand reports from defectors and detainees. The latter would no doubt say that the moon was made of Feta cheese, if that would help their case. Powell kicked off with audio intercept of a conversation between a Republican Guard and an officer in the field where the guard asks his subordinate to clear out the scrap before destroying the message. We were later treated to another snippet on similar lines relating to nerve gas. Given that we know that the Bush administration is determined to effect regime change, and is willing to go it alone if necessary, we can hardly be expected to take these intercepts at face value. Anybody who lives in the Arab world would have his suspicions about the first recording. It does not sound like an authentic exchange between two Arabs of differing status. Where was the elaborate greeting ritual, and how did the junior soldier dare to omit calling his superior by a respectful title, instead of just answering 'na'am, or 'ok'. He even came across as surly. Amer Al Sa'adi, Saddam Hussein's chief scientific advisor, derided the presentation as being "a typical American show complete with stunts and special effects. The Secretary of State condemned the high level committee set up by Iraq to monitor the inspectors. In light of the fact that several UNSCOM weapons inspectors admitted to being American spies, why wouldn't Iraq be cautious about allowing foreigners to run around its country unfettered, especially on the brink of a possible war? "Orders were issued to Iraq's security organizations to hide all correspondence with the Organisation of Military Industrialization," said Powell. He said that Hussein's son had ordered the removal of illicit weapons from the Iraqi president's palaces. He talked about material, which has been concealed in scientists home, as well as items in cars, which drive perpetually around the countryside. Amer Al-Saadi, countered by saying that Hans Blix had jumped the gun talking about the document found in the scientist's home. He said that the document was not classified, as Blix had first supposed, and that a copy of this research document had been given to a representative of the IAEA Gary Dillon after a conference on laser technology on September 26, 1984. In any case, the academic paper was authored by the scientist in whose house it was found, he said. Satellite photographs Powell said that he found satellite imagery hard to interpret. Don't we all? A photograph of a munitions facility in Al-Taji, taken before the latest inspections, showed decontamination vehicles driving around what he Secretary said were four active chemical munitions bunkers. Just before inspections began, Powell said, the vehicles were nowhere to be seen, and the bunkers had been cleaned out. We are left to wonder why the satellite didn't later capture the current locations of these vans, and how every trace of chemicals could have been so completely eliminated from those bunkers. The inspectors have such sophisticated state-of-the-art testing equipment that for Iraq to have removed every single trace of illicit materials, we must surely regard its technical expertise with awe. America and Britain have shown us numerous satellite photographs before in relation to Iraq. On many of these occasions, Iraq immediately took reporters to the sites photographed, and each and every time they found nothing, except such innocuous items as baby milk and sugar. The misinterpretation of satellite imagery triggered the US bombing of a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in the Sudan, depriving the population from essential medicines. Shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Colin Powell produced satellite photographs, which he said proved that Iraqi troops and tanks were amassing on the border with Saudi. The Russians double checked this claim and pronounced it spurious. Once the war was over, Powell admitted his 'mistake'. U2 spy planes Powell accused Baghdad with refusing to allow the inspectors' request for American U2 spy planes to patrol the Iraqi skies. Baghdad is under threat of war. Which country in its right mind would agree to its enemies' planes circling overhead at a time like this? However, Al Sa'adi said that the Iraqi government did not object to the U2 flights, in principle, but couldn't be held responsible for their safety as long as British and American planes were dropping bombs over the so-called Iraqi no-fly zones. He said that he wanted the flyovers to cease prior to any U2 flights because he was concerned that the US could shoot down one of their own airplanes and blame it on Iraq as a pretext for war. He said that there was already a precedent for this kind of behavior on the part of the US, citing an incident involving the sinking of a ship during the war in Vietnam. Al Qaeda connection As the editor of the Arabic daily Al Quds, Abdel Bari Atwan says, 'the link with Al Qaeda is very weak. The Secretary said these links (between Al Qaeda and Iraq) started in 95, so why didn't Saddam pass his nerve gases to Al Qaeda then? If Al Qaeda had been handed these devastating weapons from Saddam Hussein they would have used these on September 11 and not aircraft." Bari Atwan said that Osama bin Laden once offered his services to the Saudi government to eliminate Saddam Hussein and was very angry at being turned down. Given their widely differing ideologies - Saddam Hussein a secular leader and Osama bin Laden an extremist, who has called Hussein 'an apostate' it is hardly unlikely that they would now be working together. As for Abu Musab Zarqawi, an alleged Al Qaeda affiliate, he is based in Powell's own words in North Western Iraq. This is Kurdish territory protected by the United States and crawling with US special services and CIA personnel. Why doesn't America go after him instead of blaming Saddam Hussein? It didn't shirk from assassinating 'terrorists' in Yemen recently by bombing their vehicle. He said that Zarqawi spent some time in a Baghdad hospital and was soon followed by Al Qaeda militants who are allowed to come and go as they please. Couldn't we say the same thing about London, Paris, Milan, and yes, even Washington? Powell's linkage of the Iraqi regime with Al Qaeda was blatantly disingenuous, designed to sway public opinion in favor of military action. Iraq's UN ambassador said that just a few days ago the CIA reported that there are no verifiable significant links between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda. The British intelligence community concurs. Another psychological ploy used by Powell was his focus on Iraq's anthrax. He stressed that one teaspoon of dry anthrax could cause havoc as it did in Washington when the Senate had been closed down for weeks. He didn't say in so many words that the anthrax attacks in the U.S. had anything to do with Iraq, but the implication was there, again, for the benefit of a public weaned on sound bites. Al Sa'adi said that Iraq's weapons teams had never perfected the science of drying anthrax and they had only ever had liquid quantities, which could not be weaponized. He said that Iraq had destroyed its VX gas but could not prove this. He added that in any case, even if they still had it would have expired by now and no longer be lethal. The Secretary cast suspicion upon a consignment of aluminum tubes imported into Iraq. These are the same tubes that IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei had investigated at length and which he declared, during his earlier presentation to the Assembly, as having been used to manufacture short-range ballistic missiles, not fissionable material. The once dove turned hawk, didn't shrink from vilifying Saddam Hussein on a personal level citing 'his contempt for the truth' and 'his utter contempt for human life'. He knew that the unsubstantiated claim that Hussein's weapons scientists had experimented on death row prisoners would evoke horror and serve to further demonize the Iraqi leader. We heard again the old refrain of how Hussein used mustard and nerve gas against the Kurds. Powell neglected to mention that the Kurds were at that time attempting to overthrow the Baghdad regime. The Iraqi ambassador to the UN claimed that the CIA had verified years ago that Iraq didn't have that a chemicals with the same chemical fingerprints as those used against the Kurds in Halabja. The Secretary talked about how chemical weapons had been used on another nation (Iran), but failed to say, that at that time Hussein had been the blue-eyed boy of Washington. America supplied Iraq not only with weapons but also with technical know-how during the Iran/Iraq War. Al Sa'adi was dismissive of Powell's claim that Iraq had pronounced many Iraqi scientists as 'deceased' while they were still walking around. He challenged Powell to produce these individuals if, as he says, they were still alive, and called the American contention 'ridiculous' in these days of DNA testing. As for Iraq's refusal to allow scientists to be interviewed by the inspectors without a minder, Al Sa'adi reiterated that it has always been up to the scientists to agree to be interviewed privately. On Thursday, during a press conference, Al Sa'adi announced that various scientists have now shown their willingness to submit to private interviews and an interview was ongoing as the conference progressed. So which side do we believe? Both sides have a vested interest and so we should leave the final analysis in the hands of Blix and ElBaradei. After all, they are the UN appointed experts. There are two questions that bother me in the meantime. Why did the US come up with this so-called 'evidence' at the eleventh hour? And why is the Bush administration in such an indecent hurry to hurl the entire Gulf region into turmoil? The patience of the self-style 'Patient Man' George W Bush appears to be running out but not because the inspections aren't succeeding. The American President wants to launch a preemptive attack before the mercury rises; the home grown, grass-roots anti-war movement gets out of control, and before the greenback and the markets sink to even greater lows. What Powell failed to mention was the horrendous human tragedy that would be suffered by the Iraqi people if he gets his wish. Aid agencies envisage over half-a-million displaced persons, as well as food shortages and high civilian death tolls. "When we confront a regime that harbours ambitions for regional domination... unless we act we are confronting an even more frightening future," warned Powell. Detractors of American hegemony in the region and beyond may well be thinking the very same thing about his own. Linda Heard is a specialist writer on
Middle East affairs. She can be reached at: freenewsreport@yahoo.com
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Blair's Xerox
moment'' -
When Colin Powell called the attention of the U.N. Security Council to the "exquisite detail [of] deception activities" contained in "the fine paper that United Kingdom distributed," was he referring to deception by Saddam Hussain -- or by Tony Blair? As it turns
out, parts of the "fine paper" Powell used to base his speech on
was lifted verbatim -- textual errors included -- from last September's
edition of Middle East Review of International Affairs -- a public policy
paper freely available on the Internet. The plagiarized article, entitled "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis," is by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a research associate at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, California at the time of writing the article. Blair's "exquisite detail" comes from a research associates work! Where did Powell get the rest of his presentation from -- the Arabic version of Saturday Night Live? To confound the credibility of the Blair report further, most of Mashari's work had been based on 1991 sources. Marashi told Reuters that while he was flattered that his research ended up in a British government dossier, he could have provided the government with "updated information" if only he had been asked! This in itself calls for a second U.N. resolution giving Blair the opportunity to copy Marashi's updated information into another sensitive "eyes-only" document! The crude cut-and-paste technique is disappointing for those who think of British Intelligence in the image of James Bond. Unlike the meticulous work of 007, the dossier was complete with grammatical and punctuation errors from the original. One sentence reads: "Saddam appointed, [sic] Sabir Abd Al-Aziz Al-Duri as head…" A true Xerox moment! However -- to be fair to Blair -- the "intelligence" document was not a total mimeograph. It had been hot chili peppered a few degrees to impress the Security Council about the horrors faced from Iraq! For example, Mashari's reference to "monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq," is modified in the Blair version to read as "spying on foreign embassies in Iraq." A reference to "opposition groups" in the original becomes a sinister sounding "terrorist organizations" in a sentence otherwise unaltered. Additional text is replete with information obtained from articles in Jane's Intelligence Review, again without an acknowledgement for the source. The deception was detected by Glen Rangwala, lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, who told the Guardian: "Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services, it indicates that the U.K. really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data." Blair derives his intelligence from public data and Powell derives from Blair. Is British Intelligence an oxymoron? How safe is this war anyway? Both governments could save billions of dollars by shutting down CIA and M16 research wings, instead relying exclusively on starving research associates working out of public libraries. The Guardian reports that the plagiarized dossier was "compiled by mid-level officials in Alastair Campbell's Downing Street communications department with only cursory approval from intelligence or even Foreign Office sources." Campbell, AKA the "real deputy prime minister," is a former tabloid journalist. The Guardian continues: "MPs and anti-war groups were quick to protest that other features of Whitehall's information campaign are suspect at a time when MI6 and other intelligence agencies are privately complaining at the way No. 10 has been over-egging intelligence material on Iraq." Perhaps Britain was getting even with Powell for an earlier foray in copycat-ism from across the pond. Remember when presidential hopeful Senator Joe Biden had unabashedly derived context and language for his speeches from the oration of his contemporary, British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock? Biden's rival for the nomination, Michael S. Dukakis, had created an "attack video" containing the speeches by both politicians, leaving no doubt about Biden's plagiarism, forcing him to drop out of the democratic nomination race. When Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle was accused of plagiarism, his defense was that his work had being scrutinized too closely! In a similar vein, Blair's office apologized for its failure to acknowledge the academic sources, but maintained that the information included was accurate. The apology would not curry much favor with the University of Massachusetts whose definition for Academic Dishonesty includes: "Submitting an author's published or unpublished work, in whole, in part, or in paraphrase, as one's own without fully and properly crediting the author." Is this the war we are supposed to be fighting: a war with intelligence information shamelessly plagiarized and cobbled from academic information over a decade old? Aren't dishonesty, concealment, and deception the British and U.S. case for attacking Saddam Hussain in the first place? [Yusuf Agha is a historian who also dabbles in Information Technology. He reads extensively and has an interest in the visual and performing arts. He has resided in the United States for over two decades, loves its people and the land, but is still trying to figure out whom the government represents.] Yusuf Agha encourages your comments: yagha@YellowTimes.org
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Wrong Message To the Muslim
World
On Jan. 28, two agents from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) arrested me outside my office at the Brookings Institution. In a matter of moments I was transformed from research scholar at a venerable Washington think tank to suspect, from a person with a name and a face to a "body," a non-person. I was put in a car, taken to a detention center, locked in a cell, and stripped not just of my belt and shoelaces but of my pride and dignity -- all because of my nationality. As a visiting scholar from Pakistan, where I am an editor, I had visited the State Department and attended functions with senior U.S. officials. But as far as the Justice Department was concerned, I was someone to be stalked and brought in by burly federal agents. I am only one of hundreds of victims, from Pakistan and elsewhere, who have suffered such indignities under the absurd new policy that requires foreign nationals from numerous Muslim countries to register with the INS: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. Many have fared far worse than I. For more than a century, people from all over the world have come to the United States to escape repression and enjoy its freedoms. Perhaps for the first time in American history, we are witnessing the spectacle of families migrating from the United States in search of safety. It is argued that this policy is meant to increase security for the United States. A worse way of doing so could hardly be imagined. The policy is an attempt to draw a Maginot line around America. Not only is it likely to fail in securing the homeland, it is creating more resentment against the United States. Does America need a policy that fails to differentiate between friend and foe? Not only has the Justice Department designed such a policy, it has authorized the INS, arguably the most inefficient of the bureaucratic organizations, to implement it. The argument that, as a Brookings scholar, I should have known or did know about the registration policy is wrong. On Oct. 22, 2002, I was registered at the airport. I was told to return for a second interview on or before Dec. 2. But before that date I learned that Pakistan was not on the INS list of countries. So I checked with the INS help line and was told that I did not need to go in for a second interview. Later in December, Pakistan (along with Saudi Arabia) was put on the list and the INS issued another deadline for registration, sometime in February. But even then, the registration requirement related only to Pakistani nationals who had entered the United States before Sept. 30, 2002. I did not know I was in violation of the INS policy. Brookings did not know I was in violation. My friends in the State Department did not know I was in violation. And if -- even after following the policy closely and calling the INS for information -- we could not understand the law, what hope can there be for the cabdriver or the restaurant worker who doesn't have the leisure to discover the letter and intent of INS policies? The Justice Department's job is not foreign policy, of course, and part of its duty is to prevent both American citizens and legitimate visitors from doing or suffering harm in this country. The INS should keep a watchful eye on potentially dangerous foreigners, but it must do a much better job of distinguishing them from the vast majority of foreign nationals in this country who seek only to work, study and obey the law. Moreover, the law itself must be clear and fair for those to whom it applies. As matters stand, the policy draws on the "us vs. them" syndrome. The very question of "why they hate us" is begotten of the binary logic of terrorism and does incredible damage by removing the distinction between the U.S. government and America, between the official United States and American society. The irony is that confusing these two distinct categories is the big achievement not of "terrorists" but of the U.S. government itself. There are many people out there who may not, and do not, agree with U.S. policies, but neither do they hate America. Mere rhetoric about Islam's being a great religion or the fact that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or even that registration is not about racial and religious profiling will not do. People out there are neither stupid nor intellectually challenged. It does not serve any purpose for the United States to test their intelligence. The writer is news editor of the Friday Times and foreign editor of the Daily Times, both Lahore-based publications. He is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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Who are the Iraqis? By Joe Bob Briggs 2/10/03 -
Every decade or so, we should remind ourselves of who the Iraqis are: 1. Twelve thousand years ago, they invented irrigated farming. They got to be so good at it that, today, they can still produce all the food they need, even when "sanctions" are imposed. 2. They invented writing. 3. They figured out how to tell time. 4. They founded modern mathematics. 5. In the Code of Hammurabi, they invented the first legal system that protects the weak, the widow and the orphan. 6. Five-thousand years ago, they had philosophers who attempted to list every known thing in the world. 7. They were using Pythagoras' theorem 1,700 years before Pythagorean. 8. They invented artificial building materials, some kind of pre-fab-crete stuff used to construct high-rise towers. 9. Ur, in southeast Iraq, is assumed to be the place we're all descended from. 10. They were the first people to build cities and live in them. 11. For thousands of years, they wrote the greatest poetry, history and "sagas" in the world. 12. Because they were great horse breeders, they invented the cavalry in war. 13. The Iraq Museum in Baghdad contains some of the most outstanding stone, metal and clay sculptures and inscriptions created in the history of the world. Some of them are more than 7,000 years old. If a bomb hits this place, art lovers around the world will go into mourning. 14. The first school for astronomers was established by Iraqis. This is how the "wise men" got to be so wise. They knew how to follow the star. 15. Beginning around 800 A.D., the Iraqis founded universities that imported teachers from throughout the civilized world to teach medicine, mathematics, philosophy, theology, literature and poetry. 16. For the first 1,200 years of its existence, Baghdad was regarded as one of the most refined, civilized and festive cities in the world. 17. Abraham, the father of Israel, was from Iraq. 18. Abraham, the father of Islam, was from Iraq. 19. Abraham, the father and "model" of Christian faith, was from Iraq. 20. These are the Iraqis. Do they deserve to be destroyed? And why? Because God has given them oil?
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Political vacuum
Now that the Israeli elections are over, the road map to a Palestinian
state by 2005 was supposed to reappear on the agenda. But the Palestinian
Authority has been informed that the Middle East quartet has decided to
postpone the introduction of its road map until a new Israeli government
is formed and the situation in Iraq is resolved. The first endeavor has a
time limit; the second anything but. The government will take six weeks to be formed. The clock starts
ticking after President Moshe Katsav formally invites Ariel Sharon to
start working. Sharon now controls one-third of the Knesset after his
landslide victory but will still find it hard work to build a governing
coalition. He has said he would prefer a national unity government with
the center-left Labor Party, although the task of bringing the divergent
parties together is daunting. But dovish Labor leader Amram Mitzna has
said his party will not serve under hawkish Sharon. One contentious point
is the two parties’ substantially different views on Israeli settlements
in the Palestinian territories. Labor sees many of them as unnecessarily
exacerbating the conflict. Labor’s partnership remains dear to Sharon. One theory is that Sharon
is seeking the political camouflage that Labor’s participation would
give his rightist policies. Mitzna believes that Labor played that role
for Sharon in his last coalition government and paid the price for its
compromised identity in the votinThe other theory is that Sharon wants to
confound the hawks by reaching a historic peace agreement with the
Palestinians. According to that theory, Sharon wants to vault into the
ranks of Israeli peacemakers like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin and to
erase the blots on his own record. Supporting evidence lies in Sharon’s
recent rapprochement, his meeting with Ahmed Qorei, chairman of the
Palestinian Legislative Council, a day after the elections, to discuss the
possibility of resuming a cease-fire between Palestinians and Israelis.
The meeting was Sharon’s first with the senior Palestinian official in
about a year. He also met Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, before
the election. Apparently, direct talks with the Palestinians started long
before the elections and are set to continue next week. There is, of course, another possibility: that Sharon is trying to
survive in office and retain the backing of the United States while
advancing in a general direction rather than toward a specific goal. He is
not really negotiating; he is not really moving. He opposed the Oslo peace
agreement from the start of his tenure as premier and earlier. Branding it
a threat to Israeli security, and as Palestinian violence has continued,
he has taken back almost all of the autonomy that was granted to the
Palestinian Authority under the accords. The makeup of the next Israeli government could prove critical in
determining the future. But to have to wait until after the Israeli
government takes shape before the road map can take center stage is a
political vacuum which is in no one’s interests except Sharon’s. The
bigger question is how long will it take for the Iraqi issue to be
resolved before movement in the Arab-Israeli conflict is made. The Iraqi
file is only now opening.
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Weapons of mass destruction:
An endless story
After Sept. 11, the United States added to its war on terrorism the disposing of weapons of mass destruction. First of all, what are weapons of mass destruction? Who possess them? Who has the ability to manufacture and use them? Which country has previously used them? As for the first question, we all know the answer — all kinds of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Who owns them? The five permanent members of the UN Security Council possess the whole range of weapons of mass destruction and are fully capable of using them. In addition, others with the weapons include Israel, India, Pakistan and possibly North Korea. Chemical and biological weapons are available to a large number of countries and are sometimes known as “the poor man’s bomb.” Most of these countries have signed nuclear non-proliferation treaties (including chemical and biological). None of these countries, however, make their capabilities public and I believe that these are well known to the American administration whose ability to gather information by a wide variety of means is very great. When we come to the third question, we see that there is more than one country with advanced nuclear programs and they are only awaiting a political decision which will allow them to start producing them. In this group are Brazil and Argentina. What remains now is the last question and we know very well that the only time a nuclear weapon has been used was by the US when it destroyed the two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This leads us logically to demand that Washington be the first nation to dispose of its own weapons of mass destruction. As for chemical and biological weapons, these were used a number of times by various European powers from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. The US record of using these weapons can be summarized in the following way: The US used biological weapons in 1966 during the Vietnam War. They were used against civilian populations and also to destroy both crops and forests. In 1971, the CIA attempted to kill Fidel Castro by poisoning his food or cigars but failed in these attempts. The CIA also killed half-a-million pigs in Cuba by spreading plague. Israel was another leader in the use of chemical and biological weapons; it began doing so by spreading dysentery among the Palestinians in 1948. In 1925, confronted with the danger of these weapons, the Geneva Protocol was drafted to prevent the use of chemical and biological weapons in wars and was ratified by 29 countries. The United States was in fact the most prominent country which refused to ratify or take any part in the protocol. Individual, bilateral or otherwise limited attempts are not sufficient to make real the dream of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. One reason for this is that personal interests normally come into play when dealing with the problem. This situation is unacceptable. The obligation to disarm falls first on the countries that have already used these weapons and only then on those which merely possess them. Nonetheless, all countries should meet in a new expanded international conference and take a more positive stand aimed at disposing of all kinds of weapons of mass destruction without exception; otherwise the problem will never be solved.
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Telling the Palestinian story -
The pro-Israeli slant of the Western coverage of the Middle East conflict has been widely noted. But in Britain at least, the media are not entirely indifferent to the Palestinian point of view. Last month, the British commercial television company Carlton broadcast John Pilger’s incisive documentary “Palestine Is Still the Issue,” which exposed the systematic humiliation many Palestinians suffer daily. Broadcast, perforce, late in the evening, Pilger’s program nonetheless made a big impact, all the bigger because of the outrage with which it was greeted by many British Jews. Carlton’s own chairman, Michael Green, condemned the program as a “tragedy for Israel” so far as accurate reporting was concerned. A strong complaint against it was lodged with the Independent Television Commission. Far from upholding the complaint, however, the ITC ruled that, for all its polemical intent, Pilger’s portrayal of Palestinian oppression respected the perspective of the Israeli government. The documentary offered a salutary, if rare, corrective to the well-documented tendency of the British media to leave viewers uncertain as to who are the victims and who the aggressors in the struggle between Palestinians and Israel. Yet if the British media is inherently biased against any proper understanding of what is going on in the Middle East, this is doubly true of the US media. In the United States, informed and sympathetic analysis of Palestinian affairs forms little part of mainstream public discussion. It was unease about the paltry effort in the American media to speak up for the Palestinians that prompted the graphic artist-cum-journalist Joe Sacco to look for a challenging new way of presenting their predicament. In his book “Palestine”, recently published in London, Sacco employs a remarkable sequence of sharply drawn cartoon strips to dramatize the Palestinian story. Rarely have cartoons had such a serious message to impart. Born in Malta but educated at the University of Oregon, Joe Sacco spent two months in the occupied territories at the beginning of the 1990s. Together with an impassioned introduction by Edward Said, the nine original installments are only now available in book form for the first time. Over the course of the past decade, of course, much has happened in the Middle East - not least the inception and ultimate derailment of the peace process. It is, alas, a measure of how fundamentally unaltered the Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains, that the contents of Sacco’s ten-year-old cartoons seem wholly contemporary. The images and dialogue in “Palestine” might have been composed last week. Sacco figures in his own cartoons in caricatured form, as a goofy, insatiably inquisitive American tourist, who wanders about places like Nablus and Hebron, searching for the truth and nursing a keen sense of what he is up against in trying to communicate the human reality behind US media images of Palestinians as murderous fanatics. Sacco recalls the case of the American Jew Klinghoffer, who — while enjoying an idyllic Mediterranean cruise aboard the Achille Lauro — was assassinated by the Palestine Liberation Organization. From his grief-stricken wife to what he put on his cornflakes, every aspect of Klinghoffer’s story was endlessly milked by the American news media for emotional effect. Millions wept over the fate of a kindly man who fell victim to pitiless Arab thugs. The cartoons set out to counter this institutionalized bias to tell Palestinian “human interest” stories which underline the helplessness of great numbers of Palestinians in the face of Israeli oppression. Sacco meets farmers whose olive trees, the basis of their livelihood, have been gratuitously decimated by Israeli soldiers for ‘security’ reasons. An old man explains to him how — because a Molotov cocktail was thrown from his olive grove - soldiers ordered him to erect a fence around it. The old man did not have the money to comply with this demand, so the soldiers made him cut down his own trees, equipping him with a chain saw for the task. Because olive trees take many years to mature, the old man says he felt as if he was killing his own sons. As well as sorrow, there is more than a little (mostly black) humor in “Palestine”. Evoking the Israeli prison Ansar 111, Sacco introduces his readers to a former prisoner who describes how thirty-five men occupied a single cell with a barrel for a toilet, which was soon full to overflowing. During the night, a prisoner with a weight problem got up to use the barrel and toppled it. The images depicting the episode — eyes and mouths distended with horror — are hilariously vivid. Another former inmate tells how prisoners about to be released regularly swallow plastic capsules with messages inside them. Once freed, they are pestered by people anxious to know if they have any messages from inside for them. “Yes,” runs the standard reply, “but perhaps not until tomorrow.” What makes Joe Sacco’s book such a powerful piece of work, however, is that it combines piquant anecdotes with a great deal of hard information about the precise ways in which Palestinians are victimized. Sacco discusses, for instance, Israel’s monopolizing of Palestinian water resources — how the Israelis pump West Bank water to Jewish settlements at such a rate that only a trickle is left for Palestinians. And he reports, among much else, how tomatoes grown in Gaza are deliberately left to rot at Israeli airports so that they reach Europe in degraded condition, with much resultant damage to the good name of Palestinian farmers. At the close of the book, Sacco is in Jerusalem talking to two well-educated and articulate young Israeli women. Though relatively liberal (one of them concedes that there is a ‘moral problem’ with the Occupation), they are greatly more preoccupied with what Palestinians have done to Israelis than with what Israelis have done to Palestinians. At the same time, they confess that they are tired of talking about the rights and wrongs of the issue and just want to get on with their lives. Joe Sacco’s richly informative book goes a long way toward explaining why — so long as Palestinian grievances remain unaddressed — they and their fellow Israelis are likely to be thwarted in this seemingly innocent aspiration. — Neil Berry is a freelance journalist based in London.
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Effective measures needed now to end
Israeli occupation Jordan Times, 2/10/03
- IN A further attempt to rally support for a US-led attack on Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell last week told the US Senate that an invasion of Iraq could help create the conditions for a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is no logical reason to believe this is the case. The key elements of a solution are well-known: A genuine end to Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip and freedom for the Palestinian people. In exchange, Israel would receive guarantees of security within its internationally recognised borders and normal relations with all its neighbours. This plan was unanimously endorsed by the Arab League last March, although Israel has yet to respond positively to it. What is lacking is the political will by the United States to bring to bear the kind of pressure on Israel needed to arrive at such a negotiated solution, which would implement outstanding UN Security Council resolutions. If it wanted, the US government could decide today to take effective measures to stop the Israeli policies which make a solution increasingly remote, in particular the continued confiscation of occupied Palestinian land, and the relentless construction of Jewish colonies in violation of international law. Indeed, even The Washington Post proposed in a recent editorial that the United States link the approval of any further Israeli requests for American aid to a total cessation of settlement construction. Instead of taking this approach, Washington has indefinitely delayed the publication of the quartet's "roadmap." Yet even the known elements of this roadmap focus more on process and tactics rather than substance. All of the burden has been placed on the Palestinians to "reform" themselves and end violence, even though it is clear that the development of any indigenous Palestinian institutions is impossible under the weight of Israel's crushing military repression, and the vast majority of the violence claiming the lives of innocent civilians continues to originate from Israel and be directed at Palestinians. It has been revealed that despite his pledge never to negotiate "under fire," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon personally met with senior Palestinian National Authority officials, both before and after his recent election victory, and made proposals for a limited Israeli withdrawal from some Palestinian cities. The true significance of this development is not that Sharon — who continues to implement the settlement programme and has never accepted the far-reaching peace proposals from the Arab League — is likely to reach a voluntary agreement with the Palestinians that would come anywhere close to the minimum conditions needed for peace. Rather, it is a welcome signal that Israel recognises the limits of its exclusive reliance on brute force. Other reports have indicated that Sharon and the United States agreed jointly to replace the existing Palestinian leadership after any war with Iraq. Any thoughts in any quarter that this would result in a compliant and defeated alternative leadership that would accept less than the fulfilment of Palestinian rights and UN resolutions are dangerously misguided. Such a leadership, even if it did emerge to Israel's satisfaction, would not be able to impose any unjust decisions on the people. The question is not who leads whom either on the Israeli side or the Palestinian side, but rather whether the parties are willing to grasp the issues and make the necessary decisions to come to a just compromise. The Arab League and the Palestinians have clearly stated they want to do so. Israel has not. These core issues, and not the unrelated situation in Iraq, are what stand in the way of peace.
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N. Korea — 'a proud country' By Fahed Fanek Jordan Times, 2/10/03
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SINCE IT was first employed, the phrase “axis of evil” has been clouding world peace, and today it is threatening destruction and bloodshed in several parts of the world. That term is rooted in two sources. The first is the description by the Western allies of Nazi Germany and its partners as the “axis states” and the second is former US President Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” in a 1982 speech to the British House of Commons. David Frum was President George W. Bush's speech writer during the first year of his presidency, and has now published his memoirs of that period, “The Right Man: The Surprising Presidency of Bush”. It contends that the president's speech writer actually determined the direction of US foreign policy to a greater extent than did other senior administration officials in the State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Council. What Frum is referring to is the phrase he planted in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, designating Iraq, Iran and North Korea as constituting an “axis of evil”. Frum says the instructions he received on preparing the speech were to justify waging war on Iraq. Initially, it occurred to him to limit the speech to Iraq, but he found that no axis could only comprise one point, since it required a line connecting two points, so he added Iran. When it was noticed that evil was confined to Islamic countries, he decided to add North Korea. Frum adds that the original term he coined referred to an “axis of hate”, but it was changed to the “axis of evil” to give it theological overtones. The three components included in the new “axis of evil” no doubt harked back to the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis, preserving a three-dimensional concept to achieve the required psychological impact. The main thing is that Bush committed the US to confronting Iraq, Iran and North Korea because he doesn't overlook evil or give it a chance. In other words, there has been a need to recreate the atmosphere that led to the outbreak of World War II. Bush would naturally rather deal with the sides constituting the “axis of evil” individually and in succession. He has spent the past year preparing the American people for war on Iraq on the pretext that it has weapons of mass destruction that threaten America's security. That trend seemed to be working well, as evidenced by the opportunistic behaviour of Iran, which has been striving to avert being targeted by the “Great Satan” by pushing the Iran-based Iraqi opposition into coordinating with the CIA. However, the third member of the “axis of evil” chose a time that is inappropriate to Bush's plans to announce the revival of its nuclear programme, its planned withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the expulsion of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). So the “axis of evil” slogan was transformed from a US policy tool into fetters that are tying the Bush administration's hands, forcing it to woo one of the evil parties by discussing a diplomatic solution, linked to US food and oil aid. Ideological policies used to be standard fare for the leaders of socialist and revolutionary governments, whereas US policies were based on pragmatic calculation. We have now arrived at a situation in which the US builds its policies on ideological considerations, leaving it up to its adversaries to avoid any harm it might inflict upon them by resorting to reason and calculation. North Korea is a small, poor state living under a Stalinist regime that is out of step with the spirit of the US era. It is politically isolated and suffers from famine. Yet, it has adopted a position deserving admiration, particularly in the Arab world, which is suffering humiliation at the hands of America and Israel. At first sight, it might seem as though the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il has, in a sudden burst of near-mythical courage, chose to challenge the strongest power on earth, as though he were inviting it to wage war. But a second, more discerning look reveals that Washington was the one to adopt a position of enmity towards Pyongyang first, and that North Korea's position has been the natural response. To begin with, the US allocated $60 billion to the establishment of a missile shield in Alaska on the grounds that North Korea is a hostile country that could direct its missiles at US targets if it were to be attacked. In his State of the Union address last year, Bush named North Korea as a member of the “axis of evil”, alongside Iraq and Iran. North Korea was designated as one of the world's nuclear states deserving a preemptive nuclear strike, although it is a broadly accepted principle that nuclear arms are a deterrent, and are not for use in preemptive strikes. The US did not meet its commitment to supply North Korea with two nuclear reactors to produce electricity for civilian purposes, despite a pledge to do so in 1994 under then-President Bill Clinton as part of a well-known “Framework Agreement”. As though all this were not enough, the Bush administration slammed the position of South Korean President-elect Roh Moo-hyan calling for achieving reconciliation and understanding with North Korea through dialogue without preconditions. Lastly, it was the US that withdrew from talks with North Korea when the latter admitted that it was involved in a programme to enrich uranium. The US withdrew even though North Korea expressed its willingness to halt the programme immediately in exchange for a written agreement in which Washington would pledge not to launch a pre-emptive strike against it. In response to all those provocations against a country able to defend itself and benefit from US involvement in a possible war in the Middle East, Pyongyang was able to confront the challenge with a similar challenge. And the US was forced to speak of a peaceful solution, diplomatic efforts, and the use of neighbours as mediators, instead of the heavy-handed, bullying policies it has used on any country bold enough to raise its head above the parapet.
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Powell's UN speech dissected By Ali Abunimah Jordan Times, 2/10/03
- US MEDIA had suggested that Secretary of State Colin Powell was playing down what he would present to the UN Security Council about Iraq's alleged deceptions, weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism, so that when he will have made his revelations, they would have a greater impact. Having heard Powell's presentation, it is now clear he was playing things down because his hand was in fact weak. Powell's multimedia presentation was a rag-bag of old allegations, which the United States has been making for years, some of them based on information Iraq had itself provided to UN inspectors. Other claims were based on audio recordings and satellite images, and still more were based on unverifiable claims from unidentified witnesses and “defectors”. Powell all but admitted the weakness of his case by continually saying that “these are facts, not assertions”, at moments when he was providing the most sensational yet least supported claims. He also resorted to the comic book tactic of calling Saddam Hussein an “evil genius” for having succeeded in hiding what the US says is a vast arsenal, not only from UN inspectors, but from the world's only superpower. Let's look more closely at some of the “new” elements in the American case for an immediate attack on Iraq. The audio tapes: Powell played what he said were intercepted conversations between Iraqi officers who were discussing ways to conceal prohibited materials from UN inspectors. None of the three recordings, if real, amounted to a “smoking gun”. If they were real, they could be incriminating in a certain context, but they could also have been taken out of a context in which they were entirely innocent. The evidentiary value of the alleged recordings is close to nil. The recordings could easily have been faked, as the United States has a history of doing so. In 2001, US public radio's “This American Life” broadcast recently declassified tapes from a clandestine radio station set up by the CIA in the 1950s to help provoke a coup against the democratically elected government of Guatemala. The radio station, which broadcast completely fake “opposition” voices, is credited with helping bring a repressive American client regime to power. (Programme broadcast on Nov. 30, 2001. See www.thislife.org for details.) More directly related to current events, New York's Village Voice newspaper reported late last year how, during the 1990s, a Harvard graduate student celebrated for his convincing impersonation of Saddam Hussein was hired by the high-powered US government-linked public relations firm the Rendon Group to make fake propaganda broadcasts in Saddam's voice to Iraq. The student received $3,000 a month for his troubles. “I never got a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA, or policy makers on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots,” the report quotes the ersatz Saddam as saying, “but ultimately I realised that the guys doing spin (sic) were very well funded and completely cut loose.” (“Broadcast ruse: A grad student mimicked Saddam over the airwaves,” The Village Voice, Nov. 13-19, 2002) In 1990, another Washington public relations firm, hired by Kuwait, helped win support for the first Gulf War by fabricating claims, presented to Congress, that Iraqi troops threw Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. (See “The lies we are told about Iraq”, The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 5, 2003) Those taken in by that deception will want to be more sceptical this time around. It also doesn't help US credibility that the Pentagon has repeatedly, over the past two years, stated that it would use deception and black propaganda to achieve its policy goals. Satellite imagery: Powell relied on satellite images in order to support the claim that Iraq is still producing and hiding chemical weapons. He said, for instance, that some of the images he showed were of the Iraqis “sanitising Al Taji chemical munitions storage site” before UN inspectors arrived. Again, it is impossible to tell if the satellite photos displayed by Powell are real, fake, old or new. But even if they are real current photos of Iraq, they are by themselves of no conclusive value. The New York Times reported that American officials recently gave the UN inspectors satellite photos of “what American analysts said were Iraqi clean-up crews operating at a suspected chemical weapons site”. But when the inspectors went to the site, they “concluded that the site was an old ammunition storage area often frequented by Iraqi trucks, and that there was no reason to believe it was involved in weapons activities.” (“Blix says he saw nothing to prompt a war,” The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2003) For all we know, the incident referred to in The New York Times is probably the same used goods Powell tried to sell to the Security Council. Only the inspectors can tell us otherwise. Mobile units: Powell claimed, based on uncorroborated hearsay from “defectors”, that Iraq has an elaborate system of mobile laboratories used for producing biological weapons. With no hard evidence, Powell was reduced to displaying “artists impressions” of what these laboratories supposedly look like, a tactic routinely used by American supermarket tabloids to produce pictures to accompany the latest stories of landings and abductions by space aliens. In an interview with The New York Times, Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, denied US claims that the inspectors had found that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their discovery (“Blix says he saw nothing to prompt a war”, The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2003) Blix, who unlike the United States, has hundreds of staff on the ground in Iraq, is in a much better position to know than Powell. Iraq's links with Al Qaeda: Powell claimed that Iraq has close links with Al Qaeda and based this largely on the alleged movements of the threateningly unshaven Abu Mussab Zarqawi. Prior to Powell's presentation, The Washington Post noted that Zarqawi, a Jordanian, “appears to be the only individual named so far to make the link to Iraq after more than a year of major investigations in which `a good deal of attention has been paid to what extent a connection may exist between Al Qaeda and Iraq',” (“US effort to link terrorists to Iraq focuses on Jordanian,” The Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2003) To make up for the flimsiness of the case, Powell resorted to building Zarqawi up into a frightening figure in exactly the same way the US, in previous years, built up Osama Ben Laden. It seems that Ben Laden, who is still on the loose and who did not feature as a topic of Powell's address, has been replaced in American affection. Powell claimed that Zarqawi (who has now been promoted by the Americans to the status of “The Zarqawi Network”, complete with flow charts) was training terrorists in a poison-making camp in northern Iraq. Powell skipped dismissively over a very pertinent fact: since the 1991 Gulf War, northern Iraq has been out of the control of Saddam's government. The United States and the United Kingdom have been cruelly bombing the illegally declared northern and southern “no-fly zones” for twelve years, largely to limit the influence of Iraq's government to the centre of the country. Northern Iraq has been ruled by competing Kurdish factions with United States backing. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the CIA has been operating freely in northern Iraq, and the United States recently acknowledged that its special forces are operating in that part of the country. Powell showed what he said was a satellite photo of the “terrorist camp”. If the United States knows where such a camp lies, and has forces in the region, why has it not bombed it or attacked it, as it has bombed so many other installations in northern Iraq? An attack on a “terrorist” installation in northern Iraq requires anything but an invasion of the entire country. Furthermore, if the camp even exists, why would the United States give its occupants notice that it knows where it is, rather than just take it out, as, say, it took out a carload of alleged “terrorists” in Yemen last year? It just doesn't add up. That the US is claiming that Al Qaeda-linked terrorists are operating in the part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam rather undermines the argument that Saddam is backing such people. Powell's only answer to this major problem in his case was to offer more unsubstantiated claims that one of Saddam's secret agents is in charge of the whole operation. In the days prior to Powell's presentation, numerous reports appeared in the American and British press that senior intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA and even the Israeli Mossad maintain that there is no evidence to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda in any meaningful way. The BBC reported that a top secret official British intelligence report given to Prime Minister Tony Blair and leaked to the BBC states that there are no current Iraqi links with Al Qaeda. The BBC added that the intelligence document “said a fledgling alliance foundered due to ideological differences between the militant Islamic group and the secular nationalist regime”. (“UK report rejects Iraqi Al Qaeda link”, BBC News Online, Feb. 5, 2003) At the present time, it appears that there is a much stronger case on US-Al Qaeda links dating back to the days when the Reagan administration helped recruit men from all over the Arab and Muslim world to join what it called the “Afghan freedom fighters” than anything to incriminate Iraq. Powell said not a word about that. Underlining the weakness of the Anglo-American case, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the BBC before Powell's address that he had “seen no evidence which directly links Iraq to Al Qaeda, but I would not be surprised if it exists”. Is this the sort of shabby thinking on which decisions about war and peace are made? More importantly, the Pentagon has brushed aside the lack of evidence and, to the dismay of senior CIA and FBI officials, has exaggerated evidence for purely ideological and political purposes. It is the result of these political deceptions, not evidence, that was presented to the Security Council by Powell. Even if there were evidence of an Al Qaeda connection, the US claims that it wants to go to war to enforce UN resolutions. But no UN resolutions regarding Iraq says anything about Al Qaeda. Hence, even the attempt by the US to link Iraq to Al Qaeda must be interpreted as an act of desperation by an administration that knows it has not made its case on alleged weapons of mass destruction. Iraq and the United States: closing his speech, Powell sought to “remind” the Security Council that Saddam has been a horrible monster for more than two decades. He cited Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Kurds in 1988 as “one of the twentieth century's most horrible atrocities”. He forgot to mention, however, that at the time the United States, which was supporting Saddam in his war with Iran, instructed its diplomats to implicate Iran. Powell also forgot to mention that among the long history of cooperation between the United States and Saddam's Iraq were the several meetings that once and future Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held with Saddam at the request of President Reagan, one of them on the same day that Iraq was reported to be using chemical weapons against Iran. Nor did Powell point out that the same sort of satellite evidence that he now uses to indict Iraq was once gladly handed over to Saddam by the United States to help Iraq defeat Iran. And in claiming that there is not a frightening disease in the pharmacology that Iraq is not capable of creating, Powell forgot to mention that the seed stock to make anthrax, E. Coli, botulism and other biological agents was exported to Iraq from a company based near Washington, DC, called the American Type Culture Collection, under contracts approved by the United States government in the 1980s. These sales continued even after Iraq was reported to have used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians. (see “Iraq under siege”, South End Press, 2002, p. 39) Powell also sought to “remind” the Security Council about Iraq's horrible human rights record. He failed to explain, however, when the United States found its conscience on this matter which never troubled it in all the years that it was allied with Saddam. Such naked cynicism may fool some in an American public whose knowledge of history is notoriously shallow and whose mass media scarcely dare challenge any administration's foreign policy, but it will not fool anyone else. Powell was also cynical to criticise Saddam for allegedly supporting Palestinian groups. Whether this was simply an attempt to grasp at further “evidence” is unclear. There are no known links at all between Palestinian groups fighting Israel's repression and Al Qaeda, despite the Sharon government's attempts to manufacture them for American consumption. What is certain, however, is that in the Arab world, the attempt to use any alleged support for the Palestinian cause as a justification to invade Iraq can only further alienate and inflame public opinion. Conclusion: taken together, the smorgasbord of old allegations, show-and-tell and hearsay that Powell presented would fall disastrously short of proving a case against an accused person in an American court of law, where the standard of proof must be “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The flashy presentation did not conceal holes in the American case that a US Navy battle group could sail through with room to spare. The Americans have argued that the Security Council is not a court of law, and that the standards of proof are different and need not be beyond a reasonable doubt. But early in his presentation, Powell himself used judicial language when he claimed that Iraq had earlier been “found guilty” of “material breaches” by the Security Council. The American legal system, often held as an example to the world, applies stringent standards in order to protect a single accused person from being wrongly denied his/her freedom or life. If the United States attacks Iraq, not one accused person but thousands of innocent people may lose their lives. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 600,000 people may be forced to flee their homes and millions more may well be exposed to hunger, illness, danger and chaos for years to come. Is all of this worth it, when, as France's President Jacques Chirac once again underlined on Feb. 4, a perfectly viable, non-violent alternative exists? In response to a reporter's question about criticism that one hundred UN inspectors cannot possibly disarm a country the size of Iraq, Chirac pointed out that the first inspection regime destroyed more Iraqi weapons than all of the deadly American firepower directed at that country in 1991 and since. The solution to any shortage of resources, if the inspectors should complain of one (so far they have not), said Chirac, is to increase those resources. Powell said that by passing Resolution 1441, putting in place the inspections last November, the Security Council has given Iraq a “last chance” to disarm. It appears that it was the United States that had a last chance to convince the world that what is needed instead is a US-led invasion of Iraq that could devastate the whole region for years to come. The early indications, judging from the speeches of the Chinese, Russian, French and other foreign ministers seated around the Security Council table, are that the world remains convinced that inspections should be given a chance to work, Iraq, which presents no immediate threat to anyone, should urgently do everything possible to cooperate and, as Chirac said, “war is always the worst solution”. Let us hope that someone in Washington is listening. The writer is co-founder of electronicIntifada.net and contributor to `Iraq under siege' (South End Press, 2002).
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Bush has failed to inspire but so have
Arab leaders
The Daily Star, 2/10/03 -
George W. Bush keeps warning the UN
Security Council that it will condemn itself to irrelevance if it fails to
approve a US-led attack on Iraq. For Arab countries the threat is clear: A
Security Council relegated to the sidelines would entail the de facto
cancellation of resolutions 242 and 338 and so the permanent dismissal of
Palestinian national aspirations. The Middle East will not be alone in
suffering the consequences, however, if Washington goes ahead with its
plans. The brand of uber-unilateralism being pushed by the Bush
administration’s hawks has the potential to destabilize countries and
regions around the world. |