Feb 11, 2003 Op Eds

Stifling the Voice of Reason
By Firas Al-Atraqchi

The campaign to stifle dissent and censor any questioning of current U.S. policies vis-a-vis the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular, has reached new levels.

Websites which host alternative views, and/or views that contradict with U.S. foreign policy are no longer tolerated on the Internet and are systematically coming under hacker attack and political pressures to "relocate."

YellowTimes.org ( http://www.yellowtimes.org) has for the past six months withstood intense hacker attacks as it publishes views that directly question, criticize, and berate the U.S. official line regarding the impending invasion of Iraq.

"In addition to e-mail spoof attacks, I think they are attempting to overload our servers through denial of service attacks, forcing our website to go offline. Similar incidents happened last time we released an article from Imad Khadduri," says Erich Marquardt, YellowTimes.org publisher.

Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi former nuclear scientist who was instrumental in Iraq's nuclear weapons program in the 1980s and early 1990s, has charged that recent allegations concerning the competence and progress of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program are baseless and untrue.

In an article published on YellowTimes.org before it was taken off-line by its hosting company, Khadduri painted a dismal picture of Iraq's scientific community with many out of jobs and scrounging for work after the Gulf War and subsequent allied bombing reduced any nuclear hopes to rubble. (the article can be read here on Scoop)

Khadduri has also charged Khidhir Hamza, a former Iraqi scientist with whom Khadduri worked, with fabricating and exaggerating his importance in Iraq's nuclear program outlined in Hamza's book "Saddam's Bombmaker."

While several YellowTimes.org writers have been lauded for bringing previously unpublished news to its readers and informing the public of news that has been virtually "blacked out" from mainstream North American media (CNN, New York Times, etc.), a marginal number of readers have found the website to be "sick and diseased," and "unpatriotic."

Those who charge that intellectual debate is unpatriotic forget the words of John Adams, one of the forefathers of the U.S. Constitution:

"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have … a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers."

Or perhaps they forget Thomas Jefferson: "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure."

Are more websites about to be "shut down"?

For its part, YellowTimes.org is committed to continuing its ethos in providing its hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors with alternative news and views, and is not taking the recent shutdown lightly. "This setback is not going to stop us from speaking out against leaders and governments who commit gross injustices against humankind," said Marquardt.

"Believe me, YellowTimes.org will be back."

- Firas Al-Atraqchi can be contacted at: firas6544@rogers.com
- YellowTimes.org can be contacted at: YellowTimes@hotmail.com

Tony Blair is a coward
By John Pilger, The Daily Mirror, Arab News, 2/11/03
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William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of imperial wars, may have first used the expression “blood on his hands” to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass killing of ordinary people.

In my experience “on his hands” applies especially to those modern political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair.

There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that affirms his “authority”.

In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity.

The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered no threat to one’s homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the “highest authority”.

Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors have found, as one put it, “zilch”.

Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover.

Using the archaic “royal prerogative” he did not consult Parliament or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.

Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W. Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of “endless war” and “full spectrum dominance” are a matter of record.

All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush’s State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: “I must have war.” He then had it.

To call Blair a mere “poodle” is to allow him distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility.

He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism — from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American “interests”, such as a voracious appetite for the world’s resources, like oil.

When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about “bringing democracy to the people of Iraq”, remember that it was the CIA that installed the Baath Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein.

Blair and Bush

“That was my favorite coup,” said the CIA man responsible. When you next hear Blair and Bush talking about a “smoking gun” in Iraq, ask why the US government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq’s weapons declaration, saying they contained “sensitive information” which needed “a little editing”.

Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American, British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions. In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office minister, blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full list of lawbreaking British companies. He has never explained why.

As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected to people’s lives.

The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions on ordinary lives: The blood on their hands.

Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.

They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the “long box” pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a “box” was presumed destroyed.

When I reached a village within the “box”, the street had been replaced by a crater.

I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast.

The children’s skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burned flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.

I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in that “media war” I never saw images of these grotesque sights on television or in the pages of a newspaper.

I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon as a kind of freaks’ gallery.

Some years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent Orange.

It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.

This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliché-mongers would now call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam.

Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukemia.

You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.

That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.

I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I traveled in Iraq two years ago. A pediatrician showed me hospital wards of children similarly deformed: A phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf War in 1991.

She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on gray little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes.

More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British.

Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes cancer. In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable.

For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields.

It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the south.

Last November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defense Minister Adam Ingram what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium were held by British forces operating in Iraq.

His robotic reply was: “I am withholding details in accordance with Exemption 1 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information.”

Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America and Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down on its people 800 cruise missiles in two days.

This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.

A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before.”

The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud inventor. He said: “You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.”

What will his “Hiroshima effect” actually do to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14?

The answer is to be found in a “confidential” UN document, based on World Health Organization estimates, which says that “as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries”. A Bush-Blair attack will destroy “a functioning primary health care system” and deny clean water to 39 percent of the population. There is “likely (to be) an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions”.

It is Washington’s utter disregard for humanity, I believe, together with Blair’s lies that have turned most people in this country against them, including people who have not protested before.

Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN weapons inspectors to find a “smoking gun” for Iraq to be attacked.

Compare that with his reassurance in October 2001 that there would be no “wider war” against Iraq unless there was “absolute evidence” of Iraqi complicity in Sept. 11. And there has been no evidence.

Blair’s deceptions are too numerous to list here. He has lied about the nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering up the fact that Washington, with Britain’s support, is withholding more than $5 billion worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council.

He has lied about Iraq buying aluminum tubes, which he told Parliament were “needed to enrich uranium”. The International Atomic Energy Agency has denied this outright.

He has lied about an Iraqi “threat”, which he discovered only following Sept. 11, 2001 when Bush made Iraq a gratuitous target of his “war on terror”. Blair’s “Iraq dossier” has been mocked by human rights groups.

However, what is wonderful is that across the world the sheer force of public opinion isolates Bush and Blair and their lemming, John Howard in Australia.

So few people believe them and support them that The Guardian this week went in search of the few who do — “the hawks”. The paper published a list of celebrity warmongers, some apparently shy at describing their contortion of intellect and morality. It is a small list.

In contrast the majority of people in the West, including the United States, are now against this gruesome adventure and the numbers grow every day.

It is time MPs joined their constituents and reclaimed the true authority of Parliament. MPs like Tam Dalyell, Alice Mahon, Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway have stood alone for too long on this issue and there have been too many sham debates manipulated by Downing Street.

If, as Galloway says, a majority of Labour backbenchers are against an attack, let them speak up now.

Blair’s fig leaf of a “coalition” is very important to Bush and only the moral power of the British people can bring the troops home without them firing a shot.

The consequences of not speaking out go well beyond an attack on Iraq. Washington will effectively take over the Middle East, ensuring an age of terrorism other than their own.

The next American attack is likely to be Iran — the Israelis want this — and their aircraft are already in place in Turkey. Then it may be China’s turn.

“Endless war” is Vice President Cheney’s contribution to our understanding.

Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons “if necessary”. On March 26 last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons”.

Such madness is the true enemy. What’s more, it is right here at home and you, the British people, can stop it. (Daily Mirror

Back to 1914?
Arab News, 11 February 2003

In Makkah at this very moment, some two million pilgrims are praying for peace among nations, peace in Iraq, peace in our homes, peace in our hearts. Not just in Makkah, but all over the world, millions upon millions of Muslims are making the same prayer. And not only Muslims. Millions upon millions of Christians, Jews and others too, in the US, in Europe, everywhere.

And yet because of the Bush administration’s steadfast, arrogant refusal to be swayed from its determination to topple Saddam Hussein, all we can contemplate is a world on the brink of war.

That the Americans have ignored Arab appeals to draw back from the brink and settle this crisis by means other than force does not come as a surprise. Washington only sits down and talks to the Arabs when it wants something from them, not the other way around. It is not US contempt for Arab opinions that astounds. It is the contempt they show for their allies and friends. The Europeans are not traitors or fools, as too many in the media and politics in the US try to make out. If the Germans, the French, the Russians, the Belgians and others all agree that an attack on Iraq is madness at this point in time, the US should listen, not hurl abuse at them. The Europeans are America’s oldest, best and truest friends. If someone cannot listen to the advice of his friends, then he is truly lost.

Washington’s adventurism is a descent into the unknown. It is all tactics and no strategy. It has no plans beyond toppling Saddam Hussein, and after that, nothing more concrete than a vague hope of democracy in the country. It is inexcusable. No government should ever go to war without an endgame in mind.

But it is not what will happen in the days after an invasion that frightens. Saddam Hussein’s regime will probably fall very quickly and whatever fury there may be in the Middle East rapidly subside. It is what happens three or four months afterwards that terrifies. The Iraqi opposition hate each other as much as they hate Saddam Hussein. Without a strong force at the center — and the US cannot afford to remain long — there is a real danger of Iraq falling apart. Who knows where that could take the region. Will it destabilize Arab Gulf states?

There will be dire consequences if the Americans attack Iraq; of that we can be sure. But no one knows what they will be. That includes the US. That is what is so terrifying.

Washington compares Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and the situation to the run-up to World War II. World War I is a more frightening comparison. It started with ultimatums and troop movements which took on an unstoppable momentum of their own, resulting in the most lunatic, most destructive war the world has ever known. By the time it was over, those Prussian, Russian, Ottoman, and Hapsburg empires that thought they could control events had been swept into the history books and the maps of Europe and the Middle East entirely redrawn. None of that was foreseen in 1914.

There is a chilling feeling that this is August 1914 all over again. Prayers for peace are desperately needed

Time-out

Jordan Times, 2/11/03

INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC Energy Agency Director General Mohammad Al Baradei's comments on Monday saying that he and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix had noticed "the beginning of a change of heart on the part of Iraq" in cooperating with inspectors, must be taken as a good sign in the last hour efforts to avert a war on Baghdad. The inspectors bore other positive signals. Blix carefully articulated his remarks on arrival in Athens yesterday ahead of preparing the inspection team's report to the UN Security Council on Feb. 14. Although pointing out that he still saw no new evidence of, Blix appeared to welcome the papers presented by Iraqi officials, as focusing "on real, open issues." He also staunchly upheld the UN's position as the determinant of how to deal with Iraq. "[I]t is the [Security] Council, its members and Iraq...who determine whether we get to disarmament through inspections or disarmament through arms."

In their two days in Baghdad, Blix and Al Baradei conducted perhaps the most critical talks ever to international efforts to avert war. That Iraq has proposed new physical signs, and new methods of investigating is, as Blix put it, "a constructive proposal." If the inspectors' report on Friday suggest the same sort of positive assessments of Iraq's willingness to actively cooperate, then shouldn't the international community be calling for a "time-out" and a deceleration of war preparations by the US and Britain?

Given the fact that US Secretary of State Colin Powell's submissions to the UN Security Council on Feb. 5 failed to convince the global community, including several NATO members, that war is the way to disarm Iraq, the latest encouraging reports from Blix and Al Baradei should lead to a reassessment of Washington's stance on Iraq.

There is no doubt that permitting aerial surveillance of Iraq by a variety of aircraft including U-2 spy planes would succeed in keeping the country under effective supervision and control. The French proposal to deploy an international peacekeeping force in Iraq would also lend additional support to the efforts of the UN to keep Iraq under constant surveillance and in the process eliminate whatever threat that it may pose to its neighbours. If the US-led war preparations have been conducted for the specific purpose of disarming Iraq, the attainment of this objective by peaceful and diplomatic means should serve Washington's interests. US President George Bush and his administration might do well not to summarily dismiss the latest efforts of the UN inspectors but rather encourage the continuation of their sound mission.

'Let diplomacy run its course'

By Massoud A. Derhally

Jordan Times, 2/11/03

Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations Security Council did not make people gasp. While the secretary of state presented what he considered was substantive evidence of Iraq's failure to comply with a number of UN resolutions, to many around the world, the case still appears to be rooted in circumstantial bits and pieces. To the majority of the Arab world, the picture is not complete. Whether to the man on the street in Cairo, to the academic in Lebanon or to a head of state, the current crisis represents a double standard. Iraq is to be crushed for its transgressions while the US turns a blind eye to Israel — the only nuclear power in the region — massing its own weapons of mass destruction.

To many Arabs, this represents a clear and present danger. Israel's weapons of mass destruction dwarf whatever weapons Iraq may, or may not, have. Only Israel has escaped scrutiny of its nuclear arsenal. Israel built its Dimona reactor in the Negev desert through subversion, deliberately cheating inspectors in the 1950s and 60s.

This, to the majority of the Arab and Muslim worlds and a number of European states, confirms the double standard when it comes to reining in those who have weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. This hardly eases the suspicion that the US is hell bent on war. If anything, the inaction towards Israel and the fortitude with which the US has pursued Iraq undermines its credibility as an honest broker and has far-reaching ramifications for the Middle East.

The US trained Israeli nuclear scientists and provided nuclear-related technology to Israel, including a reactor in 1955 under the Atoms for Peace programme. It is also widely known, yet conveniently ignored, that French assistance enabled Israel to build a larger uranium reactor and plutonium reprocessing plant for the Dimona. We learned all of this from Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli technician who worked at the Dimona Nuclear Power Plant from 1976 to 1985.

In 1985, Vanunu believed it was his moral duty to inform fellow Israelis, as well as the rest of the world, that nuclear weapons were being built and stored in Israel. Peter Hounam, a journalist with The Sunday Times of London who helped Vanunu break the story in 1985, revealed in detail later in his book `The woman from Mossad' how Israel possessed over 200 bombs, neutron bombs, F-16 deliverable warheads and Jericho warheads. He concluded that, in light of its production capabilities, Israel could very well have close to 400 nuclear warheads today.

Whatever deterrent effect the founders of the Israeli nuclear programme may have intended, today the nuclear arsenal is linked to Israel's military and political strategy. Just before Ariel Sharon got elected as prime minister in 2000, he said: “Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches.”

The treatment, by Baghdad, of the Kurds and Iranians didn't seem to really make much of a difference to any American administration in the 1980s. In fact, officials like Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein and his henchmen in Baghdad. Neither the gassing of the Kurds nor the death and destruction of the Iran-Iraq war ever turned Americans' stomachs, until Aug. 2, 1990, the fateful day Saddam attacked a fellow Arab country. Then, as now, oil seemed to be the common denominator. Saddam's behaviour, conveniently overlooked in the 1980s, resurfaced at the bequest of American politicians. It is precisely this erratic and two-faced US diplomacy that people in this part of the world are unimpressed with.

No one on Capitol Hill — and certainly not Condoleezza Rice who used to work for a major US oil company — seems to be asking how democratic values are to thrive here? The US, which constantly says it is acting in the name of democracy and peace, continues to turn a blind eye to human rights violations and the development of WMD among its allies. Does it expect a standing ovation when it decides to violate the sovereignty of another nation?

The United States should let diplomacy run its course. If it works within the framework of the United Nations, it will have set a proper example on how to resolve disputes and crises. But if it chooses to act unilaterally, without the world's conviction, it, and it alone, will have rendered the UN and the existing international legal system irrelevant.

The writer is a Jordanian journalist, deputy editor of a publication in the Gulf.

Getting the better of dad
Gulf News, 11-02-2003
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It is rumoured that the present incumbent in the White House is anxious to exceed the accomplishments of his father. So President George Walker Bush seeks any and every opportunity to better the performance of that of former President George Herbert Walker Bush. It is also claimed - although frantically denied by all - that Bush junior seeks revenge against Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, for his having sent an assassination team to kill his father. True or not, Bush junior certainly seems a man possessed in his frenetic bid to oust Saddam from power. But, in the doing of that, it may be the undoing of two world bodies to which the U.S. is a member, albeit sometimes reluctantly.

The American president makes much of the fact that he was the one who brought the Iraq crisis to the UN. He claims this, in answer to charges of unilateralism. Yet he apparently overlooks, or forgets that he needed much persuasion by the doves in his administration and, it is said, British Prime Minister Tony Blair - one of the few leaders Bush is prepared to listen to nowadays. So claims of being the instigator to take the UN route is somewhat less than ingenuous, even though it might go down well with some of his American citizens and is a good sound-bite for the electronic media. But truth, as always, is the first casualty in war - and even in the run-up to war, as the world is now discovering.

When Bush made his address to the UN, he charged that that august body was in danger of becoming irrelevant if it allowed Saddam Hussain to continue to ignore UN resolutions. From then on, Bush, together with Blair, has kept up the pressure - or momentum, as they prefer to call it - on the UN, with special emphasis on the Security Council. In constantly applying this pressure, both inside and out of the UN headquarters, it increases the perception by the majority that the UN is, indeed, a spent force, an irrelevant body, and destined to go the same way as the League of Nations.

The charge that inaction to back their own resolutions will ultimately lead to collapse of the UN Security Council and General Assembly, may come to fruition if repeated often enough. The U.S. has, after all, never been entirely in favour of the UN, seeing it as some subversive attempt at a world government, which, not being under their control, would, as far as many Americans are concerned, be tantamount to anarchy, communism and mind-controlling practices.

Nonplussed by the consequences of their action, the Bush administration continues its own way forward, allowing the dice to fall where they may. Now, it has taken on Nato, which also looks as if it is to implode under American duress.

The U.S. wants Nato to guarantee that it will protect Turkey, should it be attacked by Iraq. The motion has been vetoed by France and Belgium, thereby adding to the ire already felt by Americans towards France. For it is France, with Germany and now Russia, who are contemplating a diplomatic approach to the Iraq problem. It is unlikely to be one that gets off the ground, but it is sufficiently to cause disruption and delay to Bush's plans.

With the possibility of the UN and Nato collapsing, maybe that is what Bush senior meant when he described a "new world order". That should please Bush junior, for he will have achieved what his father did not.

Trusting current U.S. policy is difficult
By Mustapha Karkouti, Gulf News, London, 11-02-2003
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Addressing a Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee, United States Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that his country's efforts to get rid of Iraq's regime of President Saddam Hussain would be the gateway to a new Middle East.

I am not sure whether the Arabs should take comfort, or indeed be worried stiff as they listen to Powell. Those who know him well and work closely with him speak highly of his "good intentions". A senior Western diplomat, who has personal dealings with the American Secretary on Middle East issues, has recently described him to me as "a decent man".

But as it is commonly known, decency is a rare commodity in politics. To be "cunning" is more likely acceptable, but to be "decent" in politics is, generally speaking, nothing further from reality.

Anyhow, Arab and Muslim nations do not have any problem with Secretary Powell's declared intentions, nor with the list he presented last week, to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations Security Council, the world's highest legal body.

He has strongly, and some say quite persuasively, put his president's case for war against Iraq's President. The list is long, comprehensive, unprecedented and very impressive indeed.

The war will liberate Iraqis from a tyrant who has controlled an amazing country with an iron fist for almost a quarter of a century, and who has terrorised his own people for years. Disarming Saddam's regime will make the world a safer place. The war will safeguard Iraq's national wealth for the Iraqis. The military operation will help Iraq and the Gulf region to develop.

Eventually, the list goes on, Saddam's removal will help introduce democracy into the Arab world. A successful operation in Iraq will lead to a quick and final solution for the Arab-Israel conflict and an end to the Palestine question.

A handful of Arab regimes may welcome Secretary Powell's assertion, but the majority of the people would go along and wish that these promises could come true. People are desperately eager for transparency, political and economic reforms.

Very few people would dare argue against these aims. But the trouble is that very few people trust the Americans.

Simply the vast majority of Arabs at home and those who have settled abroad do not believe what this, and previous American administrations, have been telling them over the years.

Why should they? This is a fact no one can or wish to hide, despite the fact that the majority of Arabs dearly aspire to Western and American values of political freedom, economic prosperity and parliamentarian democracy.

Arabs are not the only ones who find it difficult to trust the U.S. administration. One need only quickly scan U.S. relations with the rest of the world. The Americans have problems of their own with almost every one, including their allies among member states of Nato, South America as well as the European Union.

Recent polls in various European countries, including the five EU-member states whose leading politicians have lent their signatures to a joint appeal in support of President George Walker Bush's stand on Iraq, have strongly revealed the low level of popular trust in American foreign policy.

Not only on Iraq, but also in its war against terrorism, the U.S. is unfortunately repeating past administrations' mistakes and misjudgment on the Middle East. Bush's government is not giving Arabs much choice.

"Either you are with us or against us" - to quote the American President - and entirely on our conditions, the Arabs are being offered a raw deal and a difficult pill to swallow.

The U.S. administration should not content itself with winning the mooted support of the region's governments over Saddam, but if it is genuinely serious in presenting this impressive list, it should work on another and much more important front: winning Arab public opinion.

This can be successfully pursued by only showing the Arabs, and particularly the Palestini-ans, that those American politicians mean what they say.

Since Bush's first major speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2001, in which he declared his vision of a two-state solution, the U.S. has failed to take any action to curtail the destructive and brutal policy of Israel's premier Ariel Sharon in the occupied territories.

Take one aspect of this policy: the continuous expansion of Jewish colonies which is the pillar of Israeli colonial occupation of Arab land. Some Shekels2.2 billion of state funds was transferred to West Bank settlements in 2001, according to a study published in Israel's Ha'aretz.

The study was conducted by economist Dror Tsaban, formerly a budget official and assistant director general in the Finance Ministry. It is based on a partial estimate of the allocations of various cabinet ministries to the colonies.

The estimate does not include the security budget, the Education Ministry budget and allocations to state supported bodies and institutions.

The study shows that the "surplus allocations" for settlers out of the Shekels2.2 billion basket is Shekels1.76 billion a year. "Surplus allocations" are defined as investment in infrastructure, surplus caused by per capita budget which is higher than the average per capita allocation in Israel, and benefits given the colonies which are defined as areas of national priority (mainly income tax exemptions).

The study's main findings are:

The overall annual income tax benefits to West Bank settlers are estimated at an annual Shekels200 million.

The budgets transferred the colonies reached Shekels114 million in 2001 (infrastructures and developing production means).

The study found a Shekels618 million "surplus budget" in the current budgets which the labor and welfare, interior and education ministries pass on to the local councils.

Tsaban examined the state budget's part in the local authorities' current budget per capita in 2001. He found that via this clause, a West Bank Jewish resident received an annual average of Shekels3,416 of the current local councils' budget, compared to Shekels1,763 per resident of local council's budgets within the Green Line (Israel). To expect Arab support over Saddam while ignoring the Arab-Israel issue totally, is a recipe for disaster in the days to come.

The current American policy will not only fail to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Arabs, but could dangerously help to create a new breeding ground for a much more vicious and deadly form of terrorism than what Al Qaida has shown so far.

Mustapha Karkouti is the former president, Foreign Press Association in London. The writer can be contacted at mkarkouti.opinion@gulfnews.com

Pay attention to the deception over Iraq
By Linda Heard, Athens, 11-02-2003
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Following heavily scripted and carefully crafted speeches and presentations by members of the Bush administration concerning Iraq, the gloves have finally come off. Saddam Hussain's agreement to being interviewed by former British politician Tony Benn showed just how high the stakes have become in this battle for hearts and minds. Although the interview itself was formal, the Iraqi president came across as relaxed, as he appealed to the British people to stop the war.

The American President kicked off the public relations campaign weeks ago with his State of the Union address. The portion dealing with Iraq was peppered with nationalistic rhetoric, disingenuous promises of providing a better life for the Iraqi people, personal insults directed at the Iraqi regime and the arrogant premise that God has chosen America to save the world.

Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation as to Baghdad's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction was conducted on more phlegmatic lines. In a professional fashion, Powell put what first appeared to be an impressive case illuminating Iraq's deceit and unwillingness to cooperate with UN Security Council Resolution 1441.

Dog-and-pony show

Powell's dog-and-pony show began with purported audio intercepts of conversations between members of Iraq's forces and Republican guards, aerial photographs showing alleged chemical bunkers, innuendo that Iraq was connected with the anthrax attacks in the U.S., and went as far as to attempt to link Saddam with Abu Musab Zarqawi – an affiliate of Al Qaida supposedly now in Kurdish/CIA-controlled North Western Iraq. He further asserted that Zarqawi was running a poison and explosives factory in Khurmal.

The Secretary insisted that Iraq still refused to co-operate with inspections by not allowing scientists to be interviewed without an Iraqi minder and by refusing U-2 flyovers, as requested by chief inspectors Dr. Hans Blix and Dr. Mohammad El Baradei.

But just as the Bush administration was patting itself on the back while watching public opinion in the U.S. waver towards a pro-war stance, things began to go wrong.

As soon as the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN had finished his adequate, but unimpressive rebuttal to Powell's speech, Saddam's Scientific Adviser Amer Al Saadi appeared on our screens to ruin everything for the Powell camp.

The sophisticated, smooth-talking Al Saadi shredded most of Powell's allegations in a deliberate and convincing fashion and laughed off the Secretary's attempts to implicate Iraq in terrorism. He waved aside the intercepts indicating that he wouldn't stoop to comment on something which any third rate intelligence service could rig.

He said that Iraq had no objection to its scientists being questioned without a minder (since, scientists have been submitting themselves for private interviews), and the government did not object to U-2 flyovers in principle. He explained that the Iraqi government would agree to this as soon as American and British aircraft discontinue flying over North and South Iraq in contravention of UN Resolution 1441, which provides for the sovereignty and integrity of the Iraqi nation.

At a press conference, Al Saadi reiterated that he was concerned that Iraq could not protect the U-2s as long as allied flights were ongoing but amplified the point. Britain or America could easily shoot down a U-2 and blame Iraq, he said. To lend weight to his suggestion, he brought up the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the U.S. had claimed falsely that the North Vietnamese had sunk its destroyers as a prelude to war.

A Washington Post article dated August 5, 1964 read: "American planes hit North Vietnam after second attack on our destroyers; move taken to halt new aggression".

In reality there had been no second attack on American ships but that didn't stop the U.S. media reporting the Johnson administration's claim as gospel. Millions of lives were lost in that bloody conflagration, including some 60,000 Americans.

Incubator tale

A claim that Iraqi soldiers had stormed into a hospital post-natal ward in Kuwait and tossed dozens of newborns out of their life-saving incubators gave impetus to Congressional approval of the Gulf War. This tale was later proved to have been fabricated. Perhaps we should keep this in mind when recalling Powell's lurid description, based on hearsay, last week of Iraqi death row prisoners, used as guinea pigs in chemical and biological experiments.

Also during the Gulf War, we were treated to another display of the Pentagon's box of tricks. There was a leaked tale of "top secret" satellite imagery which showed half-a-million Iraqi troops massing on the border with Saudi Arabia. The American media ran with the story and it wasn't until the Russians took some of their own pictures that the truth came out. Powell later admitted that he had had been wrong but by then the war was over.

Most people would agree that the Gulf War was just and right was on the side of the allies who wanted to free Kuwait after an Iraqi invasion. But despite enjoying the moral high ground, the U.S. still saw fit to resort to bending the truth in a self-serving manner.

A Swedish former Brigadier General Bo Pellnas, who was head of the United Nations Military Observers in Croatia, explained how he had developed doubts over America's veracity during his service in the former Yugoslavia. During an interview he gave to a Swedish news agency, he described how Madeleine Albright, then secretary of state, accused the Yugoslav authorities of importing illegal weapons. Pellnas contends that fake aerial photographs were produced to back up the American claim.

'Liberty' attack

The Israelis haven't been reticent in its attempts to lay blame at the feet of its enemies either. The most renowned example of this is Israel's sinking of the U.S. ship 'Liberty' on June 8, 1967. In his book The Secret Hide-out author James Panford goes into historical detail of this incident, designed to put the blame on Egypt, as well as the shameful American cover-up.

As things stand, Iraq is way ahead in the public relations race. Against the advice of the Bush administration, Drs. Blix and El Baradei returned to Baghdad where they were engaged in talks designed to further Iraqi cooperation.

A further blow to Powell's case came when journalists managed to visit the so-called "poison" factory in Khurmal. What did they find? Only derelict buildings, broken rocket parts and chopped tomatoes.

Kofi Annan made an impassioned declaration to the U.S. not to go to war without UN backing on Saturday, saying, "When states decide to use force, not in self-defence but to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the UN Security Council."

On a visit to Germany last Saturday, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lost his cool, forcefully condemning France, Germany and Belgium for thwarting Nato's coming to a decision on whether or not it would rush to the defence of Turkey in case of war.

An even more enraged Joschke Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister, reacted by saying, or rather shouting: "You have to make the case. And to make the case in a democracy you must be convinced yourself. I am not convinced. This is my problem. I cannot go to the public and say, 'excuse me, there are reasons for war' when I don't believe in it."

Germany and France are now working on an alternative solution to disarming Iraq, which includes UN peacekeepers, turning the entire country into a no-fly zone and permanent weapons inspections. This is backed by Russia but is not going down well with Washington.

The incident which most eroded Powell's case was exposed in Britain last week when we were told that Tony Blair's hyped-up secret dossier, referred to by Powell as "exquisite", was in fact plagiarised from three internet sources including from the 12-year-old thesis of an Iraqi American post-graduate student.

The student, who was interviewed on CNN, admitted that his work was out of date and appeared miffed that he hadn't been credited. Some of his paragraphs had been lifted word for word from the Internet including typos and spelling mistakes, while others had been tampered with so as to further discredit the Iraqi regime.

'Yes Minister'

The entire chain of events could have been a scene from the British television series Yes Minister and we could have all had a good laugh if it weren't for one horrific thought. A nation engaged in persuading us that we should put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk going to war with Iraq, has to resort to a nameless, faceless, student wordsmith, whose intellectual property it has shamefully stolen.

As the Bush administration becomes more bogged down with the weight of burgeoning anti-war public sentiment, it could become desperate to sway the public in the opposite direction. Britain has already tried this by presenting a plagiarised dossier, deliberately accentuating the negative, and was caught with its hand in the cookie jar. We must be wary of taking things at face value and jumping to hasty conclusions. History has taught us a valuable lesson. It's time to pay attention.

Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. The writer can be contacted at lheard.opinion@gulfnews.com

Projection of power is the key
By Joseph C. Wilson, Gulf News, 11-02-2003
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I met with Saddam Hussain for the last time in a heavily curtained room in the Foreign Ministry late in the morning of August 6, 1990, four days after his invasion of Kuwait. As the senior diplomat in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, at the time, it was my responsibility to tell him to get out of Kuwait and to let the several thousand Americans, including 150 so-called "human shields," leave the region.

I knew from previous meetings that he always stacked the deck to give himself every advantage, and this session was no different.

I was accompanied by a single embassy note taker, while Saddam had eight senior foreign policy officials with him. But only Tariq Aziz, then the foreign minister, dared speak in his presence. The others were as silent as furniture.

Saddam joined me in the middle of the room with the Iraqi news cameras whirring. Typically, when it came time to shake hands, he deliberately held his low so that to take it I would have to lean over. The cameras would then capture for posterity that his visitor had bowed to the potentate. I kept my back straight.

Later in the meeting, when he turned to others in the room to elicit a reaction, the discomfort was palpable. At one point, he made a move to his ever-present gun. My immediate thought was that I had said the wrong thing. To my relief he took it off, telling me that it hurt his back when he sat. I looked at his people, who were also on edge, watching his every move. He reminded me of a big cat at a watering hole, with the zebra and antelope wondering whether he is there to drink or to eat.

During our session - the last he had with any American official before the war - I listened as he offered his deal through a translator: In exchange for keeping Kuwait, he would give the U.S. oil at a good price and would not invade Saudi Arabia. In a matter-of-fact manner, he dismissed the Kuwaiti government as "history" and scoffed at President Bush's condemnation of him.

He mocked American will and courage, telling me that my country would run rather than face the prospect of spilling the blood of our soldiers in the Arabian Desert. I was never prouder than when the American response was to confront Saddam and ultimately force him from Kuwait.

Desert Storm was a just war, sanctioned by the international community and supported by a broad multilateral coalition. Today we are on the verge of another conflict with Iraq, but unlike Desert Storm, the goals are not clear - despite Secretary of State Colin Powell's eloquent argument for war in his address to the UN Security Council.

Is it a war to liberate the people of Iraq, oppressed all these years? Is it a battle in the war on terrorism? Or is it, as President Bush often says, all about disarmament?

Clarity matters, because our goals will determine how Saddam reacts.

By all indications, Saddam is clear in his own mind about our intentions: He believes we are going to war to kill him, whether he disarms or not.

This is a major problem for us. My judgment was - and is - that only power will make him yield, but there also has to be some incentive for him to comply.

During the Gulf War, we were always acutely aware of the need to be confrontational on the issues at hand but to leave Saddam, a proud and vain man, a way to save face.

When he released the women and children hostages, Saddam initially threatened to keep dual Kuwaiti-American citizens. I told his underling that unless all Americans were put on the evacuation flight within half an hour, I would inform the American TV networks that Saddam had again reneged on his promises and was toying with the lives of children.

Saddam relented, and our official statements acknowledged Iraqi co-operation.

There is now no incentive for Saddam to comply with the inspectors or to refrain from using weapons of mass destruction to defend himself if the United States comes after him. And he will use them; we should be under no illusion about that.

Saddam and Aziz both told me directly that Iraq reserved the right to use every weapon in its arsenal if invaded, just as it had against Iran and later the Kurds.

The fact that thousands of men, women and children had died in these attacks fazed them not one bit. In fact, Aziz could barely be bothered to stop puffing on his Cuban cigar as he made these comments, of so little importance was the use of chemicals to kill people.

It is probably too late to change Saddam's assessment, and that will make any ensuing battle for Iraq that much more dangerous for our troops and for the Iraqis who find themselves in the battlefield.

The assertion that Saddam might share weapons of mass destruction with a terrorist group, however, is counter-intuitive to everything I and others know about him. The Iraqi leader is above all a consummate survivalist.

He acts as if he expects the people around him to die for him, but he has long known that every terrorist act, and particularly a sophisticated one, raises the question of his involvement and invites blame. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose. In his mind he is Iraq, Iraq is Saddam, and as long as he survives, Iraq survives.

After then-Secretary of State Jim Baker made it clear to Aziz on the eve of the Gulf War that the United States would destroy Iraq if weapons of mass destruction were used, Saddam did not use them. He is not stupid, and for him living is better than dying in vain.

Now, however, if he feels his death is inevitable, he may well arm extremist groups in an attempt to have a last, posthumous laugh.

Along with our drive toward war, it should also be made clear to Saddam that - in the little time remaining - he still has a choice.

We should do everything possible to avoid the understandable temptation to send U.S. troops to fight a war of "liberation" that can be waged only by the Iraqis themselves. The projection of power need not equate with the projection of force.

Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

Joseph C. Wilson, chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988 to 1991 and acting ambassador during Operation Desert Shield, is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.