Feb 15, 2003 Op Eds

Feb 15, 2003 Opinion Editorials http://www.aljazeerah.info

There was nothing in yesterday’s reports by UN chief arms inspector Hans Blix and IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei to the Security Council to justify an attack on Iraq at present. There were no new revelations about unaccounted-for chemical or biological materials, no new evidence of a smoking gun, no acceptance that the case presented by US Secretary of State Colin Powell 10 days ago was proven.

What came from their reports, loud and clear, was a plea for more time. The message was that the system of inspections is working and has continued to make headway since they last reported to the UN. There have now been private interviews with scientists and while more are needed, three weeks ago Iraq was still blocking them. Likewise, Iraq has backed down on aerial surveillance.

This is progress. In his impassioned response yesterday at the Security Council, US Secretary of State Colin Powell himself effectively confirmed that things are moving in the right direction when he said that Iraq had been pressured into greater cooperation because of the stand taken by the US. Iraq is being surely, remorselessly, pushed into a corner, pushed into divulging what its plans are. It does not want to — and no one would dispute Powell’s assertion that it has tried to deceive and cheat and that it hopes to play for time. But it has not succeeded and it is not going to succeed. Blix and El Baradei and their colleagues have it on the run.

Their reports immeasurably strengthen the position of France, Germany, Russia and China that arms inspectors must be given more time — all the time needed. They snookered the American and British arguments by the sheer logic of what they implied. If the inspection system is coming up with results, then why undermine it? Of course, more still has to be done, much more. There are unanswered questions about possible anthrax and nerve gas stocks and long-range missiles. Iraq must give an account — and, what is more, by giving an account, by being forced into complying with inspection process, it is effectively being forced into disarmament — and all without war. That is what the world wants.

Yesterday, after Blix and El Baradei had spoken, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was given a rare burst of applause after his comments. He was given it because he was convincingly right that arms inspections have not been taken to their conclusion and that the use of force is so fraught with danger for the region that it has to be used as a last resort. In the same way Powell was convincingly wrong. It is not those who want more arms inspections who are refusing to face reality; it is the US. The reality is that inspections can work. But Washington is not interested in them. It never was. All it is interested in is toppling Saddam Hussein, a goal that can only be achieved by force. The consequences for the whole region would be too horrific. Maybe, in the end, it will have to come to that, but there is still plenty of time to try the inspections route. We do not have to rush into war now. It is Washington alone that wants it.

Unfortunately, there is no point deceiving ourselves that the US will not sift the nuggets it desperately wants out of yesterday’s reports. Powell’s response seemed to say that the US is determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein, come what may.

Who then, is the bigger danger to regional and world peace: Saddam Hussein or George W. Bush?

Wanted: An alliance of virtue
By Neil Berry

Arab News, 2/15/03

Every year, thousands of British Muslims go on Haj to re-affirm their faith. This year, for the first time, a British TV crew was granted a visa by the Saudi authorities to record the progress of some of these pilgrims. Among those filmed by Channel 4 News undergoing the agony and ecstasy of Haj was 27-year-old British career woman Kosser Sheikh. A well-educated financier, she is struggling, like many British Muslims, to reconcile barely compatible aspects of her existence: How to adhere to Islam in a largely secular culture; how to be true to her plain-living faith while wearing expensive fashions and working as an executive in a London-based US investment bank.

In common with the Saudi authorities, Channel 4 News is committed to demonstrating that the majority of Muslims are devout and peace-loving. The urgency of the message scarcely needs to be spelled out. This is a time when Islam and its followers are facing growing misunderstanding and intolerance. The recent apprehension of North African asylum-seekers in London and Manchester on suspicion of terrorist activities has exacerbated anti-Muslim public feeling in Britain. And the current British high security alert — prompted by a perceived threat of a major terrorist attack — is likely to exacerbate it still further.

Public hostility to British Muslims was mounting even before the present state of emergency — thanks not least to the antics of the imam Abu Hamza. Much given to voicing inflammatory anti-Western sentiments, this strident fundamentalist has been a gift to Britain’s xenophobic popular newspapers: he is the “mad mullah” of their lurid dreams. When last month police shut down his favorite mosque in London’s Finsbury Park, many wondered why the authorities had been so slow to take action against the place where Hamza had been propagating extremism.

Seldom out of the public eye, Abu Hamza has come to personify the Muslim community in the eyes of ill-informed Britons. In PR terms, the consequences could not have been more damaging.

In order to counter negative public perceptions of Muslims, the magazine Q-news organized a meeting on Feb. 8, which was addressed by prominent community leaders and clerics. Entitled “Immigration, Asylum and Refuge: the Lessons of Madinah,” the discussion ranged over the issues thrown up by the history of the Muslim settlement in Britain.

Chairing the meeting, Dr. Zaki Badawi was at pains to emphasize that “asylum” (like “immigration” a word charged with racist connotations) is a subject with implications for all British Muslims. He went on to point out what an asset Muslims and other immigrants have been to Britain: an authoritative audit carried out by the Economist magazine in the late 1990s revealed that the country had actually made a net profit out of immigration. The question why so many people have been motivated to migrate to Britain in the first place is rarely asked. The answer, Dr. Badawi said, was because of the grossly inequitable terms of trade between the affluent West and societies the West has contrived to keep in a state of underdevelopment. Immigration would only stop when the world’s poor enjoyed adequately rewarded employment in their own countries.

The combative Tower Hamlets councilor and race relations adviser Kumar Murshid feared that this was a “critical time” for Muslims both locally and globally. Hopes that the fortunes of Muslims in Britain would improve under a Labour government had been comprehensively betrayed. Muslims were being demonized by leading politicians and media figures (among them people who were themselves of immigrant background). Yet British Muslims were now something like two-million strong without wielding anything like the influence of Britain’s far smaller Jewish community. It was, declared Murshid, high time that they began punching in accordance with their numerical weight and engaging the British government in a “robust” public debate about their rights.

As befitted their status as scholars and thinkers, Sheikh Adbdal-Hakim Murad and Sheikh Hasan le-Gai Eaton ruminated on the destiny of Islam at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author of many articles about Islam in contemporary society, Murad observed that Muslims were at the center of the ongoing European debate about identity, raising the question what is now meant by “Britishness” or “Europeanness”, and he did not doubt that in the fullness of time a characteristically British version of Islam would emerge — just as distinctive versions of Islam had taken shape in places like Africa and Malaya.

Perhaps the most conservative contributor to the discussion, and certainly the most venerable, the former British diplomat Sheikh Hasan le-Gai Eaton argued that the British Islamic community would do well to discourage further immigration by unwesternized Muslims until it had consolidated its own specifically British identity. Meanwhile, he counseled Muslims already settled in Britain would be wise to refrain from quarrelling among themselves. If they did not hang together, Eaton warned, they would hang apart.

The charismatic American lecturer Sheikh Hamza Yusuf (who like the two previous speakers is a white convert to Islam) spoke about how the eclecticism of Western popular culture was in many ways anticipated by Islam, with its readiness to embrace diversity.

What was vital in the present circumstances, he insisted, was that the well-meaning of all persuasions forged an “alliance of virtue”. And while acknowledging that things were “looking ominous out there,” he made much of the sustaining power of belief, reminding his listeners how Christianity, embattled as it had been under the once mighty Romans, nevertheless long survived the collapse of the Roman Empire: religious faith is if anything strengthened by persecution. Was the notion of asylum, Yusuf finally asked, not fundamental to all the great religions? What, after all, were Moses, Jesus and the Buddha if not asylum-seekers?

The speakers assembled by Q-News furnished much food for thought. It was a pity that the several hundred mostly young people who comprised their audience included so few non-Muslims. The real challenge confronting articulate Muslims now is to dispel among the British public at large the suspicion and animosity with which Islam is increasingly viewed.

— Neil Berry, a London-based freelance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.

The politics of siege
By Tariq A. Al-Maeena

Arab News, 2/15/03

Tune into most US cable news networks, and plastered across their screens you’ll notice some catchy phrase such as “terror alert-high” or “orange alert” or “under attack”. And if you are like a lot of people in the USA who get their news from such sources, you will then be compelled to stock up on necessary medical and food supplies in preparation for the impending terror.

As opposition to Mr. Bush and his war policy spreads, what better way to convince the masses that their own security is at stake? And this from the man who went to the UN last October to make his case against Iraq using highly deceptive evidence. And when that was not enough, he sent in his Secretary of State to the same body a few months later with even more flimflam evidence, evidence we came to find out later that was lifted and plagiarized from a graduate student’s thesis on Iraq.

The US has been under a siege mentality for quite some time. And as long as the US government through the media keeps spawning such fears among the populace, there is hope that voices of opposition to unwarranted killings in distant lands would be muted or at least distracted enough to let the war machinery fire the first salvo. And in emphasizing the “you’re with us, or you are the enemy‚” doctrine so prevalent in US politics today, he has created an atmosphere where any dissenting opinion is sure to be branded unpatriotic.

From some of the voices of reason in the US Congress a resolution was recently drafted based on the president not having made a compelling case to Congress, the American people, or the international community that the use of armed force is the only alternative to disarm Iraq. It further stated that “Congress and the American people are increasingly concerned that the president is prepared to use armed force against Iraq without broad support by the international community, and without making a compelling case that Iraq presents such an imminent threat to the national security of the United States that unilateral action is justified. Therefore, it is the sense of the Senate that, before the president uses military force against Iraq without the broad support of the international community: (1) The US provide full support to the United Nations weapons inspectors to facilitate their ongoing disarmament work; and (2) Obtain approval by Congress of new legislation authorizing the president to use all necessary means, including the use of military force, to disarm Iraq.”

And in his mission to stamp out terrorism, Mr. Bush today can be certain of one thing. His foreign policy has given rise to anti-US sentiments, the likes of which have not been witnessed for decades. Why does Mr. Bush and company oppose UN inspections? Who gave Mr. Bush the moral authority to launch a war? Why in the name of God should one not go to great lengths to avoid bloodshed? Why foster future seeds of terrorism in the minds of those who see his policy as nothing more than Bush bullyism?

Could it be that in this leader’s mind, those are not lives and he has been singly ordained by a higher power to guide us all to a better world. Iraqi civilians are just symbols or non-living entities that must be taken down. And perhaps those precision-guided bombs would somehow avoid most civilians, when waves of bombs are launched against a population that would be pitifully defenseless against these weapons of destruction.

Mr. Bush is impatient. His troops are all ready and assembled and waiting for his signal. To turn to inner moral guidance at this stage would mean personal defeat. A lot is riding on this, perhaps even his hopes for re-election. And signals from the UN inspectors so far have been extremely discouraging to Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and their band of bloodthirsty men.

The war on Iraq is not a war. Nor is Iraq a direct threat to the United States. Justify it to your conscience all you want, but it is nothing more than a killing of the innocent in a feeble quest to get Saddam Hussein. One single vanquished innocent life is murder! It is no less a barbarous murder as the one inflicted on the innocent victims of Sept. 11.

Scholars of international law should begin preparing briefs on those engineering this slaughter and spillage of innocent blood, and conceivably in the near future present them to the World Court. Murder under any circumstance should not be condoned or left unpunished.

— Tariq A. Al-Maeena, clsencounters@hotmail.com

Anti-war Questions and Answers
By Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom

Arab News, 2/15/03

We are nearing the anti-war demos of Feb. 15-16. These will occur all over the world in an unprecedented display of international anti-war and pro-justice solidarity. In this message I wanted to convey a new question and answer piece regarding anti-war activism.

1. As anti-war sentiment grows and the anti-war movement gains momentum, what are the most important priorities for peace and justice organizations?

To build a movement able to marshal sufficient numbers of sufficiently informed and committed people to compel ruling elites around the world, and ultimately in the US, to restrain or even terminate their war designs out of fear of the repercussions of their not doing so. To ensure that this broad international anti-war movement persists beyond the crisis in Iraq, and that it grows strong enough to make less likely further wars and international violations elsewhere. To ensure that this movement's power and humanity are both optimized by connecting it to wider issues of economic, gender, race, ecological, social, political, national, and international justice.

2. From progressive organizations, you sometimes hear the demand, "Let the inspections work." Is this a sensible demand? Should the Left back inspections?

The demand "Let the inspections work" has three meanings, one that the Left should endorse, one that is reasonable but inadequate, and one that is immoral and quite dangerous. In reverse order, the immoral and dangerous version is the one that translates to: not enough evidence has yet been collected to convince all the naysayers that war is appropriate, so let's give the inspectors a little more time and then go to war. This version is not meaningfully different from Bush's position, since he needs a few more weeks to have all his troops in place in any event. What makes this position so immoral and dangerous is that it assumes, contrary to fact, that there is a serious threat which only war can address, and it ignores all the horrendous costs of war. Iraq may or may not have hidden chemical or biological weapons, but so do many nations, and the prospects of Iraq being able to use any such weapons against its neighbors, let alone the United States, are essentially nil, given Iraq's weakened state, and the massive military forces on its borders (even before the current build-up). Yes, such weapons might be launched in the event of a US attack, but this is a very different matter from there being a realistic threat of offensive Iraqi use. Any war to disarm Iraq, whether now or a few weeks hence, will risk terrible consequences that could not possibly be justified by the need to eliminate the minor external threat posed by Saddam Hussein. While no one can know what will happen in any war, surely the dangers are immense: Death and destruction in Iraq. The UN is preparing for half a million Iraqi casualties (see the leaked internal UN document at http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/war021210scanned.pdf). Medact, the UK affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War — winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 — estimates a possible half million deaths (assuming no nuclear weapons are used; see "Collateral Damage: the health and environmental costs of war on Iraq - Report," http://www.medact.org/tbx/docs/Medact%20Iraq%20report_final3.pdf).

And despite claims that the attackers will be careful to avoid "collateral damage," the British Defense Ministry "admitted the electricity system that powers water and sanitation for the Iraqi people could be a military target, despite warnings that its destruction would cause a humanitarian tragedy." (Independent, Feb. 2, 2003)

Instability throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

Of course, instability is not automatically a bad thing, but it's hard to see how the massive protests throughout the region, and the resultant repression, will improve the prospects for decent societies. Fundamentalists have already won provincial elections in Pakistan as a result of the US war in Afghanistan; their strength is likely to grow in that country and beyond. Weakening the fragile institutions of international law and promoting the might-makes-right policy of the Bush administration.

Regardless of whether the UN Security Council ultimately gives in to Washington's bribery and threats, it's clear that this is a war favored almost exclusively by the United States. Attacking Iraq will establish the precedent that preventive war is a permissible doctrine in global affairs, reversing decades of slowly building small checks on foreign aggression. Bill Keller of the New York Times (Feb. 9, 2003) says he supports this war, but not all the other wars that Bush is likely to pursue. But nothing will make those next wars more likely than giving Bush a free hand for this one. Encourage the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Any state watching the United States at work is likely to conclude that there can be no safety from US attack by conventional means and hence only the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction offers any hope of deterring Washington's next effort at regime change. The reasonable but inadequate version of the slogan "let the inspections work" is intended as an argument against war. It says that the inspections can accomplish the goal of rendering Iraq incapable of constituting a threat to anyone beyond its borders and thus war is totally unnecessary. In the past, a less elaborate version of such inspections have destroyed far more weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than all the US and coalition bombing during the first Gulf War, together with all the subsequent US-UK bombing in 1998. In the abstract, of course, inspections and war are not the only two ways of dealing with the problem of weapons of mass destruction. As a practical matter, however, these seem to be the only short-term possibilities. That is, at the moment, inspections are the only realistic alternative to war. There are some aspects of UN policy toward Iraq that the Left clearly must condemn — for example, the sanctions, which cause catastrophic harm to Iraqi civilians while strengthening, rather than weakening, Saddam Hussein. (Hence, along with our call for no war, we will often call as well for an end to the sanctions.) But to call for an end to the inspections — given that it is the only real hope for preventing war — would be foolish. Some argue that the inspections will inherently lead to war and have always been intended to do so. This indeed may be Washington's hope, but there is no reason to believe that other UN members who have backed inspections — such as France, Germany, China, Russia, Mexico, and Syria — intend that the inspections will lead inevitably to war. This said, however, it must be acknowledged that there are serious problems with the inspections. The inspectors are much too solicitous of Washington; the demand that Iraq permit U-2 overflights while at the same time US-UK warplanes patrol Iraqi skies (authorized by no Security Council resolution) is unreasonable, even though now acceded to. Most importantly, however, the inspections imply that there is only one country in the world which seems to require inspections. Thus, to simply say "Let the inspections work," without further elaboration is not an adequate slogan. The desirable version of "Let the inspections work" is not only that the inspections make any war against Iraq wholly unnecessary, but that inspections of Iraq should be considered as part of a larger effort to prohibit weapons of mass destruction from the entire Middle East (as called for in Article 14 of Security Council Resolution 687, the resolution which originally provided for the disarmament of Iraq following the first Gulf War) and indeed globally. What applies to one should apply to all, in short.

3. What should the Left be calling for in response to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, etc.?

There are two parts to the Left response to terrorism. First, the US Left ought to demand that its government cease carrying out and supporting terrorism. Terrorism, of course, is not confined to Muslim fundamentalists crashing planes into the World Trade Center. It is terrorism also to bomb Afghanistan knowing that reputable aid agencies warned of a potential humanitarian catastrophe. It is being a state sponsor of terrorism to provide arms to Turkey's murderous campaign against the Kurds in the 1990s or to Colombia's military, which are known to be connected to paramilitary death squads, or to the Israeli occupation forces who use US assault helicopters and much more against the Palestinian civilian population. Hence, the greatest step the United States government can take to reduce international terrorism is to stop supporting it. As for anti-Western terrorism, there are some fruitful approaches to reducing this and some counter-productive approaches. The most important of the fruitful approaches is changing US foreign policy. Al-Qaeda leaders and others like them may have no other goal than provoking an apocalyptic confrontation between the Muslim world and the West from which they hope they will emerge victorious. But many of their followers, recruits, and sympathizers are motivated by US policies that can, and on their own merits should, be changed. Among these are the US's unwavering support for Israeli oppression of Palestinians, the devastating sanctions on Iraq, and the backing for corrupt and authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Other secondary but more immediate approaches to dealing with anti-Western terrorism are police measures, including going after financial networks, money-laundering banks, and the like. The US government version of police action, on the other hand — turning the country more and more into a police state through the USA Patriot Act (and an even more atrocious Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, which is apparently already being prepared within the Justice Department — text available at http://www.publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=502&L1=10&L2=1 0&L3=0&L4=0&L5=0) — probably makes things worse even just regarding terrorism, alienating the very people whose allegiance must be secured, much less regarding the overall character of our society. Most counterproductive of all is military action, with massive bombing, leading not only to many corpses, but many more terrorists. The New York Times reported on June 16, 2002, based on conversations with senior government officials, that "Classified investigations of the Al-Qaeda threat now under way at the FBI and CIA have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States.... Instead, the war may have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area."

As for how we should deal with weapons of mass destruction, one should note first that chemical, biological, and nuclear warheads are not the only weapons of mass destruction. Far more people have died — and are still dying — from the diseases attributable to the US-British sanctions than from "all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history." (Karl and John Mueller, in Foreign Affairs, May-June 1999).

Confining ourselves to weapons of mass destruction as typically understood, the acquisition of WMD by one state generally encourages, rather than discourages, their acquisition by others. So the best method for dealing with Iraqi WMD — both from the point of view of justice and efficacy — is in the context of global or, barring that, regional disarmament. One of the biggest obstacles to any such disarmament, however, has been the United States. US officials are today openly talking about using nuclear weapons and have scientists working around the clock to find ways to make these weapons more usable. The United States is a party to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which sets up a class of "have" and "have-not" nations, with the US in the privileged "have" category, but Washington has refused to meet its obligation under the treaty to move toward disarmament; it has refused, for example to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which "have-not" nations consider a minimal litmus test indicating a country's commitment to the NPT. The United States is also a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). As a report for the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies noted, "After signing the treaty in 1993, Washington largely ignored it, escaping national embarrassment only with a last minute ratification just four days before its entry into force. Moreover, the United States took steps to dilute the convention by including waivers in its resolution of ratification and implementing legislation exempting US sites from the same verification rules that American negotiators had earlier demanded be included in the treaty." Among the exemptions were the US president's right to refuse an inspection of US facilities on national security grounds. (See Amy E. Smithson, "US Implementation of the CWC," in Jonathan B. Tucker, The Chemical Weapons Convention: Implementation Challenges and Solutions, Monterey Institute, April 2001, pp. 23 29, http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/tuckcwc.htm).

The United States is also a party to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), but efforts to improve compliance with the treaty floundered after Washington blocked continued discussions. (See Jonathan Tucker's Feb. 2002 analysis, http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_7b.html).

4. Should we, and if so how should we, emphasize the economic costs of the war?

The reason to oppose a war, first and foremost, is that it is immoral, not that it will cost a lot. What is wrong with mercilessly bombing Iraq, or Afghanistan earlier, or Iran or Syria or Korea in the future, is not that doing so costs a lot, but that doing so kills and maims innocent victims by the thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands or more, for no purpose other than the defense and expansion of imperial prerogative. If costing a lot were a reason to oppose war, no war could ever be warranted. The issue isn't that the war costs a lot to finance, and that those costs imply a degree of loss for US citizens. The issue is that if the war on Iraq, and the war on terrorism as well, is perpetrated further, it will be on behalf of defending the wealth and power of corporate and political elites, and it will be at the expense of everyone else — abroad and at home. Yes, it is relevant that war spending crowds out education spending, health spending, housing spending, cultural spending, and much more. But the real economic point is that this is ultimately seen by elites as just another virtue of war spending, and not a debit. All these forms of social expenditure benefit the population broadly, which includes working people and the poor and which causes these groups in particular to become stronger, better insured against fear of unemployment and workplace reprisals, and better able to develop and attain their own agendas in their communities, workplaces, and in society. This effect of social spending is contrary to enlarging the power and wealth of those at the top and instead shifts power to those below. Military spending, on the other hand, does the opposite, enhancing the profits and power of those at the top, without empowering workers and poor people below. So most certainly the aggressive tilt of the US budget toward military rather than social expenditures should be a focus of leftists precisely to explain the motivations and logic of the capitalist economic and social system we live within and to oppose it per se, but we should not imply that the reason war is wrong is primarily because it hurts our pocket books.

5. What are the links between oppressions at home and the war abroad?

Oppressions at home include hierarchies based on race, gender, class, or political power. It is precisely to benefit those at the top of such hierarchies that wars abroad are fought. War is corporate globalization writ violent. Corporate globalization is capitalist market competition writ international. The connection between war and the basic institutions we live within is unbreakable. Ultimately, to be effective and consistent opposition to war and to domestic injustice have to be mutually connected and supportive. That is why the main anti-war coalition is about peace and about justice, not about either one or the other.

6. Why does the "peace movement" seem to be disproportionately white and middle class?

In the US, polls show that African-Americans are more skeptical of war than the population as a whole. Some of the most important anti-war efforts — the city council resolutions opposing war — have taken place in cities where whites are a minority. In fact, of the 25 cities with population of over 100,000 that have passed anti-war resolutions, 15 have white minorities. Of these 15, 6 have an African American majority and 6 an African American plurality. There are no good statistics on participants at anti-war demonstrations. There have certainly been many Arab-Americans at these demonstrations, and a much larger percentage of African Americans than during the anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Nevertheless, it's probably still the case that current demonstrations are disproportionately white and middle class. But to a considerable extent this is a function of which sectors of society can most easily take the time and expense to travel to major anti-war events.

7. What can social change organizations do to break down internal race, gender and class disparities?

There are two sides to this question. On the one hand, there is the need to reach out to underrepresented constituencies with information and organization. This much is obvious. On the other hand, there are things that need to be done to our movements and their agendas. They need to be congenial to and welcoming of and in fact empowering for the constituencies in question. If a movement's events are hard to reach, hard to participate in, or especially culturally or socially off-putting for people with jobs, people who are at risk, etc., then the participation of those sectors of people will be relatively reduced. Movements need to be multitactical both because a diversity of tactics enhances impact generally, but also because different groups will be attracted to and able to participate in different types of events. A variety of options therefore need to be available. But there is another issue. Movements whose internal structure and culture and manner are off-putting to a constituency — that make the constituency wonder about the movement's commitments, values, and aims — are not going to hold their members. If a movement is sexist in its internal division of labor, cultural tone, decision-making methods, tactics, and so on...then women will have a hard time retaining commitment and energy for it. And the same holds if a movement's internal division of labor, or cultural tone, or decision making methods, or tactics, and so on, embody or reflect assumptions and commitments that are racist or even just racially very narrow, or classist or even just narrow in class terms. To have movements that are rooted deeply in the constituencies they most need to include to be successful will require that our movements not only address the issues of these constituencies, not only provide means of participation suited to these constituencies, but also empower, make welcome and comfortable, and reflect the values, aspirations, and even just the styles and manners of these constituencies.

8. As we respond to the current crisis, how can we make choices that will ensure that we have a stronger, larger, and more deeply connected movement six months from now?

There is a tendency in all organizing to focus, very understandably, on the immediate present. We want to get some task done. In this case we want to prevent a war — or perhaps if that fails, to end one. People often feel that making the most narrow formulations possible is the best bet for reaching out as widely as possible. It can garner the largest crowds, they think. It can avoid debates, they feel. And so on. This is mistaken, however, on a few counts. First, it is wrong about the short run. It is very doubtful that utilizing a narrow appeal generates more numbers, given the likely impact on diverse constituencies of being narrow — which is to say, of ignoring what most moves them. But more, the issue isn't just attracting crowds. Elites aren't going to count our numbers and if certain totals are reached then change their positions. Elites are assessing their interests. They are asking, if we pursue the ends we seek, against the dissent, will it be on balance in our interest, or is there something about the dissent which would tip the scales so on balance it becomes against our interest? The number of dissenters is a factor, yes. But even more important is the trajectory of dissent. Is it growing, or stabilized? Smaller but growing is more of a threat than larger but stable. More tellingly, what is the character of the dissent? Is it single issue, so that when this crisis passes so too does the dissent pass? Or is the dissent becoming more fundamental? Are elite policies producing movements that will oppose them at every turn, impeding policies beyond those now in question? A reason to transcend narrowness is ultimately to reach and retain more people to our movements. But it is also to build movements that are truly threatening from the perspective of elites trying to decide how to respond. It is multi-issue movements, multi-tactic movements, broad and diverse movements, and particularly movements that threaten to persist and keep growing that raise costs that elites must take note of, and, when the movement threat grows large enough, that they will give in to. So the first requirement if we wish to be powerful in six months is to be broad in our consciousness raising and focus, in our agenda and methods. The second requirement essential to attaining longevity and power was raised above. Not only do we need to attract people and develop a stance that raises social costs to elites, but we also need to develop lasting relations that don't collapse either when an issue recedes in importance, or when people feel burned out or peripheral. Thus, the second requirement for effectiveness into the future is to have movements that are congenial to and that empower diverse constituencies through their program but also by means of their internal organization and culture, not to mention meeting people's needs.

9. Should we be doing more to link to international movements?

In a word, yes. The international opposition to this war, and war in general, and to corporate globalization, and to racism and market exploitation — and so on — is currently magnificent in scale, breadth, diversity, and energy. The US Left is but a part of all that. It is an important part, because of the role of the United States itself, but in many respects it is also a relatively modest part, in size and wisdom. Movements in the United States can benefit immensely by learning from those abroad and also by way of receiving aid and cooperation from those abroad.

10. How do we measure success?

Too many people think that success is a function of numbers of people, or whether some short term goal is attained or not — such as closing down an elite meeting. It isn't. What we are doing is, or ought to be, always conceived and measured in terms of the overall struggle for peace and justice, not a momentary aim. The issue is does our work leave the situation better or worse, each day, each week, than it was before. At the end of an event, for example, the measure of success is not only whether our work has displayed to elites a movement that is growing and dissident, but do we have more people ready to work on the next project? Is the overall consciousness of people raised, both people inside the movement and also the broader public, of course? Are its members' commitments to the movement enhanced, and are new people moving toward the movement? Have we won gains in social conditions which put us in a better position to win still more gains? Are our organizations stronger in size and assets as well as improved in their quality? These are the kinds of measures of success on which we should always be focused. On Feb. 15/16 there will be anti-war demonstrations all over the world. The final tally could be events in as many as 300 or even 500 or more cities. Many millions of people will take part. But the true mark of success won't be the total size, but the number of people who understand what they are doing as part of an on-going process, and whether that process has been enriched and empowered by the events so that attaining the same levels of dissent in the future is easier, and attaining higher levels in terms of both size and commitment is likely.

Iraq is still firmly in America’s crosshairs

The Daily Star, 2/15/03

There was no “Valentine’s Day Massacre” in the UN Security Council: Chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed al-Baradei spoke in measured tones and refrained from sweeping judgments. Nonetheless, their report was clearly an endorsement of allowing more time for the inspection process in Iraq, and the positions of France, Russia and China just might make that possible. No one should be fooled, though, into thinking that the crisis has passed.
Washington’s determination to make war on Baghdad remains undiluted, and it has repeatedly warned that it will do so with or without Security Council approval. In fact, a war of sorts is already under way: US and British fighter-bombers have been pounding Iraqi air-defense sites for months, and recently their targets have also included surface-to-surface missile systems that might threaten the invasion forces currently gathering in Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein and his advisers are deluding themselves if they think Paris, Moscow and Beijing are acting to defend his regime. In actuality, their actions have less to do with him than with the protection of their own interests as players on the world stage. They are all “Great Powers,” but they are second-tier ones, and the only way they can retain their influence in the face of America’s massive might is through a system of collective security like that envisioned by the UN Charter. That the struggle over this issue has been linked to a possible war in Iraq is a coincidence, a product of America’s having chosen the time and place to precipitate a crisis. They do not want the Security Council and so their own diplomacy to be weakened by acquiescing to American pressure. If it comes down to a choice between that and unilateral US military action that permanently castrates the council, however, they will not fall on their swords for the likes of Saddam and his henchmen.
This realpolitik might offend many people in the Arab world, but it should not surprise. International relations are about how nation-states acquire and maintain one thing: power. There will be other crises after Iraq, and much of the wrangling over this one is of a positional nature designed to avoid the same US bullying the next time. In essence, France, Russia and China are trying to prevent breakdowns of both formal institutions and informal practice that benefit their long-term interests, so they will not scuttle today what they desperately need tomorrow.
The momentum toward war in the Gulf has been building since Sept. 11, 2001. That was the day when Americans found themselves threatened on their own shores and their leader vowed to restore their sense of security. With so much political and emotional weight behind his insistence on a military solution in Iraq, it is almost impossible to imagine circumstances that might change his mind. It does not matter that the one has nothing to do with the other, only that they are inseparable in the mind of the leader of the strongest nation that ever was.
It is instructive that the Bush administration’s most moderate voice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, has become a prominent spokesman for the war camp. In response to Blix and Baradei’s relatively encouraging view of Iraqi cooperation, and to Saddam’s issuing Friday of a decree banning the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, Powell had this to say: “That is all process. It is not substance. These are all tricks that are being played on us.” That may be partly true, but given his country’s record in having consistently blocked the enforcement of so many other Security Council resolutions, one wonders how one side of Powell’s brain talked the other into believing that anyone in the Arab world would take him seriously.

The case against war: A conflict driven by the self-interest of America

By Robert Fisk

The Independent, 15 February 2003

In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays dressed up as "intelligence". We are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the Middle East to their advantage.

No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt refutation of America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday warmed so many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy "allies" they have become.

The British don't like Hussein any more than they liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as Blair does not, the Second World War; they are not conned by childish parables of Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain and appeasement. They do not like being lectured and whined at by men whose experience of war is Hollywood and television.

Still less do they wish to embark on endless wars with a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, is now sending America's poor to destroy a Muslim nation that has nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Jack Straw, the public school Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all this, with Blair. He brays at us about the dangers of nuclear weapons that Iraq does not have, of the torture and aggression of a dictatorship that America and Britain sustained when Saddam was "one of ours". But he and Blair cannot discuss the dark political agenda behind George Bush's government, nor the "sinister men" (the words of a very senior UN official) around the President.

Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included – though we play down the RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons – and many Americans – are a lot braver than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children.

Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in that play better expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do they take me for a simpleton?" The British, like other Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their opposition to this obscene war may make them feel more, not less, European.

Palestine has much to do with it. Brits have no love for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough and are outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians by a nation that is now in effect running US policy in the Middle East. We are told that our invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a burning, fearsome wound to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his meretricious State of the Union speech – but even Blair can't get away with that one; hence his "conference" for Palestinian reform at which the Palestinians had to take part via video-link because Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let them travel to London.

So much for Blair's influence over Washington – the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that he couldn't persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at least one has to acknowledge that Sharon – war criminal though he may be for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres – treated Blair with the contempt he deserves. Nor can the Americans hide the link between Iraq and Israel and Palestine. In his devious address to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked the three when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide bombings so cruelly afflict Israelis, keeps an office in Baghdad.

Just as he told us about the mysterious al-Qa'ida men who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi gorge". This was America's way of giving Vladimir Putin a free hand again in his campaign of rape and murder against the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark to the UN General Assembly last 12 September about the need to protect Iraq's Turkomans only becomes clear when one realises that Turkomans make up two thirds of the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil fields.

The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected – if he was elected – US President. And they weren't doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm) called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by – yes, Richard Perle. The destruction of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon has in store.

Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss this with us – a war for Israel is not going to have our boys lining up at the recruiting offices – Jewish American leaders talk about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish American groups who so bravely oppose this madness have been the first to point out how pro-Israeli organisations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic must be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins University, tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations' objections to the war might – yet again – be ascribed to "anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said, is opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery, argue that an Iraq war will leave Israel with even more Arab enemies, especially if Iraq attacks Israel and Sharon then joins the US battle against the Arabs.

The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lies behind Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe". He was talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and the "old" France of collaboration. But the France and Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe, the continent which refuses, ever again, to slaughter the innocent. It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the "old" America; not the "new" America of freedom, the America of F D Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolise the old America that killed its native Indians and embarked on imperial adventures. It is "old" America we are being asked to fight for – linked to a new form of colonialism – an America that first threatens the United Nations with irrelevancy and then does the same to Nato. This is not the last chance for the UN, nor for Nato. But it may well be the last chance for America to be taken seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.

In these last days of peace the British should not be tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN resolution. UN permission for America's war will not make the war legitimate; it merely proves that the Council can be controlled with bribes, threats or abstentions. It was the Soviet Union's abstention, after all, which allowed America to fight the savage Korean war under the UN flag. And we should not doubt that – after a quick US military conquest of Iraq and providing 'they" die more than we die – there will be plenty of anti-war protesters who will claim they were pro-war all along. The first pictures of "liberated" Baghdad will show Iraqi children making victory signs to American tank crews. But the real cruelty and cynicism of this conflict will become evident as soon as the "war" ends, when our colonial occupation of a Muslim nation for the US and Israel begins.

There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon a "man of peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face trial over Sabra and Chatila, which is why Israel has just withdrawn its ambassador to Belgium. I'd like to see Saddam in the same court. And Rifaat Assad for his 1982 massacre in the Syrian city of Hama. And all the torturers of Israel and the Arab dictatorships.

Israeli and US ambitions in the region are now entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and regional control. It is being cheer-led by a draft-dodger who is treacherously telling us that this is part of an eternal war against "terror". And the British and most Europeans don't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't fight for America. They just don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to fight for Blair either.

A Saudi confused response to globalization

By Abdelwahab El-Affendi

The Daily Star, 2/15/03

On one day this month, two news items emerged from Saudi Arabia that appeared contradictory. In one announcement, the Supreme Economic Council approved plans to allow foreign investment in key economic sectors. In another, the Interior Ministry publicized its decision to drastically reduce the numbers of foreign workers and bring their proportion to no more than 20 percent of the population. According to official statistics, the ratio currently stands at just over 40 percent. It thus appears that the intention is to attract more foreign funds and less foreign workers.
No official reason was given for the decisions to widen areas open for foreign investment, although some economists were quoted as praising the new moves as steps to stimulate competition and make extra resources available to revive the economy. But it is well known that Saudi Arabia, which is keen to join the World Trade Organization, is under heavy pressure to open and deregulate its heavily restricted markets.
More explanations were forthcoming for the decision to reduce the numbers of expatriate workers. The Interior Ministry argued that there are over 7 million foreign workers in Saudi Arabia who transfer about billions of dollars in repatriated funds annually and represent a drain on public services. Their presence also limits working opportunities for Saudi nationals.
The decision also foresaw an upper limit of 10 percent of the total expatriate force for any given nationality. This will affect Indian nationals (currently 1.5 million, or 20 percent), Pakistanis (1 million) and Egyptians (850,000). “It is not our task to provide a livelihood to the whole world population,” Interior Minister Prince Nayef was quoted as saying.
Gulf countries, which suffer high levels of unemployment and host huge numbers of expatriate workers (in some Gulf countries, over 70 percent of residents are foreigners) have been under pressure to rationalize their employment policies. Ironically, these pressures to rationalize have often been fed by irrational, even xenophobic, sentiments and led to equally irrational measures being adopted. For example, last year Saudi Arabia announced a ban on employing foreigners as taxi drivers. Given that the kingdom bans women from driving, the reliance on foreign drivers as private chauffeurs or taxi drivers is vital. But banning Indian taxi drivers is not likely to result in young unemployed Saudis queuing up to take their low-paid jobs.
The problem is not a purely economic one, although economic factors are important. Official policies of awarding Saudi nationals salaries that are several times higher than expatriates for the same job have raised the expectations of Saudis and made it impossible for them to accept low-paying jobs. It also made it very unprofitable for private businesses to employ Saudis. The reason is not only their high salaries, but the uncertainty of their tenure. Given that Saudi nationals (and Gulf nationals in general) have a monopoly in the areas of setting up businesses and owning property, there is little incentive to remain in a salaried job for long. A leading car dealer once complained that after training 50 mechanics abroad at great cost, the bulk of them left work within one year and set up their own garages where (you guessed it), they employed expatriates to do the job.
No wonder Gulf businesses are wary about employing nationals. Statistics in Kuwait in the late 1980s showed that only 1 percent of private sector employees were Kuwaitis. The ratios must be comparable in other Gulf countries.
As things stand, it would be extremely irrational for businesses to employ overpaid nationals who are also difficult to discipline and dismiss as they enjoy the protection of local employment laws, which discriminate against expatriates. In this regard, it is at the moment countries like India and Egypt that are subsidizing the Saudi economy, and not the reverse. Cheap, expendable, skilled and highly productive labor is a vital asset that any capitalist would greatly appreciate. Gulf countries, like the UAE, which have used this advantage judiciously, have enjoyed a booming economy, which is in turn generating numerous employment opportunities for nationals.
The official (and to a great extent the popular) attitude in the Gulf to expatriate workers is based on many misconceptions. It neglects the fact that expatriate workers constitute an asset to the economy not only as cheap, highly productive and skilled workers, but also as consumers. Whole sectors, such as real estate and consumer retail, would suffer from the reduction of expatriate workers. Gulf countries thus need to see the positive side to their workforce and enjoy its benefits while they can. They should try to get more of these workers, not less.
Policies adopted by the host governments are partly responsible for the negative aspects of the huge influx of foreign workers to the Gulf. The huge differential in salaries makes employing foreigners attractive for business, while the ban on expatriate involvement in business (frequently flouted anyway through the use of fronts) makes it unattractive for nationals to seek salaried employment. The complaint about the repatriation of expatriate pay neglects the fact that expatriates have no option but to send their earnings home. By law, they are banned from investing it or buying property and other assets, and in any case their insecure residency status makes any such investments risky, even if permitted.
It may thus be counterproductive to discuss the problem of expatriate workers in isolation from other economic and political issues. For one thing, the immigration policies of most Gulf countries are obsolete and out of tune with current world practice. Other restrictive practices are also becoming a burden on the economic, political and security fronts.
Countries like the United States and most Western European nations have adopted policies of integrating immigrants, making them an asset for their security as well as economic prosperity. The sparsely populated Gulf states need to absorb sizeable portions of their immigrant populations not only as economic assets, but also as assets for security and stability. In particular, the children of immigrants who were born and lived all their lives in these countries need to be naturalized or at least given permanent resident status and the right to own property and invest in the host countries.
A major aspect of globalization is that all states, including great powers, will lose control over their economies. Launching policies of restrictive economic and political practices at this time is a futile gesture to defy an irresistible trend. This leads to the issue of political reform, which is of course another point, if a closely related one.

Abdelwahab El-Affendi is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.

When the US and EU elephants fight, it’s the Middle East grass that suffers

By Saad Mehio

The Daily Star, 2/15/03

At last! Now that US Secretary of State Colin Powell has publicly articulated what observers have been secretly saying all along about Washington’s intention to “fundamentally reshape” the Middle East, we understand why Europe, represented by Germany and France, is so opposed to the imminent American war on Iraq.
The Europeans fear the Americans intend to use the Middle East to surround them, or else use them to encircle the Middle East. European fears seem justified in both cases, which are interrelated and conflicting at the same time.
In order for the Americans to reorder the strategic structure of the Middle East according to their post-Sept. 11 vision, they have to secure Europe’s backing or at least its quiet acquiescence.
On the other hand, they have to remove all obstacles standing in the way of the Middle East becoming a purely American lake if they want to tighten their grip on Europe.
Former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski described this dual strategy as far back as 1997 in his book The Grand Chessboard American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, when he wrote that it is “an historic race for control of the Eurasian continent.”
“Ever since the continents started
interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power,” Brzezinski wrote, declaring: “He who controls Eurasia, controls the world.” Eurasia being all of the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean and including the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent.
It seems that US President George W. Bush has already made some headway in this regard by neutralizing China with economic bribes and drawing Russia to his side through the “strategic partnership” he signed with President Vladimir Putin. Bush is now busy solving India’s problems so that Delhi can be free to join the power game.
Which leaves Europe or more accurately, Europe’s French-German heart. The heart of Europe is still fiercely resistant to American hegemony, not because of any “clash of civilizations,” but because the “old continent” wants to take the leadership of the Western world away from the American upstarts. This would undoubtedly disappoint a person like Samuel Huntington, who has put his bets on transatlantic unity as a means of maintaining Western domination.
Europe is an economic colossus looking for a political-security role to play, while the US is a political-military-economic giant that refuses to allow Europe any more than a purely economic role. A struggle is now raging between Europe and America on whose outcome will depend the fate of the Eurasian continent.
One of the first people to recognize this was Policy Review publisher Paul Kagan, who noted that the transatlantic allies are divided on a whole range of issues. Iraq, Kagan said, is a result rather than the cause of these divisions.
America and Europe are divided over the meaning of global domination, national sovereignty, and the role of power in international affairs. They also differ on what international law has come to mean, what role international organizations should play in settling conflicts, and whether countries should behave unilaterally on the world stage.
The European point of view is summarized thus:
1. Rejection of unilateral American leadership outside the framework of international law. This not only applies to changing regimes in foreign countries, but also to Washington’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, its refusal to sign up to the Rio Program for biodiversity, its abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, its pursuit of the Star Wars missile defense project, its opposition to the ban on land mines and the Biological Warfare Treaty, and finally its refusal to sign up to the International Criminal Court.
2. The end of the Cold War marked the end of ideological struggles and of the concept of pursuing military solutions for international conflicts. America’s determination to continue adopting the principles of military power is contrary to the values of the post-modern world that emerged after the collapse of communism.
3. While Europeans and Americans do not disagree on the issue of liberal democracy, they differ on from where democracy gains its legitimacy. The Americans still believe there is no higher authority than the constitutional-democratic state while Europe believes democratic authority must spring from the will of a community of nations that overrides those of individual nation states.
While it is still difficult to predict the outcome of these disagreements it is not too hard to foresee that the Middle East will be the main battleground where they will be played out. This is what happened in the mid-20th century, when America inherited the legacy of the European colonial empires in the Middle East, turning the region into a battlefield. This might well happen again in the early 21st century if Europe challenges American supremacy and, as the African proverb goes, “when elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.”
Matters might not deteriorate to such a level. It is possible that the US will decide that it needs Europe to play a role in the Middle East; Europe meanwhile may realize that it has to accept America’s conditions if it is to participate in a new Middle Eastern banquet.
Such an eventuality might come to pass if American plans for the region go awry, or if Washington realizes that the costs of the process of remapping the region would exceed its expected benefits. At that point, the two old allies will discover a new formula for cooperation. It might also happen if the American plan succeeds, and Europe agrees to scavenge for whatever economic scraps the Americans leave behind.
At any rate, a new game of nations has begun in the Middle East, and he who avoids taking part will pay a heavy price later. This, of course, does not include Arab regimes, which have been virtually comatose since Sept. 11. It does, however, include Europe, which was shocked to hear Powell say that the US intends to “fundamentally reshape that region in a powerful, positive way that will enhance US interests.”
Did he deliberately mention American and not Western interests? Most probably, and for now fairly obvious reasons!

Saad Mehio is a Beirut-based Lebanese journalist and writer.

Smell the dock yet, Ariel? The world can't wait to see you on trial

By Michael Young

The Daily Star, 2/15/03

A court in Belgium has ruled that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former associates can be investigated after all for the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982. Israeli officials complained that the Belgians had the chutzpah to “deal in issues that are not their own.”
By that minimalist logic, Israeli agents should not have violated Argentinean sovereignty to capture the Nazi, Adolph Eichmann, since he too was an issue not their own. Nor had Eichmann any business standing before an Israeli court, as one of the Germanys probably had priority there. Yet few begrudged the Israelis their desire to enforce justice however and wherever they could.
Justice has yet to be served in Belgium, where an appeal process stands between the latest court ruling and any future investigation of Sharon and several senior Israeli officers, including the former chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, and two former commanders, Amos Yaron and Amir Drori. However, for those of us who lived through the unforgiving siege of Beirut in 1982, it is pleasing to see that there may be at least one crime that Sharon will not so easily slink away from.
Technically, the Belgians are not judging Sharon on his Lebanon invasion, or the ordnance his army spent three months pouring onto the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in West Beirut. The Belgian case is limited to events in Sabra and Shatila. However, what Sharon’s defenders willfully ignore is how essential the siege was to the killings in the Palestinian refugee camps.
Leaving aside Israeli aims at the time, which included eradicating the PLO’s presence in Lebanon, the massacre was the culmination of Israel’s systematic physical and spiritual degradation of West Beirut’s inhabitants beforehand. Having spent three months denying civilians food, water, and electricity, while bombing them at will, Israel’s armed forces made Sabra and Shatila more likely by showing that nothing distinguished combatants from noncombatants.
Indeed, the distinction was unachievable in the context of West Beirut, where fighters and civilians lived side by side. And this was infinitely truer in the camps, where combatants were part of the social fabric. It would have been absurd to assume a dividing line between armed men and the unarmed civilians who were their wives, parents, brothers or children.
Sharon, of course, realized this, but used it to bolster his argument that the camps in their entirety were nests of terror. On the eve of the massacre he told the late minister Elie Hobeika, who commanded Lebanese Forces militiamen in the camps: “I don’t want a single one of them left,” referring to the Palestinians, though never specifying which ones. Sharon’s ambiguity was intentional: If you wanted to get rid of gunmen, he knew, you had to demolish the social structure around them.
Once Sharon sent in the militias, a massacre became inevitable. Israel’s Kahan Commission reported that numerous Israeli officers feared killings by the Lebanese Forces. Sharon was no less insightful. However, he had used up much political energy to maneuver Israel into its Lebanon adventure, and yet the camps were still there. Sharon knew a massacre would occur. At the least he allowed it to happen, confident it could be blamed on the Lebanese Forces.
Does this exonerate the militia? Obviously not. Opponents of a Sharon trial argue that since it was Lebanese who did the killing why blame Sharon and the Israelis? There are three rejoinders: The first is that the trial is not limited to Israelis; it is directed, as the accusation states, against “Messrs. Ariel Sharon, Amos Yaron, and other Israelis and Lebanese responsible for the massacre …” Had Hobeika lived, he would have been far more troubled by its consequences than Sharon.
A second rejoinder is that guilt involves more than pulling a trigger. That former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic never ruffled his shirt skinning a Kosovar makes him no less guilty in the eyes of prosecutors. Sharon and his collaborators had command responsibility over the camps during the massacre. The Kahan Commission argued that responsibility holds when an official controls public order at the site of a crime, has the power to prevent the crime, and doesn’t do so.
A third rejoinder is more formal. Do we really know which units participated in the bloodletting at Sabra and Shatila? The Lebanese Forces played a principal role, certainly, but no serious investigation was ever conducted to see whether other Christian groups under tighter Israeli control also participated. Nor has anyone seriously explored whether Israeli troops entered the camps, perhaps on reconnaissance missions, while the killings were taking place.
In fact, little is known at all about the operational details. An investigation in Belgium, if it takes place, might help fill in the details. The chances are that Sharon will die in his bed, as most talented criminals do. But if anxiety can lose him even a single night of sleep, those who endured his army’s remorseless assaults in 1982 would claim a small victory.

Michael Young writes a regular column for THE DAILY STAR

Chirac stands up for the region while Arab leaders dither

An Arab press review, By The Daily Star, 2/15/03

As Western powers debate Iraq’s fate, Arab governments come under much direct or oblique criticism in the regional press for failing to join last-ditch European efforts to curb the Anglo-American drive for war.
Pan-Arab Al-Quds al-Arabi publisher/editor Abdelbari Atwan expresses bewilderment that Arab leaders are even dithering over France and Germany’s request that they back their joint call with Russia for arms inspectors to be given more time to complete their mission.
“We doubt the Arab governments will respond,” he writes. “Most of them want the war over and done with, and have been colluding with the US administration by granting it bases and facilities on the one hand and prohibiting any popular protests on the other.”
French President Jacques Chirac has stuck his neck out, incurring America’s wrath against his country and the European Union in a bid to prevent the invasion of an Arab country, “but he will not find a single supporter among the Arab leaders,” Atwan predicts. “They have made up their minds and decided not to cross President George W. Bush in the hope of avoiding his retribution, and being spared from the process of democratic change he has threatened to impose on the region” once he takes over Iraq and topples its regime.
Atwan goes on to contrast the massive anti-war demonstrations planned in European and American cities at the weekend with the way Arab governments have been stifling all opposition to America’s plans.
“Arab leaders have restricted their efforts to escalating the psychological war on the Iraqi leadership in order to force it to flee from the confrontation and offer the country on a silver plate to the American invaders, while at the same time conspiring with the US to arrange
an internal coup that would have
the same effect,” he remarks.
He reports that France has urged next week’s meeting of Arab League foreign ministers to come out in support of the extension of arms inspections as an alternative to military action. But its call is likely to meet the same fate as the hundreds of appeals that the Palestinians have made for official Arab backing over the years “namely, total disregard.” Instead, the ministers are likely to echo the Gulf Cooperation Council by “blaming Iraq and its leadership, while despatching forces to Kuwait to protect it from Iraqi aggression,” Atwan writes.
Jordanian commentator Mahmoud Rimawi believes “it is vitally important to make the Americans feel that there are serious objections to their plans in the Arab world and that their takeover is not welcome but provokes universal resentment.”
That, he writes in the UAE daily Al-Khaleej, is why calls were made for the annual Arab summit to be brought forward from its scheduled March 27 date by which time Iraq may well have already been invaded. But Arab governments have been unable to agree on the matter. While they seem to have decided to relocate the gathering from Manama to Cairo, it remains unclear when they intend to convene, and whether or not it will be too late by then to do anything to prevent war.
Rimawi suggests that rather than wait for the Arab governments “who are not exactly known for their dynamism” to arrive at a consensus on what to do collectively about Iraq, the major Arab states that are willing should come together quickly and agree on “serious common policies aimed at recovering their say on matters that have a direct bearing on the region’s fate.”
They could, for example, pick up on the idea proposed by Oman’s chief diplomat Youssef bin Alawi that the Arab states formulate a political solution to the crisis, secure Baghdad’s endorsement, and then present it collectively to the US administration. While the Arab governments act as though they are powerless, they do have the leverage to influence the situation should they choose to use it, he argues. They could, for example, warn Washington that they will not recognize any future regime in Iraq that is installed in power by means of an American invasion.
“A political solution has been and remains viable,” writes Rimawi. “For Baghdad is in no position to throw down challenges to the US (like North Korea), and a political solution could and should lead to the emergence of a different regime in Baghdad.”
The active promotion of such alternatives to war under which the twin goals of political change and disarmament could be achieved peacefully would be more worthwhile than “the Byzantine debate over the best time to convene the summit,” Rimawi says.
In the Beirut daily As-Safir, chief editor Joseph Samaha expects the Arab world’s ongoing “collapse” to “continue, but at a faster pace” under the “Middle East order” which Iraq’s would-be occupiers seek to impose in the region once they have assumed control of the country.
“We will be victims of this war,” he writes, “and to get an idea of what we will be pushed toward, we need only examine those who preceded us in this situation.” Samaha writes that in pursuing its planned invasion of Iraq, the US administration has deliberately contrived to fatally undermine the UN Security Council, NATO and the European Union after failing to turn them into instruments of its policy.
The way these major international institutions have fallen victim to the Bush administration’s policies is enough reason to “expect the worst and get a foretaste of the kind of jungle Washington insists on turning the world into,” he says.
“Faced with this spectacle, it may be trivial to forecast that the ‘Quartet’ charged with resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is also set to be one of the victims of the war that has not yet broken out,” Samaha says.
As for the Arab world, its weakness has been stripped bare by the Iraqi crisis, and it has come to be taken for granted that an invasion of Iraq will plunge it into turmoil, and that it will emerge even feebler and more fragmented than ever.
“William Burns, an administration official, will be supervising the Arab foreign ministers’ meeting in a few days time. He will make sure that we don’t nurture any of the international objections to the American aggression that it directed against us,” Samaha suggests.
“It is hard to predict what the worldwide ‘confrontations’ over Iraq will culminate in two weeks hence, but what can be predicted is that they will leave an indelible mark on international relations afterward. It can also be foreseen that those who are confronting America now have a margin of maneuver. As for the Arab world, it will pay the highest price, precisely because it was not party to the pre-war confrontations.”
Raghida Dergham uses her weekly commentary for the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat to describe the mood in the Arab world on the eve of “a war we are all certain is coming very soon, even though we don’t really know what its reasons and purposes are.”
She writes that the Arab peoples are “torn between their hatred of their regimes and their hatred of America’s Middle East policy. Some saw Saddam Hussein, momentarily, as the face of defiance of America’s high handedness and its injustice toward the Arabs in the conflict with Israel. Others see him as the source of the affliction, because of the adventures and wars he waged for leadership. The vast majority blame the other Arab leaders equally for the region’s condition, due to their despotism and deliberate humiliation of their peoples to preserve the regimes. The same majority blame America for its unjust policies and its record of contempt for the Arab individual, who it has constantly sought to sideline so as to control Arab natural resources.”
Dergham says there is a section of Arab public opinion, mostly among the youth, that does not oppose war on Iraq, because it thinks it is the only route to “regime change.” Most Iraqis also apparently want to be rid of the regime by any means, even if that entails an American invasion and occupation.
“The oppression of those who live under the Iraq regime, and the discontent of those who cannot see the Arab regimes adopting necessary reforms, has reached the point of despair. And despair has bred acquiescence to anything that might shake the foundations of the Arab world, even a war that was conceived by men famed for their loathing and contempt for the Arab peoples and their total loyalty to Israel, indeed to Sharon-ism.”
For those who think along these lines, “the important thing is for the status quo to be demolished, in the hope that the region may then move toward democracy. The US, for them, is the means for demolishing the status quo … It is the ‘dynamite’… It is the appropriate temporary ‘partner’ for the transition, but it is not trusted beyond that, even by this segment of public opinion.”
Another section of the Arab public “wants to achieve the same objectives, but differ over the means.” They argue that “reform via anarchy and military might is not a recipe for democracy but for military rule,” and while they agree on the urgent need for regime change in Iraq, they give precedence to preventing an American invasion and occupation and “searching for ways of changing the status quo without catastrophic wars,” Dergham says.
“Further complicating the issue is the US administration, and the agenda of those advocating war.” The latter are certainly not enamored of the Arab peoples” or seeking to bring them democracy. “The war on Iraq is not a war for Iraq, but a war for America’s greatness waged via Iraq, which has provided the administration’s hawks with an opportunity they deem golden. They want a war on Iraq for the sake of a ‘doctrine’ they formulated years ago, and onto which they recently put George W. Bush’s name. The essence of this doctrine is that everything is permissible in order to preserve America’s pre-eminence … and prevent even friends and allies from daring to rival or share its hegemony,” Dergham continues.
Their current “battle” against France and Germany is another facet of their strategic defense “doctrine,” she adds, as is their deliberate effort to create a split within NATO.
“Iraq is a testing ground for the doctrine,” according to Dergham, and little thought has been given to the question “what next” or to what happens “the day after” Iraq is invaded and occupied.
In the Jordanian daily Al-Rai, Khaled Mahadeen wonders what possessed the likes of Spain and Australia to offer troops for an invasion of Iraq. The Spanish government may have been driven by nostalgia for the country’s despicable imperial past, he says, but Australia? And what does either country have to gain from their actions, other than the resentment of the Arab and Muslim worlds?
Mahadeen writes that in addition to behaving like lackeys, the leaders of Spain and Australia are betraying their own peoples, the majority of whom oppose a war that could kill hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians.
“American, British and Israeli spokespeople have incessantly been claiming that Iraq threatens their security and peace, but we never heard any Spanish or Australian official even attempt to echo that fraudulent and mendacious charge. And if the Australian and Spanish stance stems from a commitment to world peace and to opposing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their use to threaten others, why has neither country had a single word to say about the ongoing war of annihilation that the Israel war machine is waging against the Palestinian people?” he wonders.
Mahadeen hints that the same questions can be asked of a number of Arab governments.
“By allowing the US and Britain to lure them into a devastating war against the Iraqi people, a number of Arab, Muslim and other governments are being dragged into an adventure that lacks wisdom, intelligence and foresight,” he says. “Spain and Australia have no interest in such a war, and only harm will befall any Arab or Islamic side that contributes to it, if only by remaining lockjawed.”

Chretien finds a way to stay out of war
By Nihal Kaneira, Toronto, Gulf News, 15-02-2003
-

Canada is siding with the United States after all. Or so it seems, going by several developments this week. On Monday, Ottawa threw caution to the winds on war planning and supported the U.S. call for the Nato defence of Turkey in case of a retaliatory attack by Iraq.

Then on Tuesday, the government gave the nod to its military strategists to join the U.S. command post in Doha, which will run the war in Iraq. Both measures were taken without even a by-your-leave from the Canadian public.

Naturally, the decisions took most Canadians by surprise, as Ottawa appeared to be staking out positions favourable to President George W. Bush and his plan to invade Iraq. In the case of the first, Canada was aligning with Washington in direct opposition to its European allies, France, Germany and Belgium, which vetoed U.S. move on the ground that there should be no rush to war.

In the case of the second, sending 25 military planners to the Qatar command and control centre, seemed like a signal that Ottawa is joining the Bush coalition for war, despite the overwhelming opposition of the Canadian public.

Most Canadians were incensed, especially when it became known that the government had agreed to send the military planners in response to a U.S. request to increase its naval responsibilities in the Gulf.

Washington war planners apparently wanted Canada to take charge of the newly created Task Force 151 to guard allied naval warships – except aircraft carriers and their escort vessels – in the southern Gulf, especially in and around the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Task force

Under a Canadian naval commander – Commodore Roger Girouard has already assumed duties – the task force will now escort ships, intercept and board suspect vessels and prevent terrorist attacks on shipping in its new designated area. As part of this arrangement, the government has even agreed to send the Canadian Navy's flagship destroyer, HMCS Iroquois, for this work.

The destroyer is equipped with highly sophisticated space and communications equipment, and will be in a position to manage and command a large flotilla of warships operating in and around the Gulf.

The government as well as the Canadian military is saying very little about these military moves. Prime Minister Jean Chretien insists that the government has not given up on a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis, and that sending the military planners to Doha represent no change in Canada's position. He says he is still waiting for the UN decision, and United States too must have a UN mandate before it can launch an attack on Iraq.

Expanded role

Major Richard Saint-Louis, the spokesman for the Canadian military planners currently engaged in military coordination at the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, also plays down the significance of the Canadian Navy's expanded role in the Gulf.

"It is not a change," he says. "We are sticking exclusively to Enduring Free-dom." Operation Enduring Freedom is the campaign launched in Afghanistan to destroy the network of Al Qaida and round up terrorists fleeing by sea.

Government backbenchers, opposition parties and anti-war groups are not convinced. They want to know why Canada should increase its naval strength in the Gulf, if Ottawa has no plan to go to war without UN Security Council approval. They suspect that Washington is prodding Canada, and Ottawa is caving into this pressure.

New assignment

Up until this week, Canadian navy was playing a limited role in the Gulf, hunting for Al Qaida terrorists. With a small number of warships operating mostly in the Indian Ocean, its main job was to intercept tankers and freighters and search for fugitives.

The new assignment, military analysts here say, is clearly a much more significant one. Not only has the navy been asked to cover a much wider area, but the area assigned also extends over the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

These analysts also say that United States and Australia have moved their warships to the northern end of the Gulf, and are now intensifying the patrolling of the area close to Shatt-al-Arab, Iraq's only sea access. That means the task of patrolling the waterway from the Kuwait border to Strait of Hormuz and beyond has been left to the Canadian navy.

Even if the navy claim is right and its expanded role in the Gulf is essentially to look for terrorists and fugitives, is it not possible that Canada may be in the eye of the storm if and when war breaks out? Chretien says no.

His Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham denies that beefing up the navy strength amounts to a pre-positioning of Canadian forces with an eye to joining the U.S. in the event of another adverse report from the UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei, prompting a second Security Council resolution authorising Iraq's disarmament by force.

If they are to be believed, what is the explanation for these military moves then? May be a deal with the United States? An agreement between Ottawa and Washington under which Canada will not be directly involved in a war against Iraq, but will still play a peripheral role that is crucial to the Bush war plan.

Like playing a larger role in the Operation Enduring Freedom in order to provide some slack to U.S. warships to move closer to the Iraqi border. Like sending Canadian troops to Afghanistan to relieve American forces there to undertake more dangerous combat missions in Iraq.

In fact, Canadian Defence Minister John McCallum, hinted at such a scenario several weeks ago when he visited the U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Washington. But he was forced to back down within days after the prime minister slapped him on the wrist for daring to say that Canada might have to join a U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussain even if the UN did not sanction it.

Chretien, cabinet sources in Ottawa say, is leaning towards such a plan for it offers the best way out of what looks like a tricky situation for the Chretien government, especially if there is no second Security Council endorsement for military action, but Bush decides to wage war anyway.

By sending Canadian troops to Afghanistan and beefing up the navy's supervisory role under Operation Enduring Freedom, the ruling Liberals will be able to calm tempers at home and also keep Americans happy at the same time. They can always claim they have not joined a war against Iraq without UN Security Council approval, but only intensifying the effort to prevent new acts of terrorism by Al Qaida.

Political cover

Technically, the government would be right. On the one hand, Ottawa would be appeasing a sizeable Canadian majority that does not want Canadian troops shooting at Iraqis, and on the other, Chretien would be giving Bush the political cover he needs to claim that Canada is part of his "Coalition of the Willing."

There are other developments, which point to such a deal may be in the works. One, the prime minister's decision, after resisting for weeks, to allow a debate in the House of Commons on the Iraq crisis, subject to Canada going to war.

Two, Chretien's sudden about-face, ordering his vociferous backbenchers to cool their anti-American rhetoric. Three, Bush's acceptance of the prime minister's long standing invitation to make a state visit to Canada. The U.S. leader is not only coming on May 5, he is expected to sign a bilateral agreement with Chretien on keeping the U.S.-Canada border open for Canadians.

Bandwagon

It is hardly likely that the prime minister would have given in to the demand for a debate on the Iraq crisis if he is planning to join the Bush bandwagon for war. He agreed to the debate because he is confident that he could successfully argue that Canada will not be involved in the war.

Chretien – and Deputy Prime Minister John Manley – would not have asked the divided Liberal caucus to stop grandstanding on the Iraq issue if Canada is taking up positions directly opposed to Washington.

Manley, in fact, warned the divided Liberal backbenchers to pipe down, saying that they should consider Americans as good neighbours. He even said he is confident that that the U.S. would respect a "principled position" by Canada to follow the UN.

State visit

Similarly, it is inconceivable that Bush would make a state visit to Canada at a time when U.S could be at war in Iraq, and if Ottawa had poked its finger in his eye by opposing him and denying him some political cover for the war.

All this can and will change, of course, and Canada will march directly into war, if Saddam lobs a weapons of mass destruction into Kuwait in desperation, or Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida take it upon themselves to carry out a major terror attack on Americans in defence of Iraq.

Such an event would remove all inhibitions in Ottawa about going to war. Short of that, Chretien may be home free. It seems, he has found a neat way to stay clear of a war, but also remain friends with Bush.

The writer can be contacted at nkaneira@gulfnews.com

http://www.aljazeerah.info

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah's.