|
Jan 26, 2003 Opinion Editorials http://www.aljazeerah.info |
||
|
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
|
-
Arabs should stop apologizing
By Linda Heard
Al-Shindagah, Jan-Feb 2003
-
Judging
by some of the papers penned by a few Arab scholars and academics, it
appears that some of those erstwhile ‘experts’ have put the West and
its so-called democracies on a pedestal.
At the same time, in an apologetic tone they dredge up reports,
which paint the Arab world in a sorry light and sound almost apologetic as
to their own culture and traditions.
Instead of condemning those who seek to diminish the achievements of the
Arabs and who want to turn Arabs into American clones, they seek to prove
to Americans that ‘we Arabs are really nice guys’ by advocating
cultural exchanges and the ushering-in of Western-style ‘democracies’.
Well, I’ve got news for you. Arabs are the good guys here. It is
outrageous that just because a group of fanatics ran with their hatred and
committed a cruel criminal act last September, some three hundred and
fifty million Arabs have come under America’s microscope and are being
held up for scrutiny.
These elevated Arab intellectuals, basking in the benefits of dual
nationality, often describe Arab countries as technologically backward;
their citizens on the poverty line and condemn the restrictions imposed on
women in their societies. Clutching their diplomas from Western
educational institutes, they adopt a superior tone and unashamedly kowtow
to their Occidental masters. Enough already!
Firstly, the Arabs have nothing for which to apologise. If anything, it is
the West that should be doing the apologising.
Today, the
Riddled with double-standards,
And while the
It is perfectly content with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s statement
that some of the hundreds of Moslem prisoners who were taken to
Even
Such learned Arab pundits, who pontificate in their climate-controlled
offices basking in the material fruits, which Western societies have to
offer, appear to have short memories. Instead, of queuing up to become a
talking head on a television chat show, or positioning themselves for
election to exalted committees, they might be better employed delving once
more into their history books.
Better still, they should travel to the
Do these wise quislings really want to see the Arab world emulating the
West? Do they puff up with pride when they read how the Mid-East was
peremptorily carved-up by Messrs Sykes and Picot in a back room of the
House of Commons? Do they
consider Britain’s 70-years’ occupation of Egypt a proud achievement
when it profited from an inexpensive labour force, cheap cotton and the
canal, representing a gateway to India?
Have they forgotten France’s stranglehold of Algeria for centuries?
Let’s remind them shall we? Once
known as the Granary of Rome, that resource-rich North African country was
colonized by the French in 1830 and in 1948 became a French department.
Its indigenous Berber and Arab peoples were treated little better than
slaves, forced to bury their languages along with their religion. They
were deprived of education and stripped of their dignity until they
decided enough was enough.
The Algerian revolution, strongly backed by Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt,
began as a trickle and ended in victory on July 5, 1962. The Algerians had
emerged as experts at guerilla warfare setting up encampments in the Atlas
Mountains from where they made the cushy lives of the colonists as
difficult as possible.
Without food, the Algerian freedom fighters eat snakes and rats and when
caught, they were subjected to the worst kinds of tortures.
In recent years, a retired French general Paul Aussaresses has boasted
that he personally supervised such inhumane acts. His book ‘Special
Services: Algeria 1955-1957’ talks of a secret torture centre where the
not-so-worthy general personally oversaw the thousands of Algerians
who were brutalized by electrodes attached to their ears, lips and
genitals, near-drowning, and mock executions.
Almost one million Algerians lost their lives during their eight-year
uprising and mass graves are still being uncovered. No senior French
official has ever been charged for these crimes against humanity.
Without the heroes of Setif and Constantine, we can only wonder whether
the French would still be baking their bread with cheap Algerian wheat,
washed down with the nectar of its grape. In today’s apologetic climate,
they would, no doubt, be called ‘terrorists’.
When the French finally fled Algeria, the true sons of the soil were left
without educators, judiciary, engineers and architects. They spoke a
bastardised French and knew little about Arab history and culture. Their
economy was derelict forcing many to immigrate, ironically, to France,
where they were herded into virtual ghettoes and treated as third-class
citizens.
Those who remained set about learning the Arabic language, building
institutions of learning and factories and more importantly developed
their self-confidence and national dignity. Ask any Algerian man, woman or
child today where he comes from and he or she will say resolutely and
proudly ‘Je suis Algerien’.
Unlike America and Britain, however, France appears to have learned from
its murky history that domination and force doesn’t work in the long
term. Instead, it is now doing its utmost to courageously avert war on
Iraq, while engaging in trade and culture activities with the Arabs.
If the current American administration and Britain’s Blairites have
their way the entire world would be saying ‘I am an Anglophile or a
wannabe American’. It wants
to impose the American way of life, with all that entails, on the rest of
the world. Bearing in mind that the US is a young country of immigrants,
isn’t this the epitome of arrogance?
It would behoove both America and Britain to put their own houses in order
first before they preach to the rest of the world. These are societies
where the family structure has broken down, divorce is rampant and, in the
case of Britain, violent crime and pedophilia is on the increase. In the
US some three to five thousand children are abducted each year, while drug
and alcohol-related crimes on the up-and-up.
In the urban centers of these self-professed bastions of Western
civilisation few people know their neighbours, and although they may own a
snazzy apartment, the latest DVD player and an all-singing, all-dancing
microwave, many feel a gnawing sense of isolation, emptiness and
purposeless.
Although we can trace Arab history back through the centuries with names
of such luminaries as Ibn Battuta, Ibn Sina, Al Ghazzali, Al Kindi, Ibn
Rushd and Ibn Khaldun passing our lips, modern Arab cohesive states are
relatively young. Only 83 years have passed since Saad Zaghloul’s arrest
and exile inspired the uprising against the British, Algeria won its
independence in 1962, while Jordan received its independence from Great
Britain in 1946.
It is strange how Britain and the US demand Swiss-like precision,
American-style economies and Danish human rights records in fledgling
Eastern states. Have they forgotten that it wasn’t until 1928 that women
in Britain were enfranchised and the southern US states boasted a policy
of apartheid until the heroic 1960s’ efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King?
Among the current discussions on Arab culture, such words as
‘decency’, ‘humanity’, ‘warmth’ and ‘hospitality’ are
strangely absent. Only the negative is broadcast.
Where
in the US or Britain would friends and neighbours flock to your home when
you are sick bearing reassuring words and hot soup? I was the recipient of
such kindnesses in Alexandria.
Where in the West would a taxi driver return an expensive camera, which
you had inadvertently left in his cab months before? It happened to me in
Bahrain.
When your vehicle breaks down on a British motorway, see how many of your
fellow motorists come to your aid. None. In the UAE you would quickly be
inundated with offers of assistance.
Human kindness and compassion is surely worth more than material goods and
a fistful of dollars. The Arab world has an abundance of the former,
commodities fast waning on the streets of Western capitals.
We Westerners have much to learn from our Oriental cousins, if only we can
set aside our egotistical conceit long enough, to pay attention. And
instead of promoting the Western ‘values’ to the Orient, Arab-born
intellectuals should, instead, impart the wisdom of the Mid-East to the
Occident.
-
But why now Iraq, Nick? Arab News, 1/26/03
-
I had dropped in to see my Turkish friend Ayhan at the ACME Nuts & More Nuts Company the other day. It had been a while since I had last seen him, and I usually take the opportunity of our get-togethers to use him as a sounding board for some of my zany theories on mankind. Lately however, Ayhan has been coming up with some beauties of his own. We were soon fluttering between discussions on the present situation on Iraq, the different religious and ideological beliefs and so on, when Nick, another employee of the company dropped in. An American from the west coast who has spent the better part of two decades here (in Saudi Arabia), Nick offered to counter with some of his own theories on politics and Zen. Ayhan remained unconvinced that the facts behind Sept. 11 bombings were cut and dry as had been reported in the media. There must have been some reason why the Twin Towers, which normally house 20,000 people, had far less casualties. Could some have been forewarned to stay away prior to the aircraft smashing into the buildings? Why couldn’t the hijackers plan a later flight to ensure maximum building occupancy? And how come there were such a small number of Jews among the casualties, New York being full of them? My take on this was that I failed to see how all the federal defense agencies and spy gurus had failed to see this coming. If this was planned, it was obviously done over a considerable period of time and with lots of detail. One doesn’t simply walk onto an aircraft and with a knife bring down thousands of lives and millions of tons of steel and concrete on the spur of the moment. And where was the Northeast Air Traffic Control or NORAD during those long agonizing minutes when the planes were obviously diverting dramatically from their flight path? With Ayhan puffing away silently at his pipe, Nick retorted that this was indeed planned by Osama Bin Laden and kept under wraps very successfully until execution day. The primary intent was to rupture the alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia. And from the way things have been playing out recently, Bin Laden may have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Nick felt that our skepticism matched that of Israelis today who do not believe that it was their own who instigated the war in 1967, in their first bid for illegal land occupation. And when aware that the US spy ship USS Liberty was monitoring their moves, the Israelis sent their aircraft and mercilessly sunk it murdering everyone on board. For some unexplained reason, President Johnson at the time chose to withhold this piece of news from the general public. But why now Iraq, I wanted to know. What had that to do with Sept. 11? “As an American, do you really know all the facts behind the bombings? Don’t you have a right to? As great a crime has been committed against your country, don’t you think some commission or hearing along the lines of the Warren Commission, Watergate or the Contra hearings is long overdue? Or have you been swept away like so many others in the frenzy of Afghanistan, the panic of the anthrax scare, the terror of bridges being blown up or domestic water reservoirs being contaminated? And now Iraq?” I asked. “As far as I know, Saddam is on even par with dislike of the US or Islamic extremists. Isn’t the American public being denied a detailed and official investigation into Sept. 11? All these diversions, and for what?” I continued. “Look, the anthrax thing was strange,” Nick replied. “And suddenly it died out with no real answers. It must have been a local thing. Weapons of mass destruction aside, Iraq is about personal agendas. Bush has one, Rumsfeld has one, Powell has one, the Israelis have one and so on. What Bush should be doing is imposing peace on the region by forcing the Israelis and Palestinians into a full peace agreement, but he won’t do it.” “And you know why? His father tried, and look where it got him. He LOST the election. And this coming on the tail of the highest popularity rating a president had ever achieved. Oh sure, the media said he lost the election because of the sorry state of the economy at the time. But that wasn’t the real reason. His withholding of billions of dollars of aid to the Israelis is what did him in. Sharon now, and Netanyahu before him have had one purpose in mind and that was land expansion, and they have forced the US to turn a blind eye to this land grab.” Ayhan interjected as he refreshed the tobacco in his now dying out pipe. “Look, the bombing of Iraq is America’s way of forcing their brand of democracy into the region thereby punishing and destabilizing this area for the next 60 years while Israel continues its daily illegitimate expansion of land at the expense of the Palestinians.” I had to concede that this was indeed a war of agendas in the making, and the continued promotion of this war mattered to all and it was it not in Israel’s interest for anything but. Why else would they not have accepted Prince Abdullah’s offer of a full recognition and a normalization of diplomatic relations, an offer that was ratified by all the other Arab states in the region? They chose instead from that point onwards to increase the intensity of violence directed against the Palestinian masses, and in the process declare more occupied land under their security buffer zones. Directed by the US against innocent civilians, this war in the making is an immoral war, an illegal war. It is not about the security of the United States but one full of hidden agendas. There have been no discoveries of weapons of mass destruction threatening the US so far, and given time, Saddam can be removed by far less destructive means. Saddam is not all of Iraq. There are innocent people living there whose flesh and blood will be spilled when the US drops its payloads of destruction. And all those that support this form of terrorism against the innocent are no less guilty than the perpetrators of Sept. 11 themselves. — Tariq A. Al-Maeena, clsencounters@hotmail.com
One opens the New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. An enormous, deliberately intimidating force is being built up by America overseas, while inside the country, economic and social bad news multiply with a joint relentlessness. The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens. None the less, George Bush proposes another large tax cut for the 1% of the population that is comparatively rich. The public education system is in crisis and health insurance for 50 million Americans simply does not exist. Israel asks for $15bn in additional loan guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment rates in the US mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day. Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue without either public approval or, at least until very recently, dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalised indifference among the majority of the population (which may conceal great overall fear, ignorance and apprehension) has greeted the administration's warmongering and its strangely ineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a war; in the case of North Korea, it offers economic and energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for North Korea, an equally grim and cruel dictatorship. In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar. For almost a year American politicians, regional experts, administration officials and journalists have repeated the charges that have become standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of this predates September 11. To today's practically unanimous chorus has been added the authority of the UN human development report on the Arab world, which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the rest of the world in democracy, knowledge and women's rights. Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that Islam needs reform and that the Arab educational system is a disaster - in effect, a school for religious fanatics and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams and their wealthy followers (such as Osama bin Laden) but also by governments who are the supposed allies of the US. The only "good" Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture and society without reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired American formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of print. We lack democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam enough, we need to do more about driving away the spectre of Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what we and our American instructors say about the Arabs and Islam - vague, recycled Orientalist clichés repeated by tireless mediocrities such as Bernard Lewis - are true, they insist. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic enough. "We" need to join modernity - modernity in effect being western, globalised, free marketed, democratic, whatever those words might be taken to mean. There would be an essay to be written about the prose style of licensed academics like Fuad Ajami, Fawwaz Gerges, Kanan Makiya, Shibli Talhami, Mamoon Fandy, whose very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity and the hopelessly stilted mimicry that has been thrust upon them. The clash of civilisations that George Bush and his minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for a pre-emptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building, regime change and forcible modernisation à l'Américaine. Never mind the bombs and the ravages of the sanctions, which are unmentioned. This will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his men and replace them with a redrawn map of the whole region. New Sykes Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps. Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying situation in Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no force capable of stopping Ariel Sharon and his defence minister Shaul Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we ban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an entire people continues. As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement that the village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area of the West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60-tonne American-made Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunums of agricultural land, a mosque and an elementary school for 132 children. The UN stands by, looking on as its resolutions are flouted on an hourly basis. Alas, George Bush identifies with Sharon, not with the 16-year-old Palestinian kid who is used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking and, presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned for 10 years, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His faithful lieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press, suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or less. Remarkably, though, the great mass of this heroic people seems willing to go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going hungry, dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice of their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have done. What could be more discouraging for the average Gazan who goes on resisting Israeli occupation than to see his or her leaders kneel as supplicants before the Americans? In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the utter passivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The American government and its servants issue statement after statement of purpose, they move troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively can barely muster a bland refusal. At most they say no, you cannot use military bases in our territory, only to reverse themselves a few days later. Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness? The largest power in history is about to launch a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a dreadful regime, the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy the Ba'ath regime but to redesign the entire region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its plans are to redraw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and borders in the process. No one can be shielded from the cataclysm if and when it comes. And yet, there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral in response. Millions of people will be affected, yet America contemptuously plans for their future without consulting them. Do we deserve such racist derision? This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a region of almost 300 million Arabs wait passively for the blows to fall without attempting a collective roar of resistance? Has the Arab will completely dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last words to pronounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that, despite its drawbacks and weaknesses, nevertheless goes on functioning? Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men and women marry and work and have children, they play and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and companionship, friendship and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the business of living despite everything. This is the reality that both the Arab leaders and the US ignore when they fling empty gestures at the so-called "Arab street" invented by banal Orientalists. Who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab governments - no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom - sit back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up, threatens and ships out more soldiers and F-16s to deliver the punch. The silence is deafening. Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what? This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it's a matter of what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology, modernisation and certainly globalisation are not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with great vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into that and bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political, moral and religious leaders can only just denounce a little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors, they make plans somehow to ride out the storm. They think of survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land, the water, the air and the lives dependent on each other for existence? No one seems to be in charge. There is a wonderful expression that very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable helplessness, our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when our strength is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little left even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for extinction. Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although God knows that we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let us live in peace, another cringing, crawling, inaudible plea for mercy? Will no one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our future that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening. · Edward Said is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York. His books include Orientalism and Covering Islam. His latest work, Parallels and Paradoxes, cowritten with Daniel Barenboim, will be published by Bloomsbury in March
-
Invasion of Iraq may collapse
global economy
By Erich Marquardt
PINR, YellowTimes.org, 1/25/03
-
In the next few weeks, the struggling global economy may be put to the test if Washington chooses to invade Iraq. There are many risks involved in bombing Baghdad, the most important being a spike in oil prices. With oil prices already over $30.00 a barrel, increased pressure has been put on the global economy as more money is spent on importing oil. Should the United States attack Iraq, there is a real possibility that Middle East oil shipments will be disrupted. U.S. oil inventories are already running low due to the nearly two-month long PDVSA oil strike in Venezuela. While it takes only one week for Venezuelan oil exports to reach the United States, it takes four to five weeks for them to arrive from the Middle East. During an American attack on Iraq, an
errant bomb could destroy or interfere with oil operations, halting Iraq's
1-2 million barrels per day (bpd) in exports. Compounding the American
threat, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could opt to damage his own oilfields,
by ordering troops to light them on fire, as was done to Kuwait in 1991. This likely scenario has worried economists; it could result in oil prices as high as $40.00 a barrel, possibly causing extensive damage to the global economy. However, the Bush administration believes that the end result of the invasion will be economic growth rather than economic recession. The fate of the economy will rest on how fast the United States can get oil flowing again after the war; once oil production has stabilized again, the United States will likely be able to increase capacity by updating Iraq's oil infrastructure. While before the Gulf War Iraq was exporting 3.5 million barrels per day, it is predicted that Iraq may be able to increase production up to 5 million bpd with U.S. assistance. Larry Lindsey, former top economic adviser to President Bush, supported this prediction in a statement last fall: "When there is regime change in Iraq, you could add three million to five million barrels [per day] of production to world supply. The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy." Indeed, this scenario would provide a boon to the global economy by increasing oil supply, dropping prices down to $15 to $20 a barrel. But successful "regime change" might not be as easy as it seems. Iraq's oil infrastructure is already in bad shape and the prediction is that it will take 5 to 10 years for Iraqi oil output to reach such levels, if at all; in addition, there is no guarantee that the new Iraqi government will be willing to export such an inflated amount of oil. However, any new administration will most likely be installed and protected by U.S. troops, thus reducing the government's actual independence from Washington. The other most dangerous scenario is whether an invasion by Washington will heighten tensions in the Middle East in such a way that militant groups will attack oil interests when the U.S. and global economy are most vulnerable. Indeed, if militants inside Saudi Arabia attempted to sabotage major oil facilities within the country, limiting exports, oil prices would skyrocket since other nations would not be able to supplement the amount of oil Saudi Arabia exports. This would possibly send oil prices to over $50 a barrel, or cause prices to become static at $40.00 a barrel for many months. Indeed, Gary Hufbauer, of the Institute for International Economics, stated in the Baltimore Sun last October that a sustained rise in oil prices at a level of $45 or $50 a barrel could "turn [the economies of] the United States and Japan into a recession." Should the two largest global economies -- the United States and Japan -- enter a recession, or even suffer further economic setback due to increased oil prices, it would greatly add to the misery of other suffering states and impact emerging market economies. South American states, for instance, have had difficulty accessing global capital markets due to the economic uncertainty in Brazil -- which has been flirting with economic disaster -- and the recent economic meltdown of Argentina. Paraguay and Uruguay too have been hit by their neighbors' economic troubles, with the former suffering from low tax revenues and a stagnant economy. If the global economy were to deteriorate, it could create a scenario where Argentina would have to default on its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). If Argentina were to default, and other countries soon followed, it would compromise the Fund's own financial position and economic assistance to needy economies would falter, further spiraling the world economy toward a grave future. Along with South America, Asia will also be pushed into economic disaster should oil prices spike for a prolonged period. In addition to putting Japan into recession, South Korea, fraught with its own economic woes due to a rapid increase in real estate prices and unemployment, is also vulnerable. Seoul cannot rely on domestic spending to stimulate its economy due to ballooning household debt, a situation that increased oil prices would only exacerbate. Singapore, too, is walking on the edge of economic demise. Narrowly missing a double-dip recession this last year, weak demand for the city-state's key electronics exports and manufactured goods led to further job losses, ballooning its unemployment level to a 15-year high. Therefore, these concerns will be carefully weighed by the Bush administration as they consider whether or not to invade Iraq. With the global economy in such a precarious position, Washington will be hedging its bets; a war will either provide great economic gains, or colossal economic ruin. Erich Marquardt is the editor of YellowTimes.org. [The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an analysis-based publication that seeks to, as objectively as possible, provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader. PINR seeks to inform rather than persuade. This report may be reproduced, reprinted or broadcast provided that any such reproduction identifies the original source, http://www.pinr.com. All comments should be directed to content@pinr.com.]
-
Hypocrisy about biological
weapons
LONDON, 26 January 2003 — On Nov. 25, 1969, in the midst of the war
in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon, besieged by protests that he was a
warmonger, threw out a sop to public opinion. The US, he announced, had
decided to renounce the possession and use of lethal and incapacitating
biological weapons. He declared that the government would destroy its
stockpile of biological weapons. “These important decisions”, said
Nixon, “have been taken as an initiative toward peace. Mankind already
carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction.” Privately Nixon was convinced that they had little military utility for
the US while at the same time he feared that, if the big powers continued
to depend on biological weapons, a “rogue” state might one day get its
hands on the knowledge of how to make them and use them against American
cities. Sending the message that the US military considered them an
ineffective tool might discourage other nations from trying to develop
them. This was the first time a major power had unilaterally announced an
entire category of weapons of mass destruction and it catalyzed a quick
response from the rest of the world. By 1972, the major powers had all
signed up to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It seemed that
mankind, for once, had taken a big step forward. But the truth was
different — both the United States and the Soviet Union (and later
Russia) cheated, violating the convention in important ways. The rot started on the American side because Nixon’s original
executive order delegated the follow up on his new policy to the Defense
Department, with no effective control or follow up by the White House’s
own National Security Council. Almost immediately the CIA violated the president’s promise, deciding
to retain a secret cache of biological and toxin agents, including 100
grams of dried anthrax spores, 5.2 grams of saxitoxin (paralytic shell
fish poison) and seed cultures of the causative agents of smallpox,
tularemia and brucellosis. Only in 1975 did this come to light during
Senate hearings. The cache was then destroyed, three years after the
Convention had come into effect. Also, during the 1970s, US military intelligence used the double
agents, Sgt. Joseph Cassidy and Dmitry Polyakov, to feed false information
to the Soviet Union saying that the US was maintaining a secret program to
develop new biological weapons. The apparent point of this extraordinarily perverse exercise was to
push the Soviets to squander their scarce resources on emulating the
Americans, especially in areas the US had already decided were unpromising
for battlefield use. Of course, Moscow then felt justified in breaking its
own treaty commitment and in doing so achieved some remarkable
breakthroughs in the use of anthrax and plague in wartime and also
developed advanced delivery systems such as refrigerated warheads for
intercontinental ballistic missiles — information that by now may have
been passed on to “rogue” countries by unscrupulous or
poverty-stricken ex-Soviet scientists. Thus, instead of “smothering the
baby in the cradle”, as the US diplomat in charge of negotiating the
convention put it, the US inadvertently paced the Soviet Union to make
breakthroughs that then posed a major strategic threat to the US. Although this was perhaps the worst of it, later the US took advantages
of ambiguity in the convention’s language that allowed signatories to
purse research on biodefense. Until the late 1990s, the US was quite
transparent about its programs, keeping all the reports unclassified. But
then the Pentagon and the intelligence community, without informing
Congress or the White House, started on some secret research including on
a vaccine-resistant strain of anthrax. Only investigative reporting by the
New York Times, published in September 2001, blew the whistle. Also later
that year the Baltimore Sun unearthed a US Army program to manufacture
anthrax spores that could readily become airborne. Much informed opinion
within the US considered these programs in violation of the convention.
But even if that was unclear the programs were large-scale and serious
enough to convince many outsiders that the US was pursuing offensive
programs. Certainly if another country had carried out such research, the
US would have been quick to condemn them. Jonathan Tucker who runs the Chemical and Biological Weapons
Non-proliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International
Studies, whose work has done much to bring this troubled history to light,
argues that if the US is to regain credibility it has to rapidly change
gears. It needs a “reasonable level of transparency” with the White
House being regularly briefed. State Department lawyers need to be told to keep an eye on the research
so that it complies with the strict terms of the convention. “Suspicion
that the US is secretly engaged in offensively orientated R & D could
have a corrosive political effect and even promote the proliferation of
biological weapons programs,” he observes. If, indeed, Saddam Hussein has developed biological weapons and he is
one day arrested and arraigned before an international criminal tribunal
it would be sad day for everyone if he could use as an argument in his
defense: the Americans and the Russians did it and so did we.
-
Does Tony Blair have any idea
what the flies are like that feed off the dead? The Independent, Arab News
-
LONDON, 26 January 2003 — On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild
dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a
ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over the
desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains
of the burned military sleeve flapping in the wind. “Just for the record,” the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because
ITV would never show such footage. The things we see — the filth and
obscenity of corpses — cannot be shown. First because it is not
“appropriate” to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second
because, if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again
agree to support a war. That of course was in 1991. The “highway of death,” they called it
— there was actually a parallel and much worse “highway of death” 10
miles to the east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one
turned up to film it — and the only true picture of the horrors we saw
was the photograph of the shriveled, carbonized Iraqi soldier in his
truck. This was an iconic illustration of a kind because it did represent
what we had seen, when it was eventually published. For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War —
there was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the offing
— it was necessary for them to have died with care, to have fallen
romantically on their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like those World
War I paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had to die
benignly and without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor, without
a trace of shit or mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to make it on
to the morning news programs. I rage at this contrivance. At Qaa in 1996, when the Israelis had
shelled Lebanese refugees at the UN compound for 17 minutes, killing 106
civilians, more than half of them children, I came across a young woman
holding in her arms a middle-aged man. He was dead. “My father, my
father,” she kept crying, cradling his face. One of his arms and one of
his legs was missing — the Israelis used proximity shells which cause
amputation wounds — but when that scene reached television screens in
Europe and America, the camera was close up on the girl and the dead
man’s face. The amputations were not to be seen. The cause of death had
been erased in the interests of good taste. It was as if the old man had
died of tiredness, just turned his head upon his daughter’s shoulder to
die in peace. Today, when I listen to the threats of US President George W. Bush
against Iraq and the shrill moralistic warnings of British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, I wonder what they know of this terrible reality. Does George,
who declined to serve his county in Vietnam, have any idea what these
corpses smell like? Does Tony have the slightest conception of what the
flies are like, the big bluebottles that feed on the dead, and then come
to settle on our faces and our notepads? Soldiers know. I remember one
British officer asking to use the BBC’s satellite phone just after the
liberation of Kuwait in 1991. He was talking to his family in England and
I watched him carefully. “I have seen some terrible things,” he said.
And then he broke down, weeping and shaking and holding the phone dangling
in his hand over the transmission set. Did his family have the slightest
idea what he was talking about? They would not have understood by watching
television. Thus can we face the prospect of war. Our glorious, patriotic
population — albeit only about 20 percent in support of this particular
Iraqi folly — has been protected from the realities of violent death.
But I am much struck by the number of letters in my postbag from veterans
of World War II, men and women, all against this new Iraqi war, with an
inalienable memory of torn limbs and suffering. I remember once a wounded man in Iran, a piece of steel in his
forehead, howling like an animal — which is, of course, what we all are
— before he died; and the Palestinian boy who simply collapsed in front
of me when an Israeli soldier shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly,
murderously, for throwing a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg
sticking out of her stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem after
a Palestinian bomber had decided to execute the families inside; and the
heaps of Iraqi dead at the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq war; and the
young man showing me the thick black trail of his daughter’s blood
outside Algiers where armed men had cut her throat. But George Bush and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney and Jack Straw and all
the other little warriors who are bamboozling us into war will not have to
think of these vile images. For them it’s about surgical strikes,
collateral damage and all the other examples of war’s linguistic
mendacity. We are going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the
people of Iraq — some of whom we will obviously kill — and we are
going to give them democracy and protect their oil wealth and stage war
crimes trials and we are going to be ever so moral, and we are going to
watch our defense “experts” on TV with their bloodless sandpits and
their awesome knowledge of weapons which rip off heads. Come to think of it, I recall the head of an Albanian refugee, chopped
neatly off when the Americans, ever so accidentally, bombed a refugee
convoy in Kosovo in 1999 which they thought was a Serb military unit. His
head lay in the long grass, bearded, eyes open, severed as if by a Tudor
executioner. Months later, I learned his name and talked to the girl who
was hit by the severed head during the US air strike and who laid the head
reverently in the grass where I found it. NATO, of course, did not
apologize to the family. Nor to the girl. No one says sorry after war. No
one acknowledges the truth of it. No one shows you what we see. Which is
how our leaders and our betters persuade us — still — to go to war.
(The Independent)
-
Jerusalem holds key to Middle
East peace -
If the door to a final peace, in the Middle East, is a permanent
Palestinian state and lasting security for Israel, then the city of
Jerusalem is the key to that door. Under the leadership of Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel is constructing a 350-km security fence to
separate Israel from the Palestinians. The construction began in June 2002 and it is anticipated that the
first 120-km will be completed by June 2003. In the path of this project
lies Jerusalem. If the project continues as planned, the fence will split
the West Bank from east Jerusalem, the section of this city where
Palestinians had planned to create their own capital. To really understand what is happening in Jerusalem you need to look
back at what has occurred in her long and important history. In the 1920s,
1930s and early 1940s Jerusalem was under the mandatory administration of
the British. During that period of time, the British safeguarded the
numerous historical sites and tried to keep a balance between the Arab and
Jewish population. When the British forfeited the mandate and departed in May, 1948, the
United Nations stepped in. The United Nations approved a partition
dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab states but they did not divide
Jerusalem. In fact, they voted to make Jerusalem a completely “separate
body” or “corpus separatum” under a special international regime
with “suitable guarantees for the protection of Holy Places.” Before the ink could dry on the paper, the first Arab-Israeli war broke
out. The armistice signed in April 1949 between Israel and Jordan to end
that war resulted in Jerusalem being divided, split along the cease-fire
lines with two demilitarized zones separating the two sides. This is how
the city remained, a maze of barbed wire and danger zones until June 1967.
With the advent of the six-day war Israel seized control of the eastern
part of Jerusalem and reunited the city. The border between Israel and Jordan in Jerusalem disappeared and
Israel claimed Jerusalem as its own. In July 1980 the Israeli Knesset
officially annexed the expanded city limits Israel captured during the
six-day war. Jerusalem, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the
world, now belonged exclusively to the Jewish country of Israel. Yet, who
does Jerusalem really belong to? In its 38 centuries of existence
Jerusalem has been destroyed 17 times and it has been ruled by 25
different peoples. The pagans dominated the city for 800 years, the Jews for 543 years,
the Christians for 427 years and the Muslims for 1193 years. It is not
enough to say that Jerusalem is a Holy City only to the Jews. For Jews it
is the place where the Messiah will come and unite his people. For the Christians it is the place of the apocalypse where heaven will
descend on earth. Pope Paul II refers to Jerusalem as “the mother of all
churches.” The archbishop of Jerusalem has said “for the last two thousand years
Jerusalem was the source of continuous wars because it was always governed
by one political authority corresponding to one religion, Christian,
Muslim and today Jewish.” I say, Jerusalem belongs to the world. As the
United Nations originally voted in 1947, Jerusalem should be a “separate
body”. Not unlike the Vatican in Rome, Jerusalem should be an individual
“city state” under the guidance of the world’s three major
religions. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 from November 1967
called for a complete withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the
territories they had conquered. The most current “peace plan” follows
these same lines but they both fall short of the true key to finalization
and justice in this area of the world and that is the liberation of
Jerusalem from Israel and the return of this Holy City to the Muslims,
Christians and Jews who remember it daily in their prayers. The world has watched Israel expand her borders without regard to the
impact upon the Palestinian nation. The United States of America, a
Christian country, continues to dole out one-third of its foreign aid
budget yearly to Israel and now Israel is using some of those dollars to
buy materials to construct a fence closing the rest of the world out of
Jerusalem. Where are the American people on this issue? Where are the
speeches on the floor of Congress denouncing the thief of this Holy City?
Jerusalem has been divided, re-divided and now totally conquered. The Palestinians want her for their capital. The Israelis have already
staked their claim. Jerusalem sits in the center of this on-going war and
only with its removal can both sides be satisfied. The separate “city
state” of Jerusalem will not only solve this problem but it will give
the religious leaders of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths an ideal
opportunity to show the world how their followers can and must learn to
live together in peace with respect for one another. (Adrienne McPhail is a free-lance journalist based in Riyadh.)
Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah's. |