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WORLD VIEWS: Globe plans for apr�s-guerre humanitarian aid; Bush's
religious war rhetoric bashed by Pope, others; and more.
by Edward M. Gomez, special to SF Gate
Thursday, February 13, 2003
�2003 SF Gate
URL:
Even as European leaders square off over George W. Bush's controversial
Iraq war plans, prompting divisions in decades-old alliances, European
governments and international relief organizations are already planning for
what the French call the "apr�s-guerre" ("after the war") scenario.
Relief agencies have begun sending experts and supplies into the
prospective war region, and the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) "has spent $19 million from its reserves to purchase
tents and cooking supplies and [to] transport them to [Iraq's] neighboring
countries." The UNCHR predicts that if war breaks out, some "600,000 Iraqis
could flee abroad, with about half going to Iran and the rest to Turkey,
Syria and Jordan." The Swiss-run International Committee of the Red Cross
has bases in Kuwait, Iran and Jordan, but a spokeswoman for the
organization cautioned that "infrastructure hardly functions." She added
that "the population has been living on food rations and is very
vulnerable." (Reuters)
The Bush administration has announced that it has given the UNHCR $12.1
million for "humanitarian contingency planning for Iraq," (Reuters) but it
has declined to take part in a conference on humanitarian relief for Iraq
that Switzerland's foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, has been
organizing. (Swissinfo/NZZ) "We are uncertain as to how the conference
would assist the planning," a spokesperson for the U.S. diplomatic mission
in Geneva said. (Islam Online)
Calmy-Rey's conference comes on the heels of another humanitarian-relief
confab, the annual Aid and Trade expo, which took place in late January
in Geneva. Part conference and part trade fair, Aid and Trade attracted
some 250 exhibitors offering such wares for war-torn places as satellite
phones, de-mining suits, police cars and foods for refugees. (Alternet) Iraq
was not invited to Calmy-Rey's Feb. 15-16 Geneva conference, a gesture
that provoked criticism from Iraqi officials. Said the Swiss foreign minister,
"Humanitarian issues have got nothing to do with politics. We must do
everything we possibly can on the humanitarian side before, during and
after a possible war." (Swissinfo/NZZ)
Noting that U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had predicted "with
a smile" a short war that could last "six days or six weeks," France's Le
Monde looked ahead to a postwar world and asked, "What sort of mandate
[does the United States have] to occupy a nation that today numbers 23
million inhabitants and whose capital, Baghdad, weighs as heavily in the
collective history of the Arabs as Paris, London or Berlin does for
Europeans? To pose these questions is not to defend the indefensible
status quo, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. It is [instead] to measure
the enormity of what is at risk of taking place."
Officially, but in a low-key way, the United States also has been getting
ready for the impact of the war. In Italy, Archbishop Renato Martino, from
the pope's Council of Peace and Justice, told the media that a shipment of
100,000 body bags and 6,000 coffins had been delivered to a U.S. Navy base
on the island of Sicily. "I am very apprehensive about this," Martino said.
"The consequences of this war will make themselves all too obvious [to]
the American people when they start to see coffins with loved ones in
[them] returning home." (The Mirror)
* * * *
Overseas, observers have not failed to notice the religious tone of George
W. Bush's quips and speeches. They're lambasting him for that fervor, too,
for fanning the flames of misunderstanding and war.
"Sounding increasingly like an Old Testament prophet rather than a 21st-
century world leader, Bush continues to blur the lines not just between
church and state but between the will of God and the will of George W.
Bush," commentator Diana Wichtel wrote in The New Zealand Herald. "To
invoke God in the way he does is to cut the moral ground out from under
anyone who disagrees with you. To be against America's policies is to be
against God. It would be quite clever if it wasn't so scary."
In the United Kingdom's Observer, Mary Riddell opined that British Prime
Minister Tony Blair and Bush "may believe God is on their side, but it would
still be an immoral war." Noting that God seems to be "the coalescing agent
of this war, the unifying bond between a prime minister guided by religious
certitude and a president in thrall to Bible and gun," Riddell added, "It may
become, or lead to, the first nuclear conflict of the century. It will also
echo back through 2,500 years of bloodshed justified by the sway of good
over evil. Bush should have studied Old Testament prophecy further."
(Observer)
A higher authority, Pope John Paul II, has said, "We should never resign
ourselves, almost as if war is inevitable" and lamented that, nowadays,
humanity is being tempted by "hate and violence." (Iraq Daily) On that same
papal note, Civilta Cattolica, in a Vatican-approved text, blasted Bush's
attempts to justify making war. It scoffed at the "sort of messianic
vocation" that has marked the foreign-policy perspective of the United
States since World War II and the Cold War era and sternly intoned, "We
cannot not repeat what John Paul II said when, in 1991, President Bush Sr.
unleashed the first war against Iraq: 'War is an adventure with no return.'"
* * * *
Foreign criticism of Bush's policies is more stinging for the president's team
because it continues to come from erstwhile faithful allies such as
Australia and Canada, and because the moral dilemmas and uncomfortable
historical facts that it is stirring up cannot easily be brushed aside.
"The waging of even a short war will almost certainly lead to the hideous
deaths of even more innocent civilians than died on September 11," wrote
Robert Manne in The Sydney Morning Herald. He argued that "at the
center of our civilization is the radical idea that the life of an Iraqi peasant
is as valuable as that of an American astronaut," but with resignation,
Manne also noted that if the United States and the United Kingdom go to
war against Iraq, with or without the United Nations' support, Australia will
join them.
Reluctantly, he admitted that for his country to not send troops "would
represent such a diplomatic slap in the face to the Americans that our
alliance with them would effectively be dead."
Even so, at press time, parliamentary opponents of Australian Prime
Minister John Howard were moving to censure him and Acting Prime
Minister John Anderson "for breach of trust of the Australian people" for
not having "told the truth" about Australia belonging to the "coalition of
the willing" (countries that have pledged to support an American invasion
of Iraq). Howard has been in Washington, meeting with Bush.(The Age)
Dismissing as "pip-squeak stuff" Secretary of State Colin Powell's
presentation to the United Nations last week about Iraq's supposed links to
international terrorists, commentator Lawrence Martin reviewed
Washington's own disturbing links to Baghdad. In Toronto's Globe and Mail,
he wrote, "What he did say was interesting. What he didn't say was more
interesting. Such as: This is a war on terror, and we have no real proof
that Saddam Hussein is linked to any of the terror of recent years."
Martin pointed out that Powell "made no reference to the fact that, while
Washington has become paranoid about chemical and biological weapons,"
it was the United States that "rejected an international biological-weapons
pact two years ago," that the Iraqi leader "had biochem weapons available
in the [first] gulf war but didn't use them" and that "when he did use such
weapons in the 1980s, the U.S., then a semi-supporter of Mr. Hussein, gave
him the old wink wink." (Globe and Mail)
"Why would America not use its frightening snooping capacity to track
down and zap Saddam Hussein, now that assassinations are part of
American foreign policy?" wrote Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui.
"Wouldn't that be more moral than waging war and raining death and mass
misery on innocent Iraqi civilians?"
Noting that the Bush administration, "in contravention of Security Council
resolution 1441 of Nov. 8, [2002, has] been withholding its anti-Iraq
evidence from the United Nations' weapons inspectors," Siddiqui answered
his own questions as he concluded, "America wants war, badly, in spring,
and there's no stopping it. Let the world be damned."
Author, artist and critic Edward M. Gomez is a former diplomat and
correspondent for Time magazine in New York, Tokyo and Paris. He speaks
several languages and has lived and worked all over the world. He is a
regular contributor to The New York Times and other publications and is
the U.S. editor of Raw Vision magazine.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
�2003 SF Gate
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