Pool at stiffs.com to kill the president starts...(my 2$)
It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this
country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf
through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every
evening, just to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning, but
patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech,
designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN into
going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in moral hypocrisy
and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in Munich this
past weekend went one step further than the bumbling Powell in unctuous
sermonising and bullying derision. For the moment, I shall discount George
Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers
like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves
of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective
spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen). Bush
is, he has said, in direct contact with God, or if not God, then at least
Providence. Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the
secretaries of state and defence seem to have emanated from the secular
world of real women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger
for a time over their words and activities.
First, a few preliminaries. The US has clearly decided on war: there seem
to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take place or
not (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states who, as usual,
seem to dither and be paralysed at the same time, but by France, Russia and
Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless to have transported 200,000
troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, leaving aside smaller deployments
in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean only one thing.
Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are
chicken hawks, that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting
themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that entirely
civilian group were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam War, yet each
of them got a deferment based on privilege, and therefore never fought or
so much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence is therefore
morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, anti-democratic in the
extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks in a war with Iraq has
nothing to do with actual military considerations. Iraq, whatever the
disgusting qualities of its deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent
and credible threat to neighbours like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan
(each of which could easily handle it militarily) or certainly to the US.
Any argument to the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous
proposition. With a few outdated Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and
biological material, most of it supplied by the US in earlier days (as
Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was sold
to Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, containable, though
at unconscionable cost to the long-suffering civilian population. For this
terrible state of affairs I think it is absolutely true to say that there
has been collusion between the Iraqi regime and the Western enforcers of
the sanctions.
Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change -- a process already
begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs of this country -- there is simply no
end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a dubious caliber
actually go on blathering about bringing democracy, modernisation, and
liberalisation to the Middle East? God knows that the area needs it, as so
many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people have said over and
over. But who appointed these characters as agents of progress anyway? And
what entitles them to pontificate in so shameless a way when there are
already so many injustices and abuses in their own country to be remedied?
It's particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it
is imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice,
should have been an election adviser to Netanyahu's extreme right- wing
government during the period 1996-9, in which he counseled the renegade
Israeli to scrap any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and
Gaza, and try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man now
talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East, and does so without
provoking the slightest objection from any of the media pundits who
politely (abjectly) quiz him on national television.
Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its plagiarised
and manufactured evidence, its confected audio-tapes and its doctored
pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has violated
numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that
and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical
about the official US position is that literally everything Powell has
accused the Ba'athists of has been the stock in trade of every Israeli
government since 1948, and at no time more flagrantly than since the
occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal detention, assassination, assaults
against civilians with missiles, helicopters and jet fighters, annexation
of territory, transportation of civilians from one place to another for the
purpose of imprisonment, mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and
Shatilla to mention only the most obvious), denial of rights to free
passage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of
civilians as human shields, humiliation, punishment of families, house
demolitions on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural land,
expropriation of water, illegal settlement, economic pauperisation, attacks
on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to
name only the most outrageous abuses: all these, it should be noted with
emphasis, have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the
United States which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such
practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has
given the country upwards of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale that
beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the US government on its
own citizens.
This is an unconscionable record to hold against the US, and Mr Powell as
its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of US foreign
policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this
country, and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the
promotion of freedom -- the proclaimed central plank in the US's foreign
policy since at least 1976 -- is applied uniformly, without exception or
condition. How he and his bosses and co- workers can stand up before the
world and righteously sermonise against Iraq while at the same time
completely ignoring the ongoing American partnership in human rights abuses
with Israel defies credibility. And yet no one, in all the justified
critiques of the US position that have appeared since Powell made his great
UN speech, has focused on this point, not even the ever-so- upright French
and Germans. The Palestinian territories today are witnessing the onset of
a mass famine; there is a health crisis of catastrophic proportions; there
is a civilian death toll that totals at least a dozen to 20 people a week;
the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are
unable to work, study, or move about as curfews and at least 300 barricades
impede their daily lives; houses are blown up or bulldozed on a mass basis
(60 yesterday). And all of it with US equipment, US political support, US
finances. Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard,
is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinians' lives that
have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has the
gall to say that he acts in God's name, and that he (and his
administration) act to serve "a just and faithful God". And, more
astounding yet, he lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN
resolutions even as he supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at
least 64 of them on a daily basis for more than half a century.
But so craven and so ineffective are the Arab regimes today that they don't
dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need US economic aid.
Many of them fear their own people and need US support to prop up their
regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the same crimes against
humanity. So they say nothing, and just hope and pray that the war will
pass, while in the end keeping them in power as they are.
But it is also a great and noble fact that for the first time since World
War Two there are mass protests against the war taking place before rather
than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and should become the
central political fact of the new, globalised era into which our world has
been thrust by the US and its super-power status. What this demonstrates is
that despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam
and his American antagonists, despite the complicity of a mass media that
has (willingly or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, despite the
indifference and ignorance of a great many people, mass action and mass
protest on the basis of human community and human sustainability are still
formidable tools of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you
wish. But that they have at least tampered with the plans of the Washington
chicken hawks and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of
religious monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe
in wars of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go
to lecture or speak out against these injustices I haven't found anyone in
support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to US action
in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Israel,
Kurdistan and everywhere in the Arab world -- and also ask others to force
the same linkage on everyone, Arab, American, African, European, Australian
and Asian. These are world issues, human issues, not simply strategic
matters for the United States or the other major powers.
We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White
House has openly announced will include three to five hundred cruise
missiles a day (800 of them during the first 48 hours of the war) raining
down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce "Shock and
Awe", or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its boastful planner
a certain Mr (or is it Dr?) Harlan Ullman has said, a Hiroshima-style
effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991 Gulf War after 41
days of bombing Iraq this scale of human devastation was not even
approached. And the US has 6000 "smart" missiles ready to do the job. What
sort of God would want this to be a formulated and announced policy for His
people? And what sort of God would claim that this was going to bring
democracy and freedom to the people not only of Iraq but to the rest of the
Middle East?
These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if
anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth it
would be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals
according to the Nuremberg Laws that the US itself was crucial in
formulating. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the
war and praise George Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in the
name of Good? Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in protest,
now and again and again. We need creative thinking and bold action to stave
off the nightmares planned by a docile, professionalised staff in places
like Washington and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is
what they call "greater security" then words have no meaning at all in the
ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon have contempt for the non-white people
of this world is clear. The question is, how long can they keep getting
away with it?
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/625/op2.htm
