by Uri Avnery
Yet some more thoughts about the war.
The Coalition.
No name could be more appropriate to the cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq.
In "The Devil's Dictionary" of the American humorist Ambrose Bierce, published some 100 years ago, "coalition" is defined as (I quote from memory) the cooperation between two thieves who have their hands so deep in each others pockets that they cannot rob a third person separately.
Reconstructionists.
The problem of the Brits and the Americans is that they are possessed by an unquenchable thirst for reconstructing.
They dream about it day and night. They cannot think and speak about anything else.
Trouble is, in order to rebuild something one has to demolish it first. No destruction, no reconstruction.
Therefore the British, together with the Americans, are occupied with destroying Iraq systematically. Missile and bombs, tanks and artillery, ships and infantry--everything is employed in order to facilitate the reconstruction of the country.
The main objective of the urge for reconstruction is, of course, Baghdad. A city of five million people, miles upon miles of buildings and streets, which can be reconstructed after their demolition. If Baghdad becomes indeed the site of Stalingrad-style street fighting, house after house, street after street, there will be indeed a lot to reconstruct.
The New Mongols.
The appetite for rebuilding separates the new conquerors from their predecessors, the Mongols, who conquered Baghdad in 1258, killed the Caliph (who had already surrendered) and destroyed the city completely, after butchering all the inhabitants, men, women and babies.
They did not bring with them reconstruction crews, but laid waste to Iraq. The irrigation canals that had been built throughout thousands of years of civilization were devastated. The event has gone down in history as one of the biggest disasters ever to befall the Arab world.
By the way, two years later the Muslims annihilated the Mongol army in the battle of Ein-Jalud (today's kibbutz Ein-Harod), a major chapter in Palestininian history. That was the end of the Mongols in the Middle East, but the region never recovered from the Mongol devastation to this very day.
Demolish and profit.
Apart from the idealist aim of helping the Iraqi people, there is also a more material side to reconstruction. It will be huge business. The big American corporations--some of which are connected with the paladins of the Bush administration--are already quarreling about the spoils. They will, of course, allow no foreigners to come into this. To quote an American saying: "To the victors belong the spoils".
A rather obnoxious sight: even before the Iraqi towns are destroyed, corporate giants are dividing among themselves the profits of their rebuilding.
Humanitarians.
The unquenchable idealism of the Anglo-Americans finds its expression also in the drive for humanitarian aid. This is becoming quite an obsession. Humanitarian aid must be brought to the Iraqi people, whether they want it or not.
The inhabitants of Basra do not want the promised aid? Ha, we'll see about that. We shall bomb them, starve them--until they open their gates and allow the humanitarian aid in. After all, one cannot aid people as long as the city is controlled by the evil Saddam, cursed be his name, whose only aim is to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching his people.
The coalition could, of course, drop food and water - instead of bombs - from the air. One could also arrange for a short cease-fire, so as to bring the humanitarian aid into the besieged city. But that has been forbidden by Donald Rumsfeld, another great humanitarian. So there is really no alternative but to bomb them until they are ripe for aid.
Full story...
Well, the world has gotten itself into quite the mess hasn't it? Global crisis doesn't quite do justice to the current situation. In my old Army parlance, we are in the midst of what we used to call a cluster#$%^&^. FUBAR to the max and then some. It doesn't really matter how we opened Pandora's box, we must now deal with the aftermath. Pandora was a figure in Greek mythology who had a box which, when opened, unleashed chaos and anarchy upon those who were foolish enough to open it. As to where the current global situation will end, I have no idea. It's all on the table though. Everything from a North Korean first strike, economic collapse, a regional war in the Middle East involving Turkey, Syria, Iraq, the coalition, Iran and Israel is no longer an academic doomer fantasy. Assuming Iraq uses the weapons of mass destruction we know they have, since the western democracies gave them to him, modern life as we know it will end. Assuming Iraq was able to buy nukes and weaponized biological agents from the collapsing Soviet Union, we will be faced with the worst of both worlds. If he has them, and uses them, we will face a military disaster unique in our American history. And if he doesn't, we will suffer a political disaster also unique in our American history. As things stand now, we are involved in a snake pit of religious and nationalist passion exploding across the Arab world.
Donald Rumsfeld lied Friday (March 28) when a reporter asked if the US was misleading the public about its casualties in Iraq.
Two British soldiers have been sent home from the Gulf for refusing to fight in a war involving the deaths of civilians, according to a solicitor who advises troops.
Britain and the United States suffered a fresh blow last night when their main justification for war was undermined by reports that special forces have failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Tony Blair yesterday ordered senior ministers to nail war rebel Robin Cook.
A dreadful monster assaults the city, kills its brave defenders, and advances to devour the citizens. At the last moment, a young maiden demurely walks forward to meet the monster. Her very sight, the sight of feminine innocence, vulnerability, spirituality, certainty of the right cause, stops the ogre in its tracks. The beast suffers her to tie her belt to his mighty neck and walks away, tamed. It is the story of St Genevieve and of other beautiful and virtuous saints; a part and parcel of human heritage, and the subject of many gorgeous tapestries and paintings.
An occasional light has gone out of my life. I first met Daniel Patrick Moynihan - senator, ambassador, special counsel to one president and assistant secretary of labour to another - back in 1971. And between then and his death last week I doubt if we saw each other more than twice a year. But in his company my spirits always soared. Towards the end of his life - when he had become obsessed with the failings of the "liberal establishment" - I thought of him as the rainmaker. He came to town with obviously bogus theories, but left after making everyone who had met him feel better for his acquaintance. The drift across the political spectrum from left to right was the one thing in his whole life that he did slowly. For most of his uniquely successful political career he behaved with a reckless gaiety which I found irresistible.
Most of us have experienced the discomfort of watching a friend go off the rails. At first his oddities are dismissed as eccentricities. An absurd assertion, a lunatic conviction, a sudden enthusiasm or unreasonable fear, are explained as perhaps due to tiredness, or stress, or natural volatility. We do not want to face the truth that our friend has cracked up. Finally we can deny it no longer — and then it seems so obvious: the explanation, in retrospect, of so much we struggled to reconcile.
British soldiers injured when a US "tankbuster" aircraft attacked their convoy, killing one of their comrades, hit out angrily at the "cowboy" pilot today.
The Channel 4 News foreign affairs specialist Gaby Rado, who has died in Iraq aged 48, was a rare kind of foreign correspondent. From Bosnia to Afghanistan, from Bucharest to Jericho, he brought a dependable, engaged and humane quality to his reports that eschewed the flash or the immodest. Despite witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of Ceausescu, and the liberation of Kosovo, he never played the conquering hero. His reports from northern Iraq, his last as recently as Friday, were informative, strong on context, and interspersed with revealing interviews with those who were preparing to people Iraq's developing northern war front.
The opening weeks of the Second Oil War against Iraq - a.k.a. Operation Iraq Freedom - produced the advertised "shock and awe" all right, but it came in Washington rather than bombarded Baghdad.
Tony Blair could still get his Churchill moment. Basra might fall, Baghdad could follow, with the British and Americans finally winning their long-promised tears-and-cheers welcome from grateful Iraqis. Blair would be vindicated as surely as Winston Churchill was 60 years ago.
Ex-general who will lead reconstruction heads firm behind Patriot missiles
Hundreds of anti-war demonstrators gathered at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcasting complex, 4.8km west of their traditional protest ground in Hyde Park, to voice dissatisfaction against the BBC's biased reports on the war in Iraq.
Thank you, great leader George W. Bush.
Bilderberg will hold its annual secret meeting at the luxurious Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles, France May 15-18. The meeting dovetails with the Group of Seven meeting of finance ministers in Paris the day after Bilderberg concludes, on May 19 in Paris. Paris is only a 20-minute drive from Versailles.
This is the incoherent account of an incoherent week. It started in Ruwayshid, in Jordan, near the Iraqi border. It continued amid the hundreds of reporters imprisoned in the luxury hotels of Amman and ended up here in Cairo. I've just come from a huge demonstration against the war. It took place after Friday prayers at the Al-Azhar mosque.
The term “Pedophilia” is normally used to indicate the direct sexual abuse of an innocent child, but in reality has a far wider interpretation. Pedophilia means the intentional exploitation and/or abuse of an innocent child or children, for any reason that is detrimental to their individual or collective physical or mental health.
The real war pauses occasionally. The information war goes on 24 hours a day. Every opportunity, every scrap of information, has been deployed to reassure British and American public opinion that the war is being won, and won painlessly.
Tony Blair could still get his Churchill moment. Basra might fall, Baghdad could follow, with the British and Americans finally winning their long-promised tears-and-cheers welcome from a grateful Iraqi nation - and Blair would be vindicated as surely as Winston Churchill was six decades ago.
It has all begun to go horribly wrong for Donald Rumsfeld. The White House's No1 hawk dreamed of a swift, hi-tech precision war. Smart bombs and Special Forces would triumphantly sweep all before them.
Here on the frontline this conflict is taking its toll on morale.
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf disputed U.S. reports that Iraq might be planning to use chemical weapons or nerve agents because U.S. forces found 3,000 chemical protective suits and nerve agent antidote injectors.
At the height of the summer, as talk of invading Iraq built in Washington like a dark, billowing storm, the US armed forces staged a rehearsal using over 13,000 troops, countless computers and $250m. Officially, America won and a rogue state was liberated from an evil dictator.
The Americans and their faithful allies, the British, are committing war crimes, attacking a sovereign state outside the auspices of the UNO. Since there have been civilian casualties, these are war crimes by definition.
Bride-to-be Rebecca Williams was planning her wedding when she learned her fiancé, Llandudno soldier Llywelyn Evans, had died in the Kuwaiti desert.
Last month, when it became clear that the US-led drive to war was irreversible, I - like many other British journalists - relocated to Qatar for a ringside seat. But I am an Islamist journalist, so while the others bedded down at the £1m media centre at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I found a more humble berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm of al-Jazeera.
Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official, resigned Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy Board that is a key advisory arm for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Fuelled by graphic television pictures of wounded Iraqi civilians and text messages on mobile phones, a tidal wave of fury against Britain and America is sweeping the Arab world.