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Recent Stories
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
Gilad
Atzmon
Strategic Blunders by American Generals
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
26, 2003
Now, They Talk About Conventions of War?
Winning Hearts
and Minds Bush-Style
By LINDA S. HEARD
Athens, Greece.
Britain’s
ITV showed a small Iraqi boy lying on a stretcher in a Baghdad hospital.
He was shrieking from pain caused by burns over more than two-thirds
of his tiny body. I could see from the top half of his face, which had
escaped the flames, that he had been an exceptionally beautiful infant
with huge dark eyes, now stricken with fear.
The reporter said that this angelic looking child was not expected to
last the day. This was the first of a juxtaposition of events which
brought home to me just how immoral is the American-led invasion of
Iraq.
Fighting back a flood of emotion and anger, I was then confronted with
the Pentagon press briefing. Its spokeswoman talked about Iraq’s
alleged misuse of the Geneva Conventions by its parading five US prisoners
of war on television.
How can anyone compare the televising of military service personnel
– members of an invading force - being asked their name, rank
and age with the tortured screams of that toddler fighting for his life?
Those soldiers knew that their job involved their capture by enemy forces
or even the loss of their lives. They are likely to return home a little
worse for wear. The child in the hospital isn’t going to see his
home again. He isn’t left with the choice whether or not he wants
to be a soldier, or a lawyer or a doctor. By the time you read this
that child will be dead along with thousands of other victims of Bush’s
wish to ‘free’ the Iraqi people.
George Bush and his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have been talking
a lot about the Geneva Conventions these days. Not so during America’s
invasion of Afghanistan when they dropped their J-Dams and missiles
on a compound in Mazar-e-Sherif, killing hundreds of Afghans and Arabs.
There was no talk about the Geneva Conventions when contingents of Arabs
and Moslems were flown to Guantanamo Bay, shackled, handcuffed, gagged,
hooded and chained to their aircraft seats only to be thrown into chicken
coops open to the elements.
There was no mention of any conventions when John Walker Lindt was interviewed
while he lay on a stretcher in Afghanistan. Oh, yes. These were ‘detainees’.
They are the disappeared whose lives were not dignified with the title
‘prisoner of war’, except for Lindt, of course, who got
special treatment due to his American passport. The others were left
to rot without contact with their families and no recourse to legal
representation.
Donald Rumsfeld who is the very person, who once said that he doubted
that most of them would ever be released, is now bleating in the most
hypocritical fashion about the Geneva Conventions.
Rumsfeld says that any mistreatment of the American prisoners of war
will be treated as a war crime, but today the southern Iraqi city of
Basra is without electricity and water and as the days go past the health
of its inhabitants will be at risk. This is a war crime Mr. Rumsfeld.
This is a true crime against humanity.
When US soldiers looked on while the Afghan War Lord General Dostum
shoved Afghan prisoners into metal containers and left them without
water for three days under the sun until most of them died, did Rumsfeld
utter the words ‘war crime’. Not at all. Instead, Dostum
was rewarded with a place in the Afghan government alongside the American
puppet Hamid Karzai.
And has the White House or the Pentagon ever said a world about Israel’s
breaches of the Geneva Conventions? Even as 10 per cent of Jenin was
demolished, Palestinian refugees used as human shields and ambulances
prevented from reaching the sick and injured, the Bush administration
stayed silent.
Returning to that same Pentagon briefing, we heard how those Iraqi men
who are defending their mothers, fathers, wives and children, defending
the soil of their own country, are going to be labeled ‘terrorists’
by the Bush administration if they remove their military uniforms. These
men should play by the ‘rules’. They should not be ‘fighting
dirty’ as a Sky News anchor keeps accusing them of doing.
While an invading army sends its pilots to drop bombs on heavily populated
civilian areas from 30,000 feet, and uses its high-tech weaponry, laser
and satellite-guided missiles against a people, who have no serious
defense capabilities except their warriors, isn’t it clear just
which side is ‘playing dirty’?
If people with tanks surrounded my house, their helicopter gun ships
circling overhead and their bullets were screaming through my windows,
should I be looking into ancient tomes on international law to see what
rules I should follow?
It seems that the Iraqis are supposed to label themselves as combatants,
conveniently wearing a recognizable uniform, while fighting using the
Queensbury Rules. “Oh sorry, old chap. I really mustn’t
thump you in the balls. Please feel free to drop your bombs on my wife
and children while I dash off to get my uniform out of the dry cleaners”.
It is evident that Bush and Blair are waging an illegal and immoral
conflict. They have ignored the voices of millions around the world;
they have ignored the wishes of the United Nations and they have manipulated
the truth over and over again in the most cynical fashion.
The President’s men – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz
- as far back as 1997 planned this invasion. Iraq is just the first
stop, a launching pad from where Bush and friends will re-draw the map
of the region to suit their own self-interested agenda.
But they cannot tell us the truth. They cannot tell us that the New
World Order, with the United States at its head, is born.
As their forces rush to prevent the oil fires from consuming the black
gold, their politicians maneuver to wrest the oil for food escrow account
from the hands of the United Nations. As they talk about saving the
country’s oil for the future of the Iraqi people, they are doling
out multi-million dollars contracts to American companies, poised to
offer subcontracts to British firms, to rebuild the infrastructure,
which they themselves are in the process of tearing down. Many of those
companies are headed by cronies of the Bush camp.
Those who assert that the US administration is working from humanitarian
motives should ask themselves why, when the American economy is failing,
Bush asks for 75 billion dollars to feed the war effort… and this
for a start. What is going to replenish those coffers if not for Iraqi
oil? If Bush is suddenly suffused with such a generous humanitarian
spirit, then why isn’t more American taxpayer’s money going
to Africa, where people are dying of HIV Aids and malnutrition?
Oh, yes. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction with which it is threatening
the United States and the world. As we watch the Iraqi army lob less
than smart missiles onto the sands of Kuwait and roll around in ancient
Russian tanks clutching rusty rifles, does anyone still take this seriously?
In fact, Russia has gone as far as to warn the Coalition that if weapons
of mass destruction are suddenly produced to back up their, thus far,
unsubstantiated claims, they will be subject to investigation by UN
weapons inspectors. The world simply isn’t going to fall for that
one. If they want to get away with it, then they will have to be a lot
more professional than they were when flourishing the plagiarized intelligence
dossier and the forged uranium-related correspondence between Niger
and Iraq.
Just recently they have admitted one motive for their sudden interest
in disarming Saddam Hussein. America and Britain want regime change
in Iraq, a motive, which is not recognized by the United Nations Charter.
At first, they were shy about exposing their desire to topple the Iraqi
regime. The British Prime Minister denied that this was their aim. Later
on, he didn’t even bother to do that. The mask is finally off.
When it comes down to a battle between might and international law,
might wins.
Now they want to have their war legalized by the UN under the pretext
that they want to rebuild Iraq and provide aid and food to its people.
Without this stamp of legality, the hands of the World Bank and the
IMF are tied, so now they are attempting to use emotional blackmail
on countries like Russia and France who thus far have refused to bend
to their will. Both Putin and Chirac have again threatened to use their
vetoes if any attempt to render this war respectable is pursued.
Lawyers all over the world are already planning how they can instigate
suits against the leaders of the US and Britain for war crimes. The
British and the Australians are extremely vulnerable since their countries
have both signed up to the International Court and this is part of the
reason that Blair is so against any use of cluster bombs or depleted
uranium during this conflict, which doesn’t sit well with the
Pentagon.
No doubt with the damacles sword of war crimes hanging over him, an
Australian pilot recently disobeyed his US commander and refused to
drop his deadly payload on a heavily populated civilian area.
The fresh faced teenage American and British troops in theatre have
been lied to as well. They were told ‘Enduring Freedom’
would be a walk in the park. They were told the Iraqi people would throw
flowers in front of their tanks and armored personnel carriers.
They expected garlands around their necks and trays of welcoming candies
from a people delighted to rid themselves of their leader. This has
not happened. Instead, they are fighting the dust and the heat, the
fear and the bullets and, worse, the cold hatred of those they believed
they were coming to save.
Sure, there have been a few orchestrated photo-ops, dutifully relayed
by embedded reporters, showing soldiers allowing smiling Iraqi children
in Umm Qasr to look through their binoculars. There have been a few
smiles of relief from some of the poorest and downtrodden civilians
who are glad just to be alive. But this is only the true picture for
the more naive among us.
Whatever one thinks of Saddam Hussein, we must surely admire the spirit
of the Iraqi people. In Baghdad, they are going about their business
as though their city was not being attacked with such ruthlessness,
night after night. They are proud of their country, one of the most
ancient in the world, and they are determined to protect their families.
The Iraqis are mostly Arabs. Those in the pro-war camp who expected
to find a cowed and cowardly people have been sorely mistaken. As Arabs
they will never accept an occupying force on their land. The Palestinians
haven’t and the Iraqis won’t either. As tribal people, their
honor and their dignity will always come first, well before all the
consumerist enticements their enemies display before them.
The Coalition of the Cowardly may win this campaign with its military
might but it will never win the war. The Iraqis will never forgive and
neither will the Arab world, which is just beginning to emerge from
its stupor to wonder ‘which of us will be next?’
The Bush administration says that it wants to win hearts and minds.
They haven’t a hope in hell. I will never forget the suffering
mirrored in the large dark eyes of that tiny child who is no longer
with us. Neither will the Iraqis.
Linda S Heard is a specialist writer on Mid-East affairs
and can be contacted at: questioningmedia@yahoo.co.uk
Today's Features
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gilad
Atzmon
Strategic Blunders by American Generals
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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