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Recent
Stories
April
1, 2003
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
Power": an Interview with Jeff Halper
Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
Ann Harrison
The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
Berserk Cops
Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
War Profiteer
Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
is Safe
Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
Shelter
David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
Continues
John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
Law
Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
Tom
Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
and Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
Onward
Embedded Soldiers: the Press and the War
Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
Genocide in East Timor
Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
Out of Billions
Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
March 26,
2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch
Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning
Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets
of Blood
Patrick
Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs,
Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert
Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A
Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria
Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The
Smell of Death Surrounds Me
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
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
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
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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April 2,
2003
Lies and Double
Standards
I'm Ashamed to be British
By JEMIMA KHAN
As a dual national of Pakistan and Britain, it
is the loss of British credibility I find hardest to stomach.
Even the moderates here in Pakistan are
outraged. Across the board, young and old, poor and rich, fundamentalist
and secularist are united in their hatred of the US and their
contempt for Britain. Such unprecedented unanimity in a country
renowned for its ethnic and sectarian divides is a huge achievement.
Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the leader of the combined religious party
Majlis Muttahida Amal (MMA), announced triumphantly: "The
pro-West liberals have lost conviction. Islamic movements have
come alive."
This new-found unity, which includes
for the first time the pro-West élites, the liberal middle
classes and the mullahs, has been boosted by a fear that Pakistan
may be on the US target list. We may not be seeing burning effigies
of Bush and Blair daily (although there has been some of that),
but many of those with Western connections are considering severing
those links. Angry and fearful, expatriate Pakistanis are returning
home, and property prices are soaring despite recession. The
boycott against British and US goods is growing.
The same is happening throughout the
Muslim world. A previously fractured ummah is finally uniting
against a perceived common foe, leaving the fundamentalists jubilant
and their pro-West leaders, despite their dependence on the US,
with no choice but to join the anti-war chorus.
Bush and Blair have already shown that
they care little about world opinion, but what about when those
feelings of resentment towards the US and Britain in Muslim countries
translate into votes for virulently anti-Western fundamentalist
parties? Despite their disingenuous talk of freedom and democracy,
Bush and Blair must know that bringing true democracies to the
Middle East, and the Muslim world in general, will have the opposite
effect to the one they hope for and will go against their own
interests. It is unlikely that any democratic Muslim country
today will ever elect a pro-Western government.
Pakistan is a good example. Popular anger
at the government's co-operation with America's bombing of Afghanistan
(its provision of bases and intelligence) led to an unprecedented
victory of the religious parties in the October 2002 election.
Having never won more than 10 seats in the past 30 years, the
alliance of Islamic parties is now the second biggest party in
Parliament with 70 seats, and forms two out of the four provincial
governments. And with each bomb dropped on Baghdad, they are
growing in popularity and strength.
America can continue to count on support
from the unelected puppet governments of oil-rich countries,
such as the Middle Eastern monarchies. The darlings of Western
oil companies, they depend on the US to stay in power. Such is
the popular outrage, however, that those leaders are looking
increasingly vulnerable.
As a dual national of Pakistan and Britain,
it is the loss of British credibility in the eyes of the world
that I find hardest to stomach. Why has Blair chosen to overlook,
and in some cases propagate, the lies, misinformation and discredited
evidence used by the US to justify this indefensible war? Why
does Blair perpetuate Bush's mendacious claim that Iraq "has
aided, trained and harboured terrorists, including operatives
of al-Qai'da", when no evidence has ever surfaced of a link,
nor has any Iraqi been implicated in terrorist acts against the
US?
Why the pretence of "making the
world a safer place" when we all know an unjust war will
incite such hatred that new recruits will be queuing up to join
al-Qa'ida? Why the persistence in the lie that Saddam represents
a military threat? Why no contrition over the exposure of flawed
or faked evidence? Why the lectures on Saddam's violation of
17 UN resolutions, when Bush gives military and economic aid
to Israel, which has regularly flouted at least 64 of them?
Why the sudden concern for the Iraqi
people, when there have been years of protest against sanctions
responsible for hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi deaths?
Why the lack of concern for Iraqi children dying of hitherto-unseen
cancers linked to the use of uranium-tipped shells by the British
and Americans? Why the convenient amnesia over the fact that
the weapons of mass destruction Iraq does possess were supplied
by the US and Britain, along with France, in the first place?
Is the condemnation for dictatorships
with human rights records every bit as bad as Iraq's and no democracies
to speak of, restricted to those that are not West- friendly
or controllable?
In short, why the double standards, moral
hypocrisy and political expediency? Do they think it goes unnoticed,
or do they just not care?
It is little wonder that Muslims around
the world, pondering these questions while watching images of
maimed Iraqi women and children as lucrative reconstruction contracts
are doled out to US companies, are reacting with increasing incredulity,
anger and trepidation.
The only thing that tempers my own rage
and shame is the knowledge that there are millions like me who
oppose war in Iraq not because they are Muslims or pacifists
or appeasers or anti-West or anti-American or left wing, but
simply because they remain utterly unconvinced by the arguments
put forward for war. With British and US credibility in tatters,
no one in the Muslim world now believes that this is really all
about "making the world a safer place", about al-Qa'ida
and the War on Terror, about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction,
about the imminent threat to the "civilised world",
or the violation of UN resolutions; far less about the emancipation
of the Iraqi people. Instead, many are asking the question: Which
country is really in need of regime change and, in the words
of the great statesman Nelson Mandela, is "the greatest
threat to world peace"?
Jemima Khan
is a human rights activists and the daughter of Sir James Goldsmith.
Today's
Features
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
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