Mother Jones Daily
February 17, 2003
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The Numbers Game
The March That Was
Sometimes I think that the demonstration numbers game is ridiculous. The police or, more vaguely, the "authorities" wildly under-calculate (and most of the news sources accept their numbers); demonstration organizers, in the glow of the moment, tend to vastly inflate; and so you close your eyes and stick a finger somewhere in the middle -- and, in the end, of course, no one ever knows. But when numbers grow so staggeringly large, so visibly overwhelming, the game almost ceases to matter and the numbers themselves, whatever they may be, come into their own. Such was the case yesterday. You could definitely say that something almost approximating the world voted "no" to an Iraqi war, or as CBS correspondent Tom Fenton said of Europe, at the end of quite a fine (and rare) lead story on the U.S. demonstrations (150 cities lit up on a map) and the global ones last night, "This is an entire continent that apparently does not want to go to war."
So, if National Public Radio's reporter tells you that the police estimated two million Italians turned out in Rome yesterday, while the organizers insist three million were there, and the Associated Press reports "only" a million plus, does it matter? Even a million is a staggering figure after all. If the organizers of the London demonstration say two million, and the Guardian says one million and still counting, the point is the same, even if most American papers give the figure at 750,000.
Having marched in the court-banned New York march yesterday (see my description below), I can testify that it was an energizing event. You could even feel it in the first New York Times piece that came out last night -- on a day, by the way, in which the "paper of record" managed to lead its editorial page with a shameful editorial essentially endorsing the path to war which contained the unbelievable line, "The only way short of war to get Saddam Hussein to reverse course at this late hour is to make clear that the Security Council is united in its determination to disarm him and is now ready to call in the cavalry to get the job done." The cavalry? Well, I suppose it's useful to know that the Times editorial page thinks it's in the same classic Western that George W has no doubt he's a part of.
In the giddiness of the moment, Times Robert D. McFadden wrote:
"Crowd estimates are often little more than politically tinged guesses, and the police did not provide one. Organizers said that more than 400,000 people attended and, given the sea of faces extending for more than a mile up First Avenue and the ancillary crowds that were prevented from joining them, the claim did not appear to be wildly improbable."
An updated version of the Times piece ("From New York to Melbourne, Cries for Peace, Vast, Far-Flung Protest Against War on Iraq") appeared on the front page of the paper Sunday morning with an imposing collage of photos. For a paper which had, until now, managed to bury all war protests inside, this was in itself a near-act of giddiness (or the journalistic equivalent of a concession speech). But we can perhaps glimpse the sorts of pressures that American journalists experience in this morning's revised version of the paragraph quoted above -- after the police, overwhelmed by a demonstration of staggering size and energy, offered a low-ball estimate:
"Crowd estimates are often little more than politically tinged guesses. The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, put the crowd at about 100,000, while the organizers said 400,000 people attended. Given the sea of faces extending more than a mile up First Avenue and the ancillary crowds that were prevented from joining them, it seemed that something in between was probable."
The Times, like the Los Angeles Times, also offered low figures on the demonstrations in London, where they claimed 500,000 to 750,000 people rallied, even though British papers of every stripe reported one million or more. See, for instance, the Daily Telegram's headline, "Over a Million Take to the Streets", or the Sunday Observer's "One Million and Still They Came" with the following moving opening:
"'Are there any more coming, then?'There have been dafter questions, but not manyâ... Half a mile away, round the corner in Piccadilly, the ground shook. An ocean, a perfect storm of people. Banners, a cherry blossom of banners, covered every inch back to the Circus -- and for miles beyond, south to the river, north to Euston.
Ahead of the marchers lay one remaining silent half-mile. The unprecedented turnout had shocked the organisers, shocked the marchers. And there at the end before them, high on top of the Wellington Arch, the four obsidian stallions and their vicious conquering chariot, the very Spirit of War, were stilled, rearing back -- caught, and held, in the bare branches and bright chill of Piccadilly, London, on Saturday 15 February 2003.
Are there any more coming? Yes, Mike. Yes, I think there are some more coming."
In Australia, to leap the globe, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, "Organisers of a Sydney march today claimed at least 250,000 people had turned out to protest against US threats of military action in Iraq... Yesterday an estimated 150,000 people marched in Melbourne in protest against US threats to strike Iraq."
And similar reports flooded in from all over Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Only China, where demonstrations were evidently forbidden and the Middle East, where they were few and far between, would have been dark spots on the global demonstration map. In the United States, while the huge demos were to be in New York and, today, San Francisco, impressive smaller demonstrations took place almost literally everywhere from Bangor, Maine (several hundred) to the Los Angeles area, where an LA Times piece with low-ball figures on other demos countrywide reported (or under-reported): "In Southern California, about 30,000 people marched peacefully down Hollywood Boulevard to listen to actor Martin Sheen, while others staged a group meditation on the beach in Santa Monica and chanted peace slogans at smaller gatherings in Long Beach, Orange, Brea and Laguna Beach."
To take a look at the range of stories or figures yourself: you can check out the always useful antiwar.com, or Indymedia, both of which are updating reports worldwide.
But enough of that. Now, humor me, or rather my enthusiasm, for a while. Of the 150 demonstrations that CBS claimed took place yesterday from Minneapolis to New Orleans, San Diego to Philadelphia, I attended only one -- the march-that-was-not-to-be-a-march in New York, and I want to offer a report and some thoughts on the experience.
From the moment I looked across the aisle in the subway and saw the woman with the upside-down, hand-painted sign -- an anguished face, blood, and "no war" on it -- and she noted my sign, also resting against my knees but modestly turned away from view, and gave me the thumbs up sign, I knew things would be okay. As my wife, a friend, and I exited the subway at the 50th Street station on the west side of New York, I noted three college-age women bent over a subway bench magic-marking in messages on their blank sign boards, a signal that we were heading for some special do-it-yourself event.
We stopped to meet friends from Boston at the Donnell Library on 53rd just off Fifth Avenue and there again, people at the library's large, round tables were silently penning in signs. We left a little late from the library, the Boston train having been delayed. As we headed east for the court-sanctioned "stationary" rally a few blocks from the United Nations building and all the way across town, I must admit at first the human traffic seemed to be heading in the direction. I caught sight of people going about their normal (or touristic) lives, which left me with a twinge of worry, but by Park Avenue, we were building mass and two blocks later at Third, I tell you my heart leaped. There in the march-less city was a vast mass of people, signs, giant white doves, and Saddam-Bush heads, an enthusiastic, chanting, drumming, multi-everything flow of young and old heading like a tide up Third Avenue - in the wrong direction, no less - and I knew. Without further ado, not even caring where we were going, we let ourselves be swept into it in the bitter cold of a New York winter's day.
Admittedly, we were several blocks above and two avenues away from our destination and heading uptown and the masses of police (remarkably good-humored in our experience, but not everywhere evidently) had cordoned off the side streets leading toward First Avenue. They still had us more or less confined to the sidewalk and a bit of the street on one side of the avenue, and cars were still crawling by. But already demonstrators were moving the orange police cones quickly set up for this unexpected crowd on an unexpectedly occupied avenue ever farther out into the traffic. Soon, to relieve pressure, the police opened a side street and with a great cheer our section of the rolling non-march burst through up to Second where we found ourselves in an even greater mass of humanity, heading north on our own avenue without a single car, truck, or bus.
A few blocks ahead we gridlocked at a police blockade that we couldn't even see and, for an hour, as the crowd pressure built and crowd grew ever thicker, we went nowhere in remarkable good humor, chanting from time to time, "The streets are ours" and "Let us through" (along with the normal peace and antiwar chants), and catching bits of the rally, perhaps fifteen blocks away on radios. When our group grew claustrophobic, we slipped across the packed avenue, down a side street, back to Third Avenue and into what one demonstrator called the event's "official antiwar café" - a Starbucks packed to the ceiling. By then Third was also car-less.
Finally, more than two hours (one misto and a few bits of bagel) after we had begun, we found ourselves at 69th street, perhaps twenty blocks above the rally, setting foot on "liberated" First Avenue and creeping downtown under the white wings, in my case, of a giant puppet dove held aloft by three demonstrators. (When I thanked them for the shelter, one handler said, "But watch out for the droppings.") There on First Avenue where, the "pens" at least uptown had been dismantled by the police, you could see the endless stream of us, signage aloft, cheers literally rolling like thunder.
Here, then, was "the people" in its newest incarnation, whom both our city government and our national government considered a danger, whose numbers they tried to limit, whose legs they tried to still. And so the planned single march, which would have wended its way past the UN, across 42nd Street, and up to Central Park, banned by city and court (with Bush administration support), had become -- under the press of numbers, under the urgency of the moment, given the desire to stop a war that our President is dying to have, that the New York Times more or less endorsed that very day -- many marches, downtown, uptown, across town.
Here's just a little selection from a much larger list of "feeder marches" that came my way yesterday. I think it explains how the east side got emptied of traffic and what strange breadth of support exists even in the United States for an antiwar movement:
• NYC LABOR AGAINST THE WAR
• CONTINGENT INTERFAITH MINISTERS FOR PEACE
• TIBETANS AND SUPPORTERS AGAINST THE WAR
• NYC PEOPLE OF COLOR
• MASSACHUSETTS FEEDER MARCH
• BREAD & PUPPET FEEDER MARCH
• WBAI LISTENERS CONTINGENT
• IRISH AMERICAN CONTINGENT
• MILITANT MOTHERS BLOCK - M.A.M.A. SAYS NO TO WAR!!!
• KIDS AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS CONTINGENT
• UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS FOR PEACE
• FILIPINO AMERICAN CONTINGENT
• GLAMERICANS MARCH (my vote for most amusing sign - "foreplay not warplay")
• ANTI-CAPITALIST BLOC
• BRONX FEEDER MARCH
• JEWISH CONTINGENT
• CHICAGO HUMANIST FEEDER MARCH
... and so on and so forth. It was a remarkable demonstration of what can come into being when faced with a government as extreme as our present one.
At one point as we headed in the wrong direction, and the police clearly had no idea when, or where, or how we would ever reach First Avenue, someone asked, "But when are we going to get there?" The truth was we were "there." Yes, a rally was happening farther downtown, and on our radios we caught snippets of Desmond Tutu (shouting "Yes!" and "No!" to his various questions) and the always impressive Julian Bond, but in truth the only "there" throughout the east side of our city (as many motorists undoubtedly discovered to their dismay) was wherever we were and wherever we were going. Perhaps nothing says more about the moment, or its size and weight, than the fact that both my children were at the demonstration (my daughter in one of the "pens" on First Avenue, and my son marching with friends from farther downtown, and I never managed (despite cell phone conversations) to get within ten blocks of either of them.
Excuse my enthusiasm -- but it must have felt similarly in Rome, London, Sydney, Berlin, Madrid, and on and on. As with our crowd, the largest I've ever experienced and I was at two marches on the Pentagon in the 1960s, every reporter or commentator I've read has noted the unexpected range of people by age, race, occupation, and political conviction who turned out globally.
I'm not a total fool. I know -- as I've long been writing in these dispatches -- that this administration is hell-bent for a war. The build-up in the Gulf during these days of demonstrations has been unceasing. I still expect that war to come, and soon. Nonetheless, I find myself amazed by the variegated mass of humanity that turned out yesterday. It felt wonderful. A mass truly, but each part of it, each individually made sign and human gesture of it, spoke to its deeply spontaneous nature. That is the statement of the moment. The world has actually spoken and largely in words of its own. It has issued a warning to our leaders, which, given the history of "the people" and the countless demonstrations of the people's many (sometimes frightening) powers from 1776 on, is to be ignored at the administration's peril.
Believe me, whatever happens, this matters. Our rulers don't believe in the power of the people even in their own republican land and neither largely does our media. And yet, however emotional French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's recent speech at the UN may have been, only six weeks ago, Jacques Chirac was warning his military to prepare for war. The French people, to use our President's phrase, "stiffened his spine." Perhaps the English, ninety percent of whom now do not want a war not sanctioned by the UN, may sooner or later have an effect in England, on the Labor Party, if not Tony Blair.
And while we, in the heart of empire, in the heat of an imperial moment, not surprisingly remain a minority, we now know - we've told the world, and will again today in San Francisco -- that we are a minority to be reckoned with, that we can't be scared into silence, as in the 1950s, by governmental hysterias or new, draconian Patriot Acts. We may be a majority one day. And in the meantime, the weight of the people out there in the rest of the world, leaves this administration on the road to war in a more perilous situation than it's ever likely to admit - the loss of just one of those "willing" allies in the President's "coalition of the willing" - of Australia, or Turkey, or Spain, or Italy, or even Great Britain under the pressure of events and everything becomes harder here. This is what being on one small planet really means.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute. {publish-page-break}
The Disconnect
Hawkish History
Watered-Down Democracy
The weekend's antiwar demonstrations were unprecedented in both size and global reach. From Sydney to San Francisco, millions turned out to express their opposition to the Bush administration's war plans.
Was anybody in Washington listening?
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, appearing on a pair of Sunday morning talk shows, did her best to ignore the issue completely, The Washington Post reports.
"Asked repeatedly whether the administration was concerned about the millions of antiwar demonstrators in world capitals Saturday, Rice said that 'nothing could be further from the truth. People have the right to protest.'But she declined to address the issue of why so many oppose U.S. policy on Iraq, responding that people should be more concerned about the lack of freedom of expression in Baghdad, where the regime 'cuts people's tongues out if they say what they think.'"
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, at least, didn't try to duck the issue. Speaking at a Labour Party conference in Scotland, Blair openly dismissed the arguments made by the hundreds of thousands of Britons who marched to protest his government's support for Washington's policies. But, as The Independent reports, Blair's government was clearly "shaken" by the massive demonstrations in London and Glasgow. For the first time, the Independent reports, government insiders are admitting that the prime minister's political career "could be threatened by his hardline support for the build-up to war."
While the White House clearly wants to ignore the issue, Patrick Tyler of The New York Times suggests that the demonstrations were an undeniable indication that Bush, Blair and other hawks now face "a tenacious new adversary."
"The fresh outpouring of antiwar sentiment may not be enough to dissuade Mr. Bush or his advisers from their resolute preparations for war. But the sheer number of protesters offers a potent message that any rush to war may have political consequences for nations that support Mr. Bush's march into the Tigris and Euphrates valleys."
War party pundits, meanwhile, answered the outpouring of public dissent with a torrent of dismissive vitriol. Like most, David Horowitz brands that protesters as witless apologists for the Baghdad regime, while tarring the antiwar movement as an effort to "protect Saddam Hussein from an imminent American attempt to disarm and dethrone him." And, like so many other neoconservative scribblers, Horowitz implies that the peace protests are nothing more than a front for a host of vicious anti-American forces.
"All the marches were organized by supporters of Communist and other totalitarianisms, and by the fifth column agents of Islamo-fascism. All the demonstrations promoted Iraqi war propaganda -- myths about starving children and about alleged mercernary interests behind American policy; all of them had one purpose -- to disarm the American force already in the Middle East and allow Saddam to fight another day."
Jimmy Breslin, for one, isn't likely to buy Horowitz-style hysterics. Celebrating the crowd at Saturday's demonstration in New York as "summer people in winter clothes," Breslin elevates both the movement and the millions of individuals it represents.
"The crowd so frightening was made of people who mostly never had protested before, who were too young for the Vietnam protests and who cannot be classified under any of the old words, 'demonstrators' or 'anti-war,' because they are new and they are real.War may be a great favorite with a Texas Theocracy, with a president who speaks in the first person more than anybody we have had in decades -- "I'm sick and tired of waiting" -- and who calls on God to bless the country as if no other people made in the image and likeness of God are alive on earth.
...
On our streets of beauty yesterday, gladness was in the place of arrogance and meanness."
Conservative pundits have floated dozens of different arguments in their attempts to justify a war against Iraq. The war party's handful of lefties, by comparison, have played it simple. A war in Iraq is justified, they claim, because it will alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people.
Now, a growing number of right-wing hawks, unable to make a convincing case on their own, are adopting the liberals' 'humanitarian war' logic. But few conservatives are likely to embrace left-leaning hawk Peter Beinart's latest argument. Writing in The New Republic, Beinart suggests that Washington's sordid history of aiding and arming Saddam Hussein should actually spur the US to war.
"Only left-wingers discuss this history. And for them the lesson is obvious: The Bush administration's current outrage at Saddam's crimes is bogus. If people like Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Richard Armitage (all of whom held prominent government positions in the '80s) really cared about the Iraqi people, they wouldn't have helped Saddam brutalize them in the '80s. And, since the United States doesn't care about the Iraqi people, our real motivation for war must lay elsewhere -- either in a thirst for world domination, or oil, or both.I think the left has it wrong. First of all, France and the Soviet Union sold Saddam even more military equipment in the '80s than Washington did. So, if America's history of ignoring human rights in Iraq makes leftists cynical about our motives for war today, they should be just as cynical about France's and Russia's motives for opposing war (i.e., they'd be perfectly happy to go back to doing business with Saddam). Second, it is precisely because the United States abetted Saddam's repression in the '80s that we should atone for our sins and depose him today."
Beinart and other lefty hawks, like many of their conservative cohorts, happily assume that the 'liberation' of Iraq will free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutal regime.
But the Bush administration seems to have other plans.
Patrick Cockburn of The Independent, reporting from nothern Iraq, writes that Kurdish politicians are furious over Washington's framework for a post-Saddam government, claiming that the White House plans to keep Saddam's Baathist bureaucracy virtually intact.
"The only changes would be the replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US military officers. It undercuts the argument by George Bush and Tony Blair that war is justified by the evil nature of the regime in Baghdad.{publish-page-break}'Conquerors always call themselves liberators,' said Sami Abdul-Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdish administration, in a reference to Mr Bush's speech last week in which he said US troops were going to liberate Iraq."
Korea Going Critical
Where Were the Arabs?
Powell's Real Proof
The crisis on the Korean peninsula continues to be the Bush administration's least favorite foreign policy problem. Fixated on waging war in Iraq, the White House is working desperately to downplay the North Korean regime's increasingly antagonistic maneuvering. Clearly unwilling to divert attention and energy from the drive to war in Iraq, the White House has steadfastly refused to engage in negotiations with the Pyongyang government.
That tactic seemed doomed last month, when Pyongyang declared that it would restart its nuclear reactors and resume its bomb-building program. But the Bush administration insisted on again pushing Korea to the back burner, rebuffing official and unofficial requests for face-to-face talks. Now, North Korea's military has taken another high-risk step, threatening to abandon the 1953 armistice which ended the Korean War if the US moves to impose any sactions.
Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor reports that officials in Japan, South Korea and China are increasingly frustrated by Washington's distracted reluctance to tackle the matter and increasingly concerned that North Korea will misjudge the Bush administration's intentions. Pyongyang's unpredictability, combined with Washington's uncertain role, are giving rise to new fears, Marquand writes, "including loss of foreign investment, an arms race, and old regional rivalries."
Increasingly, officials in East Asia are suggesting that the spiraling crisis could drag South Korea and Japan into an arms race with North Korea, creating three new atomic powers and making the region a far more dangerous place. South Korea and Japan both have the capability to produce nuclear weapons in short order, Jonathan Watts of The Guardian reports. Moreover, the only missing ingredient -- political will -- is increasingly available.
"South Korea is not a nuclear power, though it was on the verge of building an atomic bomb in 1978 when Washington intervened....
In Japan, where memories of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still strong, the government has long been a strong advocate of nuclear non-proliferation.
But in recent years senior politicians have warned that this position is not written in stone. Last April Ichiro Ozawa, one of the most influential Japanese politicians of recent years, boasted that his country had the technology and the plutonium to build several thousand nuclear warheads."
Still, while North Korea's nuclear ambitions may present a threat to the entire region, Pyongyang's antagonistic gestures remain aimed solely at the US. In fact, Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times reports, North Korea has been doing all it can to appear more conciliatory towards its neighbor to the south.
"The sudden burst of enthusiasm from often balky North Korea gives rise to suspicions that the regime in the capital, Pyongyang, is hoping to boost relations with South Korea as a counterweight to a rapidly unraveling relationship with the United States.'They want to give the impression that if it were not for George W. Bush, Condi Rice and Dick Cheney, things would be really rosy on the Korean peninsula, and so they are making it look as rosy as possible,' said Lee Chung Min, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul."
Donald C. Hellmann, writing in The Seattle Times, suggests that impression may not be totally unreasonable. While noting that Pyongyang certainly bears responsibility for its belligerent and risky actions, Hellman argues that the Bush administration has repeatedly bungled the situation, allowing a disagreement to become a full-fledged crisis.
"The only way that the Korean situation can be resolved other than by military action -- an unthinkable option because of the likely loss of millions of lives -- is by negotiating with North Korea in a multilateral regional context. By refusing to do so the United States has empowered a failed pariah state to shape the American diplomatic agenda at a critical moment in our diplomatic history. It has made resolution of the Korean situation as much contingent on what happens in the Middle East as in Korea. It has needlessly put at risk not only our leadership in Northeast Asia, but also the remarkable military/political/economic achievements of the United States in Korea over the last half century."
This past weekend's antiwar demonstrations were truly global in nature. From Europe to South America, from the US to Asia and Australia, opponents of war poured into the streets in scores of cities in dozens of countries.
In fact, the only part of the world largely untouched by the worldwide protest was the very region where the war in question will take place. While there were large, government-organized protests in Iraq and Syria, most of the Arab world tave the day of demonstrations a pass. Which has Robert Fisk frothing with bewildered annoyance.
"What on earth is it with the Arabs? Of all people, they Ð and they alone Ð are likely to suffer in this American invasion of their homeland. They Ð and they alone Ð have the will and the ability to understand that this US military adventure is intended -- as Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, frankly declared last week --to change the map of the Middle East.Yet, faced with catastrophe, the Arabs are like mice. Their leaders may agree with their people -- but they will not let their people say so."
The Daily Star of Beirut angrily dismisses the few protests in the Arab world as "meaningless." And, like Fisk, the paper's editors argue that the Arab silence was less a measure of public sentiment than a reflection of Arab leaders' rigid desires to control their subjects.
"The most devastating indictment of weak Arab participation was that while even Tel Aviv saw 2,000 protesters, Cairo had just 600 -- surrounded by 3,000 police officers....
The point is that Saturday should have been a bigger day in the Arab world than anywhere else. Instead, the people with the most to lose from an outbreak of hostilities managed only a pale shadow of what was achieved abroad. Obviously this poor performance is not due to any lack of feeling: The grand majority of Arabs are steadfastly against another assault on Iraq and all the repercussions it would have for the Iraqi people. It is also not because Arabs are so rich and happy that the instinct to complain has been dulled by complacency: Nothing could be further from the truth.
The problem is that Arab governments are so backward that they prefer not to see mass demonstrations of popular sentiment -- even when that sentiment is aligned with their own public positions. It is a classic case of tyranny imagining that by preventing the expression of the peopleÕs will it can prevent that will from existing. Contrary to the myth, ostriches do not stick their heads in the sand at any sign of danger -- but Arab rulers do."
Pepe Escobar of Asia Times echoes those sentiments, writing that while Arabs "can scream in private... they cannot shout in public."
"In Cairo, for example, they were afraid, very much afraid, like the concierge of a five-star hotel surreptitiously mimicking the gesture of a man handcuffed. On Saturday morning, government officials 'had no idea' where the protest would take place. Less than 600 people eventually showed up, surrounded by no less than 3,000 security police. Even in Tel Aviv, 2,000 people protested against the war.Mubarak, the Saud family, King Abdullah in Jordan, they may all agree with the anger and the fatalistic feeling of impotence of their own populations, but still they don't allow people to express it. Tyrannies anywhere assume that to prevent the expression of popular will is to prevent the will from existing."
Amid the anger, frustration and arrogance dominating the punditsphere these days, a few liberal wags continue to turn out nuggets of pointed satire. Now, Armando Iannucci, regularly a columnist for England's Daily Telegraph, has joined that happy band. In a bitingly funny piece for the Melbourne Age, Iannucci lays out some intriguing evidence of Iraq's terrorist ties which Secretary of State Colin Powell strangely failed to include in his Security Council brief.
1. On an audiotape, Osama bin Laden calls Iraq a "stinking cesspit of socialist debauchery". This criticism is much less hostile than the sort of thing he says about America, thus proving al-Qaeda has warm feelings towards Saddam Hussein.{publish-page-break}2. Our surveillance has picked up chatter from al-Qaeda operatives talking about organising a "rendezvous". "Rendezvous" is a French word, and France has constantly obstructed American attempts to impose regime change in Iraq. So again, we see a clear connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
3. Our spy planes have photographed Saddam's deputy prime minister being driven in a motorcade of Mercedes cars. Mercedes is a German car, and Germany is in league with France to destroy America, like al-Qaeda. Therefore, etc.
Bush's Nuclear Dreams
The European Dis-Union
The Cost of Following Bush
Warring Missions in Kabul
For a half century, nuclear bombs have remained nightmare weapons -- doomsday arms designed to back up Cold War deterrence. For the past two years, however, the Bush administration has been working steadily to ease the atomic bomb out of its Cold War closet. And, with the White House pushing the world toward a war in Iraq, neoconservative hawks are picking up the pace.
The Los Alamos Study Group, an anti-proliferation watchdog group based in New Mexico, has published a classified administration memo which reveals that the White House has scheduled a meeting of Pentagon officials and nuclear scientists in August to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons. As Julian Borger of The Guardian reports, the planned meetings is the clearest indication yet that the Bush administration plans to overhaul the nation's nuclear strategy to better fit its doctrine of preemptive warfare.
"[N]on-proliferation groups say the Omaha meeting will bring a new US nuclear arsenal out of the realm of the theoretical and far closer to reality, in the shape of new bombs and a new readiness to use them.'To me it indicates there are plans proceeding and well under way ... to resume the development, testing and production of new nuclear weapons. It's very serious,' said Stephen Schwartz, the publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who added that it opened the US to charges of hypocrisy when it is demanding the disarmament of Iraq and North Korea.
'How can we possibly go to the international community or to these countries and say 'How dare you develop these weapons', when it's exactly what we're doing?' Mr Schwartz said."
James Sterngold of the San Francisco Chronicle notes that the ideas entertained in the memo -- plans for small nuclear weapons designed to destroy underground bunkers and stores of chemical and biological weapons -- are not new. But the fact that Pentagon and administration officials are actively discussing a program to build such weapons, Sterngold reports, suggests "a quickening pace toward what could be a fundamental change in the country's post-Cold War nuclear doctrine." And the White House isn't alone in looking to hurry the matter along, Sterngold writes.
"House Republicans issued a policy paper on Thursday which calls for some of the changes discussed in the Pentagon memo. These include the repeal of a decade-old law that prohibits the development of small, low-yield nuclear weapons, and steps that would make it easier to resume nuclear testing, which was halted ten years ago.The GOP paper also proposed a new doctrine under which the country would be able to launch nuclear attacks not just in response to a nuclear attack, or the threat of one, but to pre-emptively destroy stockpiles of other weapons, such as chemical or biological weapons, in the hands of hostile countries."
Iraq is, of course, not mentioned by name in the GOP paper. But earlier this month, Britain's Minister of Defense, Geoff Hoon, told the BBC that London would be prepared to use nuclear weapons in Iraq "in conditions of extreme self-defense." Taken together, Hoon's statement and the administration's memo suggest that both London and Washington believe "that the use of nuclear weapons may be appropriate in the coming war with Iraq," Paul Rogers asserts in Foreign Policy in Focus.
"If the weapons are used, then the nuclear threshold that has held since 1945 will disappear and we will move into an even more dangerous world--as other states scramble to develop their own deterrents in the form of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons."
They were all bristling in Brussles this week. First, French President Jacques Chirac snubbed 13 Eastern European candidates for the European Union, labeling the countries' support for Washington war planning "infantile" and "reckless." Then diplomats from several of those countries, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, fired back, accusing Paris and Berlin of bully tactics in the debate over Iraq.
All of which has provided US right-wingers with another opportunity to jump on the bash France bandwagon. Hating Chirac has become a second calling for many war party pundits, and the French leader's hauter is proving irresistable. The editorial writers at the Daily News certainly didn't pass up a chance to throw a rhetorical sucker punch or two, declaring that Chirac's anger "is evidence of the French inferiority complex, which started festering round about the time of Waterloo and grew only worse thanks to France's less-than-glorious military performance in the last century." Tony Blankley, writing in The Washington Times, wonders that Chirac could take such a high-handed approach at the EU when France continues in its efforts to slow Washington rush to war in Iraq -- efforts Blankley reasons make France unfit to keep company with the US.
"This from a country that perversely measures her own glory by her capacity to betray a friend and ally....
If and when the French people throw out their current government and elect one which respects its neighbors and friends, we should certainly attempt to have useful and cordial relations with that government. Until then, we should not only not seek their support on Iraq. We should deny them the honor of joining in our cause. No blackmailers should rally under freedom's banner."
Of course, the view from Europe is rather different. Columnists on the continent who have the temerity to suggest that "friend and ally" are not synonymous with "follower and supplicant," see the bust-up in Brussles as a purely European affair. Chirac's strong-arm rhetoric, John Vinocur of The International Herald Tribune argues, is an indication of a looming fight over Europe's future - and a sign of a "long-term contradiction that could tear the EU apart from within."
"At its most destructive, the outburst could well be the step too far that fractures Europe's confidence in its capacity to manage its vast expansion and re-organize its institutions, while creating a sense of unity and democracy that could be shared by all its peoples....
If it is only venting frustration at the cold prospect of France's diminished influence in Europe, a step not incompatible with the French president's personality, it is all the same a gesture that has brought Europe's future serious new pain and uncertainty."
Jan Repa of the BBC writes that Chirac "laid France's cards on the table" when he lashed out at the candidate countries. And he argues that the nature of Chirac's remarks -- and of the reactions they provoked -- raise serious questions about the future of the EU.
"People in Central and Eastern Europe do not trust West Europeans -- the French in particular -- to protect their interests. A Czech minister this week declared, 'After the experience of the 1930s, don't talk to us about French guarantees.'Central European officials have taken to talking about 'appeasement' -- the policy of accommodating Nazi Germany pursued by France and Britain in the run-up to World War II -- usually at the expense of Germany's immediate eastern neighbours."
Still, those Eastern European countries are not in the EU yet. And Timothy Garton Ash of The Guardian suggests that the ugly row in Brussles only came to pass because those countries in the union have failed to find common ground on the issue of Iraq. And for that, he writes, the blame must be shared evenly by France, Germany and Great Britain.
"As soon as the Bush administration put Iraq at the top of its foreign policy list last autumn, for its own very mixed reasons, the phone lines between Paris, Berlin and London should have started to hum. Knowing this was a test as much for Europe as it was for the west, the three team managers of Europe's premier league should have responded to Bush thus: 'Yes, we agree that international terrorism and dictators with weapons of mass destruction are a grave threat to us all. If we want peace we must prepare for war. We are with you on that, shoulder-to-shoulder. And, yes, Saddam cannot be allowed to go on violating UN resolutions. But nor can Israel. Let us work together to disarm Saddam, but also for democratic reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and for a new settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. We in Europe have an even more direct interest in pacifying and democratising the Middle East than you do: we're right next door. So let's make this the next big transatlantic project.'...
Instead, our three cavaliers galloped off in different directions. They were driven by deeply held views of the world and their own nation's place in it; by domestic politics; and by a lack of instinctive solidarity with each other."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, of course, has "galloped" at Bush's side from the outset. But it seems that Blair may be paying a domestic price for his choice. According to a new poll, Blair "has sustained significant political damage" as a result of the Iraq debate, The Guardian reports. Blair's personal approval rating has "dropped through the floor," and support for his government's war stance continues to plummet, the poll shows.
Of course, that fact should have been evident to Blair and his ministers last weekend, when more than a million Britons marched in opposition to the war. Those demonstrations appear to have shaken even some membrs of Blair's inner circle, including Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who told The Guardian:
"I don't think all the people on that demonstration -- unquestionably the largest we've seen in my lifetime in the UK -- would say that they represented alone British public opinion, but they certainly represented a very important element of it."
In his State of the Union address, President Bush hailed the US-led effort to topple the Taliban regime, and vowed that Washington would throw its weight behind efforts to secure Afghanistan's future.
But it appears that the two western mandates -- pursuing the final destruction of the Taliban and helping to secure Afghanistan's future peace -- are coming into conflict. As Scott Baldauf of The Christian Science Monitor reports, European Peacekeepers in Kabul find they have a new armed element to deal with: American soldiers.
Baldauf describes one recent run-in between Dutch peacekeepers and a truck of "heavily armed men, wearing civilian clothes and bushy beards."
"As it turned out, the occupants were American soldiers, who said that they had lost their place on the map and then hastily withdrew. The Dutch lowered their weapons -- but their irritation remains."
Not only are the two forces following very different mandates, they operate with virtually no coordination, Baldauf reports. And while American soldiers are specifically forbidden from running military operations within Kabul, the possibility of a shoot-out between American forces and peacekeepers is disturbingly high, given the lack of communication and the tendency for US forces to ignore the Kabul green line.
"A peacekeeper, also speaking on condition of anonymity, agrees. 'In the worst case scenario, you could have blue-on-blue fighting,' he says, using military jargon to indicate fighting between two friendly forces. 'The Americans never call us to let us know when they are coming to town for an operation,' the peacekeeper says, adding, 'Our mandates are very different. We are here to maintain security in Kabul. Their mandate is to kill or capture Al Qaeda. These don't always work well together.'"{publish-page-break}
War Plans on Pause
Eager for the Next Fight
Muzzled in Manhattan
The Bush administration's timetable for war has been re-set. And while officials in Washington insist they will iron out the "diplomatic snags" shortly, the administration's "coalition of the willing" is showing clear signs of stress.
The White House maintains that the US and Britain will present a new resolution authorizing the use of military force to disarm Iraq to the UN Security Council in a matter of days. But The Independent reports that officials in Washington and London are having difficulty agreeing on an approach. And even when they do present the plan, there is no reason to believe it will be adopted. Three of the Security Council's permanent members -- France, Russia, and China -- have suggested that they may veto any measure they believe goes too far.
That possibility has only deepened the divide between the US and France and Germany, with Secretary of State Colin Powell accusing the two NATO allies of being "afraid of upholding their responsibility to impose the will of the international community." Still, the impending fight at the UN is only one of Washington's problems. And it isn't even the biggest. As The Guardian reports, the most pressing concern for hawks in the White House and Pentagon is another NATO ally -- Turkey.
Washington has been lobbying Ankara for months to secure access to military bases along Iraq's northern border. But Turkish officials, no doubt considering the overwhelming popular opposition to war in their country, continue to balk at the demand.
Administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are doing their best to paper over the dispute, insisting that the US and Turkey will reach an agreement shortly. But, as The New York Times reports, the public reassurances aren't exactly convincing.
"In private ... administration officials were fuming, with one senior official calling the Turkish efforts to hold out for more aid -- and perhaps access to oil from the Kirkuk region of Iraq -- 'extortion in the name of alliance.' Another said that despite a stream of aid from the United States, 'the Turks seem to think that we'll keep the bazaar open all night.'"
The Turkish reluctance is hardly surprising. More than 90 percent of Turkey's citizens strongly oppose any war against Iraq without solid UN support, and the Gulf War was an economic disaster for the nation. Still, as The Economist reports, Turkey may eventually bow to Washington's economic and diplomatic pressure.
"Besides the promise of cash and loan guarantees, America has other, more indirect means of persuasion. Turkey depends heavily on American support in its difficult negotiations with the International Monetary Fund over a stalled $16 billion loan package, without which it may well go bankrupt. The Fund is pressing Turkey to cut spending and raise taxes to try to balance its books but the government which swept to power in November making expensive promises to public servants, pensioners and the unemployed while also pledging to cut taxes wants the Fund to soften its demands....
Supporting America would also entitle Turkey to more of a say in the remaking of an American-occupied postwar Iraq. Turkey fears that Iraqi Kurds, who set up an autonomous administration in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war, might use the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime as a pretext for setting up a Kurdish state, thereby encouraging similar sentiments among Turkey's extensive Kurdish population."
The diplomatic and economic concerns will no doubt be the deciding factors in Turkey's decision. But they will not be the only considerations. Turkey's military, long the country's most powerful political force, has been growing indignant, Robert Cutler writes in Asia Times, over Washington's assumptions about how the war in northern Iraq would be run.
"Perhaps in response to this, hints were made as recently as Tuesday in Ankara that Turkish troops could enter northern Iraq with their own battle plan and their own military objectives. Part of this misunderstanding between the two sides may have been an initial American assumption that the US-Turkish campaign in northern Iraq would have a NATO aegis, creating the possibility for American command leadership of Turkish troops. But the Turks were not pleased by this assumption, which outlived NATO unity over military assistance to Turkey."
Even if some sort of agreement can be worked out, Cutler writes, "nothing prevents the Turkish military from pursuing its own objectives in northern Iraq."
A handful of war party pundits and neoconservative think-tankers have long suggested that a war in Iraq should only be the first step in a larger mission to remake the Middle East. But now a Bush administration official has suggested that Washington intends to do exactly that -- for starters.
John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, reportedly told several Israeli officials that "he had no doubt America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea," Ha'aretz reports.
"Bolton said Syria would get a chance to prove it was behaving in a way worthy of the international community and that dealing with North Korea had not been pushed aside, but postponed."
Bolton's assertions were undoubtedly music to the ears of the Israeli politicians he met -- particularly Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Housing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky. And Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon quickly echoed Bolton's assessment, declaring that Iran, Libya and Syria are "irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction."
True, Bolton made the comments in private talks, and there is no way to know whether the undersecretary's assertions reflect official Bush administration policy. But the report has already "unsettled officials in Damascus, Tehran and Pyongyang," Susan Taylor Martin writes in the St. Petersburg Times. It should unsettle some people in Colin Powell's State Department, Martin observes, where Bolton landed after serving with Bush's legal team during the 2000 Florida recount fight.
"Bolton's nomination for the arms control job was widely seen as a reward for his help in Florida. 'I do not believe Mr. Bolton has the vision or the experience necessary for this position,' Sen. Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at a confirmation hearing.Dubbed the administration's 'hatchet man' at the State Department, Bolton withdrew U.S. support for an International Criminal Court and announced that America is prepared to use nuclear force even against aggressors who do not pose a nuclear threat.
He also surprised everyone, including his boss, Colin Powell, when he claimed, with no evidence, that Cuba was developing biological weapons."
New York City is still digging out from the blizzard which blanketed the city with snow earlier this week. Which might be a pleasant diversion for Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose reputation as an open politician took a world-class hit following his administration's attempts to stifle last weekend's massive antiwar demonstration.
Lorraine Kreahling was at the demonstration, and she lambastes the city's all-out efforts to leash the hundreds of thousands that turned out -- efforts that included confinding demonstrators to fenced-in pens and barring many late-arrivers from even reaching the demonstration area.
"The orders for crowd control handed down to the police meant hundreds of thousands of demonstrators -- many of whom had traveled hundreds of miles -- were prevented from attending the rally. The threat of 'terrorism' was being used to treat peace advocates as dangerous types.You had to be there to know how laughable this was.
The crowd was made up of the people from your supermarket. People who wrote literate, clever signs like, 'Wise men don't start wars they stop them.' People with baby carriages, and grandparents in scarves that probably had been knitted by a relative.
Seeing this mild-mannered group, who apologized to one another when they stepped on toes, faced by a wall of police in hard hats and plexiglass face protectors, carrying wooden riot clubs, suggested something was seriously out of whack."
What is out of whack, Bruce Ackerman argues in Newsday, is the federal judiciary, which may have set a chilling precedent by allowing New York to justify limiting Constitutional rights by citing vague and unverifiable 'homeland security' concerns.
"During the 1960s, federal judges were tireless in striking down the countless pretexts used by Southern cities to suppress civil rights marches against segregation.But the federal courts failed to rise to the occasion this time around. When the march organizers went to court, federal judges rubber-stamped the pretexts advanced by the Bloomberg administration.
...
The city offered no evidence of any clear and present danger to public safety, and the Saturday demonstration occurred without significant incident. If the bare risk of disorder suffices for suppression, we have come to the end of the road.
Hoping to narrow the sweeping force of her opinion last week, U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Jones pointed to the fact that 'the nation and the city are currently at the second highest security alert.' This makes the decision worse, not better. We are only at the beginning of an endless war against terrorism. Are fundamental political rights to be contingent on FBI decisions to change the alert from yellow to orange? Such a power can be blatantly abused for partisan ends."
So how has Bloomberg justified his city's decision? He essentially hasn't, Wayne Barrett writes in The Village Voice. In an interview before the demonstration, Bloomberg essentially passed the buck.
"He didn't seem to know what the Voice was talking about when asked why his police department was continuing the Giuliani-invented practice of herding demonstrators into penned-off areas, corralling them in small groups behind metal barricades about 12 feet long and four feet high. Pressed about why these pens replaced the familiar wooden sawhorses long used by the NYPD to merely establish a broad police line, Bloomberg said he had to leave tactics to the professionals.But if those who see this war as a life-or-death matter can't march against it, splitting them into hundreds of stand-still holding cells is just one more way of demoralizing protest. A mayor who has done so much in a single year to let his city breathe again, ending the era of government by unexplained edict, should see the significance of these no-march and pen-'em-up policies."
