I wouldn't have thought the piece I would post o­n this infamous day, would be from Arab News but this moves me deeply. It's a resonance with my Arab brothers and sisters — I could have written it. This is the voice of a people, and it can be sounded by any of them for all the rest. Be sure you get to the astonishing ending.

I would add a few thoughts. I cannot shake the picture of it being some mix-up here, where we lost a distinction between games and for real. How can we be playing war games with weapons that actually kill? This morning, o­n the Today Show, they were talking about tanks having a hard time in cities — they were built for the battlefield. Part of the story involved video simulations that the tank occupants practice o­n. What in true hell is this that we would play this game for real?

As I grasp for the world adding up, I keep thinking the powers that be must know something I don't know. Otherwise, how could you add up the certain horrors of war, plus its possible horrors, and have that come out to be less awful than Hussein staying in power? How can we provoke the use of weapons of mass destruction and have that not be as bad as o­ne vicious head of state, among others — o­ne who is feared by his people rather than supported by them and who has minimal military might — staying in power?

 On TV, they talk of rebuilding Iraq. After we destroy it. Great. Our schools are for shit, people don't have medical coverage, and our money will go to rebuild Iraq.

As Brian Swimme, my big-picture person, talks about, there are threshold moments in evolution where things could have gone o­ne way or the other — sometimes they have gone to doom and extinction rather than to flowering in more abundance. This is the threshold we are o­n. This war is like taunting the devil. Who in their right mind would put us here? It is not, however, a simplistic argument between war and peace, which peaceful people have a tendency to get somewhat lost in. “No war” has to go along with a complex alternative. But that is indeed what sane people need to be dealing with.

I would like someone who really knows that war is best to make more sense of this than that Hussein is a monster who kills his own people and invades his neighbors (we helped with both, to make matters more absurd). So what? How does that translate to an immediate threat to an unstable world that's vulnerable to attack by an aggressor that already got us? An army against terrorists was bizarre enough — now an army against a sleeping giant is beyond belief.

Thanks to David Langer for sending this…

An Illegal and Immoral War Arab News Editorial, 3/18/03

When American Secretary of State Colin Powell stated yesterday that the Security Council had failed to pass a test set by the United States, a new Gulf War became inevitable.

It was, of course, a test the Security Council never stood a chance of passing.

The Security Council had been given two false choices: Either meekly to submit to the will of the United States or, by rejecting a US-led proposal, reveal itself as powerless to stop the war.

Powell has gone o­n record as saying that the goal of this war is not o­nly to remove Saddam, but to redraw the regional map as a whole.

That he has the nerve, again and again, to talk in such language betrays an extraordinary arrogance, bolstered by a conviction that his government holds all the trump cards.

This war — which is illegal according to international law and immoral by any standards — is about oil and America’s strategic dominance of the Middle East — no more, no less. There was never any real debate. The war has been years in the planning, initially drawn up by neo-conservative zealots in Washington, D.C. who now dominate US defense policy.

The strategy had been finalized long before US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had assumed their respective offices.

These zealots must now surely be laughing in the knowledge that a small group of men and women has been able to harness the full military might of the world’s o­nly superpower to the promotion of their private agenda in the face of almost total worldwide opposition.

If the US, with British and Spanish backing, goes to war in the next few hours, this day will be remembered as o­ne which marked the beginning of a new era in the Middle East and international relations.

Is history repeating itself?

It is as though the Middle East has not moved o­n since the end of World War I, when Western powers carved up what is now the Middle East to suit their own ends.

Then, as now, Iraq was a morsel for the biggest power to dispose of at its pleasure.

The last-minute summits organized by the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference proved o­nly that the Arabs are divided. An Arab world speaking with a strong, united voice was the o­nly force capable of stopping this war.

They did indeed fail an important test, and now they will have to live with the consequences.

Now the US will go it alone, without the UN, without legitimacy -— and in the full knowledge that none of Iraq’s neighbors has the power or the will to do anything but either sit by and watch or join in.

So now another war is upon us, decent people the world over pray for o­ne thing: A short war, with an absolute minimum of civilian casualties.

To say that is not to dignify a victory in Iraq as anything other than a victory for imperialist aggression.

But the alternative — a long, drawn-out and bloody conflict -— would be even more catastrophic for that country, this region and the rest of the world.

From: Josh Reynolds [josh@cogcare.com]

Very appropriate, sobering & disgusting.

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