Alignment in an Unexpected Place

March 19, 2003 admin 56 Comments

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.

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World Press

Chinks in the War Armor

March 17, 2003 admin 46 Comments

On this darkening day, I got some relief from the sense that we are in an asylum for the criminally insane from this Howard Fineman Newsweek piece, that I picked up in Wade Frazier's Linksletter #4 . (If you want a fast pass through EVERYTHING being said on the progressive front, Wade's Linksletters, that we are linking to from our homepage, are astonishing.) Wade says, “Waiting for War—In White House: Blame Game to Start Soon is from one of Bush's greatest apologists. His faith is waning.” Here's how this informative Fineman piece, reprinted in Truthout, begins.

Editor's Note: It is odd indeed to find Howard Fineman in the pages of Truthout. Mr. Fineman has been, for some time, a Bush apologist of the first rank. Perhaps, however, his faith has begun to slip. Read the essay below with care, and understand from whom it has come.

I’m waiting for war to break out—not in Iraq, but in the Bush administration. I’m wondering what’s going through Colin Powell’s mind. The secretary of State is looking pretty grim these days, like a man going through the motions. Might he bail out after a not-too-distant decent interval? Friends say no, he’s a team player. “But he’s not a happy camper,” one admits.

In the meantime, who’s going to be blamed for the Turkey screw-up, or the U.N. screwups? Who’s going to leak the authoritative—and explosive—estimates of the true cost of maintaining 100,000 troops in Iraq for the indefinite future? (One general already has been whacked for piping up, but there will be others.) Who’s going to take the fall for the fact that we’ve lost the international moral high ground? The world is blaming the president, of course, but that’s not the way things work here. Someone else goes down. Who? The “neocons”? Donald Rumsfeld? The State Department? Dick Cheney? Condi Rice?

Maybe everything will go so swimmingly in Iraq that it’ll be one big happy family here at home. Maybe the war will last only a few days and Iraqis will be in the streets, joyfully greeting GIs as liberators. Maybe a world that now sees us as an imperial pariah will suddenly acknowledge the wisdom of our ways. But never has so much blood, treasure and destiny been gambled on the hope that folks will smile at us. It’s the War of the Happy Iraqis.

And here's Fineman's glimmer-of-hope ending:

The key now is Powell. He could unhinge the Bush administration in a New York minute. He’s never been fully trusted by the Bush innermost circle. He wasn’t among the group of advisers who briefed Bush in Austin as he prepared for a presidential campaign in 1999. More important, Powell has too much of an independent political (and media) base to suit the president. Bush values loyalty above all, and he likes to dominate the room. He doesn’t like knowing that one critical word from Powell could cause chaos in Washington.

Is there one, and will we hear it?

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Crop Circles

Robert Muller ON PEACE AND WAR AND THE UN

March 17, 2003 admin

I visited Robert Muller at his UN office — he was very visible at the time, and was a hero of mine whom I'd been championing in the ways I do. We made a great connection. He's not been in the public eye lately, but he was early in beautifully sounding the tone of oneness, and his doing it from a position high up at the UN (I think he was the number two person — the Under Secretary) was an astonishment.

DR. MULLER on PEACE & WAR & THE UN

By Lynne Twist

Dr. Robert Muller, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations, now Chancellor emeritus of the University of Peace in Costa Rica was one of the people who witnessed the founding of the U.N. and has worked in support of or inside the U.N. ever since. Recently he was in San Francisco to be honored for his service to the world through the U.N. and through his writings and teachings for peace.

At age eighty, Dr. Muller surprised, even stunned, many in the audience that day with his most positive assessment of where the world stands now regarding war and peace. I was there at the gathering and I myself was stunned by his remarks. What he said turned my head around and offered me a new way to see what is going on in the world. My synopsis of his remarks is below:

“I'm so honored to be here,” he said. “I'm so honored to be alive at such a miraculous time in history. I'm so moved by what's going on in our world today.”

(I was shocked. I thought — Where has he been? What has he been reading? Has he seen the newspapers? Is he senile? Has he lost it? What is he talking about?)

Dr. Muller proceeded to say, “Never before iN the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war.”

The whole world is in now having this critical and historic dialogue — listening to all kinds of points of view and positions about going to war or not going to war. In a huge global public conversation the world is asking — “Is war legitimate? Is it illegitimate? Is there enough evidence to warrant an attack? Is there not enough evidence to warrant an attack? What will be the consequences? The costs? What will happen after a war? How will this set off other conflicts? What might be peaceful alternatives? What kind of negotiations are we not thinking of? What are the real intentions for declaring war?”

All of this, he noted, is taking place in the context of the United Nations Security Council, the body that was established in 1949 for exactly this purpose. He pointed out that it has taken us more than fifty years to realize that function, the real function of the U.N. And at this moment in history–the United Nations is at the center of the stage. It is the place where these conversations are happening, and it has become in these last months and weeks, the most powerful governing body on earth, the most powerful container for the world's effort to wage peace rather than war.

Dr. Muller was almost in tears in recognition of the fulfillment of this dream.

“We are not at war,” he kept saying. We, the world community, are WAGING peace. It is difficult, hard work. It is constant and we must not let up. It is working and it is an historic milestone of immense proportions. It has never happened before — never in human history — and it is happening now, every day, every hour, waging peace through a global conversation. He pointed out that the conversation questioning the validity of going to war has gone on for hours, days, weeks, months and now more than a year, and it may go on and on.

“We're in peacetime,” he kept saying. “Yes, troops are being moved. Yes, warheads are being lined up. Yes, the aggressor is angry and upset and spending a billion dollars a day preparing to attack. But not one shot has been fired. Not one life has been lost. There is no war. It's all a conversation.”

It is tense, it is tough, it is challenging, AND we are in the most significant and potent global conversation and public dialogue in the history of the world. This has not happened before on this scale ever before–not before WWI or WWII, not before Vietnam or Korea, this is new and it is a stunning new era of Global listening, speaking, and responViEtDeVtRiCksibility.

In the process, he pointed out, new alliances are being formed. Russia and China on the same side of an issue is an unprecedented outcome. France and Germany working together to wake up the world to a new way of seeing the situation. The largest peace demonstrations in the history of the world are taking place–and we are not at war! Most peace demonstrations in recent history took place when a war was already waging, sometimes for years, as in the case of Vietnam.

“So this,” he said, “is a miracle. This is what “waging peace ” looks like.” No matter what happens, history will record that this is a new era, And that the 21st century has been initiated with the world in a global dialogue looking deeply, profoundly and responsibly as a global community at the legitimacy of the actions of a nation that is desperate to go to war. Through these global peace-waging efforts, the leaders of that nation are being engaged in further dialogue, forcing them to rethink, and allowing all nations to participate in the serious and horrific decision to go to war or not.

Dr. Muller also made reference to a recent New York Times article that pointed out that up until now there has been just one superpower–the United States, and that that has created a kind of blindness in the vision of the U.S. But now, Dr. Muller asserts, there are two superpowers: the United States and the merging, surging voice of the people of the world. All around the world, people are waging peace. To Robert Muller, one of the great advocates of the United Nations, it is nothing short of a Miracle and it is working.