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Recent Stories
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
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
27, 2003
Time for a Global Anti-Imperialist League
A Naked Display
of Imperial Power
By TARIQ ALI
The
historic significance of the protests against the war in Iraq is that
they have been unprecedented in size, scope or scale. This is the first
truly global response to a political event: millions have come out on
the streets of Western Europe, North and South America, Western Europe,
the Far East, Australia and New Zealand and last week, the Arab street
exploded with the largest spontaneous demonstration Cairo had seen since
Nasser’s funeral.
What will be the
effect of the war now raging in Iraq on the peace movement? Its fair-weather
friends (symbolised in Britain by the pathetic and spineless figure
of the Liberal leader Charles Kennedy) will naturally drop out, but
the movement itself will grow in strength and determination. The US
occupation of Iraq will necessitate a change in tactics, but the overall
strategy of the global peace movement will not alter.
It is now obvious
to a large majority of the world’s population that the real threat
to peace and stability comes not from the depleted armouries of decaying
dictatorships, but from the rotten heart of the American Empire or its
regional satrapies (Israel, Britain). It is this new awareness of world
realities that has radicalised a new generation across the globe. Those
who accept the official justifications for the conflict simply cannot
understand the resistance to this war. It has nothing to do with support
for Saddam, but reflects a refusal to believe the untruths being spouted
by Bush, Rumsfeld and Blair and their apologists in the media. Apart
from the United States, few citizens elsewhere believe that the fiercely
secular Ba’ath Party of Iraq has any links with Osama’s
gang. As for ‘weapons of mass destruction’ the only nuclear
stockpile in the region is situated in Israel. And even if Saddam Hussein
had the capacity to acquire these weapons, an imperial princess had
already pointed out that it would be a futile act.
In the January/February
2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, for example, National Security Advisor
Condoleeza Rice wrote: “The first line of defense should be a
clear and classical statement of deterrence‹if they do acquire
WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them
will bring national obliteration.”
Unusable in 2000,
but now Saddam must be removed by bombing Iraqi cities and a land invasion
before he gets them? Like many of the other pretexts for this war it
doesn’t add up, thus fuelling a broad-based opposition.
What appears to
have happened is that a Christian-Jacobin faction from the extreme-right
of the Republican Party (backed by hard-core Zionists) has utilised
9/11 to capture the White House, the Pentagon and the Department of
Justice. Their aim is the pursuit of a bold and audacious imperialist
agenda of which the occupation of Iraq is seen as the first step. Iran
and the Korean Peninsula are the next targets.
Its spokespeople,
compared to the flatulent rhetoric of their New Labour toadies, are
refreshingly honest: in order to preserve US hegemony they will use
force wherever and whenever necessary.
European hand wringing
leaves them unmoved. If the United Nations can’t be used as an
instrument of US power it should be dumped without too much delay. And,
one could argue from the other side, if the UN is genetically incapable
of preventing pre-emptive strikes by imperial rogue states that openly
violate its charter (leave alone ratifiying the occupation of Iraq and
becoming an after-sales service for the Empire) then it is time to think
of other more effective arrangements. The creation or strengthening
of existing regional associations of nation states would be an obvious
next step. Recently, the Organisation of American States isolated the
US and refused to endorse any attempts to topple Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
(another oil-rich state considering moving from the dollar to the Euro).
The antiwar movement
was given a tremendous boost by the French-German decision not to back
the war. This is the first occasion on which a disagreement between
the inner core of the EU and the United States exploded into a public
rift and helped polarise public opinion both in Europe and North America.
Add to that the Turkish parliament (unlike the House of Commons) disrupted
the war effort and the Canadian Prime Minister used strong language
to denounce the conflict. The opposition of these states is limited
(only Belgium refused to permit the use of its air space), but that
it exists at all marks a turning point in European-US relations. If
the US continues on this course then the EU will have to re-open a public
discussion regarding its future. A fierce private debate is already
taking place in France and Germany. The ramifications of the assault
on Iraq will have global consequences and a resistance to the Empire
is inevitable. Its timing is the only point of dispute. Where will this
take the peace movement?
The model of what
needs to be done by today’s dissenters was established in the
last year of the 19th century. Mark Twain, shocked by the chauvinist
reaction to the Boxer Rebellion in China and the US occupation of the
Philippines, sounded the tocsin. The problem, he argued, was imperialism.
It had to be opposed. His call led to a mammoth assembly in Chicago
in 1889, which founded the American Anti-Imperialist League. Within
two years its membership had grown to over half a million and it attracted
some of the most gifted writers and thinkers of the United States (Henry
James, Charles Elliot Norton, W.E.B. Dubois, William Dean Howells, Frederic
Douglass, Jr, etc.)
Today, when the
United States is the only imperial power, the importance of a global
Anti-Imperialist League cannot be understate, but it is the US component
of such an organisation that will be crucial. The resistance can only
be political. The history of the rise and fall of Empires teaches us
that it is when their own citizens finally lose faith in the efficacy
of infinite wars and permanent occupations that the beast implodes.
The World Social
Forum (which hosts the movement of movements every year) has, till now,
concentrated on the power of multinational corporations and neo-liberal
institutions. But Friedrich von Hayek, the inspirer of the “Washington
Consensus”, was a firm believer in wars to buttress the new system.
The World Social Forum should think of campaigning against the military
presence of the US in 120 countries. Economics is after all only a concentrated
form of politics and war a continuation of both by other means.
Tariq Ali’s
latest book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms is published in paperback
by Verso.
Yesterday's Features
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
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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