Olmert Rejects Right of Return for Palestinians

Marwan Naamani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A Palestinian woman, Umm Aziz, at the entrance to her home in a Beirut refugee camp Friday. She is from a village that is now part of Israel.

TEL AVIV, March 30 — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in interviews published Friday that Israel would not allow a single Palestinian refugee to return to what is now Israel, and that the country bore no responsibility for the refugees because their plight resulted from an attack by Arab nations on Israel when it was a fledgling state.

Of all the issues coloring Israel’s relationship with its neighbors, the fate of scattered Palestinians who lost their homes is among the most contentious.

This week, the nations of the Arab League revived a 2002 initiative offering Israel peace and acceptance as long as it withdraws to pre-1967 territorial boundaries, accepts an independent Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, and agrees to a solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants.

To most Palestinians, that means the right to return to their original homes inside Israel, but most Israelis fear that admitting large numbers of Palestinians would undermine the Jewish nature of the state.

Israeli officials say some Arab leaders acknowledge that their peace proposal can only be the basis for negotiation, and that a final peace will involve some flexibility on boundaries and refugees.

But while Mr. Olmert said there were positive elements in the Arab proposal, on the issue of refugees he suggested there was little room for compromise, the first time his government has made such an unequivocal statement on the issue. Unlike one of his predecessors, Ehud Barak, who negotiated with the Clinton administration about the possibility of even a symbolic return of some refugees to their prewar homes, Mr. Olmert said that he could not accept the return of even a single Palestinian refugee to Israel.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Mr. Olmert seemed to rule out any negotiation on refugees. He would not accept any notional Palestinian “right of return” to their homes, telling the newspaper: “I’ll never accept a solution that is based on their return to Israel, any number.”

Mr. Olmert said that the refugee problem was caused by the Arab attack on Israel in 1948 and called it “a moral issue of the highest standard.” He said: “I will not agree to accept any kind of Israeli responsibility for the refugees. Full stop.”

Then he added: “I don’t think we should accept any kind of responsibility for the creation of this problem. Full stop.” He said the return of even one Palestinian refugee to Israel was “out of the question.”

Palestinians say that even before the Arab nations attacked Israel, many Arabs fled or were forced to flee by Jewish fighters. After the war, Israel barred their return.

Mr. Olmert’s comments were part of a series of interviews published just before Passover, when every Israeli paper traditionally has its own interview with the prime minister.

He said that a renewed Arab consensus on a peace plan was encouraging, because, as he told the daily newspaper Haaretz, “a bloc of states is emerging that understands that they may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem.”

Mr. Olmert, pointing to the new concern of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states about the nuclear ambitions of Shiite Iran, called the shift “a revolutionary change in outlook.”

The Arab League endorsed the 2002 peace proposal once again at a Riyadh meeting that ended Thursday. The initiative calls for “achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194” passed in 1948.

The resolution, in its key paragraph, “resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible.”

Israel has always argued that the United Nations resolution gives no specific right of return to Palestinians. Israel is also troubled by the call in the Arab peace initiative for a return to 1967 boundaries, which it wants to negotiate, in order to keep major settlement blocs, possibly in return for land swaps.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has spoken of the refugee clauses in the Arab League initiative, but she normally says that just as Israel is the homeland for Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries, so a new state of Palestine should be the homeland for Palestinian refugees.

Shimon Peres, a deputy prime minister, has said that the Arab initiative would work only as a negotiating position, and that Israel would be happy to sit down with Arab leaders and negotiate. “Otherwise, I’m afraid, we shall go in a vain debate that will lead nowhere,” he said.

In his comments to newspapers, Mr. Olmert spent a considerable amount of time defending his record and that of this government, given his low approval ratings following last summer’s inconclusive war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and a series of political scandals, both proved and alleged.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/31/world/middleeast/31mideast.html

Normalizing Injustice

Jaffa’s Ugly Truth

Normalizing Injustice

By ARTHUR NESLEN

Diplomatic briefcases are unlikely to be dropped at news of Condoleezza Rice’s call, on the eve of the Riyadh summit, for Arab states to “reach out to Israel” and show they accept it. Israel’s insistence that negotiators begin by accepting its right to exist has already pushed normalisation up the political agenda.

The desire to become a nation like any other is strong among war-weary Israelis. The problem for Palestinians is that normalising relations with Israel also means normalising an ongoing occupation, the circumstances which led up to it, and the racism that engendered within Israel. And that’s before negotiations even start.

For secular Zionists though, the dream of becoming an ordinary nation with its own Jewish football hooligans and Jewish riot squads has deep roots. Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, believed that attaining statehood would be a guarantor of acceptance by gentile society. He may have been right, but it came at a price. In mandate Palestine, Jews constituted little more than 30% of the population and owned just 6% of its land. The statehood endeavour involved the brutal dispossession of another people.

It may have been the harshness of this reality that fostered a strain of naivety among secular Ashkenazi halutzim (pioneers). In Altneuland, Herzl himself imagined a future state where a proud Ottoman Muslim called Rashid Bey would embrace the Zionist enterprise and join his Jewish friends on sightseeing tours.

During one visit to the Valley of Jezreel, Herzl had Bey point out flourishing Arab villages and exclaim that they were impoverished hamlets before the advent of the Jews. “Would you call a man a robber who takes nothing from you, but brings you something instead?” Bey asks. “The Jews have enriched us.”

Herzl’s vision has now passed. But a “look at the pretty flowers” tradition of argument in Zionism continues. Last year, in the wake of the Lebanon war, Israel’s foreign minister Tzippi Livni launched a public relations campaign to spread a “more inviting” image of Israel abroad. Its fruits were on display during last week’s normalised coverage of the Israel-England football match, and in the news that Israel’s US consulate had successfully persuaded Maxim magazine to promote tourism by publishing a feature about the country’s stunning models. Maxim is now reportedly sending a team of top photographers to the beaches of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

While they are there, perhaps they will incidentally record what could be the final days of the 497 residential properties that are slated for demolition in Ajami, Jaffa’s last predominantly Arab district. According to Fady Shbita of the Arab-Jewish Sadaka-Reut (“Friendship”) organisation, as many as 2,000 people could be affected.

“There will be a serious struggle over this because it will change the whole structure of Jaffa if it succeeds,” he told me. “I would characterise it as a combination of ethnic cleansing or transfer and gentrification.” Most people in Ajami just call it ethnic cleansing.

The Palestinian-Israelis who live in Ajami will not be re-housed in Tel Aviv. Even if they could afford the rents here, it’s all but unheard of for Arabs to live in most parts of the city. They won’t receive compensation either, as they have technically been living in Ajami ‘illegally’ for decades. Before 1948, more than 70,000 Palestinians lived in Jaffa. During the Naqba, the majority fled and were not allowed to return. Under the Absentee Property Act of 1950, their abandoned houses were seized by the new Israeli state and rented to Jews. The few Arabs who remained were concentrated behind a fence in Ajami.

But times change. The fence came down and, in the 1970s, when beachfront property prices began to rise, Tel Aviv’s Mayor, Shlomo “Cheech” Lahat, announced a policy of “Judaising” Jaffa. Building permits in Ajami were frozen and ongoing demolitions funnelled residents into the slums of Lyd and Ramle. Many of the 15,000-20,000 Palestinian-Israelis who stayed in Jaffa were forced to build extensions to their family houses without permits. This practice is now being used as the excuse by the Israeli Lands Authority, a state actor which owns the properties for a new wave of the sort of soulless gentrification and transfer that has hollowed out Jaffa’s old town.

Much of the land reclaimed by house demolitions invariably gets sold on for luxury developments like the gated community of Andromeda Hill, “a virtual ‘city within a city’ surrounded by a wall and secured 24 hours a day,” according to its website. Local residents complain that Andromeda Hill was built on land which was formerly owned by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate “so that rich Jews can enjoy the magic of the sunset in Jaffa without seeing Arabs”.

The Jaffa sunset can be truly spectacular but Israel’s PR machine is unlikely to encourage photographers to wander the few yards down the road necessary to capture it from Ajami. In this part of the world, beneath the flowers of normalisation lies the rubble of demolished houses.

Arthur Neslen is a journalist working in Tel Aviv. The first Jewish employee of Aljazeera.net and a four-year veteran of the BBC, Neslen has contributed to numerous periodicals over the years, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and Red Pepper. His first book, Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche, was recently published by Pluto Press.

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/neslen03292007.html

Pakistan: US ally, US dilemma

President Musharraf’s power plays, once tolerated, are now raising concerns in Washington.

 

Last March: President Bush met with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad a year ago.

CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP/FILE

WASHINGTON – Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has doggedly made the case to Washington that he is the finger in the dike holding back a wave of Islamic extremism that could again reach America’s shores.

Having successfully argued his own indispensability, General Musharraf has reaped billions of dollars in economic aid and arms sales – while encountering little challenge from Washington over his backsliding from steps toward democratic rule.

But now it is political protest, fueled by Musharraf’s steps to consolidate and extend his power, that is washing over Pakistan. And that is presenting the US with a classic dilemma of the war on terrorism: Does a key leader’s security value outweigh his authoritarian practices, and when does democratic rule become the greater guarantor of security?

Earlier this month, Musharraf suspended the country’s Supreme Court chief justice. Ever since, Pakistan’s middle classes – ironically one of the chief beneficiaries of the military leader’s eight-year rule – have taken to the streets. Also fueling the uproar are suspicions that Musharraf is paving the way to another term as both president and chief military leader.

The protests are prompting concern, both in Pakistan and the US, that pent-up political frustrations and social stagnation threaten the stability of a key American ally at least as much as Islamic extremism in the country’s less-advanced regions.

“For too long, we’ve heard that the only alternative to Musharraf is something worse. But the fact is we don’t need him if he doesn’t move towards a civilianized government with broadened representation of Pakistan’s people,” says Selig Harrison, director of the Asia program of the Center for International Policy in Washington. The lack of political reform and civilian rule has exacerbated divisions, he says, “and the more polarized Pakistan is, the more unstable it’s going to be.”

While no one expects the social unrest to cause Musharraf’s imminent demise, many observers do see the coming months as crucial to Pakistan’s direction.

“This is not just a flare-up. It is reflective of a broader discontent about the failure of the Musharraf regime to take concrete steps to restore civilian rule,” says Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of State for south Asian affairs. “With elections on the horizon, this could be an important turning point.”

Musharraf cited “abuse of power” when he suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry on March 9, and many Pakistanis agreed – with the charge at least, though they attached it to the president himself. Mr. Chaudhry had taken the government to task over hundreds of disappearances of Pakistanis, some suspected Islamic extremists but others human rights activists and representatives of ethnic minority populations.

Perhaps more telling for many Pakistanis, Chaudhry had also expressed his view that it was not legal under the Constitution for Musharraf to seek another presidential term while remaining the Army chief. In addition, he had said publicly that he anticipated a number of ways in which the issue could come before him.

Such open threats to the continued reign of Pakistan’s military became intolerable, says Mr. Harrison. “The military establishment is deeply involved in a wide range of business in the country, and they have a big stake in staying in power,” he says.

So far, the Bush administration has trod lightly on the political uproar. It has expressed concern over some clashes that have turned violent but has reiterated support for Musharraf as a valuable ally in the war on terror.

But even there, cracks are beginning to show. Last month, in what some Pakistanis called the “tough love” visit, Vice President Dick Cheney made a surprise call on Musharraf to warn him that he risked losing support in the United States unless he took tougher steps against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Afghan government has pressed the US for months to get tough with Musharraf over the border issue.

Additional pressure is now coming from Congress, where several moves are afoot to set conditions for US support. Democratic senators John Kerry, Joseph Biden, and Christopher Dodd have introduced a resolution calling for US military assistance to Pakistan to “correlate” to Pakistan’s efforts to strike Taliban and Al Qaeda bases on its territory. The House has already adopted even tougher legislation.

The Pakistani military in particular would seem to have good reason to worry about any threat to US military assistance. A study by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington shows that military aid to Pakistan grew from under $10 million in the three years prior to 9/11 to more than $4 billion in the three years after.

Musharraf’s approach to the tribal regions along the Afghan border has been to pursue accords with local leaders to deny sanctuary to foreign fighters taking refuge there. The third such accord was signed this week, with some experts suggesting the approach is showing the first signs of results. Critics, however, believe the approach is more reflective of the close ties between Islamists and Pakistan’s intelligence services, as well as Musharraf’s own ambiguous relations with Islamist forces.

Some experts see an Iran factor in US reluctance to turn the screws on Musharraf. “There’s probably more than meets the eye on the administration’s resistance to pushing for civilianization in Pakistan,” says Harrison. “It is clear we are undertaking covert operations in Iran from Pakistan, aiding disaffected minorities there,” he says. “And we have an undetermined agenda with Iran that could include military action at some point down the road, and we would need Pakistan for that.”

Still, some see unrest in Pakistan’s middle classes as a bigger long-term worry, and they say the US is going to have to take a firmer stand on democratization.

“US policy must be clear that Musharraf can only be elected again as a civilian, and that he must open up to the opposition parties,” says Manjeet Kripalani, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

But others echo the State Department stance, saying the US won’t get very far issuing orders. “What we can do is present the case for why this is in their interest,” says Mr. Inderfurth, now director of graduate international-affairs studies at George Washington University. “We can make the case that if he does not respond to the calls all around him [for political reform], Musharraf risks losing many of the considerable gains he has accomplished.”

Source: Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0329/p01s01-usfp.html?page=1

Russia criticizes U.S. missile shield plan for Europe

Russia slams missile shield, wants talks with U.S.

By Louis CharbonneauTue Mar 27, 1:48 PM ET

Russia said on Tuesday U.S. plans to deploy a missile shield in central Europe would undermine global non-proliferation efforts and demanded serious discussions on the issue with Washington.

“These plans will effectively remove the possibility of dealing with the threat to the nuclear non-proliferation regime with diplomatic means,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote in the German newspaper Handelsblatt.

The United States wants to deploy a radar system in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland by 2011-12. It says the system would counter threats from so-called “rogue states” like Iran and North Korea.

Tehran denies Western accusations it is secretly developing nuclear weapons in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It accuses Western powers of hypocrisy in continuing to develop and modernise their own nuclear systems.

Russia, which sees the missile shield as an encroachment on its former sphere of influence, has accused Washington of using Cold War tactics to persuade Europe to host the system.

“What risks do we see in this U.S. project? In the first place, it will lead to an erosion of strategic stability. Also the balance in global politics can be put in danger,” Lavrov said in the article, due to be published on Wednesday.

BRIEFINGS

The United States says the project is not aimed at Russia.

But Lavrov made it clear Moscow believes the missile shield may one day be used for offensive weapons.

“The missile shafts needed for the interceptor missiles copy in a dangerous way the facilities for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles. What will find its way into these shafts in five to 10 years,” Lavrov said.

Earlier this month U.S. Lieutenant General Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told reporters in Berlin recently that the missile shield facilities were purely defensive and incompatible with offensive weapons.

The United States says it has repeatedly informed Russia of the plans in nearly a dozen briefings since last year. But the Russian foreign minister said Moscow needed more than that.

“At a minimum, we need to have a serious debate about the fundamental issue and not just briefings which provide no answers to specific questions,” Lavrov said.

Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070327/wl_nm/shield_russia_dc

Why Ralph Nader Took a Stand

The Legacy of an Unreasonable Man

Why Ralph Nader Took a Stand

By ALAN MAASS

No one can say that the documentary An Unreasonable Man sugarcoats the case against its subject.

The film opens with Ralph Nader mumbling through a brief statement at a sparsely attended press conference during his 2004 presidential campaign. Then comes several minutes of vitriolic denunciations of Nader by three of the most unpleasant, puffed-up and dishonest fixtures of the liberal firmament–Democratic “strategist” James Carville, author Todd Gitlin and Nation columnist Eric Alterman.

If you aren’t familiar with their complaints on the subject, they are easily summarized: Ralph Nader, because he ran for president in 2000 as a third-party candidate against Al Gore and George Bush, is responsible everything bad that’s happened during the Bush presidency.

Every. Thing.

“Thank you Ralph for the Iraq war, thank you Ralph for the tax cuts, thank you Ralph for the destruction of the environment, thank you Ralph for the destruction of the Constitution,” Alterman spits out. “I just think the man needs to go away. I think he needs to live in a different country. He’s done enough damage to this one; let him damage someone else’s now.”

“Wicked,” “megalomaniac,” “politically idiotic,” “deluded” and “psychologically troubled” are a few of the terms of abuse Alterman and friends lob at Nader.

If only they managed a tenth of this kind of venom when talking about Republicans. But instead, their sanctimonious and humorless diatribes are directed at the man responsible for seatbelts and airbags in cars, anti-pollution laws, any number of workplace safety regulations–and the most significant left-wing electoral challenge to the two-party political system in a half-century.

Fortunately, An Unreasonable Man spends the next two hours following Nader’s history, and what emerges plainly from the film’s interviews with supporters and detractors alike is that Nader’s transformation–from a reformer working firmly within the Washington system to a renegade confronting the two parties from the outside–is wholly in keeping with the commitment to democratic principles that motivated him his whole political life.

The Democrats’ claim that Nader was a “spoiler” who caused Gore’s defeat in 2000 is wrong for any number of reasons–not least, the fact that Gore won both the popular vote and the election in Florida that would have given him a win in the Electoral College, but the Democrats were too timid to fight the Republicans’ theft of the White House.

But Nader’s real crime for Democrats is that his campaign represented a popular challenge to the two-party corporate-dominated system–and the deeply engrained politics of “lesser evilism” that convinces liberals and progressives, time and time again, to support a Democrat who inevitably betrays them without a second thought.

* * *AN UNREASONABLE Man documents Nader’s rise to prominence in the 1960s as a relentless crusader against corporate abuses and political corruption, in the face of entrenched opposition–a history that makes the liberal insult that Nader is an egomaniac seem particularly foolish.

The long list of laws Nader played a central part in winning is remarkable–the National Automobile and Highway Traffic Safety Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Mine Health and Safety Act, Freedom of Information Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act.

As Nader acknowledges, these accomplishments were made possible by the rise of mass movements that shook U.S. society in the 1960s and early ’70s. But as these movements went into retreat in the mid-1970s, Nader’s inside-the Beltway efforts ran up against the rightward shift in mainstream politics and the reassertion of corporate power.

The turning point was the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who Nader considered an ally and advised during the 1976 election campaign. Once in office, Carter dragged his feet on promised regulations. When Nader’s proposal for a Consumer Protection Agency came up for a vote in the Democratic-controlled Congress in 1978, corporations pulled out all the stops to defeat it–and Carter sat on his hands while it died.

With Reagan, the tide turned even more sharply against Nader’s agenda, but the impact of the era was felt just as strongly on the Democratic Party. As Nader points out in the film, he spent much of the next two decades trying to pressure the Democrats to take up liberal issues, but the “party of ordinary people” didn’t want to cross big business.

“So when people say why did you do this in 2000, I’m a 20-year veteran of pursuing the folly of the least worst between the two parties,” Nader says. “Because when you do that, you end up allowing them both to get worse every four years.”

After a half-hearted Green Party presidential campaign in 1996, Nader ran all out in 2000, amid renewed activism around the global justice and other movements. The documentary’s footage of the Nader “super-rallies”–which brought together thousands, and then tens of thousands, of people in a string of cities–gives a sense of the excitement.

But the attacks from Democrats grew to a fever pitch as the election approached. When the Florida vote was decided for Bush–without the Democrats fighting for a recount that would have given Gore the edge–the liberals blamed not the incompetent Gore campaign that blew an election which was theirs to lose, but Ralph Nader.

No slander was out of bounds. Investigative journalist James Ridgeway describes Nader’s enemies as “the meanest bunch of motherfuckers I’ve ever come across”–and it’s worth stressing that he’s talking not about some faceless corporate behemoth or right-wing Republican fanatic, but the liberal Democrats who Nader once counted as trusted allies.

When Nader ran again in 2004, his campaign was snowed under by the “Anybody But Bush” hysteria. Even the Green Party abandoned its commitment to an all-out third-party campaign and rejected an endorsement of Nader’s independent candidacy.

Nevertheless, as talk show host and Nader supporter Phil Donahue points out, for all the venomous attacks on him, the Democrats did precisely what Nader warned they would.

“They killed him for saying there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties,” Donahue says. “And then the Democrats spent the next four years proving that he was right. The Democrats folded on the war. They folded on health care and No Child Left Behind. They hid under their desks.”

The irony is that Nader’s politics are not nearly as radical as the challenge his presidential campaigns represented. His positions on certain issues, such as immigration, fall short of a left-wing alternative.

In fact, despite the experience of the 2000 and 2004 campaign, Nader still talks sometimes as if he hopes the Democrats will take up his challenge to speak to “the issues that really command the felt concerns and daily life of millions of Americans”–as if the problem with the Democratic Party is a matter of the people in charge, rather than the institution itself.

But what sets Nader apart is that he has continued to try to act on his commitment to democracy and justice, even when that put him at odds with the Washington system that was once the center of his political universe.

The result is that Nader will be remembered by history as not only the man who put seatbelts and airbags in cars–but who gave voice at a crucial time to the need for an alternative to the corporate duopoly that dominates U.S. politics.

Alan Maass is the editor of the Socialist Worker. He can be reached at: alanmaass@sbcglobal.net

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/maass03242007.html

Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?

Four Years Later in Iraq

Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Pick almost any date on the calendar and it’ll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. It’s like driving across the American West. “Historic marker, 1 mile”, the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. “On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry …. “

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, Sunday March 18, one day short of the anniversary of US planes embarking on an aerial hunt of Pancho Villa in 1916;of the day the U.S. Senate rejected (for the second time) the Treaty of Versailles in 1920; of the end of the active phase of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002; of the 10 pm broadcast March 19, 2003, by President G.W. Bush announcing that aerial operations against Iraq had commenced.

This was the attack on Dora Farms outside Baghdad where some Iraqi whispered into his phone that Saddam Hussein was visiting his children. Down hurtled four 2000-pound bunker-busters and 40 cruise missiles. There were high fives in the White House situation room at news of a mangled Saddam being hauled from the rubble. It all turned out to be nonsense, like most military bulletins out of Iraq. The bunker busters all missed the compound. Saddam Hussein wasn’t there. Uday and Qusay weren’t there. Fifteen civilians died, including nine women and a child.

Here I was, a couple of days shy of four years later, in a used paperback store in a mall in Olympia, Washington, flicking through Tina Turner’s side of the story on life with Ike. My cell phone rang. It was my brother Patrick, calling from Sulaimaniyah, three hours drive east through the mountains from the Kurdish capital of Arbil, in northern Iraq. He gave me a brisk précis of the piece he’d file the next day. Every road was lethally dangerous; every Iraqi he met had a ghastly tale to tell of murder, kidnappings, terror-stricken flights, searches for missing relatives. Life was measurably far, far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis than it had been before the 2003 onslaught. He’d talked that day to Kassim Naji Salaman, a truck driver replacing his murdered brother at the wheel of an oil tanker. Salaman was now the sole bread earner for 18 women and children because so many of his male relatives had been killed “I can’t even visit the village where they live,” he told Patrick. “Soldiers or militia or just men in masks might kill me. I don’t even know how to send them money”.

I’ve had many such phone calls from Patrick since March 2003, as he returned time after time to Iraq, either to Baghdad or to the north. Unlike the embedded reporters he’s never felt moved to announce a “turning point”, as when they blew away Uday and Qusay on July 22, 2003. CNN’s studio generals said on the news that night it was a big blow to the Iraqi resistance. Then Saddam was hauled out of a hole on December 15, 2003, just in time for Christmas. Maybe the death knell of the resistance, the studio generals exulted. Then came one “new dawn” for Iraq after another: the handback of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004, the two elections and the new constitution in 2005. Now we have the “surge” into Baghdad, designed to whip the Shi’a back into line.

Contemptuous of all such bulletins, right from the start Patrick has relentlessly described the disintegration of Iraq, by measurements large and small. Remember that 13 years of sanctions ­- a horrible international onslaught of the health and well-being of a civilian population, enthusiatically supported by liberals in the US and Europe ­- Iraq’s plight was already dire. When the war began, Baghdad had 20 hours of power a day. Now it’s down to 2. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Not hundreds of thousands but two million have fled the country, mostly to Syria and Jordan. It’s the largest upheaval of a population in the Middle East since the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. Dawn after dawn rises over Iraq to reveal tortured corpses in the river beds, on the rubbish dumps, by the side of the road: bodies riddled with bullets, punctured by drills, whipped with wire cable, blown apart.

The U.N. says that in the two months before this last Christmas 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. The months since have probably been as bad. Saddam dragged his country into ruin. Then the US took it from ruin to the graveyard, plundering the corpse as it did so.

There’s plenty of blame to go round. You’d think these days that the cheerleaders for war were limited to a platoon of neocons, as potent in historical influence as were supposedly the Knights Templar. But it was not so. The coalition of the enablers spread far beyond Cheney’s team and the extended family of Norman Podhoretz. Atop mainstream corporate journalism perch the New York Times and the New Yorker, two prime disseminators of pro-invasion propaganda, written at the NYT by Judith Miller, Michael Gordon and, on the op ed page, by Thomas Friedman. The New Yorker put forth the voluminous lies of Jeffrey Goldberg and has remained impenitent till this day.

The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar “hard left”. Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube played this game eagerly. Berube lavished abuse on Noam Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking the tradition of “left internationalism”. Others, like Ian Williams, played supportive roles in instilling the idea that the upcoming war was negotiable, instead of an irreversible intent of the Bush administration, no matter what Saddam Hussein did. “The ball will be very much in Saddam Hussein’s court,” Williams wrote in November, 2002. “The question is whether he will cooperate and disarm, or dissimulate and bring about his own downfall at the hands of the U.S. military.“ (In fact Saddam had already “disarmed”, as disclosed in Hussein Kamel’s debriefings by the UNSCOM inspectors, the CIA and MI6 in the summer of 1995 when Kamel told them all, with corroboration from aides who had also defected, that on Saddam Hussein’s orders his son-in-law had destroyed all of Iraq’s WMDs years earlier, right after the Gulf War. This was not a secret. In February 2003 John Barry reported it in Newsweek.Anyone privy to the UNSCOM, CIA and MI6 debriefs knew it from 1995 on.)

As Iraq began to plunge ever more rapidly into the abyss not long after the March, 2003 attack, this crowd stubbornly mostly stayed the course with Bush. “Thumpingly blind to the war’s virtues” was the head on a Paul Berman op ed piece in February, 2004.Christopher Hitchens lurched regularly onto Hardball to hurl abuse at critics of the war.

But today, amid Iraq’s dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, — Friedman, Hitchens, Berman — like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.

Post coldwar Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great crusade shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed this war from the start ­ the real left, the libertarians and those without illusions about the “civilizing mission” of the great powers.

A Memory of Tanya Reinhart

Amid the shock of Tanya Reinhart’s sudden death from a stroke in New York, CounterPuncher Vanessa Jones reminded us of a little description she’d done of Reinhart, giving a talk at ANU in Canberra, late last year. It’s a nice vignette of a woman who gave her all for the struggle for justice for Palestinians.

She was: calm, thoughtful, down to earth, unpretentious, clear speaking, practical, not bitter, accessible, no need to smile, comfortable with her own seriousness. All the books sold out the hour before, lecture hall three quarters full, audience sympathized and laughed, but mainly listened. Over half the audience was grey or white haired- a third youngish- i.e. around 30 or 40 years old. It was easier to listen to her than read her- the content of her political writing I find depressing, with any writer. Coming from her, I found it simple and easy to digest- when you can see the sincere humanness of where she is coming from. She had the only map published in Israel before the Oslo deal- the one before the Camp David meeting. It was projected up onto the large screen. She was given a lecturer’s pointing stick to point up at the slide projected map, after her pen seemed inadequate, and Tanya laughed at the huge size of it, which seemed double her height, and hid it, until it was useful for pointing out areas.

Didn’t stay for her to sign my book. She looked like she’d be looked after for the evening. She wore short, suede-type lace up black boots, long tailored khaki skirt, with rear low slit, and black long sleeved stretch shirt, with a leather satchel on her back. When she walked down the stairs to the lecture area, she walked past, next to where I was seated, and I noticed she had a spring to her step. She had a certain vitality to her, and had that Israeli type of dress sense- slightly European and slightly hippy- or maybe I’ve only met hippyish Israelis. Sad that her view is a minority view amongst Israelis and Jews worldwide. Can’t see why her views are a minority- they seem perfect sense to me. Reminded me of an Israeli woman I met long ago- same outlook, and openness. So, I will try and read her book, but I would much rather sit and hear her read out a chapter each 2 hours. That would be easier, as it makes the situation seem as I see it- simply human, and not academic. But it’s not everyday that we can sit and hear people talk about things they would normally write about, so writing is a way to link the ideas with other minds. Communicate. I like seeing the writer/ thinker in the flesh- always comes across as normal and human, compared to the print, which at times can seem academic. Tanya Reinhart was quietly spoken and modest in her approach, with people asking for the volume up. Lots of questions at the end- they had to be limited.

Alexander Cockburn’s new book, End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, is now available.

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03242007.html

Gujarat police admit wrongful killing of Muslim teen

Police in India’s Gujarat state killed an innocent Muslim man in a staged gun battle, the authorities have admitted. They then accused him of plotting to assassinate state Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the Supreme Court heard.

A lawyer for the state said senior police officers were involved. “We are prepared to take immediate action.”

The innocent man, Sohrabuddin Sheikh, was shot dead by anti-terrorist personnel in the state’s largest city, Ahmadabad, in 2005.

Police at the time claimed Mr Sheikh belonged to the banned Kashmiri militant group, Lashkar-e-Toiba, and was plotting the assassination to avenge the death of hundreds of Muslims in riots three years before.

Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6487095.stm