Category: Politics

I don’t know why I bother. No one cares, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, but I still want to point out that the “diplomacy” of the White House has come to this: Bush has given Iraq an ultimatim, saying, “Saddam Hussein and his sons [and his sons?] must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing”
Two pages later, in the same NYTimes edition which prints the text of Bush’s rambling mess of last night there is the following report:

Allies Will Move In, Even if Saddam Hussein Moves Out
CAMP DOHA, Tuesday, March 18 — Even if Saddam Hussein leaves Iraq within 48 hours, as President Bush demanded, allied forces plan to move north into Iraqi territory, American officials said today.

Leave or we’ll blow your country to pieces, but don’t leave and we’ll blow your country to pieces. Sounds logical to me, and it certainly should attract overwhelming support all around the world. It will definitely attract the interest of war crime tribunals in the future.
Now about the sons of Hussein. Up to now I don’t remember anyone making visiting upon the sons the sins of the father a part of the argument for immediately destroying Iraq, as Bush now does.
None of this is important, as I said at the beginning, but am I the only one who notices that in last night’s statement we heard the ruling scion of one dynasty demanding that the scions of another ruler give up political power? It may take one to know one, but, historically, dynastic tyrants usually don’t risk whatever legitimacy they may claim by wiping out the legitimacy of another country’s own dynasty. But that was a rule observed at a time when it was still possible to talk about the balance of power in the world, rather than today, when we must talk about the power of the unbalanced.

This morning the Guardian printed four of Rachel Corrie’s last letters. I no longer have the nerve to show just excerpts.
A dear Palestinian friend of ours who is now staying with his family in Jerusalem found the link and sent this message with it:

When I read what Rachel Corrie’s friends and professors said about her, how intelligent she was, I wondered whether they were exaggerating in kindness to her memory. They were not, as shown by a sample of four moving letters to her family.
Her eloquent words are also the imagined, unverbalized expressions of the many nameless faceless people who are too impoverished and castrated to even know how to describe their reality in words. That is the saddest truth.
Anees

This is what the “major” media will make this war look like.
Included in Robert Fisk’s prediction:

Weasel words to watch for
‘Inevitable revenge’ – for the executions of Saddam’s Baath party officials which no one actually said were inevitable.
‘Stubborn’ or ‘suicidal’ – to be used when Iraqi forces fight rather than retreat.
‘Allegedly’ – for all carnage caused by Western forces.
‘At last, the damning evidence’ – used when reporters enter old torture chambers.
‘Officials here are not giving us much access’ – a clear sign that reporters in Baghdad are confined to their hotels.
‘Life goes on’ – for any pictures of Iraq’s poor making tea.
‘Remnants’ – allegedly ‘diehard’ Iraqi troops still shooting at the Americans but actually the first signs of a resistance movement dedicated to the ‘liberation’ of Iraq from its new western occupiers.
‘Newly liberated’ – for territory and cities newly occupied by the Americans or British.
‘What went wrong?’ – to accompany pictures illustrating the growing anarchy in Iraq as if it were not predicted.

But we won’t be fooled. The real war will be on the web.

A glance at US television makes it obvious why people are seeking an alternative. On Fox and CNN, reporters extol the hi-tech weapons in the US arsenal. Former generals lead the pundits, and anchors talk routinely of the ease with which the troops will sweep through Iraq. In the back rooms, executives rub their hands at the improved ratings that war (with pictures channelled from the front by the Pentagon) will bring. Network TV is little better: ABC showcased its latest reality TV series, Profiles From the Frontline, which looked like an hour-long recruitment ad for the US military.
. . . .
Not just geeks are logging on. A poll by the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) showed that more than 70 per cent of Americans regularly use the internet and regard it as their most important information source. “Incredible as it may seem, for the vast majority of America that uses online technology, the internet has surpassed all other major information sources in importance after only about eight years as a generally available communications tool,” said Jeffrey Cole, the director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy.

Clare Short is so mid-Atlantic. The British Secretary of State for International Development first criticized her government’s rush to war and threatened to resign from office (this definitely not the way of an American politician) and then she decided to stay, apparently convinced she needs the job and the job couldn’t be done without her (definitely an American attitude). She was convinced that the war as planned was wrong, but now believes that only she can help reassemble the country upon which she is about to rain death and destruction.
In an interview for the BBC its political editor Andrew Marr suggested,

So the difference between you and Robin Cook, essentially is that you feel that you have an absolutely vital job in government still to do involving Iraq.

Robin Cook, Labor leader of the UK House of Commons, actually did quit yesterday.

Eric Alterman again:

These are upsetting times. You can sense the nervy dejection in the emails and calls we get here at CounterPunch. True, testing times loom, though not in such measure as for the people of Iraq, or for Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza every day of the year. And how could one be entirely disheartened amid the amazing flowering of the anti-war movement, a movement that has produced the largest (almost entirely peaceful ) protests in the history of the world.
In my local northern California town of Eureka, there was a march over the weekend that brought out 3,500. Huge for Eureka. Only a handful of louts jeered from the courthouse at the marchers. There was a vigil here in tiny Petrolia, as there have been with growing numbers across the country. I wrote over the weekend here of Greenville, South Carolina, as being “not noted as a bastion of antiwar sentiment, at least when I was there a couple of months ago.” Dumb, because I should have remembered what I written and said so often, that in every American town there are people of spirit and conscience. John Hanson, Secretary of the local Amnesty International chapter, promptly emailed me from Greenville, advising me that “You may be pleased to know we scheduled a small peace rally two weeks ago (@200 people) and a vigil just last night (@80). We also put on Lysistrata at Furman University March 3.”
Multiply that a thousand times over, and you have a huge movement, a new generation of young people inducted into the fun, boredom, fear, exhilaration and experience of popular protest. It was that movement, here and across the world that frightened Bush out of the Security Council and into the lawless cliches of a Hollywood Western. That’s something to exult over, as we brace for the next stage.

Tonight Eric Alterman sees Rachel Corrie in the stars.

So here we are at the festival of Purim. Back in 1994, on the eve of Purim, a son of Brooklyn, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Palestinian worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque ( Tomb of the Patriarchs) in Hebron. And if I recall rightly, Goldstein said or implied that the massacre was done for Purim. The larger context: the massacre was five months after the first Oslo accord, of Sept. ’93, and Yitzhak Rabin was PM at the time. For Goldstein and his followers (who built a monument to his “martyrdom” and still go to his grave to heap praises on him), it was an act of protest against the “betrayal” of Oslo.
A decade later, on the Eve of Purim bulldozer crushes young Rachel Corrie of Seattle to death as she tries to defend Palestinians from having their homes destroyed in Gaza. America sends out fanatics like Goldstein and its wonderful, brave idealists like Rachel, whom I set in my mind beside the internationalist Ben Linder who gave his life in Nicaragua, or Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.

This is a statement from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) which Rachel Corrie loved and for whose noble purpose she gave her life yesterday.

Today, Rachel Corey, a 23 year old student from Olympia, USA was killed by the Israeli army when a bulldozer drove over her as she stood protesting a house demolition in Rafah, Gaza Strip. She was one of six International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers who have been staying in the city to provide international civilian protection to families at risk from the various forms of violence of the Israeli occupation.
Rachel (or ‘Racha’ as she was known to the many many Palestinians who had become her friends since she arrived in Rafah in late January) had spent most of the afternoon with the other ISM volunteers patrolling a small stretch of the border area where dozens of homes have been demolished in recent weeks and months. The group had been clearly, audibly and visibly following the tanks and bulldozers up and down this strip for three hours, using banners and megaphones to alert the soldiers to their presence, a strategy that has been employed uniformly since the start of the ISM presence in this region last December.
Occasionally the bulldozer drivers waved to the protesters.
At around 5pm the army bulldozers moved towards this house. Rachel was the first of the international group to arrive in front of the house. She stood on top of a mound of earth, wearing a bright orange jacket and waved to the bulldozer driver, shouting at him to stop. He didn’t. The group report that the driver tipped sand over her, at which point she fell down. He then drove the machine over her while the rest of the group screamed at him to stop. After crushing her body with the forward motion of the vehicle, he then reversed. During this time the group heard her scream. She didn’t die at the scene. With Rachel crying ‘My back is broken’, the other internationals waited at the scene for an ambulance to arrive. The owner of the house in question attempted to give Rachel first aid, but said that her skull was too damaged for it to be effective. She was dead on arrival to the hospital in Rafah, where her activist colleagues stood numbed with shock at the sight of her disfigured body.
The house that Rachel was killed defending is a house that internationals have been staying in frequently over the past three months. These houses are NOT homes of suspected militants. They are simply houses close to the Israeli controlled border with Egypt, the sight of a proposed concrete wall and ‘buffer zone’, similar to the Apartheid Wall now under construction around the West Bank.
Rachel Corey was the first International Solidarity Movement volunteer to be killed in this intifada. Over 2,200 Palestinians have been killed by the state of Israel since September 2000. Shot, bombed, crushed in their homes, left to die in ambulances at checkpoints. The instruments and policies of occupation and murder are numerous.
Random killings and house demolitions are part of the systematic violence that is an everyday reality for Palestinians. Today that violence became a reality for internationals.
The rationale of international protection rests upon the assumption that Israel cannot remain unaccountable for the killing of international civilians as it is unaccountable for the killing of Palestinians. Today this assumption has been challenged.
An activist for justice and for peace, Rachel joins the list of history’s martyrs, who through non-violent protest have been struck down by the forces of oppression and military power that we will continue to struggle against until Palestine is free.

This excerpt from a February 7 email Rachel Corrie wrote to her parents appears with their help and that of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

Today as I walked on top of the rubble where homes once stood, Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of the border, “Go! Go!” because a tank was coming. Followed by waving and “what’s your name?”. There is something disturbing about this friendly curiosity. It reminded me of how much, to some degree, we are all kids curious about other kids: Egyptian kids shouting at strange women wandering into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shot from the tanks when they peak out from behind walls to see what’s going on. International kids standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli kids in the tanks anonymously, occasionally shouting– and also occasionally waving–many forced to be here, many just aggressive, shooting into the houses as we wander away.

If you want to understand why the internationals are there, read the entire, very moving text on the ISM site. There’s also a gentle introduction from Craig and Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s parents.

I love the NYTimes lead headline early this morning in the print edition. And how much of it is editorial sarcasm?

BUSH AND 2 ALLIES SEEM SET FOR WAR TO OPPOSE HUSSEIN

Actually, as far as anyone seems to know, only Britain and Australia have dispatched troops to serve in a war with Iraq, so the headline should properly begin, “BUSH AND ALLY . . . .” Hey, yeah, why wasn’t Australia with the other guys in their Canary Islands hideaway?
It doesn’t bode well for Bush that the people of Spain are overwhelmingly opposed to the war [polls indicate 80% of Spain’s population is against it]. The Partido Popular, the party of Spanish prime minister José Maria Aznar, has already lost the next election according to commentators. Moreover, Aznar’s support of Bush is seriously jeopardizing Spain’s carefully nourished special relationship with Spanish-speaking countries around the world, all of whose peoples, and governments as well, oppose the war and are taking great risks by offending the government of the powerful U.S. All of this is very bad for Spanish business, and for Spain’s status in the world outside of Dubya’s head. There is no future for this frail little gang of the willing.
Elsewhere among the “allies,” the parliamentary leader of Tony Blair’s government has resigned to protest the war, and there will be more defections, perhaps even the defection of an entire allied government.
But don’t expect resignations in Washington. Americans don’t maintain principles in government. It costs them too much to get there in the first place.

The headline refers to a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and it is not hyperbole. The policy of the Sharon government is to discourage foreign defenders of the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people it has reduced to the status of chattel. Today it simply escalated the means it employs and a young American woman, Rachel Corrie, was murdered by military bulldozer as she attempted to defend a Palestinian home. The half dozen photographs on this site are truly horrifying.

The Israeli Army are attempting to dishonour her memory by claiming
that Rachel was killed accidentally when she ran in front of the
bulldozer. Eye-witnesses to the murder insist that this is totally
untrue. Rachel was sitting in the path of the bulldozer as it
advanced towards her. When the bulldozer refused to stop or turn
aside she climbed up onto the mound of dirt and rubble being
gathered in front of it wearing a fluorescent jacket to look
directly at the driver who kept on advancing. The bulldozer
continued to advance so that she was pulled under the pile of dirt
and rubble. After she had disappeared from view the driver kept
advancing until the bulldozer was completely on top of her. The
driver did not lift the bulldozer blade and so she was crushed
beneath it. Then the driver backed off and the seven other ISM
activists taking part in the action rushed to dig out her body. An
ambulance rushed her to A-Najar hospital where she died.
. . . .
Rachel had been staying in Palestinian homes threatened with illegal demolition, and today Rachel was standing with other non-violent international activists in front of a home scheduled for illegal demolition. According to witnesses, Rachel was run over twice by the Israeli military bulldozer in its process of demolishing the Palestinian home. Witnesses say that Rachel was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver, and was doing nothing to provoke an attack.

This should, and just possibly might, seal the fate of the Sharon government and possible future imitators, but also its Washington partner in these murders.
This is one of several articles from Rachel Corrie’s hometown newspaper.
For more on these incredible activists, see my posts from June to August last year here, just below this one.