What are they really up to?

THE government of the United States is, sad to say, in the hands of blinkered ideologues. And that is putting it kindly. A less generous interpretation is that a small group of people are determined to serve their own narrow interests, oblivious to the effect their actions may have on either their own nation, or the six billion people with whom they share the globe.

President George Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and presidential adviser Karl Rove have come up with a ‘policy’ toward Iraq based on a triumvirate of crass motives: oil, sleight-of-hand, re-election.

Mr Cheney and Mr. Bush are fixated on oil. After all, both of them, along with Ms. Rice and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, had a background in the American petroleum industry before they reached the inner sanctum of the White House. Their goal is so simple, so patent, that they think it is necessary to drum up a medley of terrorism and insecurity to deflect the American nation’s attention from that goal. Who, after all,will send their sons off to fight and possibly die just to make sure US corporations gain beneficial contracts for black gold?

Within the territorial borders of Iraq lies the second largest petroleum reserve in the world. Saddam Hussein may have done many things wrong, but in the eyes of President Bush one of his very greatest errors was that he signed contracts with the Russians, the French and the Italians to allow them to extract that petroleum from beneath Iraqi soil. The Americans and the British, should Saddam remain in power, will see huge profits made — but by other nations, and more particularly by corporations other than the ones headed by the men with whom the president plays golf when he is in Texas.

“Regime change,” that neutered term which means deposing Saddam Hussein, also means contract abrogation and renegotiation. With an American-installed government in Baghdad, can anyone seriously believe that the franchise to pump and ship Iraqi oil will go to anyone but American companies — and perhaps a handful of British corporations as well, as payment to Prime Minister Blair for his constant support?

Nor is Iraqi oil the only commodity at stake in this resource-rich country. In addition to its central location in the middle of the richest oil-producing region in the world, Iraq controls the water which is vital to the future development of the entire Middle East. The Tigris and the Euphrates provide a flow of water essential to the nations of the Arabian peninsula and south-west Asia. Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, even Israel, Yemen, Oman and Iran all are in need of what these mighty rivers supply. Long term, water is more important to the region than even oil.

He who controls Iraq, controls the fate of the Middle East.

Nor is the Middle East all that is in play. There are important resources all over the world. Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice want to demonstrate that American hegemony is backed by warships: They want no nation in the world to forget that gunship diplomacy trumps all other initiatives, and that the United States has both gunships and — importantly — no hesitation in using them.

Still, that demonstration could come later rather than sooner, or in another place rather than Iraq. Why Iraq, why now?

Enter Mr.Rove, the president’s chief domestic political adviser. He knows that the American economy, mired in a state so moribund as to raise rumours that a domestic economic disaster is possible, is creating great unease in the American populace. With job losses mounting and stock prices plunging, with social services eroding and pensions evaporating, Americans are not far from translating their economic discontent into discontent with their president. What better way to deflect attention from domestic failure, Mr. Rove has reasoned, than to turn everyone’s eyes to a place elsewhere? Thus, a second reason for taking on Iraq is that an American invasion will deflect attention from problems at home.

When America goes to war, each day’s news will be dominated by dispatches from the front. Plumes of smoke rising from a bombing sortie make compelling television. Images of the destruction wrought by American military might should squeeze news of factory shut-downs and mass layoffs off the television screens. With American tanks, flags waving from their turrets, emblazoning the front page of every newspaper, news of the sinking dollar and reports of budget crises in the fifty states will be relegated to the inner pages. If there is room for such stories at all, amidst the colour photos and first-person reports and self-congratulatory proclamations of victory.

Mr. Rove has an additional political motive for urging war with Iraq on the president. He knows that there is nothing like a victory to boost mightily Mr. Bush’s declining popularity. The American president’s popularity has fallen from over 90 per cent in the months following September 11, to just over or under — depending on the poll — 60 per cent today; although the figures are still quite high, there is a clear downward trend, as more and more Americans express doubts about Mr. Bush’s leadership. (Almost two-thirds of Americans will support military action against Iraq only if the United Nations and the world community approve such action: in this regard; Americans are far more diplomatic, far less unilateral, than their President.)

Mr. Rove, a brilliant if amoral tactician, foresees that wrapping the president in the American flag, surrounding him with a mantle of aggressive and successful patriotism, is highly likely to generate a wave of approval that will carry Mr. Bush — despite a failing economy — to victory when he runs for a second term as president. Mr. Rove remembers what Prime Minister Thatcher’s small war in the Falklands did to her popularity; he can well imagine what smiling US soldiers planting American flags all over Baghdad will do for Mr. Bush.

These are the primary considerations motivating American policy on Iraq. They are driving the American nation inexorably, implacably, toward launching a military offensive against Saddam Hussein in the next few weeks. Yet when all is considered, these considerations are extraordinarily petty: future profits from oil, short-term political misdirection, partisan domestic political advantage.

The smallness of the thinking in official Washington is evident when these goals are measured against the risks of war with Iraq. It is easy to enumerate those risks; the sheer fact that President Bush and his advisers pay them no heed, never even mentioning them, indicates how out of touch with reality are the policy-makers and strategists in the Bush administration. The risks? That hundreds of thousands of lives may be lost in a military campaign waged primarily from the air, in an American barrage of bombs and hail of missiles. That the entire Middle East will be destabilized and plunged into war — easy to imagine when one considers that Mr. Hussein may well respond to the first American attacks by launching missile strikes on Israel, in a gamble to win support for his nation from all over the region.

That a defensive initiative by the Iraqi Army may involve the use of either chemical or biological weapons, a possibility the United States has recently said might be met with a nuclear response. That the American display of brute power may ignite a massive increase in terrorism in the developed nations, and indeed throughout the world.

It should be acknowledged that there is one large consideration that may be motivating America policy as well, though it too derives from narrowmindedness despite the astonishing breadth of its ambition. In the post-modern world, in the era of a single superpower, a new imperial hegemony must be proclaimed, asserted, imposed. It is quite possible that the men and women in Washington see themselves as owners as well as rulers of the globe, and that military action against Iraq is their way of saying, “We own the world. We will do what we want with it.” Either possibility — the petty motives, the grandiose overreaching — is frightening. Quite likely, official Washington is driven by both. Most Americans today are frightened of what their government is about to do. They understand, as does much of the world, that Mr. Bush lacks the vision, and the sage advisers, that would seem a prerequisite for leadership of the planet’s most powerful nation.

The transport imbroglio

CALCUTTA (now Kolkata) introduced an air-conditioned underground railway system some years ago and the city fathers are extremely proud of their achievement. It wasn’t an optional cultural garnish, but something that was fundamental to the problems of that mega city.

Six weeks ago town planners in Delhi broke new ground, made a modest beginning with their metro system. Bombay, even before it emerged from the swirling mists of partition, had an extremely well planned and well executed omnibus system and an adequate surface rail network.

But in the sprawling metropolis of Karachi the town planners, perpetually faced by seething swaths of ethnic urban discontent, unfortunately have not yet been able to come to grips with the problems faced by thousands of commuters. Is this a sure sign of faltering angst, or the result of a long spiral of sublimated, unfinished plans? How one longs to have a transport system like that of Bombay, used by both patricians and plebeians.

Recently, while browsing in a bookshop I came across a delightful volume by the celebrated architect and town planner Arif Hasan. Entitled ‘Understanding Karachi,’ it is easily the best treatise I’ve read on the many problems facing this vast, sprawling, ill-planned metropolis of over 12 million people. The book is simply dripping with jewels, and unlike many forays into demographic issues which are usually set in the middle distance, ‘Understanding Karachi’ focuses on issues with an almost uncanny precision which leaves the reader spellbound.

The chapter, which I found the most absorbing, was the one on transport, which is not only a mine of information, but also shatters many of the preconceived notions that people might have had about how transport is managed in Karachi. The Karachi schoolboy of the 1950s still remembers, with a touch of nostalgia, how he travelled for a sixteenth of a rupee, from Empress Market to Keamari, in one of those delightful little single-bogey trams that trundled along their metal veins, at fifteen miles an hour, at a time when nobody appeared to be in a hurry. The Karachi schoolboy of fifty years later, is travelling in a much faster vehicle, but it is doubtful if he is looking forward to his next ride.

In 2002 Karachi apparently had 14,854 intra-city buses, all owned by private operators. Additionally, there were 513 inter-city buses, 13,613 taxis and 23,337 rickshaws plying the streets. Seventy-two per cent of all commuters using buses travel by Karachi’s 8,773 minibuses of which 3,800 were operating without route permits. This is because a ban had been placed on their operation in 1986 after a college girl had been run over by a minibus which led to severe student riots.

The government was anxious to replace the minibuses, referred to in local jargon as ‘wagons’, by large buses. But here they hit a hidden reef. Minibuses, which cost around a million rupees, are owned by individuals who are migrants from the northern part of the country. Finance is provided by twenty money lenders who invariably belong to the same area and who, in 14 years, have advanced six billion rupees for purchasing 6,350 buses.

Now, here’s the catch. The man who buys a minibus has to pay back the loan in monthly instalments, spread over a period of three to four years. If the owner defaults in a payment, the money lender takes back the bus and the earlier payments are forfeited. At all times ownership papers remain with the money lenders. They have good relations with the police and therefore the drivers of the vehicles can violate traffic rules and regulations with impunity. The larger buses cost far too much and their owners would not be able to compete with the minibuses in fares.

There is a lot wrong with the minibus. Getting on and off requires a certain ingenuity and wastes a lot of time. The design of the bus is inappropriate and uncomfortable. A commuter cannot stand erect under the low roof and the standing space is two narrow for comfort, and often arrives at his destination dishevelled and dirty. However, in defence of the yellow devils as they are often disapprovingly called, it must be said that they are relatively inexpensive and seldom charge more than seven rupees for a long journey. They travel to normally inaccessible kutchi abadis and villages that form a loose necklace around the city, often on unmetalled roads in a deplorable state.

Repeated requests by the Minibus Drivers Association to the government to construct proper transport terminals, workshops and depots have fallen on deaf ears. According to Arif Hasan, a minibus owner ends up paying an average of 3,000 rupees a month as bhatta to the police and other agencies so that he can continue to operate and use the roads for establishing depots and workshops, resulting in traffic jams and large-scale environmental degradation.

In other words, minibuses alone contribute around 26.5 million rupees every month to government agencies, while inter-city bus owners fork out an additional 13 million rupees. One wonders whether the bribe to the police was included by the governor of Sindh when he affirmed the government’s determination to put an end to the payment of bhatta.

Karachi’s traffic is the main cause of air and noise pollution in the city. Noise levels in central Karachi are between 72 and 110 decibels, in which the ubiquitous three-wheeler rickshaw, with its exhaust muffler removed, making the largest contribution. The more significant problem, however, is the air pollution caused by traffic.

School children in the Saddar area have to inhale lead levels of 0.38 mg/l. This ought to be a cause for serious concern to parents of children whose schools are located near Empress Market. Traffic policemen, on duty at a traffic crossing have, on average, lead levels of 0.45 mg/l in their bloodstream. There was a time when they were supplied with crude masks. But even these devices have disappeared.

For quite some time town planners, professionals and editorial writers have been aware of the fact that the current haphazard, unregulated bus system that operates in Karachi, cannot be the permanent answer to the problems of commuters. There is a desperate need to introduce something different. One suggestion that was prepared by World Bank consultants as part of the Karachi Development Plan 2000, was a mass transit system which envisaged six corridors of elevated transit ways on the major corridors of movement in Karachi.

The Urban Resource Centre and citizens’ groups opposed the plan, especially as some of the corridors were to run parallel to the now disused circular railway. Subsequent changes were made and the number of corridors was cut down to three, which included the circular railway. Bids on a BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) basis were invited for all three corridors, and an agreement was finally reached for the construction of priority Corridor One with a Canadian-Pakistani joint venture company, details of which are still being sorted out.

Many professionals have expressed serious concerns about the proposed Corridor One, and, in fact, about the proposed World Bank financed mass transit system in general, because of the high cost of travel involved for the commuters. One argument that has been advanced is that people who will travel do not necessarily live near the corridor so that they would need feeder bus services to reach their destinations, and the experiences of Cairo and Manila have not been happy ones.

Another is that there is really no guarantee that the other corridors will be subsequently constructed. Funds for projects in Pakistan have a mysterious way of finishing half way through, or being siphoned off partly into the pockets of unscrupulous officials and contractors.

And the third, which is a truly compelling one, is that the construction of the corridors will block from view many of the historical buildings that still give Karachi its particular charm. What is wrong with using what one already has — expanding and improving on it — like the circular railway constructed in 1962? At times it pays to think small.

Proposals for a light rail mass transit system surfaced in 1973. The 1977 plan envisaged the development of a circular railway with branch lines into the suburbs like a system of arteries. In addition, there was to be a part-subterranean, part-elevated spine that bisected the circle. This way, Saddar and other residential areas would have been linked to the commercial centres. The plan was shelved, but any sensible person will realize that the time has come for doing a little rethinking. The rehabilitation of the circular railway and the main line corridor as a rail system should be the government’s first priority. There is really no other way.

Email: a-mooraj@cyber.net.pk

The wrong question

US Secretary of State Colin Powell did a good job at the United Nations last week of laying out the evidence that Saddam Hussein has kept some of the chemical and biological weapons that he had before the Gulf War of 1990-91, and maybe even made more since then. If you doubted it before, then you shouldn’t doubt it any more. But it was the right answer to the wrong question.

Saddam should be forced to comply with his obligations and destroy all those weapons, but if you are planning to launch a war next month that will probably snuff out tens of thousands of lives, then you have to answer a different question. Is there a big enough risk that Saddam will use those weapons himself in the near future, or give them to terrorists to use, to justify pulling the inspectors out and killing all those people now?

No, there is not. Saddam Hussein has had these weapons for at least twenty years, and he hasn’t given them to anyone in all that time. And why would terrorists need to get these weapons from Iraq anyway, when they could just steal their poison gas from the huge, poorly guarded stocks in Russia (secured, in some cases, with bicycle padlocks) — or mix them up in the kitchen sink like the Aum Shinrikyo cult did for its attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995?

Besides, Saddam Hussein is no friend of Al Qaeda. He is the kind of Arab leader the Islamists hate most: a secular, westernising socialist who liberates women and makes deals with the West. Osama bin Laden says he is an ‘infidel’ and has been calling for his overthrow for years.

But, says Mr Bush, he’s a mad, expansionist dictator, a mini-Hitler who wants to overrun the Middle East and will stop at nothing. We must not appease him by waiting three months (always the Munich analogies). We have to take him down now.

Saddam is a thoroughly nasty dictator, but he is neither mad nor expansionist. In fact, if you were looking for a European parallel to Saddam Hussein’s regime, it would be something like Nicolae Ceasescu’s long reign in Communist Romania — except that Ceasescu, safely contained within the Soviet bloc, never had a war with his neighbours.

Saddam Hussein, who is 66 this year, comes from the Arab generation that believed in modernisation through revolutionary socialism on the Eastern European model. During the 1970s he behaved like a classic communist leader, eliminating his rivals but taking the task of raising people’s living standards quite seriously. With abundant oil revenues available, he built an Iraq where most people had decent jobs, the children were all in school, and women were freer than anywhere else in the Arab world. Then came the war with Iran, and everything went wrong.

Saddam always dreamed of becoming the hero-leader of the Arab world on the model of Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, which is why he had a nuclear weapons programme. (The first Arab leader to acquire a deterrent against Israel’s nuclear monopoly automatically becomes an Arab hero.) He never showed any desire to conquer his neighbours, but Iraq did have territorial disputes with Iran and Kuwait, both dating back to before he was born — and he did not manage them well.

He signed a treaty with Iran in 1975 settling the dispute over the Iraq-Iran border, but it unravelled after the Shah was overthrown in 1978, and the new Islamic government of Ayatollah Khomeini began inciting the majority of Iraqi Arabs who share Iran’s Shia religious heritage to throw off Saddam’s godless socialist rule. In the great blunder of his life, Saddam went to war with Iran in 1980. Iranians outnumber Iraqis three-to-one, and without huge amounts of US aid and those chemical weapons we keep hearing about (which the Reagan administration knew all about), he would not have survived.

Iraq emerged from that war in 1988 with hundreds of thousands dead, the welfare state in ruins — and $60 billion in debt to its Gulf Arab neighbours. Saddam asked them to cancel the debt, since Iraq’s sacrifices had ‘saved’ them from revolutionary Iran. When they refused, he invaded Kuwait (which all the rulers of independent Iraq have claimed as part of Iraq) in August, 1990. He thought he had cleared this with his American allies, but neither party understood what the other was saying in his famous conversation with the US ambassador in Baghdad.

When Saddam Hussein contacted President George H.W. Bush four days after the invasion and offered the US unlimited Kuwaiti oil at one-third of world market price in return for a deal on Kuwaiti sovereignty, Bush senior coldly ordered him out of Kuwait. He refused, the Gulf war followed, and he has been under UN sanctions ever since, clinging to power in the ruins of the country he once raised to prosperity. He has been a disaster for Iraq, but he is not the new Hitler. He is not even a visceral anti-American, though US-Iraqi relations have been bitterly hostile since 1990.

So the right questions are: is Saddam likely to give chemical or biological weapons to the Islamist terrorists he loathes this month or next, when he has not done so in the past twenty years? If not, why do we need a war with Iraq now that will kill a great many people with old-fashioned high explosives? —Copyright

Axis of Friends

Not only do we have to worry about an “Axis of Evil,” but now we also have to worry about an “Axis of Friends.”

What Axis of Friends are we talking about? I asked Foggy Big Bottom, the leading watcher of Axis allies at the State Department.

“The president is talking about the French, the Germans, the Russians and the Chinese.”

“That’s more countries than the Axis of Evil,” I said.

“It’s easy to know who your enemies are,” said Big Bottom. “Your friends keep changing from day to day.”

“I imagine the French are on the top of the list.”

“On and off. They always have been. They like to come from a different place than we do. In diplomatic terms, they are a pain in the Axis.”

“I heard Don Rumsfeld say that — diplomatically, of course.”

“We think they are more interested in Iraq’s oil than in overthrowing Saddam, and they think we’re more interested in overthrowing Saddam than in getting Iraq’s oil.”

“You are not thinking of boycotting French perfume unilaterally?”

“We are not ruling it out. We would also embargo French toast and French-fried potatoes.”

“That might bring them to their knees.”

“The president says this will be France’s last chance. If they vote against us in the Security Council, Christian Dior will be carpet-bombed.”

“What about Germany? They are one of the leading members of the Axis of Friends.”

“With the Germans it’s personal. They are more worried about their elections than they are about Saddam Hussein. The German Chancellor has said many times, ‘We didn’t lose a war to do everything the United States wants us to do.’ They are very much in bed with the French. At the same time, they want to sell their Mercedes to the Arab world.”

I said, “Another member of the Axis is Russia.”

“They don’t like Saddam any more than the other Allies, but they have a problem of their own. They have to keep the price of oil up. This means Putin is afraid that any move on the part of the US will cause an oil glut and the Russian economy will collapse.” “I don’t understand that,” I said.

“Neither do we, but we have to play nice with the Russians because they still have a lot of nuclear weapons to sell to the world.”

“Speaking of nuclear weapons, is Pakistan a member of the Axis of Evil or the Axis of Friends, since it sold North Korea weapons of mass destruction?”

“We have to pretend it didn’t happen because we need Pakistan’s help in the war in Afghanistan.”

“Lately everyone in the White House seems to consider the UN part of the Axis of Friends.”

“We have to pretend they want to blow up Saddam, but if the UN asks for more time, we will probably go it alone.”

“What about Yemen?”

“That’s not my department.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

A monument to hypocrisy

IT HAS finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news. I’ve told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what “the country” is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits.

Colin Powell’s UN speech, designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN into going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in moral hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld’s lectures in Munich this past weekend went the bumbling Powell one further, in unctuous sermonizing and bullying derision.

For the moment, I shall discount George Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with God, or if not God, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state and defence seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their words and activities.

First, a few preliminaries. The US has clearly decided on war: there seems to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take place or not (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states who, as usual, seem to dither and be paralyzed at the same time, but by France, Russia and Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless, to have transported 200,000 troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, leaving aside smaller deployments in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean only one thing.

Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are chicken hawks, that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that entirely civilian group were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam war, yet each of them got a deferment based on privilege, and, therefore, never fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, anti-democratic in the extreme. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to its neighbours. Any argument to the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. With a few outdated Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and biological material, most of it supplied by the US in earlier days (as Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was sold to Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, containable, though at unconscionable immoral cost to the long-suffering civilian population. For this terrible state of affairs I think it is absolutely true to say that there has been collusion between the Iraqi regime and the western enforcers of the sanctions.

Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change — a process already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs of this country — there is simply no end in sight. Isn’t it outrageous that people of such a dubious calibre actually go on blathering about bringing democracy, modernization, and liberalization to the Middle East? It is particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have been an election adviser to Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government during the period 1996-99, in which he counselled the renegade Israeli to scrap any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East.

Fourth, Colin Powell’s speech (at the Security Council on Feb 5), despite its many weaknesses, its plagiarized and manufactured evidence, its confected audio-tapes and its doctored pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein’s regime has violated numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical about the official US position is that literally everything Powell has accused the Baathis of has been the stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967.

Torture, illegal detention, assassination, assaults against civilians with missiles, helicopters and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, mass killing (as in Cana, Jenin, Sabra and Chatila to mention only the most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians for human shields, humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlement, economic pauperization, attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses.

All these, it should be noted with emphasis, have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the US which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has given the country upwards of 135 billion dollars in economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the US government on its own citizens.

This is an unconscionable record to hold against the US and Mr Powell as its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of US foreign policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this country, and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of freedom — the proclaimed central plank in the US’s foreign policy since at least 1976 — is applied uniformly, without exception or condition. How he and his bosses and co-workers can stand up before the world and righteously sermonize against Iraq while, at the same time, completely ignoring the on-going American partnership in human rights abuses with Israel defies credibility.

The Palestinian territories today are witnessing the onset of a mass famine; there is a health crisis of catastrophic proportions; there is a daily civilian death toll that totals at least a dozen to twenty people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move about as curfews and at least 300 barricades impede their daily lives; houses are blown up or bulldozed on a mass basis (60 on February 10). And all of it with US equipment, US political support, US finances.

Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard, is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinians lives that have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has the gall to say that he acts in God’s name, and that he (and his administration) act to serve “a just and faithful God.” But so craven and so ineffective are the Arab regimes today that they don’t dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need US economic aid. Many of them fear their own people and need US support to prop up their regimes. So they say nothing, and just hope and pray that the war will pass, while in the end keeping them in power as they are.

But it is also a great and noble fact that for the first time since World War II, there are mass protests against the war taking place before rather than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and should become the central political fact of the new, globalized era into which our world has been thrust by the US and its superpower status. What this demonstrates is that despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and his American antagonists, despite the complicity of a mass media that has (willingly or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, despite the indifference and ignorance of a great many people, mass action and mass protests on the basis of human community and human sustainability are still formidable tools of human resistance.

Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. But that they have at least tampered with the plans of the Washington chicken hawks and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of religious monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to lecture or speak out against these injustices I haven’t found anyone in support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to US action in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan and everywhere in the Arab world.

We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White House has openly announced will include three to five hundred Cruise missiles a day (800 of them during the first 48 hours of the war) raining down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce “shock and awe”, or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its boastful planner a certain Mr. (or is it Dr.?) Harlan Ullman has said, a Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991 Gulf war after 41 days of bombing Iraq this scale of human devastation was not even approached. And the US has 6,000 “smart” missiles ready to do the job.

These are questions I won’t even try to answer. But I do know that if anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth, it would be a criminal act. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the war and praise George Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in the name of God?—Copyright 2003, Edward W. Said