Discontented Soul

British raconteur and poet, Rudyard Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden in 1899, ironically to encourage US imperialism in the Philippines. The xenophobia inherent in Australians was strengthened by the philosophy expressed in this poem … it still is, if one can take our current Prime Minister and Foreign Minister as exemplars.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer spoke in Kipling’s voice when he admonished the Filipino government for withdrawing troops from Iraq back in August … now Prime Mister John Howard is on the same track with his arrogant refusal to guarantee South East Asian Nations that Australia will not launch a pre-emptive attack into their territories.

“We're sick and tired of those funny brown and yellow people passing judgement on US. We're not going to let them tell us what to do!”

___________

Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to naught.

Take up the White Man's burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man's burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

by Dahr Jamail in Iraq

Abu Talat calls me, frantic. The deafening roar of hundreds of people in a confined area yelling, "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) reverberate behind his panicked voice.
"I am being held at gunpoint by American soldiers inside
Abu Hanifa mosque Dahr," he yells, "Everyone is praying to God because the Americans are raiding our mosque during Friday prayer!"
He makes short calls, updating me on the atrocity. After a few sentences of information he hangs up because he is trapped inside the mosque and trying to let me know what is happening. Being Friday, the day of prayer and holiday, this was supposed to be an off day for us.
I just finish typing what he told me before he calls back.

"They have shot and killed at least 4 of the people while they were praying, and at least 20 are wounded now! I cannot believe this! I can't let them see me calling you. I am on my stomach now and they have our guns on everyone ... there are at least 1,500 people inside the mosque and it is sealed. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation."
Several Humvees and Iraqi National Guard (ING) vehicles showed up and 50 soldiers and well over 50 ING sealed and entered the mosque with the goal of detaining the Imam, Sheikh Muayid al-Adhami.
Abu Talat calls back, "We were here praying and now there are over 50 here with their guns on us," he said. "They are holding our heads to the ground, and everyone is in chaos. This is the worst situation possible. They cannot see me talking to you. They are roughing up a
blind man now."
The soldiers eventually released women and children along with men who were related to them. Abu Talat was only released because a boy approached him and told him to pretend to be his father.
Shortly thereafter he phones me from his home in tears.
"Dahr, I cannot believe what has happened." - pausing to collect himself - "I will go back to see what is happening now."
I urge him not to go, but he insists.
"This is my mosque and my people. I must go see what is happening to them."
It is now 2:15pm and the mosque is still sealed. We begin to interview people he is with via the mobile as he describes the scene.
"People were praying and the Americans invaded the mosque," Abdullah Ra'ad Aziz said, who had been released along with his wife and children. "Why are they killing people for praying? After the forces entered they went to the back doors and we heard so many bullets of the guns. There were wounded and dead, I saw them myself."
Some of the people who had been at prayer were ordered by soldiers to carry the dead and wounded out of the mosque.
"One Iraqi National Guardsmen held his gun on people and yelled, 'I will kill you if you don't shut up'," said Rana Aziz, a mother who had been trapped in the mosque. She was now waiting outside for her brother, who was still inside.
She said someone asked the soldiers if they would were hostages. "A soldier yelled at everyone to 'Shut the Fuck Up," she said. Suddenly, she laughed amid her tears. "The Americans have learned how to say shut up in Arabic, 'Inchev'."
Hammad Mohammed, a 20 year-old man, said, "My uncle's coffin was taken inside the mosque to be prayed on, and the Americans raided the mosque and went to the Imams' room. Then they went to the back doors and we heard so many bullets of the guns - it was a gun bigger than a Kalashnikov. There were wounded and dead, as I saw them myself. I saw 4 killed and 9 wounded."

Abu Talat then breaks the interview and tells me, "Doctors and staff are standing outside but the Americans refuse to let them inside. They can do nothing, and the Americans are not letting
them inside while there are wounded people inside the mosque."
Just like in Fallujah, soldiers denied Iraqi Red Crescent ambulances and medical teams access to the mosque. As doctors negotiated with U.S. soldiers outside, more gunfire was heard from inside the mosque.
About 30 men were led out with hoods over their heads and their hands tied behind them. Soldiers loaded them into a military vehicle and took them away around 3.15 pm.
A doctor with the Iraqi Red Crescent confirmed four dead and nine wounded worshippers. Pieces of brain were splattered on one of the walls inside the mosque while large blood stains covered carpets in several places.
Later Abu Talat comes to my hotel to see me. He is distraught, crying while he recounts the story. After listening to the tape he recorded inside the mosque during the atrocity, he says. "I am in a very sad position. I do not see any freedom or any democracy. If this could lead into a freedom, it is a freedom with blood. It is a freedom of emotions of sadness. It is a freedom of killing. You cannot gain democracy through blood or killing. You do not find the freedom that way.People are going to pray to God and they were killed and wounded. There were 1,500 people praying to God and they went on a holiday were people go every Friday for prayers. And they were shot and killed. There were so many women and kids lying on the ground. This is not democracy, neither freedom."
After several weeks of relative calm in Adhamiya, the detention of the Imam of Abu Hanifa and killing of worshippers inside their mosque is sure to ignite the fires of revenge in this area, which
is already known as the Fallujah of Baghdad.

Making Sense of Saddam Hussein's 'Exit Strategy'
by Barry Levinson
Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by the Baltimore Sun

As President Bush purges the CIA and the State Department of any who may disagree with his views on foreign policy, the reasons for the Iraq war will drift further into obscurity and the one great question regarding the war will never be analysed, scrutinized or discussed openly: How did Saddam Hussein end up in a hole in the ground with a rug and a fan? How is that possible? How could anything so absurd happen?
This question may very well hold the key to all that has happened in Iraq...

Stenographers to Power
by John Nichols
Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by The Nation

The best question asked in the aftermath of the 2004 US election came from a British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, which inquired over a picture of George W. Bush, "How can 59,054,087 be so dumb?
Now, another British newspaper has answered the question. A new marketing campaign for The Weekly Guardian, one of the most respected publications in the world, features images of a dancing Bush and notes that, "Many US citizens think the world backed the war in Iraq. Maybe it's the papers they're reading."...

Ever had the feeling that you're beimg conned?
In the brave new world of [Prime Minister] John Howard's globalized and privatized Australia, one's Union is not allowed to do one's "workplace bargaining," but can only "come to the bargaining table" as an "adviser"!
This is so flimsy as to be transparent! Surely "Management" must think we are very dumb not to realise that reducing the Union to the status of an "adviser" lessens the likelihood of a "Certified Agreement", negotiated by/on behalf of a GROUP of employees, and paves the way for "Australian Workplace Agreements", ie individual contracts, with their attendant subtle and not-so-subtle pressures.
As I understand the legislation, groups of employees, as well as individual employees, can choose a "bargaining agent" to negotiate for them. What happen, then, when an overwhelming percentage of staff in a workplace ask that the Union REPRESENT them in negotiations - which I understand to mean "NEGOTIATE ON THEIR BEHALF? What happened to "what the staff want"? What happened to "Industrial Democracy"?
Doubtless, we will be told that "Industrial Democracy" is a "privilege" not a right, and that it's a "management prerogative" to suspend Industrial Democracy when it doesn't suit!! Oops, sorry, I forgot - "Industrial Democracy" was initiated by the trendy, bleeding-heart lefties of the LAST government, and under the new Public Service "Code of Conduct", one is only expected to give one's loyalty to the "Government of the Day", not to any concept of "the public interest" or "human rights"!
On a more distant and meditative note, I often wonder what the "new breed" of Public Service "Managers" will do when a government of a different IDEOLOGICAL stripe comes to office. What will happen to the current bag of Thatcherite vampires, who, like their furry namesakes, "downsize" copiously onto those below them? Will they:
a) develop a conscience and fall on their swords?;

b) flee to the Elysian Fields of the "private sector"?; or
c) simply reverse their coats, adopt the "Nuremburg defence" and re-emerge as "one of the workers - just like youse"?
The first result, a "National Sorry Day" to those they have thrown onto the scrapheap and a public self-immolation, is unlikely, seeing that the managers will then have to give up their six-room "apartments" in Braddon, Paddington, Albert Park, and other "genteel" but not-quite-top-of the-heap areas. The second outcome, accepting lucrative "packages" in private enterprise, will suit some, since they can slash and burn with their customary maniacal glee, and, like hunting dogs, who get an extra ration for being first to sink teeth into the 'roo, receive "bonuses" for their "efficiency initiatives".
However the most probable result is the third, and the one that they will probably get away with - after all, most Australians understand that a man can play for the Raiders this week and turn around and, with equal "commitment", play for the Broncos next week! [These are two Rugby League teams in Australia] And "life's just like sport, anyway", isn't it?

The Optimism of Uncertainty
by Howard Zinn
Published on Monday, November 8, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

From an excerpt of Paul Rogat Loeb's book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While":

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate-in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. The United States and the Soviet Union soon each had enough thermonuclear bombs to devastate the Earth several times over. The international scene was dominated by their rivalry, and it was supposed that all affairs, in every nation, were affected by their looming presence. Yet the most striking fact about these superpowers was that, despite their size, their wealth, their overwhelming accumulation of nuclear weapons, they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population.
The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducted the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In Latin America, after a long history of U.S. military intervention having its way again and again, this superpower, with all its wealth and weapons, found itself frustrated. It was unable to prevent a revolution in Cuba, and the Latin American dictatorships that the United States supported from Chile to Argentina to El Salvador have fallen. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.
Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervour, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself.
No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of each other's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain.
I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement. It is this change in consciousness that encourages me. Granted, racial hatred and sex discrimination are still with us, war and violence still poison our culture, we have a large underclass of poor, desperate people, and there is a hard core of the population content with the way things are, afraid of change. But if we see only that, we have lost historical perspective, and then it is as if we were born yesterday and we know only the depressing stories in this morning's newspapers, this evening's television reports.
Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing scepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act. Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society.
We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfilment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.

Learning from Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Loss of Historical Memory?
by David B. Willis and Walter W. Enloe

Published on Monday, November 22, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

The news from Washington this past week had eerie echoes of the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Now that George Bush has been re-elected President what might we anticipate as future scenarios? If the doctrine of pre-emption is followed the next conflict is likely to go nuclear...

The Christian attitude to homosexuality never ceases to amuse me. The ban on bonking members of one’s own sex (Leviticus 18) occurs only seven chapters from the prohibition on the flesh of swine (Leviticus 11).
Are we to assume that the god of the Christians has had a dose of amnesia when it comes to roast pork lunch on Sunday, but is still breathing fire about what people do in bed?
What happened to Jesus’ dictum that “not one jot or tittle of The Law” — which Jesus the Jew would have understood to encompass ALL of the first five books of the bible — “shall pass away”?
Another amusing seachange lies in the fact that when WE went to Sunday school, we were told that the purpose of The Law was to stop us acting like animals — now we are told that because the male/female bond occurs among animals, we must follow it.

Fallujah 101: A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying
by Rashid Khalidi

There is a small City on one of the bends of the Euphrates that sticks out into the great Syrian Desert. It's on an ancient trade route linking the oasis towns of the Nejd province of what is today Saudi Arabia with the great cities of Aleppo and Mosul to the north. It also is on the desert highway between Baghdad and Amman. This city is a crossroads.
For millennia people have been going up and down that north-south desert highway. The city is like a seaport on that great desert, a place that binds together people in what are today Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. People in the city are linked by tribe, family or marriage to people in all these places.
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi Arabia in the late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi Ideas — those of a man named Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab — took root in this city more than 200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where what we would call fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been well implanted for 10 generations.
This town also is the place where in the spring of 1920, before TE Lawrence wrote the above passage, the British discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer who had quelled unrest in the corners of their empire, Lt. Col. Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of Iraq. Leachman was killed in an altercation with a local leader named Shaykh Dhari. His death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives of 10,000 Iraqis and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To restore Iraq to their control, the British used massive air power, bombing indiscriminately. That city is now called Fallujah.
Shaykh Dhari's grandson, today a prominent Iraqi cleric, helped to broker the end of the US Marine siege of Fallujah in April of this year. Fallujah thus embodies the interrelated tribal, religious and national aspects of Iraq's history.
The Bush administration is not creating the world anew in the Middle East. It is waging a war in a place where history really matters.
A change for the worse
The United States has been a major Middle Eastern power since 1933, when a group of US oil companies signed an exploration deal with Saudi Arabia. The United States has been dominant in the Middle East since 1942, when American troops first landed in North Africa and Iran. American troops have not left the region since. In other words, they have been in different parts of the Middle East for 62 years.
The United States was once celebrated as a non-colonial, sometimes anti-colonial, power in the Middle East, renowned for more than a century for its educational, medical and charity efforts. Since the Cold War, however, the United States has intervened increasingly in the region's internal affairs and conflicts. Things have changed fundamentally for the worse with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, particularly with the revelation that the core pretexts offered by the administration for the invasion were false. And particularly with growing Iraqi dissatisfaction with the occupation and with the images of the hellish chaos broadcast regularly everywhere in the world except in the United States — thanks to the excellent job done by the media in keeping the real human costs of Iraq off our television screens.
The United States is perceived as stepping into the boots of Western colonial occupiers, still bitterly remembered from Morocco to Iran. The Bush administration marched into Iraq proclaiming the very best of intentions while stubbornly refusing to understand that in the eyes of most Iraqis and most others in the Middle East it is actions, not proclaimed intentions, that count. It does not matter what you say you are doing in Fallujah, where US troops just launched an attack after weeks of bombing. What matters is what you are doing in Fallujah — and what people see that you are doing.
Fact-free and faith-based
Most Middle East experts in the United States, both inside and outside the government, have drawn on their knowledge of the cultures, languages, history, politics of the Middle East — and on their experience — to conclude that most Bush administration Middle East policies, whether in Iraq or Palestine, are harmful to the interests of the United States and the peoples of this region. A few of these experts have had the temerity to say so, to the outrage of the Bush administration and its supporters, who are committed to what I would call a fact-free, faith-based approach to Middle East policymaking.
These experts predicted that it would be difficult to occupy a vast, complex country like Iraq, that serious resistance from a major part of the population was likely, and that the invasion and occupation would complicate US relations with other countries in the region. It is clear today that all of these fears were well founded.
After 20 months of occupation, the United States continues to make the important decisions in Iraq. Instead of control being exercised through the Coalition Provisional Authority, it takes place through the largest US embassy in the world and its staff of more than 3,000. You can be sure that should the Iraqis try to end the basing of US troops, or try to tear up the contracts with Halliburton and other US companies, or take any other steps that displease the Bush administration, they would be brought up short by the US viceroy, aka Ambassador John Negroponte.
We, and even more so the Iraqi government and its people, are trapped in a nightmare with no apparent end, in part because those experts who challenged neoconservative fantasies about US troops being received with rice and flowers simply were not heeded. They warned that it is impossible to impose democracy through force in Iraq. Mao Zedong said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun; he did not say democracy does. And it doesn't.
The stench of hypocrisy rises when the United States, a nation supposedly committed to democratization and reform, does not hesitate to embrace dictatorial, autocratic and undemocratic regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and now even Libya, simply because they act in line with US security concerns or give lucrative contracts to US businesses. The United States claims to be acting in favour of democracy, yet embraces Qaddhafi! People in the Middle East notice this gap between word and deed — even if Americans don't notice the things being done in our name.
The United States, in fact, has a far from sterling record in promoting democracy in the Middle East. Initially it started off on a better footing. It opposed colonial rule and promoted self-determination, as in President Wilson's Fourteen Points after World War I. But when the United States returned to the Middle East after World War II, it soon supported anti-democratic regimes simply because they provided access to oil and military bases.
If you look carefully, what the Bush administration seems to mean by democracy in the Middle East is governments that do what the United States wants.
Conquer and plunder
Middle Eastern economics is another area about which we hear very little in our media. Americans may not be aware of it, but the wholesale theft of the property of the Iraqi people through privatization was prominently reported all over the Middle East. A recent case involved the handover of Iraqi Airways to an investor group headed by a family with close ties to the Saddam Hussein regime. The airline is worth $3 billion, because in addition to valuable landing slots all over Europe and a few tattered airplanes, Iraqi Airways owns the land on which most of the airports are built.
Such cases, and there are many, cause deep anger against the United States, and evoke bitter resistance to pressures for economic liberalization that people in the region interpret as the looting of their country's assets.
These privatization measures arouse deep suspicion in the Middle East, because of fears that the region's primary asset, oil, may be next.
Here, too, history is all-important. Since commercial quantities of oil were discovered in the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century, decisions over pricing, control and ownership of these valuable resources were largely in the hands of giant Western oil companies. They decided prices. They decided how much in taxes they would pay. They decided who controlled the local governments. They decided how much oil would be produced. And they decided everything else about oil, including conditions of exploration, production and labour.
In those seven decades the people of the countries where this wealth was located obtained few benefits from it. Only with the rise of OPEC and the nationalization of the Middle East oil industries and the oil price rises in the '70s did the situation change. Sadly, it was the oligarchs, the kleptocrats and Western companies that benefited most from the increased prices.
Fears that they will lose their resources shape much of the nationalism of the peoples of the Middle East. And events in Iraq only enhance these fears.
By invading, occupying and imposing a new regime on Iraq, the United States may be following, intentionally or not, in the footsteps of the old Western colonial powers — and doing so in a region that within living memory ended a lengthy struggle to expel colonial occupations. They fought from 1830 to 1962 to kick out the French from Algeria. From 1882 to 1956 they fought to get the British out of Egypt. That's within the lifetime of every person over 45 in the Middle East. Foreign troops on their soil against their will is deeply familiar.

After Arafat: The Same Old Song
by Sam Bahour and Michael Dahan

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Yasser Arafat's coffin had barely touched the ground in Ramallah when George W. Bush and Tony Blair, seemingly jovial over Arafat's passing, offered yet another nonstarter for moving the Middle East from its never-ending peace process to a "lasting peace."
The substance of the Bush-Blair statement on Nov. 12 was nothing more than a feeble attempt to fool the Palestinians yet again...

Fallujah: Shock and Awe
by Ken Coates
Published on Friday, November 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

It was on April 26th 1937 that the name of Guernica was immortalized. A little town, home to 7000 people, Guernica was the local market place for a cluster of hill villages. It straddled a valley only ten kilometers from the sea, and thirty from Bilbao. It was a cultural center for the Basque country, with a hallowed oak tree upon which for centuries the public power in Spain has been obliged recurrently to affirm an oath to respect the rights of the Basque people.
April 26th was a Monday, market day. It went ahead peaceably, although the Civil War was raging thirty kilometers away. The air raid was not announced (by an urgent call from the Church bells) until half past four in the afternoon. Ten minutes later Heinkels arrived, scattering their bombs across the town, and then machine gunning the streets. Following the Heinkels came the Junkers. The German Air Force was celebrating a major practice run. When the people ran away, they, too, were machine-gunned. One thousand six hundred and fifty-four people were killed, and eight hundred and eighty-nine were wounded. The town center was destroyed, and Europe received its first baptism of aerial bombardment on a modern scale...

War and Peas - This Thanksgiving, America Should Show a Little Humility
by Roger Doiron

Published on Friday, November 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

"And also that we may beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions..."- George Washington, from the 1789 proclamation establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday
Peace and peas. Many Americans will be praying for one this week and getting the other instead. My guess is that few in America's current political leadership will even silently ask for the divine national pardon envisaged by Washington in the original Thanksgiving proclamation. And that's precisely why peace isn't currently on the American menu and won't be for some time.
So what should America be asking forgiveness for? Well, there are a number of things that come to mind all of which fall under a single catchphrase: ignorance at home, arrogance abroad...

Our Moral Values
by George Lakoff
To be published in the December 6, 2004 issue of The Nation

We are the 55 million progressives who came together in this election, voted for Kerry and rejected the Bush agenda.
We came together because of our moral values: care and responsibility, fairness and equality, freedom and courage, fulfillment in life, opportunity and community, cooperation and trust, honesty and openness. We united behind political principles: equality, equity (if you work for a living, you should earn a living) and government for the people - all the people.
These are traditional American values and principles, what we are proudest of in this country. The Democrats' failure was a failure to put forth our moral vision, celebrate our values and principles, and shout them out loud.
We must immediately convince our leaders to unite behind these values, express our common moral vision and hold the line against the Bush agenda because it is immoral! Bush will call them obstructionists. They must frame themselves as heading in the right direction, going forward not backward, defending the greatest of American ideals and moral principles, working against a radical right agenda that would lead our country to disaster and speaking for more than 55 million highly moral, patriotic Americans.
If we communicate our values clearly, most people will recognize them as their own, personally more authentic and more deeply American than those put forth by conservatives. At the very least they will see progressives as having deeply held, traditional American principles. This would be a huge step forward from the present state, in which conservatives are seen as having a monopoly on "values" and progressives are framed as the party of "if it feels good, do it," with no higher principles.
Moral values at the national level are idealized family values projected onto the nation. Progressive values are the values of a responsible nurturant family, where parents (if there are two) are equally responsible. Their job is to nurture their children and raise them to be nurturers of others. Nurturance has two aspects: empathy and responsibility - both for yourself and your children. From this, all progressive values follow, both in the family and in politics.
If you empathize with your children, you will want them to have strong protection, fair and equal treatment and fulfillment in life. Fulfillment requires freedom, freedom requires opportunity and opportunity requires prosperity. Since your family lives in, and requires, a community, community building and community service are required. Community requires cooperation, which requires trust, which requires honesty and open communication. Those are the progressive values--in politics as well as family life.
Take protection. In addition to physical protection, there is environmental protection, worker protection and consumer protection, as well as all the "safety nets" - Social Security, Medicare and so on. Equality means full political and social equality, without regard to wealth, race, religion or gender. Openness requires open government and a free, inquiring press. Progressive political ideals are nurturant moral ideals.
On the other hand, the strict-father family model assumes that evil and danger will always lurk in the world, that life is difficult, that there will always be winners and losers and that children are born bad--they want to do what feels good, not what's right - and have to be made good. A strict father is needed to protect and support the family and to teach his kids right from wrong. That can be done in only one way: punishment painful enough that, to avoid it, children will learn the internal discipline necessary to be moral. That discipline can also make them prosperous if they seek their self-interest and no one interferes. Mommy isn't strong enough to protect the family and is too soft-hearted to discipline the children. That's why fathers are necessary.
Apply this, via metaphor, to the nation: We need a strong President who knows right from wrong to defend the nation. Social programs are immoral because they give people things they haven't earned and so make them undisciplined - both dependent and less able to function morally. The prosperous people are the good people. Those who are not prosperous deserve their poverty. Taxes take away the rightful rewards of the prosperous. Wrongdoers should be punished severely. Government should get out of the way of disciplined (hence good) people seeking their self-interest. The President is to be obeyed; since he knows right from wrong, his authority is legitimate and not to be questioned. In foreign policy, he is also the absolute moral authority and so needs no advice from lesser countries.
The so-called "moral issues" are affronts to strict-father morality. Strict-father marriage cannot be gay; it must be between a man and a woman. For a wife to seek an abortion on her own or a daughter to need one is an affront to strict-father control over the behavior of the women in his family. They are not the main moral issues in themselves; rather they are symbolic of the entire strict-father identity as applied to all spheres of life. That's why they are so powerful for conservatives.
Swing voters have both models - in different parts of their lives - and are unsure about which to apply to politics in a particular election. The job of a candidate is to activate his model in the swing voters. Conservatives know this: By talking to their base, they are activating their base model in swing voters. When liberals move to the right, they are shooting themselves in both feet: They alienate their base and they activate the other side's models in the swing voters, thus helping the other side.
Democrats in Congress need to understand this. They must hold their ground, be positive and be aware that moving to the right is a double disaster. It will only help the radical right's agenda, break with values that unify us and make it harder to awaken our values in swing voters.
The only way to trump their moral values is with our own more traditional and more patriotic moral values. Proclaim them and live them, and we will find that there are many more than 55 million of us.
George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics and the bestselling Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, is professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute.
© 2004 The Nation

What We Call Peace is Little Better Than Capitulation To a Corporate Coup

by Arundhati Roy

Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice. Today, it is not merely justice itself, but the idea of justice that is under attack.
The assault on vulnerable, fragile sections of society is so complete, so cruel and so clever that its sheer audacity has eroded our definition of justice. It has forced us to lower our sights, and curtail our expectations. Even among the well-intentioned, the magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of "human rights"...

Fight Against AIDS: American Realities and European Surrenders
By Khalil Elouardighi
Le Monde

Howard Leach, United States Ambassador to France, has just (November 11) published a platform piece in Le Monde's "Debate" section, entitled "America Leads the Way against AIDS". On the eve of the Global Fund against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria board meeting (November 17 in Arusha, Tanzania) and while the Fund is on the verge of bankruptcy, some specific details about the consequences of the American government's commitment against the pandemic seem indispensable.
In the United States, a large part of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) 15 billion dollars has been earmarked for prevention. However, what must immediately be set straight is that 90% of the beneficiaries of these funds are religious organizations, most usually linked to American fundamentalist churches, and that in all those cases, in order to receive those subsidies, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for sexual health in developing countries must prove that they never communicate with their patients about the possibility of abortion.
The prevention that the Bush administration finances has not a single concrete connection to what that term designates in French — promotion of condom use among youth, homosexuals, marginalized ethnic minorities, sex workers of both genders and of disposable injection supplies among drug users.
No, what the American ambassador is talking about is the "fight against addiction", infidelity, promiscuity, and prostitution — aong the strict Puritan ideological line of the public declarations by Randall Tobias, PEPFAR Director, on April 23, according to which "statistics demonstrate that the condom is not really effective," contrary to all epidemiological evidence. In Zambia, the government had to stop supplying condoms to high school students in order to qualify for the PEPFAR program.
This policy, that aims to substitute a fight against behaviour deemed deviant and against the minorities most infected for prevention material has already had the effect of reducing to naught ten or twenty years of work as fundamental as it is difficult in the countries involved.
However, even more than with prevention, the American administration reveals the clientist logic of its AIDS program in its branch devoted to treatment access.
The person the American president has named to direct this program, Randall Tobias, is no other than the former CEO of pharmaceutical giant Eli-Lilly. At the head of PEPFAR, Randall Tobias has developed strategies that aim, whether explicitly or not, to curb generic medicines. Accordingly, he has forced the World Health Organization to apply norms dictated by American industry to Indian generics — which Europe deemed abusively restrictive at the time — allowing the American propaganda machine to everywhere repeat that generics are of poor quality and to impose American firms' products.
Under the cover of health considerations, Randall Tobias masks a fundamentally protectionist motivation, to the point that PEPFAR's religious beneficiaries, through Ecumenical Pharmaceutical Network (EPN) on October 7, condemned the regulation that all generics used be approved by the American Food and Drug Administration as well as that of "buying American".
Yet George W. Bush's administration has figured out how to go even further in its support for the big laboratories by preventing these countries' recourse to generics. Hence, since the November 2001 signing of World Trade Organization agreements on the primacy of public health demands over those of intellectual property, the American government has signed bilateral agreements with Morocco and the Central America and Chilean Customs' Union that put this essential principle back into question and further limit the possibilities of recourse to generics.
At this time, Washington is in the process of negotiating similar agreements with the countries of southern Africa (including South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe), where 25% of the planet's HIV positives are concentrated.
India itself, although the main producer of generic anti-AIDS drugs, has announced that as of January 1, 2005, it will apply a certification regime as drastic as the United States'.
The United States, however, is not holding the line there and also blocks any advance at the multilateral level. Accordingly, the agreement announced August 30, 2003 to the WTO concerning the exports of generics from somewhat industrialized countries such as India and Brazil to slightly industrialized countries such as Niger or Malawi, institutes a mechanism that all NGOs from Oxfam to Act-Up, including Doctors without Borders, have denounced as deliberately inapplicable in practice (the mechanism provides, among other things, that the colour and shape of each generic must be approved by the United States before it may be considered for export).
Bush's anti-multilateralism also expresses itself in the United States' relations with the Global Fund against AIDS, on which it has just imposed a division in half of the payment rhythm (originally three cycles a year, soon to be one) with the official support of the French government, which endorses the slowing down of contributions to the Fund.
A crusade against the condom and generic medicine. Unconditional support for fundamentalist churches and pharmaceutical giants. That's what George W. Bush's program against AIDS hides.
Nonetheless the moral and commercial designs of the United States cannot be held solely responsible for the present misdirection of international arrangements against the pandemic. This policy certainly and severely strikes at fifteen years of prevention effort and five years' struggle for access to generics in southern countries. However, if the American government can so easily impose its inept policy, it's only because Jacques Chirac and his G-7 homologues place George W. Bush in the position of sole master on board the global fight against AIDS when they refuse to keep their part of the commitment (reached June 27, 2001 at the United Nations) to devote 10 billion dollars a year to that fight.
Consequently, from a financial point of view, Mr. Bush, with his three billion dollars a year for five years, is comparatively unassailable. And it must be acknowledged that PEPFAR will finance treatment access for hundreds of thousands of AIDS victims in poor countries — which no other rich country to this day is proposing to do.
Undoubtedly European countries could more easily parry a logic that is so impractical if they weren't so far removed from keeping their own promises. While Mr. Chirac may occasionally sneer at the American principles; how can one not see in the reality of French budgetary arbitration a concrete sign of surrender?

Well, everybody who works for the government can relax for the time being. Yesterday Congress sent President Bush an $800 billion boost in the federal borrowing limit. With the government facing imminent default because it has depleted its authority to borrow money, the debt limit bill would pump up the federal borrowing cap to $8.18 trillion.
To put that in perspective, that is 70 percent the size of the entire US economy, and more than $2.4 trillion higher than the debt that Bush inherited upon taking office in 2001.
Actually, the government reached the current $7.38 trillion cap last month. And I'm sure you'll be comforted to know that since then, it has been paying its bills with investments from a civil service retirement account.
If you don't think that's bizarre try this little factoid on for size ... did you know that last year the US Government spent $318 billion on interest payments on the National Debt.
Not on principle, mind you - on interest. That's nearly 17 percent of the entire budget.