Discontented Soul

The occupation and new US threats could spark neighboring uprisings
by Jawad al-Khalisi
Published on Friday, April 1, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

The US-British occupation of Iraq is poisoning all political processes in my country and across the Middle East. The elections held under the control of the occupying forces in January were neither free nor fair. Instead of being a step towards solving Iraq's problems, they have been used to prolong foreign rule over the Iraqi people.
Only when the occupiers withdraw from the country can Iraq take the first secure steps towards peace and stability. Once a strict timetable for withdrawal is set, Iraq's political forces could freely agree and set in motion a process of genuinely free and fair democratic elections, a permanent constitution, and a program that meets the demands of all the Iraqi people.
The occupying powers are now following a policy of divide and rule, encouraging sectarian and ethnic divisions and imposing them on all the institutions they have created...

© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.

'Culture of Life' is a Culture of Fear
by Ira Chernus
Published on Friday, April 1, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

The tragic case of Terri Schiavo writes a new chapter in the ongoing American saga that is often titled “the culture war.” It’s no longer just about a so-called “right to life.” The Christian right insists that it’s about a “culture of life.” They’ve been waving that slogan around for years. Now mainstream America is getting used to it. Those of us who actively oppose the Christian right had better get used it, too. We’re going to be hearing a lot about this “culture of life” from now on.
“Culture of LIFE?” we ask, with justified outrage. These same people who claim to be the guardians of life are the first to demand the death penalty for murderers, indiscriminate bombing for Afghanis, Iraqis, and anyone else they don't like, etc., etc. The hypocrisy is so blatant, it hardly seems worth spelling out the details.
When they talk about a “culture of life,” though, the right-wingers are trying to tell us that we’re missing the point. The debate is not about life, it’s about CULTURE. Everyone agrees that life is good. But the United States is split by a deep cultural divide about what makes a life good. Once we bring that divide into focus, the “culture of life” side begins to look a bit more logically consistent. And those of us who oppose them begin to see more clearly just where the lines need to be drawn.
Underneath the debate about the end of life, we find the same issue that underlies the debates about abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, and all the other hot-button social issues of the day. The basic question that ties together all these issues is one that is all too rarely addressed or even spoken: How should we acquire our moral values? It may sound like the stuff of a college philosophy course. But it’s really the stuff of the headlines about the late Terri Schiavo and all the other battlegrounds of the “culture war.”
On one side are the religious and social (no, they aren’t all religious) conservatives who wave the “culture of life” banner. Basically, they are people who are afraid of uncertainty, ambiguity, and change in the realm of moral values. Their position is simple:
moral values must be universal, timeless, unchanging truths
we should receive them from religious traditions or authority figures
once we get fixed truths, we should stick with them, no matter what
A society that doesn’t believe all this is in great danger, they warn. Why? Listen to a delightful story told by George W. Bush’s friend Richard Land, who heads the Southern Baptist Convention. Land recalled what his wife said when Bill Clinton became president: “She said, ‘The people that were sitting around [in the ‘60s] in Volkswagen vans, smoking pot with peace symbols on their vans and hanging around their necks, are running the country now, aren't they?’ I said, ‘Yes, they are.’ Basically, it breaks down to this enormous fault line. On one side of this fault line, you have people who have a traditional view of morality: Some things are always right; some things are always wrong; and if you accept a society in which that's not true, then anything becomes possible.”
That’s just what thrilled those people sitting around in Volkswagen vans, smoking pot with peace symbols. Anything becomes possible -- even a world of peace and love.
For the right-wingers, though, the idea that “anything is possible” is terrifying. Their “culture of life” is really a culture of fear. They believe that human nature is basically selfish, competitive, and aggressive, If anything is possible, who can predict what crime or evil will happen next? How can anyone feel safe? The world would be spinning out of control. We need fixed rules that come from unquestionable authority. That’s the only way to keep us all from running amok.
You can’t get that kind of certainty if you leave the rules up to human choice, the conservatives insist. People are “flip-flops.” They change their minds to suit their whims. They think with their hormones. They do all sorts of dangerous things, if we let them. That’s why we have to agree with our president, who says: “The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not a personal opinion, but an eternal truth.” That’s why we need to believe in an eternal higher authority.
From this very abstract point, it’s an easy step to the impassioned “defense” of Terri Schiavo’s life. Who gets to decide when someone dies. Is it the “flip-flop” human mind? Or is it the eternal will of the ultimate unquestionable authority, the good Lord Himself? For a conservative, that’s a no-brainer. Once you let the human mind decide when people die -- or which fetuses come to term and which don’t -- anything is indeed possible. The world feels like it’s spinning out of control. It’s hard enough already for most people to feel they have any control over their lives. A world with no eternal authorities might make it feel impossible.
Of course, a world where some eternal authority tells us all what to do is not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind, as far as many of us can tell. We believe that a nation built on freedom has to free the mind to discover moral values for itself. That means moral values will indeed be different at different times and in different places. People will disagree. There will be conflicts. That is unavoidable.
So why not make a virtue out of necessity? Why not embrace the conflict as a sign of a healthy, creative diversity in society? We trust that people who have their basic human needs met can learn to get along reasonably. The problem is not human nature. It’s a society with skewed priorities that denies so many people their basic needs.
But if we trust the free mind to find the truth, we have to consider all points of view -- even the “culture of life.” Do they have a persuasive point to make? To figure it out for yourself, you might want to take a college philosophy course, or three or four. You’ll have to start way back with Plato and Aristotle. Great minds have been wrestling with this one for thousands of years, and they haven’t come to any consensus yet. Either side might be right.
But that’s just what the right-wingers can’t admit. It’s the “might be right” that scares them and drives them nuts. They need a “MUST be right” to feel safe, to feel that their own lives are under even minimal control.
We can’t let them inscribe their fear-driven beliefs onto our laws. No compromise on that one. And we ought to encourage them to join us in a civil discussion about the issue. All the while, though, it won’t hurt to remember that they are frightened and hurting.
We also have to continue the agonizing discussion about the specific issues concerning the end of life. Now that technology can keep people alive almost indefinitely, we are in a brave new world with no simple clear-cut direction ahead. The disability rights movement rightly reminds us how easily the masters of technology can get control over us if we are not vigilant. The advocates of individual liberty and death with dignity rightly remind us that we can keep our individual right to our own death as well as life only if we are vigilant. There are no easy answers here, either.
We can’t carry on that debate constructively, though, until we first disentangle it from the great cultural debate about how we get our moral values. Perhaps that clarification would move us all a small step beyond our fears.

U.S. intervention is to blame for the war-torn country's inability to select its new president
by Carolyn Eisenberg
Published on Thursday, March 31, 2005 by the Long Island, NY Newsday

Two months past the dramatic day when millions of brave Iraqis lined up to vote, the country still lacks a functioning government.
Progress has been halted by the inability to select a new president and two vice presidents, who would together designate a prime minister. Whenever this demoralizing logjam is finally broken, it is important to recognize that the real source of failure resides in Washington and not Baghdad.
Americans are eager to believe that we have set Iraq on the road to freedom. How else to justify the deaths of more than 1,500 of our troops, the 10,000 wounded, the numerous veterans who are returning to their families with anguished memories that will shadow their lives? It is not surprising that the recent election resonated so widely here in the United States or that many critics of the Bush administration have been silenced.
Yet, since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the ability of the Iraqis to shape their own political destiny has been compromised by U.S. interventions. While hawking democracy, the Americans have not trusted Iraqis to choose the right leaders or to enact the right laws.
Hence, their endless tinkering with the machinery of governance, their unilateral promulgation of 100 laws under the Coalition Provisional Authority, and their imposition of an "interim constitution" that now constrains political life...

Sleepwalking to Disaster in Iran
by Scott Ritter
Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 by Al Jazeera

Late last year, in the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, I was contacted by someone close to the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq. There was a growing concern inside the Bush administration, this source said, about the direction the occupation was going. The Bush administration was keen on achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq before June 2005, I was told.
When I asked why that date, the source dropped the bombshell: because that was when the Pentagon was told to be prepared to launch a massive aerial attack against Iran, Iraq's neighbour to the east, in order to destroy the Iranian nuclear programme.
Why June 2005?, I asked. 'The Israelis are concerned that if the Iranians get their nuclear enrichment programme up and running, then there will be no way to stop the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. June 2005 is seen as the decisive date.'...
The American media today is sleepwalking towards an American war with Iran with all of the incompetence and lack of integrity that it displayed during a similar path trodden during the buildup to our current war with Iraq.
On the surface, there is nothing extraordinary about the news that the President of the United States would order the Pentagon to be prepared to launch military strikes on Iran in June 2005 . That Iran has been a target of the Bush administration's ideologues is no secret: the President himself placed Iran in the 'axis of evil' back in 2002, and has said that the world would be a better place with the current Iranian government relegated to the trash bin of history...
The American media today is sleepwalking towards an American war with Iran Economic sanctions and military attacks are not one and the same. Unless, of course, the architect of America's Iran policy never intends to give sanctions a chance...
Based upon history, precedent, and personalities, the intent of the United States regarding Iran is crystal clear: the Bush administration intends to bomb Iran.
Whether this attack takes place in June 2005, when the Pentagon has been instructed to be ready, or at a later date, once all other preparations have been made, is really the only question that remains to be answered.
That, and whether the journalists who populate the mainstream American media will continue to sleepwalk on their way to facilitating yet another disaster in the Middle East.

© 2005 AlJazeera.net

What hypocrites our US friends are!
What Terri Schiavo needed was not a miracle courtesy of Mad Max [Mel Gibson, ultra-Catholic producer of 'The Passion of The Christ' who described Schiavo's death as "murder," is still best known in Australia for his role in the 'Mad Max' movies] , but permission to pass on, instead of being kept alive in a vegetative state. What she got was a veritable hillsong (Do you like my new word? It describes an orgy of emotionalistic folderol, covering a sinister message… rather like a Nuremburg Rally [Hillsong is a charismatic congregation of haappy-clappy Christians in Sydney which sports rock bands and video screens, and, like its US counterparts, teaches that one CAN be a capitalist and still get to heaven]) from the Religious Right, espousing a “Culture of Life.”
What a pity that the said “Culture” was not applied to the black child in Dubya’s home state who was taken off life support because its mother couldn’t afford the bills! Wassa madder, guys… doesn’t the verse about the camel and the eye of the needle appear in the Crawford (Tx) Authorised Version? What a pity that so many of the Culture of Lifers support the death penalty, even for children and the intellectually disabled.
What a pity, too, that the Right to Life is not extended to the “funny little brown people” of Iraq, more than 100,000 of whom have been collateral damage in America’s latest imperialist adventure… or should we be categorizing these 100,000 plus individuals as Roadblocks in the Path to Democracy, and, as such, not deserving of life?

Why World War IV Can't Sell
by John Brown
Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 by TomDispatch.com

In a recent essay (Are We in World War IV?) Tom Engelhardt commented quite rightly that "World War IV" has "become a commonplace trope of the imperial right." But he didn't mention one small matter -- the rest of our country, not to speak of the outside world, hasn't bought the neocons' efforts to justify the President's militaristic adventures abroad with crude we're-in-World War IV agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in support of the administration's foreign policy follies. That's why, in his second term, George W. Bush -- first and foremost a politician concerned about maintaining domestic support -- is talking ever less about waging a global war and ever more about democratizing the world...
Drop that War! The Product No Longer Sells!
If there's one thing the sad history of recent years has amply demonstrated, it's that the Bush White House is profoundly uninterested in ideas (even the superficial ones promulgated by the neocons). What concerns Dubya and his entourage is not thought, but power. They pick up and drop "ideas" at the tip of a hat, abandoning them when they no longer suit their narrow interests of the moment.

© 2005 John Brown

Needed: An Honest Intelligence Estimate on Iran
by Ray McGovern

Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Hats off to journalist Dafna Linzer and Sunday’s Washington Post for exposing a familiar but fallacious syllogism favored by senior Bush administration officials:
Iran has a lot of oil; Ergo, Iran does not need nuclear energy for civil purposes; Ergo, Iran’s nuclear development program must be for weapons.
Linzer and her researcher, Robert Thomason remind us that in 1976—with Gerald Ford president, Dick Cheney his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz responsible for nonproliferation at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Henry Kissinger national security adviser—the Ford administration bought the Shah’s argument that Iran needed a nuclear program to meet its future energy requirements.
This is precisely what Iranian officials claim today. There is legitimacy to that claim. Energy experts note that oil extraction in Iran is already at or near peak and confirm that the country will need alternatives to oil in the coming decades. At the same time, it seems altogether likely that the Iranian leaders also believe they need a nuclear weapons capability and are preparing to produce one...