posted April 01, 2003 12:46 AM              

On responsible protesting: http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2003/13/we_341_01.html

And dispatches from around the world:
The Other Superpower - http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030414&s=schell
Russia - http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030414&s=kvh
Vietnam - http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030414&s=davis
and Britain - http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030414&s=margaronis

posted April 01, 2003 12:53 AM              

No More the Promised Land
To the Kurds in Southern Turkey, 'Ah-may-ree-ka' isn't what it used to be.

By Scott Carrier
March 26, 2003

Over the past few days I have seen the hearts and minds of the people in southeastern Turkey turn against the United States. Before the bombing started, it was clear that nearly everyone I met was opposed to the war, but there was also a nearly unanimous belief that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power, and that perhaps the United States and Great Britain were the only countries willing and able to accomplish the task.

This part of Turkey is predominantly Kurdish, and Saddam is responsible for the death and suffering of many thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq -- by the 1988 chemical gassing of the people Halabjah, by brutal execution, and by forced relocation. Nevertheless, many Kurdish people told me that they fear the Turkish military more than they fear Saddam, and they hoped that if and when the U.S. military entered the region, the Kurd's human rights and economy would be much improved.

Before the war began, the conversations I had with Kurdish people typically would start with one man inviting me to sit down and drink some tea and smoke some cigarettes. Soon four or five of his friends would crowd around, and I'd find myself answering more questions than I asked. The main thing they wanted to know was, basically, what the **** is going on with this war? I'd tell them that I thought there was a secret, something that Bush and Blair couldn't talk about until the bombing started, like a missing piece to a puzzle that, once it was revealed, would explain everything. They'd listen to me and try to believe what I was saying because I was an American and knew much more about these things than they did.

They'd ask me if the U.S. would support an independent Kurdistan, and I'd say probably not, that it would cause too much trouble with Turkey and the other neighboring states. This answer always made them very sad, like little kids being told that there would be no Christmas this year, but they would choke it down and accept it. They still wanted to be my friend. They still brought more tea, more cigarettes, and asked more questions. Inevitably the conversation would begin to taper off with this request: Sir, can you help me get a green card? I very much want to go to America.

It was like their ship was sinking, and I was the only lifeboat around.

No, I'd say, I'm sorry. The boat is full, you'll have to stay here and drown. And still they brought more tea, more cigarettes, anything to make me feel at home.

America. Ah-may-ree-ka. It was the most powerful word in the world. It would leave the lips of grown men and their hearts would crack open. Please, if you can help me I will do anything -- I will work for free, I will take care of your children, I will take care of your garden. I will stay only for one year, if you can just buy me a plane ticket to New York City.

But after the bombing started, the worm turned. We were counting on struggling masses yearning to breathe free, but video of the bombs hitting Baghdad, the video of crying children, the reports of dead civilians...these have been played over and over, sometimes with sentimental Enya-like music, and it's just been too much for the people here. They are Kurds and their identity is linked to their Kurdish culture, but, apparently, their religious identity is stronger than this. Our attack on Iraq is being seen as an attack on their Muslim brothers and sisters. It has become a religious war, and Saddam Hussein is now being called a hero, even among the Kurds. In fact, the war has given the Kurds and the Turks a common ground, perhaps the first time they've ever agreed on anything.

It seems we've blown it, again, by not understanding the Muslim mind. We thought the Iraqis would run towards our troops waving white flags, but instead they seem to be willing to die as martyrs. No one offers to talk to me now. No one offers tea and cigarettes. I've been told to say that I am Dutch or Australian, anything but an American.

Ah-may-ree-ka. The word is now joined with the Turkish word for war -- Savas -- pronounced with a hiss, ssha-vasssh.

Scott Carrier is a writer and a radio producer who lives in Salt Lake City.

posted April 01, 2003 01:03 AM              

Hearts, Minds, Hatred

"[T]he ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there."

That, of course, was President Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, talking about a very different war. But the sentiment has inevitably become timely again. Despite assurances from Washington hawks, Iraqis have not welcomed invading US and British soldiers as long-awaited liberators, and Iraqi soldiers have not surrendered in droves.

Clearly, the coalition has failed to win the Iraqis' hearts and minds. And, judging from the reactions in neighboring countries, regardless of how the invading forces fare in the coming days and weeks, the 'ultimate victory' may be a very long time coming.

In southern Iraq, Shiite Muslims long oppressed by Saddam Hussein have confounded war party pundits by greeting the invading coalition forces coldly, at best. But, like many people outside the White House, Geoffrey York of The Globe and Mail argues that the reaction is hardly surprising. Reporting from the Iraqi city of Safwan, York says that few people are "willing to forgive and forget" so quickly.

"As many as a dozen people were killed here at the start of the war, when U.S. and British forces bombarded the town and headed northward toward Basra. The deaths have provided an easy propaganda victory for the Saddam Hussein loyalists, who still hold considerable influence here.
'The British troops are shooting civilians,' said Kathem Sajed, a man who heaped praise on Mr. Hussein for 'spoiling' the town with a surplus of food rations over the past six months.

'They're killing women and children,' he said. 'This morning some people were trying to earn their living, and British troops started shooting them.'"

Such accusations are being heard everywhere in Iraq. True or not, they are inflaming Iraqi anger. And, as in Safwan, the Baghdad regime is turning that anger to military ends. Just as importantly, Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star writes, Saddam has deflated Washington's rhetoric of liberation by describing US intentions "in language that his countrymen can comprehend. He says Bush wants Iraq's oil."

"Iraqis, many of whom can remember a time when another imperial power controlled their oil fields, understand this. The fact that the U.S. says it plans to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay U.S. firms to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure that the U.S. is now destroying, also lends credence to Saddam's storyline.
Indeed, although many in the West might not like to admit this, Saddam's explanation for the war makes much more sense than Bush's."

President Bush has responded to the anger and the unexpectedly vigorous Iraqi resistance by assuring the nation that, while the war may last far longer than some had predicted, the US forces will ultimately prevail. And they undoubtedly will. But, as Pepe Escobar of Asia Times points out, the inevitable military victory could come at a disastrous price -- both for the US and for the fragile regimes in the Arab world. Over the past several decades, the entire Middle East has become increasingly "Palestinized," primed to explode in anger at both the US and their own leaders.

"The widespread anger directed at Arab leaders is overwhelming -- from taxi drivers to art students, from construction workers to businessmen. For around half a century, the anger was in a way channeled by the Palestinians - who by practical experience have learned not to trust Arab leaders. Now the loss of legitimacy is total -- a long decaying process that originated in the early 1990s. The street knows that all Arab regimes - from reactionary Saudi Arabia to relatively progressive Jordan - have failed. They have been incapable of achieving Arab unity and independence. They have been incapable of providing social, economic and technological development. They have been impotent in their promises to try to help liberate Gaza and the West Bank. And they have been shamefully incapable of uniting against what their populations unanimously consider a neocolonialist war in Iraq.
One of the most extraordinary developments of the war so far is how the resistance of the Iraqi population against a foreign invasion has galvanized this sentiment of anger in the Arab world. 'We are all Palestinians now,' as a Bedouin taxi driver puts it. One of the first things anyone mentions in Jordan - be it a Jordanian, an Egyptian, a Lebanese or a Somali refugee - is their happiness about the way the Iraqi people are resisting the 'invaders' (never qualified as 'liberators')."

Such dire assessments are lost in Washington, however, where many neoconservative hawks seem to be convinced that Iraqis are simply too scared of the Baghdad regime to express how grateful they truly are. David Gelertner, at least, doesn't make that argument. Instead, the Weekly Standard contributor makes an equally tortured conjecture: "If our cause is right, the liberated civilians will be with us in the end."

"[H]istory to date suggests that air bombing yields one and only one response among the target population -- hatred. That's human nature. No matter how precisely your airmen aim, the experience of heavy explosives falling out of the sky can only be terrifying; can only leave a person feeling vulnerable and bitterly angry. But you did mention Japan and Germany? True, we bombed them both to hell. Are you suggesting that the Iraqis will come to hate us like the Japanese and Germans did? It's true (it's obvious) that no one loves a bomber while the bombs are falling. But it didn't take long, once peace was restored, for the Germans and Japanese to decide that we were their friends after all."
Naturally, Gelertner doesn't bother to consider the one possibility that could destroy his entire cloud-castle, the possibility expressed by the French, the Germans, the Russians, and millions of antiwar protesters from San Francisco to Sydney: that Washington's cause is not right. War Watch wonders what such blind conviction might cost us, as we lose the hearts and minds of the Arab world to uncompromising opposition and bitterness.

Whose Geneva Convention?

White House officials reacted with righteous anger earlier this week when Iraqi state television aired footage of five captured US soldiers. The video amounted to "public humiliation" of the POWs, Bush administration officials declared, and they accused the Baghdad regime of violating the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners.

That claim was greeted derisively in much of the Muslim world. Citing the rhetorical and legal gymnastics the White House has employed to deny terror suspects Geneva Convention rights, pundits from Cairo to Kuala Lampur have declared that the US has lost all credibility when it comes to such arguments.

The reaction in the west has been more muted, as officials and commentators have broadly denounced Iraq for exhibiting the captured soldiers. But those same pundits have suggested that Washington must consider the hypocrisy inherent in its position.

Paul Knox of the Toronto Globe and Mail asserts that the Iraqi video footage was "disgusting." But Knox wearily points out that "nothing George Bush says on the subject of Geneva Conventions and international legal standards is likely to convince anyone."

"He has unleashed the greatest onslaught against international law of any U.S. president in living memory. He has torn up arms-control agreements and worked to sabotage the International Criminal Court. In his campaign against terrorism, he has not only flouted the venerable Geneva accords but sought to deny suspects the benefits of the law he is sworn to uphold.
...

Mr. Bush insists on calling his counterterrorism campaign a war -- yet the hundreds of prisoners rounded up since September of 2001 are not accorded the status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Hundreds have been held, incognito and without charge, for more than a year. The U.S. government says they are 'unlawful combatants,' subject to no laws whatsoever because they are neither U.S. citizens nor held on U.S. soil. It says it can hold them for as long as it wants, with no access to lawyers or judicial oversight. Shamefully, U.S. courts appear to agree.

The next time you see a video of captive U.S. troops in Iraq, spare a thought for the 18 Afghans released this month from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They showed up yesterday in Kabul -- cleared, for what it's worth, of suspicion."

In fact, while the Bush administration has kept the Guantanamo prisoners in a legal limbo, it has allowed them to be photographed, and it has allowed those photographs to be circulated to the media. Such practices, argue the editors of the Canberra Times, make Bush's indignation ring hollow.

"[T]he US has clearly violated the spirit of a number of the Geneva Conventions in the way it has held them, including the very one it complains about in relation to Iraq's handling of coalition principles. It has forcibly shaved them, allowed them to be photographed by the Press in humiliating circumstances (including with their heads covered by hoods and shackled to prison bars) and have submitted them to considerable interrogation going well beyond establishing identification.
Two wrongs do not make a right, and America's violation of fundamental principles of human rights (with the supine acquiescence of countries such as Australia and Britain) does not justify any such conduct by Iraq, which has an appalling record in relation to prisoners of war, in relation to the 1991 conflict and during its 1980s war with Iran."

War Watch wonders ... maybe the White House should consider asking a member of its 'coalition of the willing' to champion the cause of the US POWs. Maybe Denmark could make the case credibly. The captured soldiers deserve at least that much -- every prisoner does.

The Generals Sound Off

Throughout the long preparations for war, US newspapers reported how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had wrestled control of the Pentagon's planning process away from the military brass. He openly disregarded advice from commanders he considered too attached to old ways of war, and built a firewall between the nation's military leadership and the White House.

Now, with the "rolling start" war plan for Iraq showing signs of strain, those commanders are firing back. The uniformed leadership, of course, are keeping their counsel. But, in the established tradition of the military, they are being well represented by their recently-retired colleagues, who are ripping into Rumsfeld with a vigor that hints at long-suppressed ire.

Among those taking aim at the Pentagon boss is Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former assistant to Colin Powell during the Secretary of State's Army days, who commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during the Gulf War.

"'Was Rumsfeld mistaken? Sure, everybody told him that. He thought these were army generals with their feet planted in the Second World War, who didn't understand the new way of warfare. At some point it boils down ... to getting in there and blowing down the house, and making sure you dominate the area -- and we have inadequate forces."

The size of the invading force was the primary criticism leveled privately by military commanders before the invasion, Toby Harnden of The Telegraph reports. Now, he reports, those criticisms are out in the open, and Rumsfeld is increasingly facing accusations that he " arrogantly ignored the counsel of senior military officers."

"There have been long-running tensions between the defence secretary and the Pentagon's uniformed leadership over his rough-edged style and determination to shape his own war plan.
His critics now claim the rush to Baghdad has led to troops in the rear being dangerously exposed because Mr Rumsfeld repeatedly ignored requests from Gen Tommy Franks, commander of coalition forces, for extra men."

Blair vs. the Go-It-Aloners

The stated agenda for today's Camp David meeting between Bush and Tony Blair is quite simple: The War. Still, as the BBC reports, also high on the list of topics to be discussed will be "the shape of Iraq when the conflict ends." And, while Blair is claiming it would be "premature" to begin working on details now, the inevitable struggle is becoming clarified.

"Mr Blair wants any authority which replaces Saddam Hussein's regime to be endorsed by a new UN resolution.
Those hopes received a boost on Wednesday from US Secretary-General Colin Powell, who told Congress that America would seek a new resolution to back its plans."

Lined up against Blair and Powell, Patrick Wintour of The Gaurdian reports, are Washington unilateralists determined to ensure that former US diplomats take over the running of Iraq after the conflict." And at the head of that cadre, Wintour says, is Elliott Abrams, who he describes as "dismissive of any role for the UN."

posted April 01, 2003 01:48 AM              

The first link has this quote :
"That happened Thursday when cops in full riot gear surrounded several hundred protesters and began slowing compressing them into a tighter and tighter portion of Market Street, giving no one--including tourists and workers on their lunch hour--a way to disperse".

Thats exactely waht happened to me last week at the protest i went to in sydney! Yet i have not seen any mention of it in the media. I couldnt belive it, i wasent allowed to leave this street for 2.5 hours, its was terribly distressing for a lot of people... i heard a few people talking of running into the barracade and making an escape... but they didnt. But the other protestors on the outside were going crazy. I dont understand the tatics???!

And i like this from the second link you posted:
"The war, we are told, is being fought for freedom. But who, we may ask, are the free ones--those who knuckle under to violence or those who defy it? "

Very interesting Proxi... Thanx.

Jax