Seems the only question about war with Iraq is, what day will it start? Here are some arguments I’d make the morning after the war started. This is also available on the Socialist Party USA web site. A printed copy would make a dandy little leaflet to hand out on the street.

THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ

The United States has started another war against Iraq. We think there are some things every citizen should know about it.

The President is lying about Iraq.

George W. Bush has worked hard to sell this war. There have been repeated claims that Iraq is developing weapons, perhaps biological or chemical weapons, perhaps even nuclear weapons, and plans to use them against Israel, or, somehow, against the United States. The Bush Administration has offered no evidence for these claims, and has no intention of providing any.

The target is domestic political dissent, not Iraq.

What Bush calls the War on Terrorism is all about providing political cover for the right-wing Republican agenda: tax cuts for the rich, more public resources given away to big corporations, more government spying on citizens, stamping out labor unions. Bush needs war to stifle opposition to his domestic program.

Starting the war was a war crime.

Under international law, it is a war crime to attack, or threaten to attack, another country that has not first attacked us. Iraq has not attacked us. The men who gave the orders to attack Iraq are war criminals, as surely as the war criminals who have stood trial in the Hague for genocide.

There are already too many victims.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children have died as a result of United States sanctions against Iraq following the first Gulf War. Many more innocent civilians will die in this war. Those who survive will likely face even harsher conditions than before. And many more Muslims around the world, witnessing this brutal anti-Islamic crusade, are becoming convinced that we are their enemy.

Will you stand silent?

The Bush Administration is hoping you will. They cynically expect that you will put your morals aside and let war crimes be committed in your name. They think you’re scared and ignorant enough to go along with anti-Arab racism. They think you can be hoodwinked into giving up your Constitutional rights for the illusion of security. Prove them wrong. Join us in resisting the war.

Police in Wilmington, Delaware have developed a database of future criminals, mostly nonwhites, who are considered likely to break the law. Many of these suspects have squeaky-clean records, so it’s not clear how this is advance over the more traditional practice of criminalizing anyone caught DWB (Driving While Black).

This reminds me very little of Philip Kerr’s science-fiction novel A Philosophical Investigation, about a government database of likely serial killers. In that story, a man finds his own name on the list and decides to kill everyone else on the list.

NPR reported Friday (audio here, transcript here) that Palestinian civilians are being used as human shields by the Israeli army. Wednesday a 19-year-old named Nidal Duralma died of a gunshot wound to the head while acting under orders from Israeli soldiers. This has been army policy for “quite a long time,” according to NPR.

There have also been reports that Palestinians have been used to detect booby-traps in houses.

Even the Israeli Supreme Court has outlawed these practices, but the army has continued anyway. At least one Israeli Cabinet minister says there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Tomorrow’s Bush administration photo-op will be a bogus “economic forum” in Texas, a give-and-take conversation to which no administration opponents have been invited.

The official Washington line is that we aren’t bigots. The fact that Muslims all over the world are on the wrong end of U.S. guns is coincidence, we are asked to believe, and has nothing to do with anti-Islamic bigotry.

Enter Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, apparently not a team player, who says that making college students read a book about Islam is comparable to teaching Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in 1941. He questions the purpose of having students study “our enemy’s religion”.

He is joined by Rev. Franklin Graham, son of and designated successor to the famous Billy Graham, who calls Islam as a whole “wicked and violent.”

I haven’t used the word “obscene” for a while, and this seems a perfect opportunity. George W has used the rescue of nine miners in Pennsylvania to drum up support for his so-called “War on Terrorism.” What possible connection could these two events have to each other, you ask?

The Boston Globe quotes Bush as having said that the “spirit of America” rescued the miners. Quoth the President: “It’s that spirit that’s … going to prevail in the big challenges we face around the world, the challenge of making sure that we hunt down every terrorist and bring them to justice, because we love freedom.”

Leaving aside the disgusting attempt to twist someone else’s nearly-fatal adventure to his own political advantage, W seems to have made an odd choice this time. After all, if it were safe to go to work in this country, those guys wouldn’t have needed to be rescued in the first place. The Bush administration has stopped action on 29 pending job safety initiatives, including 13 from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Lest you think that events in the occupied territories are taking place against a backdrop of good-faith efforts by the United States to bring a just peace, here’s a link to House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey’s position on the subject. He openly favors removal of the Palestinians from their land, an activity that is called “ethnic cleansing” when Serbs do it.

The latest atrocity of the Israeli government is a missile attack in which one Hamas activist was assassinated, 15 civilians were killed including eight children as young as two months, and 154 civilians were wounded.

Ordinarily sensible people use the word terrorist to describe someone who would even threaten to fire a missile at an apartment building in a densely populated residential neighborhood, let alone someone evil enough to actually commit the act. If the target were American, the retaliatory strike would already be underway. But the target is not American, and the killers are U.S. allies, flying a U.S.-supplied warplane, so the word terrorist is to be reserved for those on the ground.

The Israeli Defense Ministry actually claims to be surprised by the civilian casualties. “According to the information we had, no civilians were expected to be in his vicinity,” the ministry said. This lie is shocking even by the low standards of Israeli government credibility.

Even the U.S. can’t stomach it, which is a bit of a shame since we paid for it, and in every way encouraged Israel to wage war against the Palestinians.

The Bush administration is planning on recruiting millions of informants to spy on their neighbors, as many as one in 24 Americans by some accounts. This provides an opportunity, as noted by the Washington Post in this editorial, for the government to use utility workers, postal carriers, etc. to conduct warrantless surveillance the government could not lawfully do for itself. Update: The Boston Globe lambasts Operation TIPS in an editorial. “Operation TIPS,” they say, “is a scheme that Joseph Stalin would have appreciated.”

George W. Bush has learned that there is corporate corruption in America, and he is shocked, shocked. And he intends to do something to change the appearance that nothing is being done about it: by creating the appearance that something is being done about it. Predictably, this new commitment to improve capitalism’s image will make no enemies on Wall Street.

In today’s speech, Bush did not discuss his own dishonest business dealings. All the Republican spokesmen and pundits are riding the media circuit today, repeating the White House party line: the SEC cleared George W of any wrongdoing years ago. That would be the same SEC whose chairman owed his job to young George’s daddy, then-President George H. W. Bush. Enron, the single biggest financial contributor to the younger Bush’s political campaigns, is barely being mentioned in the corporate media, never mind the President’s speech.

Bush insists that corporate managers who defraud stockholders will be held to account in this new climate of Honest Bidness. There will even be a new Task Force assigned to prosecute accounting fraud. But is it really surprising that government intends to protect stockholders? They are, after all, the people who own the country. What Bush does not intend to do is prosecute corporate misdeeds against the public at large. As long as Microsoft, big tobacco companies, and big pharmaceutical companies continue to turn a profit for stockholders, at the expense of the public, they will have no worries about the Bush administration. Violations of anti-trust law, marketing cigarette smoking to minors, price gouging the sick—all these are good for some corporate bottom line, and therefore aren’t considered criminal, or even wrong, by the corporate shills who run our government.

So how bad will it be for cheating CEOs if George has his way? The maximum penalty for mail and wire fraud will be doubled to 10 years under the Bush proposal. By way of comparison, the average penalty for first-time offenders sentenced for trafficking of crack cocaine is already 10 and a half years.