What with all the bonehead talk about boycotting French fries, not to mention French vanilla, French dressing, French onion soup, French cuffs, French kissing, French windows, French horns, and perhaps even French ticklers, it’s refreshing to find www.buyfrenchnow.com, a site all about how you can support those plucky frogs. Bless ‘em.
David McReynolds, a long-time leader of both the War Resisters League and the Socialist Party, had this analysis of the war as of early Tuesday morning:
I watched some of CNN tonight, but mainly the BBC report, and then shifted to “world news” (from different parts of the world, available on cable here in NYC on channel 103).CNN is not trustworthy and even BBC was spending too much time talking to American talking heads who were making very little sense.
My quick take, as someone who is not a fan of Saddam. First, by now everyone except Rumsfeld knows that the invasion has gone very badly. The small city near the border that was “occupied” on day one, is still giving trouble. The troops are afraid to go into Basra.
But more interesting is that the civilian population has not risen up to greet the invaders. Quite the contrary. (There are, of course, a wide mix of responses - I suspect that if any of us saw columns of Iraqi tanks rolling down Broadway we would hesitate to jeer, and might even wave hello in hopes the machine guns would point the other way).
The mass surrenders have not occured. US rumors about Saddam being killed don’t seem to be true - more for our benefit than anything else. From news (not CNN) I gather that things are getting very edgy in the Arab countries, and the diplomatic opposition is likely to rise with each passing day, as it becomes clearer than the invasion is not going according to plan. And as the bombing continues to take a growing civilian toll.
Most interesting - and the American talking heads didn’t seem to notice it - is that up to now, just after midnight on Monday, here in New York, the UN diplomats from Iraq haven’t defected, nor have I heard any reports of Iraqi defections elsewhere. That is one of the first things you would expect - if the regime has no support at all and everyone is serving under compulsion, the diplomats abroad would leap to freedom and be defecting all over the place.
I had forgotten that during the Iran/Iraq war (ghastly act by Iraq), once the Iranians pushed into Iraq, the troops put up a fierce opposition (as well as using poison gas). Those of us with long memories, due to advanced age and impending senility, may remember that when the Soviets went into Finland in 1940 they nearly lost - it was a disaster as invasions go. But when the Nazis went into Mother Russia they got one hell of a surprise, and the “six weeks to Moscow” became the real basis of the death of the Nazi regime (twenty million Soviet dead).
It is hard for us - I include myself - to realize that just as Stalin was actually popular (and still is) with wide sectors of Soviet society, there is no reason to doubt that, when it comes to choosing between Western Christian invaders (who have spent the last ten years trying to starve Iraq into submission), and Saddam, a very large number of Iraqis are going to choose Saddam.
With every day that passes the pressure within the Arab world for an end of the war will increase. And the temptation in the US to use greater air power, killing many more civilians, will increase. Already one report tonight said that rifle fire from tribesmen was so heavy the US helicopters pulled back and the bombers went in from a safer (and much less accurate) altitude.
Our job is to continue to “support our troops by getting them out of there” and pressing every button we have (letters, demos, CD, etc., visible calls for peace) to undercut the growing effort by Rumsfeld and Cheney to make this the “great patriotic invasion”. Even if the only supporters it seems to have thus far are Blair and the handful of pro-war demonstrators who turned out in New York City yesterday (the NY Times said that their 1,000 was “1% of those turning out for peace on Saturday - even that wasn’t quite accurate as I think we had far more than 100,000 on Saturday). When before in a war - at the beginning - did the peace groups pull over a hundred thousand and the “official government side” with full media support, pull less than 1,000? (Or in San Francisco, when did we have over a thousand people arrested the day after the US got into war?).
Peace,
David McReynolds
The Bush adminstration loudly demands, without a hint of irony, that Iraq comply fully with the Geneva Conventions even as Afghan prisoners of war are held indefinitely at Cuba in violation of the same treaty.
Eighteen men walked out of a prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday after 16 months in United States custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They had been accused of being members of the Taliban or al-Qaida, but after thorough questioning that sometimes involved the withholding of food, water, light, shelter, clothing, basic sanitation and other conditions necessary for the maintenance of basic human dignity, the U.S. military decided it had the wrong men and let them go.
That’s the trouble with systematically ignoring international law: it’s not there when you need it.
Update: The Guardian ran this piece about the POW issue, much better than mine.
Already, Western reporters are encountering large numbers of angry Iraqis who now see the U.S. troops as conquerors rather than liberators.
A surgical assistant at the Saddam hospital in Nassiriya, interviewed at a marine check point outside the city, said that on Sunday, half an hour after two dead marines were brought into the hospital, US aircraft dropped what he described as three or four cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing 10 and wounding 200.Mustafa Mohammed Ali said he understood US forces going straight to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but was outraged that they had attacked his city and killed civilians. “I don’t want forces to come into the city. They have an objective, they go straight to the target,” he said. “There’s no room in the Saddam hospital because of the wounded. It’s the only hospital in town. When I saw the dead Americans I cheered in my heart.
Lawrence James of the Independent writes that dominant powers have often claimed to be acting on behalf of the oppressed when they turn to preemptive war.
When the security of British India was imperilled, its rulers used force to neutralise the threat. Ironically this tactic was once applied against the United States. During the 1837 rebellion in Canada, a number of Americans collected arms for the insurgents and hired a vessel to carry them across the St Lawrence. Alerted, the British sent a small force across the river, landed at Buffalo, seized the ship, set it on fire and sent it downstream and over the Niagara Falls. Although its sovereignty had been violated, the US government conceded that this coup de main was legal on the grounds that Canada’s security was endangered.This established a precedent in international law. More commonly, imperial powers turned to the pre-emptive strike as an instrument for enhancing prestige, maintaining a favourable balance of power, and to unnerve potential challengers. When the Zulu king Cetewayo began buying repeating rifles for his impis, a British army invaded Zululand in 1879. The Zulu defeat at Ulundi by massive firepower was a warning to the region that Britain had the weapons to induce co-operation or submission. The same message was conveyed by the Allies in the first Gulf War.
While George Bush deliberately uses loaded words like “appeasement” as he beats the drum of war, there are those who think there are other ways to take the lesson of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power:
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion - “a sign from God,” he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
Boy does that have a familiar ring to it.
My long-time friend and comrade J. Quinn Brisben analyzed Bush’s speech of March 17, and came up with a list of 54 lies in it, which is depressingly unsurprising.
That is a sentence that will come to mean less as time goes on. We can’t really say that “the war” wasn’t going on yesterday, since the United States has been bombing Iraq at intervals ever since the “end” of the first Gulf War. And of course we are already at war in Afghanistan, a situation that is unlikely to change any time soon. We are, in fact, permanently at war as a matter of government policy. We’ll have to find a new way to distinguish days like today, from days like yesterday.
George W. Bush, firmly convinced that he has God on his side, is on a crusade to rewrite the map of the Middle East, with a new United States colony as its centerpiece. He is unconcerned that a clear majority of the UN Security Council opposes the war. As Henry David Thoreau pointed out, “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
After Iraq, the permanent war will seek and find further victims, at home and abroad. This, in the bizarre parlance of the Bush administration, is “working for peace.” In the coming months we will redouble our efforts to state the obvious: that the Bush administration needs war, that capitalism needs war, and that is why we are at war.
Gary Sloan writes of the religious basis of George W. Bush’s crusade against evil.
When militant nationalism is bolstered by religious fervor, the world has reason to be leery. When heads of state view themselves as instruments of the divine will, they tend to be oblivious to mere human opinion, particularly when it differs from their own, since those who have God on their side always (as Henry David Thoreau said) constitute a majority of one. To the anointed, wars are holy crusades. Supporters become saints, protesters reprobates. The virtuous cannot fail to see where simple truth and goodness lie. To squash the foreign devil, collateral damage of cataclysmic magnitude becomes justifiable - devastation of infrastructures, wrecking of world markets, maiming and killing of the innocent.
Good point.
The Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy has condemned the war on Iraq as contrary to the UN Charter and international law.
According to Andrew Lichterman, [Western States Legal Foundarion] program director, “Article 51 of the UN Charter recognizes the inherent right of self-defense ‘if an armed attack occurs’. Under Article 51, a state may not decide for itself alone that a threat that justifies war exists, unless actually attacked, or, in the view of some experts, where there is a threat of attack that is immediate and unavoidable, and where there are no alternatives to the use of force. Because Iraq has not attacked any state, nor is there any showing whatever of an imminent attack by Iraq, self-defense cannot justify U.S. war on Iraq.” Mr. Lichterman added, “There is no basis in international law for dramatically expanding the concept of self-defense, as advocated in the Bush administration’s September 2002 ‘National Security Strategy,’ to authorize ‘preemptive’ - really preventive - strikes against states based on potential threats arising from possession or development of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and links to terrorism. Such an expansion would destabilize the present system of UN Charter restraints on use of force. Further, there is no publicly disclosed evidence that Iraq is supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. If the Bush administration doctrine is allowed to stand, the next states in line may be Iran and North Korea.”
