Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Iraq

  • We Caught The Wrong Guy

    Saddam Hussein, former employee of the American federal government, was captured near a farmhouse in Tikrit in a raid performed by other employees of the American federal government. That sounds pretty deranged, right? Perhaps, but it is also accurate. The unifying thread binding together everyone assembled at that Tikrit farmhouse is the simple fact that all of them – the soldiers as well as Hussein – have received pay from the United States for services rendered.

    It is no small irony that Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad, the monster under your bed for these last twelve years, was paid probably ten thousand times more during his time as an American employee than the soldiers who caught him on Saturday night. The boys in the Reagan White House were generous with your tax dollars, and Hussein was a recipient of their largesse for the better part of a decade.

    If this were a Tom Clancy movie, we would be watching the dramatic capture of Hussein somewhere in the last ten minutes of the tale. The bedraggled dictator would be put on public trial for his crimes, sentenced to several thousand concurrent life sentences, and dragged off to prison in chains. The anti-American insurgents in Iraq, seeing the sudden futility of their fight to place Hussein back into power, would lay down their arms and melt back into the countryside. For dramatic effect, more than a few would be cornered by SEAL teams in black facepaint and discreetly shot in the back of the head. The President would speak with eloquence as the martial score swelled around him. Fade to black, roll credits, get off my plane.

    The real-world version is certainly not lacking in drama. The streets of Baghdad were thronged on Sunday with mobs of Iraqi people celebrating the final removal of a despot who had haunted their lives since 1979. Their joy was utterly unfettered. Images on CNN of Hussein, looking for all the world like a Muslim version of Charles Manson while getting checked for head lice by an American medic, were as surreal as anything one might ever see on a television.

    Unfortunately, the real-world script has a lot of pages left to be turned. Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, reached at his home on Sunday, said, “It’s great that they caught him. The man was a brutal dictator who committed terrible crimes against his people. But now we come to rest of story. We didn’t go to war to capture Saddam Hussein. We went to war to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons have not been found.” Ray McGovern, senior analyst and 27-year veteran of the CIA, echoed Ritter’s perspective on Sunday. “It’s wonderful that he was captured, because now we’ll find out where the weapons of mass destruction are,” said McGovern with tongue firmly planted in cheek. “We killed his sons before they could tell us.”

    Indeed, reality intrudes. The push for war before March was based upon Hussein’s possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 1,000,000 pounds of sarin gas, mustard gas, and VX nerve gas, along with 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, uranium from Niger to be used in nuclear bombs, and let us not forget the al Qaeda terrorists closely associated with Hussein who would take this stuff and use it against us on the main streets and back roads of the United States.

    When they found Hussein hiding in that dirt hole in the ground, none of this stuff was down there with him. The full force of the American military has been likewise unable to locate it anywhere else. There is no evidence of al al Qaeda agents working with Hussein, and Bush was forced some weeks ago to publicly acknowledge that Hussein had nothing to do with September 11. The Niger uranium story was debunked last summer.

    Conventional wisdom now holds that none of this stuff was there to begin with, and all the clear statements from virtually everyone in the Bush administration squatting on the public record describing the existence of this stuff looks now like what it was then: A lot of overblown rhetoric and outright lies, designed to terrify the American people into supporting an unnecessary go-it-alone war. Said war made a few Bush cronies rich beyond the dreams of avarice while allowing some hawks in the Defense Department to play at empire-building, something they have been craving for more than ten years.

    Of course, the rhetoric mutated as the weapons stubbornly refused to be found. By the time Bush did his little ‘Mission Accomplished’ strut across the aircraft carrier, the occupation was about the removal of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of the Iraqi people. No longer were we informed on a daily basis of the “sinister nexus between Hussein and al Qaeda,” as described by Colin Powell before the United Nations in February. No longer were we fed the insinuations that Hussein was involved in the attacks of September 11. Certainly, any and all mention of weapons of mass destruction ceased completely. We were, instead, embarking on some noble democratic experiment.

    The capture of Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis dancing in the streets of Baghdad, feeds nicely into these newly-minted explanations. Mr. Bush and his people will use this as the propaganda coup it is, and to great effect. But a poet once said something about tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow.

    “We are not fighting for Saddam,” said an Iraqi named Kashid Ahmad Saleh in a New York Times report from a week ago. “We are fighting for freedom and because the Americans are Jews. The Governing Council is a bunch of looters and criminals and mercenaries. We cannot expect that stability in this country will ever come from them. The principle is based on religion and tribal loyalties,” continued Saleh. “The religious principle is that we cannot accept to live with infidels. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be on him, said, `Hit the infidels wherever you find them.’ We are also a tribal people. We cannot allow strangers to rule over us.”

    Welcome to the new Iraq. The theme that the 455 Americans killed there, and the thousands of others who have been wounded, fell at the hands of pro-Hussein loyalists is now gone. The Bush administration celebrations over this capture will appear quite silly and premature when the dying continues. Whatever Hussein bitter-enders there are will be joined by Iraqi nationalists who will now see no good reason for American forces to remain. After all, the new rhetoric highlighted the removal of Hussein as the reason for this invasion, and that task has been completed. Yet American forces are not leaving, and will not leave. The killing of our troops will continue because of people like Kashid Ahmad Saleh. All Hussein’s capture did for Saleh was remove from the table the idea that he was fighting for the dictator. He is free now, and the war will begin in earnest.

    The dying will continue because America’s presence in Iraq is a wonderful opportunity for a man named Osama bin Laden, who was not captured on Saturday. Bin Laden, it has been reported, is thrilled by what is happening in Iraq, and plans to throw as much violence as he can muster at American forces there. The Bush administration spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this Iraq invasion, not one dime of which went towards the capture or death of the fellow who brought down the Towers a couple of years ago. For bin Laden and his devotees, Iraq is better than Disneyland.

    For all the pomp and circumstance that has surrounded the extraction of the former Iraqi dictator from a hole in the ground, the reality is that the United States is not one bit safer now that the man is in chains.

    There will be no trial for Hussein, at least nothing in public, because he might start shouting about the back pay he is owed from his days as an employee of the American government. Because another former employee of the American government named Osama is still alive and free, our troops are still in mortal danger in Iraq.

    Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His capture means nothing to the safety and security of the American people. The money we spent to put the bag on him might have gone towards capturing bin Laden, who is a threat, but that did not happen. We can be happy for the people of Iraq, because their Hussein problem is over. Here in America, our Hussein problem is just beginning. The other problem, that Osama fellow we should have been trying to capture this whole time, remains perched over our door like the raven.

    *William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org.

  • Vietnam and Iraq Have More Similarities Than Differences

    CHICAGO — To my immense surprise, I recently ran into the American scholar who, for many correspondents in Vietnam, offered the most fair-minded analysis of the war.

    Suddenly, there was Gerald “Gerry” Hickey at the Chicago Public Library, a little grayer after 35 years, but still much the same, with a big smile on his face and a welcome “Hello!”

    I remembered well how Gerry, then the Rand Corp.’s top man in Vietnam, had meticulously explained for us the cultures and behavior of highland tribes such as the Montagnards, but also the Viet Cong and the “pro-American” Saigon government.

    “And now we’re doing the same thing all over again,” he said as we talked about Iraq. “First, we suffer from the same invincible ignorance about Iraq that we suffered over Vietnamese culture. Second, in Vietnam we set the military impact with no concern about our effect on South Vietnamese culture. By the time we left in 1975, they were just exhausted. They were just tired out — and so was I.

    “It is so sad now that I can see the same mistakes being made in Iraq. The GIs busting down the doors, breaking into homes, doing everything wrong. But, you know something,” he went on, sadness outlining his voice, “I’m shocked at much of what we are seeing in Iraq: The Americans are much crueler than they were in Vietnam. Remember, when American correspondents found American troops burning down houses — that was remarkable then; today it’s the norm.”

    Gerry and I talked a long time that day, mulling over our common experiences, wondering primarily why the United States can’t ever pause to analyze a country correctly, and above all comparing the two conflicts.

    Despite the myriad voices in the press insisting, “Iraq is not a Vietnam!” the indisputable fact is that, if you consider the passions and principles applied there, it really IS another Vietnam. Among the causes for the war are obscurantist theories about foreign threats that have little basis in reality; civilians at the top who play with the soldiers they have never been; and the underlying lies that give credence to special interests (the Bay of Tonkin pretense in Vietnam, the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).
    In Vietnam, we were following the bizarre notion of the “domino theory,” the idea that a communist Vietnam would mean that all of Southeast Asia would fall to communism. The Johnson administration refused to realize that it was a colonial war, and that in colonial wars, people fight forever.

    With Iraq, the second Bush administration accepted the idea, perfervidly pushed by civilian neoconservatives, that Iraq was the center of terrorism, the cause of 9/11 and an immediate threat, ignoring the Greek chorus of voices warning against such intellectual, military and moral folly.

    Curiosly, in both cases it was civilian ideological fanatics in the Pentagon, enamored of American technology and with no knowledge of history or culture, and not the U.S. military, who pressed for the wars. (It was Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” then; now it’s Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others.)

    Perhaps the old American maxim of civilian control of the military might be changed, with what we are seeing, to military control of the civilians.

    Other comparisons of the two wars:

    Today, one hears a doublespeak that almost echoes the communists of the old days. In Vietnam, it was, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” With Iraq, it is President Bush’s statement of last week that “the more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react!”

    Today, it’s called “Iraqization.” In Vietnam, it was called “Vietnamization” — late-hour attempts to make everything look as though it’s working. As military historian William Lind wryly remarked to me of Iraqization, “It presumes that because you pay someone, he’s yours.”

    In 1967 in Vietnam, I spent a lot of time interviewing officers and troops all over the country, and I wrote a series of articles that my paper, the Chicago Daily News, headlined with: “The GI Who Asks ‘Why?’” Today’s GIs are beginning to ask that same question.

    America needs to look seriously at these two wars and analyze why it repeatedly gets involved in painful and costly faraway conflicts. Why, when we could with little effort be a great example for mankind, do we allow the driven and arrogant technocrats of the Vietnam era and the cynical and extremist Jacobins today to carry us to war after useless war?

  • Istanbul Mission Statement for the creation of an International Tribunal of Justice on the War and Occupation on Iraq

    Origins of the project

    The idea that had sprung up in several places upon the planet of having an international tribunal against the war in Iraq, was discussed and in principle supported at the Anti-War Meetings in Berlin, Jakarta and Geneva, Paris and Cancun. The Jakarta Peace Consensus made a declaration committing itself to the realization of an international war crimes tribunal. The Networks Conference (European and Cordoba Networks for Peace and Human Rights) organized by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in Brussels also devoted time and space for the discussion of the issue and the idea received broad support.

    The working group formed at the Networks conference organized by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in Brussels on 26/27 June, 2003, discussed the idea and possibilities of convening an international tribunal to investigate and establish the crimes perpetrated against the people of Iraq and humanity. The group in Turkey was entrusted with the task of acting as the secretariat and clearing house, carrying out the coordination in close contact with the groups in Brussels, Hiroshima, New York, London and others.

    The meeting of the Coordination Committee in Istanbul on October 27-29 2003 decided upon the concept, the form and the aims of the project.

    The legitimacy of the project

    A war of aggression was launched despite the opposition of people and governments all over the world, yet there is no court or authority that will judge the acts of the US and its allies. If the official authorities fail, then moral authority can speak for the world.

    Our legitimacy derives from:

    – Taking this initiative owing to the failure of official international institutions to hold accountable those who committed grave international crimes and constitute a menace to world peace.
    – Being part of the worldwide anti-war movement which expressed its opposition to this invasion.
    – The Iraqi people resisting occupation
    – We are convinced of the duty of all people of conscience to take action against wars of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other breaches of international law.
    – Acting on the basis of the struggles of the past to develop systems of peaceful co-existence and prevent future aggression and breaches of the UN Charter.
    – Giving voice to the voiceless victims of this war we are articulating the concerns of civil society as expressed in the most active parts of the social justice and peace movements.
    – Bringing the principles of international law to the forefront. Our legitimacy is earned through the process of achieving our aims.

    The tasks of the tribunal

    The first task of the tribunal is to investigate the crimes committed by the US government in launching the Iraq war. In spite of the world movement that condemned this war and against all international legislation the US government forced its premeditated war-strategy upon the world. Moreover the US-government requests impunity and puts itself above all international laws and conventions.

    The second task is to investigate allegations of war crimes during the aggression, crimes against occupation law, genocide and crimes against humanity. These may include the sanctions, the use of illegal weapons which kill over generations, such as uranium weapons.
    The third task is the investigate and expose the broader context of the New Imperial World Order. The tribunal would therefore consider the doctrines of “pre-emptive war” and all its entails;benevolent hegemony;full spectrum dominance; and;multiple simultaneous theatre wars; In this process the tribunal will investigate the vast economic interests that are involved in this war-logic.

    The tribunal would, after examining reports and evidence, listening to witnesses (Iraqi and internationals), hearing interventions by victims, would reach a decision.

    The aims

    In organizing this International Tribunal we pursue four fundamental aims. Our first goal is to establish the facts and to inform the public about crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes during the occupation, about the real goals behind this war, about the inspiration of the American politics and the dangers they present for world peace. This is especially important to contribute in breaking the wall of lies diffused by the war-coalition and their imbedded press.

    For the peace movement and the global anti-war protest, the tribunal presents an opportunity to continue mobilization. The tribunal should not remain an academic endeavor but should be backed by a strong international network. Anti-war and peace movements, which carried out the big mass movements against the attack on Iraq have in principle adopted the idea of indicting the aggressors and turning this into a campaign.

    We consider the tribunal as a continuing process. The investigation of what happened in Iraq is of prime importance to restore truth and preserve collective memory against the constant rewriting of history. We have to challenge the silence of the international institutions and impress on them to fulfill their obligations to international law. In judging the recent past our aim is to prevent illegal wars in the future. In this process the tribunal can formulate recommendations on international law and expand notions of justice and ethical political awareness. It can contribute to break the tradition of victors’ tribunals and give a voice to the victims of the war. In doing so we support the demand of large parts of world public opinion and the Iraqi people to end the occupation and restore Iraqi sovereignty.

    The International Tribunal initiative wants to inscribe itself in a broader movement to stop the establishment of the new imperial world order as a permanent state of exception with constant wars as one of its main tools. The Tribunal can bring a moral, political and partly juridical judgment that contributes to build a world of peace and justice.

    Form of the tribunal

    The general plan is to hold an independent world tribunal with : associated events, associated commissions of inquiry, commissions of investigation, hearings and specific issue tribunal sessions in various countries, culminating in a final tribunal session in Istanbul. So far, there will be hearings in Brussels and Hiroshima. Other proposals at the moment include New York, Copenhagen and Mexico. Associated events will be held in London and Mumbaï.

    Being confronted with the paradox that we want to end impunity but we do not have the enforcement legal power to do so, we have to steer a middle way between mere political protest and academic symposiums without any judicial ambition on the one hand, and impeccable procedural trials of which the outcome is known beforehand. This paradox that we are just citizens and therefore have no right to judge in a strict judicial way and have at the same time have the duty as citizens to oppose criminal and war policies should be our starting point and our strength.

    Although these commissions of inquiry or investigation will be working in conformity with an overall concept that will apply to the whole tribunal (spelled out in the Charter), the hearings will also have some autonomy concerning format. By approaching the Iraq case from as many angles as possible (international law, war crimes, occupational law, political and economical analysis…) we strengthen our common objective to end impunity and resist the imperial wars. In this way the hearings will mutually enforce each other and all the findings will be brought together in the final session in Istanbul.

    In order to be as inclusive as possible, we will support and recognize all endeavors to resist impunity. The project will endorse and support the efforts to bring national authorities and warmongers to national (like the complaint against general Tommy Franks in Belgium) or international courts (ICC).

    Timing

    The series of hearings will start on Wednesday April 14 2004 in Brussels and end in final tribunal session in Istanbul that will start on March 20 2005, second anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. These will be preceded by intensive inquiries, networking and campaigning.

    Appeal to the national and international movements

    We address an appeal to all organizations and individuals to support this project.
    We invite organizations to endorse and participate at various levels. They could:

    1. Undertake to organize a hearing or an associated event.
    2. Host a hearing.
    3. Contribute by contacts, names of people who would qualify to take part in the various components of the tribunal and establish the initial contacts with those people.
    4. Contribute names & contacts of persons and organizations of expertise who are already researching into the various aspects of the crimes and violations in question.
    5. Undertake to follow up with the preparation of certain reports and make them available for the use of the tribunal.
    6. Build a web page in as many languages as possible and constant flow of information.
    7. Undertake to organize the local campaigns around the tribunal.
    8. Contribute financially towards meeting the expenses involved in realizing this tribunal.

     Click here for PDF Version

  • What Victory?

    What Victory?

    What a difference a few months can make.

    At the end of April 2003, just four months ago, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Qatar headquarters of General Tommy Franks, effusively comparing the US victory in Iraq to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris.

    The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War and a reuniting of East and West, and the people of Paris actually welcomed the Allied forces as liberators from the Nazis in World War II. In neither case was it necessary for American forces to remain as an occupying force; in neither case did the US government have its eyes on the oil.

    As Rumsfeld savored US military dominance over the far inferior Iraqi forces, he triumphantly crowed, “Never have so many been so wrong about so much.” He was presumably referring to the “many” who doubted American military tactics in the war, not those who thought the war was immoral, illegal and unnecessary.

    It was clearly a day of jubilation for Rumsfeld and he was enjoying trumpeting to the world that he had been right all along.

    A few days later, a triumphant George W. Bush, dressed up like a combat pilot, was flown some thirty miles off the California coast to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Bush announced to the assembled troops on the carrier that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.

    Bush said: “With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.” He did not mention that approximately twice as many innocent civilians died in the Iraq War as had died on September 11th. Nor did not mention the Iraqi children who had lost arms and legs and parents as a result of the war, and would carry their injuries through their lives.

    The president, looking to all the world like the military hero he was not, continued: “No device of man can remove the tragedy from war.” He did not say, presumably because he did not think, that with wisdom the tragedy of war might be prevented. Nor did he say that, in the case of this war, it was initiated illegally without UN authorization based on arguments by him and his administration to the American people that the Iraqi regime posed the threat of imminent use of weapons of mass destruction.

    The combat pilot impersonator went on, “Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.” He might have added that this is especially true when it is he and his colleagues, and them alone, who decide who is guilty and who is innocent.

    As the television cameras rolled on, Bush said, “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on.” Four months out his perspective on victory is questionable, and there remains no established link between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorists. He was also wrong to conclude that the “battle of Iraq” was a victory or had ended.

    While an action doll of Bush in military garb is being marketed across the country, almost daily young Americans in the occupation force are being killed in what now appears to be an on-going war of liberation from the Americans.

    Saboteurs are blowing up and setting fire to oil pipelines, disrupting water supplies, and attacking UN relief workers. US occupation forces appear helpless to stop the new terrorists that have been created as a result of this war.

    The former Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, had argued for a far larger occupying force in Iraq. Rumsfeld overruled him, concluding that a larger force wasn’t needed. It now appears that General Shinseki was right and Rumsfeld was wrong.

    The weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration alluded to in order to frighten the American people and justify the war have not been found, despite our being told by Cheney that he knew where they were located.

    Four months after Rumsfeld crowed about the liberation of Paris and Bush declared an end to the major combat phase of the war, there is a deadly continuing war of attrition against US and British troops in Iraq. America, far from being hailed as a liberator, has created even more enemies in the Middle East and terrorists seem to be growing in numbers and boldness.

    Paraphrasing Rumsfeld, who himself was paraphrasing Churchill, it might be said: “Never have so few been so wrong about so much.” Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz are the leaders of the militant and shortsighted few. There has been no victory in Iraq, and under the circumstances victory is not possible. We now need a public dialogue on how best to extract ourselves from the perilous situation these men have created before we become ensnared in an oil-driven equivalent of the Vietnam War.

    The starting point for ending this peril is to awaken the American people by a full and open Congressional investigation of the misrepresentations by the Bush administration regarding Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the war. In Britain, the misrepresentations of the Blair government are being vigorously investigated by Parliament, but in the US an investigation of the Bush administration is being blocked by Congressional Republicans. What is needed is an investigation as rigorous as that being pursued in Britain.

    Additionally, as an intermediate step to transferring full administrative authority to the Iraqi people, the United States and Coalition Forces should move immediately to turn over authority for the administration of Iraq to the United Nations. Such a recommendation assumes, perhaps too readily, that the UN would be willing to accept this role and would be able to act with sufficient independence of Washington. By entrusting the future of Iraq to the UN, the United States would make clear that it is not administering Iraq in order to dictate the political future of the country or to enrich US-led corporations with ties to the Bush administration. It would also allow for sharing the security burden in Iraq and make possible the earlier return of the US troops presently in Iraq.
    *David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the editor of Hope in a Dark Time (Capra Press, 2003).

  • A Time For Questions

    A Time For Questions

    These are times in which there are many more questions than answers, and many Americans are beginning to form and articulate these questions. Some of the questions on my mind are the following:

    1. If the president gives false information to the American people about the reasons for going to war, should he be held to account?

    2. If the United Nations Security Council does not authorize a preemptive war, can any country proceed to war or is this the sole prerogative of the US government?

    3. If a country proceeds to war without UN authorization, is this “aggressive warfare,” the type of warfare for which German and Japanese leaders were punished after World War II?

    4. When the North Korean government repeatedly states that the nuclear crisis can be defused if the US will negotiate a mutual security pact with them, why is the current US administration dragging its feet in proceeding to enter into negotiations?

    5. Does the United States have a responsibility to participate with UN forces in restoring security to civilians in civil wars, such as that in Liberia?

    6. Should American troops stationed in Iraq have the right to complain about the policies of civilian leaders responsible for our policy there?

    7. With half its combat forces in Iraq, is the US military stretched so thin that it cannot adequately protect Americans at home or participate in needed UN peacekeeping operations abroad?

    8. With the war in Iraq costing American taxpayers nearly $4 billion per month and the US deficit expected to exceed $400 billion this year, was it wise to pass large tax cuts for the richest Americans?

    9. Is the desire to control Iraq’s oil the reason that the US hasn’t asked the United Nations for help in providing peacekeeping in Iraq?

    10. What is the relationship of companies such as Halliburton, Bechtel and the Carlyle Group, which are profiting from the war in Iraq, to members of the current US administration?

    11. Are Americans safer to travel throughout the world after the Iraq War?

    12. Has the credibility of the United States throughout the world increased or decreased in the aftermath of the Iraq War?

    13. What is the current status of respect for the United States throughout the world?

    14. Why has the current US administration been hostile to the creation of an International Criminal Court to hold individual leaders accountable for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity?

    15. Is war an effective way to make peace?

    It is time to start demanding answers from our government to these questions and many more, and their answers should not be given only in secrecy behind closed doors. Questions about war and peace are far too important to be left only to politicians and generals without the voice of the people. It is time for an ongoing public dialogue that includes answers to questions from the public. If democracy is to have meaning, the people have a right to know and they deserve to have their questions answered.

    –David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the editor of Hope in a Dark Time, Reflections on Humanity’s Future (Capra Press, 2003)..

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    Thanks for your message and the 15 questions each human being should be trying to answer today. More and more people actually are asking themselves these questions, so humanity’s slim chances for survival are increasing a little every day!

    – Olivier, Japan

  • Yes, We Need To Talk More About It!

    Bill of Rights: Amendment I
    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

    President Bush has dismissed already any other discussion regarding the “mistake” by the CIA for its misinformation on Saddam’s uranium mishap cited in his State of the Union.

    Several of his top aides herded to Sunday television shows stating: “End of story,”, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (ABC’s “This Week 7/13/03) and “The notion that the president of the United States took the country to war because he was concerned with one sentence about whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa is clearly ludicrous,” national Security adviser Condolezza Rice (CBS’s “Face the Nation” 7/13/03.)

    But simply a presidential order or the insistence of some officials of the Bush administration cannot erase this issue. The consequences of misleading a nation to go to war could be very serious. Therefore, if nothing is there to hide then nothing is there to fear of an investigation and open dialogue with the American people.

    Foolish errors are the cause of failures in the procedures that preceded the Iraq war. We must demand that action be taken to correct matters. It is a very simplistic excuse to blame the sole actions of the CIA. The mea culpa of CIA’s director George Tenet sounds too convenient, too easy. Suspicion grows with the quick “dismissal” of the whole affair. And it is not only the false accusations of Iraq’s seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons, it is the failure to find the major excuse for this war: the weapons of mass destruction.

    The fundaments of the United States are based on a pure democracy and the respect of its people. We must be well informed because that way we will be able to act with assurance and courage according to that knowledge.

    Let’s not fear to raise questions and to demand explanations, let’s not forget the way the American revolutionaries acted in 1776, let’s not forget the Bill of Rights. We must not be afraid of being branded as disloyal. If the U.S. as a nation bows its head and accepts without questioning these scandalous acts then the U.S. will become a nation of sheep, pitiful and weak not deserving the heritage of so many generations that have sacrificed their lives on behalf of their fellow man.

    Let’s create a climate in which will flourish again the total trust of government and institutions. The flaws in the Bush administration are not the best cradles for that trust.
    * Ruben Arvizu is Director for Latin America of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • The Bloody Lottery in Iraq

    The families of American soldiers in Iraq have a high chance to win a lottery; this one is not money or a nice gift but blood and loss of lives.

    Taking into consideration that there are about 148, 000 US servicemen and women in Iraq the odds that someone gets killed or wounded are much higher that the best expectations to win the state lottery. In other words, since May 1st when President Bush declared “that major combat had ended” more than 70 military families in the US have been “awarded” this news.

    The escalation of violence continues in the occupied Arab nation and there are no real signs that the situation will change for the better.

    With more information surfacing every day about the credibility of evidence from the Bush administration for the real causes for war, an investigation from the Congress is more likely to happen.

    Top officials of the Bush administration are now making statements that are exposing the deceit to have a pretext for the urgency of this war.

    The BBC comments: “In the United States, a recently retired State Department intelligence official said on Wednesday the Bush administration gave an inaccurate picture of Iraq’s military threat before the war and that intelligence reports showed Baghdad posed no imminent threat. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also said the United States did not go to war with Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of banned weapons, but because it saw existing information in a new light after the September 11 attacks. Weeks earlier, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz said the U.S. decision to stress the weapons’ threat as a reason for war was taken for “bureaucratic” reasons. “(“Bush under fire over Iraq claims”, 7/9/03)

    Congressman Dick Gephardt stated “President Bush’s factual lapse in his State of the Union address cannot be simply dismissed as an intelligence failure.”

    Is it really that bad the Intelligence services of the U.S. and the United Kingdom? It is possible to believe the unbelievable miscommunication and contradictions between powerful agencies such as the Secret Service, the CIA and the Pentagon? If that’s so then it is totally scary the thought of a nuclear war based on such “intelligence”.

    The American people and the world in general demand and deserve a thorough investigation to clear once and for all the political atmosphere that day by day becomes more rotten.

    Meanwhile, the wheel of misfortune continues turning in Iraq and new families will be informed of the loss of their loved ones.
    * Ruben Arvizu is Director for Latin America of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • “Bring ‘Em On?”

    Featured on Counterpunch.com

    A Former Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush’s Invitation for Iraqis to Attack US Troops

    In 1970, when I arrived at my unit, Company A, 4th Battalion/503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, I was charged up for a fight. I believed that if we didn’t stop the communists in Vietnam, we’d eventually be fighting this global conspiracy in the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas. I’d been toughened by Basic Training, Infantry Training and Parachute Training, taught how to use my weapons and equipment, and I was confident in my ability to vanquish the skinny unter-menschen. So I was dismayed when one of my new colleagues–a veteran who’d been there ten months–told me, “We are losing this war.”

    Not only that, he said, if I wanted to survive for my one year there, I had to understand one very basic thing. All Vietnamese were the enemy, and for us, the grunts on the ground, this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was being given to the American public for the war was not true.

    We had a battalion commander whom I never saw. He would fly over in a Loach helicopter and give cavalier instructions to do things like “take your unit 13 kilometers to the north.” In the Central Highlands, 13 kilometers is something we had to hack out with machetes, in 98-degree heat, carrying sometimes 90 pounds over our body weights, over steep, slippery terrain. The battalion commander never picked up a machete as far as we knew, and after these directives he’d fly back to an air-conditioned headquarters in LZ English near Bong-son. We often fantasized together about shooting his helicopter down as a way of relieving our deep resentment against this faceless, starched and spit-shined despot.

    Yesterday, when I read that US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, in a moment of blustering arm-chair machismo, sent a message to the ‘non-existent’ Iraqi guerrillas to “bring ’em on,” the first image in my mind was a 20-year-old soldier in an ever-more-fragile marriage, who’d been away from home for 8 months. He participated in the initial invasion, and was told he’d be home for the 4th of July. He has a newfound familiarity with corpses, and everything he thought he knew last year is now under revision. He is sent out into the streets of Fallujah (or some other city), where he has already been shot at once or twice with automatic weapons or an RPG, and his nerves are raw. He is wearing Kevlar and ceramic body armor, a Kevlar helmet, a load carrying harness with ammunition, grenades, flex-cuffs, first-aid gear, water, and assorted other paraphernalia. His weapon weighs seven pounds, ten with a double magazine. His boots are bloused, and his long-sleeve shirt is buttoned at the wrist. It is between 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. He’s been eating MRE’s three times a day, when he has an appetite in this heat, and even his urine is beginning to smell like preservatives. Mosquitoes and sand flies plague him in the evenings, and he probably pulls a guard shift every night, never sleeping straight through. He and his comrades are beginning to get on each others’ nerves. The rumors of ‘going-home, not-going-home’ are keeping him on an emotional roller coaster. Directives from on high are contradictory, confusing, and often stupid. The whole population seems hostile to him and he is developing a deep animosity for Iraq and all its people–as well as for official narratives.

    This is the lad who will hear from someone that George W. Bush, dressed in a suit with a belly full of rich food, just hurled a manly taunt from a 72-degree studio at the ‘non-existent’ Iraqi resistance.

    This de facto president is finally seeing his poll numbers fall. Even chauvinist paranoia has a half-life, it seems. His legitimacy is being eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered now that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all. Anti-war forces are regrouping as an anti-occupation movement. Now, exercising his one true talent–blundering–George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms.

    Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, “We are losing this war.”
    * Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He retired in 1996 from the US Army, from 3rd Special Forces. He lives in Raleigh.

  • In Iraq, Water and Oil Do Mix

    World Water Woes

    Conspicuously missing from the ubiquitous Iraq war critique was the subtle agenda of water rights in the parched Middle East region. Of all the reasons for invading Iraq, securing water rights was never mentioned because it implicates too many countries with volatile connections to Iraq, like Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Israel. Protest signs read, “No Blood For Oil,” as American corporations salivated in line for the opportunity to win contracts to rebuild the ravaged infrastructure. Why did no antiwar protesters carry signs saying, “No War for Water”? They should have.

    The current litany of reasons for invading or threatening to invade countries pertains to terrorism, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and undemocratic, fundamentalist regimes. These reasons are particularized and specific, and keep the world guessing where the United States will launch its next attack. With an explicit agenda for controlling water in the Middle East, however, the roadmap for regime change and regional control would become transparent and predictable.

    A land of displaced people and destroyed ecosystems, the once thriving marshland area of southern Iraq was home to hundreds of thousands of marsh Arabs who had sustained a 5,000 year-old culture until the ancient life-giving waters were drained and dammed by the recently-toppled Saddam Hussein government as well as by other riparian states. Truly Saddam created a catastrophic situation by redirecting the water and razing marsh Arab villages. Yet aside from the apparent ecological and humanitarian crisis pertaining to the area, why is the project of rehydrating the marshlands so urgently important for American interests?

    A World Bank webcast in May 2001 quotes Jean-Louis Sarbib, Vice President of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region, as saying that the CIA had identified water as one of the key issues of the 21st century. Water is a pressing issue in the Middle East which, like the sparse underground aquifers, stays beneath the surface. With 45 million people in the Middle East not having access to drinking water and 80 million not having access to sanitation, Sarbib’s commentary is an understatement.

    Jeffrey Rothfeder, author of explained in an article to the Boston Globe in January 2002 that “a freshwater crisis has already begun that threatens to leave much of the world dry in the next twenty years. One-third of the world’s population is starved for water. In Israel, extraction has surpassed replacement by 2.5 billion meters in the last 25 years. There are 250 million new cases of water-related diseases annually, chiefly cholera and dysentery, and ten million deaths. What’s more, vital regions are destabilized as contending countries dispute who controls limited water resources.”

    Rothfeder, quoting another World Bank official, former Vice President Ismail Serageldin, reminded readers that “the next world war will be over water.”

    Undercurrent of Water Politics

    The dialogue about access to clean water is commonplace in peace talks throughout the Middle East, but Western diplomats rarely broach the topic. An anonymous U.S. State Department official quoted in National Geographic said, “people outside the region tend not to hear about the issue (of water). It just doesn’t make the news.” By design, not by accident, this issue is obscured from Western eyes because the propaganda machinery from Washington, DC has not allowed it. Although water is at the top of the list in negotiations between Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Iraq,

    Only the region’s countries, the riparian states of Syria, Turkey and Iraq themselves have directly conferred on the issue of sharing the water of the Tigris and Euphrates. The United States cannot dictate water usage as a formal part of its foreign policy, or even legitimate the crisis surrounding clean water, in part because of its wholly unsustainable practices, and in part because a straightforward concession on the issue of dwindling water supplies would mean an complete overhaul of global diplomatic relations with a new emphasis on aquatic vulnerability.

    Published after the 9-11 terrorist attacks but prior to the recent war on Iraq, Peaceful Uses of International Rivers: The Euphrates and Tigris Dispute written by water rights expert Hilal Elver outlines the hydrohistory of the Fertile Crescent as well as the present challenges to settling the disputes between countries vying for water access in the 21st century. She notes that the “last trilateral meeting of the Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi technical committee was concluded in Damascus in 1996” with Iraq still under the United Nations-imposed sanctions regime which severely hindered international diplomatic relations. With the United States effectively in control of Iraqi politics and lobbying for the removal of the sanctions, presumably negotiations between the three nations will resume with respect to shared water issues.

    According to Thomas Naff, a professor of Middle East History at Pennsylvania State University, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which provide Iraq with nearly 100% of its water “depend essentially on agreements with Turkey” where both rivers originate. Turkey disagrees over quotas to meet Syria and Iraq’s minimum requirements for what would be the natural flow of the water and what would provide their people with adequate access to those resources, claiming that Syria and Iraq take more than their allotted amount of water from the rivers as compared to how much each country contributes to the rivers’ flows.

    Thus Turkey began constructing a major series of dams to control the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and flex their regional muscle. The Southeast Anatolia Project consists of 15 dams, 14 hydroelectric stations and 19 irrigation projects. Maybe to prove its capacity for controlling Syria’s and Iraq’s access to the life-sustaining waters of the two rivers or maybe just to fill the largest of the Project’s dams, Turkey cut off the water flow for 29 days in 1990. The point of potable prowess was well taken, and Iraq and Syria effectively tabled their mutual disagreements and colluded in 1998 to resist the construction of the Southeast Anatolia Project in Turkey. In the close quarters of Middle East politics, shared water resources often make for temperamental bedfellows.

    Closely tied to the disputes surrounding Iraq and Syria’s water supply is the proximity to Israel. Syria faces water difficulties on its southwestern border as well in the water-rich area of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. The Golan Heights has important water resources that, according to Professor Emeritus Dan Zaslavsky at Bar-Ilan University, if handed back over to Syria would mean that Israel loses nearly one-third of its fresh water.

    On May 7, 2003 Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Bouthaina Shabaan of Syria to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to returning the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967, as a key step in the peace process between Syria and Israel.

    Should the U.S. broker a peace plan that guaranteed the Golan to Syria, Israel would have to find a replacement source for its lost resources. Stephen Pelletiere, a former CIA analyst, wrote in the New York Times that Turkey had envisioned building a Peace Pipeline carrying water that would extend to the southern Gulf States, and as he sees it, “by extension to Israel.” He continued by saying that “no progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.”

    The assumptions about pan-Arab unity seem to dissolve when talking about the scarce commodity of water, especially when the two of the countries commanding control over the resources are also recipients of large amounts of financial and military aid from the United States: Turkey and Israel. This cosmetic overture to feign regional fairness and non-partiality toward Israel in returning the Golan Heights to Syria does not mask the fact that the United States has strategic goals to control water and oil supplies in the Middle East. The continued destruction of Palestinian homes and agribusiness by Israeli settlers is second only to continued U.S. aggression toward Iraqis via sanctions and wars, inciting and exacerbating global disgust at perceived American imperialism and anti-Arab, anti-Islamic policies. These sentiments contribute to the ongoing worldwide terrorist threats, which in turn propels the United States foreign policy to search and destroy any would-be terrorists and lending encouragement for further invasions in “uncooperative” countries like those listed as the Axis of Evil.

    The Dammed Water Problem

    While the regional water issues have been obscured, to some extent the poor condition of water in Iraq is no new news.

    Professor Thomas Nagy of George Washington University unloaded a massive compilation of U.S. Government documents from 1990-1991 that showed in no uncertain terms the malevolent intent to target sites of vital civilian importance in the first Gulf War. In an expose entitled “The Secret Behind the Sanctions” Nagy cites macabre foreknowledge of the effects of bombing water purification and sewage treatment facilities which provide clean water to the Iraqi people. Moreover, these documents detail how the economic sanctions, imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, would crescendo the effects of the bombings by banning items like water chlorinators and spare parts to rebuild the obliterated infrastructure, claiming that they could serve “dual use” purposes in making weapons of mass destruction.

    The result has been pandemic waterborne illnesses that have targeted the most vulnerable people in Iraqi society the children. The United Nations estimates that 5,000 children under age 5 have died every month as a result of preventable illnesses such as cholera and dysentery. Because electrical facilities were also targeted in the first Gulf War, vaccinations needing refrigeration (which requires electricity or functioning generators) spoiled, and several generations of children in Iraq have not been inoculated for illnesses which had been completely controlled under the socialist, secular Iraqi government which once provided its citizens with comprehensive, free medical care.

    It is safe to address topics like waterways contaminated by sewage in Iraq because most of the dialogue on impure water centers on the immorality of targeting civilian infrastructure. It is dangerous to talk about the scarcity of water in the region because less dialogue covers the most pressing issue: regional instability intensifying as a result of growing population rates and diminishing water supplies. The United States is testing the waters of hydropolitics by starting to acknowledge the shortage of water in the marshlands of Iraq. Missing from the critique of U.S. foreign policy in the region is a dialogue on regional and global sustainability, to the advantage of American interests.

    In justifying the recent invasion, we heard history about Saddam gassing his own people, the Kurds, developing and hiding weapons of mass destruction, displacing the marsh Arabs and ruining their land, and leading a torturous repressive regime that deprived Iraqi people from democracy and self-governance and led them to the deplorable conditions they now live in.

    The U.S. Department of State lists an interview with Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-born engineer and environmental activist, who explained that the Iraqi government diverted water by building canals and dams for many reasons. One was to catch soldiers fleeing the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980’s, and another was to punish the Shi’a people who, doing as the United States had told them to do at the end of the first Gulf War, led an uprising against the central Iraqi government and were abandoned by the U.S. military and forcefully put down by Saddam’s military.

    Alwash describes three different systems that Saddam’s regime used for redirecting the water away from the marshlands, claiming that even in the early 1990’s when dams in Turkey and Syria were built to harness hydroelectric energy and retain water for their countries’ usage, the marshlands of Iraq were vibrant and thriving. He maintains that it was exclusively the malicious ehydration campaign led by Saddam which ruined the marshlands and displaced or killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Marsh Arabs, draining 60% of the marshes between 1990-1994.

    Interestingly enough, draining the marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers what the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) calls “one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters” was done under the auspices of the sanctions and the watchful eye of the southern No-Fly-Zone, patrolled by Great Britain, the United States and, for some time, France. The No-Fly-Zones were established in 1992 to protect the Kurdish people in the north and the Shi’a people in the south from Saddam’s regime. These minority groups have received targeted repression and mistreatment, and the No-Fly-Zones were supposed to inhibit Saddam’s power to further oppress them.

    “We watched it happen,” said Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne at a forum on the marshlands at the Brookings Institution on May 7. “We had the power, the knowledge and the responsibility and we did nothing.” Undoubtedly, the long arms of Baghdad were able to reach to the southern marshlands despite the sanctions and the No-Fly-Zones, and wreak havoc on the indigenous people as well as the landscape.

    For the past twelve years while Iraqis were unable to import pencils because they contained graphite, blood bags because they contained anti-coagulants and cleaning supplies, because the Sanctions Committee 661 asserted that some parts could be used in making weapons of mass destruction, the government of Iraq was able to bring in materials and massive equipment to construct dams which rerouted the marshland waters and wrought misery on the Madan.

    Inundated by Foreign Interests

    One of the many claims of barbarism on the part of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime is displacing hundreds of thousands of Madan, or Marsh Arabs, and draining the legendary swamps where millennia-old culture had been practiced and preserved. In post-war Iraq, the United States has assumed the responsibility of restoring these marshlands. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been a vocal proponent of bringing water to the arid landscape, addressing the humanitarian needs of the remaining Marsh Arabs, and fixing the ecological crisis which, according to the UNEP, has vanished about 90% of the 20,000 square kilometers of Iraq’s marshlands.

    While addressing the marshland concerns attempts to smooth over twelve-year-old political rifts between the American administrators now governing Iraq and the displaced Madan people, it seems somewhat odd that such a relatively isolated minority of the Iraqi population would receive such attention and consideration so immediately after the war, especially since the Madan are Shi’a, a population that has largely rejected the occupying American forces and has rejoiced at the return of Islamic leaders from exile to Iraq.

    And yet, American interests are moving forward swiftly.

    Bechtel, an American firm with a controversial history of water privatization, who won the largest contract from USAID to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, is set to be a major player in the process with a contract worth $680 million. Bechtel’s history speaks for itself.

    Blue Gold, a book exposing global control of water by private corporations, listed Bechtel in the second tier of ten powerful companies who profit from water privatization. According to Corpwatch, two years ago current USAID administrator Andrew Natsios was working for Bechtel as the chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, a massive transportation project in Boston whose cost has inflated exponentially in the billions of dollars. While providing political disclaimers on its website as a result of investigative reporting centering on the close relationship between government and private business, Bechtel certainly will benefit from its positioning as the sole contractor for municipal water and sanitation services as well as irrigation systems in Iraq.

    Vandana Shiva also implicates Bechtel in attempting to control not only the process of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, but also control over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers themselves. Bechtel has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Bolivia for their plan to privatize the water there, which would drastically rise the cost of clean water for the poorest people in the country. To control the water in the Middle East, Bechtel and its fiscal sponsors, the United States government, would have to pursue both Syria and Turkey, either militarily or diplomatically. Syria has already felt pressure from the United States over issues of harboring Iraqi exiles on the U.S.’s “most wanted” list, as well as over issues of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

    It is not stretch of the imagination that a company like Bechtel with a history of privatization would have its sights set on water in the Middle East, starting with their lucrative deal in Iraq. However, the United States is not positioned to enter a new phase of global geopolitics where water, a limited vital resource that every human needs, is the hottest commodity and where American corporations like Bechtel have not already capitalized on the opportunity to obtain exclusive vending rights.

    Devoting attention to restoring the marshes clearly serves U.S. businesses and corporations who have control over which areas of the marshes get restored, and which ones get tapped for their rich oil resources. Control of the marshlands by the U.S.-led interim government and by the American corporations who have won reconstruction contracts is crucial in deciding where new oil speculation will take place. If only a percentage 25% according to experts on a Brookings Institution panel on marshland reconstruction can be restored, then it would behoove those working on issues of oil and water not to rehydrate areas where such oil speculation will likely take place.

    Water is vital to the production of oil as well; one barrel of water is required to produce one barrel of oil. Bechtel and Halliburton, who received a U.S. Army contract to rebuild the damaged oil industry which will likely reach $600 million, are the two most strategically-positioned corporations to control both the water and oil industries in Iraq.

    Yet this ruse of generous reconstruction and concern seems both an unlikely and peculiar response after a less-than-philanthropic U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq. Supporters and opponents of the war alike could hardly miss its transparency. Whether the reasoning was because of oil, liberating the Iraqi people, ferreting out weapons of mass destruction or exerting regional influence, few pretenses were made to distance the war profiteers from the battlefield in the war’s wake.

    The actions of agencies like USAID, which has pledged more than a billion dollars to facilitate rebuilding infrastructure in Iraq which the U.S. military and policymakers had a large hand in destroying, are far from altruistic. The problem of the Marsh Arabs was not invented overnight at the end of the recent war, but rather has developed in plain view of the whole world via satellite images and documented in-country reports of displacement and abuse. Moreover, the marshlands are not Iraq’s sole antiquity. Museums, regions and sites of archaeological importance were destroyed, bombed and looted not only during this last war, but also continuously since the first Gulf War. Will we be paying to rebuild those as well?

    According to Peter Galbraith, a professor at the Naval War College, three weeks of ransacking post-war Baghdad left nearly every ministry in shambles, including the Irrigation Ministry, except for the Oil Ministry that was guarded by U.S. troops. The people of Iraq are becoming rapidly disenchanted with a prolonged U.S. presence in their country as their former disempowerment under Saddam is translated into present disempowerment under the Americans.

    According to those working closely with the project to rehydrate the arshlands, in the newly “liberated” Iraq the silenced voices of the oppressed peoples can now be heard and addressed, the stories of destruction can be told and the much-needed healing of humans and terrain can take place. Whether this will actually happen is another story. At the Brookings Institution forum on the marshlands, no native Iraqis were represented, and the larger question arising in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq is what tangible legitimacy is given to voicing the will of the people by putting representative Iraqis in power.

    Water, Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink

    Perhaps the issue of water is left unspoken on the global level because the transnational corporations supported by powerful Western governments ontribute largely to water pollution and privatization and do not want to draw attention to this fact lest they be forced to clean up their acts and sacrifice profits. Certainly higher standards and levels of accountability would be imposed on industries relying on expendable water resources if the true shortage of water were openly acknowledged.

    Perhaps it is because the leaders, politicians and diplomats who negotiate issues like this do not want to cause mass hysteria in the region, or in the United States or Western world, by directly addressing the problem of diminishing water supplies. Instead they prefer to keep it their little secret, hidden from public view and accountability, prolonging the inevitable panic and hording that will ensue when people’s needs will outweigh the planet’s capacity for providing potable water.

    Perhaps water issues in Iraq and in the Middle East in general do not make the news so as not to legitimize the environmental movement’s claims that water is a precious and ever-diminishing resource that requires drastic reprioritizing on a personal, national and global level. Sustainable practices of water conservation are given cursory attention worldwide and are not yet being implemented on a credible, meaningful scale.

    Population growth expectations for the Middle East provide a staggering predicament. According to Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars, the regional population was near 500 million in 1998, and that figure is expected to double by the year 2050. There will be no peace in the Middle East without addressing issues of sustainability and access to water. The microcosm of war in the Middle East is a staggering prediction of a potential widespread global crisis if countries do not learn to conserve and cooperate.

    Or perhaps it is because resources are not allocated fairly in the region, and acknowledging massive humanitarian crises means that the whistle-blowers are accountable to fixing the problem. Israelis and Palestinians already compete for limited water resources, with Palestine getting short shrift and less water. As noted in Resource Wars, Jewish settlers already get five to eight times more water per capita than Palestinians.

    Addressing problems of war, famine, the environment, human rights, democracy and sustainability has traditionally been compartmentalized work with little overlap and interdependent relevance. The situation of the marsh Arabs integrates the urgency of ending wars, providing for humanitarian crises and looking ahead into the future at the necessity of sharing natural resources equitably. In the near future, wars may be fought not over intangible ideologies like communism, terrorism or religion, but rather fought overtly about access to clean water. It will soon be much more difficult for governments to euphemize about their intent to wage war.

    The policy of rehydrating the marshlands of Iraq is significant in that it marks American interests’ recognition of water scarcity in the Middle East. It also means that following the blue lines on the map charts a precarious course toward war or peace, depending on the management of water resources.
    * Leah C. Wells serves as the Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). She has visited Iraq three times with Nobel Peace Prize-nominated organization Voices in the Wilderness (htpp://www.vitw.org).

  • Regrouping After the War: NAPF Peace Education Coordinator Leah Wells Addresses the Campus Antiwar Network

    Last night I spoke with Kathy Kelly, who just returned from Iraq the day before as a steady member of the Iraq Peace Team, about her experiences there over the past few months, and where she sees the movement headed here in the United States. She and I spoke about an article she wrote for the Electronic Iraq website, an heartwrecking story about a mutual good friend of ours in Iraq. Kathy decided to leave Iraq after her conversation with our friend and driver, Sattar, who is quite possibly the kindest person I have ever met. Reading her account of his ordealduring the U.S.-led invasion (http://electroniciraq.net/news/692.shtml) made me shudder to think what my friend had endured over the past month.

    Squeamish by nature, Sattar had spent weeks working in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in a hospital, volunteering for overworked, overstretched doctors, nurses and hospital staff. He did everything from moving patients to inserting IV needles.

    Another member of the Iraq Peace Team, Cathy Breen mentioned that it will probably be easier to transport Americans across the Iraqi border now. He said, “You’re right. This is your country now.”

    Currently in Iraq, the American military, the American government and American corporate interests all control nearly every facet of life forthe Iraqis. Americans have almost single-handedly destroyed the country, and now want to profit from rebuilding it. UNICEF takes grant money from USAID, and the contractors must go through the U.S. government for permission to rebuild, renovate or rehabilitate any sector of Iraqi society. In essence, we control everything.

    And what is the peace movement to do? Before and during the war, bright ideas were a dime a dozen for stopping the invasion. Everyone had a spin on what would work best. And now, we are left at an uncomfortable juncture. We did not stop the war, and we have to figure out what to do now.

    It seems that American interests from the military to the government to the corporations to even the peace movement have emerging ways of telling Iraqis how things should be in their country now.

    What if we paused a moment, took a deep breath, and gave the Iraqis some space to allow them themselves to discern what would be best for them. We should give ordinary Iraqis some time to take stock of their lives and make decisions of their own before deciding that we, too, even the well-intentioned peace movement, have control over the direction oftheir lives. We should also encourage the United Nations and its international bodies to play an appropriate role in the reconstruction of Iraq as well as in global disarmament and peacekeeping.

    Rather than focusing on the external, on what is going on in Iraq, we should be focusing internally on what is going on socially and politically in our own cities and states. As citizens of the United States, what do we have the most authority over? Our country and our lives.

    Recently I spent some time at the Earthsong community near Na’alehu, Hawaii. I had gone there to finish writing and organizing a book on peace education that I began working on in mid-2001. The entire Earthsong community is sustainable. The women staying there urinate in the yard and use compost toilets for solid waste. All buildings are powered by solar energy, and the copious garden space provides lush abundance of fruits, vegetables and grains. It was quite a rude awakening for me; I initially whined for the nearest Hilton. I am not accustomed to this lifestyle and found it rather disorienting.

    Staying at Earthsong ended up being the most valuable lesson in peace education for me. I got my own radical, revolutionary course in peace education and ustainability in confronting the crucial inner peacework that makes the outer peacework possible. Since the war started, I havefelt ornery, angry, useless, agitated, sullen and just about every emotion in the range between frustration and rage. In a word, I have been unbalanced.

    Perhaps this is a familiar experience? Has anyone ditched family or friends in the past two months in order to do “the work” for preventing, opposing or ending the war? Has anyone been rundown, sick or suffered poor nutrition? Has anyone been in at least one major fight? Anyone missed sleep?

    What if we realized that our inner lives all the aforementioned questions actually mirrored all the mess, craziness and dysfunction ofthe external world, i.e. everything we’re working against. What if allthat we oppose and disavow actually exists right inside of us, and in order to effectively confront the greater evils of the world, we have to begin in our own space and consciousness?

    Rather than saying, “George W. Bush is hateful, ignorant and greedy,” we could turn the statement around and examine where each of us individually is hateful, ignorant and greedy.We need to acknowledge and honor our own lives and processes, being fully congruent in our thoughts and actions. Integrity means that we don’t put on the charade of being a happy, cheerful peacemaker out in the world and then return home grumbly and gnarly spreading peace in the world and hate in our homes.

    We should be mindful of the power of our thoughts, words and actions. We need to be aware of ourselves and of the need to keep balance and not let ignorance govern our behavior. And we should be especially concerned about our greediness, our over-consumptive lives and mindless wasteful practices. How can we begin to model what we would like to see happen in the world on a wider scale if we are not putting the “reduce, reuse, recycle” principle into practice. Living sustainably, calling for peace and justice in our own homes and neighborhoods is making the first step. Founder of the Catholic Worker communities, Dorothy Day once said that those who have more thanthey need are stealing from the poor.

    Yet, as I recall my experience in Hawaii, I heard many people who are living in beautiful conditions say that they could never return back tothe mainland after experiencing the liberation of living sustainably. While it’s important for them to live their truth, it makes me concerned for the areas where more people need to hear the message of peace through self-inquiry, mutual causality rather than blame and sustainable living practices.

    In general, there’s an overabundance of activists and “progressives” living in well-informed, cushioned, safe communities, especially in urban hubs. A whole country of consumption, of Wal-Marts and Rite-Aids, of CostCo’s and Big Lots, needs to be exposed to the reality that not onlyoil is a precious resource, but arable land, access to clean water and fresh air are as well. More people with experience in sustainable living need to fan out and bring these once-lost-now-regained practices to places where people are living most unsustainably. People in Colorado, in Southern California, in the Bible Belt, the Deep South and especially Texas need to hear about compost, about community garden space and about practices that make individuals and the planet healthier.

    A redefining moment for the peace movement

    As a group, the antiwar mobilization did not stop the invasion of Iraq,but we certainly made it much more costly on a political level, both nationally and internationally. Our challenge now is to transform the momentum from opposing this war to addressing concerns in our country, drawing attention to our ailing domestic economy, to the obliterated education budgets in so many states, and to the welfare of our citizens young, old, differently-abled and veterans.

    We need to be looking at the roots of what made this war possible.We need to examine why the military is such an attractive option for young people, a stable, well-funded and respectable institution that provides an alternative to the fact that upon graduation, many students have no viable skills or direction in an ever-shrinking job market. Because there is no living wage in our country, we need to be fully cooperating with the labor movement to ensure that jobs pay well enough and utilize students’ skills and talents that they are not subsumed into the ranks of the military simply to pay for school or have some boundaries which should have been set and supported by their home communities.We need to examine why education is bearing the brunt of budget cuts. A systematically undereducated country is a malleable, gullible country. An ignorant population is easily swayed by propaganda and fear, troublingly influenced not by books and words but by images and sounds. Having given up much of our critical thinking responsibility to powerful elected or appointed decision-makers or their corporate media mouthpieces, many American citizens cannot tell truth from fiction and are paralyzed in the chasm between.

    We need to examine why we do not have people in office who represent people like us, people who have our interests at heart. By and large, we do not have people in office who represent us because by and large, we are not running for office! One-third of the elections in our country go uncontested every year, a free and natural platform in our democratic process that we do not take advantage of. To some extent, people who want to create change that will bring about balance and peace to the world must learn to play the political game and learn how, in our own integrity, we can play to win. A few months ago, I was moved by a speech by Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder who told the UC Santa Barbara audience that we need to run candidates for office who will win. We laud candidates like Kucinich, Wellstone and Ted Kennedy but are reluctant to run for public office and attempt to make an impact like they have.

    (Michael Moore ran for the School Board during his Senior year of high school, got elected and eventually played a role in the Principal’s early resignation.)

    The Weapons Industry: Getting to the roots of the problem

    The technology used to wage the war, from start to finish, were researched, developed and built here in the United States. Our number one moneymaking export is weapons. The United States supplies nearly three-fourths of the weapons used in conflicts going on worldwide. The industry which produces weapons of mass destruction has its home in the United States.

    The nuclear weapons industry is maintained and overseen by the University of California Regents who have had exclusive contracts with the United States Department of Energy for the past fifty years. The UC Nuclear Free campaign, a project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, seeks to shed light on the UC’s complicity in the research, development, manufacturing and testing of nuclear weapons since their inception. It is immoral and inappropriate that universities who are charged with intellectual growth are also the sole responsible parties for producing weapons of mass destruction.

    Yet these are not faceless entities. There are real people, real graduate students and real professors, real administrators with real families who are just doing their jobs, the same as the employees at Boeing, Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglas and TRW. They are corporations who employ people not in a void but rather in a context, in their contexts as a professor needing tenure, as a graduate student needing funding, as a secretary needing stability and health insurance which exist for their livelihood.

    We cannot begin to transform, or even shut down, the weapons manufacturing industries without directly impacting people who work there and who do not set the policies.

    It’s conventional to hammer on the top of the power triangle, exposing the CEO’s, the shady business practices and the sweetheart deals for their blatant war profiteering. CorpWatch is a crucial instrument in this endeavor.

    It’s radical to get to the base of the power triangle, the workers in their average lives, and start organizing and influencing the employees!

    Oil and Power

    One of the primary reasons among many that this invasion took place, to no one’s surprise, is oil. Evidenced by the contracts secured by Halliburton and Bechtel, the government and corporate insiders positioned themselves to make a killing, so to speak, on their oil-based opportunities.In revising our critique of the motivations of the Bush administration, we should also take a look at how we depend on their nouveau conquistador policies. How many of us drove here to this gathering? Flew here? Carpooled? Rode bicycles? Used biodiesel? Used public transportation? We should be especially observant of our own hypocrisyand our dependence on petroleum products, not only on fuel but on plastics as well.

    Natural resources like oil are at the heart of global conflicts. Water and coastline space are already limited resources as the ocean levels rise and access to clean water is more scarce. These issues certainly will float to the surface in the next few years.

    The war was not only about oil, though. Regional control and domination served as powerful motivators for this conflict as well, and the increasing connections between Iraq and the struggle for a free Palestine cannot be overlooked. Already interconnected, another layer of overlap between these places is the context of occupation: Palestine by Israel,and Iraq by the United States.

    What to do about Iraq?

    With respect to Iraq itself, we have our work cut out for us. First and most importantly, the sanctions regime which our State Department said would remain in place “as long as Saddam Hussein is in power or until the end of time” are still punishing the people of Iraq. What use do economic sanctions serve, and is there a bigger global lesson to be learned fromthe devastating effects that have killed more than a million and a halfpeople in Iraq since 1990? The issue of the sanctions, contrary to some opinions, is not obsolete. The recalcitrant sanctions are most relevant now, when the goalpost established by the State Department has been reached.

    In many of the news reports that I have read recently, especially through independent media, the common sentiment of the Iraqi people is tepid graciousness for their “liberation” and scalding desire for the rapid exit of U.S. presence in their country. The Iraqi people want the United States out of their country. They are furious that U.S. soldiers and tanks protected the Ministry of Oil and let looters and ransackers destroy food stocks, precious artifacts and civilian infrastructure. Just recently a group of Iraqi antiwar, anti-occupation protesters were killed by our military for demonstrating. Is this the free and democratic Iraq the Bush administration envisioned? Apparently not.

    As I said before, we should not give up on the United Nations as a powerful intermediary in creating and maintaining peace in the Middle East, and we should not give up on ourselves. After the first Gulf War, much of the peace movement felt frustration and chagrin for the lack ofsuccess in stopping the war, and effectively went to sleep on the issue until 1996 when many realized that the war had not ended. No-Fly-Zones and sanctions were a debilitating after-war presence.

    At the termination of the flagrant bomb-dropping and battlefield conflict in Iraq, we have some very strong leverage points as a movement. We can keep the momentum by working on what’s doable, like focusing internally on our own political pressure points and singling out people from our communities who helped to orchestrate the war and are complicit in maintaining the occupation of Iraq.

    For example, the University of California students present at the gathering today have a powerful ally in the Middle East. Her name is Barbara Bodine, and she is the UC Alumni Regent and has been active in the UC Santa Barbara community. As a regent, she has influence over the UC’s oversight of the nuclear weapons program as well as being one of the central administrators in Iraq under newly-appointed Iraqi interim leader Jay Garner. The UC students are her constituents, and we should be able to find some important things to say to her and to lobby for. Where are the places where we can apply pressure here? The options range from importing technology necessary to determine if depleted uranium is present in the body, to ensuring that student exchanges are able to take place.

    The young people of Iraq could possibly be our greatest concern in establishing a plan for the peace movement. In Iraq, 46% of the population is under age 16. What are their needs, and what is our accountability to them? Two wars and more than twelve years of sanctions later, policies enforced by our government have been met with unfailingcompliance by the American people who are ignorant of the experiences of average Iraqis. Our inaction and ignorance have helped to kill more than half a million kids in Iraq and imprison millions of others in the sequestered hell of a nation under sanctions. These kids have died because, quite frankly, they could not afford to live. The dinar devalued from 3.3 to 3,000 dinar to 1USD in the span of twelve years. Health care and education have become luxuries in a country where public welfare was once the envy of the Middle East.

    In February when I was in Iraq for an international student gathering, I presented students and teachers with the Campus Antiwar Network statements as well as the antiwar resolutions from many other American college campuses. One gap that my presence was able to bridge is the gaping disparity of cross-cultural communication between Iraqi and American students. In early March, students from UC Santa Barbara participated in a radio dialogue with students from Baghdad University for nearly two hours. They spoke frankly about the pending war, as well as shared jokes, poetry and personal insights about philosophies on life.

    As students, one of your most powerful platforms is making the connections between education and militarism, i.e. the need for funding schools and for teaching peace. Those of you who are called to be teachers should examine the vast amount of resources available to make educating for peace an integral classroom component. The military recruiters on campus should get no more access to students than is allowed under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and certainly should be balanced with other peopleoffering careers with a conscience and peaceful alternatives to military service.

    So what’s the big picture? We have our work cut out for us. I am grateful for your hard work and organizing to make this student antiwar conference happen, and it will be a long process. I hope you are in this for the long haul.

    While I was in Hawaii, I had the time to look through a book of quotes I’ve compiled over the past few years. One in particular by June Jordan stood out to me because of its appropriateness: We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

    Thank you.