The fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is now behind us and the folly (or cynicism) of this war has never been more evident, the spin never more abundant. Perhaps the worst example is the denial of the scale of civilian deaths caused by the invasion and continuing occupation. The Lancet study, mentioned in the right column on this page, which was done by the standard cluster approach used by the UN to estimate mortality in dozens of countries each year, found the number of violent deaths to be ten times higher than the official figure given by the Iraq government.
Les Roberts, who is a coauthor of the Lancet article, puts it this way: "How can the US and Britain pretend they understand the level of resentment in Iraq if they are not sure if, on average, one in 80 families have lost a household member, or one in seven, as our study suggests? If these two countries have triggered an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide, and have actively worked to mask this fact, how will they credibly be able to criticise Sudan or Zimbabwe or the next government that kills thousands of its own people?"

The very fact that urban areas are being bombed is a sign that many civilians are being killed "collaterally." As noted recently by Juan Cole: "Late Saturday [Feb. 25], the US Air Force launched a series of bombing raids on southeast Baghdad. This is absolutely shameful, that the US is bombing from the air a civilian city that it militarily occupies. You can't possibly do that without killing innocent civilians, as at Ramadi the other day. It is a war crime. US citizens should protest and write their congressional representatives. It is also the worst possible counter-insurgency tactic anyone could ever have imagined. You bomb people, they hate you."

Even George Bush should be able to understand that.

The US killing of Iraq civilians is regular, but the reports are irregular or inexistent. The occupation of Iraq has been a series of lies and denials from the beginning. As Frank Rich puts it, "Oh what a malleable war Iraq has been. First it was waged to vanquish Saddam's (nonexistent) nuclear arsenal and his (nonexistent) collaboration with Al Qaeda. Then it was going to spread (nonexistent) democracy throughout the Middle East. Now it is being rebranded as a fight against Tehran." But the UN has called U.S. data on Iran's nuclear aims unreliable. And Seymour Hersh argues that this "redirection" of US policy is benefiting its enemies in the war on terrorism.

So is there any logic at all in the whole US Middle East debacle? Apart from (1) protecting Israel and (2) building permanent strategic military bases in Iraq, the only other consistent theme in this catastrophic venture is of course (3)... oil. The US is now encouraging adoption by the Iraq parliament of a law that proposes to open the country's currently nationalized oil system to foreign corporate control. Antonia Juhasz and Raed Jarrar describe the Bush version of democracy in Iraq: the law "is news to most Iraqi politicians."

As "The Clash of Civilizations" is taking shape, due to the efforts of American neocons and Muslim extremists, it may be time to have another look at the demonization of Islam, since even Pope Benedict has been adding fuel to the fire.
Axiom No. 1: Any religion and/or its texts can be used to justify practically any aggression.
Christianity has been used to justify the brutalities of the Crusades and the Inquisition, and, to bring it closer to US experience, even witch burning. An Armageddon mentality seems to be buttressing neocon policies in the Middle East.
On the other hand, in the "Dark Ages" of Europe, Muslim civilization was responsible for transmitting ancient Greek wisdom (Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy) and contributed to advances in mathematics (al-Jabr or algebra) and medicine: Muslims and Jews were at the origin of one of the first medical schools in Europe, in Montpellier, and a medical textbook by the Persian scientist Ibn Sina, The Canon of Medicine, was used in many European medical schools as late as 1650.
In contrast with the renowned Salafist/Wahhabite mistreatment of women, 11th century Spanish Muslims are thought by many to have inspired troubadour love songs. For instance, a mid-11th century treatise by Ali ibn-Hazm in Cordoba, "The Dove's Neck Ring" or "Ring of the Dove," deals with the art and practice of love. Ibn-Hazm also argued for the prophethood of women. All of this has been part of Muslim culture, including in parallel, of course, the 1001 Nights stories of Scheherazade that we grew up with: tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad the Sailor, with their genies and flying carpets (part of an ongoing oral tradition).
Islam, like Christianity, can be perverted to suit belligerent policies, but those perversions don't define a civilization.
The "Clash" is a political choice. Peace too.

Heard on the grapevine:
Impoverished North Korea has nothing to negotiate with. So it cooked up its nuclear program and missiles (1962 Scud technology from the Russians that the N.Koreans improved a bit in the 1970s). It wants food, fuel, foreign investment, other technologies. The Clinton administration understood this and worked a deal in the early 1990s to supply some of these, and N.Korea happily mothballed its nuclear program. The Bush administration abrogated the Clinton deal and ignored N.Korea, so N.Korea got out its nuclear program again. The Bushites won’t negotiate with N.Korea because “that didn’t work” and “North Korea is evil,” and they blame the Clinton administration for the failure. N.Korea’s missiles and nuclear tests don’t seem to work, either.
According to one theory, impoverished N.Korea hopes eventually to merge with S.Korea, which is booming economically. The S.Koreans used to dream about reunification, too, but abandoned the idea (at least for a while) after they saw what happened to Germany following reunification. S.Korea feels it must be MUCH stronger economically before merging with N.Korea. So it’s not sending its businessmen and bankers there.
The solution obviously is to give the N.Koreans lots of aid and get them to shut down the nuclear program for another decade.
But to the Bushites, N.Korea is part of the “Axis of Evil,” and they’re determined to keep playing it that way.
After all, they have elections coming up.
Mushroom clouds, mushroom clouds!!!!

Ever wonder what the real stakes are in Darfur?
To counter growing international criticism of its role in the massacres, the Khartoum government prepared and published a multipage advertising supplement extolling Sudan’s modern achievements.

The supplement ran in the New York Times late in March. The purpose of such a supplement is not just to burnish Sudan’s image; it’s also to make publications think twice about running negative articles, because big supplements bring the publications big chunks of cash. It’s a practice that Saudi Arabia has long pursued.

The supplement’s main feature article (unsigned, of course) cites a 1998 “estimate” by Chevron that Sudan may have “more oil than Iran and Saudi Arabia together.” No one knows just what Sudan’s recoverable oil and gas reserves might turn out to be. But if Sudan has even a fraction of such mammoth reserves, oil companies in neither the US nor Europe (nor in China, Japan, etc.) will want to wrench relations with the Khartoum government. So their governments will try to refrain from interceding in the Darfur genocide.

Would it be presumptuous to guess that much of those reserves may be in the western desert near the Chad border?

Chevron, incidentally, was the model for the corrupt oil giant Connex in the movie “Syriana”....

Now that Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America," is calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the support for Bush's war has never seemed more flimsy. Those who are still saying, "We can't pull out now," might take a look at these arguments from the Progressive Democrats of America.

No sooner does the American public incline toward withdrawal from Iraq, when it is confronted with threats by its government to attack neighboring Iran. Once again we hear claims of WMDs endangering the world, but where is the real threat? Certainly nothing immediate according to the IISS, the "world's leading authority on political military conflict." In the press launch of the latest IISS Strategic Dossier, "Iran’s Strategic Weapons Programmes – A Net Assessment," IISS Director, Dr. John Chipman said, "...if Iran threw caution to the wind, and sought a nuclear weapon capability as quickly as possible without regard for international reaction, it might be able to produce enough HEU [highly enriched uranium] for a single nuclear weapon by the end of this decade."

So if the immediate threat is not WMDs, what is it? In "Iran: the next war," John Pilger suggests one very good possibility: "Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous." Considering that Iran is OPEC's second largest oil producer, it would be quite a shift in world finances. Perhaps there's another meaning for WMDs: "Worries of Monetary Disaster."

We can only hope that the US will choose the diplomatic approach to resolving these problems, but the record is not reassuring, as illustrated by this list of US military and clandestine operations in foreign countries - 1798 - present

In his video Nobel Prize speech, Harold Pinter said that "the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed." Pinter further considered it "just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice" for committing "blatant state terrorism" in invading Iraq. Click here for the whole speech.

Jorge Hirsch is one of the physicists who initiated the petition by physicists on nuclear weapons policy in September 2005. In Mr. Hirsch's words, "The scientific community (which created nuclear weapons) is alarmed over the new U.S. nuclear weapons policies. A petition to reverse these policies launched by physicists at the University of California San Diego has gathered over 1,500 physicists' signatures including eight Nobel laureates and many prominent members of the U.S. scientific establishment."
This is essentially a reaction to the Pentagon's new "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations," which envisages the use of nuclear weapons against a nonnuclear adversary. Click here to see (and sign) the petition.

Rosa Parks showed how one person's determination can change the course of social history. She's an American hero, but how many courageous figures like this do we commemorate?
In an article called "Unsung Heroes," Howard Zinn wrote "Our country is full of heroic people who are not Presidents or military leaders or Wall Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to injustice and war."
We're carving Rosa into our virtual Mount Rushmore.

John Christensen returned to his native Jersey in the 1980s and found it "transformed into an offshore finance centre." In 1987, he was appointed as an economic adviser to the States of Jersey and got a much closer look at what was happening behind the scenes. In his article called "Hooray Hen-Wees," he writes:

"In the wake of the 1980s international debt crisis, banks shifted to targeting the world's eight million or so high net-worth individuals (HNWIs, or hen-wees), believing they provided the most profitable growth area. In 1995 I was told that the industry target was to move the majority of hen-wee financial assets to offshore accounts and trusts within a decade. To judge from a recent study showing that $11.5 trillion of hen-wee assets are currently placed tax-free or minimally taxed offshore, the banks have made significant progress towards this goal. Were the returns on that sum taxed at an average rate of 30 per cent, the $255 billion additional revenue would cover the financing needs of the UN Millennium Project, which aims to double aid to poor countries by 2010."

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,
"Undernourishment and deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals cost more than 5 million children their lives every year."
And this, because of systematic inequality on earth.

Not enough for the US military to extend its hegemony over air, land, and sea...
cyberspace is the new objective.
"We Must Fight the Net" declares a recently declassified Pentagon document reported by the BBC and made public by the National Security Archive. The Information Operations Roadmap describes the new forms of electronic warfare, including everything from influencing public opinion and "adversary decision-making" to attacking computer networks. They're not handing out logos, but beware: your computer may already have "DoD inside."

Katrina has given the lie to the neocon masquerade of making the world a safer place. Not surprisingly, the Iraqi people have some doubts about this safer world, but the doubts are increasingly shared by Bush’s fellow Americans, even the ones who voted for him. Faced with a predicted disaster on the home front, the Bush government has failed miserably, and the failure continues.

The disaster in New Orleans should come as no surprise. It was announced in detail as early as in 2001 in Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, and the Houston Chronicle. In 2002, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an award-winning series of five articles called Washing Away, in which they said, "A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time."
In early 2001, FEMA said that the potential damage to New Orleans was among the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters facing this country.
And yet, after decades of neglecting levee funding, the flow of federal aid to the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) dropped to a trickle in 2003, mainly because of funds diverted to the war in Iraq and cuts in federal taxes.
This trickle of money has now turned into a flood of misery. Humane federal leadership might have alleviated the misery but here again the relief effort was a failure. Not only were no measures taken to evacuate the poor (one-third of the New Orleans populace lived under the poverty level) and the bedridden, but even those who tried to get out of the city on foot were impeded.
And now New Orleans, a city famed for its great "uplifting" jazz funerals, is unable to bury its dead. Finding the bodies is slow work, identification is difficult, and the job of counting the dead has been given to Kenyon, a firm implicated in body-dumping scandals, so will real numbers ever be known?
New Orleans will rise again, but in what form? Will the original inhabitants have a say, or will heedless developers turn it into a theme park?
In the words of Naomi Klein, "Let the people rebuild New Orleans."

For those who would like to know more about what's behind the rioting in France's suburban ghettos, we recommend reading Doug Ireland's essay, "WHY IS FRANCE BURNING?"

A few rioting kids provocatively shouting "Alahu Akbar!" doesn't make it an Islamist plot.

Also worth reading is Juan Cole's blog entry, "The Problem with Frenchness."

Speaking of incendiary situations, the Gaza Strip has now become the biggest ghetto in the world. With unprecedented levels of unemployment (35 to 40 per cent), "some 65 to 75 per cent of Gazans are impoverished (compared to 30 per cent in 2000); many are hungry." The reality of the Gaza Disengagement Plan is described by Sara Roy in her article, "A Dubai on the Mediterranean."

Boom time has arrived in Gaza, but no bonanza. This kind of boom is caused by Israeli airplanes and is said to result in trauma and miscarriages. As reported recently by Chris McGreal in the Guardian, the UN has condemned the night flights, and we might expect the condemnation to go unheeded like all the others, but this time neighboring Israelis are complaining as well.

A map is sometimes worth a thousand words.
This one from Le Monde Diplomatique shows how the "Palestinian State" is splintered by "settlements," otherwise known as "colonies."

The only parts controlled exclusively by the Palestinians are in dark green. To US Americans, these might resemble Native American reservations on US maps.
The comparison is appropriate.

» This pleasant-looking man on the right has been called a "mainstream choice" for the Supreme Court. But as William L. Taylor writes:
"The record made by John Roberts in his decade of public service clearly documents his single-minded focus on limiting legal protections and opportunities for African-Americans, Latinos, alien children, people with disabilities, women, and others."
Does this mean that the mainstream profile for an American judge is now someone who is insensitive to the rights of those less privileged than he?
Go here to voice your disapproval.

» The British MP George Galloway gives American senators a lesson in how to "tell it like it is."
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong," he told the committee chairman Norm Coleman. More here.

» On Monday April 11, 2005 in Paris, France, Colombian painter Fernando Botero opened a show of new paintings depicting the horrors of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Botero was so upset by the images of torture that he felt compelled to produce works showing his typically corpulent characters naked and being beaten by Americans.
(AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Common Dreams article, Art for a Change, Counterpunch, and for those with especially strong nerves and maybe a bit of Spanish...

» The Gates of Hell Are Open in Iraq:
In a Guardian Special Report, Ayatollah Jawad al-Khalisi gives good reasons for a quick withdrawal of US and British troops.
Jawad al-Khalisi is secretary general of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress, an alliance of secular and religious organizations covering all religious and ethnic groups in Iraq.

» While Israel plans military attacks on Iran, we might ask about the concrete results of IAEA Director-General El Baradei's visit to Israel in July 2004. What goes on in the Dimona nuclear facility?

» Can Democracy Survive Bush's Embrace?
"Faced with an Arab world enraged by its occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the US solution is not to change these brutal policies; it is, in the pseudo-academic language of corporate branding, to 'change the story'." ---Naomi Klein

» The ACLU has obtained documents on torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's clearly only the tip of the iceberg, if that's an expression that can be used to describe hell.

» As Nat Hentoff says in the Village Voice, Jane Mayer's article Outsourcing torture
should be required reading for all US congresspersons.

» Enthusiasms about the internet being a place of "horizontal" freedom and democratic expression should be tempered slightly by its structure.
You need an IP address to get on the Net. Your Internet Access Provider (IAP = AOL, Wanadoo, etc.) issues you an address when you connect. Each IAP is allotted a bunch of addresses by a Regional Internet Registry (RIR), which is the RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens ) in Europe.
If your IAP doesn't have enough addresses, you don't get on line.
And the system is expected to reach saturation sometime between 2005 and 2010.
All the RIRs in the world depend on two American organizations, ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) and IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority).

ICANN and IANA reserve more than 70% of the addresses for North America, leaving 17% for Europe
and 9% for Asia/Pacific, which leaves 4% for the rest of the world (Africa, South America).

Sounds like Dubya's form of democracy!

» Elections have now taken place in Iraq despite the ongoing insurgency and boycotts. Were they democratic? What will the effects be? These and other questions are clearly discussed by Frank Brodhead in his essay, Reframing the Iraq Election.

» Don't miss the Naomi Klein interview, What Are We Fighting For? on AlterNet.

» Despite the neocons' arrogant "Project for a New American Century," there are good reasons to doubt whether the US model is the best available. Two recent articles are extremely informative on the subject:
Dream On America by Andrew Moravcsik in Newsweek
and Europe vs. America by Tony Judt in the New York Review of books.

» Lest it be forgotten, "Media Matters" reminds us that the "Media gave short shrift to allegations of election irregularities."
The Conyers Report gives us a list of 12 sorts of of fraud and other irregularities in the Ohio elections. Are they now forgotten?

» News of the School of Americas Watch can be found here. APJ supported their vigil at Fort Benning in November last year, gathering about 100 signatures of people wishing to express their solidarity.

» Here's a good interview with Noam Chomsky by M. Junaid Alam of the radical youth journal "Left Hook."
Civilization versus Barbarism

» After Bill Moyers' recent denunciation of the Christian fundamentalist Armageddon attitude toward the environment, now environmental researcher Michael Byers reveals the Pentagon version in "On Thinning Ice."
He quotes from a report prepared last year for the Pentagon, which concluded, "With diverse growing climates, wealth, technology and abundant resources, the United States could likely survive shortened growing cycles and harsh weather conditions without catastrophic losses . . . even in this continuous state of emergency the US will be positioned well compared to others."
For the whole report click here.
Climate changes? "Bring 'em on!"

» Lawrence W. Britt has examined a large number of fascist regimes and describes 14 common characteristics in "Fascism Anyone?" They sound terribly familiar.
»For Michael Klare, the "Looming Energy Crisis Overshadows Bush's Second Term" - with further catastrophic consequences for the rest of the world - an article on TomDispatch.com.

»In her Guardian article on Nov. 26, Naomi Klein said, "In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies."
The American Embassy in London objected to this, considering it was "baseless," and Klein provided the evidence in her article on Dec. 4.


Gene Sharp's 198 methods of nonviolent action are classified into three broad categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention.
As this is quoted from a 1973 book, we could now add two more to make 200:
199. E-mail
200. Websites