Guy

“Your Names Will Be Written in Gold”

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

Just before it begins, Hani Shukrallah on what is really unique about this war (Al-Ahram Weekly, March 20-26, 2003):

With 280,000 US and British troops deployed in the Gulf -- 175,000 are in Kuwait -- US military commanders were promising a war "unlike anything anyone has ever seen before," according to the US naval commander in the Gulf, Vice Admiral Timothy Keating. Speaking to reporters on board USS Abraham Lincoln, Keating waxed poetic on the forthcoming invasion. The coalition troops would go "about this particular conflict . . . in a way that is very unpredictable and unprecedented in history -- remarkable speed, breathtaking speed, agility, precision and persistence" . . . .

On board USS Abraham Lincoln, Admiral Keating addressed hundreds of his men telling them: "When it's all done... and they rewrite history, because that is what you are going to do, your names will be written in gold on those pages."

Before that gilding begins history will have to be effaced, not rewritten. An illegal war waged in blatant violation of the UN Charter and of international law; a war against which 30 million people throughout the world have already demonstrated before a single shot is fired on streets from Los Angeles to Tokyo; a war to which opinion polls in virtually all the world's nations, with the exception of the US and Israel, have produced a definitive 'no' -- how can such a war be recorded except in infamy? And this, before the body count.

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Knowledge Is Power

/ Education

Edward Said on how building a more subtle knowledge of the United States and its aims would benefit the Middle East. "The Other America" (Al-Ahram Weekly, March 20-26, 2003):

[A]part from a few courses and seminars on American literature and politics scattered throughout the universities of the Arab world, there has never been anything like an academic centre for the systematic and scientific analysis of America, its people, society, and history, at all. Not even in American institutions like the American Universities of Cairo and Beirut. This lack may also be true throughout the Third World, and maybe even in some European countries. The point I am making is that to live in a world that is held in the grip of an extraordinarily unbound great power there is a vital need for knowing as much about its swirling dynamics as is humanly possible. . . . the danger of thinking about America too simply or reductively and statically is so obvious. . . .

My interest is simply to suggest ways of understanding, intervening in, and if the word isn't too inappropriate, resisting a country that is far from the monolith it is usually taken to be, specially in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

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Protests: Vietnam

/ Iraq, Vietnam, War

Peter Davis, writing from Vietnam in The Nation (posted 3/20/03):

In this country, where a US military attack echoes more loudly perhaps than anywhere else in the world, protesters against the war are expressing themselves from Hanoi in the north to central Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta. At Nha Trang, a resonant place name in our old war, 7,000 people demonstrated yesterday against our new one. The chief sentiment is not support for Saddam Hussein but, in light of the Vietnamese experience with the American military, sympathy for the Iraqi people.

In Hanoi the government condemned the war as "a gross violation of the fundamental principles of international law, including the United Nations charter." Such language is unexceptional in prosperous countries that look at the United States on an almost equal footing economically. In Vietnam, which desperately needs American trade and is urgently trying to attract US investment, the condemnation is an act of courage. Since the normalization of diplomatic relations less than ten years ago, the Vietnamese have worked hard to be friendly to an often indifferent America, and any criticism of the United States is generally muted. The war against Iraq threatens to unravel the meticulously rebuilt relationship.

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American Tragedy

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq

Jonathan Schell, "American Tragedy" (The Nation, posted 3/20/03):

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war ended, the United States was left
in a position of global privilege, prestige and might that had no parallel in history. The moment seemed a golden one for the American form of government, liberal democracy. . . . A basically consensual rather than a coerced world seemed a real possibility.

Times Square news ticker, New York City, 3/19/03Who could have guessed that barely a decade later the United States, forsaking the very legal, democratic traditions that were its most admired characteristics, would be going to war to impose its will by force upon an alarmed, angry, frightened world united against it? . . .

The international order on which the common welfare, including its ecological and economic welfare, depends has sustained severe damage. The fight for "freedom" abroad is crippling freedom at home. The war to stop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has provoked that very proliferation in North Korea and Iran. More ground has already been lost in the field of proliferation than can be gained even by the most delirious victory in Baghdad. Former friends of America have been turned into rivals or foes. The United States may be about to win Iraq. It has already lost the world.

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Shock and Awe

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post (3/20/03) on the "Shock and Awe" bombing strategy, which he traces to Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade's Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (National Defense University Press, 1996) -- available online. From the book's introduction:

Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. The Japanese were prepared for suicidal resistance until both nuclear bombs were used. The impact of those weapons was sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of Shock and Awe. The Japanese simply could not comprehend the destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension produced a state of awe.

We believe that, in a parallel manner, revolutionary potential in combining new doctrine and existing technology can produce systems capable of yielding this level of Shock and Awe. In most or many cases, this Shock and Awe may not necessitate imposing the full destruction of either nuclear weapons or advanced conventional technologies but must be underwritten by the ability to do so.

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Iraq Invasion: The Kurdish Context

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

Gareth Evans and Joost Hiltermann, " The Kurds: a Catastrophe Waiting to Happen ," International Herald Tribune, 3/20/03:

First, it is imperative that U.S. forces get to Kirkuk fast - before the Turks and before Kurdish forces.

Second, the United States must make abundantly clear to Turkey that it has to show restraint, avoiding any unilateral military moves in northern Iraq.

Third, Washington must simultaneously make clear to the Kurds that they should take no action that risks provoking Turkey: that they must refrain from unilateral military steps and consent to a temporary international presence in Kirkuk.

In exchange, America needs to give an explicit, public guarantee to the Kurds that it will protect them from attack (from either Turkey or a post-Saddam regime in Baghdad) and support their fair expectation of greater freedom to govern themselves during negotiations over the future of Iraq, including -- crucially -- an active Kurdish role in the central government.

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Making 1441 a Justification for War

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, United Nations, War

Josh Marshall (3/18/03) on the United States's hypocritical citation of Resolution 1441 as a sanction for invasion. Security Council members like France, Russia, and China clearly supported the resolution because they were confident that the Council retained the authority to evaluate Iraqi compliance and sanction any further response. What's more, that's exactly what the United States promised at the time. Marshall cites Maggie Farley and Maura Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times, 11/8/02:

U.S. officials said Thursday's concession on the language showed that the United States is genuinely committed to a multilateral process.

"There's no 'automaticity' and this is a two-stage process, and in that regard we have met the principal concerns that have been expressed for the resolution," U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte said. "Whatever violation there is, or is judged to exist, will be dealt with in the council, and the council will have an opportunity to consider the matter before any other action is taken."

The compromise reassured diplomats who have suspected that despite engaging in negotiations at the United Nations, the U.S. will ultimately attack Iraq with or without the sanction of the Security Council. If the U.S. is sincere about involving the U.N., said Russia's ambassador, Sergei V. Lavrov, then the process has been valuable.

"We know the position of the United States," Lavrov said. "But if they say that this resolution is not about an extra authorization, [that] it's a genuine effort to have inspectors on the ground and to fulfill entirely the mandate, then it's quite important."

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How Bush Avoided UN Accountability

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, United Nations, War

More on the origins of Resolution 1441's ambiguity (Mary Dejevsky in The Independent, 3/21/03):

The White House was divided over the wisdom of seeking international support for this venture, but by August 2002 Mr Bush had decided to take the United Nations route on Iraq. The one remaining question was whether he should call formally for a UN resolution that authorised the eventual use of force -- and then whether there should be just one resolution or two. Only 24 hours before Mr Bush addressed the UN General Assembly, British officials were confident that their argument -- for a single UN resolution -- had prevailed.

Mr Bush makes his decisions, apparently, rather like a diner contemplating a sushi restaurant conveyor belt. He watches as the options are paraded before him, then grabs one that matches his view, and another, and perhaps another, even if they are not necessarily compatible. The 28th draft of his speech was what Mr Bush delivered at the UN on 12 September 2002. The crucial sentence relating to the resolution, though, was missing from his autocue. Knowing it should be there, he improvised, with one crucial error. He called for "UN resolutions", in the plural.

What seemed a tiny distinction took on huge importance in talks over the resolution that became 1441. France and Russia insisted on two resolutions -- one to get weapons inspectors into Iraq; the second to authorise military action, if necessary. That same dispute, essentially, is what finally scuppered UN diplomacy.

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Coalition of the Willing

/ Albania, Europe, Great Britain, GW Bush Admin, Iraq

The " Coalition of the Willing": Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uzbekistan.

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