Though civilians on foot passed by safely, the policy was to shoot anything that moved on wheels. Inevitably, terrified civilians drove at speed to escape: marines took that speed to be a threat and hit out. During the night, our teeth on edge, we listened a dozen times as the AVVs' machineguns opened fire, cutting through cars and trucks like paper.

Next morning I saw the result of this order - the dead civilians, the little girl in the orange and gold dress.

Suddenly, some of the young men who had crossed into Iraq with me reminded me now of their fathers' generation, the trigger-happy grunts of Vietnam. Covered in the mud from the violent storms, they were drained and dangerously aggressive.

In the days afterwards, the marines consolidated their position and put a barrier of trucks across the bridge to stop anyone from driving across, so there were no more civilian deaths.

They also ruminated on what they had done. Some rationalised it.

"I was shooting down a street when suddenly a woman came out and casually began to cross the street with a child no older than 10," said Gunnery Sergeant John Merriman, another Gulf war veteran. "At first I froze on seeing the civilian woman. She then crossed back again with the child and went behind a wall. Within less than a minute a guy with an RPG came out and fired at us from behind the same wall. This happened a second time so I thought, 'Okay, I get it. Let her come out again'.

She did and this time I took her out with my M-16." Others were less sanguine.

The rise and rise of American conservatism is neither well documented nor well understood in Britain - but it's one of the pillars on which I build my case for Europe in The World We're In*. Ever since the pivotal Supreme Court judgement in 1973 legalising abortion (the Roe v Wade case) which marked the high water mark of American liberalism, it's been downhill all the way. American conservatism, an eccentric creed even within the pantheon of the western conservative tradition, now rules supreme. Domestically it offers disproportionately aggressive tax cuts for the rich and for business, reforms that shrink America's already threadbare social contract and a carte blanche for the increasingly feral, unaccountable character of US capitalism.

Internationally it is this philosophy that lies behind pre-emptive unilateralism and the wilful disregard of the UN. American conservatives are bravely willing to use force to advance democracy and markets worldwide - the exemplars of a civilisation the rest of the world must want to copy. No other legitimacy is needed, the reason for the wrong-headed self-confidence that could launch war in Iraq expecting so little resistance. Rumsfeld's exploded strategy is ideological in its roots. This conservatism is a witches brew - a menace to the USA and the world alike. read more

pawned off like soldiers
in the theatre of insignificance
the voice of the world battered
to the beat of the mighty tomahawk
ripped from the heart of natives

a checkerboard cowboy with his chessboard
pivoting recklessly
unbalanced on it's axis
as he pauses to rearrange pieces
and redefine rules

the game of Rummy and the boy who cried Wolf
instrumental in his sandbox of power
his plastic toy soldiers
melting under the heat, forgotten
as he packs his bags for camp

They may be the ones facing danger on the battlefield, but US soldiers in Iraq are being asked to pray for President George W Bush.

Thousands of marines have been given a pamphlet called "A Christian's Duty," a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush.

"I have committed to pray for you, your family, your staff and our troops during this time of uncertainty and tumult. May God's peace be your guide," says the pledge, according to a journalist embedded with coalition forces.

The pamphlet, produced by a group called In Touch Ministries, offers a daily prayer to be made for the US president, a born-again Christian who likes to invoke his God in speeches.

Sunday's is "Pray that the President and his advisers will seek God and his wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding".

Monday's reads "Pray that the President and his advisers will be strong and courageous to do what is right regardless of critics".

Aldous Huxley's inspired 1956 essay, The Doors of Perception, detailed the vivid, mind-expanding, multisensory insights of his mescaline adventures.

By altering his brain chemistry with natural psychotropics, Huxley tapped into a rich and fluid world of shimmering, indescribable beauty and power.

With his neurosensory input thus triggered, Huxley was able to enter that parallel universe described by every mystic and space captain in recorded history.

Whether by hallucination or epiphany, Huxley sought to remove all controls, all filters, all cultural conditioning from his perceptions and to confront Nature or the World or Reality first-hand - in its unpasteurized, unedited, unretouched, infinite rawness.

Those bonds are much harder to break today, half a century later.

We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. more

And so we have a war. If you listen to American President George W. Bush, this is a noble war, indeed. It is about freeing Iraqis from the shackles of a cruel dictator. It is about creating a model for democracy in the Middle East. It is about eliminating terrorism from its roots.

Don’t listen to this stuff too early in the morning; you may lose your breakfast. If you believe America is merely reacting to the horrific, unprovoked terrorism emanating from Arab nations, here’s something interesting to consider. The author George Monbiot recently chronicled the activities of the Project for the New American Century, a pressure group established by, among others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush and Paul Wolfowitz. These gentlemen are now high-profile members of the US Government, and have been instrumental in orchestrating the lead-up to the war.

More than five years ago, these men urged the "removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power". They stated, even then, that "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council."

In 2000, their inner plan was seeing light. A confidential report said: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." The wider strategic aim was "maintaining global US pre-eminence".

These people are in power now, and their elevation made this war truly inevitable. Saddam is merely a pawn whose previous atrocities made him an easy target. September 11 provided the excuse and the means to rally Americans behind this madness. Iraq is merely step one. The ultimate goal is ‘full-spectrum dominance’ by the US. America will feel the backlash to this leadership for generations to come. more

Police said on Friday they were looking for Markovic because of well-founded suspicion she was involved in Stambolic's murder, which they said was politically motivated.

Police looked for Markovic, an influential figure during her husband's turbulent rule, in her Belgrade home on Friday and in the couple's home town of Pozarevac. Belgrade media said she was believed to be on the run.

The hackneyed phrase maintains that truth is the first casualty of war, but this does not suggest nearly clearly enough that it is a casualty because the US and UK governments are making a concerted attempt to destroy it.

War isn't fair, but if you're a chickenhawk like George Bush and you're surrounded by a cabal of warmongering advisers who similarly have never stepped foot on the battlefield, it's easy to believe your own boardgame spin.

Well, thanks to a hyper-commercialized media, Americans have been snookered into buying this spin, too. Instead of asking hard questions and analyzing the Bush answers, the US media has been obsessed with technological toys and military might. The end result is that we've been fed a steady diet of hard sell, straight from the marketing departments of Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, et al. We know more about missiles and other hardware of war than we do reasons for prosecuting this war in the first place. Imagine that!

But not everyone has been hoodwinked... read it all!

Richard Perle, recently resigned chairman of the Defense Policy Board, in a PBS interview July 11, 2002:

"Saddam is much weaker than we think he is. He's weaker militarily. We know he's got about a third of what he had in 1991."

"But it's a house of cards. He rules by fear because he knows there is no underlying support. Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder. "

Vice President Dick Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press" March 16:

"The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."

"My guess is even significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely as well to want to avoid conflict with the U.S. forces and are likely to step aside."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN March 23:

"The course of this war is clear. The outcome is clear. The regime of Saddam Hussein is gone. It's over. It will not be there in a relatively reasonably predictable period of time."

"And the people in Iraq need to know that: that it will not be long before they will be liberated."

...This willingness to deceive--both themselves and others--expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as "freedom fighters." The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz's son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush's father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House...

...Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.
via sTaRe incuBLOGula

Two leading evangelical Christian missionary organizations said Tuesday that they have teams of workers poised to enter Iraq to address the physical and spiritual needs of a large Muslim population.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest Protestant denomination, and the Rev. Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse said workers are near the Iraq border in Jordan and are ready to go in as soon as it is safe. The relief and missionary work is certain to be closely watched because both Graham and the Southern Baptist Convention have been at the heart of controversial evangelical denunciations of Islam, the world's second largest religion.

Now, apparently, is the time for all good radio and TV stations to come to the aid of their country's war.

That is the message pushed by broadcast news consultants, who've been advising news and talk stations across the nation to wave the flag and downplay protest against the war.

"Get the following production pieces in the studio NOW: . . . Patriotic music that makes you cry, salute, get cold chills! Go for the emotion," advised McVay Media, a Cleveland-based consultant, in a "War Manual" memo to its station clients. ". . . Air the National Anthem at a specified time each day as long as the USA is at war."

Police have found the grave of a missing former Serbian president they believe was killed by an elite police unit also suspected in the slaying of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, authorities said Friday.

The announcement came less than a day after two main suspects in Djindjic's assassination died in a shootout with police.

Richard Perle, a U.S. architect of the war on Iraq who faced questions about conflicts of interest, offered to resign as chairman of a Pentagon advisory panel, according to a letter obtained by Reuters Thursday.

"As I cannot quickly or easily quell criticism of me based on errors of fact concerning my activities, the least I can do under these circumstances is to ask you to accept my resignation as chairman of the Defense Policy Board," Perle wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday

If there was a common image summoned up by the protests and angry commentaries, it was of the United States as an imperial power intoxicated by its military supremacy but receiving a lesson in the price of arrogance by unexpected Iraqi resistance.
"Armed force and coercion are the antonyms of democracy," the editorial said, "so isn't using tanks and cannons to spit out `liberty' and `democracy' a mite ironic?"
"What Bush is doing is conquering with military force anybody who opposes him," said Shinichi Iida, a 25-year-old university student. "I think it's the most barbaric act in the world."

Former U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern charged Wednesday that President Bush intends to invade North Korea and Iran after finishing with Iraq.
"Even now, these wars are being planned by the current administration," McGovern said. "I'm positive, based on conversations with people close to the White House, that plans are in place for the next invasions."

This list of intricate, overlapping connections is hardly exhaustive or perhaps even surprising. But it helps to reveal an important fact. Contrary to appearances, the neocons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tighly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connections, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them grab control of the future of American foreign policy.
via American Samizdat

With fewer companies owning more media outlets, the lack of tolerance for opposing views increases, former Vice President Al Gore told a college audience here last night....

It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.

Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.

It's a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them. more

Seven Enron Corp. subsidiaries and five other energy companies manipulated natural gas and electricity prices and supplies in California, federal energy regulators ruled Wednesday.

As a result of the manipulation, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Pat Wood said California would receive more than the $1.8 billion in refunds recommended by a FERC judge in December.

The exact amount is to be determined in the coming months, but FERC spokesman Kevin Cadden estimated that the total would be $3.3 billion. California is seeking $9 billion.

The man arrested for allegedly assassinating Serbia's pro-Western prime minister ran an elite police unit tied to organized crime and former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, authorities said Tuesday...

...Since Djindjic's assassination, authorities have imposed a state of emergency and launched a major hunt for leading crime figures and their associates in the judiciary, police and other state services. More than 1,000 suspects have been arrested....

...The ferocity and scope of the authorities' crackdown drew a warning Tuesday from U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, which said in a letter to Zivkovic that certain restrictions imposed after the assassination "may not be justified under international law."

Serbian police have arrested the suspected assassin of Zoran Djindjic, the pro-western prime minister who was killed two weeks ago, his successor said yesterday.

Zoran Zivkovic named the suspect as Zvezdan Jovanovic, 38, a Kosovan Serb and the deputy commander of the Red Berets, a notorious paramilitary unit used by the Serbian regime to perpetrate atrocities and conduct ethnic cleansing in the wars in former Yugoslavia of the 1990s.

An intriguing question is the extent to which Americans share the apocalyptic views of some evangelicals that we are heading into the last days of the final battle between good and evil. Polls indicate that some 40 million do.

What's clear is that while evangelicals greatly value the renewed moral tone and religious conviction in the presidency, they, like other Americans, differ over how the president expresses that conviction and the implications for his decisionmaking. Bush has said he tends to make decisions by gut instinct. Many Americans are wondering which religious instincts might hold sway as he acts to determine the course of history.

...America has accepted this responsibility. We also accept the cost of
supporting our military and the missions we give it. Today, I'm
sending the Congress a wartime supplemental appropriations request of
$74.7 billion, to fund needs directly arising from the Iraqi conflict
and our global war against terror. My request to Congress will pay for
the massive task of transporting a fully-equipped military force, both
active duty and reserve, to a region halfway around the world.

This money will cover the current cost of fueling our ships and
aircraft and tanks, and of airlifting tons of supplies into the
theater of operations. The supplemental will also allow us to replace
the high-tech munitions we are now directing against Saddam Hussein's
regime.

My request includes funds for relief and reconstruction in a free
Iraq.

While the slaughter continues in Iraq, the United States has its sights set on the real prize: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Even though Syria is next on the chopping block according to the authors of A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Real--chief among them Richard Perle and Douglas Feith--it is Iran that they covet.

Dear Secretary Powell:

When I last saw you in Kabul in January, 2002 you arrived to officially open the US Embassy that I had helped reestablish in December, 2001 as the first political officer. At that time I could not have imagined that I would be writing a year later to resign from the Foreign Service because of US policies. All my adult life I have been in service to the United States. I have been a diplomat for fifteen years and the Deputy Chief of Mission in our Embassies in Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan (briefly) and Mongolia. I have also had assignments in Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Grenada and Nicaragua. I received the State Department’s Award for Heroism as Charge d’Affaires during the evacuation of Sierra Leone in 1997. I was 26 years in the US Army/Army Reserves and participated in civil reconstruction projects after military operations in Grenada, Panama and Somalia. I attained the rank of Colonel during my military service.

This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an Administration of the United States. I disagree with the Administration’s policies on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korea and curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S. itself. I believe the Administration’s policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place. I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them.

I hope you will bear with my explanation of why I must resign. After thirty years of service to my country, my decision to resign is a huge step and I want to be clear in my reasons why I must do so.

I disagree with the Administration’s policies on Iraq

I wrote this letter five weeks ago and held it hoping that the Administration would not go to war against Iraq at this time without United Nations Security Council agreement. I strongly believe that going to war now will make the world more dangerous, not safer. much more of this very eloquent resignation
via Craig's BookNotes

In America, the saying goes goes: If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

In Bagdhad, at Al Kindi Hospital Emergency, Fatima Abdullah is screaming in outrage: "Why do you do this to us??!"

Her 8 year old, Fatehah is dead, two other daughters are on stretchers wounded by a missle that crushed her uncle's home where they were staying outside Baghdad, near the Diala Bridge. An extended farming family, they have suffered with sanctions and ecomonic devastation shrinking their stock of animals to one cow, a donkey and chickens; they are barely able to feed themselves.

Muhammed, the four year old crying in her arms has cuts from shrapnel and debris criss-crossing the right side of his face and head, eyelids swollen shut.

Nada Adnan, 13 years old and a student at high school for girls, states "I wish that God would take Bush. Why did he do this to us? to me?". She has an open gash on her right cranium with underlying fracture and a large, deep shrapnel gauged cut into her upper left thigh. She has no narcotic relief and cries out as aides press guaze into her leg wound. 9 year old, Rana Adnan needs oxygen for a chest laceration and lung contusion with a concussion, head laceration, and shrapnel in her left arm.

And then there is Nahla Harbi who was a passenger driving away from Bagdad with her two year old in her arms when a military school for boys was hat and the explosion rolled the car fracturing both of her legs. Her child sustained head injuries.

Less than 100 meters from Alyermouk Hospital and a school, bombing crushed the foot of 28 year old man who was walking outside his home.

And the list keeps going on. A 70 year old man shopping for food for his family now has a compound fracture of his left upper arm, chest wound through his lung requiring a chest tube and making answers and complaints more dificult.

He has rage and opinions, just as the multitude of families do these several days. How can I explain reasons to them? They know that Bush's Administration is interested in oil control and that they have no interest in democracy for these people. Why don't
Americans know this? Why did we elect this man without human feelings, they ask.

It's not easy being an American in a Baghdad Emergency room seeing victims and their families. I wish that George Bush was here with his answers to their outrage.

A random sampling found Americans fearful, angry and even indignant at those who thought war would be easy.
..."I can't believe anyone is surprised by the casualties," said Nicholas Anton of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. "If anyone thought the Iraqis were going to be flag-waving and welcoming us, they were wrong. That crazy euphoria everyone had in the beginning was very short-lived, and now people have to deal with the consequences of a real war."

Military analysts said on Monday that Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, may be taking unnecessary risks in the strategy he is employing, including stretching supply lines, allowing concentrations of enemy forces in the rear of his advancing troops, and using an invasion force that simply may be too small for the task at hand.

Defence experts have warned up to 12,000 allied forces may be killed in the battle for Baghdad.
One expert said yesterday a force of up to 120,000 soldiers would be needed to capture the Iraqi capital and 10 per cent could die in the fight. more

Crimes of War was conceived as a handbook for reporters. But just as war is too important to be left to the generals, war coverage is too important to be left uncritically to the news media. The general public, too, should know the moral and legal benchmarks contained in the law. One reason for a commonality of interest is that coverage of contemporary conflicts increasingly is available to the public without a filter or a framework or context. A second is that every close observer has a restricted field of vision.

Journalists who cover wars and humanitarian emergencies of the post- Cold War world know far better than their audiences or their critics how much they are operating in uncharted territory. Understanding what is going on in the midst of all the havoc, confusion, and disinformation is anything but simple. And almost nothing in their training prepares reporters to be able make the necessary distinctions between legal, illegal, and criminal acts.
via Electronic Iraq

...The family met privately with a journalist today, without the presence of a requisite government escort and with a promise that their identities would not be published. Over a lunch of Iraqi dishes -- pickled mango, kibbe, kufta and chicken cooked with rice, peanuts and raisins -- they spoke with unusual candor about politics and war. At times brashly, they discussed subjects that are usually hinted at, as if Baghdad were already in limbo between its past and its future...

..."Iraq is ready for change," the father said. "The people want it; they want more freedom."...

...But family members expressed anger at the U.S. government, which has promised to liberate them. They criticized President Saddam Hussein and his dictatorial rule, but insisted that pride and patriotism prevent them from putting their destiny in the hands of a foreign power...

...But they bitterly denounced the war the United States has launched. Iraq, perhaps more than any other Arab country, dwells on traditions -- of pride, honor and dignity. To this family, the assault is an insult. It is not Hussein under attack, but Iraq, they said. It is hard to gauge if this is a common sentiment, although it is one heard more often as the war progresses....

..."We complain about things, but complaining doesn't mean cooperating with foreign governments," the father said. "When somebody comes to attack Iraq, we stand up for Iraq. That doesn't mean we love Saddam Hussein, but there are priorities."...

A friend of the family interrupted. "Bombing for peace?" he asked, shaking his head.

...John Keegan, defence editor of the Daily Telegraph, has a use for women in the combat zone. He writes that far from reducing the effectiveness of men under fire, making them 'over-protective', their presence encourages men to 'perform better... as if to emphasise their masculinity... '. He does not expand on the effect males have on the behaviour of their female colleagues...

...Forget the debates about who 'we' are, (divided and troubled is the most accurate answer). Chuck out those mostly male driven dialogues about 'new' nationalism, 'new' patriotism, a 'new' Britain ('...open and personal... less macho and miserable... a more feminised place...' wrote commentator Jonathan Freedland in 1997.) War reduces the turmoil to the dimensions of a dreadful old-fashioned western. Who are we? The good guys, and the women are expected to stay mum...

.... 'I'm not opposed because I'm nicer,' said one woman marching in London yesterday. 'I'm opposed because I'm informed.' ...

Osama bin Laden, in his wildest dreams, could hardly have hoped for this. A mere 18 months after he boosted the US to a peak of worldwide sympathy unprecedented since Pearl Harbor, that international goodwill has been squandered to near zero. Bin Laden must be beside himself with glee. And the infidels are now walking right into the Iraq trap.

There was always a risk for Bin Laden that worldwide sympathy for the US might thwart his long-term aim of holy war against the Great Satan. He needn't have worried. read it all !

Enheduanna's Lament to the Spirit of War

You hack everything down in battle...
You slice away the land and
charge disguised as a raging storm,
growl as a roaring hurricane,
yell like a tempest yells,
thunder, rage, roar, and drum,
expel evil winds!
Your feet are filled with anxiety!

Like a fiery monster
you fill the land with poison.
As a rage frrom the sky,
you growl over the earth,
and trees and bushes collapse before you.

You're like blood rushing down a mountain,
Spirit of hate, greed and anger,
dominator of heaven and earth!
Your fire wafts over our tribe,
mounted on a beast,
with indomitable commands, you decide all fate.

You triumph over all our rites.
Who can fathom you?

circa 2300 B.C.
via Electronic Iraq

Spring Morning: After "Shock & Awe"
Kathy Kelly, Iraq Peace Team
22 March 2003
Here in Baghdad, along the Tigris River, a gentle dawn and the sweetest of birdsongs were more precious than ever following a horrific night of intense bombardment. With the calm morning came relief after learning that the families of friends who work at the hotel are "o.k." Abu Hassan, a pro at charades, pantomimed what happened in his home. He pointed to the windows in my room, held up five fingers, touched the floor and then affirmed, “Finished.” Five windows had shattered. Then he swung his arms around to imitate a ceiling fan, also “finished,” – it had crashed to the floor, and next he crouched down with his hands on his head to indicate what the children had done. Riyadh then told us that his brother and father were “finished” in the 1991 Gulf War – making a gesture of falling asleep, which meant that both had been killed during the war, and then he mimicked wiping tears from his eyes to explain that his mother had wept through the night, remembering past agony while quivering through the present one. Abu Hassan and Riyadh live in the impoverished Saddam City section of Baghdad. more

At this grim moment, we can do nothing to stop the ongoing invasion. But that does not mean that the task is over for people who have some concern for justice, freedom, and human rights. Far from it. The tasks will be more urgent than before, whatever the outcome of the attack. And about that, no one has any idea: not the Pentagon, the CIA, or anyone else. Possibilities range from the horrifying humanitarian catastrophes of which aid and relief agencies that work in Iraq have been warning, to relatively benign outcomes – though even if not a hair is harmed on anyone’s head that will in no way mitigate the criminality of those willing to subject helpless people to such terrible risks, for their own shameful purposes.

As for the outcomes, it will be a long time before preliminary judgments can be made. One immediate task is to lend what weight we can to more benign outcomes. That means, primarily, caring for the needs of the victims, not just of this war but of Washington’s vicious and destructive sanctions regime of the past ten years, which has has devastated the civillian society, strengthened the ruling tyrant, and compelled the population to rely on him for survival. As has been pointed out for years, the sanctions therefore undermined the hope that Saddam Hussein would go the way of other murderous tyrants no less vicious than he. That includes a terrible rogues gallery of criminals who were also supported by those now at the helm in Washington, in many cases to the last days of their bloody rule: Ceausescu, to mention only one obvious and highly pertinent case.

Elementary decency would call for massive reparations from the US; lacking that, at least a flow of aid to Iraqis, so that they can rebuild what has been destroyed in their own way, not as dictated by people in Washington and Crawford whose higher faith is that power comes from the barrel of a gun.

But the issues are much more fundamental, and long range. Opposition to the invasion of Iraq has been entirely without historical precedent. That is why Bush had to meet his two cronies at a US military base on an island, where they would be safely removed from any mere people. The opposition may be focused on the invasion of Iraq, but its concerns go far beyond that. There is growing fear of US power, which is considered to be the greatest threat to peace in much of the world, probably by a large majority. And with the technology of destruction now at hand, rapidly becoming more lethal and ominous, threat to peace means threat to survival. more