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Daniel P. Welch for the World Crisis Web
The king is dead--long live the king! Okay, so the old lefty saw about it-doesn’t-matter-who-gets-elected-they’re-all-the-same-anyway might have less punch this time around. The Bush-led extremist puppet show that has hacked and brutalized its way into power is so evil, so corrupt, so completely dangerous down to the cellular and atomic level that it would be unthinkable not to wish them gone whatever the cost. Still, preventing evil is not the same as promoting good. A grim duty, perhaps. But hardly one that stirs the soul. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Pepe Escobar
Much more than George W Bush vs. the-yet-unknown-Democrat-who-would-be-king, this is the ultimate confrontation of 2004. In one corner, the military might of United States power. In the other, the white-bearded, black-turbaned Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, 74, three wives, three sons and spiritual leader of 15 million Iraqi Shi’ites. As things stand, the Bush re-election scenario for Iraq goes like this: the Medusa - Saddam Hussein - has been decapitated by Perseus - Bush - the war hero. The Sistani scenario does not involve campaigning, spinning or propaganda. Its political agenda is monothematic: free, direct, one-man, one-vote elections in Iraq as soon as possible.
Chris Floyd
A man in Lawrence, Kansas walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice. He pulls out the gun and shoots a little boy in the head, leaving his face a mass of bone-flecked goo. Then he fires into the chest of the girl in the next chair; she dies still clutching the stuffed toy rabbit she brings with her every day. Another boy is hit while running for the door. The man is using special bullets, tipped with depleted uranium; the shot explodes the boy’s shoulder in a spray of red mist and sends his gangly body hurtling down the concrete stairwell.
Jay Shaft for the World Crisis Web
Over the Christmas holidays I managed to find two US soldiers who were back from Iraq. They were both somewhat willing to be interviewed and describe their time in Iraq in their own words. You could see the strain in their faces, and an almost haunted look in their eyes. Thoughts of all the troops they had left behind were weighing heavy on their minds. Neither one knew the other before coming back on leave. They had met in the airport and realized they were both returning to the same hometown for leave. On the trip home they got to talking, and shared their experiences as officers leading combat troops on patrols and into battles.
John Brand
Let me define my terms. By “good things” I do not mean ideals valued among the noblest of human principles. Included among such majestic goals would be the dispensation of justice based on equity, the rightful distribution of goods, the pursuit of philosophy, the arts, and the profoundly spiritual. By “good things,” in this column, I imply what our materialistic society values most highly: conspicuous consumption, tax evasion by the super rich, awarding non-competitive government contracts, golden parachutes, obscene stock options, off-shore companies, accounting finesses, and sundry other such exploitive gambits. In short, by “good things” I mean the advantage the favorite few exercise over the masses.
Ahmed Bouzid
Imagine if someone had submitted to the Los Angeles Times a well-crafted op-ed that rationally and calmly argued the following: “If only the Arabs of 1948 had united more tightly, had planned more carefully, and had done a better job enrolling strategic and powerful allies to their cause, Israel as a Jewish state would never have seen the light of day, and we would have never had to endure one of the most thorny and tragic problems in modern history ? the Arab-Israeli conflict.” If such an op-ed were being submitted to the opinion editors at the Los Angeles Times, do you think the newspaper would have published it?
Geoffrey Aronson
USA officials, particularly those in the Department of Defense, have always insisted that the political and security tracks in Iraq proceed independently of one another. The Bush administration may be prepared to recall American administrators from their desks in Baghdad, but the three- and four-star generals and forces under their command will remain for an indeterminate period. The reduction in USA military personnel over the next year to around 120,000 troops (from the current 150,000) is only being achieved by recruiting civilian contractors to do some jobs. In short, the administration envisages no reduction in the ability of USA forces to project their power throughout Iraq.
David R. Hoffman for the World Crisis Web
If there is one axiom to define life under the Bush dictatorship, it is that America is dominated and manipulated by individuals without principles, who automatically denounce the policies and practices of people or political parties they oppose, yet openly embrace commensurate policies and practices that serve their own political agendas or selfish interests. Recently, for example, many “conservative” critics expressed indignation over comparisons between George W. Bush and Adolph Hitler. Yet this outrage is conspicuously absent when right-wing commentators make similar comparisons between Nazis and notable liberals.
Seumas Milne
We have been here before. In April 1972, the former brigadier Lord Widgery published his now notorious report into the killing of 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland on Bloody Sunday. The report was so widely seen as a flagrant establishment whitewash, that a quarter of a century later Tony Blair felt compelled to set up another Bloody Sunday inquiry under Lord Saville, still sitting today. In his report of the inquiry into the death of the weapons inspector David Kelly, Lord Hutton - a scion of the Northern Irish protestant ascendancy who himself represented British soldiers at the Widgery inquiry - has, if anything, outdone Widgery in his service to the powers that be.
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