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Graham Usher
"The Palestinian dream of achieving an independent state will happen no matter how long it takes,” Yasser Arafat promised on 1 January, the 39th anniversary of his Fatah movement. Three days on - and closer to earth - the Palestinian leader admitted the dream is not imminent. 2004 “is going to be a difficult year” he told reporters outside his bullet-holed headquarters in Ramallah. There are some in the leadership who fear it may prove terminal, if not for the dream then for the political “peace of the brave” they and Arafat have long argued is the only means to realise it. They have grounds for pessimism.
Michael Jansen
News reporting that the new USA embassy in Baghdad will be staffed with 3,000 officers reveals that Washington intends to continue exerting indirect control over Iraq after the occupation regime formally transfers “sovereignty” to an Iraqi provisional government at the end of June. While this will not be the largest USA embassy in the Arab world, Washington’s outpost in the Iraqi capital is clearly intended to serve as a base for a USA “governor” and his staff, similar to London’s political installations in countries once ruled by Britain. USA control in Iraq is to be extended by means of the very process designed to effect the “handover of sovereignty”.
Karma Nabulsi
All the political luminaries that attended the formal presentation of the Geneva Accords last month are citizens of states imbued with institutions whose creation are due, in no little measure, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s seminal “Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality”, published in the same city some 250 years ago. The Geneva Accords have been universally welcomed as a moment of great hope; a serious response at last to Sharon, and his bleak enterprise. How, then, to explain that the Accords directly contradict the values shared by those dignitaries at Geneva? Or how to portray the despair it has engendered among the vast majority of Palestinians?
Mike Whitney
It may seem like a minor point, but there is a yawning chasm that divides “liberals-progressives” on the one hand, and “leftists-radicals” on the other. One of the fundamental differences between the two is that liberals-progressives believe that it is possible to affect substantive change within the existing system. That simply is not the case, and Iraq will illustrate that point better than any long-winded treatise. The sad fact is that Iraq is the logical exponent of the system, not some fluke. An insightful observer could have predicted with mathematical certainty that America would arrive at this particular position at precisely this period of time. It was unavoidable.
Dahr Jamail for the World Crisis Web
On this wet, blustery day, Ken O?Keefe, an ex-USA Marine and Gulf War Veteran, and Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Iraq (TJP) founder chose the infamous Paradise Square in Baghdad for his non-violent act of defiance and solidarity. Standing amidst a cluster of media in the shadow of where the staged toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein by the Americans took place, Mr. O?Keefe somberly, yet angrily stated he was to burn his USA Passport.
Renato Redentor Constantino
Daybreak. The opening verse. The first week of the first month of a new year. What will the rest of it bring? Another epidemic of hostilities on top of the current plague? Who’s to know? Governments holding the mightiest of arsenals quake in the face of the potential power of one dissenter. A power discovered by 100,000 deserters in the USA army during its war on Vietnam. A power wielded last month by over 30 Israeli refuseniks who denounced the Palestinian occupation as eating at the moral fabric of Israel. The refuseniks who said they would no longer carry out illegal orders to bomb Palestinian cities.
Osama bin Laden - The Full Transcript
As is expected in a state that considers itself at war, little attention has been given to the contents of the recently released audio-tape from Osama bin Laden. However, a reading of the transcript of the tape makes it clear that this was as much a message to western observers, as it was to the world’s Muslim people. Gone are the rather medieval sounding references to the glory of the martyr, and the satanic nature of the Bush regime. In their place, what we find is something that, were it written by anyone else, would pass as a radical, but hardly revolutionary, Islamic political analysis of the present-day Middle East.
George Bisharat
Last May 14th, the 55th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), when one people gained a homeland and another lost theirs, I was thinking of a home in Jerusalem. It was the residence occupied by Golda Meir, author of the famous remark that “the Palestinian people do not exist” when she was Israel’s foreign minister. It was also the family home built in 1926 by my grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, “Papa” to all of us.
Manuel Valenzuela
War is that most ignoble of human creations, in which lower classes fight each other to the death for the benefits of the few elite-greed-infected bastards that blink not an eye at the death and maiming of those young “plebeians” they sent to war in far away lands to fight those same brothers being exploited by the powerful on the other side. In the end, victory or defeat matters not to the dead and injured who have gained nothing and lost everything, returning home to an easily forgetful government that throws veterans into the bowels of indifference, tossing away the key and washing its hands clean of the human catastrophe it created.
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