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World Crisis Web
The UN Security Council is presently discussing both the attempt by the USA to garner official support for it’s occupation of Iraq, and Syria’s attempt to pass a resolution criticising Israel’s recent illegal air strike against Damascus. While the USA would condemn anyone vetoing the former, it has itself threatened to veto the latter. At this point, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the seventy-seven times the USA has used its veto against proposed resolutions inside the Security Council over the last thirty years.
Jonathan Steele
Grenada was catapulted on to the front pages in October 1983 when troops from the world’s most powerful country invaded the nutmeg-exporting island in order to effect “regime change”. The White House sledgehammer was successful and US forces soon withdrew, but claims that a minuscule place with no army and a population of less than 100,000 could conceivably be a military threat prompted derision.
Two years after the “sensational victory” in Afghanistan, observers are increasingly concluding that life under the USA and oil industry puppet regime is little better than it was before the USA invasion. Meanwhile, the rising number of attacks against the occupying forces, and the failure of world powers to prevent or even locate insurgents amongst the population in western Afghanistan, testifies that Mullah Omar’s Taliban is growing in both strength and popular support.
If you don’t want people to lash out at you violently, don’t provoke them. If you want to prevent terrorist attacks, don’t make new enemies. Sound advice. But hardly macho. And the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terrorism is decidedly macho. You won’t find Bush’s team addressing the grievances of the victims of US foreign policy—the bombing victims, the injured, the disabled, the bereft, the dispossessed, the refugees. You won’t find its members laying awake at night worrying that some Afghans and Iraqis are so incensed at what the US has done to them, their neighbours, their friends, and their family that they’ve sworn never to rest until they exact revenge.
Elizabeth Sullivan
It was probably pure coincidence that the bloodiest day in U.N. history, the day a massive truck bomb killed the world body’s chief Iraq envoy and 19 others, came on the 50th anniversary of the CIA-plotted coup in Iran that seeded today’s Islamic terrorism.
Edward Said
During the last days of July, Representative Tom Delay (Republican) of Texas, the House majority leader described routinely as one of the three or four most powerful men in Washington, delivered himself of his opinions regarding the roadmap and the future of peace in the Middle East. What he had to say was meant as an announcement for a trip he subsequently took to Israel and several Arab countries where, it is reported, he articulated the same message. In no uncertain terms Delay declared himself opposed to the Bush administration’s support for the roadmap, especially the provision in it for a Palestinian state.
Rami G. Khouri
I worry when I hear the Egyptian foreign minister say, as he did Monday after meeting his Saudi Arabian and Syrian counterparts, that the USA-appointed provisional Governing Council in Iraq lacks legitimacy, and that these Arab states agreed to revive Arab action on Iraq and Palestine. I worry because legitimacy and collective Arab action are two of the greatest problems facing our societies, and repeating hollow old phrases and pursuing discredited policies in the face of our region’s new realities will only ensure more failures, tensions, and violence.
James Carroll
’’Although the War did not make any immediate demands on me physically, while it lasted it put a complete stop to my artistic activity because it forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of my fundamental assumptions.’’ These words were spoken by Thomas Mann in his Nobel laureate speech in 1929, a reflection of the broad psychological rupture inflicted on the European mind by World War I. But just as war can lead to the ‘’reappraisal of fundamental assumptions,’’ it can do the opposite, reinforcing assumptions to the point of shutting down debate. That seems a more American story.
Ali Abunimah
The first act of Belgium’s new government was to move to abrogate the 1993 “universal jurisdiction” law that allowed the trial in Belgium of any case involving war crimes and crimes against humanity anywhere in the world. Only one trial has been conducted under this law, resulting in the conviction of four Rwandans for participation in their country’s 1994 genocide. But ever since survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres brought a case in Brussels against Ariel Sharon and other Israelis, Israel’s apologists have campaigned against it. Last April, under strong US pressure, Belgium changed its law so any case against a foreign leader would first be referred to the authorities of the leader’s country. This was to reassure the US that Belgian courts would not be a venue for ‘political’ proceedings against American officials. But it did not.
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