Shields alert: We must be better prepared next time

The deteriorating situation in Iraq and the loss of credibility in Westminster & Washington does not mean any slackening in the drive to war. On the contrary, as the crisis in Western geopolitical thinking becomes more acute, the desperation of Bush and Blair is likely to drive them into more military adventures, against Cuba, Syria, Iran,  North Korea, or anywhere else their global hegemony is threatened.

Yet the Human Shields movement is less prepared for action in defence of peace than we were at the end of January, when the first buses left London for Baghdad. And it was our lack of training and selection procedures then, our lack of self-discipline, our failure to attract thousands rather than hundreds to Baghdad, that resulted, ultimately, in the failure of our mission.

However, we learned some valuable lessons in Baghdad. The committee structure we set up was brilliant, and if we had not wasted so much time squabbling among ourselves and with our hosts about the exact nature of humanitarian sites, it could have provided the authorities with a valuable channel for liaison with us.

In any future threat of conflict, our probable hosts are likely to be even less tolerant of our idiosyncrasies than were the Iraqis. We need to demonstrate that when the chips are down we really mean business and have not merely transplanted gesture politics to their countries.

It is my suggestion that we reconstitute ourselves as, virtually, a peaceful rapid reaction force, to go immediately to any future trouble spots.

I propose that we set up the UK chapter of Human Shields and convene a founding conference to elect a properly accountable steering committee.

Such a conference would need to consider a number of issues, among which I would like to suggest the following (not an exhaustive list):

1. Should we make immediate contact with the most likely targets of Anglo-US aggression, to explain our aims and objectives, and to devise, as far as possible, streamlining of visa and other entry formalities? Transport to trouble spots could also be researched, in order to get the cheapest deal.
2. Should we set up a secretariat, including a fund-raising officer, with a view to setting up a full-time office?
3. Consultation with the International Solidarity movement, and others involved in such actions, in order to devise a mandatory training scheme, which all Shields should take.
4. Shields be asked to state which country they are prepared to go and protect, and be formed into affinity groups of no more than 12 persons each all committed to that country. Country-specific training on culture, climate, diet etc, could be made be mandatory for all affinity groups (problems in N. Korea are likely to be quite different from those in Iran, for instance).

What do you think? Please let me know.

Karl Dallas, 15 Church Green, Bradford, W. Yorks, BD8 7QN. Tel: +44(0)1274 823949

Mobile: +44(0)771 980 5903 Email: karldallas@blueyonder.co.uk

Seeking Honesty in U.S. Policy

By Joseph Wilson, San Jose Mercury News

 Monday 15 September 2003

During the gulf war in 1991, when I was in charge of the American Embassy in Baghdad, I placed a copy of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland'' on my office coffee table. I thought it conveyed far better than words ever could the weird world that was Iraq at that time, a world in which nothing was what it seemed: The several hundred Western hostages Saddam Hussein took during Desert Shield were not really hostages but "guests.'' Kuwait was not invaded, but "liberated.''

 It is clearly time to dust the book off and again display it prominently, only this time because our own government has dragged the country down a rabbit hole, all the while trying to convince the American people that life in newly liberated Iraq is not as distorted as it seems.

 It is returning to normal, we are assured, even as we are asked to ante up an additional $75 billion and pressure builds to send more troops and extend the tours of duty of those who are there. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz tells Congress that all we need is to project a little confidence. The Mad Hatter could not have said it better.

 President Bush's speech last Sunday was just the latest example of the administration's concerted efforts to misrepresent reality -- and rewrite history -- to mask its mistakes. The president said Iraq is now the center of our battle against terrorism. But we did not go to Iraq to fight Al-Qaida, which remains perhaps our deadliest foe, and we will not defeat it there.

 By trying to justify the current fight in Iraq as a fight against terrorism, the administration has done two frightening things. It has tried to divert attention from Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the wave of terrorist attacks against American interests from New York and Washington to Yemen, and who reappeared in rugged terrain in a video broadcast last week. And the policy advanced by the speech is a major step toward creating a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts on the ground.

 This is an insurgency we're fighting in Iraq. Our 130,000 soldiers in Iraq now confront an angry but not yet defeated Sunni Muslim population who, although a minority in Iraq, had been in power for a century. We are now also beginning to face terrorists there, but it is our own doing. Our attack on Iraq -- and our bungling of the peace -- led to the guerrilla insurgency that is drawing jihadists from around the Muslim world. The "shock and awe'' campaign so vividly shown on our television screens has galvanized historic Arab envy, jealousy and resentment of the United States into white-hot hatred of America.

 Where once there were thousands, now there are potentially millions of terrorists and sympathizers who will be drawn into this campaign.

 We've seen other examples of the kind of insurgency we're now facing. One was in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, and we all should know the end of that story by now. Bin Laden was one of the outside jihadists drawn into that battle; he emerged as the head of a group of hardened soldiers he called Al-Qaida.

 It is perhaps not surprising that the administration is trying to redefine why we went to Iraq, because we have accomplished so little of what we set out to do -- and severely underestimated the commitment it would take to deal with the aftermath of war.

 The president told us in his seminal speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons . . . is seeking nuclear weapons . . . has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people.''

 He dismissed the concerns raised by critics of his approach as follows: "Some worry that a change of leadership in Iraq could create instability and make the situation worse. The situation could hardly get worse, for world security and for the people of Iraq. The lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power.''

 Now we know that even if we find chemical or biological weapons, the threat that they posed to our national security was, to be charitable, exaggerated.

 It all but disappeared from the president's speech last week and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the leading proponents of the threat, now tells us that he didn't even ask the chief weapons-of-mass-destruction sleuth in Iraq, David Kay, for a status report during his recent trip to Baghdad, relegating such weapons to the same dark corner as bin Laden, whose name rarely passes the lips of our leaders these days.

 Indeed, in the most telling revision of the justification for going to war, the State Department's undersecretary for arms control, John Bolton, recently said that whether Saddam's government actually possessed weapons of mass destruction "isn't really the issue. The issue, I think, has been the capability that Iraq sought to have . . . WMD programs.''

 In other words, we're now supposed to believe that we went to war not because Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction threatened us, but because he had scientists on his payroll.

 And the cakewalk post-war scenario that had been painted by some in the administration is anything but. More Americans have died since the president announced the end of major combat operations than during the war itself. The cost runs $1 billion per week in military support alone, and some experts say our deployment is already affecting future military preparedness.

 Iraqis live in chaotic conditions as crime flourishes in the unpatrolled streets and family squabbles are settled vigilante style; basic services such as electricity remain unavailable to large segments of the urban population.

 The truth is, the administration has never leveled with the American people on the war with Iraq.

 It is true that many people outside the administration, including me and many leading Democrats, thought Saddam had residual stocks of weapons of mass destruction; disarmament was a legitimate international objective supported unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. But we did not need to rush to war before exploring other, less risky options.

 Invasion, conquest and occupation was always the highest-risk, lowest-reward choice. The intrusive U.N. inspections were disrupting Saddam's programs and weakening him in the eyes of his key supporters, including in the Iraqi military. That would explain why the United States, according to reports, was able to thoroughly infiltrate the army before the onset of hostilities and obtain commitments from Iraqi generals to send their troops home rather than have them fight.

 The administration short-circuited the discussion of whether war was necessary because some of its most powerful members felt it was the best option -- ostensibly because they had deluded themselves into believing that they could easily impose flowering democracies on the region.

 A more cynical reading of the agenda of certain Bush advisers could conclude that the Balkanization of Iraq was always an acceptable outcome, because Israel would then find itself surrounded by small Arab countries worried about each other instead of forming a solid block against Israel. After all, Iraq was an artificial country that had always had a troublesome history.

 One way the administration stopped the debate was to oversell its intelligence. I know, because I was in the middle of the efforts to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium "yellowcake'' -- a form of lightly processed ore -- from Africa.

 At the request of the administration I traveled to the West African nation of Niger in February 2002 to check out the allegation. I reported that such a sale was highly unlikely, but my conclusions -- as well as the same conclusions from our ambassador on the scene and from a four-star Marine Corps general -- were ignored by the White House.

 Instead, the president relied upon an unsubstantiated reference in a British white paper to underpin his argument in the State of the Union address that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programs. How many times did we hear the president, vice president and others speak of the looming threat of an Iraqi mushroom cloud?

 Until several months ago, when it came out that the country was Niger, I assumed that the president had been referring to another African country. After I learned, belatedly to be sure, I came forward to insist that the administration correct the misstatements of fact. But the damage had already been done.

 The overblown rhetoric about nuclear weapons inspired fear and drowned out the many warnings that invasion would create its own formidable dangers.

 Middle East experts warned over and over again that Iraq's many religious and ethnic factions could start battling each other in a bloody struggle for power. Former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd fretted that we would unleash a terrorist-recruiting bonanza, and former U.S. national security adviser Brent Scowcroft warned of a security meltdown in the region.

 The U.S. army's top general at the time, Eric Shinseki, meanwhile, questioned the cakewalk scenario. He told Congress that we would need several hundred thousand soldiers in Iraq to put an end to the violence against our troops and against each other. His testimony was quickly repudiated by both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

 As we now know, he was close to the mark. Our 130,000 soldiers are failing to stem the violence. Even as Rumsfeld says jauntily that all is going well, Secretary of State Colin Powell is running to the United Nations to try to get more foreign boots on the ground. One of the administration's staunchest supporters, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, says ominously that we risk strategic failure if we don't send reinforcements.

 And the infighting that Middle East experts feared could still erupt. The majority Shiite Muslim population, brutalized during Saddam's rule, is content with a tactical truce with our forces so long as they are free to consolidate their control and the United States continues to kill Sunni Muslims so that they don't have to. That truce is threatened not only by Shiite political ambition but also by ongoing skirmishes with the Sunnis.

 The recent car bomb at the An-Najaf mosque that killed one of Shiite Islam's most influential clerics and head of the largest Shiite party in Iraq almost resulted in the outbreak of civil war between the two groups. Widespread belief that Sunni elements were behind the assassination and that the United States failed in its responsibilities for security has brought Shiite armed militias back onto the streets, actively seeking to avenge the death of their leader. Such a war within a war would make our occupation infinitely more dangerous.

 Some now argue that the president's speech Sunday represents a change of course. Even if the administration won't admit it made any mistakes, the mere call for international involvement should be enough to persuade the world to accept the burden of assisting us, as we continue to control both the military and the economic reconstruction.

 That may well be true, but we cannot count on the international community to do our bidding blindly. While the administration scurries back to the United Nations for help, our historic friends and allies still smart from the gratuitous insults hurled at them nine months ago. This is the same United Nations which Richard Perle, a not-so-invisible hand behind the war, recently called an "abject failure.''

 As Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's national security adviser, has pointed out, at a time when our military might is at its zenith, our political and moral authority is at its lowest ebb. Essential trust has been broken, and it will take time to repair. At a minimum, we need to jettison the hubris that has driven this policy, the pretensions of moral rectitude that mask a jodhpurs-and-pith-helmet imperialism that cannot succeed.

 In the meantime, we must demonstrate that we understand that more than military might is required to tame the anger in the region. This includes both the internationalization of the reconstruction effort and the redoubling of efforts to ease tensions on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

 That is the thorn that must be pulled from the side of the region. The road to peace in the Middle East still goes through Jerusalem.

 But before we can hope to win back international trust or start down a truly new path in Iraq, the administration has to start playing it straight, with the American people and with the world. Recent administration statements, including the president's speech, suggest that it still prefers to live in a fantasy world.

The Luckiest Man In The World

by Harley Sorensen, 2003

SF Gate, September 15, 2003

Quiz time. Who is the luckiest man in the world?

No, not the guy who won the Power Ball drawing, and certainly not Ben Affleck (unless the postponement becomes a cancellation). But the answer is easy. The luckiest man in the world is Osama bin Laden.

Like our very own George W. Bush, Osama was born into wealth and never had to support himself. But even without that good luck, the man could have made an easy living for himself by working as a Jesus model. With his handsome Semitic good looks and his dreamy, faraway smile, he was a natural for the job. The Old Masters would have drooled.

But what really makes bin Laden the luckiest man in the world is his surprise ally. When bin Laden ordered the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (assuming he did), he wanted to do more than kill thousands of infidels. He wanted to change the world, disrupt American society, and destroy an American culture that was slowly overtaking the entire planet.

When bin Laden made his move, there was no way he could have predicted that his greatest ally would be the current American president, the Honorable George W. Bush.

Now, that's luck!

America, whatever its faults, has always been a beacon of hope for people around the world. Although many nations have surpassed our standard of living, we are still the land of economic opportunity, virtually unfettered free speech, religious freedom and, to a large extent, tolerance of nonconformity.

People elsewhere looked to us with hope, even after the events of the year 2000, when the presidential candidate who was clearly the people's choice and the most competent for the job lost to a previously ne'er-do-well whose main qualification was that he was the scion of a rich and politically prominent family.

So when the Saudi hijackers and their helpers committed their terrible crimes on Sept. 11, 2001, the world wept for America. Never, never before in our history, not even on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, did the rest of the world bleed for America the way it did on that Sept. 11 and the days following.

So the combined tragedies of Sept. 11 became a kind of opportunity for America. We could have turned the tables on our tormentors by proving that we were what most people of the world believed we were, a good and kind and generous nation, truly the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But we didn't do that. We did just the opposite. Under the leadership of the Honorable George W. Bush, we showed how petty we could be, how mean-spirited, and even how cowardly. We truly disgraced ourselves in the eyes of the world as, under Bush, we started the methodical destruction of our wonderful freedoms in the name of self-protection.

We cringed, we cowered and, when the opportunity to do so arose, we bullied. And, when the chance came for George W. Bush to settle an old personal score with Iraq's Saddam Hussein, we thumbed our nose at the rest of the world and insulted it. "Old Europe," our leaders said, disdainfully.

We invented "freedom fries" to show our contempt for the nation that made America possible in the 18th century.

We took a page from the despots of the world and started making people disappear. We rediscovered torture of prisoners to make them talk, either through surrogates ("The Saudis know how to deal with these kinds of problems") or using modern, scientific, non-touching methods.

We pushed through the USA Patriot Act, an unreadable mess of legalistic mumbo jumbo, without a single senator or representative knowing exactly what was in it. It turned out to be such a bad piece of legislation that communities around the nation passed resolutions vowing to not cooperate with it. Even librarians united to defy its unwarranted snooping terms.

The Honorable Mr. Bush and his trusty cohorts created the mammoth Department of Homeland Security, a mishmash of departments that were already so big as to become dysfunctional. "Big government is never so big that it can't become bigger and more impersonal" -- that seemed to be the logic behind "homeland" security.

("Homeland," incidentally, has never been defined. Is it everything American? Just the North American part? Just the Lower 48? Does it include Hawaii Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa? How about Puerto Rico? Kingman Reef? Does anybody know?)

In short, Mr. Bush has set about finishing the job that Osama bin Laden started. Even his economic policy -- take from the poor, give to the rich -- is designed to increase monetary discrepancies between Americans, just like in bin Laden's native land.

Nor is Mr. Bush above religious fundamentalist superstition. In what might have been a signal to bin Laden as to what kind of leadership America now has, Mr. Bush in 2001 put the clamps on stem cell research(while pretending to maintain it at low levels). His murky "logic" cramping scientific study defies rational explanation. It is Middle Ages stuff, right out of the Osama bin Laden playbook. Osama had to be pleased.

It seems quite possible that the absence of follow-up attacks on America can be explained by a lack of necessity for them. From bin Laden's point of view, everything in America is happening just the way he likes it. We are becoming more and more like a Middle Eastern emirate and less and less like the world's foremost democracy.

Why should bin Laden attack us again and rock the boat? Mr. Bush is doing his work for him.

Will there ever be another terrorist attack here? The experts say yes, and they're most likely right. When will it be? My guess: sometime next year, timed to draw the fearful closer to Mr. Bush and assure his re-election.

The best the lucky bin Laden could possibly hope for is four more years of George W. Bush.

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at harleysorensen@yahoo.com.

Three Easy Pieces for Any Decent American

(from Michael Moore)

September 15, 2003

There are many otherwise decent Americans who are either still on the fence about George W. Bush or they actually profess to like the man. They are the ones who make up the 58% approval ratings and the 64% who say they still believe the war was a good idea. You know these people well. They work next to you, or they sit in the classroom next to you, or they may even be sitting at your kitchen table right now!

I think that we need to hold out a hand to them, not in a partisan sort of way, and not with any condescension. I think that if we share with them a few pieces of information, and do it with common sense instead of politics, there is a chance we just might break through and turn things around. Perhaps it's my foolish optimism in the goodness that is in every person, and in their ability to ultimately know right from wrong.

I would like to give you three little vignettes to share with them. They are so simple and so shocking in their very content that, if you pass them around the office, the school, the neighborhood or the bedroom, it may just do the trick. Here they are:

1. GEORGE AND LAURA ON 9/11 -- A BARREL OF LAUGHS!

The following is an interview with the First Couple from the current issue of one of my favorite magazines, Ladies Home Journal (Oct. '03). They are asked about what September 11, 2001, was like for them personally, and, although over 3,000 people had just perished, George W. was able to find some humor by the end of that day:

Peggy Noonan (the interviewer): You were separated on September 11th. What was it like when you saw each other again?

Laura Bush: Well, we just hugged. I think there was a certain amount of security in being with each other than being apart.

George W. Bush: But the day ended on a relatively humorous note. The agents said, "you'll be sleeping downstairs. Washington's still a dangerous place." And I said no, I can't sleep down there, the bed didn't look comfortable. I was really tired, Laura was tired, we like our own bed. We like our own routine. You know, kind of a nester. I knew I had to deal with the issue the next day and provide strength and comfort to the country, and so I needed rest in order to be mentally prepared. So I told the agent we're going upstairs, and he reluctantly said okay. Laura wears contacts, and she was sound asleep. Barney was there. And the agent comes running up and says, "We're under attack. We need you downstairs," and so there we go. I'm in my running shorts and my T-shirt, and I'm barefooted. Got the dog in one hand, Laura had a cat, I'm holding Laura --

Laura Bush: I don't have my contacts in , and I'm in my fuzzy house slippers --

George W. Bush: And this guy's out of breath, and we're heading straight down to the basement because there's an incoming unidentified airplane, which is coming toward the White House. Then the guy says it's a friendly airplane. And we hustle all the way back up stairs and go to bed.

Mrs. Bush: [LAUGHS] And we just lay there thinking about the way we must have looked.

Peggy Noonan (interviewer): So the day starts in tragedy and ends in Marx Brothers.

George W. Bush: THAT'S RIGHT-- WE GOT A LAUGH OUT OF IT!

(end)

Although America had just suffered the worst attack ever on our own soil, somehow this man was able to end his day on a funny note. I wonder how many of the 3,000 families who lost someone earlier that day had a funny ending before they went to sleep? Please read the above exchange aloud to anyone who will listen. It speaks volumes.

2. WE HAVE JUST WRECKED OUR KIDS' FUTURE.

The first paragraph in yesterday's New York Times story on how Bush has taken a record surplus and demolished it into a record deficit was one of the best lead paragraphs I have ever read in a newspaper article.

Here's how it went <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/politics/14DEFI.html?ex=1064116800&en=492a7429965853da&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE> :

"When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents."

Bingo. Gee, I hope the kids thank us some day!

Here's the next paragraph (my emphasis added):

"Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be BORROWED, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the NEXT generation of taxpayers AND THE GENERATION AFTER THAT. The $166 BILLION cost of the work SO FAR in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known."

Every conservative friend of yours should weep when they read that, and then you should hug them and tell them that it'll be okay, once we all do what we need to do.

3. WHAT WOULD $87 BILLION BUY?

If you can't get through this list without wanting to throw up, I'll understand. But pass it around anyway. This is the nail in the Iraq War's coffin for any sane, thinking individual, regardless of their political stripe (thanks to TomPaine.com and the Center for American Progress <http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8857> )...

To get some perspective, here are some real-life comparisons about what $87 billion means:

$87 Billion Is More Than The Combined Total Of All State Budget Deficits In The United States.

The Bush administration proposed absolutely zero funds to help states deal with these deficits, despite the fact that their tax cuts drove down state revenues. [Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

$87 Billion Is Enough To Pay The 3.3 Million People Who Have Lost Jobs Under George W. Bush $26,363 Each!

The unemployment benefits extension passed by Congress at the beginning of this year provides zero benefits to "workers who exhausted their regular, state unemployment benefits and cannot find work." All told, two-thirds of unemployed workers have exhausted their benefits. [Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

$87 Billion Is More Than DOUBLE The Total Amount The Government Spends On Homeland Security.

The U.S. spends about $36 billion on homeland security. Yet, Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) wrote "America will fall approximately $98.4 billion short of meeting critical emergency responder needs" for homeland security without a funding increase. [Source: Council on Foreign Relations]

$87 Billion Is 87 Times The Amount The Federal Government Spends On After School Programs.

George W. Bush proposed a budget that reduces the $1 billion for after-school programs to $600 million -- cutting off about 475,000 children from the program. [Source: The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee]

$87 Billion Is More Than 10 Times What The Government Spends On All Environmental Protection.

The Bush administration requested just $7.6 billion for the entire Environmental Protection Agency. This included a 32 percent cut to water quality grants, a 6 percent reduction in enforcement staff, and a 50 percent cut to land acquisition and conservation. [Source: Natural Resources Defense Council]

There you go. In black and white. A few million of you will receive this letter. Please share the above with at least a half-dozen people today and tomorrow. I, like you, do not want to see another approval rating over 50%.

Yours,

Michael Moore

www.michaelmoore.com <http://www.michaelmoore.com>

moorelist@aol.com

PS. Thanks for the astounding response to the Wesley Clark letter (and for your kind comments to me). Over 95% of the thousands of letters received favored the General tossing his helmet in the ring. All were passed on to his organization. More to come on the road to removing Bush.