Fwd: Wobbly greetings.......

[billbartlett at dodo.com.au]

>Envelope-to: billbartlett at dodo.com.au
>Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 19:38:49 -0800 (PST)
>From: Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au>
>
>Saw your Mel Age opinion post in LBO talk digest.
>Thought you might like to post this one to LBO too.
>
>We're having fun over in Perth.  Come by and check us
>out once in awhile.
>
>  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anarchistwa/
>
> 
>
>Wobbly greetings,
>Mike B)
>*******************************************************
>
>Robert Fisk: The case against war: A conflict driven
>by the self-interest of America
>15 February 2003
>In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied
>to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded
>with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and
>false information and student essays dressed up as
>"intelligence". We are sick of being insulted by
>little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes
>of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative
>henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map
>of the Middle East to their advantage.
>
>No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt refutation of
>America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday warmed so
>many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world
>could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy
>"allies" they have become.
>
>The British don't like Hussein any more than they
>liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as
>Blair does not, the Second World War; they are not
>conned by childish parables of Hitler, Churchill,
>Chamberlain and appeasement. They do not like being
>lectured and whined at by men whose experience of war
>is Hollywood and television.
>
>Still less do they wish to embark on endless wars with
>a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam
>draft and who, with his oil buddies, is now sending
>America's poor to destroy a Muslim nation that has
>nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity
>of 11 September. Jack Straw, the public school
>Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all this, with Blair. He
>brays at us about the dangers of nuclear weapons that
>Iraq does not have, of the torture and aggression of a
>dictatorship that America and Britain sustained when
>Saddam was "one of ours". But he and Blair cannot
>discuss the dark political agenda behind George Bush's
>government, nor the "sinister men" (the words of a
>very senior UN official) around the President.
>
>Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather
>like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims,
>Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for
>generations, Iraqis included ñ though we play down the
>RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But
>when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is
>not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons ñ
>and many Americans ñ are a lot braver than Blair and
>Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell
>in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children.
>
>Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in that play better
>expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do they
>take me for a simpleton?" The British, like other
>Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their
>opposition to this obscene war may make them feel
>more, not less, European.
>
>Palestine has much to do with it. Brits have no love
>for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough and are
>outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the
>Palestinians by a nation that is now in effect running
>US policy in the Middle East. We are told that our
>invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with the
>Israeli-Palestinian conflict ñ a burning, fearsome
>wound to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his
>meretricious State of the Union speech ñ but even
>Blair can't get away with that one; hence his
>"conference" for Palestinian reform at which the
>Palestinians had to take part via video-link because
>Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let
>them travel to London.
>
>So much for Blair's influence over Washington ñ the US
>Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that he
>couldn't persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at
>least one has to acknowledge that Sharon ñ war
>criminal though he may be for the 1982 Sabra and
>Chatila massacres ñ treated Blair with the contempt he
>deserves. Nor can the Americans hide the link between
>Iraq and Israel and Palestine. In his devious address
>to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked
>the three when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide
>bombings so cruelly afflict Israelis, keeps an office
>in Baghdad.
>
>Just as he told us about the mysterious al-Qa'ida men
>who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi
>gorge". This was America's way of giving Vladimir
>Putin a free hand again in his campaign of rape and
>murder against the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark
>to the UN General Assembly last 12 September about the
>need to protect Iraq's Turkomans only becomes clear
>when one realises that Turkomans make up two thirds of
>the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil
>fields.
>
>The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still
>active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have
>advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation.
>Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential
>advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton
>and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the
>overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was
>elected ñ if he was elected ñ US President. And they
>weren't doing so for the benefit of Americans or
>Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy
>for Securing the Realm
>(http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm) called for
>war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the
>incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin
>Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by ñ yes,
>Richard Perle. The destruction of Iraq will, of
>course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons
>and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose
>whatever colonial settlement Sharon has in store.
>
>Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss this with us
>ñ a war for Israel is not going to have our boys
>lining up at the recruiting offices ñ Jewish American
>leaders talk about the advantages of an Iraqi war with
>enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish
>American groups who so bravely oppose this madness
>have been the first to point out how pro-Israeli
>organisations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of
>oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the
>Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then,
>that any discussion of this topic must be censored, as
>Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins University,
>tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after
>Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European
>nations' objections to the war might ñ yet again ñ be
>ascribed to "anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead
>in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a
>malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said, is
>opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri
>Avnery, argue that an Iraq war will leave Israel with
>even more Arab enemies, especially if Iraq attacks
>Israel and Sharon then joins the US battle against the
>Arabs.
>
>The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lies behind
>Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe". He was
>talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and the
>"old" France of collaboration. But the France and
>Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe, the
>continent which refuses, ever again, to slaughter the
>innocent. It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the
>"old" America; not the "new" America of freedom, the
>America of F D Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolise
>the old America that killed its native Indians and
>embarked on imperial adventures. It is "old" America
>we are being asked to fight for ñ linked to a new form
>of colonialism ñ an America that first threatens the
>United Nations with irrelevancy and then does the same
>to Nato. This is not the last chance for the UN, nor
>for Nato. But it may well be the last chance for
>America to be taken seriously by her friends as well
>as her enemies.
>
>In these last days of peace the British should not be
>tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN
>resolution. UN permission for America's war will not
>make the war legitimate; it merely proves that the
>Council can be controlled with bribes, threats or
>abstentions. It was the Soviet Union's abstention,
>after all, which allowed America to fight the savage
>Korean war under the UN flag. And we should not doubt
>that ñ after a quick US military conquest of Iraq and
>providing 'they" die more than we die ñ there will be
>plenty of anti-war protesters who will claim they were
>pro-war all along. The first pictures of "liberated"
>Baghdad will show Iraqi children making victory signs
>to American tank crews. But the real cruelty and
>cynicism of this conflict will become evident as soon
>as the "war" ends, when our colonial occupation of a
>Muslim nation for the US and Israel begins.
>
>There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon a "man of
>peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face trial over
>Sabra and Chatila, which is why Israel has just
>withdrawn its ambassador to Belgium. I'd like to see
>Saddam in the same court. And Rifaat Assad for his
>1982 massacre in the Syrian city of Hama. And all the
>torturers of Israel and the Arab dictatorships.
>
>Israeli and US ambitions in the region are now
>entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and
>regional control. It is being cheer-led by a
>draft-dodger who is treacherously telling us that this
>is part of an eternal war against "terror". And the
>British and most Europeans don't believe him. It's not
>that Britons wouldn't fight for America. They just
>don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if
>that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to
>fight for Blair either.
>
>
>http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=378428
>
>
>=====
>http://www.iww.org/
>
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