Saturday, August 17, 2002

Time to Get Tough with Bush Before It's Too Late   Frank Rich wrote a piece in the NY Times Friday that is well worth reading.  Its brief summary of the Bush disaster shows that in all liklihood, the American people are far ahead of the press and supine democratic politicians in understanding the predicament Bush puts us in.  In Iowa, vacationing congressmen are reporting a "deep caution" about the war among their constituents.  Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to the Elder Bush and a close friend of the Bush family,  delivered a stern warning that the war on Iraq could eviscerate the war on terror.  His article in the Wall St. Journal Thursday is still having reverberations, and will likely be the subject of Sunday talk shows.  He is widely seen as speaking for the Elder Bush.  He says "This time, using weapons of mass destruction, he might succeed, provoking Israel to respond, perhaps with nuclear weapons, unleashing an Armageddon in the Middle East."   The Economist in the UK says the decline in the Dow during Bush's presidency exactly matches that of Herbert Hoover. Any reporter who is not by now completely skeptical of the lies coming out of the administration does not deserve to be called a journalist. A website / blog that I really like is called Talk Left.  It is written by a lawyer in Denver, and covers civil liberties, injustice, and crime issues. It also gives an excellent overview of a lot of political news. 11:10:39 PM   comment []    Have We Slid Into World War III As a student of history, I have thought that people living "history"  don't have the luxury of years to look back from  the perspective of a historian, and so we can only partially understand the overall historical picture of the times we live in. I think we are in the early stages of a world war.  I say this because I am more and more struck by a sense of unraveling of order.  Things which we took for granted, in terms of safety, morality, or social order, are all crumbling around us. What prompted these thoughts was the story from Haaretz today about the death of a Palestinian man whom the Israeli army used as a human shield. "Nidal Muhsein, a 19-year-old from the village of Tubas, was sent by the IDF to knock on the door of his neighbor's house where the IDF suspected a wanted man, Nasser Jerar, was hiding. After he knocked, and the door opened, the youth - who had been put in an army flak jacket for the purpose - was cut down by shots fired from inside the house." Apparently this practice is widespread in the occupied territories.  This is a war crime.  It is against the treaties governing how armies treat non-combatants. The morality is no different than when the German army forced Jews or other prisoners to walk through a possible mine field to see if there were explosives. The U.S. and Israel are allies in this war--so the actions of the IDF are our responsibility as well. The other thing that gives me the sense of being at war is the content of the news.  It is of years long American occupation of Afghanistan, of political infighting over whether or when to attack Iraq, of furious American efforts to kill the International court of Justice, of the nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan as each uses Bush's terror rhetoric for their own ends, and of course the daily war in the Middle East.  I have always thought that whatever happened in world war III would be new.  It would not be a repeat of invasion and response, like world war II, not a stalemate between countries like world war I, or the cold war, or Korea, nor a war of national liberation like Vietnam.  Now, I feel that the general sense of the unraveling of order is our introduction to war. I don't like the wording of "the war on terrorism", because this war is not about terrorism.  It is a war for American hegemony in the world.  It is not in the interests of ordinary Americans, nor did it start with an attack on America.  The attack by Al Qaeda on Sept. 11th was not the start of this war, nor will the disruption or dispersal of Al Qaeda end it. Our job, in addition to promoting peace, is to try and understand the interests that are pushing this war of hegemony forward.  It is not just a whim of George Bush, or as the media put it, a matter of family honor.  Something else is driving this war, and we need to figure out what it is so we can better organize to stop it. 12:17:06 AM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/26/2002; 9:29:43 PM.