Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Lead article in forthcoming April issue of News & Letters:

War on Iraq, Resistance, and the Shift in Global Politics


by Peter Hudis

Bush's insistence on launching a full-scale war against Iraq, replete with over 250,000 troops, hundreds of tanks, and thousands of bombs and missiles, threatens to wreak enormous destruction upon the people of Iraq while producing a major shift in world politics which we will all feel for years to come.

Anonymous Comrade writes "Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2003



America: an Empire in Denial

By NIALL FERGUSON



Once there was an empire that governed roughly a quarter of the world's population, covered about the same proportion of the Earth's land surface, and dominated nearly all its oceans. The British empire was the biggest empire ever, bar none. How an archipelago of rainy islands off the northwest coast of Europe came to rule the world is one of the fundamental questions not just of British but of world history.

Check out www.jakeneck.coma nice site from a NYC surrealist blogging upstart. - h.
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mobiustrip44 writes ..... need a good reason to reject the war in iraq? couldn't give two fucks about iraqi civillians or the general corruption of our own administration? well in that case, how 'bout thinking about our boys overseas?



check your headlines: 16 soldiers died today when a ch-46 helicopter crashed in kuwait. incidentally, the ch-46 is the brother of boeing's ch-47, a chopper known for its "substandard and dangerous" construction, that at one point led to a $54 million lawsuit filed by the department of defense against the manufacturer. sure, boeing was found guilty and lost the suit. they're still the number two defense contractor in the nation. but, that's ok... they've paid their debt to society in campaign contributions.

Aonymous Comrade writes:

"Not Oil, But Dollars vs. Euros"

Geoffrey Heard

Why is George Bush so hell bent on war with Iraq? Why does his
administration reject every positive Iraqi move? It all makes sense when you
consider the economic implications for the USA of not going to war with
Iraq. The war in Iraq is actually the US and Europe going head to head on
economic leadership of the world.

Louis Lingg writes
Dissent Magazine posted the following brief piece by Iraqi dissident architect and author Kanan Makiya (Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, published under the psuedonym Samir Khalil).

I
support a war on the grounds that the current regime of the Ba'ath
Party in Iraq is a criminal state that has gone beyond the pale
even as judged by the very low standards of the Middle East region,
and certainly of the international community. My position rests
on the exceptional nature of Ba'athi totalitarianism in Iraq (and
is therefore not extendable to all the nasty states that exist
in the world). Moreover, it derives from the particular historical
experience-dating back to the 1991 Gulf War-that binds the United
States to Iraq. The outcome of that war, which left the dictator
in place and precipitated one of the harshest sanction regimes
of recent times, places an extraordinary moral responsibility
upon the shoulders of the United States to finish that which it
in a very important sense left unfinished. Such a responsibility
might not exist were it not for that particular historical experience.
One does not transport half a million men halfway across the world
and then leave the people of a country, who were not responsible
for their state's outrage, broken and bleeding for ten years with
no end in sight to the torment that they are going through.

nolympics writes:

Though a little kind to Tony Blair it is nevertheless a good outline of why this war is a criminal enterprise on the part of Britain and the US.

Listen to it in real audio here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/events03/ukpol/hoc/cook17mar.ram

"Rachel Corrie, In Memoriam"

Peter Bohmer

Rachel Corrie was an incredibly good person. I mourn and am very saddened

by her murder yesterday, March 16th, 2003. She was killed by a bulldozer as

the Israeli military ran over her as she was protesting the destruction of

Palestinian homes in Rafah in the Gaza Strip.

A Short History of Franco-US Discord

Paul-Marie de la Gorce, http://MondeDiplo.com/2003/03/07franceusa

The current frost between France and the United States is not new. They have often disagreed over the past 45 years: France refused to allow US missiles stationed on its soil, withdrew from Nato's command structure, and recognised communist China even though it horrified the US.

"Who is in Charge?"

Edward Said


The Bush administration's relentless unilateral march

towards war is profoundly disturbing for many reasons,

but so far as American citizens are concerned the

whole grotesque show is a tremendous failure in

democracy. An immensely wealthy and powerful republic

has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all

of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public

pressure, and simply turned on its head.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"Bush's Ultimate Thule"

By Mike Davis



In the early summer of 1951, a group of Inuit hunters, guiding a French anthropologist, returned to their homes at Thule in the northwest of Greenland after a daring expedition to Canada's Ellesmere Island. When they had left the year before, Thule was one of the most remote communities on earth: twenty igloos and a trading post established in 1910 by Greenland's national hero, Knud Rasmussen, to provide a base for his famed

ethnographic explorations.