'Code Orange Christmas'
Following a path well traveled
By George Ochenski, Missoula Independent
The snow fell softly as the skis swished silently through the deep green pines while the low winter sun suffused the slopes below in a golden glow. Deep and restful peace lay upon the land and I, like so many other Montanans, drank my fill of the rich and quiet beauty in which we are so lucky to live. Peace--such a simple word to say, and such a noble goal for society. Yet at this time when peace, tolerance, and generosity should be abundant, we are a society torn and fearful, and wondering when, if, and what kind of peace we will ever experience again.

Last week's big news, of course, was the capture of Saddam Hussein. "We got him," shouted the headlines, as intentionally humiliating pictures of Iraq's bedraggled former leader were broadcast around the globe.

This week's big news is raising the terror threat level from Code Yellow to Code Orange. In case you haven't gotten the color codes by which we are expected to live our lives down pat yet, in plain old English that means we went from "elevated" threat levels to "high."



Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge says Americans should "go about our business." But meanwhile, he is also telling us that the threats to our nation from terrorist attacks are higher than at any time since 9/11. The "intelligence chatter," according to our shadowy analysts, also suggests we may be subjected to "non-conventional" attacks involving chemical or biological agents. Oh, and by the way, Happy Holidays.

Time magazine, getting in the holiday spirit, slaps three soldiers, in full camo and armed to the teeth, on its cover, proclaiming them Time's "person of the year." The incongruity between the Season of Peace and those who carry out the grim business of war is not lost in translation.

So here we are, having outlasted and bankrupted the former "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union, standing alone as the world's sole remaining superpower. Yet we are spending more on so-called "defense" than any nation on earth...by exponential magnitudes. Our aircraft carriers roam the high seas, our satellites spy from the heavens, and our submarines lurk silent and undetectable off the shores of friends and foes alike. We still have thousands of nuclear warheads ready to unleash hellfire and total destruction at a moment's notice. And our soldiers are scattered across the globe on every continent, in or around every country, securing, if not the peace, then at least their place on the cover of Time magazine.

Which brings us, of course, to the core question here: What kind of world and what kind of "peace" are we creating? As in Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," we are at the juncture where "two roads diverge in a yellow wood." We, like Frost, are confronted with the choice of paths, knowing we "could not travel both and be one traveler."

Our current path is well traveled. Like so many nations and empires before us, we are searching for peace and security through the colonial approach of force of arms. Using all the might at our disposal--and indeed, our weapons have the combined might to destroy the globe--we seek the way of the sword, intimidating those who would challenge us with utter and total destruction.

Twice in rapid succession, President Bush has thrown our country into unprecedented pre-emptive wars on other nations, while threatening many more. Bush's so-called "war on terrorism" is global in nature we are told, wildly expensive as we're finding out, and, if you believe those who crafted and launched it, potentially endless. We are also told that such efforts are absolutely necessary to "secure the peace."

The evidence, however, does not seem to support the theory. The Code Orange warnings reflect an increased, not decreased, level of threat. Even as our carols laud "Peace on Earth, good will toward men," we are a fearful, vengeful nation, bristling with guns pointed outward at "the enemy," whomsoever it may be.

There is, of course, another way. Just as in Frost's poem, there is indeed a path "less traveled" that might deliver us to a future of real peace--not the peace enforced by threat of arms, conquest, and control, but the peace born of respect and admiration, tolerance and humility, understanding and empathy for all our fellow travelers on the globe as we whirl through time and space.

Many will dismiss such thoughts as the outmoded thinking of sentimentalists longing for a simpler world. "Times have changed," they will say, positing that if we don't "get the terrorists where they live," they will soon be coming to get us where we live. But that is far from new thinking; it is the primitive logic of the very old, very worn path that leads us where? Well, so far it is leading us to a loss of our basic freedoms, to being spied on by our own government, to massive deficits loaded on future generations, to an unconscionable loss of life, to the horrific maiming of thousands more, and to a Code Orange Christmas.

We've heard it all before: pound your "swords into plowshares," "love thy enemy," "thou shalt not kill," and "the meek shall inherit the earth." Indeed, we are celebrating the birth of Jesus, a man who expounded all those sentimentalist theories and who wound up nailed to a cross for his efforts. Yet, 2000 years later, he is still called the Prince of Peace.

We are lucky here in Montana. On any given day, most of us can walk to a quiet pine forest, stand on a windblown mountaintop, or lose ourselves in a vast prairie stretching from horizon to horizon. And we can find, for a moment at least, the deep and total peace of a nature that has no clue what Code Orange means.

Peace is still possible. But to get there, we have to take the path less traveled.

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Declassified documents show Rumsfeld backed Saddam even after chemical attacks
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington, The Independent
Fresh controversy about Donald Rumsfeld's personal dealings with Saddam Hussein was provoked yesterday by new documents that reveal he went to Iraq to show America's support for the regime despite its use of chemical weapons.

The formerly secret documents reveal the Defence Secretary travelled to Baghdad 20 years ago to assure Iraq that America's condemnation of its use of chemical weapons was made "strictly" in principle.

The criticism in no way changed Washington's wish to support Iraq in its war against Iran and "to improve bi-lateral relations ... at a pace of Iraq's choosing".

Earlier this year, Mr Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration regularly cited Saddam's willingness to use chemical weapons against his own people as evidence of the threat presented to the rest of the world.

Senior officials presented the attacks against the Kurds - particularly the notorious attack in Halabja in 1988 - as a justification for the invasion and the ousting of Saddam.



But the newly declassified documents reveal that 20 years ago America's position was different and that the administration of President Ronald Reagan was concerned about maintaining good relations with Iraq despite evidence of Saddam's "almost daily" use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Kurdish rebels.

In March 1984, under international pressure, America condemned Iraq's use of such chemical weapons. But realising that Baghdad had been upset, Secretary of State George Schultz asked Mr Rumsfeld to travel to Iraq as a special envoy to meet Saddam's Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, and smooth matters over.

In a briefing memo to Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Shultz wrote that he had met Iraqi officials in Washington to stress that America's interests remained "in (1) preventing an Iranian victory and (2) continuing to improve bilateral relations with Iraq".

The memo adds: "This message bears reinforcing during your discussions."

Exactly what Mr Rumsfeld, who at the time did not hold government office, told Mr Aziz on 26 March 1984, remains unclear and minutes from the meeting remain classified. No one from Mr Rumsfeld's office was available to comment yesterday.

It was not Mr Rumsfeld's first visit to Iraq. Four months earlier, in December 1983, he had visited Saddam and was photographed shaking hands with the dictator. When news of this visit was revealed last year, Mr Rumsfeld claimed he had "cautioned" Saddam to stop using chemical weapons.

When documents about the meeting disclosed he had said no such thing, a spokesman for Mr Rumsfeld said he had raised the issue with Mr Aziz.

America's relationship with Iraq at a time when Saddam was using chemical weapons is well-documented but rarely reported.

During the war with Iran, America provided combat assistance to Iraq that included intelligence on Iranian deployments and bomb-damage assessments. In 1987-88 American warships destroyed Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf and broke the blockade of Iraqi shipping lanes.

Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that obtained the documents, told The New York Times: "Saddam had chemical weapons in the 1980s and it didn't make any difference to US policy. The embrace of Saddam and what it emboldened him to do should caution us as Americans that we have to look closely at all our murky alliances."

Last night, Danny Muller, a spokesman for the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, said the documents revealed America's "blatant hypocrisy". He added: "This is not an isolated event. Continuing administrations have said 'we will do business'. I am surprised that Donald Rumsfeld does not resign right now."

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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US, Spain caught in Libya missile mixup
By Tito Drago

MADRID - The US government needs to explain why the missile shipment on a vessel intercepted a year ago on the high seas by the Spanish navy ended up in Libya, a spokesman from Spain's Defense Ministry said this week.

The official was referring to declarations made by sources from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Madrid daily El Mundo that claim 15 complete Scud missiles, a set of conventional warheads and 85 containers of chemical products - some 20 holding nitric acid - were ultimately delivered to Libya under a Washington decision.

The episode began on December 5, 2002, when US intelligence services informed Madrid about the route of a freighter named So San, which they suspected of trafficking weapons and which was, at the time, crossing a zone under Spain's authority in the Indian Ocean. Four days later, a Spanish frigate and warship intercepted the So San after ordering the captain to halt and firing warning shots. The vessel was found to be sailing under the Cambodian flag.

The weapons and chemicals came from North Korea and did not appear on the ship's manifest, which showed only that the merchant vessel was carrying bags of cement. After intercepting the freighter, Spain then handed the ship over to the US Navy. Immediate official explanations out of Washington and Madrid said the missiles might have been headed for the al-Qaeda network, which the US government holds responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. However, just hours later, the US administration took Spain by surprise by turning the So San over to Yemen, explaining that the cargo was actually a legal shipment of weapons purchased from North Korea by the Yemini government.

The handover was preceded by a telephone conversation between US Vice President Dick Cheney and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. When that conversation was made public, the White House justified the move by calling Yemen a friendly nation. So what initially came off as a brilliant Spanish military operation to prevent illegal trade in weapons of mass destruction was reduced to a suspected manipulation directed from Washington, with Madrid in the role of receiving and carrying out orders that were not very clear in their purpose.

The NATO sources cited in El Mundo said that at the time the shipment was intercepted, the United States was secretly negotiating the possibility that Libya would accept Saddam Hussein, then still president of Iraq, in exile. And Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who played the role of go-between during the Gulf War in 1991 by assisting in Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, had hopes of gaining access to the weapons.

"Gaddafi wanted the missiles and Yemen acted as intermediary. In the context of gestures with Libya, it was decided to look the other way, given that there was no international regulation that impeded it," said the newspaper, citing sources from the Pentagon.

Today, as it was a year ago, Madrid's reaction of disappointment regarding the United States' handling of the shipment was immediate, but not very explicit, because Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar continues to be a staunch, unconditional supporter of the policies of his US counterpart, President George W Bush.

As a result, the opposition United Left (IU) has announced that it will petition Defense Minister Federico Trillo to inform parliament about the country's participation, "past and present", in relation to the case of the weapons shipment. Madrid's handling of the issue "is one more demonstration of [Aznar's] erratic foreign policy and his troubling submission and total dependence on the policy marked by the US," IU general coordinator Gaspar Llamazares said. "The IU is highly concerned that Spain is extending political and commercial ties to a country that does not provide any democratic guarantees," such as Libya, he added.

Neither the Spanish government nor the opposition and civil-society organizations categorize the Gaddafi regime as terrorist and they agree on the need to facilitate his integration into the international community. In fact, Spain has not drawn up a list of countries it considers terrorist, noted a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, but the United States has, and Libya, which figures on that list, is subject to a commercial and military embargo. No US company is authorized to sell weapons to Libya directly or indirectly, nor to facilitate the delivery of arms.

When the United Nations Security Council lifted sanctions against Libya, then-US ambassador James Cunningham abstained from the vote, stating that Washington did not want to give the idea that it believed Libya had done an about-face, because, said the ambassador, the country continued to try to obtain weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. But things appear to have changed radically, given that the weapons shipment intercepted by Spain, and which ended up in Libya, includes such arms.

(Inter Press Service)

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Guardian | War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal: "War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal

Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: 'I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.'

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that 'international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone', and this would have been morally unacceptable.

French intransigence, he added, meant there had been 'no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein'.

Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

'They're just not interested in international law, are they?' said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. 'It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it.'

Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.

Certainly the British government, he said, 'has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq'.

The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined 'a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law'.

Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's 'sovereign authority to use force' to defeat the threat from Baghdad.

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.

Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of 'serious consequences' if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.

Other council members disagreed, but American and British lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.

'I think Perle's statement has the virtue of honesty,' said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the war, arguing that it was illegal.

'And, interestingly, I suspect a majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration said that all along.'

The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of the advisory board.

Meanwhile, there was a hint that the US was trying to find a way to release the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay.

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said Mr Bush was 'very sensitive' to British sentiment. 'We also expect to be resolving this in the near future,' he told the BBC."

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Quote of the Day

"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

George H.W. Bush (from his memoirs, "A World Transformed," written in 1998)

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Osama University?
Neoconservative critics have long charged Middle Eastern studies departments with anti-American bias. Now they've enlisted Congress in their crusade.

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By Michelle Goldberg

Nov. 6, 2003 | On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding. Its approval followed hearings this summer in which members of Congress listened to testimony about the pernicious influence of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies departments, described as enclaves of debased anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank, testified, "Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy." Evidently, the House agreed and decided to intervene.

Emboldened by its dominance of Washington, the right is trying to enlist government on its side in the campus culture wars. "Since they are the mainstream in Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of Congress, they figure, 'Let's translate that political capital to education,'" says Rashid Khalidi, who was recently appointed to the Edward Said Chair of Arab studies at Columbia University.

It's not surprising that they started with Middle Eastern studies. There's a particular enmity between hard-line supporters of Israel -- who, with the extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, now dominate the American right -- and academics who specialize in studying the Arab and Muslim world. That enmity burst into open conflict after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual fifth column. Soon after the World Trade Center fell, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., published a report called "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," which listed examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the professoriate and called universities the "weak link" in the war on terror.

At the same time, Martin Kramer, editor of the right-wing Middle East Quarterly, published a book called "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America," in which he argues that academia, in thrall to romantic third-worldism, has turned a blind eye to the region's dangerous pathologies. Last year Daniel Pipes, a colleague of Kramer's who has since been appointed by President Bush to sit on the U.S. Institute of Peace, launched Campus Watch, a Web site devoted to monitoring Middle Eastern studies departments for signs of anti-American bias. He published dossiers cataloguing the political sins of some of the most respected professors in the field, and invited students to submit reports on their instructors.

Until recently, though, this fight has been rhetorical, confined to Web sites, books, magazines and lectures. Now, with HR 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, the House has taken sides. If it becomes law, it will create a board to monitor how federally funded international-studies centers impact national security. The board will evaluate whether supporters of American foreign policy are adequately represented in university programs. Conservatives, says Kramer, "need to be able to compete on a level playing field with others."

Inherent in the act is the assumption that if most established experts believe American Middle East policy is bad, the flaw lies with the experts, not the policy. "There's the threat that centers will be punished for not toeing the official line out of Washington, which is an unprecedented degree of federal intrusion into a university-based area studies program," says Zachary Lockman, a New York University history professor and director of the school's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

The International Studies in Higher Education Act would not grant the government the power to exclude voices from Middle Eastern studies departments, but it would give the government a role in defining which views need to be included in the academic mainstream. The seven-member board it creates would make recommendations to Congress about how the centers "might better reflect the national needs related to the homeland security," and make sure that programs "reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views on world regions, foreign languages, and international affairs." Two members of the board would represent national security agencies, while others would be appointed by Congress and the administration.

The bill also mandates that centers allow government recruiters full access to students in the centers. In the past, professors have resisted cooperating with national security agencies, fearing that if the line between independent research and government intelligence was blurred, they and their students might be targeted as American agents while studying abroad.

And because the bill mandates that centers train students for government service, Kramer hopes students who plan to pursue fields useful to national defense will be given special consideration when fellowships are awarded. Right now, he says, "If you're interested in gender in eighth century Cairo, you're just as likely to receive a grant as if you're interested in the discourse of Osama bin Laden. Studying gender in eighth century Cairo is perfectly valid, but I'm not sure it's a taxpayer priority."

Of course, right now all this is speculative -- the bill remains just a bill. "This is a bill that's passed the House," says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, the country's foremost higher education lobby. "There are several other steps in the process. Obviously a lot of people remain very concerned about the bill. People will continue to try and perfect it."

The American Council on Education decided to support the bill, which also reauthorizes funding for area studies, after language was added to prohibit the board from reviewing syllabi or interfering with curricula. After all, says Hartle, there's nothing inherently objectionable about having a panel oversee federal grant-making programs. "Stanley Kurtz is someone who is looking for a conspiracy behind every tree, but that doesn't mean a properly constructed advisory committee has to be a threat," he says.

But many Middle Eastern studies professors fear that the committee will consist of the very neoconservatives who pushed for its creation. After all, the Bush administration routinely raids right-wing, pro-Ariel Sharon think tanks to fill foreign policy positions. (In the latest example, David Wurmser, a key neoconservative scholar known for his close ties to the Israeli right, was appointed six weeks ago as a Middle East advisor to Dick Cheney's national security team headed by Lewis "Scooter" Libby.) Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan, worries that the International Studies Act would give the field's most vituperative critics a perch from which to judge their doctrinal opponents.

"One of the subtexts is they don't like criticism of Ariel Sharon and want to shut it down," says Cole, who formerly directed the school's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, which could have its funding threatened under the act. "I could imagine the board making it a criterion that the politics of a faculty are not balanced, so the university must balance things out by hiring pro-Likud scholars, or else funding could be withdrawn."

The funding that's at stake supports area study centers -- interdisciplinary programs devoted to researching specific regions. It was appropriated under Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. Although the International Studies Act would affect centers concentrating on all parts of the globe, almost all of the debate about it, both inside and outside of Congress, has been about Middle Eastern studies.

There are 17 Middle Eastern studies centers in America, many of them at the nation's best schools, including Harvard, Columbia, New York University and the University of Chicago. They receive Title VI grants to fund graduate student fellowships and to do community outreach and education -- activities like training high school teachers about Middle Eastern issues and providing insight on the region to the media. No Title VI money is used for professor salaries.

The centers form the core of American higher education about the rest of the world. According to Kramer, "70 percent of Ph.D.'s in international studies did their work at these national resource centers, and government money has been vital to the production of Ph.D.'s in this field."

But government money is being misspent, conservative critics say, because, having imbibed Said's sinister post-colonial ideology, Middle Eastern studies departments have become apologists for the Arab world and have neglected the study of inconvenient subjects like the rise of fundamentalist Islam and terrorism. "Take a look at the program of the Middle Eastern Studies Association's annual conference," says Kramer. "There are hundreds of papers there, and none of them are on terrorism. That's because from an ideological point of view, a lot of academics look at the study of terrorism as an overemphasis of an aspect of reality that they would just as soon go away."

Many Middle East studies scholars, says Kramer, entered the field because "they were enamored of the subject, but that subject has an underside. A lot of academics who entered the field in certain generations did so with a third-worldist perspective. They're sympathetic to revolution and believed the Middle East was on the brink of it. They became enthusiasts of various resistance movements, nationalist movements, even at one point Islamist movements."

Other neocons decry the fact that the field has been overtaken by non-Westerners. David Horowitz, a right-wing pundit who has spent much of his career documenting and fighting what he claims is rampant leftist bias in academia, says that in 1979, 3 percent of Middle Eastern scholars were non-Western. "As a result of leftist control of hiring, now 50 percent come from Middle Eastern countries," he says. One might not think it was surprising that a significant percentage of scholars working in a field with a specific regional, cultural and religious emphasis would be from that region, but Horowitz apparently regards many Middle Eastern scholars as mere mouthpieces for their countries' terrorist ideologies. "These are fascist countries!" says Horowitz. "They're Islamofascist countries, and they support terror."

To restore balance to this degraded field, conservatives propose a kind of ideological affirmative action. They want to see a revolution in the ethos of contemporary universities, in which scholars will devote themselves to pulling their weight in the war on terror. That means schools must be compelled to seek out faculty devoted to furthering American interests. If this sounds oddly like a flag-waving version of the extreme academic left's strident calls for "engagement," that doesn't trouble the conservatives.

As Kramer wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand," "Middle Eastern studies must regain their relevance, or risk becoming 'Exhibit A' in any future case against public support for area studies. They can best achieve this by rediscovering and articulating that which is uniquely American in the American approach to the Middle East. The idea that the United States plays an essentially beneficent role in the world is at the very core of this approach."

To those who object, Kramer writes on his blog, Sandstorm, "Get off the federal dole. Float undisturbed in your post-orientalist bubble while more practical people use the resources to build credible alternatives."

But Cole says the neocon vision of Middle Eastern studies as post-orientalist bubble is a deranged fantasy. (The expression "orientalist" refers to Edward Said's seminal work, "Orientalism," which argued that racist blinders led the West to see people of color as "exotic" Others.) "These arguments that Kurtz, Kramer and others make are only plausible if you don't actually refer to reality," he says. As an example, he reels off the backgrounds of political scientists at centers receiving Title VI grants. "The political scientist at the UCLA Middle Eastern center is Leonard Binder, one of the greats of the field, who fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war. At the University of Seattle, the political scientists of the Middle East are Ellis Goldberg, who does rational choice and political economy, and Joel Migdal," a Harvard Ph.D. whose latest book is "Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society."

"At the University of Michigan," Cole continues, "our political scientist is Mark Tessler, who does survey and opinion research. He has a Ph.D. from Hebrew University. There's Gary Sick at Columbia, who served on Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. We could go on."

The real radicals, many professors say, are Kurtz and company -- and they're lightweight radicals at that. Kurtz, Pipes and Kramer all have Ph.D.'s, but have not established themselves in American academia, finding a home in the world of partisan think tanks instead. Khalidi believes they're trying to punish the academic mainstream for rejecting them.

"It's amusing that people who are by and large failed academics, people who just didn't make it through the standard approach, should argue that it's because of radical bias," says Khalidi. "Theirs are the sourest of sour grapes."

If they wanted to, Khalidi argues, conservatives could do what others do who want more attention paid to a neglected field. "They could raise money for a chair in terrorist studies," he says. "The problem is they want respectability. They want to displace virtually everybody who teaches the Middle East in this country from the center and say the center is between us and them. They want the academic respectability that comes with having federal funding. They want to move from the extreme fringe."

In the end, the debate about what constitutes the mainstream, about the role of ideology in evaluating scholarship, can go on ad infinitum, with evidence on both sides. For all their hysterical nationalism, Kramer and his cohorts obviously aren't wrong that Middle East departments, and the humanities in general, tend to be liberal, or that shrill radicalism abounds on college campuses. Horowitz is just one of a group of conservatives who have made their names documenting leftist excess at American universities, and they rarely have to look far for egregious examples. In one infamous case last year, a U.C. Berkeley course on "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" warned, "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." The graduate student instructor was forced to remove the notice after a national outcry.

"Clearly, Martin Kramer and his colleagues see themselves as an embattled minority who have been unfairly excluded from academia by what they see as the liberals and leftists who run Middle Eastern studies in the United States, so they want the federal government to come in and somehow make sure people like them get hired or their views get more attention," says Lockman.

Yet the question, finally, isn't whether conservatives really are an embattled minority in the university. It's whether the federal government should supersede experts in deciding which scholarly views deserve to be promoted, and which can be overlooked.

Ironically, given the epic scope of the debate, the actual amount of federal funding at stake is quite small by the standards of large universities. Most centers only receive a few hundred thousand dollars annually from the government. But experts say the programs are often dependent on it. Khalidi presided over five such programs when he was director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago prior to moving to Columbia. Title VI grants, he says, are "peanuts in university and federal terms, but in terms of these fields, they're really important." Around 30 percent of his graduate students learned foreign languages on area study grants, he says.

Because federal funding is so crucial to these centers' survival, Khalidi says, the threat that HR 3077 poses to Middle Eastern studies in America is "deadly serious." The bill, he says, would do one of two things. Either it would "impose the teaching of one twisted version of Middle East reality, what I call terrorology, impose it at the taxpayers' expense as one central element in the way the subject is taught. Or, by subjecting self-respecting universities to conditions they will not under any circumstances accept, it would curtail the teaching of the Middle East."

Cole says scholars will have a hard time convincing their bosses to give up funding. "It may be that some centers would forgo it if the interference looks like it's too heavy-handed," he says. "But it's really hard to go to a dean and ask to throw away $200,000 a year if the criteria that has to be met could be met in some way that isn't completely odious to the university. There would be pressure to meet it."

Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Select Education and author of the bill, insists that's not what lawmakers intend. The advisory committee, he says, will be there "to help schools to learn from each other, to gather information and help schools learn what other schools are doing so they can really improve their own international programs."

Hoekstra agrees with some of Kurtz's criticism of Middle Eastern studies, but says that has nothing to do with his legislation. "I do think that there may be some validity in some of his comments," he says. "I don't believe these studies should be used to promote an ideological point of view. I'm about getting students educated in international affairs, not having students get into a classroom and have them be indoctrinated into a political philosophy. But did we put anything into the bill that puts in some kind of screening process? For those who believe it's there, ask them to point out where it is."

Other congressmen, though, have been less cagey about the bill's likely effect. Welcoming its passage, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., said, "I am encouraged that the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely, the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias that pervades Title VI-funded Middle East studies programs in particular ... surely it is troubling when evidence suggests that many of the Middle East regional studies grantees are committed to a narrow point of view at odds with our national interest, a point of view that questions the validity of advancing American ideals of democracy and the rule of law around the world, and in the Middle East in particular."

The International Studies in Higher Education Act is a singular victory for Martin Kramer, who proposed similar legislation in "Ivory Towers on Sand." An American-born Israeli citizen with a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies from Princeton, he served as the director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. Returning to the States, he joined the same network of conservative think tanks that nurtured defense intellectuals like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. The journal he edits, Middle East Quarterly, is published by the Middle East Forum, whose director is Daniel Pipes, the man behind Campus Watch. His book was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a staunchly pro-Israel think tank whose board of advisors includes Perle and former CIA Director James Woolsey. Wolfowitz resigned from the board when he joined the administration.

Kramer's entire book can be read as an argument for legislation like the International Studies Act. Most of "Ivory Towers on Sand" is a discussion of what Kramer sees as the ideological corruption within Middle Eastern studies, but he also details the minutia of government funding, outlining Title VI's history in order to examine how it can be reformed.

As Kramer reports, Title VI was, from its inception in 1958, "administered as a no-strings-attached benefit." Back then, though, the leaders of the field were people "of a patriotic disposition, who could be counted upon to help out," Kramer writes. This, he makes clear, is no longer the case. Thus the time has come to attach strings.

"It is important for Congress to take a deeper interest in Title VI, and Middle Eastern studies are as good a place as any to begin asking questions," he wrote in "Ivory Towers on Sand." "A relevant congressional subcommittee might hold a hearing on the contribution of Middle Eastern studies to American public policy."

In June, the Congressional Subcommittee on Select Education did just that, convening hearings on "International Programs in Higher Education and Questions of Bias." At the end of his opening statement, Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., said, "I am interested in opening the discussion and debate to learn more about the merits of and concern for federal support given to some of the international education programs that have been questioned in regard to their teachings, which have been associated with efforts to potentially undermine American foreign policy."

Kurtz, testifying before the subcommittee, nodded to Kramer, calling his book "the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the extremist bias against American foreign policy that pervades contemporary Middle East studies." Much of the blame for this bias, he said, is a result of the malign influence of Edward Said and post-colonial theory, which he called the "ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies."

He proceeded to list some of Said's more inflammatory statements, including his 1999 call for Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Wesley Clark to be tried for war crimes along with Slobodan Milosevic. Said, Kurtz continued, "has even treated the very idea of American democracy as a farce. He has belittled the reverence in which Americans hold the Constitution, which Said dismisses with the comment that it was written by 'wealthy, white, slaveholding Anglophilic men.'"

There might have been an eerie déjà vu in seeing a congressional committee examine the work of a renowned scholar for treasonous intent, but Kurtz told the panel he was not proposing to blacklist Said. "My concern is that Title VI-funded centers too seldom balance readings from Edward Said and his like-minded colleagues with readings from authors who support American foreign policy," he said. This was more generous than Kurtz's comrades have been toward their enemies' work. Last year, Pipes told Salon, "I want Noam Chomsky to be taught at universities about as much as I want Hitler's writing or Stalin's writing. These are wild and extremist ideas that I believe have no place in a university."

At the end of his testimony, Kurtz made several policy recommendations, including the creation of a board to manage Title VI. Asked about the role of the board in an e-mail interview, Kurtz wrote, "The board should look to encourage intellectual diversity, and it should also encourage programs that successfully bring students into positions of responsibility in the areas of international affairs, international business, foreign language expertise, and national security."

According to Kurtz, the legislation is in the spirit of the best liberal tradition. "I hope that HR 3077 will encourage vigorous debate within the academy on the state of the world generally, and on American foreign policy in particular," he writes. "I'd like to see the sort of debate that now goes on between the academy and its outside critics take place within the academy itself. That doesn't mean excluding critics of American foreign policy from the academy. It means bringing supporters back in."

For professors of Middle Eastern studies, though, it's outrageous, and dangerous, that the government is meddling with academic freedom. And it's especially galling that those who are calling for government intervention are the very neocons whose fear-mongering claims about Iraq have been shown to be false. "The thing that burns me, these are the guys who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program and would have a nuke within three years," says Cole. "And they're coming back and telling us that our scholarship is shoddy and we need to be overseen by them?"

To Khalidi, the neoconservative attack on Middle Eastern studies recalls the assault launched earlier this year on American intelligence agencies that failed to confirm right-wing assumptions about Iraq. Once again, conservatives are questioning the competency of those who don't agree with them about the Middle East, insisting their views would triumph if only they weren't suppressed by a mandarin establishment in need of immediate reform. And just as Pentagon hawks set up their own intelligence office when the CIA didn't tell them what they wanted to hear about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, now the neocons are trying to do the same thing in academia.

"Neoconservatives want to substitute zealotry and true belief for real expertise," Khalidi says. "They're not just after us in the Middle East field. They're not just after academics. You see this inside the military, inside the intelligence community. You see this in the way the State Department has been treated. Anybody who knows anything about anything is suspect. Unless you have the right views you are not allowed to speak, and if you do, you do so at your peril."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in New York.

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Big Bucks in Iraq
by TIM SHORROCK

[The Nation, from the November 10, 2003 issue]

In early October, Iraq's US-appointed Governing Council awarded the country's first mobile phone licenses to three companies from the Middle East. The decision was widely interpreted as a signal that Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was expanding its contracting base beyond US corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton to give local companies a break. In particular, analysts pointed out that the networks will be using a technology known as GSM, used widely in Europe and the Middle East, rather than the rival CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm of San Diego for North America and Asia. Qualcomm, joined by Lucent Technologies and South Korea's Samsung, even complained to the Financial Times that the bidding process "was designed to exclude CDMA from the beginning."

But any concerns about a US shutout from Iraq's telecom market were grossly exaggerated. The biggest winner in Iraq's largest foreign investment deal since the US invasion turned out to be Motorola, the US electronics giant. Motorola has had a long relationship with US intelligence and was saved from financial disaster three years ago when the Pentagon, in a deal brokered by one of Bremer's top advisers, leased Motorola's Iridium global satellite network; that network later became the backbone of the US military's communications system in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Motorola has close financial ties with Egypt's Orascom Telecom, which won the rights to serve Baghdad and central Iraq, and Mobile Telecommunications Company of Kuwait, which will build the mobile network for southern Iraq. Motorola, with the French vendor Alcatel, has agreed to invest up to $100 million in both companies and could gain up to $200 million in sales by delivering GSM equipment over the two years of the contract, said Lucy Norton, a telecom analyst with the World Markets Research Center. Siemens of Germany could win major supply contracts as well. "Motorola has positioned itself as the primary infrastructure provider for two of Iraq's three mobile market players," said Norton, in an e-mail interview from London. Looking beyond the next two years, Motorola could also be in the "pole position, ahead of the other global vendors, as the key infrastructure provider for one of the fastest-growing markets in the Middle East."

The story illustrates how the financial and trade policies the Bush Administration is pursuing in Iraq are not only benefiting well-connected US corporations but are also slowly integrating Iraq into the global economy and transforming its largely state-run economy into a captive market for foreign multinationals. And it underscores Iraq's economic importance to countries like France and Germany, which opposed the war but voted October 16 to extend US control over Iraq in exchange for vague promises that power will quickly be transferred to the Iraqi people.

The blueprint for Iraq's economic future was unveiled by Iraq's US-appointed finance minister, Kamel al-Gailani, on September 21. The new laws, drafted by the CPA, allow foreign investors to own 100 percent of any Iraqi asset except oil and real estate and to remit profits and royalties when they choose. They also reduce import tariffs to 5 percent and allow foreign banks to take over the country's banking system. Iraq is now "one of the most open countries in the world," proclaimed Gailani. But his reforms were denounced by Iraq's leading business association, which warned that the new laws would "destroy the role of the Iraqi industrialist."

Many observers, including even US businessmen and Iraqis who favored "regime change" in Iraq, agree. They say the shock therapy being applied in Iraq will concentrate wealth in the hands of large US and Iraqi corporations, particularly the family-owned businesses that have won the majority of subcontracts from Bechtel and Halliburton. "I like the analogy of Wal-Mart coming into a town," says Timothy Mills, an attorney in the Washington law firm Patton Boggs who represents several US and foreign corporations that have contracted with the US government and are doing business in Iraq. "The downtown dies, Wal-Mart grows and the owners of local businesses are displaced. The effect of Iraq's new foreign investment law for the medium and small-sized Iraqi business could be very detrimental and could result in even more concentration of capital in Iraq." With the US Export-Import Bank providing $500 million to insure US investors, he added, "If I was an Iraqi and I was political, I'd say this was a ploy to favor US companies and let them steal the riches of Iraq." In a similar vein, Fareed Yasseen, an adviser to Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Governing Council, says that the CPA has made its economic plans "completely out of the Iraqi context." He worries that the CPA will sell state-owned assets to cronies of the previous regime and create a "new class of oligarchs" in Iraq. "They haven't taken into account Iraq's reality at all," he says.

Not so, says a US official working with CPA. The 100 percent ownership rules are needed to attract foreign firms to a country where security and basic services are in question. "If you can't have majority ownership, you won't invest," he says. "But are US firms going to get a distinct advantage? No question about it."

The CPA's mishmash of economic ideas is not simply a result of poor planning, as many in Congress have charged. Most of Bremer's advisers are either veterans of Washington's revolving door or financiers steeped in the details of corporate buyouts. Dave Oliver, one of Bremer's senior financial advisers, recently took a leave from his consulting business to draft the budget for the Governing Council. Oliver, who was advising Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Booz Allen before taking his position, remains on the board of Stratos Global, which does marketing for Iridium, now an independent company. In 2000 Oliver, then President Clinton's Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Technology, brokered the $250 million deal for the Pentagon to lease Iridium's global satellites, in which Motorola had invested more than $5 billion. (As a Stratos director, "I stayed away from Iridium because I was so close to it," Oliver says.)

Another key figure on Bremer's economic team is Thomas Foley, an investor and Bush campaign donor who specializes in mergers and acquisitions, a business he learned as head of Citicorp's leveraged buyout division and, later, founder of the NTC Group, which acquired a string of US textile and manufacturing companies in the 1980s. As director of the Office of Private Sector Development, he will manage the privatization of Iraq's 200 state-owned enterprises.

In September, someone in Foley's office had the bright idea to invite fourteen Eastern European finance officials to Baghdad to give advice about privatization. They included the notorious Yegor Gaidar, who presided over the Russian mass privatizations of the early 1990s. Gaidar's policies "led directly to the ruination of the Russian middle class, the collapse of industry, the loss of savings and widespread poverty," says Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies and history at New York University. Not surprisingly, the Iraqis weren't impressed. Mowafaq Mahmood, managing director of the Bank of Baghdad, rejected every suggestion about privatization. "I must say I haven't learned any lesson from your experience," he said, signaling that Iraqis may want to preserve parts of their socialist economy.

Bremer has already shown that he can change course when decisions go bad. After thousands protested his decision to demobilize the Iraqi military without paying them, for example, he slowed the pace of privatization and agreed to keep many employees on the payrolls of state-owned enterprises until they could be sold off to foreign buyers. That flexibility goes only so far, however; Bremer will allow dissent from the Governing Council, a US official says, "as long as it doesn't violate one of the red lines we told them about." That could give Iraqis little room to maneuver when confronted with unilateral decisions coming from Washington.

When ideology drives policy, as it does in Iraq, pragmatism is swept aside and generals and bureaucrats hop to the beat of the Commander in Chief. If Bush truly wants to transform Iraq's economy into what his aides describe as a beacon of free enterprise for the Middle East, his good soldiers will go along. Unfortunately, the outcome is likely to be more bloodshed, more chaos and more deals for American companies like Motorola.

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Eyes Wide Shut
By MAUREEN DOWD, New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the thick of the war with Iraq, President Bush used to pop out of meetings to catch the Iraqi information minister slipcovering grim reality with willful, idiotic optimism.

"He's my man," Mr. Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, a k a "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob," who assured reporters, even as American tanks rumbled in, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and, "We are winning this war, and we will win the war. . . . This is for sure."

Now Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob.

Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Bush made the bizarre argument that the worse things get in Iraq, the better news it is. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," he said.

In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

The war began with Bush illogic: false intelligence (from Niger to nuclear) used to bolster a false casus belli (imminent threat to our security) based on a quartet of false premises (that we could easily finish off Saddam and the Baathists, scare the terrorists and democratize Iraq without leeching our economy).

Now Bush illogic continues: The more Americans, Iraqis and aid workers who get killed and wounded, the more it is a sign of American progress. The more dangerous Iraq is, the safer the world is. The more troops we seem to need in Iraq, the less we need to send more troops.

The harder it is to find Saddam, Osama and W.M.D., the less they mattered anyhow. The more coordinated, intense and sophisticated the attacks on our soldiers grow, the more "desperate" the enemy is.

In a briefing piped into the Pentagon on Monday from Tikrit, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno called the insurgents "desperate" eight times. But it is Bush officials who seem desperate when they curtain off reality. They don't even understand the political utility of truth.

After admitting recently that Saddam had no connection to 9/11, the president pounded his finger on his lectern on Tuesday, while vowing to stay in Iraq, and said, "We must never forget the lessons of Sept. 11."

Mr. Bush looked buck-passy when he denied that the White House, which throws up PowerPoint slogans behind his head on TV, was behind the "Mission Accomplished" banner. And Donald Rumsfeld looked duplicitous when he acknowledged in a private memo, after brusquely upbeat public briefings, that America was in for a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No juxtaposition is too absurd to stop Bush officials from insisting nothing is wrong. Car bombs and a blitz of air-to-ground missiles turned Iraq into a hideous tangle of ambulances, stretchers and dead bodies, just after Paul Wolfowitz arrived there to showcase successes.

But the fear of young American soldiers who don't speak the language or understand the culture, who don't know who's going to shoot at them, was captured in a front-page picture in yesterday's Times: two soldiers leaning down to search the pockets of one small Iraqi boy.

Mr. Bush, staring at the campaign hourglass, has ordered that the "Iraqification" of security be speeded up, so Iraqi cannon fodder can replace American sitting ducks. But Iraqification won't work any better than Vietnamization unless the Bush crowd stops spinning.

Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Bright Shining Lie," recalls Robert McNamara making Wolfowitz-like trips to Vietnam, spotlighting good news, yearning to pretend insecure areas were secure.

"McNamara was in a jeep in the Mekong Delta with an old Army colonel from Texas named Dan Porter," Mr. Sheehan told me. "Porter told him, `Mr. Secretary, we've got serious problems here that you're not getting. You ought to know what they are.' And McNamara replied: `I don't want to hear about your problems. I want to hear about your progress.' "

"If you want to be hoodwinked," Mr. Sheehan concludes, "it's easy."

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James Zogby: 'How Bush&Co manipulated my own poll results on Iraq'

By James Zogby, Arab News

WASHINGTON - Early in President Bush's recent public relations campaign to rebuild support for the US war effort in Iraq, Vice President Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press." Attempting to make the case that the US was winning in Iraq, Cheney made the following observations:

"There was a poll done, just random in the last week, first one I've seen carefully done; admittedly, it's a difficult area to poll in. Zogby International did it with American Enterprise magazine. But that's got very positive news in it in terms of the numbers it shows with respect to the attitudes to what Americans have done.

"One of the questions it asked is: 'If you could have any model for the kind of government you'd like to have' -- and they were given five choices -- 'which would it be?' The US wins hands down. If you want to ask them do they want an Islamic government established, by 2:1 margins they say no, including the Shiite population. If you ask how long they want Americans to stay, over 60 percent of the people polled said they want the US to stay for at least another year. So admittedly there are problems, especially in that area where Saddam Hussein was from, where people have benefited most from his regime and who've got the most to lose if we're successful in our enterprise, and continuing attacks from terror. But to suggest somehow that that's representative of the country at large or the Iraqi people are opposed to what we've done in Iraq or are actively and aggressively trying to undermine it, I just think that's not true."



In fact, Zogby International (ZI) in Iraq had conducted the poll, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) did publish their interpretation of the findings. But the AEI's "spin" and the vice president's use of their "spin" created a faulty impression of the poll's results and, therefore, of the attitudes of the Iraqi people.

For example, while Cheney noted that when asked what kind of government they would like, Iraqis chose "the US... hands down," in fact, the results of the poll are actually quite different. Twenty-three percent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 percent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 percent say Syria, 7 percent say Egypt and 37 percent say "none of the above." That's hardly "winning hands down."

When given the choice as to whether they "would like to see the American and British forces leave Iraq in six months, one year, or two years," 31.5 percent of Iraqis say these forces should leave in six months; 34 percent say a year, and only 25 percent say two or more years.

So while technically Cheney might say that "over 60 percent (actually it's 59 percent) ... want the US to stay at least another year," an equally correct observation would be that 65.5 percent want the US and Britain to leave in one year or less.

Other numbers found in the poll go further to dampen the vice president's and the AEI's rosy interpretations. For example, when asked if "democracy can work well in Iraq," 51 percent said "no; it is a Western way of doing things and will not work here."

And attitudes toward the US were not positive. When asked whether over the next five years, they felt that the "US would help or hurt Iraq," 50 percent said that the US would hurt Iraq, while only 35.5 percent felt the US would help the country. On the other hand, 61 percent of Iraqis felt that Saudi Arabia would help Iraq in the next five years, as opposed to only 7.5 percent, who felt Saudi Arabia would hurt their country. Some 50.5 percent felt that the United Nations would help Iraq, while 18.5 percent felt it would hurt. Iran's rating was very close to the US', with 53.5 percent of Iraqis saying Iran would hurt them in the next five years, while only 21.5 percent felt that Iran might help them.

It is disturbing that the AEI and the vice president could get it so wrong. Their misuse of the polling numbers to make the point that they wanted to make, resembles the way critics have noted that the administration used "intelligence data" to make their case to justify the war.

The danger, of course, is that painting a rosy picture that doesn't exist is a recipe for a failed policy. Wishing something to be can't make it so. At some point, reality intervenes. It's a hard lesson to learn, but it is dangerous to ignore its importance.

For the administration to continue to tell itself and the American people that "all is well," only means that needed changes in policy will not be made.

Consider some of the other poll findings:

* Over 55 percent give a negative rating to "how the US military is dealing with Iraqi civilians." Only 20 percent gave the US military a positive rating.

* By a margin of 57 percent to 38.5 percent, Iraqis indicate that they would support "Arab forces" providing security in their country.

* When asked how they would describe the attacks on the US military, 49 percent described them as "resistance operations." Only 29 percent saw them as attacks by "Baath loyalists."

* When asked whom they preferred to "provide security and restore order in their country," only 6.5 percent said the US. Twenty-seven percent said the US and the UN together, 14.5 percent preferred only the UN. And the largest group, 45 percent, said they would prefer the "Iraqi military" to do the job alone.

There are important lessons in all of this. Lessons policy makers ought to heed if they are to help Iraq move forward. What the Iraqi people appear to be telling us is that they have hope for the future, but they want the help of their neighbors more than that of the US.

That may not be what Washington wants to hear, but it ought to listen nevertheless. Because if policy makers continue to bend the data to meet their desired policy, then this hole they are digging will only get deeper.

Copyright Arab News (c) 2003

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1967 Israeli attack on USS Liberty covered up by LBJ, counsel says
Associated Press
Oct. 23, 2003 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty says then-President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ordered that the inquiry conclude it was an accident.

In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Capt. Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy's inquiry to "conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary." It killed 34 American servicemen. Boston was senior legal counsel to the Navy's original 1967 review.

The USS Liberty was an electronic intelligence-gathering ship that was cruising international waters off Egypt on June 8, 1967. Israeli planes and torpedo boats opened fire in what became known as the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War.

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Halliburton overcharges US taxpayers while selling oil to Iraqis
Iraqi official calls Halliburton oil prices too high

By Neela Banerjee, San Francisco Chronicle

The head of an Iraqi oil agency said Tuesday that his group has been trucking in gasoline and other badly needed fuels to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages in Iraq.

Separately, a report by the independent Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan public policy research arm of Congress, warned earlier this month that the Corps of Engineers may be paying too much to import fuel.

The revelations support allegations by Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and John Dingell of Michigan that Halliburton is overcharging American taxpayers and Iraqis, in particular.

The lawmakers sent a letter to the head of the Corps of Engineers on Tuesday asking the Corps to look into the price disparity between the Iraqi agency's imports and Halliburton's.

The letter also noted new information released by the Corps that most of the money to buy the fuel has come from a fund established by the United Nations meant to provide humanitarian aid to Iraq. The fund is under U.S. control.

"Although it initially appeared that Halliburton was gouging only American taxpayers, it now seems that the company is overcharging the humanitarian Oil for Food program and the Iraqi people as well," said the Democratic lawmakers in the letter to Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, head of the Corps of Engineers.

Halliburton, which is paid a fee of 2 percent of the cost of the fuels it delivers, has strongly denied the allegations, if not the pricing cited by the lawmakers. It contends that it buys fuel by soliciting competitive bids and that the high cost stems from the price of transporting and distributing fuel in a volatile country.

The Army Corps of Engineers and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led civil administration in Iraq, have so far stood by Halliburton.

But Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization, or SOMO, is now importing fuel to Iraq, from the same countries as Halliburton. An Oct. 16 fax from SOMO to the House Committee on Government Reform, where Waxman is the ranking Democrat, indicates that the Iraqis are importing gasoline at a far lower price than Halliburton.

In the fax, SOMO's general manager, Mohammed al-Jibouri, said that gasoline from Turkey costs $347 per metric ton delivered to Baghdad, or about 98 cents per gallon.

Halliburton said last week in reply to the lawmakers' allegations that it charges $1.59 per gallon for its gasoline imports, which includes a 2 percent profit margin. It did not dispute that SOMO is buying fuel for a much lower price, explaining instead that the firm's contracts with the Corps of Engineers made it harder to get a better price from suppliers.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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Is Syria Next?

[The Nation, from the November 3, 2003 issue]

Shortly after 9/11, the government received an extraordinary gift of hundreds of files on Al Qaeda, crucial data on the activities of radical Islamist cells throughout the Middle East and Europe and intelligence about future terrorist plans. These dossiers did not come from Israel or Saudi Arabia, whose kingdom appeared more concerned at the time with securing safe passage for members of the bin Laden family living in the United States, but--as Seymour Hersh revealed in the July 28 New Yorker--from Syria. One CIA analyst told Hersh, "the quality and quantity of information from Syria exceeded the agency's expectations." Yet, the analyst added, the Syrians "got little in return for it."

What they got instead was an unrelenting Washington-sponsored campaign of vilification. It began last year, when the "Axis of Evil" was expanded to include Syria, largely because Syria--a member of the 1991 coalition against Saddam Hussein--refused to support a pre-emptive war against Iraq. And it has culminated in the Syria Accountability Act, approved 33 to 2 by a House committee on October 8. If the bill passes, Syria will not be able to receive "dual use" goods unless it cuts all ties with Hamas and Islamic Jihad (neither of which is linked to Al Qaeda) and cracks down on Hezbollah (a guerrilla movement that enjoys wide popular support among Lebanese Shiites); withdraws its troops from Lebanon; and proves that it is not developing weapons of mass destruction. What's more, the President would be directed to choose from a menu of six additional sanctions, including a freeze on Syrian assets in the United States and a ban on US exports, except food and medicine.

The committee's vote came on the heels of Bush's endorsement of an Israeli airstrike on a Palestinian training camp outside Damascus, Israel's first assault on Syrian territory since 1974. Never mind that the apparently moribund camp belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, not to Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the October 4 suicide attack in Haifa; or that Israel's attack threatened to widen the already explosive Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Bush's words, "Israel must not feel constrained in terms of defense of the homeland."

The Syria Accountability Act is all but certain to destroy the fledgling cooperation between US and Syrian intelligence agencies, which have a common interest in combating Islamic extremism. To sabotage such a relationship would seem downright perverse, when America is in desperate need of Arab allies in the "war on terrorism." But a perversion of priorities is something we have come to expect from the Bush Administration, and from the influential neoconservative clique--many of them closely allied with the Israeli right--shaping policy in the Pentagon.

In an eerie replay of the buildup to the war on Iraq, the demonization of Syria has swelled to a chorus in Washington, whose members include not only Republicans but pro-Israel Democrats like Tom Lantos, the senior Democrat on the House committee that passed the act. The leading Democratic presidential candidates backed Bush's support for Israel's bombing in Syria. Only months ago we were told that the "road to peace in Jerusalem runs through Baghdad." As resistance to the US occupation of Iraq grows and the road map continues to crumble, the neocons are having a much harder time making that argument, so we are now being told that the twisted road to peace runs through Damascus.

Syria, to be sure, is hardly an appealing regime. A police state run by a tiny Baathist clique, it deprives its own citizens of the most basic liberties, maintains thousands of troops in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in violation of UN Resolution 520 and continues to meddle in Lebanon's internal affairs. It has also supported Hezbollah's "resistance" operations against Israeli positions in the disputed Shebaa Farms, finding it a useful proxy force with which to pressure Israel to return the Golan Heights, illegally occupied since 1967. Yet Syria has also played an important role in stabilizing Lebanon since the civil war--a role quietly appreciated by Washington--and in encouraging Hezbollah's transformation from a radical militia to a pragmatic political party. Despite occasional flare-ups, violent incidents on the Lebanese-Israeli border have been rare since Israel's withdrawal in 2000.

The Accountability Act simply ignores this, in a flagrant display of the double standards of US Middle East policy. How, in good faith, can we call for sanctions against Syria for its occupation of Lebanon while coddling Israel, whose incomparably more violent and brutal occupation remains the chief source of troubles in the Mideast--the principal reason we are not viewed as honest brokers? Moreover, while claiming to promote democracy in Syria, the act is more likely to strengthen the hand of the sclerotic Baathist old guard, which can now invoke the threat of an American war to suppress dissent, and hobble President Bashar Assad's (admittedly inadequate) efforts to pursue reform. The intellectuals who participated in Syria's short-lived "Damascus Spring" two years ago will be further silenced by the act for fear of being associated with a policy that might have been devised in Tel Aviv.

In a sense, it was. To properly understand the Syria Accountability Act, one has to go back to a 1996 document, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," drafted by a team of advisers to Benjamin Netanyahu in his run for prime minister of Israel. The authors included current Bush advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. "Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil," they wrote, calling for "striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper." No wonder Perle was delighted by the Israeli strike. "It will help the peace process," he told the Washington Post, adding later that the United States itself might have to attack Syria.

But what Perle means by "helping the peace process" is not resolving the conflict by bringing about a viable, sovereign Palestinian state but rather--as underscored in "A Clean Break"--"transcending the Arab-Israeli conflict" altogether by forcing the Arabs to accept most, if not all, of Israel's territorial conquests and its nuclear hegemony in the region. This one-sided approach has succeeded only in fueling resentment against America, as demonstrated most recently by the October 15 bombing of a US convoy in Gaza that killed three Americans. The attack, which was denounced by Palestinian leaders, came just hours after the US veto of a Security Council resolution condemning Israel's new "security" wall, which gobbles up large swaths of land in the West Bank.

No one doubts that citizens of Syria and Lebanon would benefit from the demise of the Baathist dictatorship. But making an enemy of Syria will neither lead to the flowering of Syrian democracy nor bring an end to terror in Israeli cities. If any state is a breeding ground for terrorists today, it is Iraq, thanks to America's reckless war. The absence of stable governance in Mesopotamia poses far more of a threat to regional security than the presence of an Islamic Jihad office in Damascus. To be sure, states must be held accountable for fostering terrorism. What we need now, however, is not a Syria Accountability Act but an America Accountability Act.

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Spoils of war

US plans to sell off Iraqi businesses are simply the modern equivalent of pillage, says Brian Whitaker

Brian Whitaker
Monday October 13, 2003
The Guardian

For centuries, pillage by invading armies was a normal part of warfare: a way in which to reward badly-paid or unpaid troops for risking their lives in battle.

Nowadays, at least in more civilised countries, we do not let armies rampage for booty. We leave the pillaging to men in suits, and we don't call it pillaging any more. We call it economic development.

Today, the men in suits are gathering at Olympia, in London, for a two-day conference and exhibition entitled Doing Business in Iraq. Protesters will be gathering outside.

The event, which is sponsored by the US-Iraq business council, is one of a series being held in different parts of the world over the coming 12 months (another will take place in Moscow in December), culminating in a grand spoils of war exhibition in Baghdad towards the end of next year.

According to the organisers, speakers at the London conference will include several US government officials as well as a representative from Trade Partners UK, the British government's export promotion department.

This fits in neatly with plans announced in June by Paul Bremer, the head of Iraq's provisional authority, to sell off the country's state-owned industries (excluding, for the time being, oil, gas and minerals) and turn it into a US-style capitalist wonderland.

Last month, Mr Bremer issued CPA order number 39, giving foreign investors unrestricted rights to establish businesses in Iraq and/or buy up Iraqi companies.

The order also allows foreign investors to repatriate profits, dividends, interest and royalties immediately and in full. In other words, they can make a fast buck if they want to, without putting anything back.

While few would disagree that Iraq's industry needs modernisation and restructuring, two questions arise: has Mr Bremer the legal powers to do this, and is he going about it in the right way?

He has already acknowledged that his plans will create large-scale unemployment, at least in the short term. His earlier decision to disband the Iraqi army exacerbated the country's fragile security situation by leaving several hundred thousand disgruntled ex-soldiers with nothing better to do than cause trouble.

That is now widely regarded as a major blunder, and Mr Bremer now seems intent on repeating the exercise with the civilian population. According to the UN, the current level of unemployment in Iraq is around 50-60%: the last thing the country needs is more job losses.

Mr Bremer shows little interest in drawing lessons from the problems caused by economic "shock therapy" reforms in the former Soviet Union, and in Iraq - with the added factor of military occupation - this can only fuel hostility towards the US.

His order number 39 is also, almost certainly, illegal. The Hague regulations of 1907 spell out the obligations of an occupying power under international law.

Article 43 says that, when occupying forces take over a country, they must "ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country".

This means that Mr Bremer is not allowed to change Iraq's existing laws, including those that govern investment, unless it is "absolutely" essential to do so.

Article 55 says that an occupying power is only the "administrator and usufructuary" of state property. "It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct," it adds.

Mr Bremer, therefore, appears to have no right to sell off nationalised industries.

In the House of Lords last week, Baroness Williams of Crosby tried to ascertain the British government's view of Mr Bremer's approach. She asked whether the government "regard current policies in Iraq to be consistent with the legal advice the prime minister received from the attorney general".

She received the unilluminating reply that "it has been the practice of successive governments not to publish advice from the attorney general".

Fortunately, however, we already have a good idea of what the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, thinks about the matter. A memo that he wrote to the prime minister, Tony Blair, on March 26, a week after the invasion of Iraq began, was leaked to the press some time ago.

"My view," the attorney general wrote, "is that a further security council resolution is needed to authorise imposing reform and restructuring of Iraq and its government.

"In the absence of a further resolution, the UK (and US) would be bound by the provisions of international law governing belligerent occupation, notably the fourth Geneva gonvention and the 1907 Hague regulations."

He went on to note that the Hague regulations impose an obligation to respect the laws in force in the occupied territory "unless absolutely prevented".

"Thus, while some changes to the legislative and administrative structures of Iraq may be permissible if they are necessary for security or public order reasons, or in order to further humanitarian objectives," he said, "more wide-ranging reforms of governmental and administrative structures would not be lawful."

The restrictions imposed by the Hague regulations, as the attorney general suggested, can only be over-ridden by a UN security council resolution.

Interestingly, the preamble of Mr Bremer's Order No 39 claims just such backing. It states that the order is "consistent" with security council resolution 1483, approved last May, which lifted sanctions against Iraq.

But although the resolution talks vaguely (in paragraph 8e) about "promoting economic reconstruction and the conditions for sustainable development", there is nothing in it that can sensibly be construed as giving Mr Bremer permission to make sweeping changes to the investment law. Indeed, paragraph five calls upon "all concerned to comply fully" with the Hague Regulations.

The legality - or otherwise - of Mr Bremer's order is unlikely to trouble the Bush administration, although future US administrations may have to grapple with the consequences arising from it.

The prevailing view in Washington was set out with astonishing bluntness four years ago by John Bolton, now chief hawk at the state department, when he said: "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law, even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so - because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the US."

Whether the British government, which tends to be more squeamish about such matters, agrees with this is still unclear, though the presence of its official from Trade Partners UK at the investment conference in London suggests that it does.

The US, however, has made no bones about its intentions, regardless of what the Hague regulations say, to make as many structural changes as possible in Iraq while it has the chance.

Its hope, of course, is that these will have gone too far to be undone once a proper Iraqi government takes over. On the other hand, the changes may go so far that a future Iraqi government feels obliged to overturn them in order to establish its popular credentials.

In that case, the invasion - with its phoney goals of removing Saddam Hussein and disarming him of weapons that he didn't possess - may be just a prelude to the real battle for Iraq yet to come.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance

Sources:
The Sunday Herald
September 15, 2002
Title: "Bush Planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President"
Author: Neil Mackay

Harper's Magazine
October 2002
Title: "Dick Cheney's Song of America"
Author: David Armstrong

Mother Jones
March 2003
Title: "The 30 Year Itch"
Author: Robert Dreyfuss

Pilger.com
December 12, 2002
Title: "Hidden Agendas"
Author: John Pilger

Random Lengths News
October 4, 2002
Title: "Iraq Attack-The Aims and Origins of Bush's Plans"
Author: Paul Rosenberg

Project Censored wishes to acknowledge that Jim Lobe, the Washington, D.C. correspondent for Inter Press Service (IPS), has been covering the ways in which neo-conservatives, using the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) among other mechanisms, used the 9/11 attacks to pursue their own agenda of global dominance and reshaping the Middle East virtually from the outset of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism.” For more information, please vist the following link: http://www.ipsnews.net/focus/neo-cons/index.asp

Faculty Evaluators: Phil Beard Ph.D. and Tom Lough Ph.D.
Student Researcher: Dylan Citrin Cummins

Corporate Media Partial Coverage:
Atlantic Journal Constitution, 9/29/02, The President's Real goal in Iraq, By Jay Bookman

Over the last year corporate media have made much of Saddam Hussein and his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Rarely did the press or, especially, television address the possibility that larger strategies might also have driven the decision to invade Iraq. Broad political strategies regarding foreign policy do indeed exist and are part of the public record. The following is a summary of the current strategies that have formed over the last 30 years; strategies that eclipse the pursuit of oil and that preceded Hussein's rise to power:

In the 1970s, the United States and the Middle East were embroiled in a tug-of-war over oil. At the time, American military presence in the Gulf was fairly insignificant and the prospect of seizing control of Arab oil fields by force was pretty unattainable. Still, the idea of this level of dominance was very attractive to a group of hard-line, pro-military Washington insiders that included both Democrats and Republicans. Eventually labeled "neoconservatives," this circle of influential strategists played important roles in the Defense Departments of Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr., at conservative think tanks throughout the '80s and '90s, and today occupies several key posts in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. Most principal among them are:

·Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, our current Vice-President and Defense Secretary respectively, who have been closely aligned since they served with the Ford administration in the 1970s;
·Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the key architect of the post-war reconstruction of Iraq;
·Richard Perle, past-chairman and still-member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board that has great influence over foreign military policies;
·William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and founder of the powerful, neo-conservative think-tank, Project for a New American Century.

In the 1970s, however, neither high-level politicos, nor the American people, shared the priorities of this small group of military strategists. In 1979 the Shah of Iran fell and U.S. political sway in the region was greatly jeopardized. In 1980, the Carter Doctrine declared the Gulf "a zone of U.S. influence." It warned (especially the Soviets) that any attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf region would be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the U.S. and repelled by any means necessary, including military force. This was followed by the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force — a military program specifically designed to rush several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf on short notice.

Under President Reagan, the Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the U.S. Central Command that oversaw the area from eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Bases and support facilities were established throughout the Gulf region, and alliances were expanded with countries such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

Since the first Gulf War, the U.S. has built a network of military bases that now almost completely encircle the oil fields of the Persian Gulf.

In 1989, following the end of the Cold War and just prior to the Gulf War, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz produced the 'Defense Planning Guidance' report advocating U.S. military dominance around the globe. The Plan called for the United States to maintain and grow in military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge us on the world stage. Using words like 'preemptive' and military 'forward presence,’ the plan called for the U.S. to be dominant over friends and foes alike. It concluded with the assertion that the U.S. can best attain this position by making itself 'absolutely powerful.'

The 1989 plan was spawned after the fall of the Soviet Union. Without the traditional threat to national security, Cheney, Powell and Wolfowitz knew that the military budget would dwindle without new enemies and threats. In an attempt to salvage defense funding, Cheney and company constructed a plan to fill the 'threat blank'. On August 2, 1990 President Bush called a press conference. He explained that the threat of global war had significantly receded, but in its wake a new danger arose. This unforeseen threat to national security could come from any angle and from any power.

Iraq, by a remarkable coincidence, invaded Northern Kuwait later the same day.

Cheney et al. were out of political power for the eight years of Clinton’s presidency. During this time the neo-conservatives founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The most influential product of the PNAC was a report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defense," (www.newamericancentury.org) which called for U.S. military dominance and control of global economic markets.

With the election of George W. Bush, the authors of the plan were returned to power: Cheney as vice president, Powell as Secretary of State, and Wolfowitz in the number two spot at the Pentagon. With the old Defense Planning Guidance as the skeleton, the three went back to the drawing board. When their new plan was complete, it included contributions from Wolfowitz's boss Donald Rumsfeld. The old 'preemptive' attacks have now become 'unwarned attacks.' The Powell-Cheney doctrine of military 'forward presence' has been replaced by 'forward deterrence.' The U.S. stands ready to invade any country deemed a possible threat to our economic interests.

Update by David Armstrong

Just days after this story appeared, the Bush administration unveiled its “new” National Security Strategy, which effectively validated the article’s main thesis. The NSS makes clear that the administration will pursue a policy of pre-emption and overwhelming military superiority aimed at ensuring US dominance. Since that time, the major media have generally come around to the point of view presented in the article. The New York Times, which originally rejected the article’s premise, now makes a virtual mantra of the notion that the current security strategy is little more than a warmed-over version of the policy drafted during the first Bush administration of preventing new rivals from rising up to challenge the US in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The article circulated widely, particularly in the run up to the war in Iraq, and was entered into the Congressional Record. It also became a topic of discussion on such outlets as the BBC, NPR, MSNBC, various talk radio shows, and European newspapers. In the process, it has substantially helped shape the debate about the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Update by Bob Dreyfuss

For months leading up to the war against Iraq, it was widely assumed among critics of the war that a hidden motive for military action was Iraq's oil, not terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. In fact, "No Blood for Oil" became perhaps the leading slogan and bumper sticker of the peace movement. Yet, there was very little examination in the media of the role of oil in American policy toward Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and what coverage did exist tended to pooh-pooh or debunk the idea that the war had anything to do with oil. So, I set out to place the war with Iraq in the context of a decades-long U.S. strategy of building up a military presence in the region, arguing that even before the war, the U.S. had turned the Gulf into a U.S. protectorate. Perhaps most importantly, I showed that a motive behind the war was oil as a national security issue, as a strategic commodity, not as a commercial one — and that, in fact, most of the oil industry itself was either opposed to or ambivalent about the idea of war against Saddam Hussein. Yet the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, whose forebears had proposed occupying the oil fields of the Gulf in the mid-1970s, sought control of the oil in the region as the cornerstone of American empire.

Since the end of this war, it has become clear that the United States (and the U.K.) have aggressively sought to maintain direct control over Iraq's oil industry. When looters devastated Baghdad, only the Ministry of Oil was unscathed, since U.S. marines protected it. Since then, handpicked Iraqi officials have been installed in the ministry, under the supervision of U.S. military and civilian officials, and there is movement toward privatization of Iraq's oil industry, a point that I emphasized in my writing on the topic before the war. Not only that, but it is increasingly clear that France, Russia, and China are likely to be excluded from either rebuilding the industry and securing contracts for future Iraqi oil delivery.

I can't say that the media followed up on my exposure of this issue, except that I appeared on a number of radio and television talk show programs as a result of my writing on Iraq, in both Mother Jones and The American Prospect, as well as C-Span, CNBC, and CBC-TV in Canada. I was also invited to make a presentation on "The Thirty-Year Itch" at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. According to Mother Jones, the article drew more traffic to its web site than any other article.

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باريس: سورية في دائرة الخطر وعليها عدم الرهان على انهماك أميركي
باريس - رندة تقي الدين الحياة 2003/10/9

على رغم الادانة الشديدة التي وجهتها فرنسا الى اسرائيل بعد غارتها الجوية على الأراضي السورية والتي وصفتها بأنها انتهاك غير مقبول للسيادة، فإن الجانب الفرنسي لم يفاجأ بالضربة الاسرائيلية كونه يدرك أن الضغوط الأميركية على سورية ليست مجرد كلام، وانما هي سياسة فعلية للإدارة الأميركية التي تتوزع الأدوار مع اسرائيل في هذا الصدد.

ولدى باريس قناعة بأن سورية تخطئ في اعتقادها بأن انهماك الولايات المتحدة بمشاكل كبرى في العراق وبمسيرة السلام في الشرق الأوسط سيضعف الضغوط على دمشق. وتعتبر باريس ان مثل هذا الموقف ينطوي على سوء تقدير، خصوصاً أن للإدارة الأميركية الحالية ردات فعل غير متوقعة، أكثر من السابق.

ولذا، تتضمن الرسالة التي يوجهها الجانب الفرنسي منذ شهور الى السوريين، الدعوة الى الانتباه والتحذير والنصيحة بعدم المراهنة على انهماك الادارة الأميركية بمشكلات المنطقة. والتقويم السائد لدى الأوساط الفرنسية المطلعة مفاده ان رئيس الحكومة الاسرائيلية ارييل شارون يسعى الى حمل السوريين على الاقتناع بأن اقدامهم على أي عمل سيرد عليه بالضرب بقوة.

وتعتبر هذه الأوساط ان الإدارة الأميركية الحالية تعطي اسرائيل هامشاً واسعاً للحركة، ما يحمل على الاعتقاد بأن هناك خطراً على سورية. وتتوقع فرنسا من دمشق التجاوب مع مطالبها، وأولها أن يتم احترام الدستور اللبناني، وفقاً لما قاله وزير الخارجية الفرنسي دومينيك دوفيلبان خلال مأدبة العشاء التي أقامها على شرف البطريرك الماروني الكاردينال نصر الله صفير خلال وجوده في باريس أخيراً.

وشكل كلام دوفيلبان دعوة مباشرة لتذكير سورية بما تردده السلطات الفرنسية لها بصورة غير علنية.

وتتمنى فرنسا ان تغير سورية سياستها تجاه لبنان، وتعتبر أن هذا التغيير يجب أن يترجم في مرحلة أولى بعدم تعديل الدستور اللبناني بهدف التجديد للرئيس الحالي اميل لحود.

وكانت فرنسا عملت على مدى السنوات الثماني الماضية على التقرب من سورية. وباتت تربطها بها علاقات جيدة وتعاون حقيقي. وهي تنصح سورية بأنها إذا أرادت تطبيع علاقاتها مع دول العالم والعودة الى الأسرة الدولية، فانها مستعدة للمساعدة على صعيد الاتحاد الأوروبي وعلى الصعيد الدولي. اما إذا كانت سورية غير راغبة بذلك، فعندها لن تتمكن من ان تستمر في صداقة باتجاه واحد ومن دون أي تجاوب.

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