Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter
Ex-bank manager defends Palestinian suicide bombers

Chris McGreal in Nablus
Saturday March 1, 2003
The Guardian

Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. A retired bank manager from Wales, she originally planned to join the thousands of other foreign volunteers who spend a few weeks each year picking olives, monitoring Israeli roadblocks and acting as human shields in solidarity with the Palestinians.

But after nine weeks in the West Bank city of Nablus, with bullet shrapnel in her leg and horrors she never imagined etched on her mind, she says she has come to understand - perhaps support - the more extreme and tragic tactics of a brutal conflict. She has found friends in the men with guns and the proud relatives of suicide bombers, the "martyrs" whose pictures paper the streets.

"I had never seen a tank before. I'd never seen a soldier. I've seen dead people, but I've never seen someone killed by these huge 25mm bullets. The injuries are horrific. The cannon from the tank takes the whole chest off," she said. "This is terrorism gone completely and utterly crazy. There is no other word for this because it's not one incident, it thousands of incidents across the whole city.

"I really, really understand the martyrs [suicide bombers]. I am very good friends with the family of the two who went on the mission to Tel Aviv. One saw the other explode, and then he walked away and blew himself up. They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons."

Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?

"I agree that it is a strategic mistake but I understand why they do it," she said. "Let's not blame the victims. It's clear who the real terrorists are here.

"I'm going to fight it."

It is not what she imagined for herself just a few weeks ago.

Ms Gwynne, 65, retired in 1998 after 15 years as a manager for Barclays in Aberystwyth. Since then she has split her time between her two daughters, one in Germany the other, at university in California, who took her to a Palestinian solidarity meeting at which she was so outraged by accounts of children shot by the Israeli army that she decided to see for herself.

She arrived in Tel Aviv proudly announcing her intention to help the Palestinians. Immigration officers held her for three hours and tried to persuade her it was too dangerous to go to Ramallah and to ask why she wasn't there to help Israeli victims.

"I had three people telling me how dangerous it was to come to Ramallah, which I find ironic seeing as the Israelis are the ones causing the danger," she said.

Through an encounter at a New Year's Eve party, she found herself in Nablus, which has suffered even more than most West Bank cities under virtually perpetual curfew for more than six months. She is working as a volunteer "nurse" - although she has no training - with a Palestinian ambulance driver, Feras al-Bakri, taking the wounded through Israeli army checkpoints to Raffidia hospital.

It is dangerous. Last week Mr Bakri was shot in the hand and another man had a testicle shot off by a soldier who opened fire for no apparent reason.

Nine weeks latershe is something of a veteran.

"It hasn't surprised me but it has shocked me to see a baby die because it's mother has been dumped next to the roadside in the cold because the Israelis won't let the ambulance through; to see a child in a hospital with its nose shot off; to hear an Israeli soldier threaten to kill us all. He said: 'I can kill you all in 10 seconds.' This is a crime of unimaginable proportions unless you live here."

Ten days ago the Israeli army surged into Nablus's old city, the Casbah, destroying homes, searching for Palestinian fighters. The killing went on for a week. At the end 11 people lay dead, including three children, one a 14-year-old boy shotby the army alongside his grandfather.

Hundreds were wounded. Among them was a boy who took a bullet through his palate.

"It would be better if they'd killed him. He's in hospital in a terrible state," Ms Gwynne said. "I found it very difficult to handle at night. For the first week I wept, but after that I became so angry I couldn't shed any more tears."

During the fighting she caught a piece of shrapnel in the leg while trying to reach a woman who had gone into labour. She says an Israeli soldier deliberately shot between her leg, even though it was evident that she was unarmed.

"The Palestinian fighters say I am one of them now, wounded on the battlefield."

Ms Gwynne is small and, at first glance, might be mistaken for fragile. But in any discussion about the injustices perpetrated in Nablus, she offers by far the most energetic denunciations, loudly berating the Israelis while Palestinians who have lived with the misery for years almost mournfully recount the suffering.

Threat of rape

"I've been arrested too. One of the Israeli commanders threatened me with rape. He was very graphic," she said. "I've told Israeli soldiers that when you say you're just obeying orders, please remember that it was what every German soldier said.

"The soldiers say we must defend our land; God gave us this land; if I don't kill them, they will kill us.

"I used to think it was all excuses, but they actually believe this shit. We have nothing to kill them with, just a few AK-47s."

We? "I feel I am one of them. I want to live here now. I have a pension. It's not a lot but it's a $1,000 a month and it's more than a doctor here gets," she said.

Ms Gwynne plans to remortgage her house in Wales and use the money to buy a computer and digital camera to document events in Nablus for what she calls her own struggle against terrorism.

"I'm ashamed I didn't come before but I was working. I was a single parent. I had children at university. Now I'm here as a witness."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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'For six years, right-wing think tank has been hell-bent for war'
Date: Thursday, February 27 @ 09:49:58 EST
Topic: Conservatives And The Right

By Jason Leopold, The Scoop

Never before in the history of the United States presidency has a think tank had such an impact on shaping U.S. foreign policy as the Project for the New American Century has on helping President George W. Bush set foreign policy goals for his Administration, particularly dictating exactly how Bush should deal with Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein.

For the past six years, PNAC has lobbied former President Clinton and Bush heavily to initiate a war in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming the country poses a serious threat to the U.S. and its allies because of its ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. Clinton rebuffed the advice by PNAC members during the last four years of his presidency, but Bush has virtually used, word for word, the written statements by PNAC members when he speaks publicly about Iraq crisis.



PNAC, which says its goal is to promote America's foreign and defense policies, has been written about in dribs and drabs over the past year in the foreign press, but has yet to crack any of the big mainstream newspapers and magazines here. It operated below the radar while Clinton was in office and has recently resurfaced because of the uncanny similarities between its policies and that of the Bush Administration on matters relating to national defense to Asia and the Middle East.

Most of its members cut their teeth in the Reagan and the first Bush Administrations. However, many of its former members, notably Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, are working in the current Bush Administration. William Kristol, the editor of the ultra-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, heads PNAC.

In the past year, the organization has succeeded in getting the Bush Administration to scrap the Army's Crusader Artillery Program and to ask Congress for a one-year increase of more than $48 billion for national defense. But it's PNAC's position to drive America into a war with Iraq that has influenced Bush the most.

Dozens of letters and reports by PNAC members concerning Iraq are posted on its website, www.newamericancentury.org, and lays out in startling detail how war is the only way to deal with the so-called threat that Iraq poses to the U.S. Bush has drawn upon many of these letters to publicly make a case for war. Reading through the letters, the impression it leaves is not that the U.S. is in imminent danger but that the people that run PNAC have been hell-bent for war for six years and they finally got a president who will listen to them.

Robert Kagan, co-chair of PNAC and a former Deputy for Policy in the State Department's Bureau for Inter-American Affairs during Reagan's presidency, wrote in 1999 that the U.S. should "complete the unfinished business of the 1991 Gulf War and get rid of Saddam."

It's simply not enough to increase inspections by the United Nations, PNAC says, or to think that "we can contain Saddam inside a box" to ensure the safety of the U.S. and our allies. It has to be war.

"Above all, only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq whose intentions can safely be assumed to be benign," Kristol said in a PNAC report in 1997. Containment and inspections won't work, Kristol said

Consider the impact Kristol had on Cheney when the Vice President spoke about Iraq before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville last August.

"This is the same dictator who dispatched a team of assassins to murder former President Bush as he traveled abroad," Cheney said. "A person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box."

"Meanwhile, he would continue to plot. Nothing in the last dozen years has stopped him -- not his agreements; not the discoveries of the inspectors; not the revelations by defectors; not criticism or ostracism by the international community; and not four days of bombings by the U.S. in 1998. What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain possession of nuclear arms," Cheney said.

But the mere fact that many of these letters and policy statements about Iraq were drafted while Clinton was President raises a number of serious questions: for one, where's the evidence that suggests the U.S. is in imminent danger of being attacked by Iraq?

No one at PNAC would respond to these or other questions about the organization. The one thing that is crystal clear, however, is that neither PNAC nor the Bush Administration has been able to produce a shred of evidence that justifies the U.S. going to war with Iraq. Only through a coordinated effort of injecting fear into the minds of Americans has PNAC and the Bush Administration been able to win the little support it has to start a war.

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Saddam, Rummy and Reagan: When Hussein was our ally
Date: Thursday, February 27 @ 10:01:55 EST
Topic: Foreign Policy

Iraq: Newly released documents reveal U.S. talk of regime change in the early 1980s - except then it was language condemning Iran for attempting to overthrow the government in Baghdad.

By Scott Shane, Baltimore Sun

In an interview Tuesday with the Arab-language television network Al-Jazeera, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld laid out again the case for war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Among other crimes, he said, Iraq "used chemical weapons on its neighbor Iran."

The defense secretary has reason to remember that crime. It was taking place in December 1983, when Rumsfeld met with Hussein as a special envoy of President Ronald Reagan. But his mission then was to improve U.S.-Iraqi relations, assure Hussein that Iran was their common enemy and promote an oil pipeline project.

According to records of the meeting, Rumsfeld made no complaint to the Iraqi dictator about his use of weapons of mass destruction, though he did mention U.S. disapproval to Hussein's foreign minister.



The National Security Archive, a nonprofit public affairs research group at George Washington University, published this week on its Web site recently declassified documents revealing the delicate diplomatic dance performed by the United States in the 1980s as it tilted toward Iraq and away from Iran.

Twenty years ago, Iran seemed a far bigger threat to the United States. Iranian students chanting "Death to America" had seized the U.S. Embassy in 1980 and taken diplomats hostage. Iran was implicated in major terrorist attacks against American targets, including the bombing of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, carried out by Hezbollah militants.

But if Reagan and Rumsfeld were right to be cozying up to Hussein in 1983, when he was gassing Iranians and Kurds, does that mean President Bush and Rumsfeld are wrong today to be preparing a war against Iraq and citing such chemical attacks as one reason? Or was U.S. policy wrong then and right now?

U.S. presidents often present American positions in starkly moral terms, as Bush did in describing Hussein in the State of the Union address: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages. ... International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."

But all those evils were well-documented in 1983.

At the time of Rumsfeld's visit, Hussein had invaded Iran, was seeking nuclear weapons and had used lethal mustard gas. He had harbored terrorists (though he had just expelled the infamous Abu Nidal) and had a well-established record of torturing and murdering domestic opponents.

The U.S. response? It dropped Iraq from the list of nations sponsoring terror, renewed diplomatic ties, and provided intelligence and aid to Iraq to prevent its defeat by Iran.

Joyce Battle, the National Security Archive analyst who assembled the previously secret U.S. documents, says they are a reminder that diplomacy is rarely a clear-cut campaign of good against evil.

"We published these documents as a response to the way the Bush administration is trying to describe this situation in black and white terms," says Battle. "In reality, that's not the way international relations are carried out."

Following are excerpts from the documents:

* On Nov. 1, 1983, State Department official Jonathan T. Howe writes to Secretary of State George P. Shultz expressing concern about both Iraq's use of chemical weapons and its weak position in the war with Iran:

We have recently received additional information confirming Iraqi use of chemical weapons [CW]. We also know that Iraq has acquired a CW production capability, primarily from Western firms. ... If the [National Security Council] decides measures are to be undertaken to assist Iraq, our best present chance of influencing cessation of CW use may be in the context of informing Iraq of these measures. It is important, however, that we approach Iraq very soon in order to maintain the credibility of U.S. policy on CW, as well as to reduce or halt what now appears to be Iraq's almost daily use of CW.

* On Dec. 14, 1983, the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq, William L. Eagleton Jr., proposed "talking points" for Reagan's envoy:

A major objective in the meeting with Saddam is to initiate a dialogue and establish personal rapport. In that meeting [Ambassador] Rumsfeld will want to emphasize his close relationship with President Reagan and the president's interest in regional issues. ...

[Among the talking points]: The [U.S. government] recognizes Iraq's current disadvantage in a war of attrition since Iran has [easy] access to the Gulf while Iraq does not, and would regard any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West.

* On Dec. 21, 1983, a U.S. diplomat in London reports on the meeting the day before in Baghdad between Rumsfeld and Hussein, at which the U.S. envoy handed over a conciliatory letter from Reagan:

In his 90-minute meeting with Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein showed obvious pleasure with president's letter and Rumsfeld's visit and in his remarks removed whatever obstacles remained in the way of resuming diplomatic relations. ... [Rumsfeld expressed] interest in seeing Iraq increase oil exports, including through possible new pipeline across Jordan. ... Our initial assessment is that meeting marked positive milestone in development of U.S.-Iraqi relations and will prove to be of wider benefit to U.S. posture in the region.

[Hussein] used a direct quote from Rumsfeld's statement to the foreign minister the previous evening when he said "having a whole generation of Iraqis and Americans grow up without understanding each other had negative implications and could lead to mix-ups."

* On Dec. 26, Eagleton cables the State Department that:

Ambassador Rumsfeld's visit has elevated U.S-Iraqi relations to a new level. This is both symbolically important and practically helpful. ... We must now maintain some momentum in the dialogue and relationship.

* On March 5, 1984, the State Department condemns Iraqi use of chemical weapons - but also blasts Iran's determination to pursue regime change in Iraq:

The United States has concluded that the available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons. The United States strongly condemns the prohibited use of chemical weapons wherever it occurs. ... While condemning Iraq's resort to chemical weapons, the United States also calls on the Government of Iran to ... put an end to the bloodshed. The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims.

Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun

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'Missing U.S.-Iraq history'

Date: Thursday, February 27 @ 09:52:48 EST
Topic: Foreign Policy

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

Before George W. Bush gives the final order to invade Iraq -- a nation that has not threatened the United States -- the American people might want a few facts about the real history of U.S.-Iraq relations. Missing chapters from 1980 to the present would be crucial in judging Bush's case for war.

But Americans don't have those facts because Bush and his predecessors in the White House have kept this history hidden from the American people. When parts of the story have emerged, administrations of both parties have taken steps to suppress or discredit the disclosures. So instead of knowing the truth, Americans have been fed a steady diet of distortions, simplifications and outright lies.

This missing history also is not just about minor details. It goes to the heart of the case against Saddam Hussein, including whether he is an especially "aggressive" and "unpredictable" dictator who must be removed from power even at the risk of America's standing in the world and the chance that a war will lead to more terrorism against U.S. targets.



For instance, George W. Bush has frequently cited Saddam Hussein's invasions of neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, as justification for the looming U.S. invasion of Iraq. "By defeating this threat, we will show other dictators that the path of aggression will lead to their own ruin," Bush declared during a speech in Atlanta on Feb. 20.

Leaving aside whether Bush's formulation is Orwellian double-speak - aggression to discourage aggression - there is the historical question of whether Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush actually encouraged Saddam's aggressions for geopolitical reasons or out of diplomatic incompetence.

Carter's 'Green Light'?

This intersection of Saddam's wars and U.S. foreign policy dates back at least to 1980 when Iran's radical Islamic government held 52 Americans hostage in Tehran and the sheiks of the oil-rich Persian Gulf feared that Ruhollah Khomeini's radical breed of Islam might sweep them from power just as it had the Shah of Iran a year earlier.

The Iranian government began its expansionist drive by putting pressure on the secular government of Iraq, instigating border clashes and encouraging Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish populations to rise up. Iranian operatives sought to destabilize Saddam's government by assassinating Iraqi leaders. [For details, see "An Unnecessary War," Foreign Policy, January/February 2003.]

On Aug. 5, 1980, as tensions mounted on the Iran-Iraq border, Saudi rulers welcomed Saddam to Riyadh for the first state visit ever by an Iraqi president to Saudi Arabia. During meetings at the kingdom's ornate palaces, the Saudis feted Saddam whose formidable Soviet-supplied army was viewed as a bulwark against Iran.

Saudi leaders also say they urged Saddam to take the fight to Iran's fundamentalist regime, advice that they say included a "green light" for the invasion from President Carter.

Less than two months after Saddam's trip, with Carter still frustrated by his inability to win release of the 52 Americans imprisoned in Iran, Saddam invaded Iran on Sept. 22, 1980. The war would rage for eight years and kill an estimated one million people.

The claim of Carter's "green light" for the invasion was made by senior Arab leaders, including King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, to President Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, when Haig traveled to the Middle East in April 1981, according to "top secret" talking points that Haig prepared for a post-trip briefing of Reagan.

Haig wrote that he was impressed with "bits of useful intelligence" that he had learned. "Both [Egypt's Anwar] Sadat and [Saudi then-Prince] Fahd [explained that] Iran is receiving military spares for U.S. equipment from Israel," Haig noted. "It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd."

Haig's "talking points" were first disclosed at Consortiumnews.com in 1995 after I discovered the document amid records from a congressional investigation into the early history of the Reagan administration's contacts with Iran. At that time, Haig refused to answer questions about the "talking points" because they were still classified. Though not responding to direct questions about the "talking points," Carter has pooh-poohed other claims that he gave Saddam encouragement for the invasion.

But before the U.S. heads to war in 2003, both Carter and Haig might be asked to explain what they know about any direct or indirect contacts that would explain the Saudi statements about the alleged "green light." Saudi Arabia's longtime ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar also might be asked to give a complete account of what the Saudi government knows and what its leaders told Saddam in 1980.

[Haig's "top secret" talking points have been posted on the Web for the first time here.]

Reagan's Iraqi Tilt

Through the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, as first one side and then the other gained the upper hand, the Reagan administration was officially neutral but behind the scenes tilted from one side to the other.

When Iran appeared to be winning in 1982, Reagan and his advisers made a fateful decision to secretly supply Saddam's military, including permitting shipments of dual-use technology that Iraq then used to build chemical and biological weapons. Tactical military assistance also was provided, including satellite photos of the battlefield.

While congressional inquiries and press accounts have sketched out some of these facts over the years, the current Bush administration continues to plead ignorance or question the reliability of the stories.

Last September, for example, Newsweek reported that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had allowed sales to Iraq of computer databases that Saddam could use to track political opponents and shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" that could help produce anthrax and other biological weapons. [Newsweek issue dated Sept. 23, 2002]

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va,, asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the Newsweek story at a Senate hearing on Sept. 19. "Did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war?" Byrd inquired. "Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown."

"Certainly not to my knowledge," Rumsfeld responded. "I have no knowledge of United States companies or government being involved in assisting Iraq develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons."

So even the current U.S. secretary of defense - who served the Reagan administration as a special envoy to the Middle East in 1983-84 and personally met with Saddam - says he doesn't know about this secret history. Promises of further investigation last September also haven't brought answers to Byrd's questions.

Senior Bush's Advice

Beyond those "dual-use" supplies, other unanswered questions relate to whether then-Vice President George H.W. Bush urged Saddam to use greater ferocity in waging his war with Iran, advice that led the Iraqi air force to bomb civilian centers in Tehran and other Iranian cities in 1986.

A lengthy article by Murray Waas and Craig Unger in the New Yorker in 1992 described the senior Bush passing on advice to Saddam, through Arab intermediaries, for this more aggressive bombing campaign. Yet the historical question has never been settled. The senior Bush has never been subjected to a careful questioning, though it is true that Saddam did intensify his air campaign after Bush's trip.

The answer would be relevant now as the younger Bush asserts that Saddam's penchant for military aggression justifies a new war. If Bush's father actually was counseling Saddam to be more aggressive, that's a fact that the American people ought to know.

Waas and Unger described the motive for the Reagan administration's tactical advice as a kind of diplomatic billiard shot. By getting Iraq to expand use of its air force, the Iranians would be more desperate for U.S.-made HAWK anti-aircraft missile parts, giving Washington more leverage with the Iranians. Iran's need to protect their cities from Iraqi air attacks gave impetus to the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostage scheme, which later became known as the Iran-contra affair. [See The New Yorker, Nov. 2, 1992.]

Another 'Green Light'?

The devastation from the Iran-Iraq war, which finally ended in 1988, also set the stage for the Gulf War of 1990-91. The eight-year war had crippled the Iraqi economy and left Saddam's government deeply in debt.

Having been egged on by the oil-rich sheikdoms to blunt the revolutionary zeal of Iran, Saddam felt betrayed when Kuwait wouldn't write off Iraq's debts and rejected a $10 billion loan. Beyond that, Saddam was furious with Kuwait for driving down world oil prices by overproducing and for slant-drilling into Iraqi oil fields. Many Iraqis also considered Kuwait, historically, a part of Iraq.

Before attacking Kuwait, however, Saddam consulted George H.W. Bush's administration. First, the U.S. State Department informed Saddam that Washington had "no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait." Then, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."

As Foreign Policy magazine observed, "the United States may not have intended to give Iraq a green light, but that is effectively what it did." [Foreign Policy, Jan.-Feb. 2003]

While Glaspie's strange diplomacy drew some congressional and press attention during the previous Gulf crisis, the full context of George H.W. Bush's relationship with Saddam - which might help explain why the Iraqi dictator so disastrously misread the U.S. signals - has never been made explained.

A Clinton Cover-up?

Beyond that missing history of U.S.-Iraq relations, there's the secondary issue of cover-ups conducted by the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Democratic sources say Clinton heeded personal appeals from the elder Bush and other top Republicans to close the books on the so-called "Iraqgate" investigation - as well as probes into secret Reagan-Bush dealings with Iran - soon after the Democrat defeated Bush in the 1992 election.

Some Democrats say Clinton agreed to shelve the investigations out of concern for national security and the country's unity. Others suggest that Clinton was tricked by the wily elder Bush with promises that a pullback on the Iran-Iraq investigations might win Clinton some bipartisanship with the Republicans in Congress, a tantalizing prospect that turned out to be a mirage.

Whatever the reasons, Clinton's Justice Department did bail out the Reagan-Bush team in the mid-1990s when more disclosures about the secret dealings with Iraq flooded to the surface. Perhaps the most important disclosure was an affidavit by former Reagan administration official Howard Teicher that was filed in connection with a criminal trial in Miami in 1995. The Teicher affidavit was the first sworn public account by a Reagan insider of the covert U.S.-Iraq relationship.

Teicher, who served on Reagan's National Security Council staff, traced the U.S. tilt to Iraq to a turning point in the war in 1982 when Iran gained the offensive and fears swept through the U.S. government that Iran's army might slice through Iraq to the oil fields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

"In June 1982, President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran," Teicher wrote in his affidavit. Teicher said he helped draft a secret national security decision directive that Reagan signed to authorize covert U.S. assistance to Saddam Hussein's military.

"The NSDD, including even its identifying number, is classified," Teicher wrote in 1995.

The effort to arm the Iraqis was "spearheaded" by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher's affidavit. "The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq," Teicher wrote.

In 1984, Teicher said he went to Iraq with Rumsfeld to convey a secret Israeli offer to assist Iraq after Israel had concluded that Iran was becoming a greater danger. "I traveled with Rumsfeld to Baghdad and was present at the meeting in which Rumsfeld told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz about Israel's offer of assistance," Teicher wrote. "Aziz refused even to accept the Israelis' letter to Hussein offering assistance because Aziz told us that he would be executed on the spot by Hussein if he did so."

Another key player in Reagan's Iraq tilt was then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, according to Teicher's affidavit.

"In 1986, President Reagan sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran," Teicher wrote. "This message was delivered by Vice President Bush who communicated it to Egyptian President Mubarak, who in turn passed the message to Saddam Hussein.

"Similar strategic operational military advice was passed to Saddam Hussein through various meetings with European and Middle Eastern heads of state. I authored Bush's talking points for the 1986 meeting with Mubarak and personally attended numerous meetings with European and Middle East heads of state where the strategic operational advice was communicated."

Teicher's affidavit represented a major break in the historical mystery of U.S. aid to Iraq. But it complicated a criminal arms-trafficking case that Clinton's Justice Department was prosecuting against Teledyne Industries and a salesman named Ed Johnson. They had allegedly sold explosive pellets to Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos Cardoen, who used them to manufacture cluster bombs for Iraq.

Red-Faced Prosecutors

Prior to trying the Teledyne case, Clinton's Justice Department declared that its investigation "did not find evidence that U.S. agencies or officials illegally armed Iraq." But the review noted, curiously, that the CIA had withheld an unknown number of documents that were contained in "sensitive compartments" that were denied to the investigators. Despite that denial of access, the Clinton investigators expressed confidence in their conclusions.

Two weeks after that exonerating report, however, Teicher's affidavit was filed in federal court in Miami, embarrassing senior Justice Department officials. After taking the word of former Reagan-Bush officials and agreeing not to examine the CIA's "sensitive compartments," the Justice Department officials looked gullible, incompetent or complicit.

They took their fury out on Teicher, insisting that his affidavit was unreliable and threatening him with dire consequences for coming forward. Yet, while deeming Teicher's affidavit false, the Clinton administration also declared the document a state secret, classifying it and putting it under court seal. A few copies, however, had been distributed outside the court and the text was soon posted on the Internet.

After officially suppressing the Teicher affidavit, the Justice Department prosecutors persuaded the judge presiding in the Teledyne-Johnson case to rule testimony about the Reagan-Bush policies to be irrelevant. Unable to mount its planned defense, Teledyne agreed to plead guilty and accept a $13 million fine. Johnson, the salesman who had earned a modest salary in the mid-$30,000 range, was convicted of illegal arms trafficking and given a prison term.

Before a U.S. invasion of Iraq begins, former President Clinton might be asked whether he was approached by George H.W. Bush or a Bush emissary with an request to drop investigations into Reagan-Bush policies in the Middle East.

Teicher, who has since 1995 refused to discuss his affidavit, could be given a congressional forum to testify about his knowledge. So could other surviving U.S. officials named in Teicher's affidavit, including Gates and Rumsfeld. Foreign leaders mentioned in the affidavit also could be approached, including former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Mubarak and Aziz.

Junior Bush's Hidden Records

George W. Bush also has some questions he should answer before missiles start crashing into Baghdad. When he took office in 2001, one of his first acts as president was to block the legally required release of documents from the Reagan-Bush administration.

Then, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a stunned nation rallied around him, Bush issued an even more sweeping secrecy order. He granted former presidents and vice presidents or their surviving family members the right to stop release of historical records, including those related to "military, diplomatic or national security secrets." Bush's order stripped the Archivist of the United States of the power to overrule claims of privilege from former presidents and their representatives. [For details on Bush's secrecy policies, see the New York Times, Jan. 3, 2003]

By a twist history, Bush's order eventually could give him control of both his and his father's records covering 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era and however long Bush's own presidential term lasts, potentially a 20-year swath of documentary evidence.

As the junior Bush now takes the nation to war in the name of freedom and democracy, he might at least be challenged to reverse that secrecy and release all relevant documents on the history of the Reagan-Bush policies in the Middle East. That way, the American people can decide for themselves whether Saddam Hussein is an aggressive leader whose behavior is so depraved that a preemptive war is the only reasonable course of action.

Or they might conclude that Saddam, like many other dictators through history, operates within a framework of self-preservation, which means he could be controlled by a combination of tough arms inspections and the threat of military retaliation.

Without the full history - as embarrassing as that record might be to the last five U.S. presidents - the American people cannot judge whether the nation's security will be enhanced or endangered by Bush's decision to put the United States on its own aggressive course of action.

As a correspondent for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, Robert Parry broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

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'It's under Bush's bed!'

Date: Wednesday, February 26 @ 09:53:44 EST

By Paulo Coelho, The Guardian

Bearing in mind that the president of the most powerful nation in the world is responsible for his actions and knows what he is talking about, I - a Brazilian writer, with no access to the secret services, the UN inspection procedure or confidential files, but able to read newspapers with a degree of intelligence - have come up with the definitive answer on how to locate the weapons of mass destruction being hidden by Iraq. I will require payment for this information, by the way.

This is how to locate the weapons, step-by-step:

1. All UN weapons inspectors currently in Iraq should pack their bags, settle their hotel bills and drive to Baghdad airport.

2. There they should buy business class air tickets to Washington. I stress business class so that they have time to rest, as the journey will involve a number of stopovers.



3. On reaching Washington, they should catch the first bus to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. The address can be found in the telephone directory for Virginia.

4. On reaching CIA headquarters, and armed with the appropriate UN inspection mandate, they should demand to see all photos, information and documents being supplied to Mr George Bush. These are the documents pinpointing the precise location of each arms cache that allow Mr Bush to assure us that Iraq has an arsenal capable of destroying the planet.

5. Once in possession of these documents, they should return to Iraq (again they should fly business class in order to arrive feeling rested) and go immediately to the places indicated in the photographs. Unable to deny the evidence, Saddam Hussein will have no option but to destroy his arsenal, for fear that the whole world will turn against him.

6. If the CIA does not have the documents, the inspectors should go straight to Mr George Bush's bedroom in the White House, Washington. On the way, they should avoid all contact with the thousands of American demonstrators taking part in protests against the war in Iraq.

7. If Mr George Bush fails to cooperate with the UN inspectors, they should look for the evidence under his bed. If they do not find it there, they should go and see the president's psychoanalyst, having first equipped themselves with a mandate from the UN security council, and ask the following question: "Does a son necessarily have to complete his father's work?" If the answer is yes, please advise me at once: my father was a civil engineer and, when he retired, he may well have left unfinished projects for his heir to deal with.

If the answer is no, demand that the psychoanalyst - on behalf of the UN, the US and the rest of the world - prescribe the necessary medication to his patient so that he no longer constitutes a threat to his country and to his planet.

This is the required method of payment:

Once this infallible line of action has been followed, I ask that the billions of dollars that would have been spent on the war be divided up in the following manner:

1. 50% to help the poor in Brazil, since the president of Brazil is currently grappling with a huge budget deficit, and because the author of this practical guide is himself Brazilian.

2. 40% to go to Africa.

3. 9% to old Europe, which wavered but did not fall - at least not up until now, the day on which I am writing this article.

4. 1% to pay for a nice biography of Tony Blair, to be translated into 40 languages, in hard cover, with colour photographs, saying what a great leader he is, how intelligent, important, charismatic, handsome and charming. That should be enough to keep him content, in the knowledge that his remarkable qualities have been recognised.

Finally, it is important to add the following: when speaking about the war, please do not generalise and say: "Americans all want to attack Iraq." We have made the same mistake before, in saying that "Serbs are all butchers", "Brazilians are all lazy", or "Iranians are all fundamentalists".

The people who want to attack Iraq are the politicians surrounding George Bush, the Enron orphans. The American people are fully aware of what is going on, and just as they managed to stop the war in Vietnam, they may, when no convincing explanations are forthcoming, manage to persuade Mr Bush's psychoanalyst to prescribe a sedative and put an end to this nightmare.

This article is a contribution to the openDemocracy debate on the Iraqi crisis published on www.opendemocracy.net

Paulo Coelho is a bestselling novelist

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Robert Fisk: 'How the news will be censored in this war'
Date: Tuesday, February 25 @ 09:52:48 EST

A new CNN system of 'script approval' suggests the Pentagon will have nothing to worry about

By Robert Fisk, The Independent

Already, the American press is expressing its approval of the coverage of American forces which the US military intends to allow its reporters in the next Gulf war. The boys from CNN, CBS, ABC and The New York Times will be "embedded" among the US marines and infantry. The degree of censorship hasn't quite been worked out. But it doesn't matter how much the Pentagon cuts from the reporters' dispatches. A new CNN system of "script approval" ? the iniquitous instruction to reporters that they have to send all their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure it is suitably sanitised ? suggests that the Pentagon and the Department of State have nothing to worry about. Nor do the Israelis.

Indeed, reading a new CNN document, "Reminder of Script Approval Policy", fairly takes the breath away. "All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval," it says. "Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved... All packages originating outside Washington, LA (Los Angeles) or NY (New York), including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW in Atlanta for approval."



The date of this extraordinary message is 27 January. The "ROW" is the row of script editors in Atlanta who can insist on changes or "balances" in the reporter's dispatch. "A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorised manager and duped (duplicated) to burcopy (bureau copy)... When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority."

Note the key words here: "approved" and "authorised". CNN's man or woman in Kuwait or Baghdad ? or Jerusalem or Ramallah ? may know the background to his or her story; indeed, they will know far more about it than the "authorities" in Atlanta. But CNN's chiefs will decide the spin of the story.

CNN, of course, is not alone in this paranoid form of reporting. Other US networks operate equally anti-journalistic systems. And it's not the fault of the reporters. CNN's teams may use clichés and don military costumes ? you will see them do this in the next war ? but they try to get something of the truth out. Next time, though, they're going to have even less chance.

Just where this awful system leads is evident from an intriguing exchange last year between CNN's reporter in the occupied West Bank town of Ramallah, and Eason Jordan, one of CNN's top honchos in Atlanta.

The journalist's first complaint was about a story by the reporter Michael Holmes on the Red Crescent ambulance drivers who are repeatedly shot at by Israeli troops. "We risked our lives and went out with ambulance drivers... for a whole day. We have also witnessed ambulances from our window being shot at by Israeli soldiers... The story received approval from Mike Shoulder. The story ran twice and then Rick Davis (a CNN executive) killed it. The reason was we did not have an Israeli army response, even though we stated in our story that Israel believes that Palestinians are smuggling weapons and wanted people in the ambulances."

The Israelis refused to give CNN an interview, only a written statement. This statement was then written into the CNN script. But again it was rejected by Davis in Atlanta. Only when, after three days, the Israeli army gave CNN an interview did Holmes's story run ? but then with the dishonest inclusion of a line that said the ambulances were shot in "crossfire" (ie that Palestinians also shot at their own ambulances).

The reporter's complaint was all too obvious. "Since when do we hold a story hostage to the whims of governments and armies?We were told by Rick that if we do not get an Israeli on-camera we would not air the package. This means that governments and armies are indirectly censoring us and we are playing directly into their own hands."

The relevance of this is all too obvious in the next Gulf War. We are going to have to see a US army officer denying everything the Iraqis say if any report from Iraq is to get on air. Take another of the Ramallah correspondent's complaints last year. In a package on the damage to Ramallah after Israel's massive incursion last April, "we had already mentioned right at the top of our piece that Israel says it is doing all these incursions because it wants to crack down on the infrastructure of terror. However, obviously that was not enough. We were made by the ROW (in Atlanta) to repeat this same idea three times in one piece, just to make sure that we keep justifying the Israeli actions..."

But the system of "script approval" that has so marred CNN's coverage has got worse. In a further and even more sinister message dated 31 January this year, CNN staff are told that a new computerised system of script approval will allow "authorised script approvers to mark scripts (ie reports) in a clear and standard manner. Script EPs (executive producers) will click on the coloured APPROVED button to turn it from red (unapproved) to green (approved). When someone makes a change in the script after approval, the button will turn yellow." Someone? Who is this someone? CNN's reporters aren't told.

But when we recall that CNN revealed after the 1991 Gulf War that it had allowed Pentagon "trainees" into the CNN newsroom in Atlanta, I have my suspicions.

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Two men driving Bush into war
Ed Vulliamy in New York profiles the religious figures behind a 'Texanised presidency' who believe war will mean America is respected in the Islamic world

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday February23 ,2003
The Observer

Behind President George W. Bush's charge to war against Iraq, there is a carefully devised mission, drawn up by people who work over the shoulders of those whom America calls 'The Principals'.

Lurking in the background behind Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are the people propelling US policy. And behind them, the masterminds of the Bush presidency as it arrived at the White House from Texas, are Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz.

It is too simple to explain the upcoming war as 'blood for oil', as did millions of placards last weekend, for Rove and Wolfowitz are ideologists beyond the imperatives of profit. They represent an unlikely and formidable alliance forged between the gritty Texan Republicans who took over America, fuelled by fierce conservative Christianity, and a faction of the East Coast intelligentsia with roots in Ronald Reagan's time, devoted to achieving raw, unilateral power.

Rove and Wolfowitz have worked for decades to reach their moment, and that moment has come as war draws near. Bush calls Rove, depending on his mood, 'Boy Genius' or 'Turd Blossom'. Rove is one of a new political breed - the master craftsmen - nurturing a24 -year political campaign of his own design, but careful not to expose who he really is.

His Christian faith is a weapon of devastating cogency, but he never discusses it; no one knows if his politics are religious or politics are his religion. A Christmas Day child born in Denver, as a boy he had a poster above his bed reading 'Wake Up, America!' As a student, he was a fervent young Republican who pitched himself against the peace movement.

His first bonding with Bush was not over politics, but the two men's ideological and moral distaste for the Sixties - after Bush's born-again conversion from alcoholism to Christianity. Rove was courted by George Bush Snr during his unsuccessful bid to be the Republican presidential candidate for1980 .

But Rove's genius would show later, on Bush senior's election to the White House in1988 , when he co-opted the right-wing Christian Coalition - wary of Bush's lack of theocratic stridency - into the family camp.

Conservative Southern Protestantism was a constituency Bush Jr befriended and kept all the way to Washington, defining both his own political personality and the new-look Republican Party.

When Rove answered the call to come to Texas in1978 , every state office was held by a Democrat. Now, almost all of them are Republican. Every Republican campaign was run by Rove and in 1994 his client - challenging for the state governorship - was a man he knew well: George W. Bush.

'Rove and Bush came to an important strategic conclusion,' writes Lou Dubose, Rove's biographer. 'To govern on behalf of the corporate Right, they would have to appease the Christian Right.'

Bush's six years as Texas governor were a dry run for national domestic policy - steered by Rove - as President: lavish favours to the energy industry, tax breaks for the upper income brackets and social policy driven by evangelical zeal.

Bush had been governor for only a year when, as Rove says, it 'dawned on me' he should run for President; two years later, in1997 , he began secretly planning the campaign. In March1999 , Bush ordered Rove to sell his consulting firm - 'he wanted 120 per cent of his attention,' says a former employee, 'full-time, day and night'.

Rove hatched and ran the presidential campaign, deploying the Bush family Rolodex and the might of the oil industry and unleashing the most vigorous direct-mailing blizzard of all time. 'If the devil is in the details,' writes Dubose, 'he had found Rove waiting to greet him when he got there.'

By the time George W. became President, Rove was the hub of a Texan wheel connecting the family, the party, the Christian Right and the energy industry. A single episode serves as metaphor: during the Enron scandal last year, a shadow was cast over Rove when it was revealed that he had sold $100, 000of Enron stock just before the firm went bankrupt.

More intriguing, however, was the fact that Rove had personally arranged for the former leader of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, to take up a consultancy at Enron - Bush's biggest single financial backer - worth between $10, 000and $20, 000a month.

This was the machine of perpetual motion that Rove built. His accomplishment was the 'Texanisation' of the national Republican Party under the leadership of the Bush family and to take that party back to presidential office after eight years. Rove is unquestionably the most powerful policy adviser in the White House.

Militant Islam was another world from Rove's. However, on 11 September,2001 , it became a new piece of political raw material needing urgent attention. Rove and Bush had been isolationists, wanting as little to do with the Middle East - or any other corner of the planet - as possible. But suddenly there was a new arena in which to work for political results: and, as Rove entered it, he met and was greeted by a group of people who had for years been as busy as he in crafting their political model; this time, the export of unchallenged American power across the world.

Rove in theory has no role in foreign policy, but Washington insiders agree he is now as preoccupied with global affairs as he is with those at home. In a recent book, conservative staff speech writer David Frum recalls the approach of the presidency towards Islam after the attacks and criticises Bush as being 'soft on Islam' for his emphasis on a 'religion of peace'.

Rove, writes Frum, was 'drawn to a very different answer'. Islam, Rove argued, 'was one of the world's great empires' which had 'never reconciled... to the loss of power and dominion'. In response, he said, 'the United States should recognise that, although it cannot expect to be loved, it can enforce respect'.

Rove's position dovetailed with the beliefs of Paul Wolfowitz, and the axis between conservative Southern Protestantism and fervent, highly intellectual, East Coast Zionism was forged - each as zealous about their religion as the other.

There is a shorthand view of Wolfowitz as a firebrand hawk, but he is more like Rove than that - patient, calculating, logical, soft-spoken and deliberate. Wolfowitz was a Jewish son of academe, a brilliant scholar of mathematics and a diplomat. When he joined the Pentagon after the Yom Kippur war, he set about laying out what is now US policy in the Middle East.

In 1992, just before Bush's father was defeated by Bill Clinton, Wolfowitz wrote a blueprint to 'set the nation's direction for the next century', which is now the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Entitled 'Defence Planning Guidance', it put an onus on the Pentagon to 'establish and protect a new order' under unchallenged American authority.

The US, it said, must be sure of 'deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role' - including Germany and Japan. It contemplated the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry pre-emptively, 'even in conflicts that do not directly engage US interests'.

Wolfowitz's group formalised itself into a group called Project for the New American Century, which included Cheney and another old friend, former Pentagon Under-Secretary for Policy under Reagan, Richard Perle.

In a document two years ago, the Project pondered that what was needed to assure US global power was 'some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor'. The document had noted that 'while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides immediate justification' for intervention, 'the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein'.

At a graduation speech to the Military Academy at West Point, Bush last June affirmed the Wolfowitz doctrine as official policy. 'America has, and intends to keep,' he said, 'military strengths beyond challenge.'

At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and his boss Rumsfeld set up an intelligence group under Abram Schulsky and the Under-Secretary for Defence, Douglas Feith, both old friends of Wolfowitz. The group's public face is the semi-official Defence Policy Board, headed by Perle. Perle and Feith wrote a paper in 1996 called 'A Clean Break' for the then leader of Israel's Likud bloc, Binyamin Netanyahu; the clean break was from the Oslo peace process. Israel's 'claim to the land (including the West Bank) is legitimate and noble,' said the paper. 'Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights is a solid basis for the future.' At the State Department, the 'Arabist' faction of regional experts favouring the diplomacy of alliances in the area was drowned out by the hawks, markedly by another new unit with favoured access to the White House.

And in Rove's White House, with his backing, the circle was closed and the last piece of the jigsaw was put in place, with the appointment of Elliot Abrams to handle policy for the Middle East, for the National Security Council.

Abrams is another veteran of Reagan days and the 'dirty wars' in Central America, convicted by Congress for lying alongside Colonel Oliver North over the Iran-Contra scandal, but pardoned by President Bush's father.

He has since written a book warning that American Jewry faces extinction through intermarriage and has counselled against the peace process and for the righteousness of Ariel Sharon's Israel. He is Wolfowitz's man, talking every day to his office neighbour, Rove.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited2003

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Full U.S. Control Planned for Iraq

American Would Oversee Rebuilding

By Karen DeYoung and Peter Slevin

Washington Post Staff Writers


Friday, February 21, 2003; Page A01

The Bush administration plans to take complete, unilateral
control of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, with an interim administration
headed by a yet-to-be named American civilian who would direct the
reconstruction of the country and the creation of a "representative"
Iraqi government, according to a now-finalized blueprint described by
U.S. officials and other sources.

Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of
the U.S. Central Command, is to maintain military control as long as
U.S. troops are there. Once security was established and weapons of
mass destruction were located and disabled, a U.S. administrator would
run the civilian government and direct reconstruction and humanitarian
aid.

In the early days of military action, U.S. forces following
behind those in combat would distribute food and other relief items
and begin needed reconstruction. The goal, officials said, would be to
make sure the Iraqi people "immediately" consider themselves better off
than they were the day before war, and attribute their improved
circumstances directly to the United States.

The initial
humanitarian effort, as previously announced, is to be directed by
retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner. But once he got to Baghdad,
sources said, Garner would quickly be replaced as the supreme civil
authority by an American "of stature," such as a former U.S. state
governor or ambassador, officials said.

Officials said other
governments are being recruited to participate in relief and
reconstruction tasks under U.S. supervision at a time to be decided by
Franks and officials in Washington. Although initial food supplies are
to be provided by the United States, negotiations are underway with the
U.N. World Food Program to administer a nationwide distribution
network Opposition leaders were informed this week that the United
States will not recognize an Iraqi provisional government being
discussed by some expatriate groups. Some 20 to 25 Iraqis would assist
U.S. authorities in a U.S.-appointed "consultative council," with no
governing responsibility. Under a decision finalized last week, Iraqi
government officials would be subjected to "de-Baathification," a
reference to Hussein's ruling Baath Party, under a program that borrows
from the "de-Nazification" program established in Germany after World
War II.

Criteria by which officials would be designated as too
tainted to keep their jobs are still being worked on, although they
would likely be based more on complicity with the human rights and
weapons abuses of the Hussein government than corruption, officials
said. A large number of current officials would be retained.

Although
some of the broad strokes of U.S. plans for a post-Hussein Iraq have
previously been reported, newly finalized elements include the extent
of U.S. control and the plan to appoint a nonmilitary civil
administrator. Officials cautioned that developments in Iraq could
lead them to revise the plan on the run. Yet to be decided is "at what
point and for what purpose" a multinational administration, perhaps run
by the United Nations, would be considered to replace the U.S. civil
authority.

"We have a load of plans that could be carried out by
an international group, a coalition group, or by us and a few others,"
one senior U.S. official. President Bush, the official said, doesn't
want to close options until the participants in a military action are
known and the actual postwar situation in Iraq becomes clear.

The
administration has been under strong pressure to demonstrate that it
has a detailed program to deal with what is expected to be a chaotic
and dangerous situation if Hussein is removed. The White House plans
to brief Congress and reporters on more details of the plan next week.

No
definitive price tag or time limit has been put on the plan, and
officials stressed that much remains unknown about the length of a
potential conflict, how much destruction would result, and "how deep"
the corruption of the Iraqi government goes. The administration has
declined to estimate how long U.S. forces would remain in Iraq.
Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman told Congress last week that it
might be two years before the Iraqis regained administrative control of
their country. But "they're terrified of being caught in a time frame,"
said retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, one of a number of senior
military and civilian experts who have been briefed by the Pentagon on
the plan. "My own view is that it will take five years, with
substantial military power, to establish and exploit the peace" in Iraq.

Although
more than 180,000 U.S. troops are on the ground in the Persian Gulf
region, U.S. officials continued to emphasize that President Bush still
has not made a final decision on whether to go to war. Negotiations at
the United Nations, where Bush is seeking a new Security Council
resolution declaring that Hussein has violated U.N. disarmament demands
and authorizing that he be disarmed by a U.N. multinational force, are
at a delicate stage.

A majority of the council's 15 members have
said they believe a decision on war should be delayed while U.N.
weapons inspections, launched in November, continue. Bush has said
that, if necessary, the U.S. military and a "coalition of the willing"
will disarm Iraq without U.N. approval.

The administration also
is continuing discussions with Arab governments about the possibilities
of exile for Hussein and several dozen of his family members and top
officials. Sources said, however, that even if Hussein and a small
group of others were to leave, uncertainties about who would remain in
charge, the need to destroy weapons of mass destruction, and concerns
about establishing long-term stability would likely lead to the
insertion of U.S. troops there in any case.

Among the other parts of the post-Hussein plan:

?
Iraqi military forces would be gathered in prisoner-of-war camps, with
opposition members now receiving U.S. training at an air base in
Hungary serving as part of the guard force. The Iraqi troops would be
vetted by U.S. forces under Franks's command, and those who were
cleared, beginning with those who "stood down or switched sides" during
a U.S. assault, would receive U.S. training to serve in what one
official called a "post-stabilization" force.

U.S. forces would
secure any weapons of mass destruction that were found, including
biological and chemical weapons stores. "At an appropriate time," an
official said, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and
Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, who
are conducting U.N.-mandated weapons inspections in Iraq, might be
brought in to examine weaponry, scientists and documentation.

In
addition to the consultative council, an Iraqi commission would be
formed to reestablish a judicial system. An additional commission would
write a new constitution, although officials emphasized that they would
not expect to "democratize" Iraq along the lines of the U.S. governing
system. Instead, they speak of a "representative Iraqi government."

Officials
said the decision to install U.S. military and civilian administrations
for an indeterminate time stems from lessons learned in Afghanistan,
where power has been diffused among U.S. military forces still waging
war against the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, a multinational
security force of several thousand troops in which the United States
does not participate, and the interim government of Afghan President
Hamid Karzai.

The administration is particularly keen on averting
interference by other regional powers, and cites the "ability of
people like the Iranians and others to go in with money and create
warlords" sympathetic to their own interests, one official said. "We
don't want a weak federal government that plays into the hands of
regional powers" and allows Iraq to be divided into de facto spheres
of influence. "We don't want the Iranians to be paying the Shiites, the
Turks the Turkmen and the Saudis the Sunnis," the official, referring
to some of the main groups among dozens of Iraqi tribes and ethnic and
religious groups.

A similar anxiety led to the decision to
prohibit the Iraqi opposition based outside the country from forming a
provisional government. The chief proponent of that idea, Ahmed
Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, was informed this week
that any move to declare a provisional Iraqi government "would result
in a formal break in the U.S.-INC relationship," the official said.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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When U.S. Foreign Policy Meets Biblical Prophecy
Paul S. Boyer, AlterNet
February 20, 2003
Viewed on February 21, 2003

Does the Bible foretell regime change in Iraq? Did God establish Israel's boundaries millennia ago? Is the United Nations a forerunner of a satanic world order?

For millions of Americans, the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes. For many believers in biblical prophecy, the Bush administration's go-it-alone foreign policy, hands-off attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and proposed war on Iraq are not simply actions in the national self-interest or an extension of the war on terrorism, but part of an unfolding divine plan.

Evangelical Christians have long complained that "people of faith" do not get sufficient respect, and that religious belief is trivialized in our public discourse. So argues Stephen L. Carter, a Yale University law professor and an evangelical Christian, in his 1993 "The Culture of Disbelief." Carter has a point, at least with reference to my own field of American history. With notable exceptions, cultural historians have long underplayed the importance of religion in the United States, particularly in the modern era. Church historians have produced good work, but somewhat in isolation, cut off from the larger currents of cultural and intellectual history. That is changing, as evidenced by Mark A. Noll's magisterial "America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln" (2002). But, over all, the critics are on target.

However, I would vigorously challenge Carter's related complaint that religious belief plays little role in shaping public policy. In fact, religion has always had an enormous, if indirect and underrecognized, role in policy formation.

And that is especially true today, as is illustrated by the shadowy but vital way that belief in biblical prophecy is helping mold grassroots attitudes toward current U.S. foreign policy. As the nation debates a march toward war in the Middle East, all of us would do well to pay attention to the beliefs of the vast company of Americans who read the headlines and watch the news through a filter of prophetic belief.

Abundant evidence makes clear that millions of Americans -- upwards of 40 percent, according to some widely publicized national polls -- do, indeed, believe that Bible prophecies detail a specific sequence of end-times events. According to the most popular prophetic system, premillennial dispensationalism, formulated by the 19th-century British churchman John Darby, a series of last-day signs will signal the approaching end. Those will include wars, natural disasters, rampant immorality, the rise of a world political and economic order, and the return of the Jews to the land promised by God to Abraham.

In Darby's system, the present "dispensation" will end with the Rapture, when all true believers will join Christ in the air. Next comes the Tribulation, when a charismatic but satanic figure, the Antichrist, will arise in Europe, seize world power, and impose his universal tyranny under the dread sign "666," mentioned in Revelation. After seven years, Christ and the saints will return to vanquish the Antichrist and his armies at Har-Megiddo (the biblical Armageddon), an ancient battle site near Haifa. From a restored Temple in Jerusalem, Christ will then inaugurate a thousand-year reign of peace and justice -- the Millennium.

That scenario, which Darby ingeniously cobbled together from apocalyptic passages throughout the Bible, was popularized in America by expositors like Cyrus Scofield, whose 1909 "Scofield Reference Bible" became a best seller. More recently, dispensationalism has been promulgated by radio evangelists; paperback popularizers; fundamentalist and Pentecostal pastors; and TV luminaries like Jerry Falwell, Jack Van Impe, and John Hagee.

Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth" (1970), a slangy update of Darby's teachings, became the nonfiction best seller in the 1970s. Today's Left Behind series, a multivolume fictional treatment of dispensationalism by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, has sold 50 million copies since the first volume appeared, in 1995. Volume 10, The Remnant, topped the The New York Times's bestseller list for several weeks last summer.

During the cold war, Lindsey and other prophecy gurus focused on the Soviet Union, citing a passage in Ezekiel foretelling the destruction of a northern kingdom, Gog, which they interpreted as Russia. Today's popularizers, however, spotlight the Middle East and the rise of a New World Order led by their own "axis of evil": the United Nations and other international bodies; global media conglomerates; and multinational corporations, trading alliances, and financial institutions. This interlocking system, they preach, is laying the groundwork for the Antichrist's prophesied dictatorship.

As for the Middle East, the popularizers view Israel's founding in 1948, and its recapture of Jerusalem's Old City in 1967, as key end-times signs. They also see the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and a future rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple on a site sacred to Muslims, as steps in God's unfolding plan. The most hard-line and expansionist groups in Israel today, including Likud Party leaders, have gratefully welcomed this unwavering support. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States in 1998, he called first on Falwell, and only then met with President Clinton. (Dispensationalist dogma also foretells the mass slaughter of Jews by the Antichrist and the conversion of the surviving remnant to Christianity, but those themes are played down by most current popularizers.)

On the basis of such beliefs, dispensationalists denounce any proposals for shared governance of Jerusalem. As Hagee writes in "Final Dawn Over Jerusalem" (Thomas Nelson, 1998): "Christians and Jews, let us stand united and indivisible on this issue: There can be no compromise regarding the city of Jerusalem, not now, not ever. We are racing toward the end of time, and Israel lies in the eye of the storm. ... Israel is the only nation created by a sovereign act of God, and He has sworn by His holiness to defend Jerusalem, His Holy City. If God created and defends Israel, those nations that fight against it fight against God." Dispensationalists also oppose any scaling back of Jewish settlements in the West Bank or Gaza, since those areas lie well within God's grant to Abraham, recorded in Genesis 15:18, of all of the land from "the river of Egypt" to the Euphrates.

In this scenario, the Islamic world is allied against God and faces annihilation in the last days. That view is actually a very ancient one in Christian eschatology. Medieval prophecy expounders saw Islam as the demonic force whose doom is foretold in Scripture. As Richard the Lionhearted prepared for the Third Crusade in 1190, the famed prophecy interpreter Joachim of Fiore assured him that the Islamic ruler Saladin, who held Jerusalem, was the Antichrist, and that Richard would defeat him and recapture the Holy City. (Joachim's prophecy failed: Richard returned to Europe in 1192 with Saladin still in power.) Later interpreters cast the Ottoman Empire in the Antichrist role.

That theme faded after 1920, with the Ottoman collapse and the rise of the Soviet Union, but it surged back in the later 20th century, as prophecy popularizers began not only to support the most hard-line groups in Israel, but also to demonize Islam as irredeemably evil and destined for destruction. "The Arab world is an Antichrist-world," wrote Guy Dury in "Escape From the Coming Tribulation" (1975). "God says he will lay the land of the Arabs waste and it will be desolate," Arthur Bloomfield wrote in "Before the Last Battle -- Armageddon," published in 1971 and reprinted in 1999. "This may seem like a severe punishment, but ... the terms of the covenant must be carried out to the letter."

The anti-Islamic rhetoric is at fever pitch today. Last June, the prophecy magazine Midnight Call warmly endorsed a fierce attack on Islam by Franklin Graham (son of Billy) and summed up Graham's case in stark terms: "Islam is an evil religion." In Lindsey's 1996 prophecy novel, "Blood Moon," Israel, in retaliation for a planned nuclear attack by an Arab extremist, launches a massive thermonuclear assault on the entire Arab world. Genocide, in short, becomes the ultimate means of prophetic fulfillment.

Anticipating George W. Bush, prophecy writers in the late 20th century also quickly zeroed in on Saddam Hussein. If not the Antichrist himself, they suggested, Saddam could well be a forerunner of the Evil One. In full-page newspaper advertisements during the Persian Gulf war of 1991, the organization Jews for Jesus declared that Saddam "represents the spirit of Antichrist about which the Bible warns us."

Prophecy believers found particular significance in Saddam's grandiose plan, launched in the 1970s, to rebuild Babylon on its ancient ruins. The fabled city on the Euphrates, south of Baghdad, which included one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, owed its splendor to King Nebuchadnezzar, the same wicked ruler who warred against Israel and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C., for which impiety, according to the Book of Daniel, he went mad and ended his days eating grass in the fields.

In Revelation, Babylon embodies all that is corrupt, "a great whore ... with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication." It stands as the antithesis of Jerusalem, the city of righteousness, and Revelation prophesies its annihilation by fire. Since Babylon cannot be destroyed unless it exists, Saddam's ambitious public-works project is seen as an essential step toward prophetic fulfillment.

Charles Dyer's "The Rise of Babylon: Sign of the End Times" (1991) elaborates the theme. Along with the emergence of modern Israel and the European Union (forerunner of the Antichrist's world system), writes Dyer, Saddam's restoration of Babylon signals the approaching end and offers "thrilling proof that Bible prophecies are infallible." "When Babylon is ultimately destroyed," he continues, "Israel will finally be at peace and will dwell in safety."

That theme resonates powerfully with today's calls for Saddam's overthrow. Indeed, the cover illustration of Dyer's book juxtaposes Saddam and Nebuchadnezzar. Hal Lindsey's Web site recently featured a cartoon of a military aircraft emblazoned with a U.S. flag and a Star of David and carrying a missile with a label targeting "Saddam." The caption quoted the prophet Zechariah: "It shall be that day I will seek to destroy all nations that come against Israel."

All of these themes converge in the Left Behind novels. As the plot unfolds, the Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, becomes secretary general of the United Nations. ("I've opposed the United Nations for 50 years," boasts one of the authors, Tim LaHaye, a veteran activist on the religious right.) Carpathia moves the U.N. from New York to a rebuilt Babylon, laying the groundwork for the simultaneous destruction of both the city that in the grammar of dispensationalism represents absolute evil and defiance of God's prophetic plan, and the organization that more than any other prefigures the Antichrist's satanic world order.

To be sure, some current Bush-administration policies trouble prophecy believers. For example, the expansion of Washington's surveillance powers after 9/11 (led, ironically, by Attorney General John Ashcroft, darling of the religious right) strikes some as another step toward the Antichrist's global dictatorship. Counterbalancing that, however, other key administration positions -- its hostility to multinational cooperation and international agreements, its downgrading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its muted response to growing Jewish settlement in Palestinian territory, and its unrelenting focus on Saddam Hussein -- strike prophecy believers as perfectly in harmony with God's prophetic plan: a plan that will bring human history to its apocalyptic denouement and usher in the longed-for epoch of righteousness, justice, and peace.

Academics do need to pay more attention to the role of religious belief in American public life, not only in the past, but also today. Without close attention to the prophetic scenario embraced by millions of American citizens, the current political climate in the United States cannot be fully understood.

Leaders have always invoked God's blessing on their wars, and, in this respect, the Bush administration is simply carrying on a familiar tradition. But when our born-again president describes the nation's foreign-policy objective in theological terms as a global struggle against "evildoers," and when, in his recent State of the Union address, he casts Saddam Hussein as a demonic, quasi-supernatural figure who could unleash "a day of horror like none we have ever known," he is not only playing upon our still-raw memories of 9/11. He is also invoking a powerful and ancient apocalyptic vocabulary that for millions of prophecy believers conveys a specific and thrilling message of an approaching end -- not just of Saddam, but of human history as we know it.

Paul S. Boyer, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and currently a visiting professor of history at the College of William and Mary, is the author of "When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture" (Harvard University Press, 1992).

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The White Van
Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?

June 21

— Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.


Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.

She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.

Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said.

The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.

She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.

The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.

The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.

‘We Are Not Your Problem’

According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem." The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.

When the men were transferred to jail, the case was transferred out of the FBI's Criminal Division, and into the bureau's Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases, ABCNEWS has learned.

One reason for the shift, sources told ABCNEWS, was that the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.

After the five men were arrested, the FBI got a warrant and searched Urban Moving's Weehawken, N.J., offices.

The FBI searched Urban Moving's offices for several hours, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. The FBI also questioned Urban Moving's owner. His attorney insists that his client answered all of the FBI's questions. But when FBI agents tried to interview him again a few days later, he was gone.

Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse.

The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.

‘A Scary Situation’

Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients' actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. "You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They're speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on 'em. One's got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that's a scary situation."

But Gordon insisted that his clients were just five young men who had come to America for a vacation, ended up working for a moving company, and were taking pictures of the event.

The five Israelis were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ostensibly for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. But sources told ABCNEWS that FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case.

The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days, and some of them were given as many as seven lie-detector tests.

Plenty of Speculation

Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives.

Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities' interest in the case was heightened when some of the men's names were found in a search of a national intelligence database.

Israeli Intelligence Connection?

According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area."

Under this scenario, the alleged spying operation was not aimed against the United States, but at penetrating or monitoring radical fund-raising and support networks in Muslim communities like Paterson, N.J., which was one of the places where several of the hijackers lived in the months prior to Sept. 11.

For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.

Sources say the Israelis were targeting these fund-raising networks because they were thought to be channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel. "[The] Israeli government has been very concerned about the activity of radical Islamic groups in the United States that could be a support apparatus to Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cannistraro said.

The men denied that they had been working for Israeli intelligence out of the New Jersey moving company, and Ram Horvitz, their Israeli attorney, dismissed the allegations as "stupid and ridiculous."

Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, goes even further, asserting the issue was never even discussed with U.S. officials.

"These five men were not involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the American intelligence authorities have never raised this issue with us," Regev said. "The story is simply false."

No ‘Pre-Knowledge’

Despite the denials, sources tell ABCNEWS there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. Many U.S. government officials still believe that some of them were on a mission for Israeli intelligence. But the FBI told ABCNEWS, "To date, this investigation has not identified anybody who in this country had pre-knowledge of the events of 9/11."

Sources also said that even if the men were spies, there is no evidence to conclude they had advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. The investigation, at the end of the day, after all the polygraphs, all of the field work, all the cross-checking, the intelligence work, concluded that they probably did not have advance knowledge of 9/11," Cannistraro noted.

As to what they were doing on the van, they say they read about the attack on the Internet, couldn't see it from their offices and went to the parking lot for a better view. But no one has been able to find a good explanation for why they may have been smiling with the towers of the World Trade Center burning in the background. Both the lawyers for the young men and the Israeli Embassy chalk it up to immature conduct.

According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home.

While the former detainees refused to answer ABCNEWS' questions about their detention and what they were doing on Sept. 11, several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home.

Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."

ABCNEWS' Chris Isham, John Miller, Glenn Silber and Chris Vlasto contributed to this report.

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Robert Fisk: The case against war: A conflict driven by the self-interest of America

15 February 2003

In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays dressed up as "intelligence". We are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the Middle East to their advantage.

No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt refutation of America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday warmed so many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy "allies" they have become.

The British don't like Hussein any more than they liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as Blair does not, the Second World War; they are not conned by childish parables of Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain and appeasement. They do not like being lectured and whined at by men whose experience of war is Hollywood and television.

Still less do they wish to embark on endless wars with a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, is now sending America's poor to destroy a Muslim nation that has nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Jack Straw, the public school Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all this, with Blair. He brays at us about the dangers of nuclear weapons that Iraq does not have, of the torture and aggression of a dictatorship that America and Britain sustained when Saddam was "one of ours". But he and Blair cannot discuss the dark political agenda behind George Bush's government, nor the "sinister men" (the words of a very senior UN official) around the President.

Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included – though we play down the RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons – and many Americans – are a lot braver than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children.

Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in that play better expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do they take me for a simpleton?" The British, like other Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their opposition to this obscene war may make them feel more, not less, European.

Palestine has much to do with it. Brits have no love for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough and are outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians by a nation that is now in effect running US policy in the Middle East. We are told that our invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a burning, fearsome wound to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his meretricious State of the Union speech – but even Blair can't get away with that one; hence his "conference" for Palestinian reform at which the Palestinians had to take part via video-link because Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let them travel to London.

So much for Blair's influence over Washington – the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that he couldn't persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at least one has to acknowledge that Sharon – war criminal though he may be for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres – treated Blair with the contempt he deserves. Nor can the Americans hide the link between Iraq and Israel and Palestine. In his devious address to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked the three when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide bombings so cruelly afflict Israelis, keeps an office in Baghdad.

Just as he told us about the mysterious al-Qa'ida men who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi gorge". This was America's way of giving Vladimir Putin a free hand again in his campaign of rape and murder against the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark to the UN General Assembly last 12 September about the need to protect Iraq's Turkomans only becomes clear when one realises that Turkomans make up two thirds of the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil fields.

The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected – if he was elected – US President. And they weren't doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm) called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by – yes, Richard Perle. The destruction of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon has in store.

Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss this with us – a war for Israel is not going to have our boys lining up at the recruiting offices – Jewish American leaders talk about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish American groups who so bravely oppose this madness have been the first to point out how pro-Israeli organisations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic must be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins University, tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations' objections to the war might – yet again – be ascribed to "anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said, is opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery, argue that an Iraq war will leave Israel with even more Arab enemies, especially if Iraq attacks Israel and Sharon then joins the US battle against the Arabs.

The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lies behind Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe". He was talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and the "old" France of collaboration. But the France and Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe, the continent which refuses, ever again, to slaughter the innocent. It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the "old" America; not the "new" America of freedom, the America of F D Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolise the old America that killed its native Indians and embarked on imperial adventures. It is "old" America we are being asked to fight for – linked to a new form of colonialism – an America that first threatens the United Nations with irrelevancy and then does the same to Nato. This is not the last chance for the UN, nor for Nato. But it may well be the last chance for America to be taken seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.

In these last days of peace the British should not be tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN resolution. UN permission for America's war will not make the war legitimate; it merely proves that the Council can be controlled with bribes, threats or abstentions. It was the Soviet Union's abstention, after all, which allowed America to fight the savage Korean war under the UN flag. And we should not doubt that – after a quick US military conquest of Iraq and providing 'they" die more than we die – there will be plenty of anti-war protesters who will claim they were pro-war all along. The first pictures of "liberated" Baghdad will show Iraqi children making victory signs to American tank crews. But the real cruelty and cynicism of this conflict will become evident as soon as the "war" ends, when our colonial occupation of a Muslim nation for the US and Israel begins.

There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon a "man of peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face trial over Sabra and Chatila, which is why Israel has just withdrawn its ambassador to Belgium. I'd like to see Saddam in the same court. And Rifaat Assad for his 1982 massacre in the Syrian city of Hama. And all the torturers of Israel and the Arab dictatorships.

Israeli and US ambitions in the region are now entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and regional control. It is being cheer-led by a draft-dodger who is treacherously telling us that this is part of an eternal war against "terror". And the British and most Europeans don't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't fight for America. They just don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to fight for Blair either.

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