A Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities - The Ghosts of Vietnam

By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

Who said this and when?

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that the public knows... We are today not far from a disaster."

Answer: TE Lawrence (of Arabia fame) in The Sunday Times in August, 1920. And every word of it is true today. We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We were lied to about the links between Saddam Hussein and September 11, 2001. We were lied to about the insurgents--remember how they were just "dead-enders" and "remnants"?--and we were lied to about the improvements in Iraq when the entire country was steadily falling outside the hands of the occupying powers or of the government of satraps that they have set up in their place. We are, I suspect, being lied to about elections next month.

Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies--when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq--are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East. My own calculations--probably conservative, because there are many violent acts that we are never told about -suggest that in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day. How does this happen? Is there asuicide-bomber supermarket, an off-the-shelf store? What have we done to create this extraordinary industry? Time was, in Lebanon, when a suicide bombing was a once-a-month event. Or in Palestine/Israel a once-a-week event. Now, in Iraq, it is daily or twice daily.

And American troops are sending home increasingly terrible stories of the wanton killing of civilians by US forces in the towns and cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence of ex-marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee hearing in Canada earlier this month. Massey told the Canadian board--which had to decide whether to give refugee status to an American deserter from the 82nd Airborne--that he and his fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms up.

"We killed the man," Massey said. "We fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle." Massey assumed that the dead Iraqis didn't understand the hand signals to stop. On another occasion, according to Massey, marines--in reaction to a stray bullet--opened fire and killed a group of unarmed protesters and bystanders.

"I was deeply concerned about the civilian casualties," Massey said. "What they (the marines) were doing was committing murder." The defector from the 82nd Airborne, Jeremy Hinzman, told the court that "we were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists... to foster an attitude of hatred that gets your blood boiling".

All this, of course, is part of the "withholding of information". It took months before the Abu Ghraib torture and abuses were made public--even though the International Red Cross had already told the American and British authorities. It took months, for that matter, for the British Government to respond to the outrageous beatings--and one killing--carried out on defenceless Iraqis in Basra, first exposed by The Independent. In the first seven months of last year, the authorities maintained that they still "controlled" Iraq, even though--when I drove 70 miles south of Baghdad in August--I found every checkpoint deserted and the highways littered with burnt American trucks and police vehicles.

Still we are not told how many civilians were killed in the American attack on Fallujah. The Americans' claim that they killed more than 1,000 insurgents--only insurgents, mark you, not a single civilian among them--is preposterous. Still we are not freeto enter the city. Nor, given the fact that the insurgents still appear to be there, is it likely that anyone can do so. Why are American aircraft still bombing Fallujah, weeks after the US military claimed to have captured it?

It is difficult, over the past year, to think of anything that has not gone wrong or grown worse in Iraq. The electrical grid is collapsing again, the petrol queues are greater than they were in the days following the illegal invasion in 2003, and security is non-existent in all but the Kurdish north of the country.

The proposal to put Saddam's minions on trial looks more and more like an attempt to justify the invasion and distract attention from the horrors to come. Even the forthcoming elections are beginning to look more and more like a diversion. For if the Sunnis cannot--or will not--vote, what will this election be worth? Donald Rumsfeld gave us the first hint that things might not be going quite to plan when he spoke before the American election about a poll in "parts" of Iraq. What does this mean?

Yet, still the invaders go on telling us that things are getting better, that Iraq is about to enter the brotherhood of nations. Bush even got re-elected after telling this lie. The body bags are returning home more frequently than ever--we are not supposed to ask how many Iraqis are dying--yet still we are told that the invasion was worthwhile, that Iraqis are better off, that security will improve or--my favourite, this one--that they will get worse, the nearer we get to elections.

This is the same old story that Bush and Rumsfeld used to put about last spring: that things are getting better--which is why the insurgents are creating so much violence; in other words, the better things are, the worse things are going to get. When you read this nonsense in Washington or London, it might make sense. In Baghdad, it is madness. I wouldn't want to try it out on the young American soldiers who were so arrogantly

informed by Rumsfeld that "you go to war with the army you have".

It would be pleasant to record some happiness somewhere in the Middle East. Palestinian elections in the New Year? Well, yes, but if the colourless and undemocratic Mahmoud Abbas is the best the Palestinians have to look forward to, after the far too colourful Yassir Arafat, then their chances of achieving statehood are about as dismal as they were when Arafat resided in his Ramallah bunker.

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is not trying to close down illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza because he wants to be nice to the Palestinians; and his spokesman's dismissive remarks about the West Bank--that the Gaza withdrawal will put Palestinian statehood into "formaldehyde"--does not suggest that the occupied are going to receive statehood from their occupiers. Which means, one way or another, that the intifada will restart. At which point, the Israelis will complain that Abbas cannot "control his own people", and the Israelis and the Palestinians will return to their hopeless conflict.

It is impossible to reflect on the year in Iraq without realising just how deeply the Israeli-Palestinian struggle affects the entire Middle East. Iraqis watch the Palestinian battle with great earnestness. Saddam Hussein's support for the Palestinians was one with which many Iraqis could identify--even if they loathed their own dictator. And I doubt very much if the suicide bomber would have come of age so quickly in Iraq without the precedent set by the suicide bombers of Palestine and, before them, of Lebanon.

It is this precedent-setting capacity of events in the Middle East--not the mythical "foreign fighters" of George Bush's fantasy world--that is costing America so much blood in Iraq. When Sharon tries to prevent Palestinian statehood, Iraqis remember that his closest ally is represented in Iraq by an army which most of them regard as occupiers. When US forces learn their guerrilla warfare techniques from the Israelis--when they bomb houses from the air, when they abuse prisoners, when they even erect razor-wire round recalcitrant villages--is it surprising that Iraqis treat the Americans as surrogate Israelis?

We shouldn't need the evidence of ex-marine Massey to show us how brutal the occupying armies have become--and how irrelevant Iraq's "interim" government truly is. In Washington or London, these "ministers" play the role of international statesmen, but in Baghdad, where they hide behind the walls of their dangerous little enclave, they have as much status as rural mayors. Besides, they cannot even negotiate with their enemies.

Which leads us to the one clear fact about the last year of chaos and anarchy and brutality in Iraq. We still do not know who our enemies are. Save for the one name, "Zarqawi", the Americans--with all the billions of dollars they have thrown into intelligence, their CIA mainframe computers and their huge payments to informers--simply do not know whom they are fighting. They "recapture" Samarra--three times--and then they lose it again. They "recapture" Fallujah and then they lose it again. They cannot even control the main streets of Baghdad.

Who would have believed, in 2003, as US forces drove into Baghdad, that within two years they would be mired in their biggest guerrilla war since Vietnam? Those few of us who predicted just that--and The Independent was among them--were derided as nay-sayers, doom-mongers, pessimists.

Iraq is now proving all over again what we should have learned in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel: that Arabs have lost their fear. It has been a slow process. But a quarter of a century ago, the Arabs lived in chains, cowed by occupiers and oppressive regimes. They were a submissive society and they did as they were told. The Israelis even used a "Palestinian police force" to help them in their occupation. Not any more. The biggest development in the Middle East over the past 30 years has been this shaking off of fear. Fear--of the occupier, of the dictator--is something that you cannot re-inject into people. And this, I suspect, is what has happened in Iraq.

Iraqis are just not prepared to live in fear any more. They know they must depend on themselves--our betrayal of the 1991 rising against Saddam proved that--and they refuse to be frightened by their occupiers. It was we who warned them of the dangers of civil war, even though there never has been a civil war in Iraq. As a people, they watched Westerners turn up by the thousand to make money out of a country that had been beaten down by a corrupt dictatorship and UN sanctions. Is it any surprised that Iraqis are angry?

The American columnist Tom Friedman, in one of his less messianic articles, posed a good question before the 2003 invasion. Who knows, he asked, what bats will fly out of the box when we get to Baghdad? Well, now we know. So we should repeat Lawrence's chilling remark--without the quotation marks and the date 1920. We are today not far from a disaster.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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قلق معولم امتد من كولومبو الى بيروت

يومان لم تنقطع فيهما "ديفي" عن البكاء المر والنحيب. "ديفي" هي "البنت" السريلانكية التي
تعمل لدينا (كما يطلق اللبنانيون على السريلانكيات اللواتي يعملن في منازلهم). متزوجة وأم لولدين, في الثالثة والخامسة من العمر, خلّفتهما وراءها في عهدة زوجها العاطل عن العمل في تلك البلاد الجميلة (كما يجهل معظم اللبنانيين) والفقيرة, سعياً, هي وبنات جنسها, وراء مئة دولار شهرياً, وغالباً ما يقتطع مكتب الاستخدام راتب الشهرين الأولين أو الشهور الثلاثة الأولى من أجرتهن عمولة على استقدامهن.

بكت بحرقة فيما كنا نحاول مراراً وتكراراً الاتصال هاتفياً, من دون جدوى, بتلك البلاد المنكوبة بالزلزال. تمتمات غير مفهومة كانت تصاحب بكاءها. الأرجح انها كانت تلهج بالدعاء والتضرع الى الله, بلغتها الهندوسية, ان يكون طفلاها بخير.

تبدّت لي, للمرة الأولى, أماً تشبه الى حد كبير أمي وزوجتي وأختي وجارتنا, وكل نساء العالم. "اكتشفنا" انها امرأة, كما كل النساء (والرجال), تبكي وتحب وتقلق وتصلي... لم تعد "البنت التي عندنا", كما الغسالة والثلاجة وبقية الأجهزة المنزلية "التي عندنا". نجحت, تحت هول المأساة, في فرض ايقاعها على حياتنا اليومية, حزناً وقلقاً, نحن الذين تعودنا فرض ايقاعنا على حياتها, فتنام وتصحو وتأكل متى أردنا.

"ديفي" سريلانكية في لبنان (وتعبير "سريلانكية" أو "اثيوبية" باتا مرادفين في القاموس اللبناني لكلمة خادمة), تماماً كما اللبناني والسوري والفلسطيني والمصري "سريلانكيون" في بلدان أوروبا, والسوداني "سريلانكي" في مصر ولبنان, وكما كل العرب "سريلانكيون" في بلاد العرب, وكما كل الفقراء المنتشرين في أصقاع الأرض. عنصرية معولمة, تماماً كما القلق المعولم الذي امتد من كولومبو الى بيروت, والذي عاشته عائلتي اللبنانية في الايام الثلاثة الماضية, على مصير طفلي "ديفي".

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Falluja and the Disappearing Media

By Mike Whitney

"We headed to the area where we live and saw some bodies lying about the streets. I entered my neighbor's house and found him lying on the ground, nothing left of him but some bones."
- Abd al-Rahman Salim, Falluja resident

"The role of a free press is to be the people's eyes and ears, providing not just information but access, insight and, most importantly, context."
- Jon Stewart, from "America" (The Book)

The extent of America's war crimes in Falluja is gradually becoming apparent. On December 24, approximately 900 former residents of the battered city were allowed to return to their homes only to find that (according to BBC) "about 60% to 70% of the homes and buildings are completely crushed and damaged, and not ready to inhabit. Of the 30% still left standing, there's not single one that has not been exposed to some damage."

The siege, which began on November 8, was intended to rid the city of an estimated 5,000 insurgents who were using it as a base of operation. The results have been devastating. Over 250,000 people have been expelled from their homes and the city has been laid to waste. The US military targeted the three main water treatment plants, the electrical grid and the sewage treatment plant; leaving Fallujans without any of the basic services they'll need to return to a normal life. Many believe that this was done intentionally so that major US corporations and constituents of the Bush administration can rebuilt the city at some future time.

Most of the city's mosques have been either destroyed or seriously damaged and entire areas of the city where the fighting was most fierce have been effectively razed to the ground.

So far, the army has only removed the dead bodies from the streets; leaving countless decomposed corpses inside the ruined buildings. A large percentage of these have been devoured by packs of scavenging dogs. The stench of death is reported to be overpowering.

The displaced families who returned on Thursday were hoping to escape the cold weather and lack of food and water at their improvised tent cities. Many of those who have inspected their homes say the damage is too great and they don't expect to stay.

The siege of Falluja was planned to send a message that the US would take a "get- tough" approach with the burgeoning resistance. They wanted to demonstrate that defiance was futile in the face of the world's most powerful military. The full force of America's arsenal, including F-16s, C-130s, Abrams tanks, and Apache Helicopters were unleashed on a few thousand rebels in a civilian enclave. The stupidity of that action is now apparent.

Two weeks into the campaign, the military claimed victory saying they had "broken the back of the insurgency", but the truth has proved to be far different. In reality, the assault has only dispelled the illusion of US invincibility. Pockets of resistance still maintain a tenacious grip on parts of the city and the guerilla-style tactics have negated the overwhelming force of their adversary. If anything, the siege has only emboldened the resistance and broadened its sphere of influence. Violence has now spread throughout the Sunni triangle; ending last week with a devastating mortar attack that killed 22 in a mess tent outside Mosul. Now, the occupation forces are in a defensive mode; having to spend much of their energy simply trying to protect supply lines and oil facilities. Insurgents are increasingly able to "operate at will".

A number of recent government reports indicate that the widespread insurgency cannot be defeated and that the stated goals of the invasion will not be achieved. Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the Iraq war and later as a war planner in Iraq, states in a Washington Post article that, "those who planned the war suffered from stunted learning and reluctance to adapt.... the 'western coalition' failed, and continues to fail, to see Operation Iraqi Freedom in its fullness... the U.S. military remains 'perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it." Wilson's comments are a powerful indictment of imperial hubris and the stubborn unwillingness to accept the parameters of brute force.

The obliteration of Falluja makes the prospects of "losing the war" all the more likely. The pointless murder of 6000 civilians (Red Cross estimate) will only galvanize the resistance and hasten the inevitable defeat of America's misguided crusade. The Administration has added to their dilemma by establishing a prison camp-style regimen for returning Fallujans. By requiring retina scans, ID papers displayed on one's arm, curfews and work crews, the Administration is showing that it has abandoned all pretense of creating a "free" Iraq and is trying to install police state in its place. If the military succeeds, life in Falluja will become very similar to life in the West Bank; a demeaning daily struggle with the brutish enforcers of occupation.

The Disappearing Media

The role of the media in the siege of Falluja has been nearly as extraordinary as the battle itself. The siege began on November 8, but by Nov. 15 the military had declared "victory" and the story disappeared from all the major media. It was as if the Pentagon had simply issued an edict forbidding any further coverage of the conflict, and the press left without protest.

The fact is, the siege is ongoing and the final results are far from certain. A city of 250,000 has been evacuated; as many as 20,000 American servicemen have been engaged in the operation with "the largest concentration of heavy armor in one place, since the fall of Berlin". The military is proceeding with house-to-house searches and bombing raids are still being conducted on a regular basis. The siege of Falluja continues to be a huge story, despite the fact that the establishment media is nowhere to be found.

How do we explain the sudden and complete desertion of the media from the largest operation since the fall of Baghdad? Did Rumsfeld simply tell them to pack their cameras and go home?

Actually, the siege helps to expose the real nature of corporate media. Clearly, an authentic "free press" would cover the details of a massive military confrontation that has lasted for nearly two months. Not so, for the corporate press. The curtain has been drawn on Falluja; allowing the military to pulverize the city beyond the scrutiny of the world community. The only news to emerge is from the eyewitness accounts of independent journalists. Everyone else has complied with the "total news blackout".

Normally, media tries to maintain the facade of objectivity. After all, their livelihood depends on credibility, so it doesn't pay to show that they are a fully-owned franchise of corporate America. Regrettably, the selective coverage and calculated omissions of the Falluja story proves that to be the case. "For profit" media operates by the same standard as any other business and can't be expected to function in the public interest. In Falluja the goal of informing the public has been subordinated to the more powerful objectives of ownership, who want to create a narrative of "benign American intervention" to democratize a Muslim nation. It's an absurd idea and (as the polls show) fewer Americans are finding it credible. Despite the virtual uniformity of news promoting our involvement, support for the war is steadily eroding.

The incestuous relationship between media and the state is rarely displayed as plainly as it has been in Falluja. Both institutions are working in complete harmony like the spokes on a wheel. The deregulation of media has proved to be a great boon to the war mongers in Washington. They're free to quash a civilian enclave of 250,000 in an orgy of terror while the press diverts attention the tawdry details of the Scott Peterson case.

Falluja illustrates what happens when the nation's information delivery system is controlled by a handful of corporate plutocrats. Media becomes the bullhorn for butchery and adventurism. All hope of rekindling democracy in America depends on eradicating the current media paradigm.

The Forces behind the Occupation

The collective punishment and wholesale savagery of the Falluja campaign cannot be understood without recognizing the economic forces that are driving the repression. The military is nothing more than the enforcement arm of American commercial interests. As Emad Mekay reports for Inter Press Service, "The United States is helping the interim Iraqi government continue to make major economic changes, including cuts to social subsidies, full access for U.S. companies to the nation's oil reserves and reconsideration of oil deals that the previous regime signed with France and Russia." The first of these changes will involve the privatizing of the Iraqi National Oil Company so that Iraq's prodigious oil wealth will be directly owned by foreign corporations. Iraqi oil will remain "national" in name only. Iraqi oil receipts will remain entirely under US control, tariffs will stay ridiculously low, all public assets and services will be privatized, and subsidies for Iraq's malnourished and unemployed people will be dramatically cut. All the usual suspects (The IMF, the World Bank, the US Treasury, Big Oil, USAID, U.S. Export-Import Bank etc) are complicit in this systematic and ruthless plundering of Iraq's national assets.

The impetus for the Iraq war originated with these organizations. Operating through their foot-soldiers in the media and right-wing think tanks, they have fabricated the rationale for attacking a defenseless nation and stealing its resources. Even the political apparatus in Washington (of which George Bush is a mere figurehead) is only a manifestation of this stateless corporate regime that now dictates American foreign policy. The bloodletting in Falluja is as much their responsibility as the confiscatory, neo-liberal tyranny they are applying to the economy. Any final judgment on war crimes in Falluja will have to take into account the corporate big-wigs who led the charge to war.

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An Eyewitness Account of Fallujah

published December 16, 2004
The Ester Republic
© 2004 by Dahr Jamail

http://esterrepublic.com/Archives/djamail9.html

Dec. 4, 2004, Baghdad

Horror stories—including the use of napalm and chemical weapons by the US military during the siege of Fallujah—continue to trickle out from the rubble of the demolished city, carried by weary refugees lucky enough to have escaped their city.

A cameraman with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) who witnessed the first eight days of the fighting told of what he considered atrocities. Burhan Fasa’a has worked for LBC throughout the occupation of Iraq.

“I entered Fallujah near the Julan Quarter, which is near the General Hospital,” he said during an interview in Baghdad, “There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone.”

He nervously smoked cigarettes throughout the interview, still visibly shaken by what he saw.

On November 8, the military was allowing women and children to leave the city, but none of the men. He was not allowed to enter the city through one of the main checkpoints, so he circumnavigated Fallujah and managed to enter, precariously, by walking through a rural area near the main hospital, then taking a small boat across the river in order to film from inside the city.

“Before I found the boat, I was 50 meters from the hospital where the American snipers were shooting everyone in sight,” he said, “But I managed to get in.”

He told of bombing so heavy and constant by US warplanes that rarely a minute passed without the ground’s shaking from the bombing campaign.

“The Americans used very heavy bombs to break the spirit of the fighters in Fallujah,” he explained, then holding out his arms added, “They bombed everything! I mean everything!”

This went on for the first two days, he said, then on the third day, columns of tanks and other armored vehicles made their move. “Huge numbers of tanks and armored vehicles and troops attempted to enter the north side of Fallujah,” he said, “But I filmed at least twelve US vehicles that were destroyed.”

The military wasn’t yet able to push into Fallujah, and the bombing resumed.

“I saw at least 200 families who had their homes collapsed on their heads by American bombs,” Burhan said while looking at the ground, a long ash dangling from his cigarette, “Fallujans already needed everything?I mean they already had no food or medicine. I saw a huge number of people killed in the northern part of the city, and most of them were civilians.”

At this point he started to tell story after story of what he saw during the first week of the siege.

“The dead were buried in gardens because people couldn’t leave their homes. There were so many people wounded, and with no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans; even I saw so many civilians shot by them.”

He looked out the window, taking several deep breaths. By then, he said, most families had already run out of food. Families were sneaking through nearby houses to scavenge for food. Water and electricity had long since been cut.

The military called over loudspeakers for families to surrender and come out of their houses, but Burhan said everyone was too afraid to leave their homes, so soldiers began blasting open the gates to houses and conducting searches.

“Americans did not have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English! They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and shot people because they didn’t obey their orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English. Ninety-five percent of the people killed in the houses that I saw were killed because they couldn’t speak English.”

His eyes were tearing up, so he lit another cigarette and continued talking.

“Soldiers thought the people were rejecting their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn’t understand them!”

He managed to keep filming battles and scenes from inside the city, some of which he later managed to sell to Reuters, who showed a few clips of his footage. LBC, he explained, would not show any of the tapes he submitted to them. He had managed to smuggle most of his tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him.

“The Americans took all of my camera equipment when they found it. At that time I watched one soldier take money from a small child in front of everyone in our house.”

Burhan said that when the troops learned he was a journalist, he was treated worse than the other people in the home where they were seeking refuge. He was detained, along with several other men, women, and children.

“They beat me and cursed me because I work for LBC, then they interrogated me. They were so angry at al-Jazeera and al-Arabia networks.”

He was held for three days, sleeping on the ground with no blankets, as did all of the prisoners in a detention camp inside a military camp outside Fallujah.

“They arrested over 100 from my area, including women and kids. We had one toilet, which was in front of where we all were kept, and everyone was shamed by having to use this in public. There was no privacy, and the Americans made us use it with handcuffs on.”

He said he wanted to talk more about what he saw inside Fallujah during the nine days he was there.

“I saw cluster bombs everywhere, and so many bodies that were burned, dead with no bullets in them. So they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Julan district. I watched American snipers shoot civilians so many times. I saw an American sniper in a minaret of a mosque shooting everyone that moved.”

He also witnessed something which many refugees from Fallujah have reported.

“I saw civilians trying to swim the Euphrates to escape, and they were all shot by American snipers on the other side of the river.”

The home he was staying in before he was detained was located near the mosque where the NBC cameraman filmed the execution of an older, wounded Iraqi man.

“The mosque where the wounded man was shot that the NBC cameraman filmed—that is in the Jubail Quarter—I was in that quarter. Wounded, unarmed people used that mosque for safety?I can tell you there were no weapons in there of any kind because I was in that mosque. People only hid there for safety. That is all.”

He personally witnessed another horrible event reported by many of the refugees who reached Baghdad.

“On Tuesday, November 16th, I saw tanks roll over the wounded in the streets of the Jumariyah Quarter. There is a public clinic there, so we call that the clinic street. There had been a heavy battle in this street, so there were twenty bodies of dead fighters and some wounded civilians in front of this clinic. I was there at the clinic, and at 11 a.m. on the 16th I watched tanks roll over the wounded and dead there.”

After another long pause, he looked out the window for awhile. Still looking out the window, he said, “During the nine days I was in Fallujah, all of the wounded men, women, kids and old people, none of them were evacuated. They either suffered to death, or somehow survived.”

According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, which managed to get three ambulances into the city on November 14, at least 150 families remain trapped inside the city. One family was surviving by placing rice in dirty water, letting it sit for two hours, then eating it. There has been no power or running water for a month in Fallujah.

People there are burying body parts from people blown apart by bombs, as well as skeletons of the dead because their flesh had been eaten by dogs.

The military estimates that 2,000 people in Fallujah were killed, but claims that most of them were fighters. Relief personnel and locals, however, believe the vast majority of the dead were civilians.

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The End Of Warfare

by Abhay Mehta

India Outlook at http://outlookindia.com/ 20 December 2004

www.globalresearch.ca 22 December 2004

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MEH412A.html

---

Against the most heavily armed opponent in the history of War, Fallujah has still not let itself be "taken" to date. The mightiest military machine in history has met its match. A turning point in military affairs? The end of warfare, as practiced by the Americans - the application of overwhelming force to obtain a victory?

Fallujah per se, on the face of it, is not a strategic or a militarily significant target. It however represents the "great challenge" to the US/UK's military occupation of Sovereign Iraq since April 2003.

In the first siege of Fallujah in April 2004, the Iraqi Resistance inflicted a severe defeat on the Americans.

In April 2004, while over 1,200 Iraqis were killed, blown up, burnt or shot alive by the Americans -- two thirds of them civilians, mostly women and children -- while 2,000-pound bombs were falling on the the city, AC-130 Spectre gunships were demolishing entire city blocks in less than a minute and of course silence of the plop as Iraqis targeted by marine snipers hit the ground. Nonetheless the operative portion remains: the Marines were beaten back in no uncertain terms. This was followed by a "truce".

The truce did not hold for very long.

This humiliation of the American military was spun as a "strategic retreat" but the desire to get rid of the "weeping sore that Fallujah was" has been on top of the US agenda since then. Fallujah represented a "stellar act of defiance" one that allowed the resistance to "actually secure and control a city, and to beat off the US military"

The second formal large scale assault on Fallujah (Nov./Dec 2004) pitted images of the world's most powerful military force against fighters in tennis shoes, wielding homemade rocket launchers. There were three declared tactical objectives.

The first was to either kill or capture the Jordanian born "terrorist" "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" (if indeed he exists) and to "battle and destroy some 4000 to 5000 suspected fighters".

The Americans also vowed to "liberate" the residents of Fallujah from "criminal elements" and to "secure Fallujah" for the January elections.

Lastly, it appears an additional declared tactical/political objective of the American Military's task was to engage in a "fight of good versus evil". Additionally it appears (presumably per their intelligence reports) that the mission also was to "destroy" "Satan" since it appears that "he lives in Fallujah"

On the face of it, it appears as if none of these tactical/military objectives have been met, including, it appears, the desire to presumably meet Mr Satan, resident of Fallujah.

As for the other very laudable and rationally quantifiable objectives including that of stuffing democracy into a city by simply obliterating it, all of these seem to be a bit astray.

48 hours into the offensive, the official narratives were filled with reports that Zarqawi (if indeed such a entity exists) may have "slipped outside" of their perimeter defenses.

This of course left Mr "Satan" still in residence together with the rest of the unfortunate inhabitants of the "militant stronghold". The city of 300,000 residents had perhaps an estimated 40,000 civilians left per the US military. Since this estimated number included 5000 resident "militants", one can presume that the rest (per the US military) would be civilians.

The actual civilian count remaining in the city on the 8th of November is around around 60,000 to as much as 100,000 since males between the ages 16 and 60 were disbarred by the US military from leaving the city.

One can also infer the most vulnerable--the poor, the old, the women, children and the sick--continued to reside in their city in significant numbers -- of the order of 40,000+

With the "target softening" bombing raids that killed a few hundred civilians in the first week of November, the first formal target of the US military armored assault was doctors and the nurses. These were the first to be eliminated as these were "legitimate military target" and since "insurgents" were "forcing the doctors there to release propaganda and false information".

The assault has left as many as 10,000 civilian dead--perhaps much much more . The Red Cross/Red Crescent estimate was upwards of 6000 as of November 25th. Till date no formal Red Cross/Red Crescent operation has been allowed in the city.

What the images of Phantom Fury did not convey is that this assault is the largest concentration of heavy armor in one place, since the fall of Berlin. This was the first time since World War II that "an American armored task force" has been turned "loose in a city with no restrictions".

More to the point, the force of as much as 20,000 soldiers (12,000 to 17,000 American/coalition soldiers, about 2000 odd Iraqi "National guards" and perhaps 1000 odd peshmergas) were supported by an estimated 1100 to as much as 2000 armored vehicles and tanks. Air support was largely carrier based out of the gulf and B-52's from bases outside of Iraq.

The armor alone represents the heaviest ever concentration of armor since the fall of Berlin (1945) in one place against a single military objective.

Phantom Fury was officially underway on the 8th of November and declared to be a sweeping victory on or about the 15th of November.

Thereafter the military communiqués and the press reports have been limited to occasional deaths in the "Anbar province". That all of Fallujah is under "coalition" control since then i.e on or about November 15th 2004. Since then detailed stories on Fallujah in the official narrative have stopped completely or refer to action/discoveries between the 8th and the 19th of November 04.

There is no evidence of what has transpired save intermittent but very very regular losses attributed to "pockets of resistance" in the "Anbar Province". And, yes, reportage on the brand new movie on Fallujah starring Harrison Ford.

Now for a moment, consider the substantive anomalies in the official discourse. Consider one such example- Satellite Imagery of Fallujah (block by block including "after action") available to the media till the 15th of November and carried in graphic detail day by day from the 8th of Nov. through the 15th stopped abruptly. There are no explanations.

There are no satellite pictures of Fallujah available in the public domain after November 15th.

Or consider that the Red Cross/Red Crescent has not been allowed to enter the city in any substantive manner. Today is the 20th of December and it has still not been allowed in.

Or consider another break in the regular stream of consciousness. No reporter has set foot in the city on or after the 22nd of November.

A "Great Victory" like this and no footage?

These anomalies are noteworthy. Therefore it is very unclear whether this is indeed the case or, as a matter of fact, the converse is.

Fallujah has not been taken. Not only has Fallujah not been taken, but the coalition forces have staged several retreats and are now confined largely to the outside of the city.

The Iraqi resistance is currently in control of most of the city and have forced back at least three of the largest armored assaults in recent history.

In fact, one can make a claim that this was the largest series of armored assault ever. The objective is 16 sq km and if one were to normalise over time and term for incremental intensity in firepower that this represents, then these are historically unprecedented. Now if these were not only repulsed, but perhaps defeated, it leads to something that ought to be examined more carefully.

Despite being flattened (perhaps about 12,000 to as much as 20,000 homes out of an estimated 50,000 razed) by the application of, as US Army Gen. John Abizaid put it, "more military power per square inch than anybody else on earth".

Curiously, the US general then very very strangely goes on to add: "If you ever even contemplate our nuclear capability, it should give everybody the clear understanding that there is no power that can match the United States militarily."

Oh. Let me contemplate the nuclear capability of the US. Never mind. It is a bore.

So?

The General also said, when talking about generating "more military power per square inch than anybody else on earth". that "every one knows it". Oh. The words of the General--the mightiest general of them all--Commander Centom, do not appear to have been heard. At least, the Iraqi resistance has not heard them.

The mightiest military machine ever in world history with the mightiest firepower the world has ever seen has been mightily trying to capture Fallujah. But no luck so far.

Instead the Americans faced an opposition that broke the back of the assault. Instead of "breaking bone by bone" and crushing "the backbone of the insurgents", it seems that the same has been done unto them as they were planning to do unto the resistance.

At the peak of the assault, the Americans held no more than 35-40% of Fallujah (largely the north on or around the 18th of November) Thereafter, they appear to have been steadily repulsed and in fact the coalition forces currently have been repulsed to where they were on November 13th or thereabouts and to the outskirts of Fallujah.

Now consider the fate of the rest of the occupation. It is in tatters. The mightiest military in the world cannot control an 8 km stretch of road, perhaps the single most important road in all of Iraq – the Airport Road from the center of Baghdad to the airport. The purported troop concentration is 120 soldiers per km of a open road and despite that the Australian defence minister could not even make it to the green zone and simply flew back from the airport.

Unlike Vietnam, where the Americans were largely in control of the cities for most parts (save Tet, and even there complete control was not lost), the US/UK garrisons are isolated in the middle of a hostile population.

They cannot even traverse a km or two out of the "green zone". Their supply convoys have come to a standstill over the last month and a salvage operation of re-supplying by air has started over the last 10-12 days. Air supplies are limited and there is no reason to believe that these can be significant (a max of 400 tonnes a day, slated to rise to 1600 tonnes a day against an estimated minimum 20,000 odd tonnes needed daily to keep a force of 160,000+ fed, watered, armored and resupplied).

The 300 mile long supply line is toast. Well, at least any thing dark, metallic, armored or otherwise. (4000 pounds of armor on a humvee that can carry a max load of 5000 pounds) Can it move? And even that is not helpful – in the words of the great military strategist, Rumsfeld, circa Dec 04, even tanks blow up. Why bother at all?

Against the most heavily armed opponent in the history of War, Fallujah has still not let itself be "taken" to date (As of 20th Dec, 2004).

Falluah and indeed the rest of Iraq post April 2003, heralds "supersymmetrical" warfare and the end of conventional warfare. This represents a turning point in military affairs – the end of warfare--as practiced by the Americans --i.e the application of overwhelming force to obtain a victory.

Consider one such example. A RPG 7 can travel up to 300/700/950 meters. At 300 meters, even a basic warhead can penetrate 330 mm of steel armor. Yes, 33 cms, 13 inches--that is a lot of steel. The projectile would cost perhaps $30-40. Conservatively, a squad of 3 armed with RPG-7s have more than a fighting chance against a M1 Abrams. In close urban quarters, the advantage that the tank had (in say open ground in a conventional war) is completely lost.

The cost/personnel advantage is noteworthy. With minimal or no training, just about any one can operate a RPG. A squad of say 3 would cost perhaps no more than $5000 to equip. Against this, the M1 Abrams ("the mightiest tank", 70 odd tonnes of steel, a few million a pop).

Now consider the mightiest Gun in the West against the rookie squad of three. Throw in a street. Add cover (even rubble will do, in fact quite nicely, thank you)

Even odds?

Now consider for a moment. Consider a force of say a few thousand men -- the best in the business and certainly the bravest men on the face of this planet--say no more than 3000, anything more and it would be one sided. 3000 against 12,000 to 20,000 sounds about right.

Now add ingenuity, intelligence and passion and a good reason to be very very angry. Throw in a just cause. In fact, the "most just cause of all".

Now consider that these are equipped with only say RPG 7s as well as say RPG 9s, a few dozen Strellas, a few thousand modified versions of the S5K rocket, basic antiaircraft guns, a few hundred tonnes of say c4/semtex (it is quite cheap), a few thousand fin stabilised rockets (52 mm to 152 mm), basic artillery and mortar (say 60mm, 82mm, and 120mm shells), a few SAMs (say SAM7 and SAM 9), a few thousand grad rockets, faithful ole Kalasnikovs, a few hundred sniper rifles with say .50 mm explosive ammo. It may also be possible that few Samud and Abgail missiles (range of 100 km) are available. These are not very large missiles. Add a few more, nothing fancy again--say, the Tariq and Katyusha, very very basic indeed).

There is more, but you get the idea. Not very state of the art weapons, far from it. But very very functional. Now, consider the sheer amount of counter offensive power these represent.

Add to that pre-prepared defensive positions, not very fancy for sure, but very functional and very very functional minefields with a variety of triggers. Throw in, the "most ingenious" booby traps ever.

Add the Iraqi resistance--the bravest of the brave--operating these. Well now, it is state of the art. The State of the Art of Urban Warfare.

Oh yes, And yes, how can I forget toys. Well, one needs to buy those since "remote controls from toys" (Well at least as per the American Military) are a primary trigger in IEDs.

So we add a few 10s of dollars per toy car and remote kit, say from your local K-mart.? Turns out that an army cannot be equipped from K-mart, to quote the great military tactician Rumsfeld once again, circa early Dec 03. Also turns out Centcom claims that they cannot jam these (circa Dec 04),

It does appear that we have a problem here. Toy remotes. Rather sad, would you not say? Coming from the second in command of the Mightiest Super powers' mightiest command. Beam me up, Scotty.

Now pit against them a "superpower" that has already spent 150 billion of declining currency for sure but buys plenty still. Do not forget to add 450 billion recurring every year. (Hey, it can buy anything but armor). Add another 100 billion on the cards (Jan 04).

But this does not help.

Short of using a neutron or a nuclear bomb (the Americans did use chemical weapons in Fallujah), despite all efforts, what the Americans have been able to achieve is relatively little, if anything at all, even in the best case estimates of the official narrative.

45 days and going on and on and on and on.

Oh, oh, but, but, but we took Baghdad in 21 days.

45 days for 16 sq kms.....

The opposing American army in this case has not been able to actually "take" them out. Never mind control or physically occupying 16 sq kms.

In fact, even a neutron bomb would not be militarily significant. You need to "take" it and keep it and keep on keeping it and keep on and on and on....

And they have not. They will not. They cannot

The limits of raw firepower have been reached and no matter what (2000 pound bombs to container cluster bombs to the new "large Abrams" tank. Oh well, if not a RPG7, a RPG9 or two will do the trick, thank you), the American military objective is no longer possible.

Shoulder-held surface to air weapons limit the role of armored copters. In fact there are several 'copter graveyards in and around Fallujah. Big ones. Some of them are quite near the tank killing fields. Yes, several hundred armored vehicles resting, not quite in peace but hey...

Close air support is not feasible on account of the proximity of "friendlies". Savage bombing without limits does not help.

The war in the former Yugoslavia is a case in point. Despite 72 days of non stop bombing, it is now (post facto) a conceded position that the opposing side lost no more than 5-10% of their military hardware. (The loss was political, but that is another story.)

Now consider an entirely different narrative. Of the the land between the two rivers, of your ancestors and my ancestors, of the fountainheads of civilisation, of Sumer, Ur, Mesopotamia, of Lions, of Hummurabi, of Salah al Din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub and much much more.

And yes, a place. Called Fallujah. But, say, about 84 years ago

And now add to the narrative, parts of the present: a unilaterally disarmed opponent (remember the tizzy circa late March 03 about night vision equipment? Night vision? Never mind state of the art SAMs and Kornets. The sanctions? Oh what were they?

Now add 25 million men, women and children – the richest denizens on this planet (Yes the richest. In every sense. As the very inheritors of civilisation itself. Or in a more mundane sense with 300 billion+ barrels of oil, an average Iraqi's garbage would be reconstructing the streets of Manhattan in a fairer world (the Americans have in contrast 22.5 billion barrels left), and, yes, the bravest. And the most suffering on the face of this planet

Add to that the Story of Fallujah (circa late 2004). Then perhaps you will not be so astonished to hear what appear to be strange words to your ears.

For these are Iraqi words. Yes, Iraqi. Dated 10th of December 2004

"The enemy is on the run. They are in fear of a resistance movement they can not see nor predict. We, now choose when, where, and how to strike. And as our ancestors drew the first sparks of civilization, we will redefine the word 'conquest'. Today we write a new chapter in the arts of urban warfare"

The Iraqi resistance has put an end to "the end of history". A new history is being written. Yes indeed it has been written. Not just another chapter but an entirely new book. One may see the the beginning of the great American retreat across the oceans, if they are lucky. Over 50,000 American soldiers have been medically evacuated out of Iraq till Nov. 2004 (interesting number, is it not?).

Yes, there will be a lot lot more lives lost and the endgame's contours are still unclear.

Oh the last line. Yes the last line addressed specifically to one Mr. George W. Bush:

"You have asked us to ‘Bring it on’, and so have we. Like never expected. Have you another challenge?"

Yes Indeed, has he another challenge? No, he is a trifle busy, you see. We did try a photo-op on the 18th of Dec 2004. We are not fools you see. But no photos.

I wonder why..

Raw unopposed firepower has reached its limits. Never have so few battled against so many in face of overwhelming odds and brought a superpower to its knees. And the nightmare continues.

It is indeed the greatest military victory in history. The self proclaimed mightiest empire that ever was, in fact, turns out to have had the shortest reign ever.

This Empire met its match in the land between the two rivers.

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Fear factor: 44 percent of Americans queried in Cornell national poll favor curtailing some liberties for Muslim Americans

EMBARGOED UNTIL FRIDAY, DEC. 17, 2004, AT 11:59 a.m. EST Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

ITHACA, N.Y. -- In a study to determine how much the public fears terrorism, almost half of respondents polled nationally said they believe the U.S. government should -- in some way -- curtail civil liberties for Muslim Americans, according to a new survey released today (Dec. 17) by Cornell University.

About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, and 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine percent agreed that undercover law enforcement agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations, in order to keep tabs on their activities and fund raising. About 22 percent said the federal government should profile citizens as potential threats based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle Eastern heritage. In all, about 44 percent said they believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans.

Conversely, 48 percent of respondents nationally said they do not believe that civil liberties for Muslim Americans should be restricted.

The Media and Society Research Group, in Cornell's Department of Communication, commissioned the poll, which was supervised by the Survey Research Institute, in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The results were based on 715 completed telephone interviews of respondents across the United States, and the poll has a margin of error of 3.6 percent.

The survey also examined the relation of religiosity to perceptions of Islam and Islamic countries among Christian respondents. Sixty-five percent of self-described highly religious people queried said they view Islam as encouraging violence more than other religions do; in comparison, 42 percent of the respondents who said they were not highly religious saw Islam as encouraging violence. In addition, highly religious respondents also were more likely to describe Islamic countries as violent (64 percent), fanatical (61 percent) and dangerous (64 percent). Fewer of the respondents who said they were not highly religious described Islamic countries as violent (49 percent), fanatical (46 percent) and dangerous (44 percent). But 80 percent of all respondents said they see Islamic countries as being oppressive toward women.

"Our results highlight the need for continued dialogue about issues of civil liberties in time of war," says James Shanahan, Cornell associate professor of communication and a principal investigator in the study. Shanahan and Erik Nisbet, senior research associate with the ILR Survey Research Institute, commissioned the study, and Ron Ostman, professor of communication, and his students administered it.

Shanahan notes: "Most Americans understand that balancing political freedoms with security can sometimes be difficult. Nevertheless, while a majority of Americans support civil liberties even in these difficult times, and while more discussion about civil liberties is always warranted, our findings highlight that personal religiosity as well as exposure to news media are two important correlates of support for restrictions. We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding."

Researchers found that opinions on restricting civil liberties for Muslim Americans vary by political self-identification. About 40 percent of Republican respondents agreed that Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts, compared with 24 percent of Democratic respondents and 17 percent of independents. Forty-one percent of Republican respondents said that Muslim American civic groups should be infiltrated, compared with 21 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents.

On whether mosques should be monitored, about 34 percent of the Republicans polled agreed they should be, compared with 22 percent of Democrats. Thirty-four percent of Republicans said that profiling of Muslim Americans is necessary, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.

The survey also showed a correlation between television news-viewing habits, a respondent's fear level and attitudes toward restrictions on civil liberties for all Americans. Respondents who paid a lot of attention to television news were more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties, such as greater power for the government to monitor the Internet. Respondents who paid less attention to television news were less likely to support such measures. "The more attention paid to television news, the more you fear terrorism, and you are more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties," says Nisbet.

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The Islamic Petroleum Commons: From Morocco to Indonesia

Another conception of a petroleum commons has developed in Islamic economic theory and political practice since the 1970s. It claims that petroleum found beneath Islamic territory is the common possession of the worldwide Islamic community (Ummah) and consequently it is neither state nor private property. This conception is challenging the relations that have been worked out between the oil companies and Islamic nation-states since World War I.

A key event in the development of the international oil industry was the destruction of the last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World War I. A Caliphate requires a secular military-political entity that is pledged to defend the worldwide Islamic community. The Ottoman Turks had been performing this role of "defenders of the faith" since the 15th century. Their imperial lands included Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Saudi Arabia--i.e. the center of the main oil reserves of the planet. In order for the petroleum industry to operate on a capitalist basis, the large international oil companies and main imperialist powers at the end of World War I (US, Britain, France) tore up the Ottoman Caliphate and created a number of rentier states that were largely under their control.

The incompatibility between the existence of the Caliphate and the for-profit operations that were required by the oil industry is evident. An Islamic Caliphate had to be committed, at least in principle, to specific re-distributive economic principles (including the concept of a petroleum common owned by the ummah, the entire Islamic community) that were in contrast with the corporate control envisioned by the founders of the oil industry in the Middle East in period between 1918 and 1945. A genuine Caliphate would have had to invest in ways that would have made it autonomous from the directives of the imperialist powers (governmental or corporate). Last, a genuine Caliphate would have had worldwide reach, and would have had to be committed to intervening in areas where the Islamic community resided. These areas, however, were often essential parts of the empires of Britain, France and Holland. (e.g., India, Algeria, and Indonesia).

What is presently called Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, or Islamism, is in part an effort to revive the Caliphate almost a century after its end. This gives these social movements a "global reach," as they claim to unite and "protect" the Islamic community presently stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and, through immigration, into the heart of Europe and North America. Whatever the ultimate fate of this type of patriarchal politics and whatever its class composition, this drive towards a Caliphate represents an important reality for the oil industry since both are operating at the center of the major oil reserves of the planet. Indeed, if one correlates the nation-state members of the Organization of Islamic Congress with the oil reserves that are estimated to lie in their territories, one sees that nearly two-thirds of the world's petroleum is "Islamic" Such a drive is toward an "imagined community"--but then, what community except the most intimate is not imagined?

Along with the revival of Islam as a political force has come the development of an "Islamic economics" that has a number of tenets relevant to the oil industry. First, since oil is a sub-soil resource, from an Islamic perspective, it is seen as a gift from Allah and hence a community good. Although Islamic economics respects private property --after all, Islam is a religion founded by a merchant-- it also recognizes the role of communally shared resources. Islamic economics accepts the standard division of private, state, and common property, and oil is definitely included in the category of common property. It is now traditional to repeat at this juncture the famous statement of Mohammed: "The people are partners in three things: water, pastures and fire [today, petroleum]." The recognition of an Islamic petroleum commons is seen as a first step in the realization of an Islamic economics.

True, some common property must be mined (like oil, gold, silver, and iron), but the minerals themselves remain the common property of all Muslims. The Caliphate itself might mine them or sub-contract their collection, but all revenues gained from their sale should be kept in the Bait al-Mal--the same treasury that the zakat, or redistributive tithe, is destined for.

The second principle of Islamic economics is the redistributive one. Islam, for all of its respect of private property, instituted from its beginning a system of income transfers. Even non-Muslims know of the zakat, but there are many other re-distributive mechanisms (e.g., the prohibition of charging interest) that make the doctrine of neo-liberalism anathema in Islamic discourse. A Caliphate is duty-bound to fund the poor, the needy, the travelers, the debtors and its jihad from the funds in the Bait al-Mal. This is especially true of revenues derived from oil, since they are directly derived from the sale of a communal good. Thus the charges of corruption hurled against the Saudi Arabian elite by Islamists are especially damning, since the Saudi elite's extravagant ways of living can be accused of denying bread to the mouths of the poor children Allah destined it for.

The third principle of Islamic economics is based on the prohibition of waste and the concern for conserving scarce resources. Islamists can plausibly argue that if the conspicuous consumption and self-protective expenditure on military hardware indulged in by the present elites are ended, more oil could be left in the ground. Such an economic policy would clearly have a significant impact on the price of oil, since oil would no longer be considered a state or corporate commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, and instead would be viewed as a common good whose conservation would be valuable in itself.

Common property in the Islamic tradition is often not emphasized in academic expositions of Islamic economics, where the pride of place is given to a symbolic zakat and a banking system that denies a role to interest. The works of Pakistani social thinker Savyid Abul-Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), martyred Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Iraqi writer Muhammad Baquir al-Sadr (1931-80) --the intellectual progenitors of Islamic economics-- are often taken to task for imposing unrealistic constrains on the development of capitalism in the Islamic world. Nevertheless, if the doctrine of the petroleum commons were implemented as the basis of social planning, in an Islamic world that counts more than a billion people, we can presume it would have a far greater impact than any other of its economic recommendations.

If Islamic nations turned their petroleum resources into a commons, then three major, even revolutionary changes would follow. First, this would lead to a tighter control of the pace of extraction and a willingness to exercise the "Right to say 'No'," resulting in much higher oil prices. Second, the surplus of the commons would flow into re-distributive projects in the Islamic world, rather than being channeled into the economies and financial systems of Europe and the US. Last, the neo-liberal program for the Middle East (as outlined in George W. Bush's plan for the outcome of the Iraq war) would be challenged.

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Fallujah: Pentagon Plans a High-tech Strategic Hamlet

It is now official—the United States does not learn from history. It is destined to make the same mistakes over and over again.

By Kurt Nimmo

12/09/04 -- In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet program was introduced in Vietnam, based on a British counterinsurgency program used in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. In a dismal attempt to prevent the National Liberation Front from “influencing” peasants in South Vietnam, the United States turned villages into concentration camps—they erected stockade walls and patrolled the villages with armed guards. According to figures compiled by the United States, 39 percent of the South Vietnamese population was housed in these restrictive hamlets (4,077 strategic hamlets were completed out of a projected total of 11,182).

As to be expected, this program was a stupendous failure because the peasants resented living in concentration camps, far away from their ancestral lands. As noted in the Pentagon Papers, peasants “were herded forcibly from their homes” and locked inside the so-called strategic hamlets and their “old dwellings—and many of their possessions—were burned behind them.” As the Pentagon saw it, the program “was doomed by poor execution,” not the fact that people don’t like being locked up in concentration camps and will resist and continue to resist until things change. But then, as history demonstrates, there were a lot of obtuse “experts” holding down desks at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War—obviously, over the last forty or so years, nothing much has changed.

Fast forward to the present. In the pulverized wreckage of Fallujah, Iraq, the United States will soon introduce the Strategic Hamlet program once again, albeit with significant differences. Under the new plan, according to the Boston Globe, “troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned.” In Vietnam, peasants were forced to build their gulags, while in Fallujah male civilians will be organized in “military-style battalions” and, depending “on their skills” will “be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.” In other words, Fallujans will be organized into chain-gangs and forced to clean up the criminal mess the United States made of their city. For some reason the Pentagon either does not realize or could not care less about the anger and resistance such humiliation will cause.

“You have to say, ‘Here are the rules,’ and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability,” Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, told the Globe.

Bellon asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, ” ‘What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?’ All this Oprah [stuff],” he said. “They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, ‘I’m with you.’ We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe.

No more Oprah “stuff.” Instead, the Pentagon believes it can pretend to be a “dominant” tribal leader—sort of an Americanized version of Saddam—and thus win the trust (or fear) of Iraqis, a monumental and culturally ignorant—if not completely bigoted—mistake, one certain to engender even more animosity on the part of Iraqis and empower the resistance further. Bellon understands most Iraqis will continue to hate the United States for illegally invading and occupying their country and butchering 100,000 or more of their fellow citizens but hopes there will be “mutual respect.” Exactly how reducing Fallujah to rubble, sniping thirsty and starving women and children, using internationally banned weapons such as napalm, cluster and phosphorous bombs, depleted uranium shells, killing doctors and hospital patients, and crushing the wounded under the treads of tanks will create “mutual respect” is not explained.

Like an act from some macabre theater of the absurd play, the Pentagon declares that converting the bombed remnants of Fallujah, with its interred civilians, into a concentration camp—with the latest invasive technology instead of stockade walls—is an effort to create a “model city.” In other words, the Pentagon and its Iraqi stooges plan to use “coercive measures” in other Sunni cities; i.e., they will bomb, invade, kill thousands of people, and then “reconstruct” the ruins to resemble something out of a here-and-now version of the dystopian movie Minority Report, complete with retina scan terminals and an omnipresent police state dominating every aspect of life.

“‘It’s the Iraqi interim government that’s coming up with all these ideas,’ Major General Richard Natonski, who commanded the Fallujah assault and oversees its reconstruction, said of the plans for identity badges and work brigades.” Of course, the “Iraqi interim government” does not bend over to tie its shoe laces first thing in the morning without permission from Bush and the Pentagon. However, pretending Allawi and Crew, handpicked by the United States and almost universally hated by Iraqis, are calling the shots looks good, especially with a rigged election right around the corner. Iraqis, of course, know better, even if a somnolent American public—ultimately responsible for mass murder and war crimes perpetuated by its “elected” leaders—has not a clue about what is really going on.

Naturally, this “firm hand,” as Lieutenant Colonel Leonard DiFrancisci characterized the plan for Fallujah, will fail—and fail miserably, just as the Strategic Hamlet program did in Vietnam. If the Pentagon believes it can lock out the resistance, force it out in the desert where it can be conveniently and uniformly liquidated with B-52s and artillery, it is seriously deluded. Nothing short of killing every male of military age will stop the resistance in Iraq.

If the engineered massacre of Fallujah is any indication, no doubt the Pentagon has entertained such a terrible contingency.

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The real fury of Fallujah
By Pepe Escobar

"The Romans create a desolation and call it peace."
- Tacitus

"The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him."
- Colonel Gary Brandl, US Marines

President George W Bush is "reaching out" to Fallujah - the first major foreign policy initiative of the second Bush administration. The name: Operation Phantom Fury. The strategy: precision-strike democracy. The message: kill them all, and let God sort them out.

Former US intelligence asset turned prime minister without a parliament Iyad Allawi - widely known in Baghdad as "Saddam without a moustache" - has got himself another title: the Butcher of Fallujah. On Sunday, before co-launching with the Pentagon the biggest urban war since the storming of Hue in 1968 Vietnam, Allawi installed de facto martial law in Iraq for 60 days. Historians and political scientists are breathlessly trying to explain to the world that no democratic election can possibly be preceded by a state of siege.

To add insult to injury, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld is saying that Allawi is responsible for all major military decisions regarding Fallujah: only the Bible Belt may be gullible enough to believe that an Iraqi civilian without an army rules over the Pentagon. So it's the Vietnam tragedy all over again, replayed as farce - a biblical crusade in Mesopotamia. Those who learned their lessons from history know full well what happened after Hue.

The new Hue, or the new Grozny
The Pentagon spin machine is selling Operation Phantom Fury as a battle of good against evil to root out "terrorists" in the "militant stronghold" of Fallujah. It is selling war on civilians as "the liberation of the people of Fallujah" as well as the next step towards implementing "democracy" in Iraq. These are outright lies. Fallujans insist they are not harboring al-Qaeda fighters, or even the elusive Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Pentagon insists that Fallujah is the headquarters of Zarqawi's al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Unity and Holy War) movement. So if there's no Zarqawi - if he really does exist, he has already left the building, sources tell Asia Times Online - and no al-Qaeda, what's the point of unleashing this fury?

The code name betrays it all: the real motive for turning Fallujah into Grozny is revenge. In the first siege of Fallujah in April, the mujahideen inflicted a severe defeat on the Americans. Fallujah had already become the symbol of the Iraqi resistance after Marines killed 15 civilians in May 2003 - when the city even had a pro-American mayor. Last April, up to 1,000 Iraqis were killed, blown up, burnt or shot by the Americans - two thirds of them civilians, mostly women and children. Now, one of the first targets of Phantom Fury was a Fallujah hospital, qualified by the Pentagon as "a center of propaganda". The fact is, in April hospital doctors were carefully detailing to the world media the hundreds of innocent civilians killed by the American assault. Now, under a strategy of what could almost be called collective punishment, the hospital has become a military target.

No images, no sound
This is the ultimate asymmetric war - ultra high-tech F-16s, Cobra and Apache helicopters, AC-130 gunships, tanks, Bradleys and awesome firepower against a bunch of youngsters in tracksuits and trainers with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. A few hundred of them are Arabs - Saudis, Yemenis, Jordanians, Tunisians - the new generation of the jihad diaspora. But the majority are Iraqi fighters, many of them former or retired military officers, engaged in a war of national liberation. The Pentagon is pitting between 2,000 to 2,500 fighters in Fallujah and environs along with another 10,000 Iraqi civilians against at least 12,000 troops - four US military brigades and one 500-strong Iraqi brigade, trained by the Marines and included in the American payroll.

Serious fighting rages in al-Guaifi, in the northern part of the city, in the Golan and Military neighborhoods to the east, and in the Industrial and al-Shuhada neighborhoods to the south. The mujahideen, at least for the moment, are holding their positions.

Nobody will know the full extent of the horror inflicted on Fallujah civilians because this is a war micromanaged by the Pentagon - carefully built up for weeks, timed to set off only after the re-election of Bush, and now conducted with a few embedded journalists on the side duly brainwashed by a barrage of propaganda and spin. The Sunni triangle has become so dangerous that independent journalism is out of the question. Thus the absence of war images - apart from Pentagon propaganda videos of Marines under night vision cameras with the faint sound of explosions in the background.

There's no soundtrack to this war. No sound of 2,000-pound bombs falling on rows of houses and followed by relentless wailing, the sound of missiles flying overhead, the sound of prayers and cries of "Allah Akbar!" trying to drown out the fear, the sound of AC-130 Spectre gunships demolishing a whole city block in less than a minute, the sound of bodies hitting the sand targeted by Marine snipers. The only reliable information of what's happening on the ground in Fallujah comes from civilians who have left to Baghdad.

It's a blatant lie to describe a city of 300,000 as a "militant stronghold". Even if there were only 100,000 residents left, most of these, tens of thousands, are civilians, and as usual in any war, they are the most vulnerable: the poor, the elderly, the sick, the ones who could not get way because of fate, and the bravest of the brave - nurses and doctors.

Fallujah from the inside
Senior scholar Sheikh Omar Said identifies three major strands in Fallujah - Sufism, the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafism, all united at the moment against the occupation. The city is being run by the mujahideen shura (council) - led by influential imams and mosque preachers like Abdullah al-Janabi, Zafir al-Obeidi and Omar Hadid.

Fallujah has four main clans: Zawbaa, al-Jamilat, Bu Eisa and al-Mahameda, plus many secondary clans like Tamim, Bani Kabis, al-Fayad, al-Aneen and al-Raween. Most of the clans are Sunni and originally came from the Arab peninsula.

The backbone of Fallujah is Islam and its tribal clans. Bravery is the common staple. Vendetta is a must. People prefer to die than to submit to a foreign invader: it's considered their Islamic duty. More than 20 prominent Saudi scholars recently qualified the resistance as a legitimate right and obligation.

The Fallujah mujahideen shura is a real unifying force. There are no "terrorists" in the midst of these resistance leaders, tribal chiefs and Sunni clerics - only Iraqis fighting a war of national liberation. To counteract Pentagon propaganda, the shura has promised to protect journalists and house them in a "special building". But considering what happened in Kabul in 2001 and Baghdad in 2003, there's every reason to believe the Marines could have an "accident".

The local command in Fallujah is centered in two mosques: Saad ibn Abi Wakkas, run by imam Abdullah al-Janabi, and al-Hadra al-Mohammadiya, run by imam Zafir Al-Obeidi. Janabi controls the mujahideen shura and Obeidi controls the political shura, presided by Sheikh Tarlub Abdel Karim al-Alusi and uniting tribal and religious chiefs and city notables. Tarlub is the de facto political chief of the guerrillas in Fallujah - even though decisions are collective and the word of the imams and the emirs carries enormous power.

Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad close to the resistance in Fallujah confirm that Tarlub was saying as late as last week that the city would have preferred negotiations, but the Americans wanted a war. The sheikh also said that 80% of the youth of Fallujah had joined the resistance, as it would be a shame for their families if they were not committed to defend their city. According to the sheikh, there are more than 1,500 foreign jihadis in town (the Pentagon says they are between 2,000 and 2,500), but no al-Qaeda. The sheikh defends the presence of "the Arabs" - as Iraqis call them: they are "Muslim brothers" who came to help expel the invaders. Many nationalist Iraqis though are angry with the foreigners' presence because, they say, this serves the American strategy of labeling everybody as "terrorists". But in terms of an attack on Fallujah and as far as the Iraqi resistance is concerned, the sheikh was sure that the mujahideen would adapt, retreat and later come back in full force.

What will the world say?
Even before Phantom Fury, American bombing had been killing Fallujah civilians for weeks. Now the Marines are invading hospitals, targeting ambulances and in the next few hours and days may even bomb mosques: so much for capturing Iraqi hearts and minds. The souk in the city center used to be open until noon and still had some food - but this was before Allawi cut off the roads from Fallujah to Baghdad and Ramadi. The hospitals are overflowing, but with no supplies, medicine and only occasional electricity. The brand new Nazzal hospital - funded by Saudi donors - was destroyed last Saturday by two American missiles.

A few days ago, a message from "the mosques of Fallujah" threatened a jihad all over Iraq against the Americans and those who helped them if Fallujah was attacked. A fatwa - approved by top religious authorities in Baghdad - officially proclaiming the jihad may be issued in the next few hours or days, something that would set the whole Sunni triangle on fire and promote even closer collaboration between the jihadis and Iraqi nationalists.

The civilian victims of Phantom Fury can barely count on global public opinion expressing outrage. It didn't happen last April, under the first siege of Fallujah, and it didn't happen last August, when Najaf was attacked. According to a study published by the British medical paper The Lancet, the American invasion and occupation has caused at least 100,000 Iraqi deaths - September 11 dozens of times over. Fallujah may add one more September 11 to the list. More than half of the dead were women and children.

Fallujah as the road to civil war
What will be achieved by turning Fallujah into Grozny? Absolutely nothing positive for the US. History shows that a people fighting a war of national liberation is never easily intimidated. The resistance will melt away and regroup. Top Sunni clerics all over the Sunni triangle and beyond have reminded Iraqis - as if they needed any reminding - that they should help the guerrillas to escape. On the jihadi front, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, the group linked to al-Qaeda which has claimed responsibility for the Madrid bombing, has already threatened the US with "unbearable hell" - and did not forget to hold the American electorate responsible for condoning Bush's Phantom Fury-style strategies.

Mohamed Bashar Faidhi, a member of the Sunni Association of Muslim Clerics, promised the powerful association would boycott the January election if Fallujah was attacked. The association - as well as the majority of Iraqis - knows that "Saddam without a moustache" Allawi is alive and in power only because of 137,000 US troops.

On Tuesday, a major Sunni Muslim political party, the Iraqi Islamic party (Hizbul Islami al-Iraqi), quit the interim government and withdrew its single minister from the cabinet in protest against the assault on Fallujah. The Iraqi Islamic party is the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic party well established in the Middle East.

Its members have a long history of oppression under Saddam Hussein's rule. As a result, party leaders went into exile, mostly in London. Immediately after the fall of Saddam, they restored their activities, and somewhat surprisingly adopted a peaceful political struggle to give the US a chance to hand over power to the Iraqi people. This chance has now been lost.

Martial law means in practice a daily curfew, no political meetings and no free press - but the resistance won't go away. The dynamic is inexorable: Sunnis will increasingly view themselves as excluded from the new Iraq as Shi'ites keep gaining power. This is the road for civil war.

There could not be a more tragic exercise in futility than Phantom Fury as Vietnam revisited - to destroy Fallujah in order to "save" it. The new Grozny, filled with rubble, will either become a garrison - with scores of Americans being blown up by roadside bombs - or the resistance will eventually get the city back when the Americans leave. Few Sunni Iraqis will believe this was all about protecting them from "terrorists" and promoting "democracy". Precision-strike democracy is a neo-conservative phantom, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint

"The Pianist" of Palestine

By OMAR BARGHOUTI

When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film's depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel's much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.

In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: "that's one thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians." I spoke too soon, it seems. Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz reported last week that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem.

In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as little more that "insensitivity," with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra about soldiers having to "contend with a complex and dangerous reality" was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940's.

Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual "punishment" meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing: "The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto."

Even Tommy Lapid, Israel's justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army's wanton and indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying: "[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague."

Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers, who could no longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their complicity in the daily humiliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as acceptable, even necessary, acts of "disciplining" the untamed natives, as a measure to maintain "security."

According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an army commander was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence presented against him was a videotape filmed by the army's education branch. In that particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that an army film crew was located nearby, and without any provocation, beat a Palestinian "flanked by his wife and children," punching him in the face, and "even kicked[him] in the lower part of his body," the report said.

A recent exhibit titled "Breaking the Silence," organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence towrds defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers' graffiti that included: "Arabs to the gas chambers"; "Arabs = an inferior race"; "Spill Arab blood"; and, of course, the ever so popular "Death to the Arabs," soldiers used a myriad of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of such abuse: "Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs." The exhibit's main curator described a particularly shocking policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods, like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.

The Hebron horrors pale, however, in comparison to what Israeli army units have done in Gaza. In an unnerving interview with Ha'aretz in November last year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant (res.) in the Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described the gradual transformation of every soldier to an "animal" when staffing a roadblock, irrespective of whatever values he may bring with him from home. From his perspective, those soldiers get infected with what he calls "checkpoint syndrome," a glaring symptom of which is acting violently towards Palestinians in "the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment ." "At the checkpoint," he explains, "young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate ."

Furer cites how his colleagues degraded and mercilessly beat a Palestinian dwarf just for fun; how they had a "souvenir picture" taken with bloodied, bound civilians whom they'd thrashed; how one soldier pissed on the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had "the nerve to smile" at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier asked Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused "broke someone's hand" and "slashed their tires."

The most chilling of all the incidents was his own personal confession. "I ran toward [a group of Palestinians] and punched an Arab right in the face," he admitted. "Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside." He then goes on to describe in gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the tightly handcuffed captive, dubbed "the Arab;" how they hit him until "he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva;" how he "grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side," until he cried aloud, and how the soldiers then "stepped harder and harder on his back," to make him stop crying.

Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered them on: "Good work, tigers." And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse continued in different forms. "All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly." One of the soldiers, Furer said, "went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy."

As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity and respect that full humans deserve. At the height of Israel's massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives to engrave the star of David on the arms of a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage boys. The haunting pictures of the victims were first shown on Arab satellite TV channels and eventually exposed on the internet.

In the same year, at al-Amari refugee camp, during a mass roundup of Palestinian males, teenagers and elderly included, Israeli troops inscribed identification numbers "on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation." The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat compared the act to well known Nazi practices at concentration camps. Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable." Nonetheless, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, was worried only about Israel's image being tarnished: "clearly it conflicts with the desire to convey a public relations message," he told Israel Army Radio. Parroting that line, the mainstream media in Israel, too, were far too concerned about the "public relations disaster" to express any abhorrence or protestation at the immorality of the act and the irony of it all.

Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and media at Tel Aviv University, sees PR as "a fundamental issue in Israeli life." "We do not think we do anything wrong," he clarifies in an interview with the Guardian, "but we think we explain ourselves badly and that the international media is anti-Semitic." Obsessed with how Israel is seen rather than with what it actually does, Israelis, according to Peri, are mostly worried that "we do not explain ourselves well. When we discuss the horrible things that happen in the West Bank, we don't talk about the issue but about how it will be seen."

Recognizing this prevailing cynicism, apathy and acquiescence among the majority of Israelis in the criminal oppression of the Palestinians, former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a recent interview with the Irish publication the Handstand that "gross insensitivity" was threatening a moral disintegration of Israeli society. Referring to the Germans during the Nazi rule, she added, "I am beginning to understand why a whole nation was able to say: 'We did not know.'"

I wonder when the time will come when a glamorous, award-winning director braves predictable intellectual terror and intimidation tactics to expose the venomous Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity by making a Palestinian version of "The Pianist."

Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst. His article "9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen among the "Best of 2002" by the Guardian. He can be reached at: jenna@palnet.com

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