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part of the warmwell Iraq War archive : Feb - March 2003

March 31 2003 ~ No one here believes this is a humanitarian war

Jonathan Steele in Damascus The Guardian (external link) "In this highly politicised city where anger over the invasion of Iraq alternates with pride in the resistance, there is one sure way to lighten the mood. Suggest that George Bush and Tony Blair launched their war because of Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction. Hoots of derision all round. Whether they are Syrians or members of the huge Iraqi exile community, everyone here believes this is a war for oil. In nearby Jordan and across the Arab world the view is the same. ....
.... Leaks from the state department's "future of Iraq" office show Washington plans to privatise the Iraqi economy and particularly the state-owned national oil company. Experts on its energy panel want to start with "downstream" assets like retail petrol stations. This would be a quick way to gouge money from Iraqi consumers. Later they would privatise exploration and development. Even if majority ownership were restricted to Iraqis, Russia's grim experience of energy privatisation shows how a new class of oil magnates quickly send their profits to offshore banks. If the interests of all Iraqis are to be protected, it would be better to keep state control and modify the UN oil-for-food programme, which has been a relatively efficient and internationally supervised way of channelling revenues to the country's poor. ..."

March 31 ~ "illegal combatants" will be shipped to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay

From the Washington Post (external link)"...The British troops found no sign of chemical or biological weapons, although they discovered crates of gas masks and chemical protection suits and containers of packets of atropine, the antidote to the deadly nerve agent VX.
... American forces have started rounding up Iraqi men in civilian clothes suspected of being involved with paramilitary squads. Marines patrolling in Nasiriyah and other areas of heavy fighting have detained more than 300 men in civilian clothes.
Military lawyers are drafting new criteria to guide troops on when they should take into custody Iraqis who appear to be civilians. Those detained are being locked up in facilities separate from prisoners of war, until a hearing is held under the Geneva Convention . Any deemed to be POWs will be held until the end of the war and then released. Those prisoners found to have used civilians as human shields or otherwise violated international laws of war will be deemed "illegal combatants" and shipped to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or other facilities.

March 31 - Denial from Washington

(Washington Post) "....The Pentagon's top military and civilian officials took to the Sunday television talk shows to insist that a major attack on Baghdad remains part of the U.S. war plan, although they said it will not take place until conditions are more favorable to U.S. forces. They rejected arguments from some current and retired military officers that the war had been started with an inadequate number of ground forces.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denied reports that a pause in the rush to the Iraqi capital had been ordered while the southern part of the country is pacified, supply lines are secured and troop reinforcements arrive. But they stressed that the battle for Baghdad would be tougher than any military engagement thus far. "There are difficult days ahead. Baghdad is not going to be easy," Rumsfeld said. ..."

March 31 ~ Denial from Robin Cook

Today's Mirror "....Mr Cook appeared to water down his comments, claiming in a Radio 4 interview that he wanted Britain to "see the job through". He added: "I am not in favour of abandoning the battlefield and that is not my position. "There can be no question at this stage of letting Saddam off the hook." But he added Mr Blair should recognise what the consequences of a siege of Baghdad would be. He warned of a "very serious risk of humanitarian tragedy".
Mr Cook's outspoken remarks, particularly those in the Sunday Mirror, stunned Downing Street and triggered a brutal response....
.anti-war Labour MPs rallied round Mr Cook. Ex-Armed Forces Minister Doug Henderson echoed his call for troops to be brought home. He said the Government must remove itself from the "hellish" situation in Iraq to avoid another potential Vietnam. Earlier, Mr Cook expressed his "serious concern" over US threats to Iran and Syria - and criticised American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He said: "I can't think of anything worse for the present situation than convincing the neighbours of Iraq that they are next on the list."....(more)

March 31 ~ !00,000 tonnes of wheat from Australia - no date yet for Um Qasr in spite of safe docking of Sir Galahad (carrying estimated 650 tonnes of aid)

Reuters (external link) "Two giant ships carrying 100,000 tonnes of Australian wheat are awaiting the all-clear to dock at the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr and it is unclear when they will be able to unload, officials said on Monday.
Despite the safe arrival of British supply ship Sir Galahad last Friday, carrying food, medicine, blankets and fresh water, the Australian government's aid agency said no date had been set for sending in the two wheat ships waiting off the coast of Oman. "(Security) has been the issue," said an AusAID spokeswoman. "We still don't have any advice as to when it will be safe. These ships are huge." Australia's national wheat exporter AWB Ltd had expected the docking of the Sir Galahad to pave the way for the wheat deliveries, possibly over the weekend...."

March 31 ~ Jay Garner, the retired US general who will oversee humanitarian relief and reconstruction in postwar Iraq, is president of an arms company...

Observer (external link) ".. that provides crucial technical support to missile systems vital to the US invasion of the country. Garner's business background is causing serious concerns at the United Nations and among aid agencies, who are already opposed to US administration of Iraq if it comes outside UN authority, and who say appointment of an American linked to the arms trade is the 'worst case scenario' for running the country after the war. Garner is president of Virginia-based SY Coleman, a subsidiary of defence electronics group L-3 Communications, which provides technical services and advice on the Patriot missile system being used in Iraq. ....... Phil Bloomer of Oxfam said 'The worst case scenario would be to put in charge of the reconstruction someone from the US or UK linked to the arms or oil industries.' .... The Ministry of Defence has confirmed that it was a Patriot missile that was involved when a British Tornado was hit last week. Jack Tyler, an SY Coleman senior vice-president, confirmed that Garner still held his position at the company. "

March 31 ~ "Three soldiers have been sent home for complaining about the way the war is being fought and the growing danger to civilians.

The fact that they are seeking legal advice makes it clear they have been sent home for refusing to obey orders rather than because of any medical or related problems such as shell shock. MoD lawyers were understood last night to be anxiously trying to discover the circumstances surrounding the order to send the soldiers home. Any refusal of soldiers to obey orders is highly embarrassing to the government, with ministers becoming increasingly worried about the way the war is developing. It is also causing concern to British military chiefs who are worried about growing evidence of civilians being killed in fighting involving American soldiers around urban areas in southern Iraq. " See report in the Guardian (external linnk)

March 30 ~"the situation in which we currently find ourselves: a protracted war...."

".. with no second UN Resolution, no commitment to UN governance of post-war Iraq, no commitment to a mid-East peace settlement. But Blair misread the character of American conservatism, its grip on the American body politic and its scope for rationality. He continues to do so, the miscalculation of his life."
Will Hutton, writing in the Observer today.
" ....Rumsfeld's exploded strategy is ideological in its roots. This conservatism is a witches brew - a menace to the USA and the world alike....
...There are only two possible rival power centres that champion a more rational approach to world order - in the US a revived and self-confident Democratic party, and abroad an unified European Union. Britain's national interest requires that we ally ourselves as powerfully as we can with these forces - both of whom are only too ready to make common cause. Blair has done neither. Either he is now a convinced conservative or the author of a historic political misjudgment. Neither the Labour party nor the country can indulge this ineptitude much longer." (More)

March 30 ~ "I got it wrong - very wrong." John Simpson, world affairs editor of the BBC.

TheAge.com (Australia)
"True, I wasn't the only one and if the American tactics had been different I might not have been so wrong after all. But Saddam Hussein's forces have not crumbled quickly, and ordinary Iraqis have not greeted the coalition as their liberators. Instead, there is a growing danger they will see the allies as enemies - as bad, indeed, as Saddam himself.
This, you will remember, was the war which was fought because (as US Vice-President Dick Cheney told the Saudi Foreign Minister) it was "do-able"....... But it is clear hubris played a greater part in the initial planning of this campaign than it should have. And the hubris came not from the American military, who like most senior soldiers are a cautious lot, but from the politicians.
"An explosion of joy will greet our soldiers," said the US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. There has been nothing joyful about the explosions that have greeted the allied forces in Iraq. Why? All my experience in Saddam's Iraq assured me that people longed to be free of him. The analogy, I felt, was with Nicolae Ceaucescu's Romania - when people saw his power was collapsing, they came out to claim their freedom.
.... If, Iraqis reason, the father decided that he wanted, on balance, to keep Saddam in power 12 years ago, maybe the son will want the same thing, whatever he may say now. So they watch the bombs falling and they keep their own counsel. ... Whoever drops the bombs, they're only falling because there is a war; and they don't blame Saddam for that war, they blame the Americans and the British."

March 30 ~ Protest in Edinburgh "The best way to support the troops is to bring them home immediately, that's the way to support them"

Thousands join anti-war march (BBC external link) " Thousands of anti-war protesters have taken to the streets of Edinburgh to register their opposition to military action in Iraq. Police estimated that about 5,000 people took part in the protest in the Scottish capital on Saturday afternoon. However, organisers put the figure at more than 10,000. Protesters marched along Princes Street before heading for a mass rally in the city's Meadows area. They were led by Labour MSP John McAllion and Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan, marching behind a banner reading Stop the Invasion. ..... "I don't want any Armed Service personnel killed or maimed in the same way that I don't want any innocent Iraqis killed or maimed," he said. "The best way to support the troops is to bring them home immediately, that's the way to support them."
Iraqi citizen Susan Karim reminded the crowd that women throughout Britain would be receiving flowers and presents on Sunday for Mother's Day. "But the Iraqi mothers are burying their sons and daughters, the Iraqi children are burying their mothers and some Scottish women are burying their sons as well, needlessly," she said.
... Lothian and Borders Police said the demonstration had been peaceful and no arrests were made. "The vast majority of the crowd were good natured and followed police instructions which ensured that the march went well," said Assistant Chief Constable Malcolm Dickson.

March 30 ~ "Leaders of Amnesty International deliver a petition to Downing Street

calling on the prime minister to abide by international law during the conflict in Iraq. Neil Durkin, a spokesman for Amnesty, said: "Eleven to 12 days into the conflict and some of the fears that we were raising are worryingly enough coming true. We are seeing civilians being killed or injured and we have worries about the nature of the strikes and the bombs. Have they been properly targeted, were they discriminate or indiscriminate?"

March 30 ~...fundamental questions about the role of the media to provide an objective and accurate view of war.

Extract from article by Warren Gamble (New Zealand Herald) Bigger picture the first loss of real-time war (external link)
"One of the central debates is whether the media, in particular television, and specifically the "embeds", are serving the Pentagon's propaganda war, their own ratings, or the greater public good. Or perhaps a mixture of all three. New York media columnist Michael Wolff laments that the media have switched into 24-hour war mode, leaving behind the real and continuing debate about whether it is justified. ....It's all spectacle. War is a media thing. N..... Most cable channels have brief segments on antiwar protest marches, and little coverage of the ongoing political opposition.
On the war coverage itself there are questions over bias, problems caused by the round-the-clock immediacy including running with unproven stories, and the pros and cons of the restricted reporting from the field. Some have claimed the television networks are in the Pentagon's propaganda pocket. But after the initial hype surrounding the forces' smooth advance in the first days, there has been a distinct change in the tone and content of the coverage. ....
...impression America and Britain want to convey to a world deeply divided about their campaign, stressing the precision of their strikes aimed at ousting Saddam Hussein while not harming civilians. On the other side, the state-run Iraqi television has used graphic pictures of dead American and British soldiers and Iraqi civilians to convey its own message to its people. The Western media have a continuing dilemma about the sensibility of their audiences to showing such pictures, particularly if an audience includes relatives of a dead soldier. Al-Jazeera has no such restraint and has caused Western outrage by showing the Iraqi footage of dead American and British soldiers and dead civilians, including a boy in Basra with his head blown off. The channel says it is simply showing the reality of war. ...."
Wall-to-wall instant coverage has flushed out another significant problem for television - running with unproven rumours which later turn out to be false. " "

March 30 ~ Another sign of things to come.

Robert Fisk today ".... At least 20 international "human shields" - hitherto "guarding" power stations, oil refineries and food production plants - decided to leave Iraq yesterday. So did all Chinese journalists, on instructions from their government. Not all the optimistic claims from the Iraqi government, a victory against US Marines outside Nasiriyah was among them, could change their minds.
The nightly attacks long ago spread into the daylight hours, so the sound of aircraft and rockets - I have several times actually heard the missiles passing over the central streets - have acquired a kind of normality. A few stores have reopened. There are fresh vegetables again. And like every blitzed people, Baghdadis are growing used to what has become a dull, familiar danger.
Is this "shock and awe", I sometimes ask myself? "

March 30 ~ Cook: Bring troops home

BBC report (and Sunday Mirror article too - both external links)
"Former cabinet minister Robin Cook has called on Tony Blair to bring UK units home from the war in Iraq. Mr Cook - who resigned as Leader of the House of Commons in protest at the decision to launch hostilities without international agreement - denounced the campaign in Iraq as "bloody and unjust". The ex-foreign secretary also warned that Britain and America risked stoking up a "long-term legacy of hatred" for the West across the Arab and Muslim world.
In an outspoken article for the Sunday Mirror, Mr Cook said that US President George W Bush and his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not appear to know what to do now that their hopes that Iraq would swiftly capitulate had proved unfounded. They appeared to be contemplating laying siege to Baghdad, which would result in massive civilian suffering and many unnecessary deaths, he said.
Mr Cook wrote: "I have already had my fill of this bloody and unjust war. "I want our troops home and I want them home before more of them are killed."

March 29 ~"The harassment, arrest, detention and frustration of those who are against the war is becoming routine."

Democracy is under threat in the United States; anyone who objects to the conflict in Iraq is not allowed to say so Thursday's Guardian (external link)
"Relatives of victims who died on September 11, who are opposed to the war, have been prevented from speaking in schools. Last month Stephen Downs was handcuffed and arrested after refusing to take off a Give Peace a Chance T-shirt in a mall in Albany. He was told he would have been found guilty of trespass if the mall had not dropped the case because of the bad publicity. As Iraqi civilians and American, British and Iraqi soldiers perish in the Gulf, this war is fast claiming another casualty - democracy in the US. This process is not exclusive to America. Civil liberties have suffered in Britain...."

March 29 ~ Planned UK anti-war protests -

With hostilities under way, anti-war groups are planning their next wave of demonstrations. Andrew Ellson lists the major protests scheduled across the UK ....Guardian page (external link)

March 29 ~If anyone is the "appeaser" it is Blair, in his support for the US government's pre-emptive attack on Saddam. ....

From Tam Dalyell's article in Tuesday's Guardian (external link) " I don't think that Blair really understands the horrors of modern-day warfare. In 1994 I visited Baghdad (all expenses paid by me) and saw the carbonated limbs of women and children who had been impregnated against a wall by the heat of just one cruise missile. In the current war, hundreds of cruise missiles have been launched just to soften up the enemy. We are told that the US intends to use incapacitating bio-chemical and depleted-uranium weapons. We are receiving information that the it intends to use war in Iraq as an opportunity to test out a range of weapons: cluster aviation bombs with self-guided munitions and pulse bombs being examples. ..."

March 29 ~ "I hope I'm wrong, for the sake of the American lives that are going to be lost..."

Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector and ballistic missile technology expert who worked in military intelligence in the U.S. armed forces. In 1998, Ritter resigned from the U.N. Special Commissions team to protest Clinton Administration policies that he said subverted the weapons inspection process. (From GuluFuture.com)
"Remember I'm a 12 year veteran of the Marine Corps. I fought in the first Gulf War. I know what war is about. I know what defending my country is about.
This is a bad war, because it has nothing to do with the defense of the United States of America. Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration has pulled an enormous lie to the international community; to the American people.
And now we're in Iraq --carrying out the right-wing neo-conservative motives of a handful of people; the Richard Perle's, Paul Wolfowitz's; the Dick Cheney's. And we've allowed them to hijack our foreign policy. And they've been cheered on by these Iraqi expatriots, who have zero credibility in my eyes. They're so brave and they want Iraq liberated... Then my goodness man, go to Iraq... fight and die for your country... But don't ask Americans to do it..."

March 28 ~"The burst of gunfire from across the road finally stopped all attempts to supply the aid.

As soldiers leapt into the jeeps, a Warrior turned round and took out the position the gunfire had come from. And with daylight fast fading, the humanitarian taskforce decided to speed back to its base at Shaibah airfield.
Tomorrow, they will undoubtedly try again to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi civilians. And presumably tomorrow, they will encounter yet more resentment. .." Guardian (external link)

March 28 ~ ... let me whisper this truth in your ear: we don't have an answer.

"..We're flummoxed and floundering, as so often when faced with the issue of self-determination. " Guardian yesterday Which peoples should govern themselves? Our answers are as confused as ever (external link) "The Kurdish question raises a cardinal dilemma for the Anglo-Saxon liberal imperialism on which we have so curiously re-embarked at the beginning of the 21st century. When London and Washington were briefly making the case for the Iraq war as a "humanitarian intervention", it was the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja that they always cited, and the killing of an estimated 100,000 Kurds by Saddam's men. Though such comparisons are always odious, the Kurds have suffered even more terribly than the Kosovans. The moral case is also strong for two other reasons. The Bush (senior) administration encouraged the Kurds to rise against Saddam in 1991, and then let him massacre them with the helicopter gunships that Washington let him keep. Britain has its own special responsibility, since the first people to bomb the Kurds were us, when they revolted against the Iraq we created after the first world war. (Since Tony Blair has apologised for the potato famine in Ireland, will he be apologising for this?) "

March 28 ~ Iraq: chemical suits are 'standard'

(Guardian) (external link) " Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, insisted today that chemical protection suits found by coalition forces, and cited as evidence that Iraq has chemical weapons, were just "standard equipment" for Iraqi soldiers. He said that they were in no way proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and added that they were normal kit for soldiers around the world."

March 28 ~ "This is the real shock and awe."

Two articles in the Guardian today about Al-Jazeera: "...people are turning to us simply because the western media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a 15-minute drive from central command, the view of events from here could not be more different. Of all the major global networks, al-Jazeera has been alone in proceeding from the premise that this war should be viewed as an illegal enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants and the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has provided a corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring occasional resistance, going to plan. "
"...I think if these photos were shown on the general media the anti-war movement would double."
"...She feels frustrated by the one-sided nature of TV coverage " .... these are the real brutalities of liberation. I don't believe the mother of these children will feel any happier if she's liberated, because she's already lost everything. As a mother it makes me so angry. This is what should be shown. This is the real shock and awe."

March 28 ~ Jeremy Paxman

It was a relief last night to find Jeremy Paxman taking John Reid to task for Tony Blair's use of the word "executed" (he had said that Iraq had "executed" the two British soldiers.) Then we heard the truly Freudian slip from Mr Paxman; he referred to "Tony Bush"...

March 28 ~ Robert Fisk: Raw, devastating realities that expose the truth about Basra

...... The unedited al-Jazeera videotape - filmed over the past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad - is raw, painful, devastating.
......The short sequence of the dead British soldiers - over which Tony Blair voiced such horror yesterday - is little different from dozens of similar clips of dead Iraqi soldiers shown on British television over the past 12 years, pictures which never drew any condemnation from the Prime Minister.
......... Far more terrible than the pictures of dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra's largest hospital that shows victims of the Anglo-American bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain. A middle-aged man is carried into the hospital in pyjamas, soaked head to foot in blood. A little girl of perhaps four is brought into the operating room on a trolley, staring at a heap of her own intestines protruding from the left side of her stomach. A blue-uniformed doctor pours water over the little girl's guts and then gently applies a bandage before beginning surgery. A woman in black with what appears to be a stomach wound cries out as doctors try to strip her for surgery. In another sequence, a trail of blood leads from the impact of an incoming - presumably British - shell. Next to the crater is a pair of plastic slippers.
The al-Jazeera tapes, most of which have never been seen, are the first vivid proof that Basra remains totally outside British control. .....
..... optimistic reports from "embedded'' reporters - especially on the BBC - who gave the impression that Basra was "secured'' or otherwise in effect under British control. This the tape conclusively proves to be untrue. ....seeing the tapes, it is hard to imagine that it amounted, if it existed at all, to anything more than a brief gun battle. (Robert Fisk's article)

March 28 ~ Perle of doubtful price?

The resignation of Richard Perle is widely reported. We choose this article from RepubliCons.org (external link)
Perle Resigns: Was it Conflict of Interest or Poor War Planning "The unexpected resignation Richard Perle, one of the chief architects of the US led invasion of Iraq, was largely believed to have stemmed from recent allegations of conflict of interest between his governmental role and his business relationships. Of course, if this were the Bush administration's modus operandi Dick Cheney would have been already shown the door for Halliburton's (see here) immediate profiteering in Iraq. So, what else could bring the "Prince of Darkness" to his knees? Could it be his decade in the making war plan for Iraq is not working?
Consider this: The possibility exists that as the US inserts itself further into an increasingly more intractable war in Iraq that the prognostications by Perle and others were wrong. The fiction advanced in the Perle manifesto was based on the assumption that the Iraqi populace rising in full support of the invading troops and ushering Saddam and his minions out of power. It assumed that the Iraqi military would surrender en masse and even the Republican Guard would wither in response the "shock and awe" propagandizing; that the Saddam regime would implode rapidly and the US would be hailed internationally as the liberator of the enslaved Iraqis. All these predictions and unreasonably Pollyannaish expectations of a brief and decisive conflict that would demonstrate American supremacy and moral rectitude have proven false. ...."

March 28 ~ U.S. ambassador walks out of U.N. debate

Toronto Star (external link) "...The walkout was a dramatic finale to the first open meeting of the bitterly divided council since U.S. and British forces launched their attack last week. Iraq's U.N. envoy Mohammed Al-Douri claimed the United States had arranged contracts to rebuild Iraq in 1997, six years before the U.S.-led war began last week. Negroponte got up and walked out as Al-Douri continued speaking, .... Al-Douri (Iraq's U.N. envoy Mohammed Al-Douri ) said the United States had even planned the carving up of Iraq before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Almost spluttering, he said the United States now was using the issue of humanitarian aid to hide its "criminal aggression.'' The Iraqi envoy urged the Security Council to halt the war in Iraq, saying ending the conflict was even more important than getting humanitarian assistance into the region. ...... "If the humanitarian issue is very important, it is more important" to halt the war, he said.
"The warning I would like to make to the members of the august council is that the United States and the British were hoodwinked when they were told that the Iraqi people would receive them with flowers and hugs and ululations, and the children and the mothers will rejoice at the coming of the U.S. forces," he said.
It was at that point that Negroponte got up from his seat around the horseshoe-shaped table in the Security Council chamber and walked out.

March 28 ~ "loyal" supporters can expect to be "rewarded"

The Telegraph this morning speculates about Tony Blair's "Post-War" reshuffle: Telegraph "....The fashionable opinion inside government is that Mr Blair will oust Clare Short the International Development Secretary, because of her criticism of his conduct of the Iraq crisis. The counter view is that, with Mr Cook already positioning himself as a future leader of discontented MPs on the centre-Left, Mr Blair will keep her in the Cabinet to limit the problems from the back benches. The burning question is whether Mr Blair would dare to remove Gordon Brown as Chancellor following tensions between the two men over the euro and a range of domestic policy issues. A direct swap between Mr Brown and Jack Straw, the ultra-loyal Foreign Secretary, to whom Mr Blair feels indebted, has been rumoured."

March 27/28 ~ how do we know this is the real George Bush?

A little light relief from the Guardian yesterday (external link) "Yesterday President George Bush made his first public appearance since the start of the war, speaking to service personnel at the MacDill airforce base in Tampa in an obvious bid to reassure Americans and boost the morale of the armed forces. But how do we know this is the real George Bush? Later in the day a man who looked and sounded like Mr Bush appeared alongside Tony Blair at Camp David, leaving intelligence experts to ponder whether a lookalike had been used, and whether the same lookalike had been deployed on both occasions.
It has long been suspected that Mr Bush employs a string of lookalikes for difficult or dangerous speaking engagements, some of whom may have had their ears specially enlarged for the task.
Most of those who regularly monitor Mr Bush's speech patterns believe that it was the genuine article who spoke at Central Command HQ in Florida yesterday, pointing to a characteristic tendency toward quasi-biblical phrasing ....."

March 27 ~ Antics of the President -

See this article by Kevin Lowe is a Canadian expatriate living in Amsterdam.
"If you stayed up late enough to watch the announcement of the start of the war in Iraq, you might have caught a glimpse of something very unsettling. In an apparent error, the BBC aired coverage of pre-speech preparations, live from the satellite feed coming from the Oval Office.......... Bush, the so-called leader of the free world, was sitting behind his desk going over his speech, as we would expect. But then it got weird. I felt like I was looking behind the curtain, and it was uglier than I ever imagined.
Like some class clown trying to get attention from the back of the room, he started mugging for his handlers. His eyes darted back and forth impishly as he cracked faces at others around him. He pumped a fist and self-consciously muttered, "feel good," which was interestingly sanitised into the more mature and assertive, "I'm feeling good" by the same Washington Post.
He was goofing around, and there's only one way to interpret that kind of behaviour just seconds before announcing war on Iraq: the man is an idiot.
Most Europeans and many others around the world have assumed this for some time. To have it actually confirmed - beyond a reasonable doubt - on live television, is perhaps a little too harsh to reconcile with our wish to believe we live in a fair, democratic world of which benevolent forces are mostly in charge. I felt sick."

March 27 ~ The Web sites of Arab news agency Al-Jazeera have been taken offline, with a denial of service attack one possible cause.

http://www.arborwood.com/awforums/show-topic-1.php?start=1&fid=7575&taid=30&topid=1169&ut=1048748835
"The Qatar-based agency, which operates an Arab-language site among its many media properaties, launched an English-language Web site on Monday, providing a starkly different view on the war with Iraq than that offered by many Western media outlets. According to a report on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) online, the English site was hit almost immediately by what they have termed "hacker attacks" and technical glitches. The report quoted Al-Jazeera managing editor Joanne Tucker. "We've had a lot of obstacles thrown in our way," she told the ABC. ...."

March 27 ~ . "How dare you refer to our friends as 'collateral damage? And who is Mr. Bush kidding when he expects us to believe that the US wants to secure Iraq's oil fields for the benefit of Iraqi people?"

"God save all the people," said his father, quietly, "And God save all countries from this destruction." ......... "Most of the casualties are children, elderly people and civilians, What do they have to do with fighting and war?"
From an article at Common Dreams.org
".....We felt some relief in being able to tell patients and their families that people in countries around the world are turning out for massive demonstrations against the war.
Each of these victims whose bedsides we visited today will lie still, hopefully recovering, with many hours to reflect on what has happened to them. Peace activists who continue to fill jails in the US will likewise spend hours of confinement, pained by the cruel stupidity of warfare. Most of us are angry, very angry, - few of us can manage the genuine sweetness of little Ruba Salem whose gaze radiated easy affection in spite of her trauma,-- and yet I believe that we can channel our anger, our disappointment, our frustration and our rage into the kind of energy that will champion nonviolent resistance to the works of war, and an ever deepening desire for the works of mercy."

March 27 ~"As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities..."

Robert Fisk today in the Independent (external link) ".. There was the electrical shop-owner killed behind his counter by the same missile that cut down Ta'ar and Sermed and the doorman, and the young girl standing on the central reservation, trying to cross the road, and the truck driver who was only feet from the point of impact and the beggar who regularly called to see Mr Danoon for bread and who was just leaving when the missiles came screaming through the sandstorm to destroy him.
In Qatar, the Anglo-American forces - let's forget this nonsense about "coalition" - announced an inquiry. The Iraqi government, who are the only ones to benefit from the propaganda value of such a bloodbath, naturally denounced the slaughter, which they initially put at 14 dead. So what was the real target? Some Iraqis said there was a military encampment less than a mile from the street, though I couldn't find it. Others talked about a local fire brigade headquarters, but the fire brigade can hardly be described as a military target.
Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions; these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.
Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent yesterday could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned co-ordinates, and the sandstorm would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud's friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn't want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems.
And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in Baghdad..."

March 27 ~ "The United States will not cede control of Iraq to the United Nations

if and when it overthrows President Saddam Hussein, Secretary of State Colin Powell says. "We didn't take on this huge burden with our coalition partners not to be able to have a significant dominating control over how it unfolds in the future," Powell told a House of Representatives subcommittee....
Powell said the United Nations should, however, have a role in a post-Saddam Iraq, if only because it makes it easier for other countries to contribute to reconstruction costs. ......
The question of the U.N. role has come to the fore in the last few days because of debates in New York on the terms for releasing Iraqi oil money to pay for humanitarian relief. The problem is expected to loom even larger if the United States takes control in Baghdad and then starts managing the Iraqi oil industry or seeking funds for reconstruction. Washington will argue that as the victor it has the right to manage the transition to an Iraqi civilian government. Its opponents will say that the invasion was illegal and that the United Nations cannot endorse it retroactively." See the Swissinfo website (external link)

March 27 ~ Mankind is experiencing "a difficult moment in history, with the world taking up arms once again".

Pope John Paul made a fresh appeal for peace in Iraq and said his heart was "oppressed" by the news of battles. Speaking to thousands of pilgrims and tourists in St Peter's Square, he asked Catholics around the world to continue praying for peace. The 82-year-old Pope, who headed the Vatican's diplomatic campaign to avert war, said that when he prayed he did so "with a heart that is oppressed by news that reaches us from an Iraq in war." ... See more (external link)

March 26/27 ~ Kofi Annan appeals to Security Council to unite and bring relief to Iraqi people

Invoking "the terrifying impact" of war on Iraq, grief for the dead and anguish for the living, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealed today to the divided Security Council to unite on a common purpose and to the international community to respond swiftly and generously to a new "flash appeal" for humanitarian aid for the Iraqi people. (More) (external link)

March 26/27 ~ what the Prime Minister calls "our simple patriotism"

It's the kind of patriotism, wrote Tolstoy, "that is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason and conscience." (John Pilger)

March 26 ~ "Blair is on the move over the Atlantic to see Bush, amid mounting evidence that there is indeed fierce disagreement with America on the aftermath of war."

(Channel Four "Snowmail") "A key role for the UN at odds with Washington's determination to have an American military/civilian administration run post-Saddam Iraq, and award American companies the contracts to rebuild the place. ..."

March 26 ~ Annan 'increasingly concerned' by civilian casualties in Iraq

....Mr. Annan said he was confident the UN Security Council would find a solution on adjustments to the now-suspended Oil-for-Food programme, which allows Baghdad to use part of its petroleum sales to buy relief supplies and is responsible for feeding 60 per cent of the Iraqi population. .."UN News Centre external link

March 26 ~ "Yesterday, Tony Blair said that 400,000 Iraqi children had died in the past five years from malnutrition and related causes.."

"..He said "huge stockpiles of humanitarian aid" and clean water awaited them in Kuwait, if only the Iraqi regime would allow safe passage.
In fact, voluminous evidence, including that published by the United Nations Children's Fund, makes clear that the main reason these children have died is an enduring siege, a 12-year embargo driven by America and Britain.
As of last July, $5.4billion worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN and paid for by the Iraqi government, were blocked by Washington, with the Blair government's approval. The former assistant secretary general of the UN, Denis Halliday, who was sent to Iraq to set up the "oil for food programme", described the effects of the embargo as "nothing less than genocide". Similar words have been used by his successor, Hans Von Sponeck. Both men resigned in protest, (external link) saying the embargo merely reinforced the power of Saddam..." John Pilger in the Daily Mirror(external link)

March 26 ~ It is not those who oppose this war who need to justify themselves, regardless of Blair's calls to "support our troops". There is only one way to support them - bring them home without delay.

In 1932, Iraqis threw out their British colonial rulers. In 1958, they got rid of the Hashemite monarchy. Iraqis have shown they can overthrow dictators against the odds. So why have they not been able to throw out Saddam? Because the US and Britain armed him and propped him up while it suited them, making sure that when they tired of him, they would be the only alternative to his rule and the profiteers of his nation's resources. Imperialism has always functioned like that. The "new Iraq", as Blair calls it, will have many models, such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, all of them American conquests and American ruled until Washington allowed a vicious dictatorship to take over. Saddam only came to power after the Americans helped install his Ba'ath Party in 1979. "That was my favourite coup," said the CIA officer in charge." The tireless John Pilger in today's Mirror

March 26 ~ ".. the U.S. miscalculated the response of Iraqis to any invasion. It forgot that people don't take kindly to foreigners telling them what to do, no matter how noble the intentions..."

Today's Toronto Star (external link)
"Relying on the fact that Saddam is a cruel dictator, U.S. war planners assumed that most ordinary Iraqis would welcome anyone who entered their country to depose him.
But as reports from journalists entering southern Iraq demonstrate, this is far from true. The BBC describes Iraqis in the so-called liberated towns as sullen and bitter. Others write of lawlessness and of Iraqi civilians berating the American-led coalition for shelling their towns.
Throughout the south, the U.S. and British have run into far fiercer resistance than they anticipated. Yet the south was supposed to be the easy part, the section of Iraq populated by Shiite Muslims opposed to Saddam.
By contrast, Saddam has described U.S. intentions in language that his countrymen can comprehend. He says Bush wants Iraq's oil...."

March 26 ~".. Independent Strategy believes that the US shows many symptoms of an empire that is cresting. "

Guardian today
"First, it sees deepening mistrust of the US and predicts a rise in terrorism in reaction to US unilateralism. That is certainly the case with the Bush administration, which has made a habit of tearing up international treaties from Kyoto to the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Iraq is the culmination of the Bush administration's unilateralist streak, as the White House plunges into an unpopular war in disregard of the UN security council.
Second, Independent Strategy sees trouble ahead for US economic policy. It notes that Mr Bush has boosted discretionary government spending more than at any time since the Vietnam war. Inheriting big budgetary surpluses from the Clinton administration, the Bush White House is heading for record deficits. ......
Third, what was known as the Washington consensus - free market economics and deregulation - has broken down. ..... "Empires work best when they project power through the successful export of a social model or ideology," argues Independent Strategy. "....Japan and Europe have long rejected both, at least implicitly, as inimical to their culture and alien to their social contract."
Independent Strategy sees the weakening dollar as the fourth strand in the decline of empire. ...(More)

March 26 ~ " Already, reconstruction contracts are being earmarked for politically well-connected American corporations .."

".. like Halliburton (Vice President Dick Cheney's former company) and Bechteland oilmen from Texas have begun making their first forays into Iraq's Rumaila oil field." India today
"Apart from the strategic pay-off in getting to decide how much Iraqi oil is produced and to whom it is sold, there's serious money to be made for American companies. The Iraqi oil industry will need some capital investment but given the high quality of the oil and the relatively low extraction costs, profits will be enormous. Nationalisation of the oil industry in most Arab countries over the years has led to US oil companies being restricted to downstream, i.e. refining and marketing, activities. But the real profits are in upstream, i.e. extraction, operations. If Saddam Hussein is overthrown, US oil companies would be well placed to gain control of Iraqi reserves from the extraction to marketing stage. The US could also block Russian, French and Chinese oil majors from benefiting. Finally, control over the international oil trade will help to protect the dollar's dominant position vis-a-vis long-term rivals like the euro.
But this war is about more than just oil: It is about cementing the domination of the US in a world that is likely to undergo fundamental economic and strategic changes in the next few decades. " More

March 26 ~ "We know that the Americans are again using depleted uranium munitions in Iraq, just as they did in 1991.

But yesterday, the BBC told us that US Marines had called up an A-10 strike aircraft to deal with "pockets of resistance" - a bit more military-speak from the BBC - but failed to mention that the A-10 uses depleted uranium rounds. So for the first time since 1991, we - the West - are spraying these uranium aerosols in battlefield explosions in southern Iraq, and we're not being told. Why not?"
from today's New Zealand Herald.

March 26 ~ The first casualty of battle is often the plan.

"There will be those who say that, "No it's been meticulously planned," but it doesn't feel like it to be here" Robert Fisk "I think the Bush administration has shown as a characteristic, is that it dreams up moral ideas and then believes that they're all true, and characterizes this policy by assuming that everyone else will then play their roles. In their attempt to dream up an excuse to invade Iraq, they've started out, remember, by saying first of all that there are weapons of mass destruction. We were then told that al Qaeda had links to Iraq, which, there certainly isn't an al Qaeda link. Then we were told that there were links to September 11th, which was rubbish. And in the end, the best the Bush administration could do was to say, "Well, we're going to liberate the people of Iraq". And because it provided this excuse, it obviously then had to believe that these people wanted to be liberated by the Americans."

March 26 ~ "Well, poor old UN. Very soon, the Americans are going to need the United Nations as desperately as they wanted to get rid of them..."

".. Because if this turns into the tragedy that it is turning into at the moment, if the Americans end up, by besieging Baghdad day after day after day, they'll be looking for a way out, and the only way out is going to be the United Nations at which point, believe me, the French and the Russians are going to make sure that George Bush passes through some element of humiliation to do that. But that's some way away. Remember what I said early on to you. The Americans can do it- they have the firepower. They may need more than 250,000 troops, but if they're willing to sacrifice lives of their own men, as well as lives of the Iraqis, they can take Baghdad; they can come in. But, you know, I look down from my balcony here next to the Tigris River- does that mean we're going to have an American tank on every intersection in Baghdad? What are they there for- to occupy? To repress? To run an occupation force against the wishes of Iraqis? Or are they liberators? It's very interesting how the reporting has swung from one side to another. Are these liberating forces or occupying forces? Every time I hear a journalist say 'liberation', I know he means 'occupation'. " Robert Fisk

March 26 ~ "They may dislike Saddam but they hate the Americans"

commented a reporter for the Today programme. It was chilling to hear senior doctors in Amman (Jordan) on the World Service, explaining calmly that those responsible for the death of the ten year old boy in Basra, whose head had been shown on television, were "evil...devils..." and how "that British Prime Minister..what's his name...Blair?..." had made such a misguided and terrible mistake to think that the Iraqis would accept an interfering power from thousands of miles away. The expected uprising of the civilian population may or may not come - but it would surely be naïve to think that those brave enough to face down the Ba-ath tyrants, armed to the teeth, are likely then to hand over their country to foreign invaders."

March 26 ~ In relation to reconstruction, of course we want it to be authorised by the United Nations

Tony Blair on March 24 (external link to Hansard) "Let me emphasise again that when we talk of reconstruction we mean the reconstruction of the country following Saddam, not reconstruction to do with allied war campaigns. That reconstruction - that rebuilding of Iraq - will be a lot easier if it has proper United Nations authority. I hope very much that people can come together and make the system work. That will be an important part of bringing the international community back together at the end of this."

March 26 ~ "A Citizen's Declaration

As a US-led invasion of Iraq begins, we, the undersigned citizens of many countries, reaffirm our commitment to addressing international conflicts through the rule of law and the United Nations.
By joining together across countries and continents, we have emerged as a new force for peace. As we grieve for the victims of this war, we pledge to redouble our efforts to put an end to the Bush Administration's doctrine of pre-emptive attack and the reckless use of military power."
This is the text of the declaration that people are being invited to sign at http://www.moveon.org/declaration/

March 25 ~"Madness is the rule in warfare.."

"..When we send our young men and women off to combat we send them into a zone of madness, and they are never the same when they return, whether they are physically injured or not..."
I think the extraordinary televised coverage of the war with Iraq is a good thing. It looks less like a video game these days, and more like the real hell of combat. I don't see how any sane person could watch the astonishing bombardment of Baghdad, and follow the reports on the ground of one human tragedy after another, and remain cavalier about sending troops into harm's way... Wars are planned and championed by the folks who stroll the corridors of power. But they are fought by ordinary men and women and their families, who have to watch their budgets closely, and tend to all their daily duties, while hoping against hope that no one really close to them gets lost in the madness. ..." New York Times Editorial (external link) yesterday.

March 25 ~ Switzerland's largest bank, UBS, is to transfer frozen Iraqi-held assets in the United States to US authorities.

See http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=41&sid=1715890 "The bank said it would honour a request for the funds, blocked since 1990 under United Nations sanctions, to be handed over. UBS did not specify the exact amount of money involved. Last week, the US authorities ordered 17 banks in the US to release a total of about $1.7 billion (SFr2.4 billion) to the Treasury Department. The money comes from transactions between US oil firms and the Iraqi state oil company."

March 25 ~ "The sovereignty of Britain is now irrevocably compromised ..."

"....Using discredited evidence, lies and criminal thoughtlessness we have been made the second most-hated nation in the world.
....... That quivering sincerity Blair brings out every time he has to sell us another repulsive US directive is just another bit of fakery; it is make-up he slaps on to look good while he covers up the truth. And he doesn't fool Muslims by patting us on the head as he did last week in the Commons: "I know the vast majority of Muslims are good and law-abiding people who are contributing an immense amount to our country." Time to throw up. Again.
This war is immoral, illegal, dangerous and wrong. And even if we get our devastation in fast and Iraqis are dancing in the street, this remains my assessment.
Real patriots should reject the devious calls to "support our boys" now that action has begun. This is abominable blackmail, as vile as the accusation that anti-war people support Saddam. My husband has young male relatives actively engaged in our army. Yet he and his sister are stridently anti-war. ...Our leadership has stamped over our democracy, and our relationships with the European Union and the rest of the world. The hate-mongering against France should make Britons ashamed. ....... Britain was once trusted by Arabs, with whom we shared a long history. ...old post-colonial suspicion had faded and mutual respect was emerging. A new report, Public Diplomacy and the Middle East, by the Foreign Policy Center and the British Council, shows how this trust has collapsed. ...Ponder this as cluster bombs and depleted uranium cause more deaths, as more Iraqi flags are replaced with the stars and stripes (we have witnessed this already), and we join the coalition of the lowly." The Independent today ."

March 25 ~ "So the message from Iraq is clear: go home and leave us alone..."

"... You will never be welcome in Iraq as colonisers. Stop destroying Iraq. Do not bury our nation. Stop the war and give peace and the UN inspectors a chance in the name of humanity. ..."
Dr Burhan M al-Chalabi, chairman of the British Iraqi Foundation and a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs has written in the Guardian today

March 25 ~ One rule for them

"Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".... George Monbiot today (Guardian)

March 25 ~ thought /speech control

"Even the Western Morning News is now staunchly supporting war in Iraq.."writes an emailer from the West Country " ..- on the grounds that we MUST support our soldiers who are only doing their job (and I do support them in my own way - although like Glenda Jackson ( the MP Glenda Jackson described as "needless deaths" those in the the helicopter crash ) I shall never believe that they should be there in the first place) You're quite right of course to be "sad not mad" on the website - it just seems to be another aspect of this thought /speech control that is so prevalent today.... My father must be revolving at speed in his grave - he was Old Labour and firmly believed in freedom of speech and the right to object. Why should anybody be forced to change how they express their views on war solely because their opinions (and those of millions of others) have been disregarded and soldiers been sent out to wage a war despite them?"

March 25 ~ The International Committee of the Red Cross accused coalition forces yesterday of failing to follow the Geneva Conventions in their treatment of prisoners of war.

Telegraph today (external link)"....In a letter to The Telegraph today, Louise Christian, solicitor for three British detainees in Guantanamo Bay, said the US was breaching international law there. "On their original arrest Guantanamo detainees too were humiliated and paraded on TV manacled, shackled and hooded," she said...."

March 25 ~ This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer

The Independent on Sunday. Veteran war reporter Robert Fisk tours the Baghdad hospital to see the wounded after a devastating night of air strikes ".... let's forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the equally cheap moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip around the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital. ......Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is "as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed" but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs ­ they were bound up with gauze ­ and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg..."

March 24 ~ Iraq is the first instance in which the Bush doctrine is being applied, and it is provoking an allergic reaction...." George Soros, chairman of the Open Society Institute and of Soros Fund Management

See article "...The doctrine is built on two pillars: First, the United States will do everything in its power to maintain unquestioned military supremacy; second, it arrogates the right to preemptive action. These pillars support two classes of sovereignty: American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties; and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the Bush doctrine. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: All animals are equal but some are more equal than others. ..." (more)

March 24 ~"those who want less filtered information . .."

Read the article 'Embedded' in spin from Daily Camera.com
"..Now control is even tighter. Reporters have been "embedded" with troops in Iraq, but they are on military leashes and their stories subject to censorship; don't count on hearing much about Iraqi casualties. That's not so different from what reporters went through in Saddam Hussein's Iraq: minders, tightly controlled access and censorship.
The military insists that all this is necessary for "security." But Sharkey disagrees, noting, for example, that reporters knew the date and time of the World War II D-Day invasion and nobody spilled the beans.
I believe the journalists would like to give us the fullest story possible, but under constant government control, they can't. So Americans who want a more balanced picture of how the war is going might want to supplement their usual media diet with other, more independent sources. In this day of the Internet, that's not hard to do. I'd advise scanning "progressive" Web sites such as www.commondreams.org, balanced, English-language Israeli media such as The Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com) and English newspapers, such as The Independent (www.independent.co.uk). Find out what the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera has been reporting.
I'm not saying alternative sources are 100 percent reliable, either. I disagree with much that I have read from those listed above. But with mainstream American media coverage "embedded" in government spin, those who want less filtered information should take advantage of the freedom George Bush touts and seek out news and views elsewhere. ..."

March 24 ~Chirac is sending humanitarian personnel to Qatar, to be ready to help when needed

"... Chirac is now working on preventing the US from taking all the spoils when the war is finished and on reestablishing the UN's authority on the situation. He is also sending humanitarian personnel to Qatar, to be ready to help when needed. France did the same thing in former Yougoslavia: the Americans paraded with their shiny weapons and tanks and the French buried thousands of dead (my cousin spent 6 months there burying people and vomiting, and digging, and burying, and vomiting again, and could not utter a single word for several months afterwards)." From an email received today

March 24 ~ Three coaches did not make it to Fairford on Saturday...

See report "....They confiscated people's hats and scarves, some cardboard shields, and tore off the hoods of the white paper weapons inspector suits that had been passed around the coaches earlier. They detained two people from the coaches, One for possession of a cardboard shield and the other for suspected incitement to criminal damage. Both of were released later that evening. When a few people, who'd been processed, tried to board a local bus to Fairford, they got pulled off by the police."

March 24 ~ "the doubters seem to ignore the most compelling evidence that Salam is who he says he is.."

- the detail of his day-to-day life. Those who know Baghdad well, and who have read the diary closely, say there is no doubt in their mind that whoever is writing it is currently resident in the Iraqi capital. The author may display evidence of spending time in the west (possibly Britain, though he does use Americanisms) with his cynical sense of humour and love of David Bowie lyrics, but the reams and reams of fascinating detail about domestic and street life in Baghdad are highly convincing." See today's Guardian (external link) and then see if you can log on to Salam's website without getting the 502 bad gateway message

March 24 ~ We live in fictitious times," he thundered, "when a fictitious president sends us to war for fictitious reasons

- shame on you Mr Bush. Shame on you." - Michael Moore, upon receiving the award for the best documentary at the Oscars, 23 March 2003. Guardian (external link)

March 24 ~"Not one single refugeee has arrived in Jordon; the traffic is all going the other way"

said Dominic Arkwright on the Today Programme. Far from capitulating or greeting troops with photographable scenes of joy, the Iraqis appear to be demonstrating increasing resistance. Ordinary Iraqi people in Jordan long to return to "die with their children" and "defend their homeland". We hear too that the British newspapers are full of outrage at the appearance on Iraqi television of pictures of dead Americans and the "parading" of the five captured servicemen and one woman. Words such as "barbarism" abound on the front pages. Amazement that Baghdad is defiant and news that there seem few cracks in the dictator's regime show that we are seeing dawning realisation among some that the "Coalition" has underestimated the task they have set themselves. It is all horribly reminiscent of Vietnam - an adventure that should have been a short sharp campaign but that dragged bloodily on and on. Memories are very short. So short that we have not yet heard anyone draw a comparison with the treatment by the invaded Iraqis of captured prisoners with what the Americans are doing in the US military base of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. See again The Bush Administration Through the Looking Glass

March 24 ~ There is a humanitarian emergency developing in Basra.

In the first days of this war one is reminded too of the words of the poet Wilfred Owen. Writing ninety years ago without rancour but just deep sadness, he knew from first hand the nature of war and was killed just before the end of the First World War - that war to end wars...:

March 24 ~ "ITN has called a halt to all independent reporting in southern Iraq"

"amid fears that the veteran ITV reporter Terry Lloyd may have been killed by "friendly fire" in an incident on the road to Basra yesterday. He said they had taken the decision to suspend reporting from anyone other than those who are "embedded" with the troops..." This report in the Guardian (external link) is likely to lead many - in addition to their concern and sympathy for the family and friends of Mr Lloyd - to wonder about that "friendly fire" and to ask questions about the definition of the word "embedded" in this context.

March 24 ~ Rumsfeld and Bush - a change in tone

Visibly shocked and angry at way things have not gone according to plan - the parading on Iraq television of captured soldiers from Fort Bliss in Texas yesterday and the strong resistance from the Iraqis - the US administration now seem to be preparing public opinion for a much longer war. The lack of the finding of any "weapons of mass destruction" is also causing great embarrassment.

March 23 ~ "Adviser quits Foreign Office over legality of war"

(Guardian) There seems to have been no mention of this on radio or television. ".... Ms Wilmhurst has been a legal adviser at the Foreign Office for 30 years, and deputy legal officer since 1997. Her resignation will be an embarrassment to Tony Blair as well as to Mr Straw and raises new doubts about the legal basis for the war. It will encourage anti-war MPs to renew pressure on the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to publish in full his legal advice to the government. The Foreign Office was reluctant to discuss Ms Wilmhurst's departure. ..."

March 23 ~ The lesson for today's serial regime changers is a simple one.

The Guardian's story by Neil Clark of how you "can try to subjugate a people by sanctions, subversion and bombs. You can, if you wish, overthrow governments you dislike and seek to impose your will by installing a Hamid Karzai, General Tommy Franks or a Zoran Djindjic to act as imperial consul. But do not imagine that you can then force a humiliated people to pay homage to them. ..." Extract:Read the full article.

March 22 ~ Demonstration at Fairford

A beautiful Cotswold town in blazing Spring sunshine. Except for the fact that helicopters passed overhead and media people with cameras (perhaps hoping for some violence) were in evidence, it was almost impossible to tie up in one's mind the bleak reason for being there with the idyllic pastoral scenes past which we walked - cows grazing peacefully with their calves, ducks in the sparkling river. The route was lined with daffodils. A group from the Gower Women for Peace sang in harmony that kept all around them in contemplative and peaceful step. What a total contrast to the misery in Baghdad. Policemen and women (particularly the local ones) were friendly - perhaps aware of the absurdity of the overwhelming police presence when almost all participants were so evidently peace-loving and respectable.
Most of the several thousand walkers carried flowers.

March 22 ~ today I weep for my country.

said Senator Byrd of West Virginia on Thursday " I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.
Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place...." (Read the Senator's speech)

March 22 ~ "We are worried that the US believes and acts like it can replace the UN in delivery of humanitarian aid and reconstruction,"

said Justin Forsyth, head of policy at Oxfam. "We don't believe they have the skills or the legitimacy." The disagreements between Britain and the US extend even to who should be in charge of the immediate humanitarian work as the battle rages. Washington is boasting that its soldiers will double as mobile aid workers, bringing rations to the vulnerable population, 60% of whom depend on food handed out by the UN's oil for food programme. "We don't want our aid equipment to be offloaded off the back of a US military lorry, because if we were to do that we would be seen as part of a belligerent force," said Mr Forsyth. ..See Guardian report (external link)

March 22 ~ Your Excellency

I am writing to request that you support invoking General Assembly resolution 377A, Uniting for Peace, to end the war on Iraq.
We are in precisely the situation that this resolution was designed to address. The Security Council is deadlocked: there is a "lack of unanimity of the permanent members" of the Security Council. An illegal breach of the peace and an act of aggression have now occurred, which will claim the lives of untold thousands of innocent victims.
I ask you to live up to the mandate upon which the United Nations was founded. I ask you to join the voices calling for an emergency session of the General Assembly to be convened to condemn this act of aggression and recommend collective measures to "maintain and restore international peace and security" by halting this war.
The future of our world, and of the United Nations, hang in the balance. Please take action now.
You can send this letter or something similar from http://act.greenpeace.org/aas/e?a=ufp&s=amb_s (external link)

March 21 ~ The world has been cancelled. There is a war on.

Simon Jenkins in the Times today "I normally consume news by the hour, almost the minute. Yesterday I had to turn it off. For much of the day, there was no news, merely the fallout of a bungled assassination attempt on President Saddam Hussein. There was just hours of waiting for news. Yet nothing else had a look-in. Only the ultimate anaesthetic, football, was permitted to supplant bombs as fit subject for public interest. ....... Yesterday Britain suddenly had no worries over Europe's constitution, the NHS, London's transport, the Olympics or the Budget. Instead the nation waited breathless for tales of bombing and heroism..... ......the most notoriously wasteful department in Whitehall a golden key to the Exchequer. Drugs clinics, the elderly, Aids in Africa, the war on poverty could all eat their budgetary hearts out. War excused everything. Politics was in abeyance.
I have tried over the past month to argue my way through this wretched war. Debate is now overtaken by action. .......Despite Tony Blair's crude efforts to scare the public into becoming pro-war, there is no threat to British territory. We have sent professional soldiers to aid an American "disarmament" expedition in the Gulf. This should not require emergency powers. ..... " Read the article

March 21 ~ America mounts a relentless propaganda campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq.

From today's Independent (external link) ".....That message is that President Saddam, not Mr Bush, is responsible for the war; that it is a war to disarm a country which is "a grave danger to the world", as Mr Bush declared on Wednesday; that President Saddam is armed to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons (and soon, according to Vice-President Dick Cheney, nuclear weapons as well); and that the "liberation" of Iraq will shine as a beacon of hope throughout the Middle East.
The mantra is repeated daily by Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush's notably uncommunicative spokesman. But Washington has been caught bending the truth already, most notably over Saddam Hussein's links with al-Qa'ida, and the forged document purporting to show that Iraq had bought uranium from Niger. Similar doubts surround American claims yesterday that oil fields near Basra had been set on fire, an allegation disputed by eyewitnesses. Above all though, the return to the colours of Ms Hughes, a veteran of the Bush campaigns of 1994, 1998 and 2000, is evidence of how thoughts are already beginning to turn to 2004 - though no Bush aide would admit as much. President Bush's chances of a second term hinge on the war - not so much on its ultimate outcome, but on how quickly and with how few casualties, both Iraqi and American, that objective is achieved."

March 21 ~ US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war

Let us hope that the news (see Observer report from March 2nd) about the 28 year old unsung heroine of Cheltenham's GCHQ will not be allowed to fade away. Her action revealed that US govt. is spying on its UN 'allies' - and reminds us again of the story about phone tapping discovered in Brussels on March 19
".....The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza's office. However, when The Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told 'You have reached the wrong number'. On protesting that the assistant had just said this was Koza's extension, the assistant repeated that it was an erroneous extension, and hung up. ..."Observer article.

March 21 ~ Southampton University's willingness to assist this form of protest.

At Southampton university counter-strikers are requesting the deduction one hour per week of their pay in protest against the war (as beginning of March) and in favour of Asylum Aid, 28 Commercial st, London E1 6LS, charity no.328729. Mark Levene writes, ".., it is denying money which would have gone into the exchequer's war chest and it is a positive action in favour of a cause doing something for the victims of war and violence as demonstrably linked to anti-war protest."

March 21 ~ The Bush Administration Through the Looking Glass

By Peter Fruendlich, National Public Radio.
"All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gun, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend it...." (more)

March 20/21 ~ the Vatican condemned the U.S. attack as a "defeat for reason."

Cardinal Roberto Tucci, speaking on Vatican Radio, said the war is "beyond all legality and all international legitimacy." He said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein bore what he said was an "enormous responsibility" for the war, but he also criticized the United States.
Pakistan's information minister, Sheikh Rashid, expressed regret over the start of the war. He said Pakistan sympathizes with the Iraqi people, and emphasized the United Nations did not approve the war.
Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi described the U.S. attack as "a black mark on history." He said the world is now witnessing that "might (power) is right." "The world is now at a critical juncture following the action of the United States and its allies, which will go down as a black mark in history," he said. The United States, as "a large and powerful nation, along with its allies, has acted with disregard for international law, humanity and universal justice. It has launched an attack against a sovereign state that has diminished capacity to defend itself."
The president of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim state, Megawati Sukarnoputri, urged the UN Security Council to hold an emergency meeting and also called on the United States to halt the war.
New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clark reiterated her government's opposition to the war...." See Radio Free Europe

March 20 ~ "Donald Rumsfeld tells us the scope and scale of what is to come is beyond anything that has ever been seen before. "

Channel Four. Whatever the strategy for the war against Iraq, it has started. Forty Tomahawk cruise missiles hit Baghdad in the night hours. Iraq fired three scud-like missiles in return penetrating the Kuwaiti desert. The war is not unfolding yet as advertised... Saddam was targetted, but appears to have survived. His speech is slurred, he appears nervous and tired. Un-confirmed reports of fires in the southern oil fields. Quiet currently in Baghdad...."

March 20 ~Big military assault on Afghanistan on the same day as the attacks on Iraq.... a "coincidence"

"The United States has launched one of its biggest military assaults on Afghanistan since Operation Anaconda a year ago but insisted it was a "coincidence" that the offensive began on the same day as the attacks on Iraq. Up to 1,000 troops and attack helicopters converged on villages in southern Afghanistan early this morning to flush out al-Qaida terrorists and their allies, a US army spokesman said. The operation, code-named "Valiant Strike", began with an air and ground assault in the remote mountains of southern Kandahar province, Colonel Roger King said. He said the military had launched the assault after receiving "a mosaic of different intelligence inputs" of activity in the area. Washington military officials said that radio transmissions had been detected from caves near the villages. However, Col King told Reuters that, as far as he was aware, the operation had been planned for two months.... " Guardian (external link)

March 20 ~ "None of the nuclear-related intelligence trumpeted by the administration has held up to scrutiny..

.., inspectors say. From suspect aluminum tubes to aerial photographs to documents -- revealed to be forgeries -- that claimed to link Iraq to uranium from Niger, inspectors say they chased U.S. leads that went nowhere and wasted valuable time in their efforts to determine the extent of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of weapons banned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. ..... In the case of the Niger documents, they appeared genuine at first glance -- accurate nomenclature, proper stamps -- but further study turned up crude errors, such as words misspelled in French and dates that did not match the day of the week. Who created the counterfeit documents remains a mystery." See Mercury News on Znet (external link)
Germany's Der Spiegel accused the United States and the U.K. as the forgery perpetrators in a March 17 Web story titled, "Grounds for War Urgently Required: Forgeries and Half-Truths Intended To Heighten Fears of Saddam's Weapons Arsenal"

March 20 ~"... In its past wars, the millions of Lilliputians sat glued to their TV sets and watched the propaganda broadcasts, identical on all channels."

They watched and believed that the war is for sublime values of peace and justice. Now as well, obedient spokesmen explain that Saddam is Hitler and the Iraqi children must be saved from him. But who is listening? Now the truth is exposed - the U.S. is perceived as a gangster that does whatever he feels like. In the past, the U.S. committed its crimes to the sounds of cheers of the majority of the Western society. It has lost this majority. The change that has occurred in the world can no longer be reversed."
Some optimism, again from Znet (external link)

March 19 ~ Yours in despair

An emailer writes: "On Radio 4 PM programme I have just heard German, Russian and French condemnation of USA and UK - very strong.
Also Hans Blix saying that he wished the Inspectors had been given more time. Why in Heaven's name did they not say this yesterday before the Commons debate? Perhaps that's why Blair timed the Debate for yesterday and not today. These recent statements would have not helped him at all. Everything is stage managed, and so full of deception. I think some MPs may already be having second thoughts. Yours in despair"

March 19 ~"If nothing else, Mr Cook's resignation swept away the notion that the Prime Minister has further devastating evidence

that the rest of us don't about the threat posed by Iraq. If there really were further evidence of a "clear and present threat" from Iraq it would surely have been shared with Mr Cook." Western Morning News external link

March 19 ~ "Plans for the future of Iraq following the downfall of Saddam Hussein have been drawn up by a secret Whitehall unit

, it emerged yesterday. The existence of the Iraq Planning Unit, which includes representatives from the military as well as the Foreign Office and Department for International Development, was kept under wraps in order to avoid giving the impression that Britain believed war was inevitable, British sources said. Officials from the unit have been liaising closely with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) set up by US President George Bush under director Jay Garner in January, and British officials have joined ORHA's forward base in Kuwait..." Western Morning News - external link

March 19 ~ How your MP voted

MPs last night were asked to vote on a motion which (1)"supports the decision of the Government that the UK should use all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction". Secondly, to vote on a cross-party amendment which said that (2) "the case for war against Iraq has not yet been established, especially given the absence of specific UN authorisation" but also expressed "total support" for the British forces in the Gulf. From Hansard, here is how the MPs voted:

March 19 ~ The Pentagon has threatened to fire on the satellite uplink positions of independent journalists in Iraq,

according to veteran BBC war correspondent, Kate Adie. In an interview with Irish radio, Ms. Adie said that questioned about the consequences of such potentially fatal actions, a senior Pentagon officer had said: "Who cares.. ..They've been warned."
According to Ms. Adie, who twelve years ago covered the last Gulf War, the Pentagon attitude is: "entirely hostile to the the free spread of information."
"I am enormously pessimistic of the chance of decent on-the-spot reporting, as the war occurs," she told Irish national broadcaster, Tom McGurk on the RTE1 Radio "Sunday Show." (See report) Ms. Adie made the startling revelations during a discussion of media freedom issues in the likely upcoming war in Iraq. She also warned that the Pentagon is vetting journalists according to their stance on the war, and intends to take control of US journalists' satellite equipment --in order to control access to the airwaves. "

March 19 ~ Fostering Terror

The population is now being told to prepare for the worst....breathtaking.
'Stay indoors' terror advice http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2863003.stm
Simple preventative steps http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/terrorism/athome.htm

March 19 ~ Uranium Warfare: A Crime Against Humanity

Fintan Dunne GuluFuture.com " What if they announced the inevitable deaths from depleted uranium weapons at the actual time of war? Nightly News might go like this:
"Coalition forces today captured a key enemy stronghold. In a statement, Mr. Bush said that only 75,000 more deformed babies could secure the capital for the US. Ed Carnage reports from Washington..."
"...The Uranium Babies will be with us for a very long time. For countless millions of years to come, Iraq, Kosovo and indeed the uranium test firing ranges in the USA, will be lands of poison harvest. So will all war theaters of this slow, hidden nuclear holocaust. Uranium nuclear war is a crime against humanity."

March 19 ~ "Now Pandora's box creaks open once again and out will jump the miseries, distempers and demons of war...."

writes Simon Jenkins in the Times in another very readable article. "We should remember what the ingenious Greeks left at the bottom of that box, a mistress called Hope. She did not escape. She remained "to assuage the lot of man".
Hope now pleads for a quick victory. Hope pleads for no gratuitous bombing. Hope craves a swift rebuilding of Iraq. Hope prays for the Palestine "road map" to be sincere. Hope longs for the UN to pick itself up and play a full role in a reconstructed Middle East. Hope wants this war to purge once and for all America's September 11 trauma and rejoin the world community. Hope believes in America as a force for good in the world. Hope wants this war turned to good account.
Hope hates the sound of bin Laden laughing."

March 18/19 ~ The rebel amendment -

217 voted for the amendment (139 Labour) while 396 voted with the government. The House of Commons shows itself to be very much more pro-war than the rest of us. The Tory leadership too lost four good people. John Randall, Tory Whip last week, shadow environment minister Jonathan Sayeed, shadow home affairs minister Humfrey Malins and shadow health minister John Baron all left their posts on March 18th.

March 18 ~ "What is uncertain is the aftermath."

"This is the variable that is never factored into the thinking of our native political lumpen-bourgeoisie; their deeds plant the seeds of future and furious resistance.....This invasion will also ignite the fires of Arab and Muslim humiliation and anger throughout the region. Most importantly, in my view, there are the Kurds. Anyone who has followed the news has heard about "Saddam's" gassing of the Kurds. That's how it is portrayed. Nonetheless, few people have bothered to find out what the truth is, or even to investigate this claim..."
A fascinating and sobering article by retired U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff , which re-examines what we can expect on the battlefield when the United States begins its invasion

March 18 ~ Blair and Bush must have been told the truth... it is likely that Iraq has been substantially disarmed for at least eight years

John Pilger (external link) last Friday. ".......In his dramatic presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the truth about Iraq's nerve gas weapons "only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son in law". What Powell neglected to mention was that his star witness had told them all the weapons had been destroyed."

March 18 ~ "Don't the politicians realise that people's lives depend on what they say?" Iraqi man in a petrol queue

"Most shops are shut now, and Iraqis are as ready as they ever will be for war. The drivers we work with say everyone's always asking them, "When will it start?" because they think anyone who knows journalists must have inside information. Alas, we're just waiting too. I met a man in a petrol queue who said he'd been glued to Radio Monte Carlo and Al Jazeera TV (his brother has an illegal satellite dish). "Sounds like it'll happen Wednesday or Thursday," he said. "We know 95% that it's going to happen - we've just got 5% hope that it won't. Don't the politicians realise that people's lives depend on what they say?" He had sent his children to the village, so that if he had to flee he could move more quickly." From Channel Four's news update this afternoon

March 18 ~ George Monbiot ~ We may believe that George Bush and Tony Blair have the interests of foreigners at heart only when they spend more on feeding them than they spend on killing them

Today's article in the Guardian ".....There is surely no more obvious symptom of the corruption of western politics than the disproportion between the money available for sustaining life and the money available for terminating it. We could, I think, expect that, if they were asked to vote on the matter, most of the citizens of the rich world would demand that their governments spend as much on humanitarian aid as they spend on developing new means of killing people. But the military-industrial complex is a beast which becomes both fiercer and hungrier the more it is fed. ...the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, flew to Washington to beg George Bush for more money. He was given $50m, $35m of which the US insists is spent on the construction of a five-star hotel in Kabul. Karzai, in other words, has discovered what the people of Iraq will soon find out: generosity dries up when you are yesterday's news. "

March 18 ~ Home Office minister John Denham has resigned from government

Reuters

March 18 ~ Clare Short has decided to stay in the Cabinet

See Reuters report. Having already written to Ms Short to congratulate her on putting conscience before career, we now can only assume that the pressure put on her by those who have begged her to stay must have been very persuasive indeed. It would be presumptuous of us to comment further but we are again reminded of Simon Jenkins' article of March 5 Clare Short, ally of the 'post-heroic strategists'
Read her interview with Andrew Marr BBC external link.

March 18 ~ BP and Shell - (but it isn't about oil)

See article from wsws.org ".... The Financial Times reported last week that the two companies had held talks with Downing Street and Whitehall officials "about the commercial benefits from developing the country's huge oilfields once Saddam Hussein is toppled". Shell is reported to have raised the issue during a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior policy adviser, whilst BP has been pressing Whitehall to ensure that the UK do not lose out on potential contracts to the United States. The newspaper's claims brought an angry rebuttal from the two companies, denying they had actively sought talks with the government on the issue. But their denials only confirmed that talks on oil exploration in Iraq post-Saddam Hussein had indeed taken place...."
Friends of the Earth (external link) say: "Baghdad Bazaar Big Oil in Iraq was published last October but only came to light last week. It indicates that a regime change in Iraq would benefit US and UK oil companies while a peaceful resolution would benefit oil companies based in Russia, France and China:.." See Baghdad Bazaar Big Oil (external pdf link) Extract:

March 18 ~ Lord Hunt said he had agonised over the Iraq policy for weeks and had now decided to resign.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I don't support the pre-emptive action which is going to be taken without broad international support or indeed the clear support of the British people."

March 18 ~ "He dismissed Mr Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British people, insisting the Iraqi dictator had no weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed against his enemies."

Channel Four News "MPs have given former Cabinet minister Robin Cook a standing ovation after he told the House of Commons he would vote against the Government's plans to go to war in Iraq. ... He dismissed Mr Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British people, insisting the Iraqi dictator had no weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed against his enemies. And he said that the regime of weapons inspections and sanctions imposed on Iraq since the Gulf War had contained Saddam more effectively than military action had in 1991. Mr Cook said the Prime Minister was wrong to argue that France alone was to blame for the failure to achieve consensus in the United Nations Security Council. War was opposed by many countries around the globe - and by the British public he said, adding: "I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support." He also claimed that that history would be "astonished at the diplomatic miscalculation" that saw the international coalition fall apart. Mr Cook warned that Britain was in danger of isolating itself internationally by going to war without the support of any of the international institutions of which it is a member - Nato, the European Union and the Security Council. ..... Mr Cook said that after working so hard to try to achieve a second resolution we could not now "pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance." Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said parliament would hold a vote on military action in Iraq after a debate in the House of Commons tomorrow."
The Prime Minister (and the Prime Minister's wife) has been seeing Labour MPs in batches to try to reduce the number of rebels in tomorrow's vote.

March 18 ~ Astounded by the BBC news that said "40% of the population is still against war"....

... we looked at the Local London Ballot. This allows only one vote per computer address.

March 18 ~ "The United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has warned the United States that the legitimacy of military action will be questioned.."

(See report from The Hindu - external link) and the "..support for it diminished" in the absence of any authorisation of the Security Council on the use of force. Mr. Annan told the media after a meeting of the Security Council. Mr. Annan maintained that should military conflict break out, the Council and the U.N. as a whole would have a role to play. ..."

March 17 ~ Both the UK and US governments have booked airtime for 8am EST on Wednesday.

Our informant asks himself : " I wonder what they will have to talk about." Other information suggests that hostilities will begin in the early hours of Wednesday.

March 17 ~ "Good afternoon, Jon Snow here with a briefing on a turbulent news day..."

For those who have not signed up for the Channel 4 news update: UN route fails:
Diplomacy has died, officially buried at 3.00pm our time (10.00am Eastern) by UK UN Ambo, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. The French are being blamed, but of course the coalition of the unwilling is far wider than that. Don't mention the Russians who first used the dreaded V word (VETO) Don't mention the 36 times the US has deployed the veto to prevent resolutions passing on the Israeli-Arab issue. No need to mention much beyond the reality that this is war: Tonight, tomorrow night, sometime extremely soon. And if previous patterns are to be deployed, all this talk of 3,200 smart weapons in the first 48-hours may be a deception. Expect, perhaps, a land invasion to cut-off Baghdad from the rest of the country...."

March 17 ~ "Of the 535 members of Congress, only ONE (Sen. Johnson of South Dakota) has an enlisted son or daughter in the armed forces.."

"..If you really want to stand up for America, please send your twin daughters over to Kuwait right now and let them don their chemical warfare suits. And let's see every member of Congress with a child of military age also sacrifice their kids for this war effort. What's that you say? You don't THINK so? Well, hey, guess what -- we don't think so either! " Read today's letter to President Bush from the wonderful Michael Moore "There is virtually NO ONE in America (talk radio nutters and Fox News aside) who is gung-ho to go to war. Trust me on this one. Walk out of the White House and on to any street in America and try to find five people who are PASSIONATE about wanting to kill Iraqis. YOU WON'T FIND THEM! Why? 'Cause NO Iraqis have ever come here and killed any of us! No Iraqi has even threatened to do that. You see, this is how we average Americans think: If a certain so-and-so is not perceived as a threat to our lives, then, believe it or not, we don't want to kill him! Funny how that works!...." More

March 18 ~ "He dismissed Mr Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British people, insisting the Iraqi dictator had no weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed against his enemies."

Channel Four News "MPs have given former Cabinet minister Robin Cook a standing ovation after he told the House of Commons he would vote against the Government's plans to go to war in Iraq. ... He dismissed Mr Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British people, insisting the Iraqi dictator had no weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed against his enemies. And he said that the regime of weapons inspections and sanctions imposed on Iraq since the Gulf War had contained Saddam more effectively than military action had in 1991. Mr Cook said the Prime Minister was wrong to argue that France alone was to blame for the failure to achieve consensus in the United Nations Security Council. War was opposed by many countries around the globe - and by the British public he said, adding: "I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support." He also claimed that that history would be "astonished at the diplomatic miscalculation" that saw the international coalition fall apart. Mr Cook warned that Britain was in danger of isolating itself internationally by going to war without the support of any of the international institutions of which it is a member - Nato, the European Union and the Security Council. ..... Mr Cook said that after working so hard to try to achieve a second resolution we could not now "pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance." Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said parliament would hold a vote on military action in Iraq after a debate in the House of Commons tomorrow."
The Prime Minister (and the Prime Minister's wife) has been seeing Labour MPs in batches to try to reduce the number of rebels in tomorrow's vote.

March 17 ~ Robin Cook has resigned

The scenes in the House of Commons were very unusual - not least because of the applause that greeted the end of his moving resignation speech and the fact that many were seen to rise to their feet to acknowledge him. His speech was described by Andrew Marr as the best he had given.

March 17 ~ Does the British army share the conviction of two thirds of Americans - i.e. that Saddam Hussein blew up the twin towers on September 11 2001?

"Now it appears that there are two sides squaring up and people at home seem to think we are just slavishly following the Americans. The events of 9/11 obviously didn't have the same effect on British people as they did the Americans. "But you can bet that if anything like that had happened in the UK, people at home would be baying for us to get in there and flatten Saddam."
This was the comment from a British soldier, reported in the Western Morning News under the headline: FRONT-LINE FRUSTRATION OVER LACK OF SUPPORT . (external link)

March 17 ~ An early draft of Resolution 1441 included the phrase "all necessary means" but after pressure from France and Russia that was watered down only to "serious consequences".

(Channel 4 News - external link) At the time, America's ambassador to the UN John Negroponte made it clear that 1441 wasn't enough to send the boys in. Now, however, government lawyers point to Resolution number 678 which does use the magic phrase "all necessary means" in relation to Iraq. That, however, was passed in 1990 before the last Gulf War and before the UN ceasefire arrangements. There's another problem too. Resolution 1441 ends by saying that the UN security council "decides to remain seized of the matter". "Seized" has a very specific legal meaning of possession or ownership. In plain language the council was saying that nothing could happen until it met again. And there is a formal process to go through before military action can be taken in the name of the UN. .."

March 17 ~ We are told ..by someone who would seem to know.. that war will begin at 2.30am on Wednesday morning.

And an emailer writes: "I remember as a child my mum, who was a child herself during the war, had an autograph book she had kept. Her friends had all signed it. One had written the well known quote- "Man's inhumanity to Man makes many countless mourn". It had a profound affect on me at that young age. 40 years later nothing has changed. Tonight 12 of us in Almeley Church joined countless thousands around the world praying that it would." She sends this article When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History :"....instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us. Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite. ..." The parallels are terrifying.

March 17 ~" I'll hazard a guess right now, we shall see many of the British and American journalists back to their old trick of playing toy soldiers, dressing themselves up in military costumes for their nightly theatrical performances on television."

Robert Fisk in yesterday's Independent on The War of Misinformation has Begun "Here's a few guesses about our coverage of the war to come. American and British forces use thousands of depleted uranium (DU) shells - widely regarded by 1991 veterans as the cause of Gulf War syndrome as well as thousands of child cancers in present day Iraq - to batter their way across the Kuwaiti-Iraqi frontier. Within hours, they will enter the city of Basra, to be greeted by its Shia Muslim inhabitants as liberators. US and British troops will be given roses and pelted with rice - a traditional Arab greeting - as they drive "victoriously" through the streets. The first news pictures of the war will warm the hearts of Messrs Bush and Blair. There will be virtually no mention by reporters of the use of DU munitions.
But in Baghdad, reporters will be covering the bombing raids that are killing civilians by the score and then by the hundred. These journalists, as usual, will be accused of giving "comfort to the enemy while British troops are fighting for their lives". By now, in Basra and other "liberated" cities south of the capital, Iraqis are taking their fearful revenge on Saddam Hussein's Baath party officials. Men are hanged from lamp-posts. Much television footage of these scenes will have to be cut to sanitize the extent of the violence.
Far better for the US and British governments will be the macabre discovery of torture chambers and "rape-rooms" and prisoners with personal accounts of the most terrible suffering at the hands of Saddam's secret police. This will "prove" how right "we" are to liberate these poor people. Then the US will have to find the "weapons of mass destruction" that supposedly provoked this bloody war. In the journalistic hunt for these weapons, any old rocket will do for the moment...."

March 17 ~ Tony Blair is trying to convince us that the existing resolution, 1441, always offered sufficient scope for war.From today's

Letters in the Telegraph

Where's the opposition?

Date: 17 March 2003
Sir - It now seems that a second UN resolution will not be tabled, as it will not be passed. Consequently, Tony Blair is trying to convince us that the existing resolution, 1441, always offered sufficient scope for war. Such a massive policy U-turn by the Government hands the Opposition fantastic ammunition, yet Iain Duncan Smith has offered Mr Blair his support. Only the Liberal Democrats question the international legality of military aggression without UN support. The saddest fact is not that Britain is effectively sidelining the UN, but that we have no effective opposition. Any opposition will be soon deemed "unpatriotic" and be stifled, because our troops will be in battle.
Now is the time for opposition to be vociferous, before the fighting starts.
From:
Garry Honey, Esher, Surrey
Sir - Following the revelation (report, Mar 13) that Iraq has developed an unmanned drone aircraft that can fly for 90 miles, I can reveal that plans for this machine were given away free to readers of Aeromodeller magazine in the April issue of 1988. No doubt our security services will be able to search that magazine's archives to determine if Saddam was a subscriber.
From:
Alex Pincus, Buxted, E. Sussex

March 17 ~ "London would not push a vote if it did not think it would get the necessary nine out of 15 Security Council votes..."

Reuters (external link) "..Despite massive domestic opposition to British involvement in a war against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein without U.N. support, Blair tried to put a brave face on events. Asked if he was confident he and his ruling Labour Party would survive the Iraq crisis, he replied: "Yes, actually." He declined to tell reporters when he would call a cabinet or a parliamentary debate on the issue. Both are expected this week, although some analysts are saying bombs may be falling before legislators have a chance to debate again the legitimacy of military action in Iraq.....(he) was expected to work the phone from his plane and then during the night in a last-ditch effort to bring other nations on board the U.S.-British position on Iraq."

March 17 ~ Because of the level of opposition to war in Britain, the failure to achieve a second United Nations resolution will have serious consequences for Tony Blair.

Independent (external link) "Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, is reported by friends to be very depressed by the prospect of war without proper UN authority. Insiders now regard Mr Cook's resignation from the Cabinet as even more likely than the departure of the International Development Secretary, Clare Short. Other members of the Government such as the Environment minister, Michael Meacher, the Agriculture minister Lord Whitty, and parliamentary aides Ken Purchase and Tony Wright, would not say whether they expect to be in office at the end of the week. Tony Blair has promised MPs another vote on the war in the coming week. He is likely to face a rebellion from Labour MPs even bigger than the 121 who voted against the Government last time. Many Labour MPs who backed the Government then made it clear they were doing so on condition that the UN Security Council passed a second resolution authorising war, as Mr Blair confidently predicted they would."

March 16 ~ Letters Guardian March 15 "Counsels against war"

We must not let ourselves be decieved by Downing Street's false argument that UN resolution 1441 justifies an Anglo-American attack on Iraq without the need for a further resolution (War Analysis, March 14).
Last October, Washington originally put forward a resolution specifying that failure by Saddam Hussein to fulfil UN demands for his disarmament should be dealt with "by all possible means" - code for automatic use of armed force. This was totally rejected by France, Russian and China. In November, after six weeks of haggling, the present resolution 1441 was passed , stating that a material breach by Iraq would entail "serious consequences" - not code for automatic war. Moreover, France, Russia and China, in accepting resolution 1441, formally stated that they did so only on the clear understanding that it did not carry with it any automatic recourse to war without a further security council decision.
Therefore, Bush and Blair's war will be contrary to resolution 1441. It will also breach the UN Charter itself, which reserves decisions over peace and war to the security council except in cases of self-defence against attack. But neither America nor britain has been attacked, or even threatened with attack, by Iraq.
Of course, the cold-eyed warmongers of Bush's Washington don't give a damn about any of this. But we might have hoped that Tony Blair would have felt some scruples about embarking on a war which will be illegal, as well as opposed by a majority of the British nation.
Correlli Barnett
East Carleton, Norwich

March 16 ~ "...apart from new types of cluster bombs and cruise missiles, the Americans will use their untested pulse bomb, known also as a microwave bomb..."

writes John Pilger in his article.."Vladimir Slipchenko, one of the world's leading military analysts, says the testing of new weapons is a "main purpose" of the attack on Iraq. .... Each discharges two megawatts of radiation which instantly puts out of action all communications, computers, radios, even hearing aids and heart pacemakers. "Imagine, your heart explodes!" he said.
In the future, this Pax Americana will be policed with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons used "pre-emptively", even in conflicts that do not directly engage US interests. In August, the Bush administration will convene a secret meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including "mini nukes", "bunker busters" and neutron bombs. Generals, government officials and nuclear scientists will also discuss the appropriate propaganda to convince the American public that the new weapons are necessary.....It is vitally important that we understand their goals and the degree of their ruthlessness...... With an attack on Iraq almost a certainty, the millions who filled London and other capitals on the weekend of 15-16 February, and the millions who cheered them on, now have these transcendent duties..... There is only one form of opposition now: it is civil disobedience leading to what the police call civil unrest. The latter is feared by undemocratic governments of all stripes. ..... My own view" (writes John Pilger) "is that if the protest movement sees itself as a world power, as an expression of true internationalism, then success need not be a dream. That depends on how far people are prepared to go.

March 16 ~ elements within the British security services were unhappy with the Government's use of intelligence information.

See last Sunday's Observer (external link): "An employee at the top-secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been arrested following revelations in The Observer last weekend about an American 'dirty tricks' surveillance operation to win votes at the United Nations in favour of a tough new resolution on Iraq. ...Officials at GCHQ, the electronic surveillance arm of the British intelligence service, were asked by the Americans to provide valuable information from 'product lines', intelligence jargon for phone taps and e-mail interception. The document was circulated among British intelligence services before being leaked. A GCHQ spokesman confirmed last night that the woman was an employee. "
See also: UN launches inquiry into American spying (external link) "... Sources in the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan confirmed last night that the spying operation had already been discussed at the UN's counter-terrorism committee and will be further investigated. The news comes as British police confirmed the arrest of a 28-year-old woman working at the top secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on suspicion of contravening the Official Secrets Act. Last week The Observer published details of a memo sent by Frank Koza, Defence Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) at the US National Security Agency, which monitors international communications. The memo ordered an intelligence 'surge' directed against Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea with 'extra focus on Pakistan UN matters'. The 'dirty tricks' operation was designed to win votes in favour of intervention in Iraq."

March 16 ~ "Through the internet, the nonviolent movement is linked by billions of e-mails and forwarded articles meant to surround and circumvent the corporate media."

says Harvey Wasserman, senior editor of Free Press and author of The Last Energy War (Seven Stories Press). "Amidst the agonizing crisis over Iraq, the violent contortions of the world's only military superpower have given birth to a transcendental force: the global Superpower of Peace. .....They warn
  • the blood shed in this proposed war would be unconscionable.
  • That its ecological costs would be unsustainable.
  • That civil rights and liberties are being trashed.
  • And that the multiplier effects of such devastating chaos cannot be predicted.
    A war between unelected macho madmen, launched by a military superpower against its own puppet gone astray, is the ultimate yin to the new movement's yang. If, as you read this, war has broken out, know this: the global Superpower of Peace can bend, but it won't break. If Bush still hasn't attacked, and Saddam continues to be disarmed, count another day the Superpower of Peace has extended its pre-emptive influence, its maturity, its scope. The new millennium will be neither American nor Chinese nor European nor military nor corporate nor dictatorial. It belongs to the Superpower of Peace, being born before our electronic eyes. " See articles from this weekend's Counterpunch

    March 16 ~ "Supporters of war with Iraq attribute international hostility to either pacifism or visceral anti-Americanism..."

    writes Max Hastings in the Sunday Telegraph today (How to lose friends and offend people.) " It seems more just, however, to blame the stunning diplomatic failure by the Bush Administration. For once, there is a valid historical comparison. Never since Suez has a great nation blundered so disastrously in attempting to justify the use of force before the world. A British diplomat observed to me that following American representatives around the world requires an enormous dustpan and brush to clear up the mess.
    The last straw was Mr Bush's belated promise on Friday to unveil a new Middle-East peace plan. For months, the British Government has been beseeching Washington to make some gesture about Israel and the Palestinians. Bush's failure to offer even token linkage between war on Iraq and firmness towards Israel has represented a gaping hole in the American case. Yet who can take seriously a bone now thrown so carelessly to a sceptical world, on the eve of war?..."

    March 16 ~ And today's Sunday Scare story is...

    in the Sunday Times. Police go on high alert for suicide attack (external link) Masterly use of language here to frighten the population with imaginary "potential" bugbears:
      "...... to counter the threat of ...possible suicide bombings...The authorities fear ...could trigger ...there are now concerns ...could heed ... ...Tom Ridge, America's homeland security secretary is seeking clearance to raise the colour-coded threat- alert level to orange, reflecting the "high risk" of a terrorist attack if America invades Iraq. ...All police forces across Britain have received guidance from the Association of Chief Police Officers on how to handle a potential suicide bomber. ...Civil defence planners are also gearing up to deal with a possible chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear strike. ...a simulation of a chemical attack on the London Underground. ...The exercise at Bank Tube station in the City of London is expected to see police go through the motions of sealing off a contaminated "hot zone" while council and health officials set up mobile decontamination units. Scores of volunteers are likely to play the role of dead or injured passengers. ...190 decontamination units will also be deployed across the UK within weeks to help cope with a such an attack. ...Ministers revealed this weekend that the system, which is able to transmit a warning message nationwide within 60 seconds of an instruction, would be operational by the beginning of April."
    One emailer writes in disgust:"Now why might they want to make us feel insecure? Oh yes something about wanting to go to war this week .... Absolutely pi**ed off with conniving politicians.."

    March 15 ~ With a new UN resolution now unlikely, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted war was now "much more probable" than before - a point reinforced by cabinet colleagues.

    From Calling time on Diplomacy by Julian Rush, Channel 4 news (external link) "....A decision hammered out at Number 10 - where senior ministers met Tony Blair ahead of his summit meeting with George Bush and the Spanish Prime Minister tomorrow. But behind the scenes, anti war MPs say they're coming under intense pressure to bac