The Human2Human Network World Peace BLOG

 
Arab News
SAUDI ARABIA'S FIRST ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAILY

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

Thank You, America
Dr. Samia Al-Amoudi/Al-Madinah
Published on Sunday, April 20, 2003

I have never felt so happy and pleased with America. Indeed, it has been the first time since I began understanding what was happening around me that I have felt like this toward that country. I grew up with people around me adoring everything American — from the T-shirt to the food. I saw them glorify America’s values, sciences, freedom and way of life. The sole dream for them was to travel to America to study and then settle there and live like an American.

I am happy that America has at last let its mask slip and now we can see what lies behind it. It seems that America was not what it wanted us to think or what we thought it was.

Today, I say “Thank you, America” because it has shown the entire world and not only the Saudis, Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, Lebanese and others, what it really stands for. Even America’s cousins, the Europeans, woke up to find themselves dealing with an America which they did not know and which was unfamiliar to them.

The credit for what we have learned must be given to modern information technology. Sitting in our homes we have been able to see how the Security Council functions and how summit conferences are run — all of this through live television coverage. Through the same television, we have also been able to see America’s barbarity, the massacres it commits and apparently condones against those it imagines to be its enemies. We have all heard and read a great deal about occupation and colonization. Today, we can see it with our naked eyes. We see how the American soldiers treat Iraqi civilians and how insensitive they are to the feelings and traditions of Islam and Muslims.

In the past, colonizers used to enter a country, occupy it and then start directing its affairs by sending their soldiers into the streets to maintain order. This American colonization is different, however. Like the sexual freedom so common in the United States where every one is free to do what they like — no matter what and with no consideration whatsoever for religious or human values — the Americans have brought this kind of freedom to Iraq. A country of millions has been left without administration or any kind of government.

America, the great nation which possesses the most advanced technologies and is capable of making the most unimaginable of plans, entered and occupied Iraq but forgot to prepare itself for what might happen next. It forgot to plan for any kind of provisional administration to run the country but was very keen to occupy and carefully guard those government institutions which concerned it and that are the reason behind its occupation — the Iraqi Ministry of Petroleum and the country’s oil fields. The rest of the country is of no importance and has thus been left to enjoy American freedom and democracy; the looting, burning and systematic destruction of Iraq. Today it is Iraq. Tomorrow Syria? Who will be next?

Arab News From the Local Press 20 April 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2003 ArabNews All Rights Reserved.

posted by H2Hguy at 6:42 PM

 
Marin Independent Journal
April 19, 2003


Anti-war activists speak in Marin
By Beth Ashley
IJ senior feature writer

Thursday, April 17, 2003 - DANIEL ELLSBERG, outspoken anti-war activist who will lecture here April 28, is convinced that America's next military target is Syria, though he says the reasons for such an attack would obviously be spurious.

"Saddam has moved his biological weapons to Syria?" Ellsberg snorts in a phone interview from Brattleboro, Vermont. "Why would he do that?" - supporting a country ruled by a rival Baathist party which has opposed Iraqi policies in the past.

And why would Syria want them, when the recent U.S. attack made it clear that "this is a good time to get rid of biological weapons?"

After Syria, Ellsberg predicts, the U.S. will move into Iran. When the Bush administration says there are no plans for further aggresssion, "that's an obvious lie," he says.

Ellsberg - an ex-Marine best known for making public the government's super-secret Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War - will join David Harris of Mill Valley, a high profile Vietnam War protester, onstage at Olney Hall, College of Marin, at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 28, for a forum titled "Voices of Conscience: Reclaiming American Democracy Through Awareness and Action." Belva Davis of KQED-TV's "This Week in California" will moderate.

Sponsored by the college, the Vanguard Foundation and the ad hoc citizens' Ruth Group, the forum is intended to help participants sort out the mixed messages of today's political debate and to find a focus for their concerns.

"I want to grapple with how we can break the current war juggernaut," says Harris. "How can we harness the power of the millions of (people), locally and globally, who want to find peaceful solutions to the world's political problems?"

Ellsberg says rallying the opposition will be an uphill battle, thanks to the Bush administration's success in controlling media reports on the war and its rationale. Hitler's Joseph Goebbels would have envied the administration's propaganda machine, Ellsberg says.

For instance, he points out, the administration convinced 70 percent of the American public that there was a linkage between Saddam Hussein and events of 9/11, despite open testimony by the CIA's George Tenet that his agency had found no such linkage.

Bush and his supporters persuaded the American public that war was necessary to keep Saddam from using weapons of mass destruction, which Secretary of State Colin Powell, for instance, said we had proof he possessed.

Yet none have been found, and none were used, even when the administration insisted he would use them in a last-ditch effort to defend Baghdad.

"A lot of people who opposed the war think Bush will now transport (such weapons) to Iraq and then 'find' them," says Ellsberg. "But I don't think he's going to bother. So he doesn't find any, so what - 'I guess they went to Syria.' What's the evidence they went to Syria? 'You didn't ask for evidence before.'

"He's going to count on the public losing interest."

Ellsberg says most Americans believe the war was a great success, "even if you didn't find Saddam, even if you didn't find weapons of mass destruction. The war wasn't about weapons of mass destruction anyway - it was so blatantly about two things - oil and Israel."

Many anti-war protesters today feel a sense of failure, Ellsberg says, but he insists they shouldn't. Although they were a minority in the United States, they were linked with "16 million who marched throughout the world." They had allies in the United Nations Security Council, France, Russia, Germany and in the British Labor Party "who couldn't put a leash on their prime minister."

United Nations opposition succeeded in depriving the administration of the cloak of legitimacy in launching a pre-emptive war, he says. United Nations opposition preserved the concept that pre-emptive war "is a crime against peace." For that crime, in Ellsberg's eyes, Bush is "clearly indictable."

By directing the attention of the world to Iraq, the opposition "did keep the military on its toes" about willy-nilly targeting of population centers and did, to an extent, hold down mass destruction.

Ellsberg says he is "unreservedly happy" that the fighting is over and that the casualties were no greater than they were. "I did not want egg on the face of Rumsfeld in the form of more blood."

But he says the war has dug a hole for the United States that will take a long time to dig out of. He questions why the American public feels safer now than before the war, which further enraged one billion Muslims who already hate us. "The world has become dangerous in a way it never was before," he says, and becomes more so "with every arrogant piece of imperialism, every arrogant thing our leaders say, which is almost every word that comes out of their mouths."

Ellsberg's advice to concerned citizens - including those who favored the war - is to seek out other opinions than those in the mainstream media, particularly in such websites as buzzflash.com, antiwar.com and commondreams.org, or in newspapers like the Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post Dispatch or the Los Angeles Times.

"We all speak the same language," he says. "We should engage in dialogue on as calm and rational a level as possible. Rhetoric is not very helpful."

At the April 28 forum, Harris will also urge calm. "We need to take a step outside the frenzy of the last six months to assess where we are in regard to the larger policies that have driven this war. What are the implications for democracy and for us as individual citizens? What can we do to make sure we can continue to be a democracy and to reclaim the democracy we have lost?" he says.

Ellsberg says concerned Americans 'should listen to the people of Europe and the rest of the world - maybe they have some ideas about how we can get out of this hole."

"We should be linking arms with our counterparts all over the world - joining consciously with a worldwide movement for peace that is stronger and wider than ever.

"We are not the engine of the worldwide movement, but we can be part of it," he says.

Ellsberg, who lived in Mill Valley in the mid-1970s, now lives in Kensington, but has been traveling widely recently while promoting his new book, "Secrets."

Harris is the author of eight books and is at work on a ninth, an account of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80.

IF YOU GO

"Voices of Conscience: Reclaiming American Democracy Through Awareness and Action," Monday, April 28, 7:30 p.m., Olney Hall, College of Marin, sponsored by the Ruth Group of Marin County, the college and the Vanguard Foundation. Tickets are $8 adults, $5 students and seniors over 65. For reservations, call College of Marin box office, 485-9385.

Contact Beth Ashley at bashley@marinij.com.


posted by H2Hguy at 5:18 PM