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Anti-War

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They’re talking about McDonald’s and Starbucks. Someone’s already downloaded the facts about a Burger King restaurant in an Israeli settlement, and now they’re compiling a “Top Ten American Companies to Boycott—and Why” list. They’re talking about petitions, about email forwards, maybe building a website, sending out cellular phone text messages. It could be New York or San Francisco, Porte Allegre or Buenos Aires. It happens to be Beirut, Lebanon.

America’s left had its Seattle. The Middle East just had its equivalent.

"I did not look on the press as an asset. Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed.” —Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, on how he managed press coverage during the 1991 Gulf War.

Was Dick Cheney the father of modern warfare? If not, he at least helped birth the postmodern art of wartime press management as Defense Secretary during the first Gulf War in 1991. Now, along with his old White House mentor Don Rumsfeld and sidekicks Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney is no doubt looking forward to another lightning campaign against Saddam Hussein and another free pass from an obliging press corps.

In an April 4 Washington Post article about Israel's detention and temporary exile of almost the entire male population of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tulkarem (around 2,000 men), the reporter informs the reader that this and the killing that day of 7 Palestinians "were a departure from the relative calm that has prevailed here since the start of the Iraq war." A few days later an AP story said that the Israeli missile attack on a Hamas leader which killed at least 5 innocent bystanders "ended a lull in Israeli air strikes since the beginning of the war in Iraq."

As the “war on terror” announced by our rulers approaches its third year, it is receiving bad reviews all around, even in the mainstream media, establishment, and intellectual circles. Pranjal Tiwari takes a look.

Typical of the barrage of criticism that the war on terror has been subjected to is a recent report from none other than the Army War College which concluded that “[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious,” but qualified that “its parameters should be readjusted.”

The Syrian Baath regime, in power now for over 40 years, is in very tight spot. Internal political reform is long, long overdue. External pressures, mainly from the US but increasingly from Europe and the Arab world are mounting quickly. President Bashar Assad’s defiant speech to the nation on November 10 had all the hallmarks of regime in a corner, fighting for its very survival.

The failure of many in the US antiwar movement to fight anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism is often rooted in conscious or unconscious acceptance of two interconnected racist ideologies—Islamophobia and Zionism. A good example of this is the anti-war movement’s wary response to Hamas’ overwhelming victory in this year’s Palestinian legislative elections.

“Black sites,” “ghost prisoners,” and “points of darkness” are all real terms used to describe the clandestine nature of US detention facilities all over the world being used as part of the “war on terror.” Hearing these terms, one might think of a Hollywood movie of espionage and intrigue. But as more stories come out on torture and abuse in these detention facilities, the reality seems less like an action drama and more a like a horror film.

American Methods is the latest from the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. In his latest book, Williams has produced a well-documented and extremely readable, if also extremely disturbing, piece of work that seeks to lay out the idea that torture works. He explains that torture is not something used to get information or punish, but is rather a system designed to control populations and is a base characteristic of state power. He writes, “Torture doesn’t represent a system of failure; it is the system.”

The war on terror is the most blatant example of anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism, but there are other less overt and more sophisticated examples, which together contribute to the overall hysteria against Arabs and Muslims. In his State of the Union address, Bush pledged to end US dependence on Middle East oil. Bush—whose ties to oil corporations are well known—had the audacity to say, “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world,” and “this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”