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Hello Muhamed (why not "Muhammed" ?),
SORRY for adressing you wrongly as Hassan.
I was in a hurry (when ever not?)
Andreas
----- Original Message -----
From: "Muhamed Ali" <Muhamed.Ali@Hackney.gov.uk>
To: "as-ilas" <as-ilas@gmx.de>; "casi" <casi-discuss@lists.casi.org.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 4:48 PM
Subject: RE: [casi] Dreamers and Idiots
Dear colleagues,
To-day's Guardian covers Iraq extensively.
Private Lynch's media war continues as Iraqi doctors deny rape claim
Sexual assault would have killed injured soldier, says medical team
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1083110,00.html
There is also a feature in Guardian G2 on the Iraqi lawyer, who helped
saving Private Lynch's life.
Regards,
Muhamad
-----Original Message-----
From: casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk
[mailto:casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk] On Behalf Of as-ilas
Sent: 12 November 2003 11:19
To: casi
Subject: [casi] Dreamers and Idiots
"....
None of this matters to the enthusiasts for war. That these conflicts
were
unjust and illegal, that they killed or maimed tens of thousands of
civilians, is irrelevant, as long as their aims were met. So the hawks
should ponder this. Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been
attempted, Osama bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a
pliant
and largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and the
prevailing sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the
United States, rather than anger and resentment. Now who are the
dreamers
and the useful idiots, and who the pragmatists? "
http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=620
Dreamers and Idiots
Bush and Blair did everything necessary to prevent the outbreak of
peace
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 11th November 2003
Those who would take us to war must first shut down the public
imagination. They must convince us that there is no other means of
preventing invasion, or conquering terrorism, or even defending human
rights. When information is scarce, imagination is easy to control. As
intelligence gathering and diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom
discover - until it is too late - how plausible the alternatives may be.
So those of us who called for peace before the wars with Iraq and
Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers. The intelligence our
governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were
immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such enemies, what would
we
do?, the hawks asked, and our responses felt timid beside the clanking
rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch, we were "indulging
...
in a cosmic whinge".1 To the Daily Telegraph, we had become "Osama bin
Laden's useful idiots".2
Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their
bards
suggested, this may have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the
time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear
to
have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to suggest
that, as
President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed ... al
Qaeda".3 Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of
Uzbekistan
reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of
foreigners.
But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now beginning to
come
to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies
and
their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and
just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we
discovered
last week, Saddam Hussein proposed to give Bush and Blair almost
everything
they wanted before a shot had been fired.4 Our governments appear both
to
have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us
about
the possibilities for diplomacy.
Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam
Hussein's government made a series of increasingly desperate offers to
the
United States. In December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached
Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an
offer to prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11th attacks,
and
to permit several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for
weapons of mass destruction.5 If the object was regime change, then
Saddam,
the agents claimed, was prepared to submit himself to
internationally-monitored elections within two years.6 According to Mr
Cannistraro, these proposals reached the White House, but were "turned
down
by the president and vice president."7
By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost everything the
US
government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of
mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position on
Israel
and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil.8 Among the people they
contacted
was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been urging a
war
with Iraq. He passed their offers to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Last
week he told the New York Times that the CIA had replied, "Tell them
that we
will see them in Baghdad."9
Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything
possible
to find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US
government
appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the
opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On March
6th,
13 days before the war began, Bush said to journalists, "I want to
remind
you that it's his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's
Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the choice of war and
peace.
Thus far, he's made the wrong choice.".10 Ten days later, Blair told a
press
conference, "we have provided the right diplomatic way through this,
which
is to lay down a clear ultimatum to Saddam: cooperate or face
disarmament by
force ... all the way through we have tried to provide a diplomatic
solution."11 On March 17th, Bush claimed that "Should Saddam Hussein
choose
confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been
taken to avoid war".12 All these statements are false.
The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan. On September
20th
2001, the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic
country for trial if the US presented them with evidence that he was
responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington.13 The US
rejected
the offer. On October 1st, six days before the bombing began, they
repeated
it, and their representative in Pakistan told reporters "we are ready
for
negotiations. It is up to the other side to agree or not. Only
negotiation
will solve our problems."14 Bush was asked about this offer at a press
conference the following day. He replied, "There's no negotiations.
There's
no calendar. We'll act on [sic] our time."15
On the same day, Tony Blair, in his speech to the Labour party
conference,
ridiculed the idea that we could "look for a diplomatic solution".
"There is
no diplomacy with Bin Laden or the Taliban regime. ... I say to the
Taliban:
surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It's your choice."16 Well,
they had just tried to exercise that choice, but George Bush had
rejected
it.
Of course, neither Bush nor Blair had any reason to trust the Taliban
or
Saddam Hussein: these people were, after all, negotiating under duress.
But
neither did they have any need to trust them. In both cases they could
have
presented their opponents with a deadline for meeting the concessions
they
had offered. Nor could the allies argue that the offers were not worth
considering because they were inadequate: both the Taliban and Saddam
Hussein were attempting to open negotiations, not to close them: there
appeared to be plenty of scope for bargaining. In other words, peaceful
resolutions were rejected before they were attempted. What this means is
that even if all the other legal tests for these wars had been met (they
had
not), both would still have been waged in defiance of international law.
The
charter of the United Nations specifies that "the parties to any dispute
...
shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation."17
None of this matters to the enthusiasts for war. That these conflicts
were
unjust and illegal, that they killed or maimed tens of thousands of
civilians, is irrelevant, as long as their aims were met. So the hawks
should ponder this. Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been
attempted, Osama bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a
pliant
and largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and the
prevailing sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the
United States, rather than anger and resentment. Now who are the
dreamers
and the useful idiots, and who the pragmatists?
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. David Aaronovitch, 16th November 2001. Stop trying to stop the war.
Start trying to win the peace. The Independent.
2. Throughout the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, the Telegraph ran a
col
umn on its leader page entitled "Useful Idiots", dedicated to attacking
campaigners for peace.
3. George Bush, 6th March 2003. National Press Conference in the White
House. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030306-8.html
4. James Risen, 6th November 2003. Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach
Last-Minute Deal to Avert War. The New York Times; Bill Vann, 7th
November
2003. Washington rejected sweeping Iraqi concessions on eve of war.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/iraq-n07.shtml; Newsweek Web
Exclusive, 5th November 2003. Lost Opportunity? On the eve of the
invasion
of Iraq, Defense officials were offered a secret, back-channel
opportunity
to talk peace with Saddam. http://www.msnbc.com/news/989704.asp; Julian
Borger, Brian Whitaker and Vikram Dodd 7th November 2003. Saddam's
desperate
offers to stave off war. The Guardian.
5. Julian Borger, Brian Whitaker and Vikram Dodd, ibid.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. Newsweek Web Exclusive, ibid
9. James Risen, ibid.
10. George Bush, 6th March 2003, ibid.
11. Tony Blair, 16th March 2003. Press Conference with George Bush and
Jose Maria Aznar, the Azores.
12. George Bush, 17th March 2003. Remarks by the President in Address
to
the Nation.
13. Luke Harding and Rory McCarthy, 21st September 2001. Bush rejects
Bin
Laden deal. The Guardian.
14. Julian Borger, 3rd October 2001. White House rejects call for
proof;
Taliban 'ready to negotiate'. The Guardian.
15. Julian Borger, ibid.
16. Tony Blair, 2nd October 2001. Speech to the Labour Party
conference,
Brighton.
17. Article 33, Charter of the United Nations. The full text of this
article reads: "1. The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which
is
likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security,
shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation,
conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional
agencies
or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice. 2. The
Security Council shall, when it deems necessary, call upon the parties
to
settle their dispute by such means."
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_______________________________________________
Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss
To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk
All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk