"The President has adopted a policy of 'anticipatory self-defense' that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American President said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy."

- Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in the Los Angeles Times, Mar. 23, 2003

By: William Rivers Pitt  

The residents of an unassuming house, tucked away in a quiet corner of a small New England college campus, have found themselves at the center of a disturbing fight for the basic right to express their opinion as Americans. Seven students at 44 Howard Street on the Wheaton College campus, located in the rural community of Norton, Massachusetts, have discovered, with suddenness and fury, how difficult it is today to speak your mind in a nation divided by war.

It started on the day the Bush administration took this nation to war in defiance of the international community and with little, if any, justifiable rationale. The American attack upon Iraq, fraught with all the terrors of American and civilian casualties, spiraling regional hostilities, and the surety of reciprocal attacks here at home, convinced these students that their beloved country was in grave danger. The leadership of this nation, and the deadly course they chose, motivated the seven in this small house to make a large statement of disapproval.

And so, on that day, the young men and women of 44 Howard hung an American flag upside-down outside of their house.

By: Burt Worm  

We must not forget this essential fact about the Bushists: they did not win the presidency legitimately. I repeat: This is not mere opinion but hard fact.

The evidence for Bush's defeat in Florida is enumerated on several websites, news agency archives, and a small library of books. It resides in the findings of the NORC study, released in November 2001 under the misleadingly "reassuring" headline that Bush really would have won the Florida vote. In fact, this would have been true, according to the NORC study, only if the state-wide manual recount of undervotes that Justice Antonin Scalia had stopped on December 9 had been permitted to continue to its finish or if Gore's legal team had won the right to "cherry-pick" the traditional Democratic strongholds on Florida's Gold Coast. As is well known among dissenting Democrats (and other outraged democrats), however, Gore would have won in every single instance in which machine-discounted "overvotes" as well as "undervotes" were manually recounted statewide.

By: Antonia Zerbisias  

For a few interesting - at least for news junkies - days over the weekend, when the war seemed bogged down by unexpected resistance, bad weather, and vulnerable supply lines, the right was on the run, defending the Pentagon's "humane" bombardments, even as civilians going to market were being blown to smithereens.

Dovish opinionators for some of the major agenda-setting newspapers, including the New York Times, were serving up crow to the hawks.

But they weren't biting: Instead of taking some well-deserved shots at the administration or Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the right aimed at the messengers who, by questioning the Pentagon's plan, were committing the sin of journalism.

By: Stanley I. Kutler  

First, Perle is the proud, hardly modest, behind-the-scenes promoter of the present Iraq policy. Then we have Perle, lobbyist extraordinaire. Several companies, charged by the Department of Defense and the FBI with dubious connections to the Chinese government, retained Perle to lobby the Pentagon in their behalf. The revelations prompted Perle to resign as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, but he remains a member - a distinction without a difference.

Perle's real importance is in the realm of policy and strategic doctrines. He has pursued an ambitious agenda for years, which now is momentarily triumphant. Sadly, it has gone largely unnoticed and unchallenged.

By: K. Tomasi  

I'm experiencing a growing sense of frustration and hopelessness; a fear that the corporate despots who have seized control of our government may very well be unstoppable; that every possible contingency has already been contemplated, and a response planned.

Yes, they're close to pulling it off. But they're not there yet. Not quite. There's still one chance at stopping them, or at least slowing them down long enough for history to catch up and expose the deceit. That chance is the popular vote in 2004.

Here's my proposal for taking advantage of that opportunity. In the 2000 presidential election approximately 100 million votes were cast. To simplify things, let's say half went to Bush, half to Gore. If only 5% of those who voted for Gore - one person out of every 20 - made a commitment to do just two things, we could change the course of this country overnight:

1. Convince at least two people that voted Republican in 2000 to switch sides in 2004.
   
   
2. Encourage two others who did not vote in 2000 to vote Democratic.
   

By: David Isenberg  

It is increasingly an Orwellian world. Up is down. White is black. Invading another country is providing for the defense of your own. And now, it appears that the use of lethal chemical weapons will be "non-lethal", if, as appears possible, so-called "non-lethal weapons" (NLW) are used by the United States in Iraq.

Military interest in NLW goes back many years. In 1991, then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney (now Vice President) established a Non-Lethal Warfare Study Group chaired by his undersecretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz (now Deputy Secretary of Defense). Even back then, there was disagreement about how non-lethal such systems would prove to be. According to an April 1991 memo from Wolfowitz to then-deputy Defense Secretary Donald Atwood, NLW "disable or destroy without causing injury or damage". But comments written in the margin, apparently by Atwood, said "This claims too much."

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

- Richard Perle

By: Robert Scheer  

After sweeping aside a U.N. disarmament program that was working, and now with the United States unable to produce evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, we find after-the-fact justification for our preemptive invasion in our talk of Saddam Hussein's desperate resort to guerrilla tactics.

How easy to forget that our own war for independence was largely fought by "irregulars" condemned as terrorists by the British because they would snipe from behind scattered trees rather than fight from the tight parade formations that were the civilized form of warfare in those days.

Ours is a long history of covert actions, political assassinations, special ops, anti-democratic coups, and dirty tricks that are, even today, being used in Iraq. And we claim that the ends of U.S. policy are so noble that even clearly illegal means, such as a preemptive invasion, are justified.

Of course, the enemy also claims noble ends: God's will, defense of the national homeland, protecting one's family. The thing about pure causes - that glorious end that justifies despicable means - is that they tarnish so easily in the heat of battle.

By: Arianna Huffington  

When it comes to learning from its mistakes, corporate America has fallen off the rehab wagon more times than Robert Downey Jr.

A quick glance at last week's papers reveals that it's monkey business as usual on Wall Street.

Clearly corporate America hasn't gotten the message. Unless, of course, it has - the message that the spotlight is off, the media's focus has moved on to Iraq or the new batch of hotties on The Bachelor, so there is no need to reform its nefarious ways.

We need to change that. And the quickest, most efficient way to do it would be to round up the worst and the slimiest and bring them to justice.

"Stop this war now... This war has been advanced on lie upon lie. Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for any role al-Qaida may have had in 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for the anthrax attacks on this country. Rescue this nation from a war that is wrong, that is unjust, that is immoral."

- Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), on the House floor, Apr. 1, 2003

What has become of American values and idealism? All swept away in this thoroughly un-American war.

By: Jonathan Freedland  

This war is un-American. That's an unlikely word to use, I know: it has an unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds under the beds, purging anyone suspected of "un-American activities". Besides, for many outside the U.S., the problem with this war is not that it's un-American - but all too American.

But that does an injustice to the U.S. and its history. It assumes that the Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of the U.S. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the American rule.

By: Gene Lyons  

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the neocon hawks talked Junior into a "faith-based" plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was going to be a cakewalk. Vice President Dick Cheney said the conflict would be over in weeks; Saddam's vaunted Republican Guard would refuse to fight.

Richard Perle, the ubiquitous ideologue who resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board due to the appearance of war-profiteering, described the Iraq as "a house of cards" which "will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder". Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another architect of the great game of "Risk" to which America has committed its lives and fortunes, told the VFW that: "The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940's, they view us as their hoped-for liberator."

Barely two weeks into the war, the alibis and finger-pointing have begun...

By: Richard Cohen  

In about a week, the Bush administration has done in Iraq what the Johnson administration took more than a year to do in Vietnam: opened a credibility gap. This one is about "the plan", which the Bush administration describes as both "brilliant" and on schedule. As anyone can see - and as some field commanders keep saying - it is neither.

Last winter in Europe I met with an important Arab leader who, like George Bush, wanted Saddam Hussein gone - but he wanted him gone quickly. Anything else - a war that dragged on - could cause lots of trouble. Television pictures of dead Iraqi civilians, the destruction of Baghdad, the natural desire to root for the underdog, and the already virulent hatred of the United States might prompt the storied "Arab street" to rise and threaten moderate regimes throughout the region.

Report from:  

Twenty people, including 11 children, were killed when a nighttime missile attack struck a farm near Baghdad, relatives said on Monday.

Another 10 people were wounded, according to relatives who survived the Saturday night assault, which destroyed three homes in the Al-Janabiin suburb on the southeastern edge of Baghdad.

They said the dead also included seven women and two men belonging to five families.

The two relatives were the only residents to escape unharmed from the ruins of the homes, according to an AFP journalist on the scene.

By: demosthenes  

If you think back to the late and unlamented dot com hype, doesn't the whole Rumsfeld/Cheney package sound a bit familiar, in both style and content?

What the President's fair-haired good-old-boys really "got" was deeply in touch with their inner Gen-X sharpster. The same expensive high-tech toys. The same hubris and inevitable groupthink as they sytematically intimidated or excluded any dissenting voice that might question their vision or demand a reality check.

And the same kind of money. Just like the dot com entepreneurs, the Suits found theselves bathed in a river of other people's money, empowering all their big, new ideas. Some of it flowed, of course, into the coffers of the movers and shakers, the smart guys who put themselves on the inside track before the gravy train pulled in. Ask Perle or Cheney about it. Under oath.

By: Peter Lee  

George Bush has been surprised that major elements of the Iraqi army do not share his privileged personal perspective on combat duty - that it should be avoided at all costs - and dismayed that that he has lost the battle for the hearts and minds of a skeptical world in just one week.

The cock-ups of the last week have revealed America as a clumsy, self-deluded giant led astray by faulty judgement and questionable competencies. Instead of the omnipotent, omniscient colossus striding over the recumbent but grateful Iraq to lead the world into the 21^st Century, the neocon Moses stepped on the global stage, tripped on its own shoelaces, and fell flat on its face.

"We have a President for whom English is a second language. He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators', but he's pretty much one himself."

- Robin Williams

Editorial from:  

It happens all the time when troops are fighting in areas full of civilians, mixed in with terrorist insurgents. The My Lai massacre in Vietnam was not the result of bad intentions, but of the fury of frightened young American men who were no longer able to distinguish between innocent civilians and hostile forces. The great hatreds between common people and military authority that existed for so long in Northern Ireland, and that exist now in the West Bank, have all been fanned by the same phenomenon. When troops wonder whether a man standing in his own doorway is harboring a sniper, or if a van full of women and children is a van full of suicide bombers, each side quickly learns to distrust, fear, and finally hate the other.

Yesterday in southern Iraq, American soldiers fired into a van filled with women and children, killing seven. The van was approaching a military checkpoint near an area where a car bomb had recently exploded, killing four soldiers.

"[The administration's] preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the President called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn't true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs - part of its plan all along. Strip away the Presidential Seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con."

- Joshua Micah Marshall, from an article in the April 2003 edition of the Washington Monthly

By: Charles J. Hanley  

Bruised and bleeding, in need of medical care, the Americans stranded in Iraq's western desert approached the mud-brick town and found the hospital destroyed by bombs.

"Why? Why?" a doctor demanded of them. "Why did you Americans bomb our children's hospital?" Scores of Iraqi townspeople crowded around.

The American peace activists' account was the first confirmation of a report last week that a hospital in Rutbah was bombed Wednesday, with dead and injured. The travelers said they saw no significant Iraqi military presence near the hospital or elsewhere in Rutbah. The doctor did not discuss casualties, the Americans said.

Editorial from:  

Having waited until the war in Iraq started to discuss its price tag with Congress, President Bush suddenly wants the money now, and with as few restrictions as possible on how he may spend the $74.7 billion requested. Congress is responding speedily, and rightly so, with House and Senate appropriations committees planning to take up the matter today. But members of Congress, again rightly, are balking at some of the broad authority the administration seeks in the name of wartime flexibility.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tossed that word around a lot during his appearances on Capitol Hill last week. We're sympathetic to the administration's request to handle the bulk of the war funding, $60 billion, through what it calls a DERF - a Defense Emergency Response Fund that would give it enormous spending flexibility. But with half that money already eaten up by known costs, such as transferring troops, it seems the military could be more precise about its spending plans and make do with a smaller discretionary pot. Moreover, outside this fund, the administration is seeking far more leeway than it needs or responsibly can be given...

Editorial from:  

Federal regulators have now provided decisive evidence of the cynical behavior of major energy companies in the power crisis that crippled California's economy in 2000 and 2001. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in an exhaustive study released last week, found that Enron and more than 30 other major companies in the energy markets manipulated not only wholesale electricity prices but also the price of natural gas, a basic fuel for generators. This manipulation was enough to bankrupt a major utility and cost the state billions in excess electricity charges.

"I fear this war will have enormous consequences and lead to an increase in terrorism. When this war ends, there may be 100 bin Ladens instead of just one."

- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak

By: Seymour M. Hersh  

As the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein faltered last week, with attenuated supply lines and a lack of immediate reinforcements, there was anger in the Pentagon. Several senior war planners complained to me in interviews that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his inner circle of civilian advisers, who had been chiefly responsible for persuading President Bush to lead the country into war, had insisted on micromanaging the war's operational details. Rumsfeld's team took over crucial aspects of the day-to-day logistical planning - traditionally, an area in which the uniformed military excels - and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff, the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "He thought he knew better", one senior planner said. "He was the decision-maker at every turn."

On at least six occasions, the planner told me, when Rumsfeld and his deputies were presented with operational plans - the Iraqi assault was designated Plan 1003 - he insisted that the number of ground troops be sharply reduced. Rumsfeld's faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. "They've got no resources", a former high-level intelligence official said. "He was so focussed on proving his point - that the Iraqis were going to fall apart."

By: Paul Krugman  

I've written before about the myth of the heartland - roughly speaking, the "red states", which voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, as opposed to the "blue states", which voted for Al Gore. The nation's interior is supposedly a place of rugged individualists, unlike the spongers and whiners along the coasts. In reality, of course, rural states are heavily subsidized by urban states. New Jersey pays about $1.50 in federal taxes for every dollar it gets in return; Montana receives about $1.75 in federal spending for every dollar it pays in taxes.

Any sensible program of spending on homeland security would at least partly redress this balance. The most natural targets for terrorism lie in or near great metropolitan areas; surely protecting those areas is the highest priority, right?

Apparently not. Even in the first months after Sept. 11, Republican lawmakers made it clear that they would not support any major effort to rebuild or even secure New York. And now that anti-urban prejudice has taken statistical form: under the formula the Department of Homeland Security has adopted for handing out money, it spends 7 times as much protecting each resident of Wyoming as it does protecting each resident of New York.

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war."

- Dave Paulsen

By: Norma Sherry  

There's a huge misconception being proliferated in the media about war protestors. I've read that these misguided seekers of peace don't support our service men and women; that they are the fringe of society; misfits that jump on every anti-American bandwagon or cause; that they, themselves are un-American.

People for peace come from all sectors of our society: Democrat, Republican, liberal, right wing, leftist, preacher, pastor, rabbi, man, woman, white, black, yellow, red, Jewish, Catholic, Christian, Buddhist, soldier, veteran, intellectual, scholar, student, homeless, educated, uneducated, doctor, lawyer, cashier, rich, poor, and every thing and every one in between. They are not the scum of the earth. They are not the hippie, flower child, dope heads that the media and particularly, the talk show combatants seem bent on portraying them.

Some in fact are even Nobel laureates. Not just any laureates, but laureates of science and economics. Forty-one, to be precise have declared their opposition to the war against Iraq in a formal declaration.

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