01
Apr
2003
As the first large-scale United States military operation to take place in the age of the Internet, the current conflict in Iraq is for many of us an overwhelming experience. We not only have a virtually unlimited supply of news sources, but the minute-by-minute coverage rarely pauses. The result, unfortunately, is that it's easy to lose perspective.
Our goal here is to provide a wide range of thoughtful, intelligent views on the war in as small a space as possible. We've scoured dozens of online and print publications, from conservative to liberal, and here offer a sampler of provocative and important perspectives that you won't find on cable news or your daily newspaper.
We've divided these brief excerpts into thematic areas and present them, as much as possible, in context. We've also included Web links for the full text of the articles when available.
WAR COVERAGE
Live, but not really
Meghan O'Rourke, slate.com, March 26
What was striking about the past week's coverage was, paradoxically, how often the latest equipment made the live war less immediate than it was on the old-fashioned photographic film shot in Vietnam, which had to be processed in a lab before anyone could see it. So far, there has been little unvarnished ground-level detail, let alone Black Hawk Down scenes of gritty action. Instead, the broadcast news channels spend the bulk of the day oohing and aahing about military hardware or serving as very expensive communications systems for soldiers to talk to their families back home ("Hi mom! I'm OK!").
The PR war
Jack Shafer, slate.com, March 25
The downside of the embed program ... is that the battlefield reporters are viewing the war through soda straws - the soda straws of their specific, narrow battlefield locations and the soda straws of their self-preservation. All of the embeds have a strong stake in the outcome of any hostile action they might encounter, hence their understandably enthusiastic embrace of the plural pronouns "we," "our," and "us" to describe the progress of the units to which they're attached. You'd probably use the same words if you were dune-buggying your way to Baghdad.
THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
Advise and dissent
David Greenberg, slate.com, March 26
Protesting war isn't some Vietnam-era relic, like love beads or Country Joe McDonald, but an American democratic tradition. ...
In American history in particular, wartime dissent has a venerable lineage. Even during that most mythic of causes, the Revolution, fully one third of Americans opposed independence, in John Adams' famous estimate, while an equal third favored it. Only in retrospect did the Revolution become an unambiguously glorious endeavor.
Cause for dissent
Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's, April
Unpopular during even the happiest of stock-market booms, in time of war dissent attracts the attention of the police. The parade marshals regard any wandering away from the line of march as unpatriotic and disloyal; the unlicensed forms of speech come to be confused with treason and registered as crimes, and in the skyboxes of the news media august personages reaffirm America's long-stranding alliance with God and the Statue of Liberty. Counting through the list of the country's exemplary virtues - a just cause, an invincible air force, a noble truth - they find no reasons for dissent.
Rage or reason
Michelle Goldberg, salon.com, March 27
Some [peace] activists still believe that Operation Iraqi Freedom can somehow be halted - or, at least, that they have a duty to keep fighting for that goal - and that business in America should be disrupted until it is. Others, hearing the murmurs from America's foreign policy elite that Iraq is but the first step in a grander plan to remake the Middle East and the world, are using their energy to lay the groundwork for a broader movement against George Bush's agenda and his re-election.
FOREIGN RELATIONS AND POLICY
No more unto the breach
Jonathan Schell, Harper's, March
There is little doubt that the attack on the Pentagon and destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, constituted another of history's formative shocks. The administration of President George W. Bush immediately launched its global "war on terror"; led a reorganization of the federal government from top to bottom; rewrote the rule book of domestic politics; severely curtailed civil liberties and challenged the separation of powers ordained by the Constitution, especially in regard to the war-making power; and propounded a "revolutionary" (the word is Henry Kissinger's) new foreign policy that placed at its center the preemptive use of force. Elsewhere - in the Middle East, in South Asia, within Russia, in North Asia - military conflicts and confrontations, conventional and nuclear, as if taking their cue from September 11 and the American response to it, flared up with new intensity. The optimism and hopefulness that had largely prevailed since the end of the Cold War more than a decade before gave way in an instant to war fever and war.
The empire of freedom
Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, March 24
The end of the Western alliance has now moved out of the realm of conjecture. ... The European street is filled with protesters against the Bush administration, and insults to Europe are heard daily in the American street ... . The idea that NATO, at least in its present form, is obsolete is being seriously entertained. ...
The unsatisfactory nature of most of the alliances on offer may explain why interest is growing in another possibility: a closer relationship among the English-speaking nations. ... The chief theoretician of this alliance is an American Internet entrepreneur names James Bennett. He calls his idea the "Anglosphere." ...
[Bennett has written:] "Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Anglophone regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa, and India constitute the Anglosphere's frontiers." ...
He favors a "network commonwealth," which he defines as "a set of cooperative associations such as trade areas, defense alliances, agreements for free personnel movement and other such integrative measures." Countries might, for example, introduce "sojourner" provisions into their immigration laws that would make it easier for residents to travel, work, and migrate throughout the Anglosphere (or at least those parts of it that maintain healthy border-security regimes). ...
If what Bennett envisions deserves to be called an "empire" - and he himself adheres to the term - it is a very liberal one: an empire of freedom.
No more unto the breach
Jonathan Schell, Harper's, April
Yet no American decision alone can secure peace in the world. It is the very essence of the task that many nations must cooperate in the effort. If they do, however, they will find that 20th Century history has presented them, side-by-side with all its horrors, an abundance of materials to work with. There are grounds for optimism in the restricted but real sense that if the will to turn away from force and toward cooperation were to develop, there are more extensive and solid foundations for accomplishment than have ever existed before.
The moron majority
Ted Rall, uexpress.com, March 18
Decades of budget cuts in education are finally yielding results, a fact confirmed by CNN's poll of March 16, which shows that an astonishing 51 percent of the public believe that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
There is no reason to think that. None. ...
So why do these pinheads think such a thing?
Like a befuddled chemistry lab student who works backwards from the answer in order to ensure the correct results, the Moron Majority have talked themselves into an excuse they can live with for a war they can't otherwise morally justify.
By a two-to-one margin, Americans think that their country should adhere to its tradition of attacking other countries in self-defense only, never preemptively. Thirty-seven percent say that they support an invasion of Iraq only with UN approval. This war against Iraq fulfills neither of these conditions, so Americans have managed to morph Bush's insinuations about a Saddam-Al Qaeda link into full-on blame.
Duct tape needed
The Economist, March 22
No one can now accuse the UN of being America's rubber stamp. The charge against it instead is that it has passed a series of resolutions telling Saddam Hussein to disarm or else, yet, despite his failure to make more than grudging efforts to oblige, the "or else" turns out to be "or nothing." Others who wish to defy the UN will take heart.
MOTIVES AND THE OIL QUESTION
The curse of oil
Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review Online, March 28
We wouldn't have worried so much about the possibility that the Iraqi regime would invade (or use nuclear weapons to blackmail) its neighbors if the neighborhood were not geopolitically important. And everyone knows the principal reason that it is important. It is a vulgar error to suppose that either the first or the second Gulf war concerned the price of oil; but these wars have very much concerned the power of oil.
The 30-year itch
Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones, April
If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world - Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration - which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate.
I want you ... to buy more stuff!
Jane Holtz Kay, Grist, December 14, 2001
World War I was fought to make the world safe for democracy. World War II for ourselves and our allies. Is this new breed of war being fought simply to make the world safer for consumption?
War for freedom
Quin Hillyer, National Review Online, March 31
If the battles in Iraq are pursued for "enlightened self-interest," the emphasis has been more on the enlightenment than on the self-interest.
Never in history have invading armies taken such care, even at greater risk to its own soldiers, to spare civilian populations and the infrastructure of services (electricity, water, etc.) they depend on.
Rarely, if ever, has humanitarian assistance been such a priority. When allied forces reopened the port of Umm Qasr (after using specially trained dolphins to clear its harbor of mines), the first order of business wasn't ordnance or armor, but food and water for the Iraqi people.
The United States does not aim to own new territory. It - we - intend not to rule, but to provide the tools and the freedom for democratic self-rule.
We put American soldiers at risk, not just of bullets but of exposure to chemical weapons, so that those same chemical weapons will never be used to subjugate neighboring nations.
And for the last 100 years, at least, it has always been thus.
RECONSTRUCTION
After the battle
David Remnick, The New Yorker, March 31
How the world comes to see this invasion - as a reckless imperial adventure or as a decisive attempt to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and the brutal dictator who would not relinquish them - will be determined by the character of its aftermath.
Whoever wins the war, the U.S. has lost the peace
Adrian Hamilton, The Independent, March 28
Just as the Pentagon had prepared its war plans for nearly a year before this invasion, so it has prepared its peace plans for almost as long. In the same way that George Bush was prepared to go to the UN in the run-up to war so long as it backed his plans, so he is prepared to see the UN participate in relief and fundraising for reconstruction so long as it in no way dilutes U.S. control.
The lucrative business of rebuilding Iraq
Ehsan Ahrari, Asia Times Online, March 26
$900 million in U.S. government contracts will be offered to U.S. companies for the initial rebuilding of infrastructures in Iraq that will be shattered by U.S. bombs and missiles. ...
Five U.S. companies are invited to submit bidding. They are Kellogg Brown & Root, Parsons Engineering, Louis Berger, Bechtel Corporation, and Flour Daniel. ...
It is interesting to note that Kellogg Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton. Vice President Dick Cheney was the chief executive officer of that company from 1995-2000, when he joined the Bush-Cheney ticket in the presidential elections. Bechtel Corp has equally impressive government connections. George Schultz and Caspar Weinberger - who were secretaries of state and defense, respectively, during President Ronald Reagan's administration - were top executives of that corporation. Halliburton is also reaping the bonanza from its past association with Cheney by getting a number of construction projects in Afghanistan.
U.S. army under fire over Iraqi oil firefighting contract
AFP, March 26
The U.S. army came under fire for granting an Iraqi oil well firefighting contract to a subsidiary of Halliburton Company, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, without a bidding process.
Cheney's cronies?
The Economist, March 22
Alas for the administration's reputation, there may be no better qualified firm for many of the jobs that will need to be done. Halliburton has one main challenger for the title of the world's leading oil-services firm: Schlumberger, which is, ahem, French in origin. But when it comes to military outsourcing, Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root has a more impressive record than any of its rivals.
HOLY WAR AND TERRORISM
Saddam, terrorists, & Islam
Marvin Olasky, World, March/April 2003
Saddam, who rose to power as a secular semi-socialist, is now committed to Islam, his publicists say. He purportedly donated 12 quarts of his own blood over three years for the dark red calligraphy that went on 605 gold-framed pages of a copy of the Quran exhibited in the rotunda of the Umm al-Ma'arik mosque. ...
The Iraqi press has certainly been pushing Islam hard and stating that any who die fighting Israel or the United States are martyrs. The daily Al-Jumhuriya published on December 1 an article stating ... "With the first drop of blood [the martyr] is given absolution and he can see his seat in paradise. ... "
Coverage of Islam
Marvin Olasky, World, March/April 2003
Sadly, the U.S. press has not delved into the debate about what kind of war and violence the Quran condemns. Let's look at several Arabic words. Saddam Hussein and Saudi members of the Wahhabi sect argue that terrorists are martyrs: They pay $25,000 or more to the surviving families of mujahideen (holy warriors) who participate in jihad and become shahidin (martyrs). But other Muslims call terrorists mufsidoon (evil-doers) engaged in hirabah (unholy war against society) and heading not to paradise but to jahannam (eternal hellfire). ...
Similarly, Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic Studies at American University, said that "al-Qaeda's brand of suicide mass murder and its fomenting of hatred among races, religions, and cultures do not constitute godly or holy jihad - but, in fact, constitute the heinous crime and sin of unholy hirabah."
HISTORY
Use power of victory
Charles Krauthammer, Miami Herald, March 28
If there had been TV cameras not just at Normandy, but after Normandy, giving live coverage of firefights at every French village on the Allies' march to Berlin, the operation would have been judged a strategic miscalculation, if not a disaster. The fact is that after a single week we find ourselves at the gates of Baghdad, servicing the longest supply lines in American history, with combat losses astonishingly low by any standard.
The haunting echoes of war
Ellis Henican, Newsday, March 28
This all goes back to 1966 and 1967. [P.C.] Taylor, who is 55 now, was a farm boy from southwest Virginia. Suddenly, he was a U.S. Marine, a rifleman in the legendary First Marine Division, dropped into a war that wasn't going nearly as well as it was supposed to.
Sound familiar? ...
No one is saying "quagmire" yet. But the Iraqis haven't surrendered, like Washington promised. They haven't greeted our troops with flowers and hugs.
SUCCESS OR FAILURE
"Knife fight in a phone booth"
Eric Boehlert, salon.com, March 28
In the days and weeks ahead, military commanders will be pressed to find a difficult balance: While they must use enough force to win the battle, they must limit casualties among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians or risk losing the crucial war of public opinion. Images of grief and destruction have already inflamed war opponents at home and throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and that's come even as the allies have pulled their punches, militarily.
Counting heads
Peter Beinart, The New Republic, March 27
The war's conduct suggests at least one irony: This supposedly cold-blooded administration is making a remarkable, some might even say militarily dangerous, effort to spare Iraqi lives. Conservatives once attacked Bill Clinton for being too squeamish about civilian casualties. But compared with George W. Bush at least so far Clinton didn't even come close.
What kind of victory?
The Economist, March 22
The Americans and British must also be careful to keep their own killing to a minimum. ... This, after all, is a war of choice, not of self-defense, and it is being waged, in part, in order to "liberate" Iraqis from an odious dictator. Afterwards, the gratitude of the liberated will depend very much on how many of their countrymen - not just civilians, but the regime's wretched conscripts as well - perish in the fighting.
Will trying to avoid civilian casualties cause more deaths?
John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, March 27
The allies genuinely hope to avoid inflicting civilian deaths. Is that realistic? Is the effort counter-productive? ...
Do slow and careful operational procedures actually increase the number of civilian deaths and the amount of suffering, when a less precautionary and more peremptory approach might achieve the same, or even a better effect, by hastening the end?
The Iraq Body Count Project
Civilian casualties are the most unacceptable consequence of all wars. Each civilian death is a tragedy and should never be regarded as the "cost" of achieving our countries' war aims, because it is not we who are paying this price. One in four killed in the U.S. war on Afghanistan were civilians, and in Yugoslavia the proportion was even higher. We believe it is a moral and humanitarian duty for each such death to be recorded, publicized, given the weight it deserves and, where possible, investigated to establish whether there are grounds for criminal proceedings.
War crimes
Washington Post, March 27
Reports from Baghdad yesterday suggested that one or more U.S. missiles might have struck a shopping street, killing a number of people. ... Those pictures of destruction and death were getting plenty of airtime yesterday in the world's media, as happens in every case when U.S. forces are accused of harming the innocent. Yet a full assessment of civilian suffering in the war's first week points in a different direction: Iraqis have endured far more injury from Saddam Hussein's forces - and those blows have been deliberate.
TACTICS
Rumsfeld and all the Army's men
Michael O'Hanlon, Washington Times, March 27
Over the last year, there was vigorous debate between [Secretary of State Donald] Rumsfeld's civilian team on the one hand and the uniformed military on the other. Mr. Rumsfeld's instincts were to go with a small force and a daring, modern battle plan building on the model of Afghanistan. The military's instincts, especially among Army officers, were to deploy a big enough sledgehammer to crush the entire Iraqi military with brute force. ...
In the end, each side got half of what it wanted, and the country got a good war plan. Operation Iraqi Freedom is being fought with the big force the U.S. military wanted and the creative concepts Mr. Rumsfeld desired.
War could last months, officers say
Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, March 27
The combination of wretched weather, long and insecure supply lines, and an enemy that has refused to be supine in the face of American military might has led to a broad reassessment by some top generals of U.S. military expectations and timelines. Some of them see even the potential threat of a drawn-out fight that sucks in more and more U.S. forces. Both on the battlefield in Iraq and in Pentagon conference rooms, military commanders were talking yesterday about a longer, harder war than had been expected just a week ago ... .
Our goal here is to provide a wide range of thoughtful, intelligent views on the war in as small a space as possible. We've scoured dozens of online and print publications, from conservative to liberal, and here offer a sampler of provocative and important perspectives that you won't find on cable news or your daily newspaper.
We've divided these brief excerpts into thematic areas and present them, as much as possible, in context. We've also included Web links for the full text of the articles when available.
WAR COVERAGE
Live, but not really
Meghan O'Rourke, slate.com, March 26
What was striking about the past week's coverage was, paradoxically, how often the latest equipment made the live war less immediate than it was on the old-fashioned photographic film shot in Vietnam, which had to be processed in a lab before anyone could see it. So far, there has been little unvarnished ground-level detail, let alone Black Hawk Down scenes of gritty action. Instead, the broadcast news channels spend the bulk of the day oohing and aahing about military hardware or serving as very expensive communications systems for soldiers to talk to their families back home ("Hi mom! I'm OK!").
The PR war
Jack Shafer, slate.com, March 25
The downside of the embed program ... is that the battlefield reporters are viewing the war through soda straws - the soda straws of their specific, narrow battlefield locations and the soda straws of their self-preservation. All of the embeds have a strong stake in the outcome of any hostile action they might encounter, hence their understandably enthusiastic embrace of the plural pronouns "we," "our," and "us" to describe the progress of the units to which they're attached. You'd probably use the same words if you were dune-buggying your way to Baghdad.
THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
Advise and dissent
David Greenberg, slate.com, March 26
Protesting war isn't some Vietnam-era relic, like love beads or Country Joe McDonald, but an American democratic tradition. ...
In American history in particular, wartime dissent has a venerable lineage. Even during that most mythic of causes, the Revolution, fully one third of Americans opposed independence, in John Adams' famous estimate, while an equal third favored it. Only in retrospect did the Revolution become an unambiguously glorious endeavor.
Cause for dissent
Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's, April
Unpopular during even the happiest of stock-market booms, in time of war dissent attracts the attention of the police. The parade marshals regard any wandering away from the line of march as unpatriotic and disloyal; the unlicensed forms of speech come to be confused with treason and registered as crimes, and in the skyboxes of the news media august personages reaffirm America's long-stranding alliance with God and the Statue of Liberty. Counting through the list of the country's exemplary virtues - a just cause, an invincible air force, a noble truth - they find no reasons for dissent.
Rage or reason
Michelle Goldberg, salon.com, March 27
Some [peace] activists still believe that Operation Iraqi Freedom can somehow be halted - or, at least, that they have a duty to keep fighting for that goal - and that business in America should be disrupted until it is. Others, hearing the murmurs from America's foreign policy elite that Iraq is but the first step in a grander plan to remake the Middle East and the world, are using their energy to lay the groundwork for a broader movement against George Bush's agenda and his re-election.
FOREIGN RELATIONS AND POLICY
No more unto the breach
Jonathan Schell, Harper's, March
There is little doubt that the attack on the Pentagon and destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, constituted another of history's formative shocks. The administration of President George W. Bush immediately launched its global "war on terror"; led a reorganization of the federal government from top to bottom; rewrote the rule book of domestic politics; severely curtailed civil liberties and challenged the separation of powers ordained by the Constitution, especially in regard to the war-making power; and propounded a "revolutionary" (the word is Henry Kissinger's) new foreign policy that placed at its center the preemptive use of force. Elsewhere - in the Middle East, in South Asia, within Russia, in North Asia - military conflicts and confrontations, conventional and nuclear, as if taking their cue from September 11 and the American response to it, flared up with new intensity. The optimism and hopefulness that had largely prevailed since the end of the Cold War more than a decade before gave way in an instant to war fever and war.
The empire of freedom
Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, March 24
The end of the Western alliance has now moved out of the realm of conjecture. ... The European street is filled with protesters against the Bush administration, and insults to Europe are heard daily in the American street ... . The idea that NATO, at least in its present form, is obsolete is being seriously entertained. ...
The unsatisfactory nature of most of the alliances on offer may explain why interest is growing in another possibility: a closer relationship among the English-speaking nations. ... The chief theoretician of this alliance is an American Internet entrepreneur names James Bennett. He calls his idea the "Anglosphere." ...
[Bennett has written:] "Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom, while Anglophone regions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa are powerful and populous outliers. The educated English-speaking populations of the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa, and India constitute the Anglosphere's frontiers." ...
He favors a "network commonwealth," which he defines as "a set of cooperative associations such as trade areas, defense alliances, agreements for free personnel movement and other such integrative measures." Countries might, for example, introduce "sojourner" provisions into their immigration laws that would make it easier for residents to travel, work, and migrate throughout the Anglosphere (or at least those parts of it that maintain healthy border-security regimes). ...
If what Bennett envisions deserves to be called an "empire" - and he himself adheres to the term - it is a very liberal one: an empire of freedom.
No more unto the breach
Jonathan Schell, Harper's, April
Yet no American decision alone can secure peace in the world. It is the very essence of the task that many nations must cooperate in the effort. If they do, however, they will find that 20th Century history has presented them, side-by-side with all its horrors, an abundance of materials to work with. There are grounds for optimism in the restricted but real sense that if the will to turn away from force and toward cooperation were to develop, there are more extensive and solid foundations for accomplishment than have ever existed before.
The moron majority
Ted Rall, uexpress.com, March 18
Decades of budget cuts in education are finally yielding results, a fact confirmed by CNN's poll of March 16, which shows that an astonishing 51 percent of the public believe that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
There is no reason to think that. None. ...
So why do these pinheads think such a thing?
Like a befuddled chemistry lab student who works backwards from the answer in order to ensure the correct results, the Moron Majority have talked themselves into an excuse they can live with for a war they can't otherwise morally justify.
By a two-to-one margin, Americans think that their country should adhere to its tradition of attacking other countries in self-defense only, never preemptively. Thirty-seven percent say that they support an invasion of Iraq only with UN approval. This war against Iraq fulfills neither of these conditions, so Americans have managed to morph Bush's insinuations about a Saddam-Al Qaeda link into full-on blame.
Duct tape needed
The Economist, March 22
No one can now accuse the UN of being America's rubber stamp. The charge against it instead is that it has passed a series of resolutions telling Saddam Hussein to disarm or else, yet, despite his failure to make more than grudging efforts to oblige, the "or else" turns out to be "or nothing." Others who wish to defy the UN will take heart.
MOTIVES AND THE OIL QUESTION
The curse of oil
Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review Online, March 28
We wouldn't have worried so much about the possibility that the Iraqi regime would invade (or use nuclear weapons to blackmail) its neighbors if the neighborhood were not geopolitically important. And everyone knows the principal reason that it is important. It is a vulgar error to suppose that either the first or the second Gulf war concerned the price of oil; but these wars have very much concerned the power of oil.
The 30-year itch
Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones, April
If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world - Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration - which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate.
I want you ... to buy more stuff!
Jane Holtz Kay, Grist, December 14, 2001
World War I was fought to make the world safe for democracy. World War II for ourselves and our allies. Is this new breed of war being fought simply to make the world safer for consumption?
War for freedom
Quin Hillyer, National Review Online, March 31
If the battles in Iraq are pursued for "enlightened self-interest," the emphasis has been more on the enlightenment than on the self-interest.
Never in history have invading armies taken such care, even at greater risk to its own soldiers, to spare civilian populations and the infrastructure of services (electricity, water, etc.) they depend on.
Rarely, if ever, has humanitarian assistance been such a priority. When allied forces reopened the port of Umm Qasr (after using specially trained dolphins to clear its harbor of mines), the first order of business wasn't ordnance or armor, but food and water for the Iraqi people.
The United States does not aim to own new territory. It - we - intend not to rule, but to provide the tools and the freedom for democratic self-rule.
We put American soldiers at risk, not just of bullets but of exposure to chemical weapons, so that those same chemical weapons will never be used to subjugate neighboring nations.
And for the last 100 years, at least, it has always been thus.
RECONSTRUCTION
After the battle
David Remnick, The New Yorker, March 31
How the world comes to see this invasion - as a reckless imperial adventure or as a decisive attempt to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and the brutal dictator who would not relinquish them - will be determined by the character of its aftermath.
Whoever wins the war, the U.S. has lost the peace
Adrian Hamilton, The Independent, March 28
Just as the Pentagon had prepared its war plans for nearly a year before this invasion, so it has prepared its peace plans for almost as long. In the same way that George Bush was prepared to go to the UN in the run-up to war so long as it backed his plans, so he is prepared to see the UN participate in relief and fundraising for reconstruction so long as it in no way dilutes U.S. control.
The lucrative business of rebuilding Iraq
Ehsan Ahrari, Asia Times Online, March 26
$900 million in U.S. government contracts will be offered to U.S. companies for the initial rebuilding of infrastructures in Iraq that will be shattered by U.S. bombs and missiles. ...
Five U.S. companies are invited to submit bidding. They are Kellogg Brown & Root, Parsons Engineering, Louis Berger, Bechtel Corporation, and Flour Daniel. ...
It is interesting to note that Kellogg Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton. Vice President Dick Cheney was the chief executive officer of that company from 1995-2000, when he joined the Bush-Cheney ticket in the presidential elections. Bechtel Corp has equally impressive government connections. George Schultz and Caspar Weinberger - who were secretaries of state and defense, respectively, during President Ronald Reagan's administration - were top executives of that corporation. Halliburton is also reaping the bonanza from its past association with Cheney by getting a number of construction projects in Afghanistan.
U.S. army under fire over Iraqi oil firefighting contract
AFP, March 26
The U.S. army came under fire for granting an Iraqi oil well firefighting contract to a subsidiary of Halliburton Company, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, without a bidding process.
Cheney's cronies?
The Economist, March 22
Alas for the administration's reputation, there may be no better qualified firm for many of the jobs that will need to be done. Halliburton has one main challenger for the title of the world's leading oil-services firm: Schlumberger, which is, ahem, French in origin. But when it comes to military outsourcing, Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root has a more impressive record than any of its rivals.
HOLY WAR AND TERRORISM
Saddam, terrorists, & Islam
Marvin Olasky, World, March/April 2003
Saddam, who rose to power as a secular semi-socialist, is now committed to Islam, his publicists say. He purportedly donated 12 quarts of his own blood over three years for the dark red calligraphy that went on 605 gold-framed pages of a copy of the Quran exhibited in the rotunda of the Umm al-Ma'arik mosque. ...
The Iraqi press has certainly been pushing Islam hard and stating that any who die fighting Israel or the United States are martyrs. The daily Al-Jumhuriya published on December 1 an article stating ... "With the first drop of blood [the martyr] is given absolution and he can see his seat in paradise. ... "
Coverage of Islam
Marvin Olasky, World, March/April 2003
Sadly, the U.S. press has not delved into the debate about what kind of war and violence the Quran condemns. Let's look at several Arabic words. Saddam Hussein and Saudi members of the Wahhabi sect argue that terrorists are martyrs: They pay $25,000 or more to the surviving families of mujahideen (holy warriors) who participate in jihad and become shahidin (martyrs). But other Muslims call terrorists mufsidoon (evil-doers) engaged in hirabah (unholy war against society) and heading not to paradise but to jahannam (eternal hellfire). ...
Similarly, Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic Studies at American University, said that "al-Qaeda's brand of suicide mass murder and its fomenting of hatred among races, religions, and cultures do not constitute godly or holy jihad - but, in fact, constitute the heinous crime and sin of unholy hirabah."
HISTORY
Use power of victory
Charles Krauthammer, Miami Herald, March 28
If there had been TV cameras not just at Normandy, but after Normandy, giving live coverage of firefights at every French village on the Allies' march to Berlin, the operation would have been judged a strategic miscalculation, if not a disaster. The fact is that after a single week we find ourselves at the gates of Baghdad, servicing the longest supply lines in American history, with combat losses astonishingly low by any standard.
The haunting echoes of war
Ellis Henican, Newsday, March 28
This all goes back to 1966 and 1967. [P.C.] Taylor, who is 55 now, was a farm boy from southwest Virginia. Suddenly, he was a U.S. Marine, a rifleman in the legendary First Marine Division, dropped into a war that wasn't going nearly as well as it was supposed to.
Sound familiar? ...
No one is saying "quagmire" yet. But the Iraqis haven't surrendered, like Washington promised. They haven't greeted our troops with flowers and hugs.
SUCCESS OR FAILURE
"Knife fight in a phone booth"
Eric Boehlert, salon.com, March 28
In the days and weeks ahead, military commanders will be pressed to find a difficult balance: While they must use enough force to win the battle, they must limit casualties among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians or risk losing the crucial war of public opinion. Images of grief and destruction have already inflamed war opponents at home and throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and that's come even as the allies have pulled their punches, militarily.
Counting heads
Peter Beinart, The New Republic, March 27
The war's conduct suggests at least one irony: This supposedly cold-blooded administration is making a remarkable, some might even say militarily dangerous, effort to spare Iraqi lives. Conservatives once attacked Bill Clinton for being too squeamish about civilian casualties. But compared with George W. Bush at least so far Clinton didn't even come close.
What kind of victory?
The Economist, March 22
The Americans and British must also be careful to keep their own killing to a minimum. ... This, after all, is a war of choice, not of self-defense, and it is being waged, in part, in order to "liberate" Iraqis from an odious dictator. Afterwards, the gratitude of the liberated will depend very much on how many of their countrymen - not just civilians, but the regime's wretched conscripts as well - perish in the fighting.
Will trying to avoid civilian casualties cause more deaths?
John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, March 27
The allies genuinely hope to avoid inflicting civilian deaths. Is that realistic? Is the effort counter-productive? ...
Do slow and careful operational procedures actually increase the number of civilian deaths and the amount of suffering, when a less precautionary and more peremptory approach might achieve the same, or even a better effect, by hastening the end?
The Iraq Body Count Project
Civilian casualties are the most unacceptable consequence of all wars. Each civilian death is a tragedy and should never be regarded as the "cost" of achieving our countries' war aims, because it is not we who are paying this price. One in four killed in the U.S. war on Afghanistan were civilians, and in Yugoslavia the proportion was even higher. We believe it is a moral and humanitarian duty for each such death to be recorded, publicized, given the weight it deserves and, where possible, investigated to establish whether there are grounds for criminal proceedings.
War crimes
Washington Post, March 27
Reports from Baghdad yesterday suggested that one or more U.S. missiles might have struck a shopping street, killing a number of people. ... Those pictures of destruction and death were getting plenty of airtime yesterday in the world's media, as happens in every case when U.S. forces are accused of harming the innocent. Yet a full assessment of civilian suffering in the war's first week points in a different direction: Iraqis have endured far more injury from Saddam Hussein's forces - and those blows have been deliberate.
TACTICS
Rumsfeld and all the Army's men
Michael O'Hanlon, Washington Times, March 27
Over the last year, there was vigorous debate between [Secretary of State Donald] Rumsfeld's civilian team on the one hand and the uniformed military on the other. Mr. Rumsfeld's instincts were to go with a small force and a daring, modern battle plan building on the model of Afghanistan. The military's instincts, especially among Army officers, were to deploy a big enough sledgehammer to crush the entire Iraqi military with brute force. ...
In the end, each side got half of what it wanted, and the country got a good war plan. Operation Iraqi Freedom is being fought with the big force the U.S. military wanted and the creative concepts Mr. Rumsfeld desired.
War could last months, officers say
Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, March 27
The combination of wretched weather, long and insecure supply lines, and an enemy that has refused to be supine in the face of American military might has led to a broad reassessment by some top generals of U.S. military expectations and timelines. Some of them see even the potential threat of a drawn-out fight that sucks in more and more U.S. forces. Both on the battlefield in Iraq and in Pentagon conference rooms, military commanders were talking yesterday about a longer, harder war than had been expected just a week ago ... .
