good example of American McJournalism (McPropaganda?) -- quick, doesn't demand any thinking or time taken out from "our busy lives;" almost no preparation or foundation; functional, without any style; convenient, but with very little nutritional value and an unhealthy longer-term effect.
Europeâs Muslim Street Muslims confront the United States, in the place their votes count most. By Omer Taspinar Islam may still be a faraway religion for millions of Americans. But for Europeans it is local politics. The 15 million Muslims of the European Union (EU)âup to three times as many as live in the United Statesâare becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab street. Europeâs Muslims hail from different countries and display diverse religious tendencies, but the common denominator that links them to the Muslim world is their sympathy for Palestine and Palestinians. And unlike most of their Arab brethren, growing numbers of Europeâs Muslims can vote in elections that count. This political ascendance threatens to exacerbate existing strains within the trans-Atlantic relationship. The presence of nearly 10 million Muslims versus only 700,000 Jews in France and Germany alone helps explain why continental Europe might look at the Middle East from a different angle than does the United States. Indeed, French and German concerns about a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq or Washingtonâs blind support for Israel are at least partly related to nervousness about the Muslim street at home. ctd - http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/story.php?storyID=13576
"As Peg Bracken once wrote, you have an obligation to stick up for your beliefs in public. Unless it's some jackass who wouldn't understand you if you argued all night." LOL...this is too true. It is funny to watch these stupid kids try to evade all historical fact because it doesnt' fit in with their delusions !
Ba'athists slip quietly back into control Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad Monday April 21, 2003 They have quietly removed the pictures of Saddam Hussein from their sitting rooms, and reconfigured their memories to transform lives of privilege into tales of suffering. Less than two weeks after the collapse of the regime, thousands of members of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist party, the all too willing instrument of Saddam, are resuming their roles as the men and women who run Iraq. Two thousand policemen - all cardholding party members - have put on the olive green, or the grey-and-white uniforms of traffic wardens, and returned to the streets of Baghdad at America's invitation. Dozens of minders from the information ministry, who spied on foreign journalists for the security agencies, have returned to the Palestine Hotel where most reporters stay, offering their services as translators to unwitting new arrivals. Seasoned bureaucrats at the oil ministry - including the brother of General Amer Saadi, the chemical weapons expert now in American custody - have been offered their jobs back by the US military. Feelers have also gone out to Saddam's health minister, despite past American charges that Iraqi hospitals stole medicine from the sick. It has become increasingly apparent that Washington cannot restore governance to Baghdad without resorting to the party which for decades controlled every aspect of life under the regime. It has equally become apparent that the Ba'ath party - whose neighbourhood spy cells were as feared as the state intelligence apparatus - will survive in some form, either through the appeal of its founding ideals, or through the rank opportunism of its millions of members. "The coming bureaucracy will be overwhelmed by Ba'athists. They had loyalty to Saddam Hussein, and now they have loyalty to foreign invaders," said Wamidh Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University who broke with the Ba'ath in 1961, and is trying to organise a new political grouping. The Ba'athist project of reinvention gathered pace at the weekend when the Iraqi Writers' Union - who received salaries for poems for Saddam - held a meeting at which they claimed to have been secret opponents of the regime for years. At the same time, remnants of the regime see no reason to abandon a party that has been around since 1947. "The Arab Ba'ath Socialist party was not Saddam Hussein's idea. Like Marxism, it was not founded by Lenin and Stalin. It is an idea. That is why the Arab masses sup ported Iraq, not because of Saddam Hussein, but because of ideas," said a senior culture bureaucrat. The resurrection of the Ba'ath is, in part, acknowledgment of the daunting reality of governing a country as complex and battered as Iraq. Under Saddam membership was mandatory for teachers, police, the army, and senior posts in hospitals, universities, banks and the civil service. Local party bosses, or mukhtars, dispensed marriage licences, pressganged locals into militias, and organised parades in honour of Saddam. They also winnowed out potential neighbourhood traitors, destroying the lives of the millions who fell foul of the regime. That elite - dominated by the Sunni minority which has governed Iraq since the Ottoman empire - remains the major source of local talent for the new US administration. Now, though the party cadre has been orphaned by the flight of Saddam and the upper echelons, local party bosses and bureaucrats who joined up strictly for career advancement see no reason to step aside. "I haven't hurt anyone, and the people love me," said Haji Talat, the boss of Adhamiya, with direct charge for 4,000 households. The northern neighbourhood was the most solidly Ba'athist of Baghdad - so secure that Saddam did a walkabout there just three days before the US tanks rolled in. Mr Talat has taken down his photo of Saddam but he is not willing to relinquish his control. "I had to go along with the regime because otherwise they would turn me into cinnamon. But the people know me. The bad mukhtars might go now, but the good ones will stay," he said. Such attitudes prevail even in poorer neighbourhoods, such as the Jamila suburb of Baghdad, where there was more resentment of the Ba'ath. "In our circumstances, it is necessary to work with the Americans to keep order, but later we might not agree," said Rahim Ahmoud, a mukhtar of eight years. The prospects for the survival of the Ba'ath have been enhanced by the chaos of these early days of the US military occupation. There is also no serious challenge to its iron grip. The party, with its secular principles - though trampled on by Saddam's cynical use of religion - also represents a bulwark against a nascent Islamist movement among Iraq's disenfranchised Shia majority. For middle class Iraqis, the declarations for religious self-rule now emanating from mosques in Baghdad and southern cities are deeply troubling. The new assertiveness by the Shia clergy probably does not sit very well with the Americans either. So that leaves the Ba'ath. "The Ba'ath party was the right hand to Saddam," said Hind Mahmoud, a computer programmer at one of the nationalist banks sacked by the looters. For people like Ms Mahmoud, faith in the party, and in its future role in Iraq, remains undimmed: "No one can take the place of the Ba'ath party. The Ba'ath party has experience - doctors and managers and scientists. It works in everything."
Look msfe al-Tikriti If you studied any history you would know that there is a thick black line drawn and life goes on. Other than the big fish, you simply can't dedicate the rest of the country's life/time/resources to hunting and bringing to justive every little runt. That's just reality. Yes, its bitter but it is the best option.
This occupation is a disaster. The US must leave - and fast Any gratitude for the removal of Saddam is now virtually exhausted Jonathan Steele Monday April 21, 2003 Abdul al-Malaki lives opposite the gatehouse of the extravagant palace that Saddam Hussein built in his home town of Tikrit. Flanked by megalomaniac twin statues of the former Iraqi president riding a horse above four missiles, the palace arch was a daily affront to locals. "The people of Tikrit are like the rest of Iraq. They hated Saddam Hussein. I want to kill him," the 28-year-old cafe-owner spat out his words. But as lorry-loads of US Marines trundled through the arch, he switched focus: "This is an occupation. Nothing else. We will keep quiet for a year and if they have not gone we will kill them." The gratitude for removing Saddam Hussein on which Washington mistakenly expected to bank for years is almost exhausted. Those who warned the Bush administration against this war have been proved right. Only in the Kurdish areas of the north is there any satisfaction. The Tikrit cafe-owner's views are replicated throughout the largely Arab parts of Iraq. In Nassiriya, Shia protesters greeted the US proconsul General Jay Garner with shouts of "No to Saddam, no to occupation" last week. In Baghdad, tens of thousands of Sunni and Shia worshippers came out of Friday prayers and marched through the streets, calling on the US to leave. In the Iraqi capital, where American troop strength is most visible, it is easy to understand why people complain of feeling humiliated. The soldiers' presence is a reminder that Iraqis failed to topple the dictator themselves. Adding to their long list of complaints against him, Iraqis now blame Saddam Hussein for letting the Americans in. Hassan Ali Hussein, a graduate of the Oil Institute, says he refused a job at the oil ministry because it meant joining the ruling Ba'ath party. Now this principled anti-Saddam man delights in the dictator's overthrow and accuses him of failing to organise urban guerrilla warfare. "Saddam betrayed us. We think there was an agreement between Bush and Saddam for Baghdad not to resist," he says. The Pentagon's failure to plan for the "day after" adds to the anger. Making the time-honoured mistake of re-fighting the last war, the only preparations they made were for food. Air-dropping humanitarian parcels or delivering food by road provides good propaganda images. In a country that had suffered from three years of drought like Afghanistan it also made sense. Washington did not seem to know Iraq was different. The one thing people are not short of is food, thanks to the monthly rations of basics such as rice, sugar, cooking oil, tea and flour that every Iraqi receives, regardless of income. In a sanctions-damaged economy, 60% rely on the state-run programme and on the eve of war Saddam Hussein sensibly issued up to five months rations in one go. Instead of concentrating on food aid, the US ought to have prepared teams of water and power engineers, as well as flown in extra troops to prevent the postwar looting that breaks out in every country when regimes collapse (there should have been no surprise here). The immediate priority is to provide security and get the lights and telephones back on. But a far greater problem looms. Ten million Iraqis, who depend on the state sector for jobs, have not been paid for a month. Washington may parrot the mantra about turning Iraq into a free-market economy, but this is for the birds. The poverty that hundreds of millions of Russians and other eastern Europeans faced in the over-hasty dismantling of a state-run economy is as nothing to what is hitting Iraqis. Eastern Europe at least had a "transition". In Iraq the budget and the government that ran it collapsed overnight. Who is going to pay the doctors, teachers, bus-drivers, and other government employees now? Many Iraqis are looking to the UN oil-for-food programme, and suggesting additions. The UN should take over paying government salaries to the thousands of people who are currently working for nothing in the mood of postwar solidarity. Looting has had most of the international media attention but the enormous amount of work being done free in the country's hospitals is equally important. When electricity returns and schools resume, no doubt most teachers will work for nothing too. Another proposal is that every family that benefits from subsidised food rations and is listed at one of the scheme's 45,000 well-run distribution points should be given a monthly cash handout of $10 per person. This would ease the threat of postwar poverty and pump-prime the local market. Along with humiliation over defeat and anger at the postwar chaos, resentment over colonisation is on the rise. People point to the fact that the oil ministry was the only government office in Baghdad that the US did not bomb and protected from looters by planting a ring of troops around it on day one of "liberation". Episodes like the massacre in Mosul when on two consecutive days last week US troops fired into crowds of protesters have classic imperial overtones and feel like the foretaste of greater repression to come. In the vacuum of power the mosques are emerging as the main source of resistance. The good news is that far from confronting each other, Sunni and Shia clerics and worshippers are uniting behind a common agenda. Many are fundamentalists but Iraq's progressive secular forces say this is not the primary issue at this stage. "What we're faced with today is not a choice between secularism and religion. We're facing an invasion and foreign rule. We have to work together to end it," says Dr Wamid Omar Nadmi, a leading political scientist at Baghdad university. Every aspect of today's chaos and the danger of clashes between Iraqis and their occupiers highlight the need to get a UN presence into Iraq fast. The UN should expand the oil-for-food system to head off the poverty crisis. It should appoint a UN administrator to start brokering intra-Iraqi talks and forestall US efforts to create an Iraqi government of US placemen. One of the Pentagon's many failed predictions was that someone, if not Saddam Hussein, would surrender to US forces in the face of overwhelming US military might. Had that happened as in Japan and Nazi Germany, it could have given Washington the right of continuity which its failure to get UN backing before the attack had denied it. Instead, the postwar occupation runs counter to international law as much as the war itself. The UN has a moral obligation to take over and, hard though it will be to get it past Washington's veto, the EU states and Russia should draft a security council resolution to authorise a strong UN role as soon as possible.
JP Morgan Banker came from Germany and ruled you since that's also historical facts that you don't even seem to know
Interesting that you have stopped including sources recently. Don't tell me you are embarassed to let everyone know you are quoting from the Guardian! Don't worry no one will be surprised. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/voices/story/0,12820,940520,00.html
"JP Morgan Banker came from Germany and ruled you since that's also historical facts that you don't even seem to know" Uh, hello, J.P. Morgan was AMERICAN. As for coming from Germany, so did many of my relatives, I have no problem with that at all !