The occupation in iraq begins its second year and the 9-11 commission is holding hearings to ostensibly discover who may have dropped the ball and "allowed" the disaster to happen. Its obvious to me that someone will be the fallguy (and i'm pretty sure it will be a guy, not Ms. Rice). The questions that this commission are not asking and the questions that the U.S. media are not asking speak, no scream, louder than the asinine answers being given at the commission hearings by administration "officials" and answers given by Generals, Lt. Generals, Majors, Maj Generals, etc. w/r to the resistance movements and fighting in Iraq.

Why? Why did someone plan an elaborate attack on the U.S. in September of 2001, what would have given cause? Why are we in Iraq? Why are we setting up a puppet regime? Why are we further isolating ourselves from the world? Why is the U.S. wedding itself evermore tightly to the Likudist solution and the extremist Sharon with regards to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict? Why have we, once again, abandoned Afghanistan to its petty warlords, rape and opium production?

I've read two articles lately that resonate. The first was written April 10th by Robert Fisk in the London Independent, the second by Amira Hass about 6 months ago and published in the Israeli English language daily Haaretz. Israel has been involved in a 37 year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and although the government is in the hands of fanatics, the Israeli press, at least some elements, seem to be unafraid to ask hard questions. I can only hope that, given the lessons of the present time, cracks may appear and the U.S. press will finally begin to assume its role of "watchdog of the people" instead of "lapdog of power". I remain skeptical, power is entirely too seductive.

————————-Fisk Article ————————————————
The planners of the war in Iraq have just one answer to their critics: 'shut up'

Thanks to the subservience of many members of the press, the US administration has had an easy time

by Robert Fisk
10 April 2004

Just shut up. That’s the new foreign policy line of our masters. When Senator Edward Kennedy dubbed Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam”, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told him to be “a little more restrained and careful” in his comments. I recall that when the US commenced its bombing of Afghanistan, the White House spokesman claimed that some journalists were “asking questions that the American people wouldn’t want asked”. Back in the early 1980s, when I reported on the Iranian soldiers on a troop train to Tehran who were coughing Saddam’s mustard gas out of their lungs in blood and mucus, a Foreign Office official told my then editor on The Times that my dispatch was “not helpful”. In other words, stop criticising our ally, Saddam.

So maybe the policy has been around for quite a while. When the occupation authorities deliberately concealed the attacks against US troops after the start of the Iraq occupation last year, journalists who investigated this violence were told that they weren’t covering the big picture, that only small areas of Iraq were restive. And there was a lot of clucking of tongues when a few of us decided to take a close look at US proconsul Paul Bremer’s press laws last year. A whole team of “Coalition Provisional Authority” lawyers was set up to see how they could legalise the closure and censorship of Iraqi newspapers that “incited violence”. And whenever we raised questions about it, the CPA spokesman - and its current attendant lord, Dan Senor, used the same phrase last week - would announce that “we will not tolerate incitement to violence”.

So when Bremer’s own closure last week of Muqtada Sadr’s silly little weekly - circulation about a quarter that of the Kent Messenger - incited the very violence he supposedly wanted to avoid, what did the American High Commissioner announce? “This will not be tolerated.” One of the paper’s major sins was to have condemned Paul Bremer for taking Iraq down “Saddam’s path”, an article which Bremer condemned in painstaking detail in his signed letter - in execrable Arabic - to the editor of the miscreant paper.

Now I’m all against incitement to violence. Just like I’m against incitement to war by the use of fraudulent claims of weapons of mass destruction and secret links to al-Qa’ida. Just like I’m against the use of Saddam’s army against Iraqi cities and the use of America’s army against Iraqi cities. For let’s remember that some of Muqtada Sadr’s dangerous militiamen fought Saddam in the 1991 insurgency - the one we supported and then betrayed. Saddam, of course, knew how to deal with resistance. “We will not tolerate…,” he told his commanders. And we all know what that meant. No, the Americans are not Saddam’s army. But the siege of Fallujah is likely to give that city the heroic status among future generations of Iraqi Sunnis as Basra - surrounded by Saddam’s hordes in 1991 - holds among Iraqi Shias today.

But still, we must shut up. I remember how last autumn the cabal of right-wing neo-conservatives who urged the Bush administration into this war suddenly went to ground. What was this so-called neo-conservative lobby behind Bush and Cheney, a New York Times columnist demanded to know, these so-called former Likudist supporters of Israel? When one of them, Richard Perle, turned up on a radio show with me a few weeks ago, he insisted that things were getting better in Iraq, that we were all en route to a cracking little democracy in Mesopotamia.

The moment I suggested that this was a massive case of self-delusion, Perle replied that Fisk had “always been for the maintenance of the Baathist regime”. I got the message. Anyone who condemned this bloody mess was a secret Baathist, a lover of the dictator and his torturers. Thus far have the falcons of Washington fallen.

Of course, the “shut-up” principle works both ways. Back on 16 March 2003, when the world was obsessed with the war that would break out in Iraq three days later, a tragedy occurred on another battlefield 500 miles west of Baghdad. On that day, an Israeli soldier and his commander drove a nine-ton Caterpillar bulldozer over a young American peace activist called Rachel Corrie who was unarmed, clearly visible in a fluorescent jacket and trying to protect a Palestinian home that the Israelis intended to destroy. The Caterpillar was part of the regular US aid to Israel. Israel acquitted its own army of responsibility for Rachel’s death - which was taped on video by her appalled friends - and the Bush administration remained gutlessly silent.

Rachel’s grieving mother Elizabeth has been a picture of dignity. US citizens, she wrote, “should ask themselves how it is that an unarmed US citizen can be killed with impunity by a soldier from an allied nation receiving massive US aid… When three Americans were killed, presumably by Palestinians, in an explosion on October 15th, 2003 … the FBI came within 24 hours to investigate the deaths. After one year, neither the FBI nor any other US-led team has done anything to investigate the death of an American killed by an Israeli.”

Well, the answer is that Bush and his administration know how to shut themselves up when it pays them to do so. That’s what Condoleezza Rice initially tried to do when summoned before the 11 September hearings. And, thanks to the subservience of many members of the White House and Pentagon press corps, the administration has an easy time. Why, for example, no press conference questions about Rachel Corrie?

It seems that as long as you say “war on terror”, you are safe from all criticism. For not a single American journalist has investigated the links between the Israeli army’s “rules of engagement” - so blithely handed over to US forces on Sharon’s orders - and the behaviour of the US military in Iraq. The destruction of houses of “suspects”, the wholesale detention of thousands of Iraqis without trial, the cordoning off of “hostile” villages with razor wire, the bombardment of civilian areas by Apache helicopter gunships and tanks on the hunt for “terrorists” are all part of the Israeli military lexicon.

In besieging cities - when they were taking casualties or the number of civilians killed was becoming too shameful to sustain - the Israeli army would call a “unilateral suspension of offensive operations”. They did this 11 times after they surrounded Beirut in 1982. And yesterday, the American army declared a “unilateral suspension of offensive operations” around Fallujah.

Not a word on this mysterious parallel by America’s reporters, no questions about the even more mysterious use of identical language. And in the coming days, we shall - perhaps - find out how many of the estimated 300 dead of Fallujah were Sunni gunmen and how many were women and children. Following Israel’s rules is going to lead the Americans into the same disaster those rules have led the Israelis. But I guess we’ll shut up about it.

In the end, I suspect, the Iraqis will probably have a greater say in the US presidential elections than American voters. They will decide if President Bush loses or wins. The same may apply to Mr Blair. Funny thing, that a far away people, just 26 million, can change our political history. As for us, I guess we’ll be expected to shut up.

———————————–Hass Article—————————————–
Explaining the occupation to the occupier

By Amira Hass

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/347524.html

How can a tiny Palestinian organization like Islamic Jihad produce so many walking bombs, suicide bombers who choose babies in strollers andtheir grandparents as targets? And how does an organization that once declared it would only target soldiers send its latest suicide bomber to a mixed Jewish-Arab city, to sow death and sorrow in a restaurant whose owners, workers and customers are Jews and Arabs, old and young.

Intelligence experts and Arabists on our side say it's because of Islam, which sanctifies wars, that there is unceasing incitement in the mosques, that Iran and Syria are behind it, that the suicide bombers and those who send them are out to destroy the State of Israel, that the people who blow themselves up are animals and that Arafat encourages terror.

There's a concept behind all these explanations, in which this sickening form of the Palestinian struggle has nothing to do with the occupation, that Israelis should not believe Palestinians who say there is a connection to the Israeli occupation. The concept says there is no connection between the proliferation of suicide bombings and the prevailing view in Palestinian society, which is that Israel, as a military and nuclear power, wants to squeeze a surrender out of the Palestinians that will legitimize the Israeli takeover of land in the West Bank and Gaza.

In other words, the concept is that the historical, political and geopolitical connections, the sociological and psychological ramifications - none of it is relevant. The concept is that there is something inherent to the heritage of the suicide bombers and those who send them that is to blame, because the Palestinians won't give up their dream of destroying Israel and that Muslims only believe in the most radical interpretation of their religion.

Israeli society can accept this insane situation - investing billions in something called "defense" and then being afraid of primitive walking bombs made up of a few kilograms of explosives and nails - because of a belief in the Israeli intelligence apparatus and the "objectivity" of its information. After all, the intelligence officers are fluent in Arabic, they analyze the speeches of every imam, they watch all the Arab TV stations that broadcast incitement, they get their hands on texts that are barely known to Palestinian writers and their audiences, and they have personal human intelligence from all sorts of collaborators and informants.

Indeed, from Islamic Jihad's perspective, now is a good time to intensify the sense of chaos in the country and region. As a tiny group, it is able to disregard and scorn the condemnations and warnings of the Palestinian Authority; it isn't looking for an electoral constituency. But that perspective does not explain why Islamic Jihad, despite the blows it suffers from the army, is able to find candidates to conduct a policy that is dictated from abroad and is foreign to the Palestinian longing for normalcy. Yes, only the Israeli occupation can explain that. All the rest of the explanations are appendices, marginal footnotes.

So, how does one explain the occupation to the occupier? The knowledge of daily life of 3.5 million people, whose future offers no chance of normalcy: the daily experience of the land of their grandparents and parents falling prey to this or that army order, for some "public" expropriation or pirate outpost? How does one explain to the bulldozer what it means to live when the land is constantly shrinking under your feet, when across the way, meanwhile, some rich settlement of Jews grows and a brand new road is paved just for them? How can the paper on which the army orders are written know what it's like to live for 37 years under the arbitrary rule of the representatives of the foreign occupation, many of whom are residents of the settlements, who make arbitrary decisions about who will be able to travel and who won't, who will get medical treatment and who won't, how many inches a water pipe can have as its diameter, if and when a water tanker reaches the village, which tree will be uprooted and which won't?

How to explain to the tanks and planes what a little boy's fear is like - not the fear of 10 or 100 but hundreds of thousands, not once a month or every other week, but daily, for three years, and what happens to a daughter and grandmother whose loved ones, civilians, are killed in front of their eyes, not by the dozens but the hundreds. How to explain to Israelis, who get only the most partial of reports about the horrors of the military occupation, that the Palestinians also suffer daily from horrific scenes, indeed, from the very first day of the renewed clashes, when they were still only throwing rocks and not blowing up in our cities?

Yes, the suicide bombers feel they represent their society. That's their strength. They represent their society's sense that it's no use living under the occupation, with the terrible weakness against the Israeli military power, the impotence as they watch their land vandalized and degraded, the rage over the stupidity of the Palestinian leadership. They are willingly represented by the vengeance.

Israel tends to blame those who demand to explain the phenomenon of the suicide bombers in the context of the occupation, as if they understand and even justify the terrorist means. That might be understandable for a developed society, but it does not help Israeli society when dealing with the threat of the terror.