Hans Blix on the Iraq war

Cartoon from Steve Bell, The Guardian

The Torture Files: W Reloaded

And Unrepentant.

Things you won't read in the western press about Bush's ME visit

Photo The Guardian
Of course, there are these pictures of Palestinian militants in Gaza who protest Bush's visit. But the western press and the Saudi controlled Arab press agree that Gaza is not part of the Arab world, it is not part of any world, it is somewhere between the axis of evil and nowhere, as far as Bush and Olmert are concerned.

So the western press and the Saudi controlled Arab press will not tell you that ordinary Arab citizens, as well as ordinary Arab columnists in a small portion of the press not controlled by Saudi media, can also protest Bush's visit. But this will become too complexe for the western mind used to the rethoric of Evil versus Good, of Islam versus the West, of ballot box democracy, consumer civilisation, and life loving culture, versus barbaric Arabs.

To illustrate its article on Bush's visit to Israel and the ME, Lebanon's Al-Safir chooses to show a Palestinian child from Qalqilya sleeping near a curtain dotted with Israeli bullets.

In Al-Quds Al 'Arabi, columnist 'Abd-El-Bari 'Atwan takes on Bush's illogic and asks how Bush can tie the end of 'illegal' settlements* to the end of the launching of rockets on these same settlements when the rocket launchers are in Gaza and when the only Palestinian 'authority' Bush recognises and meet is in Ramallah and has nothing to do with Gaza ? How Bush can promise Abbas peace when he ties the peace process to the end of the rockets coming from a territory Abbas does not control ?**

'Atwan writes that not only Abbas does not control Gaza but he does not control Ramallah, for to enter Ramallah or to leave it he needs the approval of Israeli authorities. He cannot even smuggle a baby to or from Ramallah without the approval of Israeli authorities. 'Atwan doubts that Bush's intention in this visit is peace because if this is so he shouldn't have left peace for the last year of his two term presidency.
'Atwan ironically finishes his column by reminding the reader that his wife is not Iranian, his mother is not a Shia Muslim, and that he is an Arab to the bone, in case anybody reading his column might perceive his critique of Bush as motivated by the love of Iran. This kind of sectarian thinking is also symptomatic of the Arab press owned by the Saudi royal family and very submissive to it...The kind of freedom of expression and democracy Bush promotes in the Arab world...

Lebanese blogger Mustapha, close to March 14th, Bush's favourite political movement in the ME, explains why Bush is not welcome in Lebanon.

Todo sobre mi madre:Lebanese blogger Jamal's sweet peaceful and politically apathic mother is mad angry about Bush visiting Lebanon and has prepared some rotten eggs for him.

*A zionist oxymore since all settlements are illegal.
**In my opinion, this can only be understood as a call for civil war among Palestinians until the end of all Palestinians, or at least that's how peace efforts of the Bush presidency can be caracterised.

But what the western press won't tell you about Bush's visit to the ME, it will tell in cartoons. Saudi media definitely won't.
Here is my preferred cartoonist Steve Bell on Bush's visit:

UPDATE, January 16th: From Spiegel, a round-up of the Arab press on the visit.
Gideon Levy on Bush's visit

'Sheherazade at the white house'

Le Monde Diplomatique is a great read every month. But it is available only through subscription. Here is an excerpt from one of January's 2008 issue articles:

The image becomes the story

For Bush's speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the "great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve", Sforza rented three barges to take
the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan's declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with
the Statue of Liberty in the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was around the speaker's head was
as important as the head itself (5).

What is around the head turns an image into a legend: "Mission accomplished", the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty - over time the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the desired emotion. For Americans in 2002 nothing could have had a greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was ready to concentrate on important matters.

According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the "Scheherazade strategy": "When policy dooms you, start telling stories - stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of
control" (6). Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters' attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.

As Chernus explains, Rove was "betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier - at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq." Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. "The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what's
actually going on out there in the world. Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement" (7). This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: "I feel like I'm Moby Dick... they're after me."
________________________________________________________

Christian Salmon wrote Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer
des histoires, La Découverte, Paris, 2007

Lebanon and The Puppeteers

Read carefully this interesting press review from Syria Comment on the deadlock in the Lebanese crisis to elect a president and tell me how many puppeteers can you count in these stories ?

The only sense we can make of such news is that Lebanese Politcians are puppets and seem happy with the fact, especially those of March 14th who let Bush and Sarkozy speak on their behalf. I have one objection however, the role of the puppeteer Syria is exaggerated by Sarkozy and Bush. That's to hide their own role as puppets masters.

I mean read the title at Syria Comment: 'Bush, Sarkozy, and Mualem face off'. That's hilarious because to make sense of this you have either to inflate Mualem or to deflate Bush and Sarkozy. And Mouallem seems to be more than happy to play the game.

Carnival of Hypocrisy

The Dalai Lama was honored today by the US congress in the presence of George Bush who lended him his arm to walk him before the congress.

All eyes are truned on Beijing who, it is said, is furious at the US giving this honor and credibility to the exiled political and spiritual leader of Tibetans.

I say, the Chinese must not be upset. For it is the Dalai Lama who is lending credibility to the man who destructed Iraq, killed nearly a million of its civilians, many of them children, and displaced another four million making them refugees in their own country, and put its population in a state of famine.

Oh yeh, the Chinese must not be upset because the Dalai Lama, a man fighting for the right of his people to get some political autonomy from an occupier, was honored by Elie Wiesel, the man who refuses, not only a political autonomy for the Palestinians opressed and occupied by Israel, but the very existence of the Palestinian people alltogether.

And during this carnival of hypocrisy, even the house speaker Nancy Pelosi's genuine wish that the Dalai Lama's visit bring peace to the congress, sounded unauthentic. For the man who is supposed to bring peace is helping Bush's diplomatic war at China and Wiesel's and the zionists' pathetic search for respectability.

Jean Bricmont on Why Bush Can Get Away With Attacking Iran

That's the Guy. I love everything he writes. One of the last few remaining true rational academics and a committed public intellectual.

"All the ideological signposts for attacking Iran are in place. The country has been thoroughly demonized because it is not nice to women, to gays, or to Jews. That in itself is enough to neutralize a large part of the American "left". The issue of course is not whether Iran is nice or not ­according to our views -- but whether there is any legal reason to attack it, and there is none; but the dominant ideology of human rights has legitimized, specially in the left, the right of intervention on humanitarian grounds anywhere, at any time, and that ideology has succeeded in totally sidetracking the minor issue of international law.

Israel and its fanatical American supporters want Iran attacked for its political crimes--supporting the rights of the Palestinians, or questioning the Holocaust. Both U.S. political parties are equally under the control of the Israel lobby, and so are the media. The antiwar movement is far too preoccupied with the security of Israel to seriously defend Iran and it won't attack the real architects of this coming war--the Zionists-- for fear of "provoking antisemitism". Blaming Big Oil for the Iraq war was quite debatable, but, in the case of Iran, since the country is about to be bombed but not invaded, there is no reason whatsoever to think that Big Oil wants the war, as opposed to the Zionists. In fact, Big Oil is probably very much opposed to the war, but it is as unable to stop it as the rest of us."

Relevant links:

Another proxy war with Iran ? Israel hit Missiles in Syria-The US pleased-story stinks.

A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime, FOX News confirmed Tuesday.

Sarkozy's visit to Bush: fast track for world leader media status for Sarko and chicken soup for Bush

From Spiegel

Hot dogs instead of lobster and hamburgers rather than swordfish: French President Nicolas Sarkozy's blitz visit to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport was anything but a culinary summit. Politically, it was all show.
...Although he does not speak English fluently, and although Bush does not speak French at all ("I can barely speak English," the US president quipped), the visit was meant to emphasize one thing more than anything else: that the physically unimposing Sarkozy is used to dealing with the world's powerful in a completely relaxed way.

...Hamburger diplomacy at the lunchtime barbeque organized by the Bush family was just the right thing for hyperactive Sarkozy (who jetted across the Atlantic earlier to attend the funeral of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger). And since neither Tony Blair from Britain nor Silvio Berlusconi from Italy nor José Maria Aznar from Spain is still in office, Sarkozy used the opportunity to sharpen his profile as old Europe's allied leader.

... It was chicken soup for Bush's soul. A solid 65 percent of US citizens now take a negative view of their president. His international ratings are similarly devastating: According to one poll, citizens in 42 out of 47 countries believe Washington is primarily pursuing its own interests when it claims to be promoting democracy. The Bush administration's power politics are being criticized the world over. That makes the friendship with Sarkozy all the more satisfying...

The Vandalism Of The Truth in the Iraq War Should Be Prosecuted

When ordinary citizen lie to an official representative of their government, being a judge, a policeman or a tax inspector, they are held responsible and prosecuted. But it is not the case with our rulers who appear to bear no consequences for their lies, even though these lies have had tremendous tragic consequences like the wrecking of a country, the killing of hundreds thousands, and an irreversible damage to citizens security and basic rights.

I think the main effect of the Iraq war and the 'War on Terror' will be felt for a long time to come in our commitment, as a society, to live up to our ideals; Justice, Truth and Rationality, those ideals the West has proclaimed his own and has so cheerfully trampled on. As long as the Bush administration and its allies are not prosecuted for the amount of lies, fabrications, suffering and prejudice they produced, we can consider ourselves in danger of loosing these core values that make us human beings. Make no mistake, the immorality of the Iraq war is not only in its illegal character but also in the incredible amount of lying rulers have done to their people in order to wage this war.

''A report presented to the armed services committee by the Pentagon's inspector general, Thomas Gimble, exposes the Bush administration to new charges of manipulating intelligence to make its case for going to war against Saddam nearly four years ago.''

And what is the answer of one of the main culprits ? I am not guilty because I am not endorsing a lie that we fabricated in order to test and go against the consensus in the intelligence community, even though this lie has had tragic consequences.

''Mr Feith, who left the Pentagon in 2005 for a post at Georgetown University, yesterday played down the influence of his unit. "This was not an alternative intelligence assessment," he told the Washington Post. "It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance."