[Peace] News notes for May 12 (part 2 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 1]

THURSDAY, MAY 09, 2002

WHO GETS THE MONEY? The papers all report that the Senate passed a bill
yesterday authorizing about $20 billion worth of farm aid annually over
the next 10 years. [SLATE]

WHO GETS THE MONEY (II)? The Bush administration is seeking to relax rules
dictating that hospitals accepting Medicare provide emergency care to
patients even at non-emergency facilities ... industry lobbyists
approve... [WSJ]

WHO GETS THE SHIT? The House votes to back the Bush administration's plan
to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2002

HARDLY "INTRACTABLE." More than half of Israelis believe withdrawing
troops from Palestinian territories and dismantling most Jewish
settlements there will help put the peace process back on track, according
to an opinion poll ... In the poll, 59 per cent of those questioned said
they believed a unilateral withdrawal of troops and settlers from the West
Bank and Gaza Strip would lead to the renewal of the peace process while
72 per cent felt it would improve the country's international standing.
[AP]

AND HOW IS THIS TAUGHT? A Department of Education report that reveals
American high-school seniors have a "truly abysmal" understanding of U.S.
history, according to an administrator of a test they took. For example,
over half the students couldn't pick the U.S. ally at the beginning of
World War II out of the following list: (a) Germany (b) Japan (c) the
Soviet Union and (d) Italy. Scores haven't improved since the last time
seniors took the test seven years ago. [USAT]

AND THEY KNOW SOME HISTORY. After three 15-year-old Palestinians were
killed charging Israeli soldiers recently, Hamas issued a statement
forbidding attacks by teen-agers acting alone and told youngsters to turn
in friends who were considering becoming suicide bombers.

LOYAL OPPOSITION. The Senate and White House have agreed on a plan to give
Bush "fast-track" authority to negotiate trade deals with other countries
that Congress can only approve or reject, not change, the papers report.
The president's ability to do this has not been renewed by Congress since
1994. Senate leaders expect the deal to become law.

SATURDAY, MAY 11, 2002

AND WHO WILL GET THE MONEY? Republicans, frightened by public opinion
polling data that suggest that the word "privatization" is more or less
synonymous with "Enron" these days, are furiously backpedaling and trying
to distance themselves from Social Security privatization schemes they
previously endorsed. Besides pushing language infused with euphemisms like
"personal retirement accounts" or, simply, "control," Republicans have
also hatched a plan whereby they will introduce on the House floor "a
deliberate exaggeration" of the Bush privatization plan in order to
voraciously vote it down. These votes can subsequently be used to confound
any Democratic challenger. Completing the Byzantine circle, minority
leader Gephardt, a lifelong privatization foe, "has introduced the Bush
commission's recommendations as a House bill and wants to gather enough
signatures to force a vote on it this summer." [WP]

SUNDAY, MAY 12, 2002

WOT, THEN AND NOW. On this day in 1898 a squadron of 12 U.S. ships
commanded by Rear Adm. William T. Sampson bombards San Juan without
provocation or warning. And in 1916: James Connolly is executed for his
part in this spring's Easter Rebellion, which challenged British rule in
Dublin. wounded from the uprising, Connolly is tied to a chair to be shot.
He is the 15th Easter Rebellion leader executed this week. Connolly wrote,
"One great source of the strength of the ruling class has ever been their
willingness to kill in defense of their power and privileges. Let their
power be once attacked either by foreign foes or by domestic
revolutionaries, and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill and kill
and kill. The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the small
value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked contrast
to the reluctance of all revolutionaries to shed blood."

PROJECTION? Administration officials have briefed Congress on what they
described as disturbing intelligence indicating that Russia is preparing
to resume nuclear tests, even as President Bush is scheduled to meet with
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to discuss arms control later this
month, government officials said ... One member of Congress, who was
present at the briefing and remained skeptical of the evidence of Russian
testing, said, "The administration seems to want to resume nuclear testing
and to develop new nuclear weapons." The only public reference to the
briefings came on the floor of the House on Thursday, when Representative
Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania, made passing reference to the
intelligence analysis. [NYT]

CAN WE EXPECT A SYMPATHETIC PORTRAIT OF PALESTINIAN SNIPERS? NYT Magazine
has a sympathetic portrait of Israeli snipers in the Occupied Territories.

SURPRISE. Enron manipulated California's energy markets. A variety of
questionable tactics was employed. An Enron strategy called "Death Star,"
for example, created the appearance of congestion on transmission lines,
which the company then collected a fee from the state for relieving. [LAT]

JUST AS WE DID IN THE '80S. In a survey of postwar Afghanistan, a reporter
travels along what was once a major, paved highway from Kabul to Herat,
finding it "disintegrated by war and neglect into a rutted track in
places." Outside of Kabul, which the paper calls an "island of progress,"
chaos and intimidation are commonplace. In Kandahar, after six years of
in-house confinement under the Taliban, girls and female teachers
returning to school have received death threats. The city "looks and feels
like a place slowly being left behind by the new government in Kabul."
[WP]

OUR S.O.B.S. Following an "unprecedented" meeting of Afghan warlords, in
which the U.N. presented a 52-page Human Rights Watch report entitled
"Paying for the Taliban's Crimes," Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, northern
Afghanistan's most important power broker, signed an agreement with three
rivals to stop targeting civilians. Dostum is also feeling the heat from
Physicians for Human Rights, which is investigating evidence that his
troops may have massacred or suffocated Taliban troops after they
surrendered last November. [SALTE]

TRUST US. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences is citing post-9/11
security concerns for its refusal to release reports on the development of
non-lethal weapons, but critics say the real reason is that the research
violates both U.S. law and international treaties on chemical and
biological weapons. [SLATE]

	*	*	*

[The following article was published on Saturday, May 11, 2002 in the
Guardian of London]

THE SOLUTION IS THE PROBLEM: THE US PRESENTS ITSELF AS THE PEACE-BROKER IN
THE MIDDLE EAST; THE REALITY IS DIFFERENT by Noam Chomsky

A year ago, the Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed
that "what we feared has come true -- War appears an unavoidable fate", an
"evil colonial" war. His colleague Ze'ev Sternhell noted that the Israeli
leadership was now engaged in "colonial policing, which recalls the
takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in
South Africa during the apartheid era". Both stress the obvious: there is
no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" in this conflict, which is
centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for
35 years.

The Oslo "peace process", begun in 1993, changed the modalities of the
occupation, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud
Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that "the Oslo agreements
were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on
the other forever". He soon became an architect of the US-Israel proposals
at Camp David in 2000, which kept to this condition. At the time, West
Bank Palestinians were confined to 200 scattered areas. Bill Clinton and
Israeli prime minister Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to
three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another
and from the fourth enclave, a small area of East Jerusalem, the center of
Palestinian communications. The fifth canton was Gaza. It is
understandable that maps are not to be found in the US mainstream. Nor is
their prototype, the Bantustan "homelands" of apartheid South Africa, ever
mentioned.

No one can seriously doubt that the US role will continue to be decisive.
It is crucial to understand what that role has been, and how it is
internally perceived. The version of the doves is presented by the editors
of the New York Times, praising President Bush's "path-breaking speech"
and the "emerging vision" he articulated. Its first element is "ending
Palestinian terrorism" immediately. Some time later comes "freezing, then
rolling back, Jewish settlements and negotiating new borders" to allow the
establishment of a Palestinian state. If Palestinian terror ends, Israelis
will be encouraged to "take the Arab League's historic offer of full peace
and recognition in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal more seriously". But
first Palestinian leaders must demonstrate that they are "legitimate
diplomatic partners".

The real world has little resemblance to this self-serving portrayal --
virtually copied from the 1980s, when the US and Israel were desperately
seeking to evade PLO offers of negotiation and political settlement. In
the real world, the primary barrier to the "emerging vision" has been, and
remains, unilateral US rejectionism. There is little new in the current
"Arab League's historic offer".

It repeats the basic terms of a security council resolution of January
1976 which called for a political settlement on the internationally
recognized borders "with appropriate arrangements ... to guarantee ... the
sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of all
states in the area". This was backed by virtually the entire world,
including the Arab states and the PLO but opposed by Israel and vetoed by
the US, thereby vetoing it from history. Similar initiatives have since
been blocked by the US and mostly suppressed in public commentary.

Not surprisingly, the guiding principle of the occupation has been
incessant humiliation. Israeli plans for Palestinians have followed the
guidelines formulated by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labour leaders more
sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Thirty years ago Dayan advised the
cabinet that Israel should make it clear to refugees that "we have no
solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may
leave". When challenged, he responded by citing Ben-Gurion, who said that
"whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a
Zionist". He could have also cited Chaim Weizmann, first president of
Israel, who held that the fate of the "several hundred thousand negroes"
in the Jewish homeland "is a matter of no consequence".

The Palestinians have long suffered torture, terror, destruction of
property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basic resources,
crucially water. These policies have relied on decisive US support and
European acquiescence. "The Barak government is leaving Sharon's
government a surprising legacy," the Israeli press reported as the
transition took place: "the highest number of housing starts in the
territories since Ariel Sharon was minister of construction and settlement
in 1992 before the Oslo agreements" -- funding provided by the American
taxpayer.

It is regularly claimed that all peace proposals have been undermined by
Arab refusal to accept the existence of Israel (the facts are quite
different), and by terrorists like Arafat who have forfeited "our trust".
How that trust may be regained is explained by Edward Walker, a Clinton
Middle East adviser: Arafat must announce that "we put our future and fate
in the hands of the US" -- which has led the campaign to undermine
Palestinian rights for 30 years.

The basic problem then, as now, traces back to Washington, which has
persistently backed Israel's rejection of a political settlement in terms
of the broad international consensus. Current modifications of US
rejectionism are tactical. With plans for an attack on Iraq endangered,
the US permitted a UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the
newly-invaded territories "without delay" -- meaning "as soon as
possible", secretary of state Colin Powell explained at once. Powell's
arrival in Israel was delayed to allow the Israeli Defense Force to
continue its destructive operations, facts hard to miss and confirmed by
US officials.

When the current intifada broke out, Israel used US helicopters to attack
civilian targets, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, hardly in
self-defense. Clinton responded by arranging what the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz called "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the
Israeli Air Force in a decade", along with spare parts for Apache attack
helicopters. A few weeks later, Israel began to use US helicopters for
assassinations. These extended last August to the first assassination of a
political leader: Abu Ali Mustafa. That passed in silence, but the
reaction was quite different when Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi
was killed in retaliation. Bush is now praised for arranging the release
of Arafat from his dungeon in return for US-UK supervision of the accused
assassins of Ze'evi. It is inconceivable that there should be any effort
to punish those responsible for the Mustafa assassination.

Further contributions to enhancing terror took place last December, when
Washington again vetoed a security council resolution calling for dispatch
of international monitors. Ten days earlier, the US boycotted an
international conference in Geneva that once again concluded that the
fourth Geneva convention applies to the occupied territories, so that many
US-Israeli actions there are "grave breaches", hence serious war crimes.
As a "high contracting party", the US is obligated by solemn treaty to
prosecute those responsible for such crimes, including its own leadership.
Accordingly, all of this passes in silence.

But the US has not officially withdrawn its recognition that the
conventions apply to the occupied territories, or its censure of Israeli
violations as the "occupying power". In October 2000 the security council
reaffirmed the consensus, "call[ing] on Israel, the occupying power, to
abide scrupulously by its legal obligations..." The vote was 14-0. Clinton
abstained.

Until such matters are permitted to enter mainstream discussion in the US,
and their implications understood, it is meaningless to call for "US
engagement in the peace process", and prospects for constructive action
will remain grim.  [chomsky at MIT.edu]

	* * *

[The following article was published on Sunday, May 12, 2002 in the
Champaign-Urbana New-Gazette]

NO EASY ANSWERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST by John Foreman

Unless he shares his father's affinity for pork rinds, President George W.
Bush and I probably don't have much in common -- save one short-coming.

It appears George W. and I are the only two people around who are not
exactly sure how to fix the gaudawful mess in the Middle East.

The people who write letters to the editor and call radio shows all know
exactly what to do.  Politicians and political commentators all know
exactly what to avoid.

I look at the whole thing and wonder how anyone will ever straighten it
out.  And it looks like George W. may have the same problem, maybe a worse
one.

Now, no one seems to hold it against me if I don't know how to end decades
of hatred and violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis.  Nobody
assumes it's my problem to solve.

But when the president doesn't have it all untangled in a few weeks,
people are beside themselves.  If he appears to lean a little in one
direction, American supporters of Israel are all over him.  If he appears
to nod a little the other way, those who sympathize with the Palestinians
are outraged.  The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that George W.
Bush sure hasn't solved this problem.

What the heck is the matter with him, anyway?

This raises a couple of questions.

First, just how did this tar baby come to be perpetually stuck on the
hands of American presidents in the first place?  Why can't George W. just
watch it on TV like you and I do and let someone else sort it out?  Just
who decided that playing referee along the West Bank and the Gaza is part
of the unwritten job description for the president of the United States --
and a major part at that?  Yet, like untold presidents before him, it now
is apparently George W. Bush's turn to make the lion lie down with the
lamb -- or vice versa.  The fact that he must try at all is sufficient
evidence to prove that none of his predecessors have succeeded.

Oh, some produced grand gestures and Kodak moments -- a cease-fire here,
an accord there, a handshake or two, even a little hug once.  The Middle
East was President Jimmy Carter's legacy, as I recall.  And when the
mantle slipped, Bill Clinton tried mightily to assume it.  Still, the
bombs explode, the tanks rumble and the body count rises.  Wild success is
defined as coaxing the warring parties into their corners until the start
of the next round.

And George Bush hasn't got it done yet.  Somehow that's being viewed as a
failing Remarkable.

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is easily solved
only for those who can quickly cast it in terms of good and evil.  Many
can.

While my sympathies Wt toward Israel, it's less black and white for me.
Say what you will, each side has at least occasional cause to feel
aggrieved by the other.

And for the purposes of American diplomacy, it can't matter much anyway.

Israel is a popular cause among a significant portion of the American
electorate.  Both American Jews and a good number of non-Jewish
conservatives see the United States as the principal protector of a state
that shares its moral heritage and democratic system Pity that poor
politician, particularly on the right, who seems insufficiently
sympathetic.

The Palestinians find some support among the American left.  But far more
important, politically, is the sympathy they engender in most of the Arab
world.

Like it or not, America runs on the oil of those Arabs.  And it has little
choice but to do so for a very long time.  It may be more a symbiosis than
a love affair, but it is a vital relation- ship all the same.  Couple the
need for Arab acquiescence in Bush's war on terrorism, and supporters of
Palestine become important strategic allies.  We trifle with them at our
peril.

So Bush is denied the luxury of choosing between good guys and bad guys,
however tempted he may be.

He is expected to order Israeli troops out of Palestine -- without
stipulating the consequences of refusal.  And he is expected to keep
suicide-bombing Palestinian teenagers out .of Israel -- when, in reality,
he can't keep pipe-bombing Wisconsin college students out of Iowa.

And Bush knows well that Israel throws its punches from behind American
skirts.  If he can't find a way to stop the suicide bombers or can't
somehow find a way to restrain Israeli retaliation to them, he risks
seeing the collective weight of the Arab world come crushing down on
Israel.  And who will have to defend it -- regardless of consequences?

So, for reasons not at all of @is own making, George W. Bush doesn't
really have the option of watching this mess from the sidelines.  He isn't
exercising our obligations to the world.  Like his predecessors, he's only
trying to avoid a more damaging American involvement.

For this, he deserves our pity, our prayers and our patience.  Feelings
run strong on this issue like few others.  But it isn't Bush's role to
protect Israeli interests or Palestinian interests, it is his obligation
is to protect American interests.

If history teaches anything, it teaches that this is not accomplished
quickly, easily or effortlessly.

I wish I could help, George W. But I don't have a clue how to unravel the
mess.  In fact, if I were you, I'd be a little careful listening to anyone
who tries to @ell you they do.

In the meantime, I'll try to be patient while you work on it.  If you're
so inclined, you're certainly welcome to commiserate over a few pork
rinds.

[John Foreman is editor and general manager of The News-Gazette.]

END