Selves and Others

Editor’s Note: A new video game that uses real-life footage from contemporary battles in Iraq exploits the sacrifices of U.S. soldiers, the writer says.

Halliburton is not the only company that seeks to profit from the war in Iraq. Video game makers do, too. Kuma Reality Games’ "Kuma War — The War On Terror," which was previously only available online, will be released into stores in October. (...)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, October 6, 2004 - The costs and benefits of America’s occupation of Iraq vary, according to proponents and opponents, except when it comes to oil exports. The U.S.-led invasion has resulted in the loss of an average of 2 million barrels a day of Iraqi oil from world markets. That is a significant number with huge consequences for economies around the globe. Instead of rosy promises by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration who pushed for the invasion - partly on the premise that they would turn it into America’s private gasoline-pumping station - the contrary has occurred. (...)

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (IPS) - Is there anything at all left of the Bush administration’s case for going to war in Iraq or, for that matter, the way it has been fought?

The answer seems increasingly doubtful given what appears to be an accelerating cascade of news, leaks and admissions by senior administration officials over the past several weeks. (...)

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 6 (IPS) - Nation-wide elections in Iraq, scheduled to take place before the end of January 2005, are now jeopardised by two powerful U.N. staff unions demanding that no U.N. employees be sent to the violence-ridden country. (...)

Fog Watch

So just as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iraq were dire threats, so is Iran today because the Bush government says so and is supported here by Ariel Sharon. The first rule in supportive propaganda is to intensify attention to the villain and the alleged threat that he poses.... The second rule in supportive propaganda is to frame the issues in such a way that the premises of the propaganda source are taken as given, with any inconvenient considerations ignored and any sources that would contest the party line bypassed or marginalized.

[October 2004, Volume 17, Number 10]

Conventional wisdom informs us that "weapons of mass murder" in the hands of terrorists is the greatest danger facing the world today. Regrettably, people from both sides of the political aisle accept this pronouncement as though it was a fundamental law of physics. Leftists are just as apt to advocate ratcheting up surveillance, increasing covert operations and circumventing the law to make sure that, as Bush says, "the world’s most dangerous weapons don’t get into the hands of the world’s most dangerous people." (...)

Last April, an F-16 fighter jet cruising over Fallujah, the stronghold of the Iraqi insurgency, zeroed in on a crowd of people mulling about on a street corner in the heart of the city. The American pilot of the fighter radioed back to his mission commander asking for permission to "take them out." (...)

American warnings that Darfur is heading for an apocalyptic humanitarian catastrophe have been widely exaggerated by administration officials, it is alleged by international aid workers in Sudan. Washington’s desire for a regime change in Khartoum has biased their reports, it is claimed. (...) [Sun October 3, 2004 | page 2]

In every standard Bollywood movie there comes a scene that never fails to work up the audience into a frenzy of excitement and applause. The hero, after being whipped black and blue by the villain and his henchmen, finally wipes the blood off his chin and starts kicking ass like he invented the concept. (...)

The newly announced budget in Pakistan relies heavily on the World Bank and IMF’s preferred mode of poverty reduction, liberalization that is supposed to generate investment, preferably foreign, leading to employment, eventually culminating in reduced poverty. That at least is the theory. In practice there have been severe problems with this strategy. However, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers espousing this strategy have been sponsored by the World Bank and other donors and are celebrated as being participatory, and dynamic; a ‘living document’ evolving with the needs of the people. The Pakistani PRSP has been recently finalized, in December 2003 and has a profound impact on the recently proposed budget. (...)

While Paul Martin was congratulating Canada on "not participating" in the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq during last spring’s federal election, a Quebec-based weapons firm sealed a deal which will ensure that every time Iraqi or Afghani blood is shed, a Canadian-made bullet will be one of the prime suspects. (...)

Peter Hansen, the commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency in the territories, is being persecuted for having spoken the truth: Members of Hamas work in UNRWA. The Canadian Foreign Affairs Department is concerned and the Israeli Foreign Ministry is upset over the "revelation." Two days after the broadcast of aerial photos that allegedly show, according to Israel, Palestinians loading a Qassam rocket into a UNRWA ambulance, Hansen’s words could strengthen Israeli accusations that "UNRWA is collaborating with terrorists." (...)

Vice Presidential nominees Dick Cheney and John Edwards faced off in the first and only vice presidential debate of the election Tuesday night. We hear excerpts of the nominees discussing Iraq, the White House linking 9/11 to Saddam Hussein and more and get analysis from journalists Rahul Mahajan and Robert Parry.

By way of implying that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were connected, Dick Cheney claimed that a poisons lab existed before the war in Iraq in a town called Khurmal.

The vice president didn’t say so, but Khurmal is in northern Iraq, an area that was controlled by the Kurds, not the former Iraqi regime. (...)

When asked about the situation in Afghanistan and the upcoming election, Vice President Dick Cheney called it a success in democracy and compared it to El Salvador in the 1980s. We speak with veteran investigative journalist Robert Parry about what he calls the "bloody mess" of El Salvador and Rahul Mahajan about voter manipulation in Afghanistan.

At the Vice Presidential debate, John Edwards dropped what pundits are calling the "H-Bomb" on Dick Cheney - Halliburton. We speak with John Nichols of The Nation magazine and author of Dick: The Man Who Is President about Halliburton’s record while Cheney was its CEO and beyond.

John Edwards blasted Dick Cheney’s voting record as a congressman where he voted against the release of Nelson Mandela, instituting a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., Head Start and more. We speak with John Nichols of The Nation magazine and author of Dick: The Man Who Is President.

John Kerry and John Edwards used their debates with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to tell America that if the incumbents are re-elected, as far as Iraq goes we can expect ’More of the same.’ Those four words exemplify the essence of the Democrats’ argument for regime change in the U.S., a Kerry-Edwards mantra, if you will, that defines the Bush administration’s plan for dealing with the debacle they got us into in Iraq. But there’s another mantra that bodes equally ill for our efforts to win the peace in Iraq, one that is used by Democrats and Republicans alike to encapsulate their approach to dealing with the mother of all issues in the region: ’Israel has a right to defend itself.’ (...)

When Dick Cheney confessed to Gwen Ifill of PBS, the moderator of last night’s vice presidential debate, that he did not know anything about the struggles faced by African American women with AIDS, his admission spoke directly to one of the defining characteristics of the Bush administration: the decided lack of interest in or concern for the difficulties faced by the most oppressed, most troubled sections of the US population. During this 90-minute debate, Senator John Edwards produced a solid presentation that highlighted the glaring difference between the Bush administration and the leadership Americans expect in a president. (...)

The United States vetoed an Arab-backed UN Security Council resolution calling for a halt to Israeli military operations in Gaza.

Last night’s vote in the 15-member Security Council was 11 in favour, one against, and three abstentions by Britain, Germany and Romania. (...)

If your anti-Bush sentiments have turned into electoral passion, then you probably restrained your exhilaration after last Thursday’s debate until you got a sense of how it played to the American electorate; which means, how it played in the polls that began to pour out only moments after the event ended. The first "instant" polls seemed to indicate a Kerry victory, and by Sunday the Newsweek poll (considered notoriously unreliable by the pros) had appeared with the news that Kerry had pulled even or might be ahead in the presidential sweepstakes. If it was then that the real rush of excitement hit you, face it, like a host of other Americans, you’re a polls addict. (...)

Tony Blair’s speech yesterday to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton was "low-key, conversational and reasoned" the Guardian informs us (Leader, September 29, 2004). And his "long-awaited apology on Iraq, as far as it went, was a rightly well-received milestone in his fragile rehabilitation with his critics".

How nice. No matter that Blair lied about intelligence on WMD, ignored security warnings about unleashing more terrorist attacks, and deceived Parliament and the country over the nonsensical "serious and current threat" posed by a strangled Third World nation. (...)

On September 21, Salih Booker, the director of the Africa Studies Program at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations ruling-class think tank, argued in the International Herald Tribune that the US government has failed to convince the UN Security Council to take tough action to end Sudan’s “government-sponsored campaign of genocide” in Darfur because it “cried wolf” over Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in order to justify its illegal invasion of Iraq.

Booker and many other US liberals, as well as influential establishment organisations such as Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group (ICG), are campaigning for President George Bush to launch a military “humanitarian intervention” in western Darfur. (...)

Halima is in her sixties. She was born in the village of Hajr Shalick, east of El Geneina in West Darfur, and has lived in the Kerenic Camp, a settlement for internally displaced people near El Geneina, for the past year

" I came to this camp nearly a year ago with my grandson Ismail, who is only five years old, and my daughter Fatima, his mother. We walked all the way, carrying my grandson in our arms. We had nothing. The Arab militias had stolen everything we owned. We had 12 cows, 50 goats and sheep, four donkeys - they took them all. (...)

The two vice-presidential candidates in next month’s US elections clashed over Iraq in their televised campaign debate.

The Republican candidate Dick Cheney accused Democratics of turning against the war for political gain. (...)

Desmond Tutu is taking his off-Broadway debut in his stride. "I’m just waiting for my Tony nominations now," he says from his New York hotel. Tutu, 72, is relaxing for a few minutes after two well-received performances in Guantánamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom. Then he is on his way to Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia and back home. (...) [page 10 | G2 features]

For the first time in more than 35 years Iraqis are free to talk, discuss and debate - publicly and relatively without fear - the political and social aspects of their daily life. But for most of them all they can talk about is violence.

What happened this morning? How many mortars fell on your neighbourhood yesterday? Did the Americans free your cousins or are they still being "interrogated"? All these questions have become part of the daily chit-chat of Iraqis when they meet in the souq, bus or cafe. (...) [page 7 | G2 features]

Many around the world are surprised at how little attention the economy is receiving in President Bush’s re-election campaign. But I am not surprised: if I were Bush, the last thing I would want to talk about is the economy. Yet many people look at America’s economy, even over these past three-and-a-half years, with some envy. Annual economic growth - at an average rate of 2.5% - may have been markedly slower than during the Clinton years, but it still looks strong compared with Europe’s anaemic 1%. (...) [page 23 | Comment]

Project Syndicate