Backtalk, November 18, 2004

Pledge WeekThis morning I contributed $20 to Antiwar.com. On the surface it would appear that it is insignificant. The sum of my income is dependent on a disability benefit. I was hesitant to even contribute such a paltry amount for concern that it may appear as an...

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The Sweetheart Contract With Sharon

"In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. ... In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, 'God bless...

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800 Civilians Feared Dead in Fallujah

BAGHDAD - At least 800 civilians have been killed during the U.S. military siege of Fallujah, a Red Cross official estimates. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of U.S. military reprisal, a high-ranking official with the Red Cross in Baghdad told IPS that...

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They’re Gonna Like Us, Really Like Us

If [America] becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such; it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are desirable. - William Graham Sumner (1903) Americans have come to notice, through all the smoke from burning American flags,...

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Hawks Flying High With Rice Posting

U.S. President George W. Bush's nomination of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to replace Secretary of State Colin Powell consolidates the control over U.S. foreign policy of the coalition of hawks that promoted the war in Iraq, led by Vice President Dick...

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Triumph of the Neocons

The neoconservatives won't have Colin Powell to kick around anymore, who's leaving along with his sidekick Richard Armitage: with them go the last vestiges of sanity in this war-maddened administration. The general purge of Republican "realists" from the...

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Liberation Has a Body Count

After their jerry-built justifications – 1. WMD. 2. Saddam and Osama sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G – fell apart, the neoconservatives had a problem. Why, exactly, did we invade Iraq? It seems we invaded not so much for us as for them. The Iraqi people,...

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Arafat’s Death May Change Very Little

RAMALLAH - Just one moment in that jostling crowd under undisciplined Palestinian security forces at the funeral of Yasser Arafat was enough to pick up on huge problems for resumption of a peace process in the Middle East. The faithful of Arafat's Fatah movement were...

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‘Success’ in Fallujah, Failure Elsewhere

BAGHDAD - Everyone saw it coming, only the U.S. forces did not: humanitarian disaster in Fallujah, and stronger resistance against U.S. and allied occupying forces all around Iraq. The real face of the "success" of the U.S. military assault in Fallujah is now...

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Dogs Eating Bodies in the Streets of Fallujah

It never fails to get my adrenaline flowing when my hotel rumbles from a car bomb detonating in central Baghdad. Last night around 7 p.m. the explosion occurred at a hotel compound which houses foreign contractors over near Firdos Square. Shortly thereafter, the...

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