88698877


Micah Holmquist about the upcoming
war with IRaq:

We are told war is necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein but from using weapons of mass destruction
and/or giving them to terrorists such al Qaeda. But no evidence has been presented that Saddam intends
to use such weapons and he certainly hasn’t shown much interest in using them over the last 12 years.
And the U.S. has been talking about invading Iraq for over a year now. During that time, Saddam could
have given weapons of mass destruction to terrorists but the Bush Administration doesn’t profess any
concern about this possibility. It appears Bush doesn’t take this risk seriously.

88698868


Nathan Newman on how Bush is
helping the Kurds :

Well, we secured support from Turkey for an invasion of Iraq.

The price? Selling out the Kurds whose oppression by Hussein was supposedly one of the justifications
for this war.

See this article on a new
agreement to allow Turkey to occupy Kurdish regions of Iraq to prevent any moves towards independence by
the Kurds.

But then, raising the hopes of the Kurds only to sell them out is nothing new for the Bush family. Dubya’s
Dad did it twice– once back in the 1975 when he was head of the CIA and, of course, after the first Gulf
War when the Kurds were encouraged to rebel, only to have the US step back and let them be slaughtered.

88698698


Ruminate This has a piece about the deafening
media silence greeting the just introduced bill to repeal the Iraq Use of Force Resolution and what we can do
about it:

After Colin Powell spoke to the UN Security Council yesterday,
a bi-partisan bill was introduced in
Congress
by Reps. Peter DeFazio (D- Ore.) and Ron Paul (R-TX). It wasn’t just any bill – this is
legislation that looks to repeal the Iraq Use of Force Resolution passed by Congress in October.

[…]

Major bipartisan legislation opposing a war nobody wants, and what do we hear? The sound of media silence.

[…]

Take Back The Media has a network contact directory
with email, phone and physical addresses to the leaders in mainstream print and broadcast journalism.
Click here to access that list. It’s
time to write some letters and email.

88698686


The Sideshow on Bush’s enablers:

It really makes you wonder what the media “expected” of Bush to begin with. Personally, I expect
the presidential nominee of one of the two major parties to be, at the very least, able to deliver
a campaign speech convincingly – at minimum, to give the impression that he knows about the major
issues of the day. But this guy consistently demonstrated that he was neither qualified to discuss
these issues intelligently nor even qualified to perform as an actor playing the role of someone who
is. Nevertheless, the press talked about him as if somehow he had managed to meet the standard of
the job.

88653567


Shadow of
the Hegemon
examines Powell’s speech to the U.N.:

The problem is the reaction to the evidence. The Bush administration continues to argue that
it means that war is the only option, whereas others interpret it as evidence that the inspection
regime needs to be beefed up. In some respects I think the spectacle of what was essentially a
strident American attack on the entire inspection process actually furthered this division; I
know that when I read the transcript, the question that kept on popping up in my mind was “why
wasn’t Blix and Co. made aware of these issues”, and the answer was that the Americans were
setting them up; deliberately standing aside and gathering what they’d need to produce the attempt
at a Adlai Stevenson moment that we saw today. I’m sure that Blix is spitting mad, for example;
the same satellite tracking information that was used by Powell today could have been given to
Blix weeks ago in order to give the inspectors an information edge that would have aided them in
finding what they were looking for. The fact that this didn’t happen says volumes about the American
attitude towards inspections throughout the entire process, and the mentality involved: a desire
not to disarm Iraq, but to justify the invasion.