August 2003 Archives

The head of the U.S. occupation in Iraq has announced that the "Iraq rebuilding effort will costs tens of billions of dollars":www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50396-2003Aug26.html, in addition to the three billion being spent per month by the Pentagon. The costs of war can be counted not only in lifes destroyed or shattered, but in very real economic terms. According to figures from the War Resisters League, "47% of Amercans' income taxes go to fight wars past present and future.":http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm Much of the federal deficit built up over the Vietnam War era and Reagan military buildup can be traced back to military spending. With an already shaky U.S. economy, these costs threaten to send us over the edge into another Great Depression.

From the War Resisters League's Judith Mahoney Pasternak, "an honest look at the challenge pacifism faces in places like the Congo":www.warresisters.org/nva0703-1.htm: bq. There are those who challenge the pacifist position with such questions as, “A man with a gun is aiming it at your mother. You have a gun in your hand. What nonviolent action do you take?” Our usual answer is, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t have a gun in my hand. Next question.” But at least once in every generation—more frequently, alas, in these violence-ridden years—the challenge is a harder one to shrug off with a flip answer. The answer of course is to stop wars before they start, by stopping the arms trade, the dictatorships, and the crushing economic reforms demanded by Western banks _before_ these forces all combine and erupt into war. Pasternak outlines four parts to a blueprint that could end much of the violence in the Congo. I've always been impressed that the folks at War Resisters are willing to talk about the limits of nonviolence (see David McReynolds seven-part "Philosophy of Nonviolence":www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php). While war is never the only option (and arguably never the best one), it's much more effective to stop wars ten years before the bullets start flying. In each of the wars the U.S. has fought recently, we can see past U.S. policies setting up the conflict ten, twenty and thirty years ago. The largest peace marches in the world can rarely prevent a war once the troops ships have set sail. If U.S. policy and aid hadn't supported the "wrong" side in Iraq and Afghanistan twenty years ago, I don't think we would have fought these current wars. Pacifists and their kin need to start asking the tough questions about the current repressive regimes the U.S. is supporting--places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--and we need to demand that building democracy is our country's number one goal in the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations (yes, prioritize it _over_ security, so that we "don't replace Saddam Hussein with equally repressive thugs":www.nonviolence.org/articles/000130.php.

It shouldn't be a surprise but it makes me sick anyway. The _Washington Post_ reports that the "U.S. occupation is hiring Saddam Hussein's ex-spies":www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37331-2003Aug23.html. It must be a good job market for mid-level Saddam Hussein loyalists. Back in June, we learned that the U.S. had put "ex-Iraqi generals in charge of many Iraq cities":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000027.php (at the same time the U.S. canceled promised elections). The U.S. trumpets capture of big-name Iraqi leaders like "Chemical Ali":www.msnbc.com/news/955391.asp?vts=082120030615 but then quietly hires their assistants. The majority of the new U.S. intelligence recruits come from Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat, an agency whose name is said to inspire dread among Iraqis. The infrastructure of Saddam Hussein's repression apparatus is being rebuilt as a U.S. repression apparatus. The statues of Saddam Hussein go down, the "playing card" Iraqi figureheads get caught, but not much changes. The article says that the new spy hiring is "covert" but it's apparently no secret in Iraq. even the Iraqi Governing Council, a dummy representative body handpicked by U.S. forces, has expressed "adamant objections" to the recruitment campaign: bq. "We've always criticized the procedure of recruiting from the old regime's officers. We think it is a mistake," Mahdi said. "We've told them you have some bad people in your security apparatus." No, the "covert" audience is the U.S. public, who might start feeling quesy about the Iraq War if they knew how easily the U.S. was slipping into Saddam Hussein's shoes.

Here’s an interesting quote that captures a certain 1950s mainline liberal protestantism that was a very strong influence in twentieth-century Quakerism.

"Bill Hobbs":http://hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106139209827725521 challenged Nonviolence.org about the recent lack of condemnations of Palestinian violence. It's a fair critique and a good question. For the record, Nonviolence.org agrees with you that bombing buses is wrong. Hamas should be condemned, thank you. Of course, Israelis building in the occupied territories is also wrong and should also be condemned. The zealots in the conflict there demand that everyone take sides, but to be pacifist means never taking the side of evil and always demanding that the third way of nonviolence be found. The Israelis and Palestinians have so much in common. Both are a historically-persecuted people with contested claim to the land. The war between them has been largely funded and egged on by outside parties who seem to have a vested interest in the violence continuing ad infinitum. Both sides chronicle every bus bombed and bullet fired, using the outrage to rally the faithful to fresh atrocities. Blogs like Bill Hobbs' and organizations like the International Solidarity Movement help insure that the bombings will never stop. Caught in the middle are a lot of naive kids: suicide bombers, soldiers, and activists who think just one more act of over-the-top bravery will stop the violence. The war in Israel and Palestine will only stop when enough Israelis and Palestinians declare themselves traitors to the chants of nationalistic jingoism. We are all Israelis, we are all Palestinians. There but for the grace of God go all of us: our houses bulldozed, our loved ones killed on the way to work. Once upon a time we in America could think that we were immune to it all; the idea that we're all Israelis and Palestinians seemed a rhetorical stretch. But I was one of the millions who spent the night of 9/11/01 calling New York friends to see if they were safe (I was on my honeymoon and was so shaken that one of my calls was to an ex-girlfriend's parents; my wife gracefully forgave me). On that day, we Americans were delivered the message that we too are complicit. We too must also declare ourselves traitors to our country's war mythologies and start being honest about our historic complicity with war. As a people, Americans weren't innocent victims at either Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center towers (though as individuals we were, which is the point of nonviolent outrage of nationalistic violence). every blog post commemorating a victimhood, whether in New York City or Tel Aviv, supports the cause of war. I will not condemn every act of violence but I will condemn the cause of violence and I will expose the mythologies of war.

Conservative godfather of the internet "Instapundit almost linked to Nonviolence.org":http://www.instapundit.com/archives/011100.php the other day. He didn't like our take on the enola Gay exhibit, but instead of linking directly to us so his readers could see what we had to say, he linked to Bill Hobbs' critique. I guess Instapundit alter ego Glen Reynolds must not think his readership can handle dissenting voices. Instapundit readers who cut and pasted to get here: * Yes, the Japanese were secretly trying to surrender _before_ the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. The U.S. thought incinerating 150,000-some people was a good negotiating tactic, and it worked: the Japanese government to instantly agree to unconditional surrender. * Yes, the U.S. takeover of Hawaii and the Philippines were aggressive acts to secure shipping routes in the South Pacific. In 1854, a U.S. warship under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed to Japan and forced it to sign treaties opening up its markets. The threat of Russian expansion from the West and U.S. expansion from the south and east was a large part of the reason Japan militarized in the first place. These are the kind of facts one should have when standing in the Smithsonian gazing up at _enola Gay_ and wondering how it ever came to be that the U.S. would drop two nuclear weapons over two heavily-populated cities.

With the U.S. economy down and jobs scarce, everyone's looking for the big boom industries of the Bush Administration. _Dollars & Sense_ maganize brings us this handy-dandy list of "who's making money in Iraq":www.dollarsandsense.org/0703tavares.html (formally titled "The Real Winners: A Rouge's Gallery of War Profiteers"). The big coinky-dinky is the first-place finish of Bechtel, who looks to get anywhere from $34.6 million to $680 million, depending how the contracts play out. Bechtel is best known for its Who's Who list of former Republican Administation officials who it has hired over the years. Second place goes to Halliburton, who's subsiderary stands to earn $490 million. The former CeO of Halliburton is of course our very own Vice President Dick Cheney, who came into office positively _drooling_ for a second Iraq War. Dick did more than anyone to "sex up" the U.S. case for war. (Now there's an old fashioned corporate exec. for you, willing to take a pay cut to boost company profits "from the inside"--give that man a bonus, hurrah for Dick!). So polish up your resumes boys and girls. The Great Iraq Oil Rush of 2003 is on. Ka-ching! Oh, and don't forget to slide a little green to the "GWB Campaign":http://www.gwbush04.com/ before you send the letter.

The case of David Kelly, the British weapons inspector who anonymously told the BBC that the Blair Administration "sexed up" its report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, just gets odder and odder. Today a UN diplomat recalls asking Kelly in February what would happen if Britain and the U.S. started a war with Iraq. Kelly answered: "I will probably be found dead in the woods":politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1027066,00.html. The war did of course go on, with much help from the doctored-up "dossier" that Kelly helped write and later exposed as exaggerated. In July, Kelly's body was found dead in the woods near his home, the result of an apparent suicide. What could Kelly have meant? A clue comes from one of his last public statements. A week before his death he asked a panel investigating "have you ever felt like the fall guy?":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000002.php Clearly, this is a man who was tortured in his role of supporting a manipulative and politicized document designed to mislead the British (and American) public by purposefully exaggerating the threat Saddam Hussein posed. Did Kelly know the document would eventually come under the glare of public scrutiny and be exposed? Did he think he would be the "fall guy" for its lies. The Hutton Inquiry looking into all this continues, and more bombshells are certainly possible. Can the Blair Administration survive the intrigue and scandal? And didn't similar lies and machinations take place in the Bush Administration?

There's an interesting conversation over at TalkLeft about the Pentagon's vetting of movie scripts. One of the next movies they're working on is a dramatization of the the already highly-embellished story of the "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq (one's tempted to ask whether a movie about her could even say "Based on a True Story").

The Smithsonian Museum in Washington has "reassembled the enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945":www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/national/19MUSe.html. Trying to avoid the controversy that accompanied a 1995 exhibition, the current museum director says this exhibit will: bq. "focus on the technological achievements, because we are a technological museum... This plane was the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time." This continues the moral blindness that created the bloodiest century in human history. Instead of looking at how politics, war and technology intersected in an event that instantly killed 80,000 people, we shine up the metal and blabber on about technology. The bombing's death count far overshadows the 3,000 deaths at the World Trade Center two years ago. If the sight of the towers collapsing is a horror we can never forget or minimize, then so too is Hiroshima's mushroom cloud. The only way militarism and nationalism survives is by abstracting war and ignoring the very real death, blood and tragedy. The Japanese people caught up in their country's lust for war were victims as soon as the fighting started. Their participating in their country's war was a result of propaganda and nationalistic fervor, the same mix that led so many Americans to support the war in Iraq. The overwhelming majority of people killed on August 8, 1945 were people who never fired a gun. They were simply trying to stay alive in a world full of human-made terror. They were ordinary people who watched as their country's leaders plotted and warred. Most were afraid to say no to war, to unite with pacifists around the world, or to denounce militarism wherever it existed and with whatever excuse it gave for its horror. The roots of World War II were oil and terror: Japanese leaders attacked its neighbors to gain control of the industrial resources the home islands didn't have. American leaders (industrial and political) had waged war against Hawaii and the Philippines for control of Pacific shipping lanes. The plotting for war started long before Pearl Harbor and involved the leaders in both countries. In a very real way, the war in Iraq is just the latest chapter in the century-long war over oil. But history, truth and morality will all be stripped out of the Smithsonian's new exhibit, as spokespeople for the American Legion and Air Force have declared: bq. "As long as the enola Gay is presented in the light that it was used — to end the war and save lives — that's fine." bq. "We are satisfied that it is in historical context this time and does not make comments about U.S. aggression in the Pacific." No, schoolchildren visiting Washington won't learn the truth about the bombing. Another generation will be spoon-fed propaganda about its country's greatness and goodness. Another generation will not pause to consider its country's old sins and tragic mistakes. A typical blog entry about the Smithsonian exhibit that claims "no single plane did more to save lives in World War II":http://www.hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106130896137661056 . Abstract death and claim righteousness to your country, keep militarism going and keep peaceful people from uniting across national boundaries.

*By Johann Christoph Arnold* bq. "I often wonder how many more tragedies it will take before we learn to truly love each other, and before we grasp how happy we could be if we cared for those around us as well as we care for ourselves."

Inquiries into the "manufactured threat of WMDs":http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3161719.stm have been going on this week in england, a result of the suicide of WMD expert Dr. David Kelly. The BBC reports today's development: an September email from Prime Minister Tony Blair's top aid arguing that the intelligence dossier that justified the coming did '"nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam." These Hutton Inquiry hearings ("official":http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/ and "BBC":http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2003/david_kelly_inquiry/default.stm)are a fascinating glimpse at the inner workings of British government and their work to convince a relunctant citizenry to support war against Iraq. At the end of May 2003, an unnamed source told the BBC that the dossier overstated British evidence of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. Dr. Kelly's name soon began to be reported as the source of this information and in the ensuing media storm he took his own life. The Hutton investigation is shedding light on Kelly's claim and showing just how the British government exaggerated the danger Saddam Hussein posed. They lied to get support for a war that would not have been supported if the truth of WMD intelligence had been made public.

The big news this week has been the foiling of a plot to smuggle ground-to-air missile from Russia into the United States. ABC News claims there's "less in missile plot than meets the eye":abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/missile030813_sting.html and goes so far as to call it a set-up. From start to finish, the plot was orchestrated as a sting operation by U.S. and Russian agents. The accused mastermind Hemant Lakhani had no Russian contacts and no history of arms smuggling. The ABC article paints him as a small-time black market importer down on his luck who thought this would be a good way of making easy money and paying off debts. This doesn't excuse his actions but it does change the way this we think about this whole plot. There was no arms seller. There was no terrorist user. No weapon made it by U.S. or Russian intelligence (for they were the ones who shipped it). What we do have is a two-bit middleman who talked trash abou the U.S. and offered to be a link of the arms trade. Like an idiot, Lakhani followed the bread crumbs of opportunity left for him by U.S. intelligence agencies. We now know there are people desparate enough to selll anything if the price is right (didn't we already know that?) and that salesmen will talking trash about a potential buyer's competitors to close a deal. That there's someone willing to sell missiles is indeed frightening, but it's not worth this sort of media coverage. No terrorist was involved in all this and the only ones talking about using these weapons were U.S. agents! One has to to wonder if this is the latest "threat" all "cooked up by some White House insider":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000116.php. "Lets pose as Al Qaeda, wave lots of money in front of a desparate idiot, nail him when he grabs for it and declare it as a Al Quada plot foiled."

Like something out of an old Looney Toons reel, the U.S. military is "trying to build a death ray bomb":www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1018361,00.html. Part of the next generation of boutique nuclear weapons the Pentagon craves, this one kills by sending nuclear gamma rays. The _Guardian_ article talks about how development of the new weapon might lead to a new arms race. This is of course quite possible: new weapons throw off the balance of power and often create the perceived need for new defences in a continuing cycle. One wonders why the U.S. needs to be building ever more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. It already has enough nuclear weapons to ensure total destruction of a country and the two recent wars have shown that its military is quite efficient at invasion. A gamma ray weapon wouldn't help in a situation like North Korea, where there are more-conventional weapons they could strike back with that would seriously hurt U.S. or its allies (even without their renewed nuclear weapon program their short-range missiles would devastate South Korea and Japan).

Oh yes, and the Iraqi chemical weapons trucks? They were actually for weather balloons just like the Iraqis claimed. It's kind of pathetic that Saddam Hussein was telling the truth a lot more than President Bush was. Here is _New York Times'_ piece on the "Iraqi hydrogen trucks that were actually just making hydrogen":www.nytimes.com/2003/08/09/international/worldspecial/09WeAP.html. It's another embarrasing retraction for U.S. and British intelligence and another example of Bush Administration war hawks seeing what they wanted to see. The new revelation in the _Times_ article: a majority of the Defense Intelligence Agency engineering team inspecting the trucks had come to doubt the chemical weapons story by May 28. That was the day the CIA & DIA jointly release a white paper that said the intelligence teams inspecting the trucks had concluded they were designed for chemical warfare. That report started a hoopla--weapons found!--yet now we know the DIA inspectors themselves weren't in agreement. So what happened? Was it the higher-ups in the DIA administration who just ignored the actual reports from their engineers. Meanwhile the Bush P.R. folks throw a bone to ever faithful true believers who still wait for the Great Pumpkin, er..., WMDs. The plot thickens, as they say.

A major article by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in the _Washington Post_ "blows open Bush Administration lies about Iraq's nuclear program":www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39500-2003Aug9.html. The Administration set up an in-house public relations group to oversee the selling of the Iraq War to the American public. It was led by White House Chief of Staff Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., who famously told the _New York Times_ last year "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." The misinformation campaign was extremely-well coordinated, with specific threats and wording being introduced at precisely-timed moments by various Adminstration and British officials. Named the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, this P.R. group consistantly ignored and mocked evidence. One of the lies concerned intercepted aluminum tubes that U.S. officials said were going to build centrifuges for uranium enrichment. The Iraqis claimed that the tubes were to be used for rockets. Time and again Administration officials followed the WHIG script that the tubes "overspecified," "inappropriate" and "excessively strong" for rocket use. Now it turns out that the tubes were the exact size of an Italian rocket design, with specifications exact to the millimeter. U.S. intelligence knew the Iraqis were copying this rocket and that the tubes were probably meant to be used this way. The whole centrifuge-tube story came from a guy identified only as "Joe" who worked at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility's cetrifuge plant and spent his spare time obsession over cetrifuge tubes going to Iraq. Not connected at all with U.S. intelligence, he made up this story, which was quickly discredited by centrifuge experts, including the founder of the Oak Ridge department Joe worked at ("it would have been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges") and Department of energy experts ("they were convinced that no way in hell were these likely to be centrifuge tubes." Still, the centrifuge story fit with the WHIG script and became international headlines. One U.S. policymaker, speaking anonymously, told the _Post_ : bq. To me, just knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a lot of equipment. You can stare at the yellowcake [uranium ore] all you want. You need to convert it to gas and enrich it. That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the people who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and effort involved in producing the nuclear material and the physics package. There are many revelations in this article. Two especially show the machinations of WHIG: * Dick Cheney's assertion that the U.S. had first-hand information on Iraq's nuclear program from Saddam Hussein's son-in-law is exposed as an outright lie. * On September 7, 2002, British PM Tony Blair Blair said proof of an Iraqi nuclear threat came in a "report from the International Atomic energy Agency this morning" and Bush added: "a report came out of the . . . IAeA, that they [Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need." The report was seven years old and specifically referred to the Iraq's program before weapons inspections had destroyed it in the early 1990s. Friends, this is how Watergate started. The _Post_ chipped away one by one at the Nixon Administration lies until it became clear that they were part of a larger pattern of lies and cover-ups. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Colin Powell have all repeatedly claimed threats they knew not to be real (one gets the impression the naturally-cautious Powell was repeatedly hoodwinked in all of this). A political misinformation campaign was run out of the West Wing by Chief of Staff Andrew Card. It consistantly mocked U.S. and British intelligence knowledge and built sandcastles out of threats it knew not to be true. On a number of occasions it just made stuff up. The U.S. war effort was led by West Wing speech writers. President Bush's reponse to all this is to "distract Middle America's potential outrage of WMD lies with gay marriage non-news":http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/30/bush.gay.marriage/index.html (Since when is marriage a Presidential issue? Why bring it up again when there's already federal laws against its recognition?).

More reports that the U.S. used internationally banned napalm against Iraq, this time from the UK _Independent_. Best quote comes fromm Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11: bq. Unfortunately there were people there... you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm." Here's some new info I dug up on "Mark 77":http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/mk77.htm the new napalm, from the Federation of American Scientists. More on the story from my entry "When is Napalm not Napalm":http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000110.php from three days ago (based on the _San Diego Union-Tribune_ article that inspired the _Independent_ story).

2,200 tons of outlawed chemical weapons in the news. Not in Iraq, but in Alabama. A citizen's organization called the "Chemical Weapons Working Group":http://www.cwwg.org/ temporarily delayed an Army plan to burn a stockpile of deadly nerve gas just outside the "city of Anniston":http://www.cwwg.org/Alabama.html, described as a low-income, minority community already saddled with environmental poisoning. The U.S. "signed on":http://www.state.gov/t/ac/rls/fs/2001/956.htm to the "Chemical Weapons Convention":http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention back in 1997. This treaty "bans the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, and direct or indirect transfer of Chemical Weapons" and defines them as Weapons of Mass Destruction. Yet six years later the U.S. Army still has stockpiles of sarin, VX, and mustard gas in Alabama. I don't know the in's and out's of weapons destruction but it does seem like quite a time lag. Certainly if Saddam Hussein had taken six years to get around to destroying banned weapons it would have created international headlines. Ahh, but the U.S./British coalition has had its hands dirty all along with chemical weapons. The "first to use chemical weapons in Iraq were the British":http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,939608,00.html. Some sources say that it was the Pfaulder Corporation, of Rochester, New York that helped Saddam Hussein build the chemical weapon plant that produced the nerve gas he used against Kurdish rebels (the company is now "Apogent":www.apogent.com/). U.S. intelligence believed the weapons were dropped out of American-built helicopters (Bell Helicopters, Ft. Worth Texas, link below). After the attacks the "Reagan Administration sent Donald Rumsfeld to have tea and cookies with Saddam":http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0802-01.htm, hoping to tie closer ties between the U.S. and Iraq. He was especially trying to sweet-talk Saddam into letting the Republican-Party controled Bechtel Corporation (San Francisco, California) build a oil pipeline through Iraq. He was unsuccesful, but shortly thereafter Saddam did hire them to build a chemical plant outside of Baghdad. Now the friend of Saddam is the "The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld":http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/secdef_bio.html , Secretary of Defense. It gets a bit dizzying remembering each official and U.S. corporation cashing out by supplying weapons to Iraq. While there was a lot of U.S. corporate and governmental complicity, I don't want to give the impresson that Iraqi officials were nice guys, so here's "Iraqi General Ali Hassan al-Majid":http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/01/iraq0117.htm in 1988: bq. "I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! the international community, and those who listen to them! Of course the international community didn't say anything. That was the same year Bechtel started building the Baghdad chemical plant, starting a flow of millions of dollars a year to a company headed by former high-ranking officials of the Republican Party.

More word games at the Pentagon. They've recently denied reports that they used napalm against troops in Iraq. Reporters have claimed they did and so to have Air Force pilots "We napalmed both those bridge approaches":www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20030805-9999_1n5bomb.html said one. Turns out the weapons used were "remarkably similar" to napalm, "the firebombing agent used extensively during the Vietnam War":http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm. Those burning Vietnamese kids running from giant orange balls of fire in the classic pictures were being "napalmed." Highly controversial, it was banned by a United Nations convention in 1980 that the United States refused to sign. The U.S. did claim to have destroyed its napalm arsenal two years ago but here it is napalming Iraqi troops. When is napalm not napalm? When you switch gasoline for for jet fuel apparently. The new not-napalm has the happy name of "Mark 77," which sounds more like the latest boy band than the latest firebombing agent. Marine spokesperson Col. Michael Daily explained the difference between the gasoline of napalm and jet fuel of Mark 77 in a recent email: bq. This additive has significantly less of an impact on the environment. Nice to know the Pentagon is environmentally-senstive when it's roasting people alive.

Today, August 6th, marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of one of the saddest events in human history: the use of weapons of mass destruction against a civilian population. There's much that's been written about the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At the time, U.S. leaders said that use of such overwhelming force would prompt a quick Japanese surrender that would save the thousands of American and Japanese casulties that would surely result from an invasion. We have since learned the Japanese were secretly suing for peace even as the bomber planes took off. We have learned that President Truman was looking ahead. He used the bombing (and the attack on Nagasaki a few days later) to demonstrate the weapon to the Soviet Union. In the post-war world emerging, it was clear the U.S. and the Soviet Union were on a collision course and Truman wanted to start the competition off with a bang. The lesson the Soviet leadership learned from the blast was that they'd better get their own atomic weapons and the arms race was on, straining the economies of both countries for the next fifty years. Amazingly, those two bombs remain the only atomic weapons ever to be used against people in an act of war. Through all the years of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union, and despite the multiplying members of the "nuclear club":www.fas.org/irp/threat/wmd.htm, no one has ever done what the U.S. did all the Augusts ago. It is a fact that the world should be grateful for. But there is no guarantee that the human race will go another fifty-eight years without mushroom clouds of human ashes. Or that development of super-bombs that pack Hiroshima-like charges won't be used to equally-devastating effects. The U.S. is busy developing all sorts of low-yield exotic nuclear weapons to make their use more palatable to a queasy public. "As the current mayor of Hiroshim Tadatoshi Akiba said earlier today":http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030806p2a00m0fp022000c.html : bq. A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of glowing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment. The chief cause of this is the United States' nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small 'useable' nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God. On the Nonviolence.org Board, there's a lively commentary on this anniversary of "Humanity's darkest hour approaching":www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=3976

By Martin Kelley. Should armed forces personnel threaten dissenters by telling them to leave the country? Here's my proposal for an Armed Forces pledge to support dissent.

I’m starting the process of putting my whole site onto MovableType, even the old static pages.

From the _Washington Post_: "Jailed Iraqi scientists still deny arms program":http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5497-2003Jul30.html bq. Some scientists have been arrested and held for months, others have made deals in return for information and at least one has agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq. No matter the circumstances, all of the scientists interviewed have denied that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998. A year ago President Bush wanted Saddam Hussein to give his scientists freedom to have U.N. inspectors question them outside Iraq, on the premise that if the scientists' lives weren't at risk they'd talk about the weapons programs. Now these scientists have little to lose. If anything they would get out of jail sooner if they started telling verifiable stories of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday President George W. Bush talked about the still-unsuccesful search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "It's going to take awhile, and I'm confident the truth will come out." It looks like it already is, Mister President.

U.S. government officials keep promising that some Iraqi scientist will come forward to show U.S. military forces where all the weapons of mass destruction are hiding. Meanwile, an unidentified aid close the the Iraqi dictator says "Saddam did shut down his WMD program & bluffed the world":http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030802/ap_on_re_mi_ea/saddam_s_bluff_4 to keep everyone guessing. This certainly would explain why no WMDs have been found. And on the face of it, it wasn't such a bad strategy. A few weeks ago I dubbed it the Rattlesnake Defense in reference to North Korea. It's a basic military strategy really: bluff other countries to convince them you have a stronger military bite than you really do. The U.S. and Soviet Union did that all the time during the Gulf War. Today's article goes on: bq. Intelligence officials at the Pentagon, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some experts had raised the theory that Iraq put out false information to persuade its enemies that it retained prohibited chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. What's incredible is the implication that the Pentagon is just figuring this out now! Maybe it was in the best interests of the U.S. military machine to believe Saddam Hussein's bluff. The U.S. Congress won't fund a unneeded military. The Pentagon needed Saddam Hussein's threats to justify its existence at high levels after the end of the Cold War. The Pentagon will always over-estimate the threat of war. Petty dictators like Saddam Hussein will always bluff their militarily-stronger adversaries. Combine that with a Presidential Administration full of oil executives hungry for Persian Gulf supplies and you get all the ingredients for Gulf War II.

In the Washington Post, an article on shifting U.S. rhetoric. The basic story: Bush silent on missing weapons, going back to "War on Terror" story. While U.S. inspectors in Iraq might be optimistic about someday finding weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration has stopped talking about them (probably hoping everyone will forget their threat was the stated reason for war). I'm sure they conducted enough polls to realize that mainstream Americans are finding the WMD stories increasingly fishy. In response, the official U.S. rationale has now shifted back to the "War on Terror" angle. No matter than U.S occupation forces have also come up empty-handed on any links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And never mind that it's come out that paid Saudi government officials put up U.S. rent money for two of the 9/11 hijackers. Waffling stories are a sign that critical questioning of the Bush Administration policies is having an effect. Let's keep debunking the lies!

For those who wonder how the Bush Administration could press a war forward even though they knew they didn't have the evidence, here's another display of dogged persistence. Showing again that true belief doesn't need any evidence, David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, yesterday told a Congressional committee that although his 1,400-person team hasn't found anything he just knows they will. A surprise is ahead, he assures us: bq. The active deception program is truly amazing once you get inside it. We had people who participated in deceiving UN inspectors now telling us how they did it. We have Iraqi scientists who were involved in these programs who are assisting us in taking them apart. We are making solid progress. It is going to take time. I know there are plenty of people who will hear this message and feel heartened. A lot of Americans want weapons to be found. A lot of us are also true believers alongside Kay and President Bush, and we don't want to think we went to war for false reasons. How long will it take us to tell the self-deluded George Bush's that they're full of it? I took a lot of flak during the war for saying it was really about control of oil and that "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and the "War on Terror" were foils to generate popular complicity in this war. For the last hundred years, everything that's happened in Iraq has been about control of oil fields. It was the British who strategically set the country's borders and created its neighbors from whole cloth, and U.S. policies have long been oriented toward oil. Americans are buying ever larger cars burning ever more oil per mile and the S.U.V.s and oversized trucks are merely personal expressions of empire being claimed.

So there's been a flurry of blogging about Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist, an article condemning the activist group Voices in the Wilderness by one of it's former members. Lots of conservative blogs, including the very influential Instapundit are commenting on it. But so far I've seen no pacifist responses other than my own and Voices' website is silent. What's up with this? Is everyone just figuring it's better to let this all die down or do they not know the publicity value of such a prominent article?

Some sites and writings by the generation of young Christians disillusioned by modern church institutionalism. Do Friends have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism, perhaps with different flavored toppings?