Stories from 2002-09-12

"I've taken to constituting myself as an anti-war movement of one—a man of impeccable conservative credentials and long experience in the national-security field, a grumpy old Marine, who has grown infuriated with and appalled by both the conservative embrace of disaster and the enormity of the smallness of what passes for the anti-war movement today." [more]

"Saddam Hussein, prior to an American attack, might well go after Israel with the chemical or biological weapons that Mr. Bush says Iraq possesses. Israel, if it survives, will retaliate, perhaps even with nuclear weapons. Just over the horizon lies Pakistan, a Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons and permeated by extremists. Pervez Musharraf, its president, has joined America's war on terrorism but he is unlikely to survive politically should there be a nuclear attack by an American ally on Iraq's Muslims. Islamists, overthrowing him, would take control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal; lacking the ability to launch missiles that would reach Israel, they would turn on India, their more proximate enemy. A nuclear attack would set off global chaos." [more]

"There are no large, cohesive peace groups, nationally or locally. Activists are spread among dozens of issues, and coalition building is difficult." [more]

"The document argued that the core assumption guiding U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century should be the need to establish permanent U.S. dominance over virtually all of Eurasia. It envisioned a world in which U.S. military intervention would become 'a constant fixture' of the geo-political landscape. [T]hrough the nineties, the two authors and their boss, then-Pentagon chief Dick Cheney, continued to wait for the right opportunity to fulfill their imperial dreams. Their long wait came to an end on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001." [more]

"This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam. People who wonder about the Bush war-urgency only need to think about this: There’s a blind spot that needs to be exploited now, before too many journalists get the idea to go inside Iraq and find out what’s really happening." [more]