www.counterpunch.org An American Crisis by JOE QUANDT

Let us have no illusions.

In Baghdad, once I'd gotten to know someone fairly well, they'd often ask me point blank: "The war, Joe... when is it coming?" And searching my eyes, it was clear that they weren't looking for comfort. They wanted the unmitigated truth.

They need, of necessity, to ask these hard questions. The 8-year war with Iran in which 200,000 died; the Gulf War, which took possibly another 300,000 besides wrecking the entire infrastructure; 12 years of U.S.-enforced U.N. sanctions, which have cost them an additional million lives-23 years of sustained economic and military conflict have simply made the Iraqi people immune to illusions, in the matter of war.

Let us, like the Iraqis, have no illusions.

I was in the states at the end of September when the House of Representatives handed the president a gun. I was in Baghdad when the Senate loaded it for him. History repeats itself, as the power to make war is now invested in the person of one, fallible man. Was not the American Revolution fought to prevent a king from making war at his subjects' expense?

As the "Old Europe" of Germany and France makes waffling attempts to assert their independence from Washington realpolitik, Eastern European nations are lining up to take their places at the table. Washington will not lack for lackeys, because power makes money makes power makes money, and this is the first lesson of politics. Have no illusions; other nations will not come to our moral rescue. It may seem ridiculously obvious to you that if the inspectors remained in Iraq for the next 75 years it would still be just plain cheaper than any other solution.

You may be angry at how deeply your civil rights are being slashed at, and recreated in the image of a neo-conservative New World Order.

Or you grasp all too well that it is U.S. arms sales around the world that make inevitable the endless cycle of big and little wars to come, for the next hundred years.

Maybe it's equally clear to you that any future U.S. treaty is a thing of convenience, to be abrogated when its purpose has been served... That the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Accords, bans on nuclear and conventional weapon testing, research into alternative energy sources, all of these are only impediments to "preserving the American way of life"...

That the War on Terrorism is simply a convenient place to focus American fears now that Communism is dead, and the Pentagon needs a new justification for its ever-expanding budget...

That this war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan to secure right of way for the natural gas reserves of central Asia, the war for the oil of Iraq, the not-so-coincidental turmoil in Venezuela...these are only the opening gambits in the U.S. bid to secure the fossil fuel resources of the entire planet, in order that we may dictate terms to the rest of the industrialized world.

Ask the shoeshine boys, the art dealers, the doctors, the cafe operators, the hotel staff, ask anyone in Iraq why the United States is coming there. They have no illusions. "It's the oil, we know," they say, shrugging their shoulders as though this is a commonplace, known to every child.

In ancient Assyria, war was not dressed up in Patriotism or the tattered gown of Democracy or a distorted Moral Righteousness fabricated from the loving words of long dead Holy Men. War was an undisguised grab for the wealth of another state, the losers impaled or sold into slavery. And you had to face your "enemy".

Will the government of Pakistan, a nation that possesses nuclear weapons, be destabilized? Will the Israelis use the occasion to push the Palestinians into Jordan? Will Turkey finally move on Iraqi Kurdistan? Will the Shia'a majority of southern Iraq link up with Iran or simply demolish itself in endless revolt against the American invaders? How many more Saudi terrorists will be inspired to action? How long before the New Hiroshima, and what unfortunate land will suffer it?

Hundreds of thousands would die in such a war, but that is academic, an historical footnote, statistics. Lives mean nothing to this administration, yours, mine, or the Iraqis'. Have no illusions.

Dare we note that, should the Iraqis put up a stiff resistance, the American military machine will merely back up, and then, oh my fellow citizens, then we will see a demonstration of Weapons of Mass Destruction such as the world has not previously witnessed.

Debate or forget all of the above, but be assured of one thing: the present crisis is over nothing less than the American Soul.

So why, in a world pitching giantly out of control, would you bother to raise your tiny voice, against a din of violence, waste, fear, greed, and "gut feelings", that seeks to drown out any rational consideration of events? We raise our voices because we are Americans...unlike the Iraqis, we can still raise them. We raise our voices because we have children...and parents...and loved ones...and cherished ideals that we'd like to hang onto, and we realize that everywhere an American bomb falls, an Osama bin Laden seed is sown.

We raise our voices because the right of assembly has not yet been taken from us. We raise our voices because our government's arrogant denial that all the peoples of this planet are beautiful and necessary parts of creation, this arrogance is now attributed to the American people as well, and soon it will be unsafe for us to travel outside of our borders.

We raise our voices because the incontrovertible result of war is more war.

We raise our voices because we have galloping inequities in our schools, in Corporate America, in our inner cities, and the 100 or 200 or 900 billion dollars we would squander on further brutalizing our brothers and sisters in Iraq would be better spent otherwise than in financing the theft of that nation's natural resources, to fill the pockets of the conglomerate that is running this country.

Writing in the early Baghdad evening, I often watched the sun setting over the Tigris River. There, in the Cradle of Civilization, one was, perhaps, more keenly reminded of the flickering and snuffing out of civilizations, and by a small leap, to grasp the historical illogic of war as a problem solving device.

We raise our voices because we must. Because our hearts tell us that the clock is ticking, not quite as loudly as it's ticking for the Iraqis, but time is running out on the American Dream. Have no illusions: An attack against Iraq will be one of the cataclysmic events in American history, on a par with The Civil War and the Great Depression. Would it not signal to the world that democratic principals and Jeffersonian humanism have no more significance in the American ethos than they did in Nazi Germany? And to send that message is to invite a return to international barbarism, but on a scale we must shudder to contemplate.

We raise our voices because there's a drunk at the wheel. Approaching the wall, the catastrophe ever more imminent, we begin to see, with growing and terrible clarity, who and what drives the American State. There is precious little time left in which to grab the keys and avert this self-inflicted disaster.

We raise our voices in the certainty that even should the dreaded Battle of Iraq come, it need not, must not, will not stun us into silence.

And the clock is still ticking...

Joe Quandt is a 52-year old actor/cab driver/activist/teacher/poet living in the Albany, NY area. He traveled to Baghdad on the 49th Voices in the Wilderness delegation, during the month of October, 2002. He can be reached at: Ytonthemoon@aol.com

Yesterday's Features

CounterPunch News Service Slow Lerner: It May Not Help Kids in Iraq, But It Sure Got Michael Lerner Airtime

Andrew Murray Tony Blair Versus the British People

Ben Tripp President A**hole

Peggy Thomson My Close Encounter with Saddam

Gary Leupp Meet Mr. Blowback: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, CIA Op and Homicidal Thug

Saul Landau Bush and Corporate Fraud

Adam Engel A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture

Anthony Gancarski Jacksonville in Crisis

Rick Giombetti Specific Threats to Democracy

Jean-David Levitte A Warning on Iraq from France: Make War the Last Option

Ian Gurney Whose Side is Bush On?

Maria Engqvist Did the FARC Shoot Down a US Military Plane in Colombia?

Ron Jacobs This Madness Must Cease

Josh Frank Call to Washington: Stonewall Bush

Website of the Day Rock Out Against War

europe.cnn.com Monday, February 17, 2003 Posted: 1206 GMT

Demonstrators in Berlin take part in global anti-war protest at the weekend

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Only an end to tensions over Iraq could counteract a downturn in the global economy whose recovery slowed noticeably towards the end of last year, Germany's central bank said on Monday.

The Bundesbank said Germany saw a slight contraction in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of last year, but it did not expect a recession -- defined as two successive quarters of economic shrinkage -- as there were recovery signs.

The central bank warned in its February monthly report that a prolonged conflict in Iraq would lead to sharper falls in world growth.

"The global economic recovery slowed noticeably in the autumn of 2002; in the group of industrial nations it even stood still. There was little change in this picture at the end of the year,'' the Bundesbank said.

The prospect of a war in Iraq and disturbances in Venezuela had led to a significant rise in oil prices which, combined with lower stock prices, dragged down growth.

Economic gloom would lift only when confidence improved.

"Reducing geopolitical tensions is unavoidable in this.... A longer (Iraq) conflict would result in a continuation of a higher oil price and renewed global slowdown.''

"The recent rise in the value of the euro is less an expression of the economic strength of the euro zone, it is much more the result of negative factors hitting other currencies,'' the report said.

German economy almost stagnant

The Bundesbank said Germany, Europe's largest economy, was effectively treading water in the final months of last year and fourth-quarter GDP shrank very slightly versus the previous quarter.

"By our initial reckoning, real GDP in the fourth quarter of 2002, excluding seasonal and calendar effects, was somewhat lower than in the previous three months,'' it said.

Year-on-year, fourth-quarter GDP was up around 0.5 percent, according to Bundesbank calculations, in line with forecasts that average gross domestic product in 2002 rose by 0.2 percent.

However, some leading indicators were pointing to a gradual recovery in Germany and the Bundesbank did not expect Germany to slip into recession.

"Increasingly signs from surveys of firms and industrial orders allow hope that the German economy will bottom out in the early months of this year. This is particularly true of industry,'' the Bundesbank said.

Production in the final quarter of 2002 was particularly affected by holidays, while cold weather hit construction hard.

"The economy has been in a phase of quasi-stagnation for over two years now. Global slowdown contributed to this and, additionally, Germany is particularly intensively involved in international trade,'' it said.

The central bank said the current slowdown could not be explained solely by cyclical factors and reform was needed.

"Home-made reasons are coming to the fore more and more, such as labour market rigidity, high tax and social contributions or lack of incentive in the social security system,'' it said.

"Insecurity about economic policy has also hit basic sentiment in economy,'' it said.

The central bank said the government had taken the first steps to reform the labour market by introducing reforms, such as those of the Hartz Commission. "However, introducing these will take time.''

The head of Germany's respected Ifo economic research institute said separately on Monday that he saw little scope for German recovery in 2003 even if no war erupts over Iraq.

"I think we can no longer expect the much desired recovery in 2003, but only a sluggish and dragged out improvement -- in a best case scenario,'' Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the think tank told Italian daily La Stampa in an interview.

Ifo's key business sentiment indicator rose for the first time in eight months in January, but Sinn said when the report was released late last month that it would be premature to say Germany's economy had turned the corner.

When asked what Germany must do at this current time of risk, Sinn added his voice to calls for reforms.

www.4ni.co.uk Monday, 17th February 2003 @ 22:17

The EU is trying to agree a plan to warn Iraq it faces a "last chance" to disarm peacefully, according to a draft proposal. The proposal being considered by the leaders of the 15 EU states says force should only be used as a last resort, but UN weapon inspections cannot continue indefinitely. "Baghdad should have no illusions. The Iraqi regime alone will be responsible for the consequences if it continues to flout the will of the international community," said the proposal. The proposal gives strong backing for the US and British demand for swift action to disarm Iraq, giving the American military build-up in the Gulf credit for forcing Saddam Hussein to work with UN weapons inspectors. Meanwhile, Britain and the US are expected to push ahead this week with a new resolution seeking authority to forcefully disarm Saddam Hussein, diplomats say. Despite fresh threats by France and others to oppose the measure, the resolution will probably be circulated on Wednesday, after two days of open debate. The diplomats say they expect Security Council negotiations on the draft to be concluded by the time chief weapons inspector Hans Blix delivers his next report on March 1.

www.newsday.com February 16, 2003 Let's play "What If." What if Saddam Hussein cedes power in Iraq without a war? What if the Israel-based intelligence and rumor site Debkafile (debka.com) tells us that Osama bin Laden is confirmed dead or in custody, and then two days later Fox, CNBC, MSNBC and CNN interrupt their programming to breathlessly report the same thing? What if the Commerce Department stuns Wall Street by posting surprisingly strong consumer spending figures? What if Venezuela straightens up and oil prices fall? What if the Bush administration starts pushing an eye-popping reduction - maybe even an elimination - of the payroll tax? Can you imagine the impact any of these unexpected events, or a combination thereof, would have on the Dow and the S&P? It's nice to think so. But as far as Hersh Cohen's concerned, now's the time to embrace the future, for when it comes to investing, ignoring potential positives can be almost as bad as ignoring the negatives. "I'm looking to put money to work," Cohen told me recently. "If you look, there's plenty of opportunities." This is no idle chitchat from an casual online investor. For as co-manager of the $4.1-billion Smith Barney Appreciation fund (part of Citigroup traded SHAPX), and another $2 billion in private accounts and institutional funds, Cohen's thoughts and feelings move markets. In terms of relative bear market performance, he's one of the best in the business, beating S&P 500 since he took over SHAPX in 1979 even after factoring in the maximum load. (The fee when you buy into the fund now stands at 5 percent of assets.) And during that last three years, he's landed in the top 3 percent of large-cap core fund managers. Yet Cohen - who runs the fund with Scott Glasser - recently told me he's not satisfied with his track record. That's because in real terms, he's lost money, posting annualized losses of 15.70 percent during one year and 6.8 percent through three years. "My priority is not losing money," he said. "Personally, I don't feel very happy about it." In donning the hair shirt, Cohen said he underestimated the force of the accounting scandals on fragile investor psychology, manifested in July's selling spree, which saw a record monthly outflow from equity mutal funds of $52.6 billion, according to the Investment Company Institute. So it's with a strong sense of resolve that Cohen says he's looking aggressively for openings in a market that's even thornier than the legendary thickets that ensnared stock pickers in 1962, 1974 and 1987. While others give in to gloom and despair, Cohen sees the market hitting bottom and ratcheting higher. Exactly when this starts happening, he doesn't know. But he says conditions are ripe for a rebound. Americans are still benefiting from the lowest interest rates in decades, a boom in refinancing, stalwart consumer spending and strong fiscal and monetary stimulus. And perhaps most significantly, no one seems to be discounting the possibility of good news. "The easiest thing to do in the near term is almost always the wrong thing," Cohen said, noting that the hard thing now is to step up and allocate money to equities. As such, Cohen is less inclined at this point to sell stocks or sit on the sidelines than to buy stocks for long-term appreciation. He's scouting for good companies - industry dominant, strong balance sheets, dividends, sane management - whose stocks have been unfairly sucked down into today's angst-ridden morass. While this market has left few places to hide, there are some places to run. "If your time horizon is two to six months or a year, you shouldn't be in stocks. But if you ask someone who's been in blue chips over the last 20 years whether the market is a good place to put your money, I think the answer would have to be 'yes.' " Long before the rest of the market figured out 3M Co. makes duct tape, the St. Paul-based behemoth was one of Cohen's largest holdings. "Over the next five years, 3M will be one of the best stocks to own," he said. "I'm high on their profitability and management." Like Warren Buffett, Cohen - with his staid, low-risk approach - was not in vogue back in the late 1990s, when clients were suing brokers for getting them only 9 percent on their money. Today Cohen - a native Midwesterner who lives in Port Washington - looks good. He owns a big block of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway stock, along with other insurers, including St. Paul Corp. and Chubb. Kimberly Clark and EnCana Corp., the Canadian oil and gas concern, are other favored positions. On the other hand, Cohen is not sanguine on AOL Time Warner, saying he's hanging on to his battered shares, but not adding positions to new accounts. "AOL has become a very controversial company," he said, adding, "I don't like controversial companies." SHAPX also holds a large block of SBC stock, and Cohen said it would be ill-advised for SBC to pursue a deal with DirectTV because it would not enhance SBC's profitability over the long term. Moreover, Cohen, whose fund holds about 1.8million shares of Cablevision Systems Corp., said it would be a bad move for the Bethpage-based company to buy DirectTV. Cablevision "made a lot of mistakes" and as a result is facing enough of a challenge selling assets to raise cash without taking on a new acquisition, he said. "What do I think about Cablevision getting into a deal with Hughes GM?" Cohen said. "Unbelievable!"

www.dailytimes.com.pk It was expected that the UN Security Council session that heard the chief UN weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix on Friday would be divided over what to do next about Iraq. For the first time in the Security Council, members opposed to the American point of view actually clapped long and hard after listening to a hard-hitting French rebuttal of the pro-attack view. Out of the veto-wielding permanent members, only the United States and the United Kingdom thought that the chief weapons inspector’s report meant that Iraq was in “material breach” of the resolution 1441 and thus attracted the “serious consequences” (read attack) pledged in the resolution. Three permanent members, France, Russia and China differed with it and wanted to give more time to the inspectors to disarm Iraq and avoid war, the eight non-permanent members more or less following the cue. Pakistan was in a bit of the cleft stick, being opposed to war but not in a position to take on the United States frontally. It was not present in the Council earlier when a tough unanimous resolution was passed against Iraq asking it to disarm on its own and show proof thereof. At the earlier session, hearing US Secretary of State Colin Powell presenting proof of Iraq’s wilful non-compliance, Pakistan had cautiously attached conditions to the decision to invade Iraq, taking into account the situation in the region, including the Palestine crisis that would certainly be exacerbated by it. The good fortune was that Pakistan’s position was no more strident than the one taken by the other members. Thus it was able to hedge itself against any adverse reaction back home where the public mind is understandably inflamed by the prospect of an invasion that is bound to inflict the long-suffering Iraqi population. On Friday, Pakistan was once again afforded the opportunity to retain its “safe” posture when disagreement on war was expressed by a majority of the members, including those who are, like Pakistan, partners of the US in the international coalition against terrorism. The conjecture in Pakistan was that if it came to casting votes for or against a war resolution, Pakistan might have to abstain in order not to offend the United States. But an abstention might give an opportunity to the country’s strong opposition forces, especially the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, to accuse Islamabad of having betrayed an “Islamic cause”. Equally, a negative vote in a largely pro-US house would certainly sour US-Pak relations at a time when its contradictions with India are at their peak and US support is critical to keep India at bay. But now that the Security Council has clearly expressed itself against the Anglo-American position, Pakistan can relax and assume its normal “pro-UN” posture. Pakistan has carefully crafted its position within the UN framework. It says that a resolution of the Iraq crisis should be affected through the UN Security Council. It supported resolution 1441, which was interpreted as the triumph of the Anglo-US position last year, and expressed itself strongly in favour of Iraqi disarmament. Now Pakistan, along with the other members opposed to the invasion, has been given enough leeway by the chief inspector’s report to oppose the American plan. Since the UN is now seen as an obstacle to the invasion, it is safe to recommend that it may be made the only channel of collective action. Does Pakistan still run the risk of offending the United States? This will depend on what course President George Bush takes. Given the current state of opinion in the Security Council, he might have to go it alone, invading Iraq without a resolution from the Council. Pakistan’s position will then be comparable to all the Islamic states, including Turkey and the Gulf states, from where the Americans will launch their assault on Iraq. Yet, the prospect of unilateral action outside the UN is fraught with difficulties for the United States, unlike when the US and NATO bombed Yugoslavia to stop the Muslim genocide in Kosovo, ignoring the UN because of the threat of a certain Chinese veto and a possible Russian veto. The world “official” opinion then was overwhelmingly in favour of the US attack although the UN itself decried the trend of taking action against the spirit of the UN charter. It has to be understood that President Bush and American public in general look at the developing UN scenario from the point of view of a traumatised nation that the rest of the world no longer feels at one with. The 9/11 tragedy has changed the world but it has also changed the thinking of the United States to such a degree that it now stands alone. President Bush faces a moment of decision. If he backs off, he faces a backlash within the US that will damage his prospects for a second term in office. If he invades Iraq, he will have to do a lot of arm-twisting at the level of individual states, putting to test his country’s superpower status as never before. In that case, Pakistan will have to tread even more carefully to protect its self-interests than some of the US’s other allies. *