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Mike Whitney - Falluja has taken on a meaning that far exceeds whatever transpires in the battle. It has become an Iraqi Alamo; the definitive symbol of Muslim resistance to the Bush onslaught. The significance of the invasion is greatly enhanced by already knowing the final outcome. The world’s only superpower will crush the resistance, destroying anything in its path and laying large swaths of the city to waste; that much is certain. This understanding increases the stature of those who are bravely fighting within the city; fighting for their country, homes and families against the most prodigious military machine ever assembled. It is David against Goliath, only David has no sling.
Daniel Patrick Welch - Bush’s Sword of Damocles is poised above the people and city of Fallujah , ready to wreak the pent-up wrath his addled brain thinks his tainted election victory permits. Already thinking that they had a mandate from God, the American fascists now think they have one from the American people. However, like true warriors, the election for these crazies is no more than a blip on the screen, a hiccup on the road to world domination. What is the true fascist reaction to the recent news that your invasion has killed 100,000? Why, to prepare to kill another hundred thousand, of course. Remember Kissinger’s chilling exchange on the Nixon tapes where they casually discussed how many would die if they ordered the bombing of the dikes in the north of Vietnam : “…a few hundred thousand… That’s a lot of people.”
Conn Hallinan - The Bush administration likes to invoke the so-called changed nature of the post-9/11 world as the justification for rendering the Geneva Conventions obsolete, somehow trumping USA adherence to international law. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales dismisses the Geneva Conventions as “quaint,” and the U.S. Justice Department wrote up memos giving the CIA the right to violate both international laws and the U.S. War Crimes Act. But systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions by the USA hardly started with 9/11. Indeed, they are characteristic of virtually every conflict the USA has been involved in since the end of World War II.
Daoud Kuttab - My barber, Abu Salah couldn’t wait for me to come to his shop. He had been very concerned this week and wanted an answer to his question. He was searching hard in his mind for a solution to what he felt was a complicated problem: how could Marwan Barghouthi spring out from the Israeli jail he is kept in. Abu Salah felt relieved when I explained that Hizbollah could answer his riddle. The Lebanese resistance group still has bodies of Israeli soldiers that they could trade with the Israelis for the remaining Lebanese hostages, as well as some Palestinian prisoners, possibly Barghouthi. The long-shot hope that many pin on Barghouthi is not limited to my barber. After wanting to know about the health of their president, many Palestinians, both inside and outside the occupied territories, had the issue of succession on their minds.
Joseph Massad - The recent controversy elicited by the propaganda film ‘Columbia Unbecoming’ a film funded and produced by a Boston-based pro-Israel organization, is the latest salvo in a campaign of intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticize Israel. All those pro-Israeli propagandists who want to reduce the Jewish people to the State of Israel are the anti-Semites who want to eliminate the existing pluralism among Jews. The majority of Israel’s supporters in the United States are, in fact, not Jews but Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites who seek to convert Jews. They constitute a quarter of the American electorate and are the most powerful anti-Semitic group worldwide. The reason why the pro-Israel groups do not fight them is because these anti-Semites are pro-Israel. Therefore, it is not anti-Semitism that offends pro-Israel groups; what offends them is anti-Israel criticism.
Danny Dayus - Many times over the last nine hours I’ve thought kindly of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have worked tirelessly over the past four years against the policies of the Bush presidency. To those people I must ask forgiveness for my siding with the world outside America. It is they, as well as the people who voted for Bush, who will have to bear the shame of belonging to a society that democratically elects war criminals to office. However, not all the world’s people will feel the same way. Many will see the election of George W Bush as a signal that America as a whole has chosen a course of confrontation and greed, and for a generation or more afterwards these people will teach their children to hate all that American society stands for.
B. Michael - Between September 29th and October 15th, fifteen days in all, I killed thirty children. Two children per day. Two dead children per day is more or less four bereaved parents per day. Why more or less? Because some of them were brothers. So, two dead children for one pair of bereaved parents. Perhaps that’s better, because these parents are bereaved anyway, so they are just bereaved twice, and another pair of parents is released from being bereaved. But perhaps it is less good, because to be bereaved is worse than being dead, and being twice bereaved is twice worse than being dead. So I don’t really know what to decide.
Pepe Escobar, Asia Times - Whatever the result of the USA presidential election, at least half of the nation has already rejected Bush as a divider, not a uniter, someone who did not even have a popular mandate to begin with. Bush was not elected by the majority in 2000. If he is really elected now - with or without the majority of the popular vote - this will send a strong signal to the whole world that Americans support the neo-con agenda. The sequence is predictable: more corporate tax cuts, an even more repressive Patriot Act, more wars in the Middle East, more geopolitical chaos. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The crusading armies may legitimize “exporting death and violence to the four corners of the Earth”. Or progressive America may rejoin reality and punish the Bush administration for what it is: an illegitimate aberration.
Michael Saba - According to the American Center for Responsive Politics, spending on US elections this year will total almost $4 billion, including $1.2 billion on the presidential election. Just how much money is that and how much are the candidates spending per vote received? Almost half of the nations in the world have a Gross National Product, GNP (sum of all of the goods and services produced in a country in a year) of less than $4 billion a year. That includes countries like Zambia and Laos. Over 53 nations have a GNP of less than $1.2 billion a year. That group includes countries like Mauritania and Mongolia. Think about it. If we in America said money could no longer be used for funding a candidate’s election, we could use the money raised this year to fund almost half the world’s nations.
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