Archive 1986 – 2017

While President Bush and President Hussein surely differ in many respects, this piece of homespun philosophy argues that they also display surprising similarities. Bush and Hussein, as well as their respective bands of cheering supporters, try to convince the rest of us that they share absolutely no characteristics and have nothing in common with each other. This is undoubtedly part of the (subjective) truth, but it is never the whole truth about a conflict. While not denying the differences, this article turns the spotlight on the similarities. Conflicts usually put the disagreement between the parties on display, and the parties to a conflict usually emphasise how different they themselves (the good guys) are from the others (the bad guys). Thus, it is perfectly normal that conflicting parties deny that there could be any similarities between “them” and “us”! But professional conflict-analysts know that no conflict is possible unless the parties...

An essay by SGI President Ikeda which summarized the key themes of the January 26, 2003 Peace Proposal, “A Global Ethic of Coexistence: Toward a ‘Life-Sized’ Paradigm for Our Age.” Citizens everywhere today are demanding that their leaders make choices to advance the cause of peace. Having seen the end of the Cold War, they are deeply concerned that our world seems poised on the edge of a new and even more ominous “clash”-one based on cultural and religious difference. They are disturbed by the grotesque imbalance between our powers of destruction and our failing ethical capacity for empathy and self-restraint. They recoil at the bizarre sight of million-dollar missiles flying over the heads of people subsisting on one or two dollars per day. They sense that such a world is dangerously askew. But I firmly believe that such a clash of civilizations is not inevitable. It can and must...

SAN JUAN de la RAMBLA, Spain – U.S. policy “has weakened a civilisation that is also its own” wrote Juan Luis Cebrian, the founding editor of Spain’s principal newspaper, El Pais, the other day. Everywhere one goes here one runs headlong into what the polls say, that over 85% of the population is against the decision by Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to support George Bush in his war against Iraq. Since the demise of Franco, with the savage civil war behind it, Spain has been in a mood of relatively quiet politics, intent on healing division rather than provoking it. Politics has not been, as in its Mediterranean Latin sister, Italy, either a subject for bitter party contest or over heated conversation. No more perhaps. I go up to the police station to report the theft of my car papers and all the policeman wants to talk about are his...

LONDON – When Prime Minister Tony Blair met President George Bush in Belfast earlier this week there was highfalutin talk on the British side of the hope that Bush would take home the lesson of Northern Ireland: that even the most intractable conflicts can be peacefully resolved. The British, even as they walk in America’s shadow, love to cock a snook at their transatlantic kissing cousin – whether it is the British soldiers in Iraq jeering quietly at the American soldiers’ affected wearing of sun-glasses or the boasting of unique skills the British supposedly possess, after years of counter insurgency work in Northern Ireland, in dealing with urban warfare. Or the treatment by U.S. forces of captured Iraqi fighters. Much of this is a bowlful of self-serving hypocrisy dealt out by those with short memories. The initial decision in 1971 to send into Northern Ireland the British army, supposedly to protect...

“It is enough that a lie is believed for three days – it has then served its purpose.”Marie de Medici, 1573-1642, queen consort and queen regent of France # 1 March 27 – April 8. Start at bottom # 2 April 9 – April 27 # 3 April 28 till now  25. Perhaps history will repeat itself? Day 20 – April 8, 2003 – Yesterday, R. W. Apple, writing in the IHT, points out that it won’t be easy for the American and British troops to portray themselves and convince the Iraqis that they are liberators: “But they are walking old and treacherous ground. The British commander who seized Baghdad from the Ottoman Turks in March 1917, General Frederick Stanley Maude, told the local citizenry, “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” The British dominated Baghdad and what became Iraq for...

Kampen om sanningen i Irakkriget förs inte bara genom propaganda och spridandet av felaktiga uppgifter utan också genom sabotage och missiler. Den arabiska TV-sändaren al-Jazira står för en kvalificerad alternativ bild av kriget, utifrån ett arabiskt perspektiv och på kompetent journalistiska grund. I tisdags och onsdags i förra veckan förstördes sändarens engelskspråkiga webbsida, oklart av vem. Den som gick in på www. aljazeera.net fick i stället se en amerikansk karta utformad som en flagga, med texten “Låt friheten ringa” och finstilta upplysningen “Hackad av den patriotiska frihetscybermilitian”. Det skulle förvåna mig mycket om det bara var datorkunniga tonårsgrabbar som låg bakom. I samma veva blev sändarens reportrar portförbjudna på New Yorkbörsen. En talesman för al-Jazira vädjade förgäves om stöd för pressfriheten. I tisdags i förra veckan träffades irakiska televisionens byggnad i Bagdad av en missil. Attentatet var ett uppenbart brott mot Genèvekonventionen som förbjuder angrepp på civila mål. Det ledde...

Heyerdahl Burns “Tigris” Reed Ship to Protest War  By Betty Blairai@artnet.net Thor Heyerdah with his international crew of 11 members had just completed a 5 month journey of 4,200 miles that began in the Tigris Valley. Here he sets his reed boat “Tigris” at Djibouti, Africa ablaze in protest of the numerous wars going on in the region which were fueled by Western and Soviet sales of military arms. Photo: April 3, 1978 © The Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo, Norway. Used with Permission. April 2, 2003 Twenty-five years ago, on April 3, 1978, Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) was just completing a 4,200-mile voyage on a 60-foot reed ship known as the Tigris. His journey had started at the place many consider to be the birth of civilization – the verdant valley between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Iraq. Setting sail from the banks of the Tigris, Thor and his crew navigated...

SAN JUAN de la RAMBLA, Spain – U.S. policy “has weakened a civilisation that is also its own” wrote Juan Luis Cebrian, the founding editor of Spain’s principal newspaper, El Pais, the other day. Everywhere one goes here one runs headlong into what the polls say, that over 85% of the population is against the decision by Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to support George Bush in his war against Iraq. Since the demise of Franco, with the savage civil war behind it, Spain has been in a mood of relatively quiet politics, intent on healing division rather than provoking it. Politics has not been, as in its Mediterranean Latin sister, Italy, either a subject for bitter party contest or over heated conversation. No more perhaps. I go up to the police station to report the theft of my car papers and all the policeman wants to talk about are his...

LONDON – War, the systematic and organised use of violence with all its bestial destructiveness, is peculiar to the most advanced of animals, man. Writing in the early sixteenth century, Erasmus considered war “unnatural”. “Animals do not make war on one another. Whoever heard of 100,000 animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” It was the European thinkers of the eighteenth century Enlightenment who saw the issue of war in perhaps more realistic terms. “Want of a common judge with authority puts all men in a state of nature,” wrote John Locke. Or as Michael Howard, the distinguished war historian, has written more recently, “War is an inherent element in a system of sovereign states which lack any supreme and acknowledged arbiter.” There is probably something in this. After all, the few societies which have never practised war appear to have a common ingredient, a homogeneous culture...

I write with a heavy heart. Our cause has shifted from trying to prevent a needless war to seeking to end an illegal war. The audacity of the Bush administration takes one’s breath away.  The United States is bombing Baghdad, engaged in its “shock and awe” strategy. Shock yes, but there is no awe. To suggest awe reflects only the arrogance of the Bush militarists. US attacks on Iraq are shocking and awful.  Shocking that we are at war in violation of international law and our Constitution.  Shocking that our government is committing aggressive warfare, which is a crime. Shocking that a large majority of the US Congress has been so compliant and cowardly, handing over their responsibility to declare war to the president. By giving up their Constitutional powers, Congress is putting the future of our Republic in jeopardy.   Shocking that Bush has demonstrated contempt for the strongly held...

, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Security Council decided about inspections and sanctions it must have suffered from some kind of hubris. Iraq should be punished for the invasion of Kuwait – and it did invade and it was foolish and illegal to do so. Sanctions should put pressure on the regime and, it was hoped, turn the people against the leadership. Hard as the sanctions were, they were designed to last for a short time, the time it was assumed to take to find and disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass-destruction. The winners of the war dictated the conditions. Iraq, the loser, had to obey unconditionally. Lifting the sanctions was made dependent upon the delivery of an inspection report to the Security Council that would state that all that could be used in the production of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons had been found and destroyed and...

“>Christian Hårleman, TFF Boardmember When, in 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Security Council decided about inspections and sanctions it must have suffered from some kind of hubris. Iraq should be punished for the invasion of Kuwait – and it did invade and it was foolish and illegal to do so. Sanctions should put pressure on the regime and, it was hoped, turn the people against the leadership. Hard as the sanctions were, they were designed to last for a short time, the time it was assumed to take to find and disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass-destruction. The winners of the war dictated the conditions. Iraq, the loser, had to obey unconditionally. Lifting the sanctions was made dependent upon the delivery of an inspection report to the Security Council that would state that all that could be used in the production of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons...