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With these words, Mr. Bush sought to reassure the American people that his war plan is working, moving us closer to “victory.” As the United States continues its heavy and unrelenting bombing of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, inflicting death and suffering on the Iraqi people who we are supposedly liberating, we would do well to explore the meaning of victory. Thus far, few journalists, at least in the corporate mainstream US media, appear ready to do so. Those concerned with the path the war is taking might have added the following observations to Bush’s statement. Day by day we are killing more Iraqi civilians. One day US forces bomb a marketplace, killing 62 civilians. Another day a car carrying women and children is fired on by US troops, killing seven. An Iraqi mother describes watching her young children’s heads severed from their bodies. According to news reports, some 500...

Så har regimen fallit. Den förhatlige Saddam har försvunnit och folket jublade, statyer drogs omkull, butiker plundrades och anarki härskade i vissa områden. De eforiska scenerna som presenterades i media var inte helt oväntade men sanningen var kanske inte så eforiska som de framställdes. Den berömda sekvensen med statyn föreställande Saddam Hussein som drogs omkull med en hjälp av en stridsvagn bevittnades endast av ett hundratal Irakier och skedde på Paradistorget vilket ligger i lämplig närhet av hotell Palestina, centrat för den samlade världspressen. Media var också väl representerat. Plundringen fick oanade konsekvenser och kanske långt utöver den brittiske försvarsministern Hoons uttalande som ansåg det förståeligt att människor efter år av terror sparkade in några dörrar – ett påstående som torde var årets understatement bl. a. mot bakgrunden av ett plundrat Nationalmuseum och ett utbränt Nationalbibliotek. Ansvaret för vad som hänt dessa två institutioner som ingår i det så kallade...

Lurades och manipulerades vi av bilderna när Saddamstatyn fälldes i Bagdad, undrar Sören Sommelius. Var det hela iscensatt “reality-TV” snarare än ett folkligt uppror? I onsdags föll Bagdad. Inför jublande folkmassor störtades statyn av Saddam Hussein på Fardustorget i centrala Bagdad. Lars-Eric Jönsson skrev om den symbolladdade händelsen här på kultursidan i lördags. Glädjerusiga Bagdadbor stormade regimens institutioner och plundrade de förhatliga symbolerna för dess makt. Det var som när Berlinmuren föll för snart fjorton år sedan. Var det så det gick till? Saddams staty har dragits omkull åter och återigen i televisionens nyhetssändningar. Bildsekvenserna kommer att gå till historien över detta korta krig. Vi har sett de jublande människorna och deras tacksamhet mot de amerikanska befriarna. Eller? Vad var det vi såg? Jag försöker rekapitulera. Amerikanska marinkårssoldater klättrade upp på statyn. Man täckte först över Saddams huvud med en amerikansk flagga, sedan med en irakisk. Därefter drog man med...

Lurades och manipulerades vi av bilderna när Saddamstatyn fälldes i Bagdad, undrar Sören Sommelius. Var det hela iscensatt “reality-TV” snarare än ett folkligt uppror? I onsdags föll Bagdad. Inför jublande folkmassor störtades statyn av Saddam Hussein på Fardustorget i centrala Bagdad. Lars-Eric Jönsson skrev om den symbolladdade händelsen här på kultursidan i lördags. Glädjerusiga Bagdadbor stormade regimens institutioner och plundrade de förhatliga symbolerna för dess makt. Det var som när Berlinmuren föll för snart fjorton år sedan. Var det så det gick till? Saddams staty har dragits omkull åter och återigen i televisionens nyhetssändningar. Bildsekvenserna kommer att gå till historien över detta korta krig. Vi har sett de jublande människorna och deras tacksamhet mot de amerikanska befriarna. Eller? Vad var det vi såg? Jag försöker rekapitulera. Amerikanska marinkårssoldater klättrade upp på statyn. Man täckte först över Saddams huvud med en amerikansk flagga, sedan med en irakisk. Därefter drog man med...

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...

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...

There comes a time when the prevarications and faulty logic of official policy become so extreme that only satire can shed light on the truth. We have reached such a point with respect to the warmongering of the United States and Britain in relation to Iraq’s alleged possession of a threatening stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. George Bush and Tony Blair are trying to impose a deadline of March 17th, just days away, for Saddam Hussein to prove that he does not have weapons of mass destruction. If Bush and Blair succeed in getting the support of the UN Security Council for this, they are prepared to proceed to war. From their pronouncements, they seem determined to proceed to war even without Security Council approval. But how can Hussein prove that he doesn’t have something? What would the proof be that something doesn’t exist? If he were asked to...