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Opinion:

Who is really interested in the welfare of Jerusalem?; by Daoud Kuttab*

I am a Jerusalemite and I love the city. But I am sick and tired of all the people who pretend to be interested in the city by their lip service but not by their action.

I say this because it seems that that we are again in the annual Jerusalem season. The routine has become boring. The American congress for election's related reasons pass some sort of Jerusalem resolution in congress aimed at pleasing the pro Israel lobby. The White House makes some sort of shy remark about not changing traditional US policies about Jerusalem. The Arab countries rise up as one man in protest of the US congressional resolution and two weeks later everyone forgets Jerusalem.

In the meantime Israel's control is not any more or less intrusive. The people of Jerusalem are not any better or worse off and everyone is pleased that they have done their part in this charade. Calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel year in year out does little to change its character or what people think of it. And Arabs rejection of this resolution do very little to improve the lives of the over 200,000 Palestinians living in this city that is united only in the Israeli books but not in the reality of our lives.

For my part I am not too concerned about the US congress many of whose members vote annually for these Jerusalem resolutions without even knowing anything about the city, its history or its present situation except what the AIPAC lobbyist tells them.

I am, much more interested in the position of Arab leaders and the Arab public about Jerusalem.

To begin with Arab and Islamic opposition to the Jerusalem resolution is an exercise in rhetorical brinkmanship. Arab and Muslim leaders and public figures compete between themselves who can verbally oppose this issue louder than the other. I underline the word verbal because this is as far as the protest goes. If Arab leaders would donate a dollar (or whatever their national currency is) for every time they protested the Jerusalem resolutions many of the real problems in Jerusalem would have been solved by now.
An example from life in Jerusalem will explain my point of view.

For years private schools in East Jerusalem have been complaining that they will be unable to stay open unless they could find someone to support them. These schools have worked hard at keeping Palestinian students away from the influence of the Israeli ministry of education. Shortly after 1967 these schools fought and won a fierce battle in their refusal to apply the Israeli educational curriculum. Parents are unable to pay the high cost of private education so these schools were caught between a rock and a hard place. The Israeli municipality of Jerusalem offered to support these schools. Israeli law guarantees education and the high taxes collected from Palestinian in Jerusalem provide enough money to the Israeli coffers. Palestinian leaders, including the late Faisal Husseini tried unsuccessfully to raise money from Arab (mostly Gulf) sources to help subsidize these schools and ensure that they are not obliged to take money from the Israelis. He failed to do that and the schools finally buckled and accepted Israeli funding.

Al Quds University, the largest Palestinian institutions and a leading center for higher education in Palestine has been going through financial troubles for some time. The university's president Professor Sari Nusseibeh has been traveling in Arab and international locations seeking support for the university with little success. Teachers have not been paid in Al Quds University for months. For their part the Israelis are pressuring the university at times by closing its administrative offices and at other times by threatening to declare them illegal because they have not been accredited by the Israeli higher council of education.

If Arab and others are genuine in their protest of the US congress's latest resolution the answer is simple. Quit nagging and protesting and start doing something about it. Opportunities for strengthening the Arab character of Jerusalem are readily available. The Palestinians of Jerusalem are not interested in your statements and protests. Put up or shut up might sound crude but the time have come for those who really support Palestinian steadfastness in Jerusalem to act and not restrict themselves to empty rhetoric.

* The writer is a Palestinian journalist, director of the Institute of Modern media at Al-Quds University in Ramallah.

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News Flash (Radio, Voice of Palestine 7:30 - 8:30 am)

Gaza: Early this morning, Israeli occupation forces invaded Tal Zu’rub near the borders with Egypt amidst extensive shooting by tanks. The shelling took the life of two Palestinian martyrs: Tawfiq Hussam Briekah, 4, and Ibrahim al-Ghouti, 26. Briekah was killed when Israeli soldiers demolished his house while he was in. Israeli shelling left 26 injured including seven in serious conditions.
Also, two other Palestinians were martyred in an exchange of fire with Israeli soldiers near the borders with Egypt. Two Israeli soldiers were injured according to security resources.

Tulkarem: Funeral of the Palestinian martyr Taher al-Qinab, 18, is scheduled to take place today in Tulkarem. Al-Qniab was shot dead by Israeli troops who invaded the to impose the curfew.

Nablus: Israeli occupation troops continue to impose their curfew on the eastern parts of Nablus for the third consecutive day. This noon funeral for the Palestinian martyr Shaden Abu Hijlah, 54, will take place. Abu Hijlah was shot dead two days ago during the Israeli random shooting in Rafidya.

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Interviews (Radio, Voice of  Palestine 7:30 - 8:30 am)

Attacks against Rafah

Dr. Ali Musa  - Member of the Medical Staff in Abu Yusef al-Najar

Q: Can you elaborate on the situation in Rafah?
A: early this morning, they raided Zu’rub area. At 2:00 a.m. this morning we received martyr Ibrahim Muhammad Yousef al-Ghouti, 26, who was shot in the abdomen. Later, we received other four injured two in serious conditions. Among them Ramzi Ali Zu’rub, 24, who was shot in various parts of his body. Also, there is another 22-year-old martyr who was shot in the neck.
At 5:00 am, we were surprised that several ambulances arrived to hospital at the same time bringing 26 injured Palestinians. The majority where injured when Israeli troops demolished their houses on them. Martyr Tawfiq Hussam Breikeh, 4, was removed from under the rubble, while his grandfather, Tawiq Breikeh, 60, was injured seriously in the head. Also, there is the one-month-old Nagam Hussam Breikeh who sustains serious injuries.

Q: Do you think Israeli troops have deliberately targeted the populated areas?
A: yes and this is not the first time. Rafah is besieged by Israeli troops and settlements from all parts and is always subjected to shooting. When Israeli tanks opened fire against this highly populated area this means that the Israelis want to kill. During the Intifada, the biggest number of martyrs and injured fell in Rafah.

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The new cabinet
 
Nabil Shaath – Minister of Planning and International Cooperation

Q: Do you think there will be something new in the new cabinet?
A: consultations form the way to discover what is new and acceptable by Palestinians, Palestinian Legislative Council, Palestinian cadres and leaders. The President is engaged in intensive consultations. The meetings take three to four hours so that the President will explore the ideas and views for forming a ministry that can push PNA forward. I think the government should join between efficiency of ministers and their political affiliation.

Q: Is it going to be a technocrat government or have political affiliation?
A: personally, I hate the term technocrat. Our people do not lack for efficient people that join between technical efficiency and political affiliation.
The people who will lead the government should be politicians who are the most capable to administer the ministries.

Q: Are there going to be reduction in the number of ministers?
A: I believe the number will be the same to what was approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Q: There are reports that the new cabinet will surprise the Americans. What is your comment?
A: if there is a surprise it will be the creation of ministries that join between the political affiliation and proficiency. The government should not be comprised in a way that meets US or Israeli measures but to please Palestinian public.
If there are who believe that the new government will be comprised only from persons of technical administration, I believe they will be surprised.

Q: Can you elaborate on PNA international contacts in order to succeed with Palestinian efforts in regards to reforms?
A: we are on daily contacts with the major figures. Personally and according to President Arafat instructions, I am going to leave tomorrow to conduct an intensive tour in Europe. I will start my tour by meeting with the French foreign minister in Paris next Monday. Later, I will meet with the Belgium foreign minister and Javier Solana in Belgium. Afterwards, I will meet with Mr. Jack Straw, the British Foreign Minister in London. Then I will return to Paris to meet with members of the Quartet and then I will meet the Danish prime and foreign ministers in Copenhagen. Finally, I am going to hold a meeting with the Italian foreign minister in Rome. In this tour, I am going to try to urge the Europeans to play an active role in the Quartet and outside it to end at least this occupation, which began on the 28th September 2002.

Q: Should there be fears from the coming meeting between Bush and Ariel Sharon?
A: Sharon is an evil man. We expect he will try his bests to convince the Americans to give him the green line to escalate his aggression on claims of fighting terror. However, on our part we act. The Americans do not accept this logic. They see in it an additional blast in our region that doubles their problem. We will rely partially on our direct relations with US and partially on our relations with the Europeans, Russians and Kofi Annan.

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Arab Press

Headlines

Egypt: Al-Ahram daily, Oct. 13

* Strengthening American military build-up in the Gulf in preparation for attacking Iraq.
* One Palestinian killed and Israel arrests Hamas and Al-Jihad members.

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The United Arab Emirates: Al-Khaleej daily, Oct. 13

* Powell confirms the plan of “occupation government” for Iraq. Baghdad allows the inspectors to enter the Palaces and Blair was rebuffed by Putin.
* Vietnam and Cambodia oppose the war. Malaysia criticizes the Congress “Mandate”.
* Thousands of French people demonstrate against the aggression.
* Confrontations in Jerusalem between the occupation and demonstrations against segregation.
* The American Congress permits punishments against Sudan.
* Washington officially asserts concern for the Syrian-Russian nuclear cooperation.
* The Syrian chief of staff: the US has gone too far in its enmity to Arabs.

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Al-Sharq Al-Awsat daily; London-Oct. 13

* Iraq retreats and accepts inspecting the Palaces. Washington moves a command of land troops to Kuwait.
* Kuwait: 15 defendants confessed to a plan to attack American locations.
* Sharon rejects settling the issue of the besieged .
* A campaign in the American universities to stop investing in Israel.

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Opinion

Jordan: Al-Rai daily, Oct. 13; by: Jareer Maraqa

Indications show that the use of American force against Iraq is certain, and talking about the return of inspectors is the only thing that links Iraq with the UN. Bush has obtained the mandate from the Congress to take the decision of war, and the few voices that opposed only reminded of what is left of the principles of the great state that is concerned no more with the bulk of the catastrophe which will result from the destruction of the Iraqi locations and killing and displacing civilians and innocents.

The expression of “attacking Iraq” is shifting now into occupying Iraq as an inevitable measure to topple the regime of Saddam Hussain. American papers revealed that there is already a plan in the White House to appoint a higher commissioner to handle the affairs of Iraq and establish a new regime which certainly will need American military bases to protect it.

If the American plan proceeds successfully, then we will have to look at the map of Arab oil wells and the American military bases. If we can know then how many years it will take until the US extract the last drop of oil then we can decide how many years the American forces will spend in the Arab region.
Among others, there are two expected changes according the historical context of this region, it is either that all the countries which will go under the American forces will be led to the American culture, or that the Americans will embrace Islam just like the Tatars (when they conquered the Islamic world)!!!

A Palestinian physician accuses the Israeli occupation army of killing his wife with cold blood.

The family of Palestinian physician Jamal Abu Hejleh accused the occupation soldiers of killing his wife Shaden (60) with cold blood as she was sitting with her son Saed in front of their house in Rafidya area in the city of Nablus. The husband who was wrapping his head with bandages of injuries inflicted in the incident, told France Press that “ the occupation soldiers were apparently searching for a hunt Saturday night and they added my wife to their list of daily victims”. The son Saed 36, a lecturer of geography at Al-Najah University in Nablus said they “were sitting at the threshold of the house at sunset, and the mother was sitting on a chair embroidering a folkloric piece of cloth. Two patrols of Israeli soldiers approached to a distance of about 20 meters from the entrance of the house, and opened fire at us without any warning. I took to the ground and thought I was injured, I looked and found my mother thrown on the stair. I crept towards her and raised her head, she smiled while dying”, said the son.

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Syria: Syria Times, Oct 12 - Recalling Vietnam...; by: M. Agha

Opinion polls show how the people in any country view matters related to their interests, social or national. Sometimes, opinion polls reflect the true feeling towards leaders or domestic or foreign policies.

In the latest opinion poll, American pollsters believe that their Boss George W. Bush has to give international arms inspectors more time to do their job. They also believe he must wait for his Western and non-Western allies’ support! Pollsters also see that Congressmen did not pose sufficient questions on the policy pursued by Bush towards Iraq.

Despite the feeling of fears that the Americans have when their bosses speak of war, some of them show superiority complex and still persist in support for the adventurist policy of their president. But, those people are also taxpayers and they pay many bucks for the war machine their bosses intend to use against other peoples. Will they think about this point?! Or, will they recall Vietnam!

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Syria: Syria Times: The Intifada enters its third year; by: Fouad Mardoud

The idea behind the Israeli approach to concluding accords with the Palestinians was to subcontract the dirty business of suppressing Arab Palestinians to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. But when that Israeli gamble was lost, the Ariel Sharon’s government decided to brush it aside and install a new government more favourable to Israel’s interests and demand. As a result, the Israeli casualties since Sharon’s military offensive began far outnumber those killed and injured during the past three decades. It is a war in every sense of the word. It is the last thing wanted by the peoples of the Middle East.

It shows that the extremist factions in Israel feel that they are winning the war, and time was on their side especially in the aftermath of the September 11's events in New York and Washington. So they must look to Israeli military power to mobilize hostility and to achieve their goals in destroying the already stalled peace process and strengthen their grip on the occupied territories.

The tragedy is classical, men and women of all ages are being caught and killed, homes demolished, and whole cities are being besieged and demolished. Tanks and armed gunships attack populated areas and shell them mercilessly. And the draconian measures that the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has ordered have hurt Palestinian as well as Israeli civilians.

Palestinians have little choice. The Israeli military offensive against them is intolerable, deadly, and damaging, and they must express this in deeds of resistance as well as in words. They argue about the credibility of all those accords with the Israelis if they and their children are not safe in the heart of their cities and villages. And who can urge patience on them when their death toll soars, and their misery and humiliation mount?

When Palestinians said resistance and armed resistance they certainly meant against the Israeli occupation of their lands. The Intifada has already entered its third year, and the vicious military offensive has failed to quell it.

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Lebanon: Daily Star Online: Islamic governance needs radical reform

The Arab and Islamic worlds are under tremendous strain these days. There is no denying that these difficulties stem in part from the policies of an American president who assumes that he has a right to change other peoples’ leaders and systems of government. But the relationship between our problems and outside influences is a circumstantial one. At the core of the crisis looming over the region lies a damnable failure to adapt, a crippling condition that has consistently caused this part of the world to lag behind its counterparts elsewhere. Whatever George W. Bush’s plans are for the region, they are a symptom of what we have done to ourselves, not the cause.

The “golden ages” of various Islamic and pre-Islamic civilizations, from city-states to vast empires, were not mere experiences that happened by coincidence. They were the result of a commitment to excellence. Some of those civilizations shone brightly for only brief periods, while others lasted for centuries. But the region that produced them was able to continually reinvent itself, repeatedly amalgamating the experiences and territories of faltering entities into new ones. Frequently the new whole was greater than the sum of its parts, providing new vigor with which to make societies richer, more harmonious, and better able to withstand challenges from outside and/or expand into the realms of other cultures.

These civilizations were anything but perfect, but for hundreds of years they were far more advanced than their contemporaries in neighboring lands. Our doctors could cure what theirs could not even identify; our warriors crushed theirs on the field of battle; our mathematicians were testing the limits of human comprehension when theirs were struggling with simple division; our intellectuals even preserved the greatest works ever produced by theirs because their religious leaders thought them blasphemous.

Then it all went away, and like the beginning, the end did not happen by osmosis. The last Muslim empires crumbled because they had lost the zeal and vision of their predecessors. The much-lamented Crusades and the subsequent era of colonialism inflicted frightful damage, but how did it come to pass that we became so vulnerable to peoples who had once trembled before our power? Why did our economies grow weak by comparison? Why did our systems of governance fail to modernize to make more productive use of natural and human resources? Why did our armaments and strategies not keep pace with developments abroad?

The short answer has to do with a mistake that was repeated by even the most glorious of our empires and remains a fatal flaw to this day: The leader has always been the law. Rather than having developed systems in which affairs large and small are all regulated by rules that apply to all, we remain prisoners of sickly set-ups that allow the rich and powerful to play God. Where leaders are above the law, no private citizen can truly be free. And where people are not free, societies in general cannot help but to crumble from the bottom up  and from the inside out.

A prime example of the failures engendered by hobbled legal systems has been the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. Individual rulers have sometimes favored particular communities in a bargain that involved protection against persecution by the majority in exchange for unquestioning loyalty to the regime. But that ad hoc environment offered little solace under less “tolerant” caliphs, princes, or sultans and often made these same minorities the instruments by which colonial powers implemented the dictum of “divide and rule.”

We remain severely deficient in this area, and therefore whole sections of our populations are potential fifth columns because we deny them what is rightfully theirs. The Turkish government spent generations denying the very existence of the Kurdish people, let alone their right to be educated in their own language. The Iraqi government has murdered tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites. The Algerian government treats Berbers like unwanted chattel. The Sudanese government has waged war against the freedom of Christians and animists to practice their religions. The Iranian government makes life miserable for Bahais. We all mistreat Jews to varying degrees, including those who are avowedly anti-Zionist. Bahrain recently granted citizenship to 1,000 “stateless Arabs,” but even that step was too long overdue to earn more than faint praise.

Muslim governments did not set out to persecute minorities. Instead, this is the inevitable fruit of rule by personal fiats rather than immutable laws. The whims and prejudices of individuals were destined to become the caprices and paranoias of the state.

The situation of minorities is especially instructive because the rights of majorities in Muslim countries are in fact just as fragile. Minorities are targets of convenience for governments that are instinctively hostile to the unknown, but that just makes members of privileged “castes” targets of opportunity. They have no voice either, no avenue by which to safely and successfully challenge a miscreant state. No government that betrays its own citizens deserves their allegiance.

Despite what George W. Bush seems to think, there is no need for Muslim societies to reshape themselves in America’s image. Instead, we need to mold our future by borrowing from our own past.
Once we were the undisputed masters of adapting the ideas of the “Other” to fit our own requirements and traditions. We can  and must  do that again.

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Lebanon: Daily Star Online - A ‘globalized’ Iraq war  even if it’s fought by only two states Joseph Samaha is the editor in chief of the Beirut daily As-Safir. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star

Foreign policy was almost completely absent as an issue in the last American presidential election.
The contest was between the most interventionist of isolationists, George W. Bush, and the most isolationist of interventionists, Al Gore. It was seen as very strange at the time that foreign policy should not figure in a battle in which the winner would play a pivotal role in global affairs, thanks to America’s unique standing.

The same phenomenon was repeated just a year later in the French legislative and presidential elections. This was remarkable if only because France  while admitting its status as a medium-sized power  has never abandoned its belief that it still has something to say to the world, more than other major powers like Japan and Germany. Even discussion of European affairs was conspicuously absent in the French elections, although such issues could not be seen as foreign in a European Union country.
Foreign affairs lay at the heart of the recent German general election, for instance. Ironically, the Germans, weighed down by the heavy burden of their history, had never sought a role in global politics since the end of World War II. It was enough for them to declare allegiance to NATO.

The one foreign policy issue that dominated the German election was Iraq. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (from the Green Party) turned the issue of the impending Anglo-American war on Iraq into their No. 1 election issue, playing to the German electorate’s inherent pacifism as well as their exasperation with the US.

Using this strategy, Schroeder and Fischer succeeded in minimizing the losses they would have incurred had the elections been fought on economic and social matters. Realizing the appeal of anti-war posturing, their conservative opponents were forced to compete with them on their terms. The result was that Germany risked damaging its long-standing relationship with the United States for the sake of maintaining a distinctive anti-war stance.

Now it is the turn of the United States itself. In a few weeks time, Americans go to the polls for mid-term congressional elections. It is obvious that the war against Iraq will dominate the domestic pre-election debate. Some Democrats have already accused the administration of politicizing the prospective war for electoral gain. Responding, President Bush accused the Democrats of denying him “the ability to protect our national security,” which led an incensed Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to demand an apology.

Many congressmen have been trying to tap into prevailing pro-war sentiment among voters by expressing exaggerated support for hawkish administration policies. Democrats have accused Republican rivals of using the war as a “marketing gimmick.”

At any rate, all attempts to move the debate on to other issues such as corporate fraud, the collapsing stock market, the growing budget deficit and slowing economic growth, failed.

It is quite possible that Bush will avenge his father’s election defeat to former President Bill Clinton. Clinton defeated Bush the elder  fresh from victory in the 1991 Gulf War  with the slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Yet today, interest in the economy seems to be taking second place. In other words, “it’s the war, stupid.”

The same trend can be surmised  albeit to a lesser degree  in the campaigns for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Turkey. The fact that the Iraq question has not come to the fore is not only because of the economic crisis, which shook Turkish society to the core, but also because it is the prerogative of the country’s powerful  and unelected  military.

It is easy for Iraqis to feel somewhat cocky, especially when they see how crucial their fate is in determining the fates of other peoples. The facts, however, should convince them to be modest; for the only important factor in the equation is that they will be confronting the United States.

The world is standing at a crossroads. The course of action Washington chooses to take will determine the nature of international relations for many years to come. Will the world continue to live in a world order ruled by international law, familiar institutions, established relations and long-standing conventions? Or will it be a new post-Cold War world in which the US reigns supreme, especially after it has apparently decided since Sept. 11 to put its supremacy into effect?

According to all indications, it is the latter possibility that will prevail. Even if token recognition was given to the old order, the reality will be that the US will want to exploit its supremacy to the limit. And since other nations realize this, and recognize that their future relations with Washington are in the balance, they are using their elections (with Iraq as the main issue) as referenda on what they want the future of international relations to look like.

If Washington continues on its present course, all major international institutions will be shaken to the core. Bush stated it clearly in his Sept. 12 speech to the UN General Assembly: “We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather. We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. And, delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand as well.”

Earlier in his speech, Bush had pointedly asked: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?”

The implication is that relevance in tomorrow’s world can only come from blind obedience to the superpower. The punishment for revolt will be irrelevance. That was what Bush himself said after months of total contempt for all that the international community agreed upon, from the Kyoto Protocol to biological weapons and from the International Criminal Court to all the issues raised at the Earth summit in Johannesburg.

Even NATO’s future will be in doubt if the current splits continue and the Franco-German axis succeeds in challenging Washington.

NATO, which lost part of its significance in the Afghan war and the ongoing “war on terror,” is threatened with further marginalization if it fails to kowtow to the US.

Ironically, NATO is also threatened with veiled marginalization if it submits to Washington.
The same can be said of relations between the US on the one hand and Russia and China on the other.
And it is no secret that every Arab and Muslim state in the world believes that the worst that can happen to it is to embark on a confrontation with the American empire.

This applies to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and every other country that might find itself having to participate in the coming war without considering public opinion.

The war on Iraq (which is a near certainty now), even if it is waged by America alone (meaning without Britain), will be “globalized” in the sense that it will usher in a new world era shaped by a single country.

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Editorial

The United Arab Emirates: Al-Khaleej daily, Oct. 13 - More that occupation

Now the  US has revealed its real goals, it wants to put her hand on Iraq, and to appoint an American military governor to be a prime minister to run the affairs of the country. With this however, all justifications and allegations marketed by the US so far about Iraq,  including that it poses a threat against its neighbors and possessing weapons of mass destruction are not valid any more.

We are facing an open and explicit American announcement of colonizing Iraq, subjugating its people to occupation, controlling it capabilities,  abrogating its independence and sovereignty. This however imposes a question on whether there is a plan to redraw the map of the region in accordance with the American interests/ it is certain. Why then the US will not be satisfied with waging war against Iraq and talks about occupying it. The Arabs are heading towards a grave situation, and towards a new chapter of conspiracies, which will decide the destiny of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the seen future.

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Lebanon: Arab Press - Fueling fundamentalism  on our side and theirs

As the US Congress gives President George W. Bush a free hand to initiate military action against Iraq, Arab commentators wonder if his administration will also be able to browbeat the UN Security Council into doing the same.

In assessing the question, Raghida Dergham, New York bureau chief of the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, argues in her weekly commentary that the weakest link in the chain of enduring international opposition to an American war on Iraq is the increasingly submissive attitude of the Arab world.

“There’s a sense of resignation to the inevitability of war in the Arab countries” based on the perception that the Bush administration has decided to attack Iraq regardless of how much it complies with UN disarmament demands, she writes. “This resignation is partly due to a fatalistic mentality and partly to the Arabs’ traditional self-marginalization once they decide that the great powers have made up their minds.”

Some Arabs also feel that the status quo in Iraq, the combination of Saddam Hussein’s regime and sanctions, could not be worse for the Iraqi people, and that any change  even via war  might allow a process of democratization to begin that would also make its influence felt elsewhere in the region. That attitude points towards a desire not just to be rid of Saddam and sanctions, but also to see the other Arab regimes  or at least their thinking and behavior  radically changed, according to Dergham.
“Many of the Arab regimes, for their part, are focused on surviving in power and believe submission to US dictates is their safeguard, whereas challenging the American decision to wage war on Iraq would make them targeted,” she writes. Others blame the Iraqi leadership, “both for what it did in the past and what it will do in future if it fails to comply fully with international demands.”

As a result, “yesterday, the official Arab position was opposed to war on Iraq. Today, that position is expressed in terms of willingness to go along with any war resolution if it is issued by the UN Security Council, on grounds that Chapter VII of the Charter is binding on all nations,” Dergham writes.

“Yesterday, Arab officialdom was actively engaged in averting the specter of war on Iraq. Today, it is studiously distancing itself from the Iraqi leadership, while sending it the clear message that it faces a choice between submission and invasion.”

This is dangerous, because it could make the Iraqi leadership feel that its climb down over arms inspections has gone unappreciated, and that the other Arab leaders have abandoned it just when it needs them. It could react by “adopting an attitude of ‘what befalls me should befall my enemy’ if it concludes that everyone is determined to be rid of it,’” she warns. “The problem with Iraq’s neighbors is that they are convinced the Bush administration will invade Iraq whatever its leadership does and have resigned themselves to that reading of the decision.”

As a result, the Arabs “are failing to participate in the formulation of their fate,” Dergham writes, and that is “what the advocates of war are waging on.” For the Bush administration’s war plans still face resistance from the American public  despite the congressional vote (296-133 in the House of Representatives and 77-23 in the Senate)  and from the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, chiefly France and Russia.

Both countries are trying to avert the American drive to war, “but they are not being helped by Arab resignation to the idea that war is inevitable because the Americans have decided on it.”

Abdelbari Atwan, publisher/editor of the pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi, sees the recent attack on US Marines exercising in Kuwait as a foretaste of the kind of Arab popular backlash that a war on Iraq could provoke.

He writes that no one could have imagined that the opening shot of the “Third Gulf War” would be fired in “Kuwait, the Arab state most loyal to Washington, and whose people are the most scornful of Arabism, the most affluent and pampered, and the most enamored of American Marines.

“It is ironic that while the traditional centers of radicalism vis-à-vis the US  such as Egypt, Syria, Sudan and Yemen  have turned to moderation, the traditional centers of moderation in the Gulf have begun turning to radicalism  and we’re talking here about peoples, not regimes,” Atwan stresses.

But the Bush administration is beating the drums of war against Iraq without the slightest understanding of how much anger and hostility its behavior in the region has provoked in the minds of millions of young people in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf, he writes.

“Arab public opinion has started losing patience” with the regimes’ submission to America’s biased and oppressive policies in the region, Atwan warns. “We would not be surprised if a volcano of anger were to erupt if a blitz on Iraq were to begin, which would be seen as both unjustified and a product of shameful and humiliating official Arab impotence.”

In the wake of the attack in Kuwait, and the earlier bombing of an oil tanker off the Yemeni coast, the Bush administration “ought to appreciate that its ‘war on terror’ is doomed,” Atwan suggests. It ruined that war because it “turned a blind eye to the real terror in occupied Palestine,” and believed it could nevertheless easily get its way in the rest of the region  “a belief that may prove to be not only mistaken but highly costly.”

In a separate unsigned editorial, Al-Quds al-Arabi sees the attack on the French oil tanker in Yemen as a reaction to the way the government in Sanaa has been cracking down on local Islamist groups at the behest of the United States.

It writes that one of the Islamist factions, the Aden-Abyan Army, which is close to Al-Qaeda, issued a statement saying the assailants who carried out the attack thought they had been targeting an American vessel.

And while the Yemeni government initially insisted that the explosion was the result of an accident and not a terrorist attack  despite the resemblance to the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbor  it found it impossible to maintain that pretense for long.

“Arab governments always try to deny that any terrorist actions occur on their soil so as to avoid giving the impression of having lost control over their national security, and the Yemeni government is no exception,” it remarks.

Al-Quds al-Arabi says Yemen appears to have been targeted for two reasons: For having given the FBI, under duress, free rein to operate against, arrest and interrogate suspected Al-Qaeda associates in the country, and for having gone overboard in arresting, torturing and harassing Muslim fundamentalists itself.

A recent example was the arrest in Yemen of the father, brother and several relatives of Osama bin Laden’s last wife, even though they had no real connection to the Al-Qaeda leader, as though merely being related to him by marriage made them complicit in Sept. 11.

Countless Islamists have been harassed and mistreated throughout the Arab world, the paper says, “and the Arab governments have been harsher on their citizens than the Americans, who were actually targeted by the said attacks, in most cases gratuitously insulting and torturing them.”

It is that kind of thing that turns bin Laden into a “hero” in the eyes of most Kuwaitis  as a recent opinion poll showed  “and paves the way for the emergence of organizations even more extreme than Al-Qaeda,” Al-Quds al-Arabi says.

Elsewhere in the Arab press, commentators sound the alarm about the rise of intolerance and religious fundamentalism in the United States, following a spate of virulently anti-Muslim comments made prominent conservative Christian leaders there.

While there has been much indignation in the Arab media recently about Reverend Jerry Falwell’s description of the Prophet Mohammed as “a terrorist,” Fahed Fanek writes in the Jordanian daily Al-Rai that this is only one example among many.

Another politically well-connected preacher, Reverend Franklin Graham declared Islam “a very evil and wicked religion,” while leading TV evangelist Pat Robertson called the notion of Islam being a peaceful religion “fraudulent” and described the Prophet Mohammed as a “wild-eyed fanatic” and “brigand,” he writes.

Fanek says it is ironic that Bush should be admonishing other countries for alleged religious intolerance when people who constitute a key part of his core political and ideological constituency make such bigoted statements.

The State Department recently issued a report faulting a number of Arab and Muslim countries for failing to respect religious minorities, he writes, “but it did not have a word to say about the racist fundamentalism in America itself, of which Christianity is innocent.”

Saad Mehio similarly wonders in the UAE daily Al-Khaleej: “Are we beginning to slide unwittingly into a war of fundamentalisms  the sole, legitimate and true representative of the war of civilizations?”

Anyone listening to the recent diatribes of leading American right-wing evangelists allied to Bush would be excused for thinking they were in Taleban-era Afghanistan rather than “in the land of ‘Uncle MacWorld’  the leader of post-modern globalization,” he writes.

Islam-bashing has become “the fastest-growing American political, ideological discourse these days,” Mehio writes. While the demonization of Islam in the West is hardly new, having been with us since the eighth century in different guises, its latest reincarnation in Bush’s America “is not just old wine in new bottles,” he writes.

For the forces of religious fundamentalism in America that espouse it are fast evolving into a powerful and influential political force.

“And they are likely to grow even stronger now, following the emergence of a grand alliance between neocons, American nationalists, and both Protestant fundamentalists and Jewish fundamentalists in America and Israel,” he says. This coalition “instills terror even in the Americans themselves,” says Mehio. Both The Washington Post and New York Times have recently taken to berating President Bush, accusing him not just of supporting this coalition, but also of seeking to encourage Jewish Americans to defect from the liberal camp to the extreme conservative camp.

“When matters reach that stage of fundamentalist mobilization in America, we cannot fail to put our hands on our hearts out of fear that the war of fundamentalisms has already begun, without us knowing,” writes Mehio.

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