Their Iraq Homework

As the war talk twisted and turned through the week, it was difficult to keep track, or make sense. The WASHINGTON POST8217;s columnist app...

As the war talk twisted and turned through the week, it was difficult to keep track, or make sense. The WASHINGTON POST8217;s columnist appeared to understand that predicament. Proxies, he wrote, are of limited value in forming a view on the question: Is Iraq a serious enough threat to justify an American-led assault? In a confusing time, he advised: 8216;8216;Do your own homework on Iraq, its dictator and history.8217;8217; And 8212; for objectivity8217;s sake, and though the columnist didn8217;t say it 8212; on America, its president and history.

But for those daunted by that task, ready-made opinion abounded in the US media. In THE NEW YORK TIMES, Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser to George W., laid out Washington8217;s case. Countries that decide to disarm, she wrote, 8216;8216;lead inspectors to weapons and production sites, answer questions before they are asked8230;8217;8217; In contrast, Iraq has a 8220;high level political commitment8221; to 8220;maintain and conceal8221; its weapons and its declaration to the UN is 8216;a 12,200 page lie8217;.

In the NYT, columnist Thomas Friedman was also 8216;Thinking about Iraq8217;. But for Friedman, this war is not about disarmament. Regime change, he said, is the prize. Because what really threatens 8220;open, Western, liberal8221; societies is not the 8220;deterrables8221; like Saddam and his weapons, but the 8220;undeterrables8221; 8212; 8216;the boys who did 9/11.8217;

War? No. Saddam? No!

This week the case for war was met with increasingly louder resistance, especially outside the US. Reports of anti-war demonstrations poured in from all over the world. There were protests on the streets of major cities in the US as well, and the NYT wrote that the protestors are 8216;8216;raising some nuanced questions in the name of patriotism about the premises, cost and aftermath of the war8230;8217;8217; But those questions, are they too nuanced? 8216;8216;Two things numb a protest movement8217;8217; analysed Norman Mailer, grand old man of American letters, who acted as a journalist in his account of the protests against the Vietnam War. 8216;8216;One is 9/118217;8217;, he told the NYT. 8216;8216;The second thing is Saddam Hussein himself8230; Ho Chi Minh had that wonderful saintly look that made life much easier for a good protest movement8217;8217;.

Ending weeks of hedging, France and Germany declared their opposition to the US on Iraq. The French announcement 8212; that France would not back a second UN resolution authorising war and may use its veto 8212; set off ripples. Britain8217;s GUARDIAN cheered France on: 8216;8216;Deft French diplomatic footwork to head off an attack on Iraq presents a sharp contrast with our own government8217;s unpopular slumped-shouldered trudge towards war.8217;8217;

In a poem for the same paper, distinguished playwright Harold Pinter wrote: 8216;8216;Here they go again,/ The Yanks in their armoured parade8230; And all the dead air is alive/ With the smell of America8217;s God.8217;8217;

Middle Of Nowhere?

Ankara called a summit of all the major Middle East countries to discuss the much speculated about 8216;Arab Alternative8217;. The region8217;s papers frontpaged reports of eleventh-hour consultations ahead of the meeting to avert war.

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Writing in Egypt8217;s AL-AHRAM WEEKLY, Edward Said said that in this 8220;panorama of desolation8221;, what catches the eye is the 8216;8216;utter passivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole.8217;8217; For Said, 8216;8216;Technology, modernisation and certainly globalisation are not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and history8230;8217;8217;

Said asked: 8216;8216;Hasn8217;t the time come for us to collectively demand and try to formulate a genuinely Arab alternative8230;? 8230; Will no one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our future that isn8217;t based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz8230;?8217;8217;

Preity Newsmaker

And India was in the international news for reasons Preity and not so pretty. Actress Preity Zinta gave her first interview after testifying in the Bharat Shah case to THE WASHINGTON POST. The POST applauded Zinta. The star herself sounded piquantly un-heroic. Her motives for breaking the code of silence on the Bollywood-mafia connection: not just to 8216;do the right thing8217;, but also 8216;wanting to get out of court8217; quickly8230;

The situation with Iraq and North Korea sent old war-gamers swarming back to their computers and for most, the New York Times pointed out, the best area to look is South Asia. A scenario compiled by Bruce G. Blair, president of the Centre of Defense Information, began with Pakistan dropping a bomb on Indian troops and ended with about 420,000 Pakistanis and 600,000 Indians dead. Even that, said the haughty Blair, presumed a level of decision-making and intelligence that 8216;simply wasn8217;t there8217;.

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PS: The ECONOMIST had a solution. For the likes of Saddam Hussein, 8216;8216;a secure island, tropical perhaps but not desert, where discarded despots could pass their declining years in comfort and safety8230;8217;8217; Despotamia 8212; where tyrants could slink off, guaranteed immunity from prosecution, plus a lifetime supply of gin and tonic8230;