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In early February, the Bush administration announced plans for an Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance to oversee three agencies involved in the reconstruction of post-war Iraq: humanitarian relief, reconstruction and civil administration. Directed from the Pentagon, the head of the new office was to be Jay Garner, a retired general. Although the Pentagon would oversee reconstruction efforts, international groups and non-government organizations would not deal directly with the Defense Department. Instead, they would work with US Agency for International Development (USAID). read more

I  would like to discuss a number of reservations that I have with policies that you seem to be promoting. First, it troubles me that you interpreted the events of September 11, 2001 as attacks on our “freedom.” This isn’t the obvious conclusion. The attacks were against the most prominent symbols of our corporate economic and military systems, and terrorist leaders said that they were opposed to our military aid to Israel. In attributing the attacks to our freedom, you have made it much more difficult for the US public to understand why so many people throughout the world hate us. Without a realistic understanding of the situation, it will be impossible to effectively stem the growth of anti-US feeling. read more

Who among us can possibly imagine what being an Iraqi, living anywhere in that doomed nation, must feel like? Should each resident of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosel build a bomb shelter? Should you abandon your home in the city and flee to a village where your cousins live? Should you get out garden tools and be prepared to fight in the street? And if so, against what and whom?

Perhaps you could head for the border to a neighboring land. But which one — Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, or Jordan? Will any of them let you in? And how will you reach the border? read more

In his preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre described the callous nature of the individual bred into a colonial regime. "This imperious being," he wrote, "crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of the ‘inferior’ race will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all, there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us." read more

As troops and planes headed toward Afghanistan, few people questioned the reasons for military engagement. An enemy that didn’t hesitate to sacrifice thousands of civilian lives had ruthlessly attacked the nation’s capital and brought down New York’s tallest buildings. The identity of the chief "evildoer" also seemed self-evident: Osama bin Laden, whose al Qaeda network had struck the US before and was being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban. In the wake of such an outrage, could anyone doubt that a "war on terrorism" should begin there? read more

Upon disembarking from the Olympic Airways plane that brought me to Iraq in November 2000, I can see some of the effects of the Western-imposed sanctions. What was once a busy international airport is now a desolate strip. Two lonely planes sit as if abandoned on the vast tarmac. There are no airport personnel to speak of, no baggage carts or utility vehicles, not even any visible security. On a wall inside the empty terminal is a handmade sign in Arabic and imperfect English; it reads: "Down USA." A large portrait of Saddam Hussein gazes down upon us. His image can be found along the road to the city, in the hotel, and on various public buildings. read more