NP? Cathy's Clown

[Doug Millison]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,800216,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,800048,00.html

[...] The world is now undergoing a crash course of
political education in the new realities of global
power. In case anyone was still in any doubt about
what they might mean, the Bush doctrine (set out last
Friday in the US National Security Strategy) laid bare
the ground rules of the new imperium. The US will in
future brook no rival in power or military prowess,
will spread still further its network of garrison
bases in every continent, and will use its armed might
to promote a "single sustainable model for national
success" (its own), through unilateral pre-emptive
attacks if necessary. 

In the following week, Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld accused the German chancellor of "poisoning"
relations by daring to win an election with a
declaration of foreign policy independence. Even the
Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy felt moved to
accuse the US of "imperialism". But it has been Al
Gore, winner of the largest number of votes in the
last US presidential election, who blurted out the
unvarnished truth: that the overweening recklessness
of the US government has fostered fear across the
world, not at what "terrorists are going to do, but at
what we are going to do". [...] The planned US
invasion of Iraq will increase the threat of war
throughout the world. By legitimising pre-emptive
attacks, it will lower the threshold for the use of
force and make aggression by powerful states more
likely. It will encourage nuclear proliferation, as
states rush to get hold of some protective deterrent.
It will damage the fabric of international law and
multilateral treaties. It will encourage terrorism by
pouring oil on the flames of anti-western rage. 

It also risks creating a humanitarian disaster in Iraq
- on top of the terrible human toll exacted by
sanctions. Nor is it easy to believe that a
US-orchestrated regime change in Iraq will lead to
democracy, or that the US would be likely to accept
the kind of government free elections might produce.
The last time Britain and the US called the shots in
Baghdad, in 1958, there were 10,000 political
prisoners, parties were banned, the press was censored
and torture was commonplace. [...] "


"Saddam Hussein has brutalized and repressed the Iraqi
people for more than 20 years and more recently has
sought to acquire weapons of mass destruction that
would never be useful to him inside Iraq. So President
Bush is right to call him an international threat.
Given these realities, anyone who opposes U.S.
military action to dethrone him has a responsibility
to suggest how he might otherwise be ushered out the
backdoor of Baghdad. Fortunately there is an answer:
civilian-based, nonviolent resistance by the Iraqi
people, developed and applied in accordance with a
strategy to undermine Saddam's basis of power.

Unfortunately, when this suggestion is made publicly,
hard-nosed policymakers and most commentators dismiss
the idea out of hand, saying that nonviolence won't
work against a tyrant as pathological as Saddam. That
is because they don't know how to distinguish between
what has popularly been regarded as "nonviolence" and
the strategic nonviolent action that has hammered
authoritarian regimes to the point of defenestrating
dictators and liberating people from many forms of
subjugation.

The reality is that history-making nonviolent
resistance is not usually undertaken as an act of
moral display; it does not typically begin by putting
flowers in gun barrels and it does not end when
protesters disperse to go home. It involves the use of
a panoply of forceful sanctions—strikes, boycotts,
civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of
government, even nonviolent sabotage—in accordance
with a strategy for undermining an oppressor's pillars
of support. It is not about making a point, it's about
taking power.

Another misconception about nonviolent resistance that
policymakers and the media entertain is that there is
some sort of inverse relationship between the degree
of severity of a regime's repressive instincts and the
likelihood of a civilian-based movement's success in
overturning it. Three cases come to mind in
illustrating that repression is not typically the
decisive factor in the dynamics of these struggles.
[...] 
continues at:

http://www.sojo.net/magazine/index.cfm/action/sojourners/issue/soj0209/article/020910.html


http://mit.midco.net/deepow3/clown.html







=====
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