“There is no doubt Saddam Hussein is a despicable dictator,” Wright told Powell. But she believed U.S. military forces shouldn’t be used without Security Council compliance. “In our press for military action now, we have created deep chasms in the international community and in important international organizations,” Wright said. “America has lost the incredible sympathy [resulting from the Sept. 11 attacks] of most of the world because of our policy toward Iraq.”

Wright’s government career spanned the worlds of diplomacy and military affairs. She joined the Foreign Service in 1986, and asked to be assigned to a position as a Defense Department attaché. At the time, however, women weren’t allowed to hold those jobs.

In 1997, Wright managed the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Sierra Leone and of Americans living there when a coup d’etat took place. She assisted in the evacuation of a number of diplomats from other countries, as well, and was given the State Department Award for Heroism for her work.
....

Since sending her letter to Powell, Wright said she has received about 150 e-mails from Foreign Service officers around the world expressing support for her actions.

John Brown, a career diplomat who also resigned this month, has said there is an air of dissent in the State Department over the administration’s policies. But it’s rare that Foreign Service officers use public resignations as a means of protest, or an attempt to influence administration policy.

Nevertheless, the resignation of three senior diplomats is significant because the individuals had invested so many years climbing the ladder of the Foreign Service. ...

TODAY is a day of shame for the British military as it declares the Iraqi city of Basra, with a stricken population of 600,000, a "military target".

You will not read or hear those words in the establishment media that claims to speak for Britain.

But they are true. With Basra, shame is now our signature, forged by Blair and Bush.

Having destroyed its water and power supplies, cut off food supply routes and having failed to crack its human defences, they are now preparing to lay siege to Iraq's second city which is more than 40 per cent children.

the Pentagon’s response can only be seen as an implied threat to other reporters who are endeavoring to provide objective and accurate coverage of the US assault and its impact on the Iraqi population.

This is not the first time that such a message has been delivered. When the Pentagon first unveiled its plan to “embed” journalists with military units, it specifically refused to vouch for the safety of reporters operating outside Pentagon control and in fact warned journalists that using their satellite phones could make them targets for unfriendly missile fire.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

"the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."
----------
Samuel P. Huntington

"There are none so blind as those who will not look. If you are one of those who will look, take a look around. You are surrounded surrounded by millions who will not look. These are the blue pill people. Who are these blue pill people and why won t they look? "

" Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

"This comes from the CorpWatch website. I feel it's vital that all of us understand the symbiotic relationships in the military corporate complex. In this way we can make more educated choices, to not only whom we elect, but also how we spend our consumer dollars and what those dollars are funding."

March 16, 2003 -- The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago -- February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.

It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)

...One of the most frequent uses of the Nation As Person metaphor comes in the almost daily attempts to justify the war metaphorically as a "just war." The basic idea of a just war uses the Nation As Person metaphor plus two narratives that have the structure of classical fairy tales: The Self Defense Story and The Rescue Story.

In each story, there is a Hero, a Crime, a Victim, and a Villain.

... In Gulf War II, Bush II is pushing different versions of the same two story types, and this explains a great deal of what is going on in the American press and in speeches by Bush and Powell. If they can show that Saddam = Al Qaeda - that he is helping or harboring Al Qaeda, then they can make a case for the Self-defense scenario, and hence for a just war on those grounds. Indeed, despite the lack of any positive evidence and the fact that the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist bin Laden despise each other, the Bush administration has managed to convince 40 per cent of the American public of the link, just by asserting it. The administration has told its soldiers the same thing, and so our military men see themselves as going to Iraq in defense of their country.

In the Rescue Scenario, the victims are (1) the Iraqi people and (2) Saddam's neighbors, whom he has not attacked, but is seen as "threatening." That is why Bush and Powell keep on listing Saddam's crimes against the Iraqi people and the weapons he could use to harm his neighbors. Again, most of the American people have accepted the idea that Gulf War II is a rescue of the Iraqi people and a safeguarding of neighboring countries. Of course, the war threatens the safety and well-being of the Iraqi people and will inflict considerable damage on neighboring countries like Turkey and Kuwait.

And why such enmity toward France and Germany? Via the Nation As Person metaphor, they are supposed to be our "friends" and friends are supposed to be supportive and jump in and help us when we need help. Friends are supposed to be loyal. That makes France and Germany fair-weather friends! Not there when you need them.

This is how the war is being framed for the American people by the Administration and media. Millions of people around the world can see that the metaphors and fairy tales don't fit the current situation, that Gulf War II does not qualify as a just war - a "legal" war. But if you accept all these metaphors, as Americans have been led to do by the administration, the press, and the lack of an effective Democratic opposition, then Gulf War II would indeed seem like a just war.

But surely most Americans have been exposed to the facts - the lack of a credible link between Saddam and al Qaeda and the idea that large numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians (estimates are around 500,000) will be killed or maimed by our bombs. Why don't they reach the rational conclusion?

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors - conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains - physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.

It is a common folk theory of progressives that "The facts will set you free!" If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don't work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel.
...

This war is a symptom of a larger disease. The war will start presently. The fighting will be over before long. Where will the anti-war movement be then?

...As the war begins, we should look ahead to transforming the anti-war movement into a movement that powerfully articulates progressive values and changes the course of our nation to where those values take us. The war has begun a discussion about values. Let's continue it."

George Lakoff is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," University of Chicago Press, Second edition, 2002. He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.

The words used during war can have special significance - who can forget the classic "collateral damage" from the first Gulf War? E-cyclopedia will be keeping an eye out for the words being used in this conflict, and what they actually mean.

"The idiocy of this little man does not stop at making fabrications and feigning concern for the destiny of mankind, as though he were the absolute custodian of humanity, while his intent is to bring killing, destruction and death to humanity.

On this Full Moon evening (Pisces Sun, Virgo Moon--the "service" signs) I am feeling so much. A few of you have written recently and asked what I am feeling as we move toward war (or more precisely, what are my thoughts!) and this is such a hard question to answer. Of course I feel outrage and a deep sense of disbelief, all this on the surface potentially ready to explode into judgment and anger. But more deeply I have felt, and continue to feel, a deep sense of calm sadness over the inevitability of events, the "ripening of karma" as the Buddhists put it. After all, our government was not elected in the first place, and we didn't stop them, so it's hardly surprising that they are acting in ways that are not congruent with our interests. There is something much larger at work here.

One way to view it is through astrology, which shows a scenario more complex than the simple-minded events unfolding in the external daily reality. The chart of George Bush and the chart of Saddam Hussein are interlocking, along with the charts of the U.S. and Iraq. The transits to those charts are targeted in ways that seem almost supernatural, certainly fateful, and cause one to pause and reflect on destiny (both individual and collective), the ripening of karma, and the deeper reincarnational structure that holds us all in place.

The Vatican says anyone who gives up on peace will answer to God. For weeks, the Vatican has repeatedly spoken out against the possibility of war in Iraq. Pope John Paul says the use of force is a last resort and should only be considered after all peaceful means are exhausted.

The Vatican's short response to President Bush's ultimatum for Saddam Hussein says anyone who believes peace is exhausted "assumes a grave responsibility before God, his own conscience and history."

George W. Bush, with his no-frills education, may believe that God or Moses, or some other sacred advisor, gave us this as a commandment: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

It was in fact the Babylonian king Hammurabi who said it first. And he wasn't urging his own people to be more ferocious, more bloodthirsty. He was trying to make them less so. He was saying, in effect, that if you must seek revenge, you are entitled to this much of it, and not one bit more. Otherwise, you will create more people entitled to closure, until everybody in Babylonia is going to be seeking closure, and our once great country will go down the toilet of history.

Which it did.

And I thank you for your attention.

'But the Trojans dismissed the warnings as "windy nonsense" and sealed their fate. We Americans are the Greeks of our day, and as we now go to war, we should appreciate not only the beauty of the tale, but also the warnings within it.'

Many people in the world today are concerned about the current situation in Mesopotamia, specifically, the threat of war between the United States and Iraq. This is holy ground, home of one of the most ancient and venerable civilizations on Earth. A major war in this region would be a great tragedy not only for the people of region, but for all peoples everywhere. We wish to pray for peace by appealing to the oldest Goddess known from anywhere in the world, Inanna. She was worshipped thousands of years ago by the direct ancestors of the present-day Iraqi peoples. She was called Inanna when the region was known as Sumer, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, and Virgin Mary by later civilizations.