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Sunday, March 30, 2003
War Gadget roundup from Gizmodo :: Is this war a tech bonanza or what? Editorial Arab News: Of the Iraqi taxi driver suicide bomber: Davy Crockett is a hero to the Americans. Every citizen remembers the Alamo. Can Washington therefore appreciate that the Iraqi in the taxi is going to be a hero as well, when his name and his self-sacrifice become known, and that he will be a hero not just in Iraq but throughout the Arab world ? If they can imagine this, maybe the Bush White House will go the extra intellectual mile and understand that the guy in the taxi in Iraq was no more laying down his life for his president in Baghdad than the guy in the raccoon hat was dying for his president in Texas. Both men chose to die because they loved and wanted to defend their homeland. An attack against one Texan or one Iraqi was an attack against all Texans and all Iraqis. But America of course cannot ascribe to its enemies the noble and decent motives it is happy to honor among its own heroes. For Washington, there can be no equivalence between Iraqis and Americans. Yet consider this: One of them has a warmongering, bloodthirsty president, elevated to his position in a sham election, who is happy to slaughter innocents to promote his world vision. The other has Saddam Hussein. ArabNews Editorial Losing the peace:: At the same time, Operation Iraqi Freedom has been exposed as a gruesome travesty. An old-fashioned colonial war, built on lies, greed and geopolitical fantasies, it has nothing to do with 'disarming' Iraq or 'liberating' the Iraqi people. Iraq is a threat to no one. No connection has been found between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of September 11, and no evidence has been provided that Iraq has continued to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and might pass them on to terrorist groups. All this is malicious propaganda to mask the real war aims which are what they have been since 1991: to affirm America's global supremacy in a strategically vital, oil-rich part of the world, and to protect Israel's regional supremacy and its monopoly of weapons of mass destruction. Patrick Seale We are all Palestinians Now:: One of the most extraordinary developments of the war so far is how the resistance of the Iraqi population against a foreign invasion has galvanized this sentiment of anger in the Arab world. "We are all Palestinians now," as a Bedouin taxi driver puts it. One of the first things anyone mentions in Jordan - be it a Jordanian, an Egyptian, a Lebanese or a Somali refugee - is their happiness about the way the Iraqi people are resisting the "invaders" (never qualified as "liberators"). Their intuition also tells them that every extra day in this war is further humiliation to the Pentagon - especially because the real war, and not the US version, is being followed by the whole Arab world, in Arabic, through Arab satellite channels. The 'Palestinization' of Iraq By Pepe Escobar Elsewhere a similar sentiment :: We are all Iraqis now The unexpectedly stiff resistance mounted by Iraqi troops has rolled back decades of Arab humiliation, says distinguished Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah More ::"Yet for the Arabs, as galling and bitter as the sense of injured dignity has been and continues to be, it has also been disabling, creating a situation and mindset in which their choices seemed to be limited to either suicidal vengeance or abject and bitter hopelessness. It remains to be seen whether the war in Iraq will put the Arab masses on a new trajectory, one in which they fight to win, rather than just to die while maintaining some sense of their basic human dignity. But whatever the course of the war in the coming days or weeks, for the moment the Arab masses have two things going for them: They are not mice, and they are not alone." --Hani Shukrallah is managing editor of the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly
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