Lifeboat News - Seeing Ourselves 0

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), about 35,615 children died from conditions of starvation on September 11, 2001#

RELEVANT STATISTICS

* Victims: 35,615 children (source: FAO)
* Where: poor countries
* Special tv programs: none
* Newspaper articles: none
* Messages from the president: none
* Solidarity acts: none
* Minutes of silence: none
* Victims mournings: none
* Organized forums: none
* Pope messages: none
* Alert level: zero
* Military mobilization: none

# nearly 13 million children per year

On the military in general, the USA spends more than the rest of the G7 countries combined

Source

The U.S. military budget request for Fiscal Year 2002 is $343.2 billion. (The U.S. military budget request for Fiscal Year 2001 was $305 billion -- five times larger than the Russian budget, the second largest spender.

And Congress had increased that budget request to $310 billion. This was up from approximately $288.8 billion, in 2000.)

The US military budget is more than twenty-two times as large as the combined spending of the seven "rogue" states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria).

It is more than the combined spending of the next twelve nations.

The United States and its close allies spend more than the rest of the world combined, accounting for 63% of all military spending.

Together they spend over thirty times more than the seven rogue states.

The seven potential "enemies," Russia and China together spend $106 billion, less than one-half (35%) the U.S. military budget.

Global military spending has declined from $1.2 trillion in 1985 to $785 billion in 1998. During that time the U.S. share of total military spending rose from 30% to 36% in Fiscal Year 1999

In 1997 alone, half of USA's aid was related to military aid/trade -- and most of that was to countries that are already wealthy, like Israel, or Turkey (which is the largest recipient of US military aid and has often been criticized for its human rights violations and crackdowns). Compare that to very poor countries like Sub-Saharan African nations that received very little aid.

With President Bush coming in, he has promised an additional 45 billion dollars over nine years to the military budget.

A NEW ENERGY CRISIS:
When Will We Ever Learn ?

The French fishermen led the revolt, but it soon spread across the Channel. Everyone is up in arms about the high price of fuel. Understandably they are confused and look for someone to blame, finding ready candidates in a greedy Chancellor or the OPEC sheikhs. They are right to blame the Government: not for the high price of oil but for their record of denial and obfuscation in facing up to the reality of oil depletion. Had the people been better informed, they would have devoted their energies not into blockades but to finding viable long-term solutions.

The world is now entering a new oil crisis. The roots of it have been evident for a long time to those analysts who give due weight to the endowment of oil in nature, its distribution and above all its depletion. Others, with a blind faith in technology and market forces, have failed to read the signals.

Oil has to be found before it can be produced, meaning that there is an obvious relationship between discovery and production. It follows that the peak of discovery in the 1960s, which is now an historical fact, has to be followed by a corresponding peak of production. When the numbers are added up, the evidence indicates that such a peak for conventional oil will arrive around 2005, and about five years later for all hydrocarbons, assuming no radical change in demand.

Oil is most unevenly distributed for geological reasons, with about half the remaining conventional oil, lying in just five Middle East countries. Furthermore, the expropriations of the 1970s distorted the normal economic pattern of depletion. It forced the industry to explore and exploit the relatively difficult and expensive places like the North Sea or Alaska as fast as possible, leaving the principal OPEC countries with control of the relatively cheap and easy oil, found long ago. This predictably led to price volatility.

The oil industry has suffered throughout its history from "boom and bust", which is inherent in the very nature of finding and producing a liquid resource, concentrated by Nature into a few preferred places. The industry has accordingly always needed a degree of overall control that runs in the face of free market capitalism. Such control has been exercised variously by Standard Oil, the Texas Railroad Commission, the major oil companies and finally OPEC itself. Up until now, such regulation has sought to limit excess production to support price in an environment of surplus capacity. The fundamental nature of the regulation however changes at peak production when the need is to produce more not less. The Texas Railroad Commission ceased US pro-rationing when that country peaked in 1970. North Sea production is at peak now and set to fall at a high rate. The FSU peaked in 1988, and non-Gulf OPEC countries have also peaked. It means that the control of the supply of world oil rests squarely with the five Middle East countries.

This seems so obvious, yet it is not widely understood. Even the OPEC governments themselves fail to fully grasp the strength of the position that has been forced upon them. They have a misplaced fear that rising prices will encourage non-Middle East production, spurred by new technology and market forces. They fear that high prices will prompt a move to alternative fuels, including gas, coal and nuclear power, as well as energy savings and eventually renewable energy..

In reality, non Middle East production is inexorably set to decline through natural depletion. Production in the North Sea will halve in about ten years. Accordingly, the share of conventional oil production coming from the five Middle East countries is set to rise. It was 38% in 1973 at the time of the first oil shock, but had fallen to 18% in 1985, as already found new provinces in Alaska, the North Sea and elsewhere delivered flush production from giant fields. They are always found early in the exploration process. Share has been rising since 1985 to reach 30% to-day. This time, it is set to continue to rise because there are no major new conventional provinces ready to deliver, or indeed in sight. By 2010, it is likely that the Middle East will be asked to supply 50% given that demand can be held steady by rising prices.

The world has huge deposits of non-conventional oil in the form of heavy oil, bitumen, oil shale, polar and deepwater oil but it is perforce a slow and expensive business, carrying environmental costs. It cannot accordingly have any material impact on peak,

Spare capacity can mean many things. A shut-in Middle East well can be re-opened to provide an instant high rate of flow, but infill drilling, enhanced recovery techniques and exploration can deliver less, taking much investment, work and above all time. The OPEC producers have to run ever faster to stand still, as they desperately seek to offset the natural decline of their old fields, which hold most of their oil. 90% of the world's oil comes from fields more than twenty years old, and 70% from fields more that thirty years old.

It transpires that there are very few shut-in wells anywhere. The world is just about out of operational spare capacity and an improvident draw on stocks has left them at a 24 year low.

OPEC has no good reason for raising production when its revenues increase by not doing so. The Western consuming countries also have no good reason to press OPEC to increase production. It would merely mean that the inevitable global peak becomes higher and the subsequent decline steeper. While increased production would solve a temporary price surge, it offers no long-term solution to the West.

OPEC now finds itself in a dilemma as it begins to question its fundamental role. Is its traditional function of rationing production to support price giving way to a new policy of having to exert pressure on its members to increase production to meet the consuming nation's demands and possibly threats, even military threats? It is ironic that Britain and the USA continue to bomb Iraq, whose oil they now desperately need.

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to understand the simple concept of depletion. Think of a glass of beer. The first sip tastes good, but your brow creases when the glass is half empty and you realise that you have drunk more than remains. When the glass is empty, all you can do is ask for another unless it is closing time. It is the same with oil. Peak comes more or less at the midpoint of depletion, when the glass is half empty.

The reason why people don't understand the situation better is that the public data on reserves is grossly unreliable, subject to lax definition and poor reporting practices. The industry has systematically under-reported the size of discoveries for good regulatory and commercial reasons. Accordingly, the reported reserves have appeared to grow over time, giving the misleading impression that more was being found than was the case. In fact, the world consumes four barrels of conventional oil for every one it finds. The upward revision is mistakenly attributed to advances in technology when it is simply in the reporting. Technology holds production as high as possible for as long as possible,which increases profit, but has little impact on the reserves themselves. A field contains what it contains because it was filled in the geological past.

BP wins the prize for the most oblique reference to the depletion of oil, its principal asset, when it changes its logo to a sunflower and says that BP stands for Beyond Petroleum.

The world faces an oil crisis. Oil production is at peak. We depend on it for transport and agriculture. World trade depends on transport. We are not running out of oil, but we are facing the natural peak of the fuel that has driven our economy and prosperity for most of the last Century. What should we do about it? The first step is to satisfy ourselves as to the facts, and then face them head on. The second step is to use the oil we have intelligently to help us over the transition as a matter of urgency and priority as we find new ways of using less. We have only to look at our traffic choked streets to see how wasteful we are.

The message for government is clear. Get off your knees and stop begging OPEC for help. Face the situation squarely. Inform the people honestly so that they will support the measures to be taken, however draconian, and then get to work on a new direction. Think of 1940.

Also see:
THE IMMINENT PEAK OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION
A presentation to a House of Commons All-Party Committee on July 7th 1999 by C.J. Campbell Read it here.

THE END OF CHEAP OIL
by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere,
Scientific American, March 1998
Read it here

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FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH
A Program of Development Policy Research, Analysis and Action

Issue # 31September 18, 2001

Endless War?

The calculated attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have left many aghast but the raw emotions, as history will show must not be the basis for the retaliation. As a more in depth analysis will show, terrorism should be addressed not by shooting down its symptoms but by understanding and facing its roots.

By Walden Bello*

The assault on the World Trade Center was horrific, despicable, and unpardonable, but it is important not to lose perspective, especially a historical one. For a response that is dictated primarily by fury such as that now displayed by some American politicians, while understandable, is likely to simply serve as one more proof for Santayana's dictum that those who do not remember history are bound to repeat it.

The Moral Equation

The scale and consequences of the World Trade Center attack are massive indeed, but this was not the worst act of mass terrorism in US history, as some US media are wont to claim. The over 5000 lives lost in New York are irreplaceable, but one must not forget that the atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 210,000 people, most of them civilians, most perishing instantaneously. But one may object that you can't really compare the World Trade Center attack to the nuclear bombings since, after all, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targets in a war. But why not, since the purpose of the nuclear bombings was not mainly to destroy military or infrastructural targets, but to terrorize and destroy the civilian population? Indeed, the whole allied air campaign against Germany and Japan in 1944-45, which produced the firestorms in Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo, that killed tens of thousands had as its central aim to kill and maim as many civilians as possible.Similarly, during the Korean War, terror bombing of civilians was the policy of the US Air Force's Far Eastern Command, which was instructed to pulverize anything that moved in enemy territory. So successful was the policy that in the summer of 1951, the commander was able to report that "there is no structure left to be targeted."

During the Cold War, mass elimination of the enemy's civilian population, alongside the destruction of his armed forces or industry, was institutionalized in the strategy of massive nuclear retaliation that lay at the center of the doctrine of Deterrence. In Vietnam, where the US was frustrated by the fact that combatants and civilians were indistinguishable, indiscriminate killing of civilians was a central part of a "counterinsurgency war" in which 20,000 civilians were systematically assassinated under the CIA's Operation Phoenix Program in the Mekong Delta.

But must not such actions against civilians be judged in the context of a broader strategic objective of sapping the enemy's will to fight and thus bring the war to a conclusion? But then how different is this justification from the terrorists' aim to change the foreign policy of the US government by eroding the support of the country's civilian population?

The point is not to engage in a "maleficent calculus," as Jeremy Bentham would have called this exercise, but to point out that the US government hardly possesses the high ground in the current moral equation. Indeed, one can say that terrorists like Osama bin Laden, an ex-CIA protege, have learned their lessons on the strategic targeting of the civilian population from Washington's traditional strategy of total warfare, where damage to the civilian population is not simply seen as collateral but as essential to achieving the ends of war.

The Clausewitzian Calculus

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center assault, the perpetrators of the dastardly deed have been called "irrational" or "madmen" or people that embody evil. This is understandable as an emotional reaction but dangerous as a basis for policy. The truth is the perpetrators of the deed were very rational. If they were indeed people connected with Osama bin Laden, their goal was most likely to raise the costs to the United States to its maintaining its current policies in the Middle East, which they consider unjust and inequitable, and this was their way of doing it. They very rationally picked the targets and weapons to be used, paying attention not only to maximum destruction but also to maximum symbolism. The choice of the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon as the targets, and American and United Airlines planes as the delivery vehicles doubling as warheads, was the product of cold-blooded thinking and planning. The loss of their own lives was factored into the calculation. What we saw was a rational calculus of means to achieve a desired end. In the view of these people, terrorism, like war, is the extension of politics by other means. These are Clausewitzian minds, and the worst mistake one can make is to regard them as madmen.

Pearl Harbor or Tet?

One metaphor that the Washington establishment has used to capture the essence of recent events is that of a second Pearl Harbor, with the implication that like the first, the September 11 tragedy will galvanize the American people to an unprecedented level of unity to win the war against still unidentified enemies. The other side, one suspects, operates with a different metaphor, and this is that of the Tet Offensive of 1968.The objective of the Vietnamese was to launch massive simultaneous uprisings that, even if defeated separately, would nevertheless add up to a strategic victory by convincing the other side, especially its civilian base, that the war was unwinnable. The aim was to rob the US of the will to win the war, and here, the Vietnamese succeeded.

The perpetrators of World Trade Center assault are operating with a similar calculus, and, despite the current jingoistic talk in Washington, it is not certain that they are wrong. Will the American people really bear any burden and pay any price in a struggle that will persist way into the future, with no assurance of victory, indeed, with no clear sense of who the enemies are and of what "victory" will consist of?

The media are full of news about the creation of an alliance against terrorism, conveying the impression that coordination among key states combined with the outrage of citizens everywhere will give a Washington-led coalition an unbeatable edge. Perhaps in the short run, although even this is not certain. For the problem is that, as in guerrilla wars, this is not a war that will be won strictly or mainly by military means.

The Underlying Issues

If it was bin Laden's network that was responsible for the World Trade Center attack, then the underlying issues are the twin pillars of US policy in the Middle East. One is subordination of the interests of the peoples of the region to the US' untrammeled access to Middle East oil in order to maintain its petroleum-based civilization. To this end, the US overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, cultivated the repressive Shah of Iran as the gendarme of the Persian Gulf, supported anti-democratic feudal regimes in the Arabian peninsula, and introduced a massive permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia, which contains some of Islam's most sacred shrines and cities.

The war against Saddam Hussein was justified as a war to beat back aggression, but everybody knew that Washington's key motivation was to ensure that the region's most massive oil reserves would remain under the control of pro-Western elites.

[[[Note by djw: The struggle over control of Afghanistan, is about installing a pliant, pro -Western government to allow Western oil corporations access to an oil pipeline corridor to draw off large deposits of Central Asian oil. That fits with Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Accord - DJW.]]]

The other pillar is unstinting support for Israel. That Arab feelings about Israel are so elemental is not difficult to comprehend. It is hard to argue against the fact that the state of Israel was born on the basis of the massive dispossession of the Palestinian people from their country and their lands. It is impossible to deny that Israel is a European settler-state, one whose establishment was essentially a displacement from European territory of the ethnocultural contradictions of European society.The Holocaust was an unspeakable crime against humanity, but it was utterly wrong to impose its political consequences--chief of which was the creation of Israel--on a people who had nothing to do with it.

It is hard to contradict Arab claims that it was essentially support from the United States that created the state of Israel; that it has been massive US military aid and backing that has maintained it in the last half century; and that it is deep confidence in perpetual US military and political support that enables Israel to oppose in practice the emergence of a viable Palestinian state.

Unless the US abandons these two pillars of its policies, there will always be thousands of recruits for acts of terrorism such as that which occurred last week. And while we may condemn terrorist acts--as we must, strongly--it is another thing to expect desperate people not to adopt them, especially when they can point to the fact that it was such methods that targeted civilians as well as military personnel, combined with the Intifada, that forced Israel to agree to the 1993 Oslo Accord that led to the creation of the Palestinian entity.

Yet another reason why the strategic equation does not favor the US is that there are a great many people in the world that are ambivalent about terrorism. In contrast to Europe, there has been a relatively muted response to the World Trade Center event in the South. A survey would probably reveal that while many people in the Third World are appalled by hijackers' methods, they are not unsympathetic to their objectives. As one Chinese-Filipino entrepreneur said, "It's horrible, but on the other hand, the US had it coming." If this reaction is common among middle class people, it would not be surprising if such ambivalence towards terrorism is widespread among the 80 per cent of the world's population that are marginalized by current global political and economic arrangements.

There is simply too much distrust, dislike, or just plain hatred of a country that has become so callous in its pursuit of economic power and arrogant in its political and military relations with the rest of the world and so brazen in declaring its cultural superiority over the rest of us. As in the equation of guerrilla war, civilian ambivalence in the theater of battle translates strategically to a minus when it comes to the staying power of the authorities and a plus when it comes to that of the terrorists.

In sum, if there is one thing we can be certain of, it is that massive retaliation on the part of the US will not put an end to terrorism. It will simply amplify the upward spiral of violence, as the other side will resort to even more spectacular deeds, fed by unending waves of recruits. The September 11 tragedy is the clearest evidence of the bankruptcy of the 30-year-old policy of mailed-fist, massive retaliation response to terrorism. This policy has simply resulted in the extreme professionalization of terrorism.

The only response that will really contribute to global security and peace is for Washington to address not the symptoms but the roots of terrorism. It is for the United States to reexamine and substantially change its policies in the Middle East and the Third World, supporting for a change arrangements that will not stand in the way of the achievement of equity, justice, and genuine national sovereignty for currently marginalized peoples.

Any other way leads to endless war.

* Executive Director of Focus on the Global South and professor at the University of the Philippines.

It's the Oil
Never mind the pundits, the root cause remains the same

by Johnny Angel

In the orgy of examination of who and what is to blame for the events of September 11, we must have heard every conceivable explanation. The American right, as exemplified by President Bush, Fox News and the opinion page of the The Wall Street Journal, blames envy of American values and success. The extreme right blames secular humanism, gay rights and the other bogeymen they love to flog. The center faults lax airport security and a general lack of preparedness, while the left, all but ignored by the corporate media, blames American imperialism and in some cases our unconditional support for Israel.

Yet for all the noise generated by partisans and centrists alike, no one is willing to accept the blatantly obvious, the real underlying factor behind America's involvement in the byzantine labyrinth of Middle East politics. What could possibly motivate the propping up of repressive non-democracies like the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families, or murderous regimes like that of Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran? Or pouring billions into the coffers of Saddam Hussein in the '80s, or even creating the monster that is possibly the mastermind of these attacks, Osama bin Laden, beneficiary of CIA lucre and training?

It's the oil, stupid.

Once again, America's twin addictions, that of its people to cheap gasoline and its corporations to billions of petro-dollars, has led us right into the proverbial pit. Having learned very little or forgotten a lot in the wake of the oil embargoes of the 1970s, America is as strung out on the fossil-fuel jones as any Bonnie Brae Street junkie is on Mexican tar heroin. Even though American dependency on oil from the Middle East has fallen to about 17 percent of national consumption, Saudi Arabia remains the cornerstone, producing 50 percent of the whole world's supply. So in order to keep this economic balm flowing, to keep the status quo static and the balance sheets of the major oil companies brimming, we've installed our military as a kind of mega police force in the region. Our official reason for being there is to ensure "stability," one of the great buzzwords in the history of business, but this is nothing more than spin the military is in the Middle East to guarantee that whatever comes out of the ground is exploitable and controlled by American multinationals.

And it is the simple fact of the presence of American soldiers on the holy soil of Islam that has so enraged our new nemesis, bin Laden.

Speaking to British journalist Robert Fisk in 1996 Afghanistan, bin Laden made clear his agenda. "When the American troops entered Saudia Arabia [after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait], the land of the two holy places [Mecca and Medina], there was strong protest from the ulema [religious authorities] and from students of the Shariah law all over the country against the interference of American troops," bin Laden told Fisk, who published the comments in The Nation in 1998. The Saudi leaders made a "big mistake," bin Laden said, when they responded by suppressing the protests and cementing ties to the U.S. "After it had insulted and jailed the ulema . . . the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy," bin Laden said. And so began his deadly fatwa against the United States.

Oil has been the prime mover behind any and every political decision in that region since the First World War, when trucks, tanks and planes replaced horses and camels. Once the internal-combustion engine became the technological centerpiece of the century, keeping it going by any means necessary became a most profitable business venture. And despite the myth that has been rammed down America's psyche for eons, American business loathes competition and aims for monopoly. Sure, they'll partner with the Saudi royal family (because the government that they dominate owns all of its oil), but in exchange, anyone in the region who actually believes in the rights of the people of that country to share in the wealth of their homeland is shut out. And forcefully, with the aid of the American military and CIA, as we saw in Iran and during the Gulf War.

This dusty, empty part of the world was basically nothing more than a bedouin crossroads for 1,300 years, between the end of the Crusades and the early 1900s. During the period when America endured revolution and a civil war, and Europe tore itself apart, the Middle East was downright peaceful. Tell me why the United States and Great Britain reflexively back the state of Israel in its battles with its neighbors. Were it not sitting strategically close to vast pools of viscous crude, no one would give a rat's ass about either side.

It's the meddling in the internal affairs of the indigenous people of the region to ensure that said oil stays in the hands of the privileged few that has led to an enraged underground movement of terrorists in these lands. And oil is all we're there for what else of value comes from that part of the world, what strategic value does it have otherwise?

That may seem as obvious as the nose on our collective face, but it's something no one wants to acknowledge. Especially given the ties between the media and the oil companies: ABC is tied to Texaco, NBC to British Petroleum, Time Warner to Mobil Oil, as revealed in the marvelous media-watchdog flier Censored Alert in the summer of 2000. And now the oil industry is entrenched as America's No. 1 player with Bush and Cheney, two oil men (one failed, one successful) in command.

Eliminate the oil, and the American presence ends in the area; the resentment aimed at our land and our people also ends. Out of sight, out of mind, remember? Never mind the bollocks about how the Arabs envy our wealth: I don't see them terrorizing Monaco or flying jets into the side of the Big Ben. The simple fact is, our armies piss them off as colonial enforcers. Much in the same way that our forefathers loathed Hessians in the American Revolution.

If anything, the leaders of the Middle East are terrified of our abandonment. Like savvy survivors, they play both sides at the same time. Just as an American corporation will donate money to Republicans and Democrats both, so these strongmen pay lip service to America while nodding, winking and (in the case of Yemen and allegedly some Saudi businessmen) donating money to terrorist cells on the side, just to be safe.

It's our own greed and need for control that has led us into this petroleum quagmire. Ross Perot, hardly the voice of progressive politics, made the canny observation in the first presidential debate of 1992 that the Gulf War was fought solely for control of oil and nothing more. He made the further point that American blood wasn't worth shedding over a product that Saddam would have been glad to sell us himself.

Too late for that sort of pragmatism. The war we're about to wage will surely be protracted and costly, with profound repercussions, and all because we decided that dealing with our enslavement to gasoline via conservation, alternative energy sources and the like was just too incon-fucking-venient. Feel that way now?

This is not a war on terror. It's a fight against America's enemies

'We are being asked to support a war whose aims appear to be as misleading as they are secretive'

By Robert Fisk

While covering the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, I would, from time to time, drive down through Jalalabad and cross the Pakistan border to Peshawar to rest. In the cavernous, stained interior of the old Intercontinental Hotel, I would punch out my stories on a groaning telex machine beside an office bearing the legend "Chief Accountant" on the door. On the wall next to that office - I don't know if it was the Chief Accountant who put it there - was a framed piece of paper bearing four lines of Kipling that I still remember:

A scrimmage at a border station
A canter down a dark defile
Five thousand pounds of education
Felled by a five-rupee jezail

Or, I suppose today, a Kalashnikov AK-47, home-produced in Quetta, or one of those slick little Blowpipe missiles that we handed over to the mujahedin with such abandon in the early Eighties so that they could kill their - and our - Russian enemies.

But I've been thinking more about the defiles, the gorges and overhanging mountains, the sheer rock walls 4,000 feet in height, the caves and the massive tunnels which Osama bin Laden cut through the mountains. Here, presumably, are the "holes" from which the Wes is going to "smoke out" Mr bin Laden, always supposing that he's been obliging enough to run away and hide in them. For there is already a growing belief - founded on our own rhetoric - that Mr bin Laden and his men are on the run, seeking their hiding places.

I'm not so certain. I'm very doubtful about what Mr bin Laden is doing right now. In fact, I'm not at all sure what we - the West - are doing. True, our destroyers and aircraft carriers and fighter aircraft and heavy bombers and troops are massing in the general region of the Gulf. Our SAS boys - so they say in the Middle East - are already climbing around northern Afghanistan, in the region still controlled by the late Shah Masoud's forces. But what exactly are we planning to do? Kidnap Mr bin Laden? Storm his camps and kill the lot of them, Mr bin Laden and all his Algerian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Gulf Arabs?

Or is Mr bin Laden merely chapter one of our new Middle Eastern adventure, to be broadened later to include Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the destruction of the Lebanese Hezbollah, the humbling of Syria, the humiliation of Iran, the reimposition of yet another fraudulent "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians?

If this seems fanciful, you should listen to what's coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv. While The New York Times Pentagon sources are suggesting that Saddam may be chapter two, the Israelis are trying to set up Lebanon - the "centre of international terror" according to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon - for a bombing run or two, along with Yasser Arafat's little garbage tip down in Gaza where the Israelis have discovered, mirabile dictu, a "bin Laden cell".

The Arabs, of course, would also like an end to world terror. But they would like to include a few other names on the list. Palestinians would like to see Mr Sharon picked up for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, a terrorist slaughter carried out by Israel's Lebanese allies - who were trained by the Israeli army - in 1982. At 1,800 dead, that's only a quarter of the number killed on 11 September. Syrians in Hama would like to put Rifaat Al-Assad, the brother of the late president, on their list of terrorists for the mass killings perpetrated by his Defence Brigades in the city of Hama in the same year. At 20,000, that's more than double the 11 September death toll. The Lebanese would like trials for the Israeli officers who planned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which killed 17,500 people, most of them civilians - again, well over twice the 11 September statistic. Christian Sudanese would like President Omar al-Bashir arraigned for mass murder.

But, as the Americans have made clear, it's their own terrorist enemies they are after, not their terrorist friends or those terrorists who have been slaughtering populations outside American "spheres of interest". Even those terrorists who live comfortably in the US but have not harmed America are safe: take, for example, the pro-Israeli militiaman who murdered two Irish UN soldiers in southern Lebanon in 1980 and who now live in Detroit after flying safely out of Tel Aviv. The Irish have the name and address, if the FBI are interested - but of course they're not.

So we are not really being asked to fight "world terror". We are being asked to fight America's enemies. If that means bagging the murderers behind the atrocities in New York and Washington, few would object. But it does raise the question of why those thousands of innocents are more important - more worthy of our effort and perhaps blood - than all the other thousands of innocents. And it also raises a much more disturbing question: whether or not the crime against humanity committed in the US on 11 September is to be met with justice - or a brutal military assault intended to extend American political power in the Middle East.

Either way, we are being asked to support a war whose aims appear to be as misleading as they are secretive. We are told by the Americans that this war will be different to all others. But one of the differences appears to be that we don't know who we are going to fight and how long we are going to fight for. Certainly, no new political initiative, no real political engagement in the Middle East, no neutral justice is likely to attend this open-ended conflict. The despair and humiliation and suffering of the Middle East peoples do not figure in our war aims - only American and European despair and humiliation and suffering.

As for Mr bin Laden, no one believes the Taliban are genuinely ignorant of his whereabouts. He is in Afghanistan. But has he really gone to ground? During the Russian war, he would emerge, again and again, to fight Afghanistan's Russian occupiers, to attack the world's second superpower. Wounded six times, he was a master of the tactical ambush, as the Russians found out to their cost. Evil and wicked do not come close to describing the mass slaughter in the US. But - if it was Mr bin Laden's work - that does not mean he would not fight again. And he would be fighting on home ground. There are plenty of dark defiles into which we may advance. And plenty of cheap rifles to shoot at us. And that wouldn't be a "new kind of war" at all.

White House Reprimands Maher

WASHINGTON -- The White House press secretary scolded the host of "Politically Incorrect" Wednesday for calling some past U.S. military actions cowardly.

The host, Bill Maher, said on his show last week: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly," Bill Maher said on the show last week.

Then, referring to terrorists who hijacked four jetliners and crashed them Sept. 11, Maher said: "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

Maher later apologized "to anyone who took it wrong," and said his comments were aimed at political leaders.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said he remained troubled by the remark.

"It's a terrible thing to say, and it's unfortunate," Fleischer said.

"There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."

Seeing Ourselves

A Collection of Perception & Info from the NetEditor's Note