I suggest if you don’t have to time that you read the last two articles first and then read the rest of these special edition of the newsletter.

A GENERAL UPDATE  OF THE MARKET WAR AND WOLRD WIDE SITUTATION

Reuters
Software Shares Drop on Weak Oracle View
Wednesday March 19, 4:29 pm ET
By Lisa Baertlein

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Software stocks got hammered on Wednesday, a day after Oracle Corp.
(NasdaqNM:ORCL - News) said sales fell last month as war-wary customers put-off purchases, feeding fears of one
more delay in the long-awaited tech recovery.

Reuters
Disney Says War Fears Stem Tourism
Wednesday March 19, 4:18 pm ET
By Peter Henderson

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS - News) on Wednesday cut its profit target for 2003, saying war
fears were hurting its theme parks business and expected growth in the economy had stalled.

Speaking to a few dozen shareholders at an annual meeting in Denver, where a snowstorm shut down the airport and most of
 the city, executives said profit growth this year would be more modest than the 25 percent to 35 percent they forecast six weeks ago.

Reuters
Bristol-Myers Restates More Earnings
Wednesday March 19, 4:05 pm ET
By Toni Clarke

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., whose shares have fallen 60 percent over the past three years after a
series of missteps that culminated last week in its restatement of four years of earnings, stumbled again on Wednesday,
 when it restated results for two additional years.

The New York-based drug company has frustrated investors in recent weeks after issuing one earnings restatement,
then another, to account for its improper booking of $2.5 billion in revenue. Sales were artificially inflated after the
company encouraged wholesalers to overstock its drugs.

Northwest Air Cutting 4,900 Jobs
Fri 4:03pm ET - Reuters
Northwest Airlines Corp. on Friday said it was cutting 4,900 jobs and its flight schedule by 12 percent because of lower travel demand before and following the conflict in Iraq.

Consumer Prices Rise on Oil, Food in Feb.
Fri 4:03pm ET - Reuters
U.S. consumer prices posted their biggest gain in more than two years in February as energy surged on the march to war with Iraq and food costs jumped, the government said on Friday.

More Airlines Cuts Flights; Shares Rise
Fri 4:03pm ET - Reuters
Two more major airlines, bankrupt United Airlines and Dutch carrier KLM, said on Friday that they would slash flights because of the Iraq war, as another travel decline threw salt in the wounds of the suffering aviation industry.

Reuters
Iraq war could cost airlines another $10 bln -IATA
Saturday March 22, 9:01 am ET

ZURICH, March 22 (Reuters) - The war in Iraq could easily add $10 billion to losses on international air travel as passengers hold off on trips, possibly well into the mid-year season, the International Air Transport Association said.

Fall-out from the conflict looks set to deepen what is already the worst crisis in the industry in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The crisis has led to accumulated losses of $30 billion, IATA said in a statement on Saturday.

Sol’s comments:

With all that lovely news above, everyone still thinks this is  a real bull market, if you fall for this lie then you are sadly in need of the light. Business don’t fire, cut back, cite reduced profits and difficult working conditions while in a bull market. I have just posted only the highlights of the stories, except for a few here and there where I have posted the full stories. War’s normally can usher in a new bull market, but not this time, we have endemic fraud and accounting issues still waiting to be discovered, a huge derivatives issue in excess of 72 trillion which some big houses have begun to feel and suffer from hence the huge unprecedented attack on gold from changing margin requirement’s over night, unprecedented shorting of gold shares and gold bullion and huge deployment of Tax payers money to shore up the financial markets, because the only way they can get any money is to  extort it via taxes or printing more money. Read the above headlines carefully and think when you can remember when did we have a full blown bull market with  gloomy news for such a long period of time and instead of leveling of the news is getting worse.

Reuters
Oil Deepens 5-Day Rout, on War Alert
Wednesday March 19, 3:50 pm ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - World oil prices fell again on Wednesday, deepening a five-day rout that has knocked 21 percent off the cost of a barrel as dealers brace for an impending U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Prices have tumbled $8 in the last five trading days as dealers bet hard on an easy U.S.-led victory in military action they expect to cause only a brief disruption to Middle East oil flows.

Sol’s comments

The Arab world will see this as one of the main reasons why we attacked Iraq, it does not matter if we were right or wrong, it’s the outcome they will focus on, as I said in my special update the coming religious wars which was special 40 page report done last year and still available on my website, if you have not read it, I suggest you read it or if you have read it again, my expressions are a little more colorful there and many will say I have calmed down tremendously, however the information is very pertinent. We will become the Israel of yesterday or today whichever one is more violent very soon. The Arab radicals are mobilizing and gathering more and more support as each new bomb is dropped in Baghdad. Bin laden has put out an order that its every Muslims right and duty to kill Americans, normally this would not be so bad because he is not a religious leader, but increasingly he is being viewed as one and to add substantial credibility to this order, Hamas and Hezobollah ( two radical religious groups) have supported this order. Its time to stop traveling to exotic places if you value your safety or make sure you have second passport that many of you are entitled to as your ancestry goes back to some other country. If not there are many programs that help you get a second citizenship but they are not cheap. This is only something you will be doing in case you travel often to exotic places. Otherwise restrict your movement to the western world if possible. There will be  day soon when it will be absolutely necessary that you have two passports because traveling with an American one will be an absolute liability but we are not there yet.

HealthSouth, CEO Face Fraud Charges
Wednesday March 19, 12:58 pm ET
By Kevin Drawbaugh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities on Wednesday charged HealthSouth Corp. (NYSE:HRC - News), one of the nation's top healthcare services companies, and its chief executive with "a massive accounting fraud" as FBI agents raided its headquarters.

HealthSouth said FBI agents on Tuesday served it with a grand jury subpoena, and that additional subpoenas have been served "on certain company employees." FBI agents were given access to company financial records a

Sol’s comments

Another news article reflecting the fake bull market we enjoyed for many years in the 90’s, every company form Cisco, Amazon etc had to restate some of their  earnings. The situation is only going to get worse, before all this over, the Dow will be at a minimum level of 5500 and this is being extremely optimistic.

Dow Jones Business News
Boston Properties/Sale: Proceeds To Pay Down Debt >BXP
Wednesday March 19, 4:48 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Boston Properties Inc. sold a building in the nation's capital to Blue Capital Investments Inc. for about $114 million, net of $8 million in future obligations for the buyer.

In a press release Wednesday, Boston Properties said the building, located at 2300 N Street, has about 279,264 rentable square feet of space.

Boston Properties will use the proceeds to reduce debt.

-Thomas Derpinghaus; Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5388

Sol comments

The coming housing and property bubble, this is how it starts slowly, luxury and commercial properties have been dropping in value rapidly, the next sector the single-family house and then the economy is finished.

House passes 2.2 trillion measure

Besides the war, at least one domestic issue was on the agenda for his meeting with legislative leaders. Bush wanted to talk about the federal budget one day after the House passed a $2.2 trillion measure that endorses his plan to cut taxes by $726 billion over the coming decade.

Bush hoped for another victory Friday in the Republican-led Senate, where Democrats and moderate GOP lawmakers were trying to cut the package in half. Democrats say the tax-cut plan is too expensive in a time of war and spiraling deficits.  ( from Middle east- AP By RON FOURNIER, AP White House Correspondent

Sol’s comments.

Another guaranteed reason why this war charade will only hamper the price of gold in the near term, we are going to have to remove the spigots of the printing presses and have them running on full force, soon they will be labeled printing presses on crack. This war  may not cost much, what will cost a ton will be the clean up and the administration of the new installed government, US troops are going to have to be there for a long time, you have Shiites who want to break free from the sunies and then you have the Kurds who want  to have their own freedom to, and against US requests Turkey has already moved in over 1500 troops into the area, they are scared that a rebellion here will fuel the large population of Kurds in their country to rebel and seek independence so will do whatever it takes to crush any rebellion, can you see the war coming to an end any time soon, the real war will begin when Sadham is gone then all the cockroaches will crawl out of the woodwork making new demands, when in the past they were frozen into immobility be sadhams forces. This is going to be one disastrous country to manage, the Russians had a taste of what it was like trying to run Afghanistan, with all their fire power and strength they had to eventually give up and call it a total loss. History is full of examples but we never stop to look or learn from them

A comment from war room member

Perhaps it should have been called the invasion of Central Iraq, helped by our allies the Shiites and the Kurd

Could be true, but then these very people could then start problems once Hussein is disposed of and they will  feel safe to rise up and make demands, and since we claim to that we want to install  a democratic government,  and  if everything is fair the Shiites  should win, wont that be interesting the Shiites in power with their minority oppressors now powerless, do you see the possibility of revenge, how about the Kurds who will want a voice in the new government I see a fruit salad, but the fruits will have to be replaced with TNT and Semtex, a volatile situation is coming up.

An Excerpt from  Middle east times

The leader of Lebanon's militia Hizbullah addressed hundreds of thousands of Shia followers on the day of Ashura and warned that US troops will face suicide attacks if they strike Iraq.

The 10th day of Moharam (the first month of the Islamic calendar) is a day of mourning for Shias throughout the world, who commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, Prophet Muhammad's grandson, in the battle of Kerbala in modern-day Iraq in the 7th century AD.

This year the day was marked by the various anti-war rallies that took place around the mourning and the processions.

"We declare in no uncertain terms our rejection of the American war, its treacherous slogans and its lies about saving people and establishing democracy," Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said.

"Don't expect the people of the region to greet you with rice and rose water, but with bullets, guns, blood and suicide operations," he said, as the crowd gathered to mark Ashura chanted "Death to America".

Ashura commemorates the 7th century death in battle of the in Kerbala, present-day Iraq.

He also welcomed the opposition of the Catholic Church and Christian religious leaders to US plans to attack Iraq, holding out the possibility of a "political alliance" to counter "US-Zionist efforts" to dominate the world.

( middle east times 14 march 2003)

Sol’s comments.

The situation has just moved up one notch higher. Dangerous times are here and here to stay for a while. The crusades have begun once again; Christianity is out to tame the world once again not with peace but with guns and butter. All the Christians leaders of the world have forgotten their teachings, it now just attack the heathen, the rhetoric in the south by many Christian leaders has reached to psychotic levels.

Time for Wolfowitz to resign
AN OPEN LETTER FROM JOSH REUBNER

Dear Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: I doubt it if you remember me. That's okay – I didn't do anything to merit the attention of the dean as a student at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

The comfortable, accessible relationship that you had with your students makes it difficult for me to address you as the Assistant Secretary of Defense. It sounds so formal and removed. Yet I wouldn't have the audacity to call you by your first name either. Perhaps, I can simply call you 'brother'; I write to you as a fellow Jew.

Perhaps in Hebrew school you learned the dictum kol yisrael arevim zeh lazeh: all Jews are responsible for and to each other. It is in this spirit that I write to you.

BROTHER, I AM CONCERNED that you are being exploited. before you discard my views as the ranting of an SAIS student who somehow escaped the school's neo-conservative straitjacket, I plead with you to engage in chesbon nefe that powerful, beautiful Jewish tradition of "soul accounting".
Before the bombs start falling on the long-suffering, innocent civilians of Baghdad, please look into your heart and ask yourself whose interests you are serving by being such a prominent symbol of this policy.

The Bush Administration is using you as its 'court Jew'.

'Court Jew' is a term that originates in the context of anti-Semitism in 'enlightened' Europe. On that blood-soaked continent, the reigning monarchs and other despotic rulers thought up an ingenious system to perpetuate their oppressive governments. These Machiavellian rulers made a pact with an elite, assimilationist group of Jewish subjects who craved to be accepted by this power structure.

Often, these ambitious Jews viewed serving the power structure as a way to overcome the negative stigmas associated with being Jewish that had been built into the very fabric of society by this self same power structure.

The rulers took advantage of this yearning, dangling the illusion of power before the hungry eyes of this wayward Jewish elite. These 'court Jews' were given politically unimportant, yet highly visible positions within the regime, so that when the masses rose up in outrage at the oppressive nature of the regime under which they lived, the 'court Jew' served as the lighting rod to bear the brunt of the blame and deflect criticism from where it belonged.

Brother, need I remind you how disastrous it was for our people to be the target of this rage?

Your job is to interact in the world of intelligence and diplomacy. My job is to interact with the people. With all due respect, I think that I am in a better position to hear what the people are saying.

They are saying that the war in Iraq is being planned by a cabal of extremist Jews, that it is the first part of a Zionist conspiracy to redraw the map of the Middle East, and that it is a Zionist Israel that stands to be the prime beneficiary.

It's not just the skinheads who are saying this – it's also those who would don't have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies.

I'm sure that you, like me, recoiled in horror when you heard Congressman Jim Moran assert that it is the Jews who are advocating for this war and that only the Jews can stop it.

It pains me that so many of my fellow citizens are falling into this age-old trap of blaming the powerless Jews for the actions of a handful of 'court Jews'.

This doesn't mean that the 'court Jews' of the unelected Jewish Establishment haven't been hawking for this war – they have been. There is no denying that Israel sent Benjamin Netanyahu to Capitol Hill to testify for the war in Iraq and "convince" Members of Congress that it was in the interests of the US to let loose the dogs of war.

This is the beauty of how the system works: take a few 'court Jews' and give them unimpeded access to the mainstream media and – voila! - you create the impression among the masses that Jews are spoiling for a war.

Do you see now how you are misrepresenting us?

I wish that we in the Jewish peace movement could have as much access as you do to the mainstream media so that we could shatter the monolithic view of the Jewish community which the 'court Jew' is set up to propagate.

I'm really afraid that we are heading for a calamity. If the people are this incensed now, brother, how do you think they will feel when Americans start returning from the sands of Kuwait in body bags? Who is going to be blamed if, God forbid, we are subjected to another terrorist attack?

Do these thoughts keep you awake at night? Are you, like me, terrified that this war in Iraq threatens the very existence of the Jewish people?

There is only one honorable thing that you can do: resign. For the sake of your own dignity, you must refuse to be exploited as the 'court Jew' and thus expose the factors that motivate the Bush Administration.

Tell everybody what you and I both know: that the real interests hawking for this war are the defense contractors and the oil industry, who will make billions of dollars to first destroy Iraq and then "rebuild" it under the wing of US "democracy". And, while you're at it, please tell the world that the $100 billion the Bush Administration will require to pay the military-industrial complex to finance this war will be sucked from the impoverished American working class which is systematically stripped of public services by this rapacious regime.

I am not the type of Jew who bases his opinions on whether a particular action "is good for the Jews". I would like to believe I have a more holistic view of humanity.

But it seems to me that this war will benefit no one but the corporate interests I mentioned above – not Jews, not Americans, not Israelis, not Iraqis, and not Palestinians.

Josh Ruebner is the co-founder of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel and has served as an analyst in Middle East Affairs at the Congressional Research Service.

(Middle east times march 14^th 2003)

Sol’s comments

I don’t need to say much , the article pretty much says it all

British oil giants discuss Iraqi oil with government
LONDON

Oil giants BP and Shell have discussed with the British government the possibility of winning a share of oil reserves in a post-war Iraq, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

The two groups broached the issue at a meeting with Geoffrey Norris, senior policy adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the daily said.

The companies' case – that Britain should not lose out to US industry - was sympathetically received, the paper said.

While the value of the oil would allegedly be given back to the Iraqis, Britain and the United States were keen to use some of the proceeds of developing it to 'offset war costs'.

Sol’s comments

Openly they plan to carve the spoils before the war is even over, further angering the Muslim world, we are going to force many a conservative Muslim into the radical camp. This time these guys wont lie down, these crusades are going to be violent and bloody, while we fire missiles and bombs into their homes, they will detonate themselves off in populated areas as the ranks of suicide bombers surge, they wont run out of willing candidates, and this war has just increased new enrollment drastically, I would hazard a guess that before this war is over, enrollment will be up at least by a 100%. Try to think for a second how do you frighten an enemy that is not afraid to die, our main weapon of deterrence is to induce fear into the would be opponent that if they try something that is hostile death is something that they could be rewarded with, but these radicals are looking forward  to death and they think that God is waiting for them on the other side with 20 virgins. Answer there is no way to win, no way, you are fighting against a pure terror that knows no fear no limits, fear of death is the main weapon any country has, once that weapon is rendered useless you have nothing but shadows to chase.  Now if it was you or I, we would be immediately willing to listen and calm down if someone told us, you don’t behave you die, I don’t know about you but there would be not much argument from me, unless off course I knew they planned to kill me regardless of whether I listened or not then I would fight to the very end, but give me a chance to chose and I will chose life.

 Lets go one more step I don’t mean to be a fear monger but this is what has happened in Israel many many times in the past.

You are at a busy restaurant, one of those restaurants that has an outdoor place in the summer, everyone is having a good time, the sun is in the sky, the air is filled with laughter and then suddenly and explosion and you have limbs all over the place, blood and the whole place is blasted into pieces,  I wont go into any more detail. Are we ready for this? I think not, I really hope homeland security can keep out all these  radicals out of the country, but I also know that where there is a will there is way, and their wills have suddenly become immensely stronger, I suggest that if you live in a big city once the war winds down you spend as little time as you can in crowded area’s. We have to many ports of entry for us to secure everyone of them 100%. Lets just pray and hope that this War ends in Iraq.

AFP

Iran on Monday rejected allegations by two senior Bush administration officials that the Islamic republic had a very advanced secret nuclear weapons program.

"Such remarks are a continuation of US interference in Iran's domestic affairs," the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

"Iran's nuclear program is in accordance with realities and in our opinion the US tries to thwart the constructive cooperation between the Islamic republic of Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency," Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said

He emphasized that his country's activities were transparent and that peaceful application of atomic energy was part of the "natural and legitimate rights of the Iranian nation to attain economic development".

On Sunday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "the IAEA is discovering that Iran has a far more robust program for the development of nuclear weapons than it previously thought."

Meanwhile on ABC television, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice also told former Clinton press aide George Stephanopolous that the US had talked to Russia, China and the atomic energy agency "about the need to get into Iran and to understand what is going on there".

On Tuesday, Iran officials said the remaining components needed to complete the nuclear power plant would be supplied by Russia.

"Over 70 percent of the work has been accomplished," Assadollah Sabori, deputy head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran said. "The main thing left is shipping nuclear fuel from Russia, which is expected to take place in May."

Last month, Iran officially announced it had attained the technology to process uranium it needed for its future nuclear power plants. Iran says its target is to reach a 6,000-megawatt capacity of nuclear-generated electricity in 20 years.

Sol’s comments

Look to Russia helping more countries as like china they are very angered by the US actions, and the fact that Iran openly states  as matter of fact that Russia will supply them with the nuclear fuel in May, means that Russia has made the commitment to supply it to them no matter what. Once you have this technology its not to hard to modify if you have the know how, and I am sure they could buy the know how from Russia or Ukraine, even China. This war is now going to put the message out clear once and for all, that the only war to ensure that you are safe is to make sure you have nuclear weapons and so now many nations will do whatever it takes to arm themselves. North Korea has just shown that if you make the so called enemy believe that you have nuclear weapons that they will bow down and kiss your butt to try and defuse the situation. The world laughs at the hypocrisy of our standards, N. Korea is in  open violation and has even threatened to attack but because they have Nuclear weapons we won’t talk down to them like we have done with Iraq. Eventually Japan might even consider  going  nuclear. Ukraine might also decide to go back to nuclear to, they destroyed all their nuclear weapons. They were the weapons basket of the former Soviet Union, they have the technology and could have these weapons ready in months.

With all this news can Gold still keep going down,  you decide.

Afghanistan borrows first World Bank cash
for 24 years KABUL

Afghanistan on Wednesday was preparing to accept a $108 million World Bank loan, the first money borrowed by the penniless nation from the bank's development fund for almost quarter of a century.

"Today's credit, which carries no interest, is the first loan to be provided by the World Bank's International Development Association since 1979, when Afghanistan went into arrears after discontinuing payment on its loans," the organization said in a statement.

The loan, which was approved in Washington on Tuesday, will pay for work to upgrade Afghanistan's badly war-damaged transportation infrastructure, including road repairs and improvements to Kabul's international airport.

(Middle east times 14 march 2003)

Sol’s comments

First you had to pay for the war, now you have to pay for them to rebuild the country and don’t worry they will borrow a lot more, this is just the tip of
the iceberg, oh and this money is interest free, what about us, why cant we get 0% loans especially since we are giving this money to  others for free

Poll: Britons see Bush as bigger threat than Saddam Hussein LONDON

The British public sees President Bush as a greater threat to world peace than Iraq 's Saddam Hussein , a poll published on Tuesday showed.

It also believes that as long as United Nations weapons inspectors can do a useful job in Iraq, it would be wrong for the United States and Britain to attack. However, Britons say something has to be done about Saddam and suspect he is determined to hide his weapons of mass destruction from U.N. inspectors.

The poll, commissioned by Channel 4 Television, asked 1,000 people whether they believed Bush was a greater threat to world peace than Saddam. Forty-five percent agreed while 38 percent disagreed.

Two-thirds of those polled said it would be wrong to attack Iraq while inspectors felt they still had a useful job to do.

However, 64 percent of respondents said they agreed with Prime Minister Tony Blair 's claim that "if the international community fails to act firmly now against Iraq, then the world will become a more dangerous place in years to come." Only 24 percent disagreed.

Those polled were also asked for their views on the following statement: "Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, and to hide as many as possible from the United Nations arms inspectors." Two thirds agreed with the statement while one in five disagreed.

Blair has wholeheartedly supported Washington's campaign to rid Iraq of banned chemical and biological weapons. Iraq denies it has such weapons.

The British Prime Minister has struggled to convince the public of his case, and has faced serious dissent from members of his ruling Labour Party.

A poll conducted by Channel 4 in November produced similar results, with Bush seen as a bigger threat to world peace than the Iraqi President.

(Middle east time march 14^th 2003)

Sol’s comments

Interesting what the Brits think of bush.

Reuters

A comment on gold from article I forgot the source, but the information is very informative

There have already been about five major gold rallies in our young gold 

bull

market to date, all numbered above, and subsequently five major 

pullbacks

right after these very rallies.  Provocatively, and indeed in tell-tale

bull-market signature fashion, each major gold pullback only managed to

bludgeon gold down to a higher low.  The very definition of a bull 

market is

a series of higher lows and higher highs in any given price over a year 

or

longer.

( could be Reuters)

Sol’s comments

Gold is in a raging bull market still, we are just most likely going to fall all the way down to the main support line, 
which depending what time frame u look at is from 300-330.

At 325 we have very strong support but we could go all the way to 300-310 area as they try to destroy 
your mind and complete state of mind and get you to dump you gold, gold is now left mostly in
 strong hands, so the battle will be wicked here, but as fast it dropped it will gap up.

I suggest everyone read these two articles especially the last one which is very long If you want to skip everything less skip it but read these two articles I am not going to make any comments on them but  just one finishing comment at the bottom

US races against time and sandstorms

By B Raman

The medium-intensity sandstorm which had been blowing across the deserts of West Asia has subsided and weather forecasts predict tolerable, armor andaircraft friendly weather for seven to 10 days.

Contrary to media predictions, the Bush administration has made a radical departure from the battle plans of Kosovo and Afghanistan, which were marked by intensive air action for days before the ground troops ventured into battle. Now, the ground troops have gone into Iraqi territory right from the word go, with simultaneous air action designed to weaken the morale of the Iraqi political and military leadership.

The new strategy reflects the US anxiety to achieve its ground objectives as rapidly as possible before another serious sandstorm sets in, and a willingness to suffer casualties in the process. Reports from Baghdad speak of confusion and declining morale in the Iraqi political and military leadership, including in the much-vaunted Republican Guards.

The predicted anti-US demonstrations have resulted in violence only in Yemen. In other places, such as Amman and Cairo,the demonstrations were newsworthy, but not uncontrollable or worrisome. The streets of Pakistan have been reassuringly (for the US) far from volatile. This should be encouraging for the US-led coalition because the ground offensive coincided with a Friday, when Muslim emotions tend to be high. There are indications of stepped-up action by al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Gulbuddin Heckmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami in Afghanistan, but the US should be able to deal with them.

The British, who know Iraq and its terrain better than the Americans and who are less suspected of partisanship by the Shias of the south, have been playing a more active role in the south, while the US, which has a better equation with the Kurds of the north, have been more active there. But the US is having problems controlling the Turks, who are already reported to have sent 1,500 troops into Iraqi territory, disregarding US requests not todo so.

A rapid-action US contingent is making a dash toward Baghdad, preceded by intensive air action, in order to reach there before another sandstorm starts. If the Iraqis put up stiff resistance at Baghdad, the US will need to reinforce the advancing contingent considerably by air before they step into Baghdad and get involved in street fighting. However, there is a strong possibility of Saddam, if still alive, caving in, thus obviating the need for messy action in Baghdad. ( Asia times march 23 2003)

Another Gulf War, another al-Qaeda
By Ahmad Faruqui

Arguing that there is a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, the administration of US President George W Bush convinced Congress last October about the need to invade Iraq as an act of self-defense. A slender majority of Americans now believe that Iraq was behind the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, and support such a war with or without United Nations approval. Unfortunately, this link is a mirage. The real link between al-Qaeda and Iraq is very different.

It is a fact of history that the US decision to prosecute the Gulf War in 1991 spawned al-Qaeda. From the very beginning, Osama bin Laden's refrain has been that Western forces on Arab soil have compromised Arab sovereignty and polluted Islam's holy lands. Al-Qaeda played on these grievances to recruit radical young Arabs to its cause. By pointing out the pro-Israel bias in US foreign policy, bin Laden gave his message a grassroots appeal on the Arab street. Through the clever use of historical symbols, he has sought to position himself as a modern-day Saladin who would wrest control of Jerusalem for the Muslims.

Right after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bush referred to the war against terrorism as a "crusade". His critics were quick to exploit what was probably an inadvertent misuse of the term. The term played right into the theme that bin Laden had been laying out for years. The Arab world remembers well the words that British General Allenby, a descendent of the English Crusaders, uttered when he entered Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, "The Crusades have ended now!" Similarly, it has not forgotten either the content or the tone of the statements made by French General Henri Gouraud when he entered Damascus in July 1920. Striding to Saladin's tomb next to the Grand Mosque, Gouraud kicked it and exclaimed, "Awake Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent."

During an interview with CNN in 1997, Osama bin Laden said the ongoing US military presence in Saudi Arabia was an "occupation of the land of the holy places". In February 1998, notwithstanding the fact that his only formal education is in economics, bin Laden issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. Only highly learned clerics can issue such a fatwa, which is a binding religious ruling on their followers. However, three other militant groups, including Islamic Jihad in Egypt, moved quickly to endorse the ruling. The World Islamic Front (a grouping of dozens of Islamic militia) issued a statement: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim." It was published three months later in the London newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi.

It is a comment on the depth of anti-American sentiment in the region that bin Laden has been able to call his violent campaign of terror against civilian Americans a jihad, even though Muslim clerics have said such a terrorist campaign cannot be interpreted as a jihad under Islamic law.

It is useful to recall that the Gulf War in 1991 was waged by the United States to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It had United Nations support, and the forces that went in to fight the armies of Saddam Hussein comprised a large coalition of troops drawn from several Muslim and Arab nations, in addition to the US, Britain and Australia. Even then, al-Qaeda was able to portray that war as a crusade, giving credence to Samuel Huntington's theory about an inevitable clash of civilizations.

This new war has proved profoundly unpopular around the globe. It has been opposed by the 116 nations who belong to the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League, in addition to several key European nations.

The war will be fought largely with US troops, with assistance from Australian and British troops. Neither Arab armies nor any Third World armies are likely be in the "coalition of the willing", belying the allegation that Iraq poses a threat to its neighbors. It is likely to lead to a significant rise in anti-Americanism in the Arab world.

A just-released survey by Professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland provides a disturbing commentary on Arab public opinion. Telhami, who holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, interviewed 2,620 men and women in five Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. The respondents were asked to state their opinions on major foreign-policy hypotheses that have been advanced by the Bush administration.

The overwhelming majority of respondents felt that war with Iraq would worsen the chances for peace in the Middle East. Most pessimistic were the respondents in Saudi Arabia, where 91 percent concurred with the statement, and least pessimistic were those in Jordan, where the percentage was 60 percent. When asked whether the war would lead to less terrorism, more than three-quarters of the respondents disagreed. The Saudis were in greatest disagreement, with 96 percent saying that the war would lead to more terrorism. The Egyptians had the most positive position on this topic, but even then 75 percent felt it would lead to more terrorism. When asked if the war would improve the chances for democracy in the region, respondents disagreed strongly, with 95 percent of Saudis leading the way but even in Jordan, 58 percent disagreed. The survey uncovered significant negative attitudes toward US foreign policy. Only 4 percent of the people in Saudi Arabia had a favorable opinion of US foreign policy, followed by 6 percent in Morocco and Jordan, 13 percent in Egypt and 32 percent in Lebanon.

Bush has expressed a hope that this war would lead to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former foreign minister of Israel, finds much that is troubling in this assertion. "The president's bellicose rhetoric and his intention to invade an Arab country and dismantle its regime by force, however despicable that regime may be, while pretending to ignore the Palestinian tragedy provides a platform for unrest throughout the region."

Once hostilities commence, it is likely that Iraqi civilian casualties will occur on a large scale. According to published accounts, the US will fire more than 3,000 cruise missiles on Iraq within the first 48 hours, an amount that exceeds the entire number fired in the Gulf War. More casualties will occur as US forces fight their way into Baghdad, fueling resentment on the Arab street.

While the US has sought to portray this campaign as a war of liberation, so have others in the past. When British forces marched into Baghdad 86 years ago, their commanding general assured the people of Iraq, "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude proclaimed, "O people of Baghdad, remember that for 26 generations you have suffered under strange tyrants who have endeavored to set one Arab house against another in order that they might profit by your dissensions." Three years later, Iraqis were in open revolt against British rule. This led an exasperated Winston Churchill - the architect of Britain's Iraq policy - to say that the crown was spending millions for the privilege of sitting atop a volcano. Similarly, the new Gulf War will be seen as a colonial war of the 19th-century genre. Historians may well call it "a war to end all peace", an appellation they have used to capture the strategic myopia of World War I.

The incoming prime minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Badawi, worries that "a war against Iraq would be seen in the Islamic world as unfair, and if it causes Muslims to join the extremists, then moderate Muslim governments would be threatened everywhere". Georgetown University's John Esposito, an expert on Islam, has voiced his concerns about the wisdom of pursuing knee-jerk military action against Muslim states. Esposito says an example was the US strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan in the wake of the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa. The target in Sudan, a factory that the Sudanese government contended was manufacturing only pharmaceuticals, is widely thought to have been a mistake, though the US government has only indirectly acknowledged that was the case. "The risk is that in the rush to respond and retaliate, which is understandable, we may end up hitting the wrong targets and the wrong people," Esposito said. "It's the opposite response that we need."

There is a strong chance that the second Gulf War will succeed in accomplishing the very opposite of what Bush has sought to achieve. The US president has made a virtue of regime change, and has compared the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after World War II to what he is about to undertake in Iraq. However, 21 contemporary historians from Europe and North America have termed this concept "a pick-and-mix history of regime change". In a letter to the Financial Times, they say that Iraq cannot be compared to either postwar Germany or Japan since it differs from them in its endowment of natural resources, borders, institutions, religion, political culture and ethnicity. In other words, it is likely that post-Saddam Iraq will be even more chaotic and dangerous than Iraq under Saddam.

The United States is making rapid strides against al-Qaeda. As a result of Pakistani cooperation, it has apprehended or killed many of its key leaders and appears to be rapidly closing in on the top two. With the capture of the third man, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the organization may have lost its operational capability to mount "spectacular" acts of terrorism. However, all of this will come to naught once the US invades Iraq.

It is likely that this war will add new credibility to grievances about loss of Arab sovereignty. It will complicate the resolution of the Palestinian problem, leading to a rise in anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world. In a fulfillment of the law of unintended consequences, it may spawn a second generation of terrorists even more determined than al-Qaeda to evict US forces from the Middle East, thus defeating the very purposes for which it is about to be fought.

Speaking at Tufts University, former US president George Bush Sr said that any military action against Iraq should be backed by international unity. He said the case against Iraq this time was weaker than in 1991, and urged his son to build bridges with France and Germany, rather than to bear grudges. Instead of listening to the neo-conservatives in the administration, Bush Jr should have taken a few moments to reflect on his father's advice. Not only would this have been a patriotic thing to do, it would also have been very Christian. And it may have led to a safer America. 

( ASIA TIMES MARCH 23 2003)

THE ROVING EYE
This war is brought to you by ...
By Pepe Escobar

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - They've won. They got their war against Afghanistan (planned before September 11). They're getting their war against Iraq (planned slightly after September 11). After Iraq, they plan to get their wars against Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Last Sunday, one of them, Vice President Dick Cheney, said that President George W Bush would have to make "a very difficult decision" on Iraq. Not really. The decision had already been taken for him in the autumn of 2001.

As far as their "showdown Iraq" is concerned, it's not about weapons of mass destruction, nor United Nations inspections, nor non-compliance, nor a virtual connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, nor the liberation of the Iraqi people, nor a Middle East living in "democracy and liberty".

The American corporate media are not inclined to spell it out, and the absolute majority of American public opinion is anesthetized non-stop by a barrage of technical, bureaucratic and totally peripheral aspects of the war against Iraq. For all the president's (sales)men, the whole game is about global preeminence, if not unilateral world domination - military, economic, political and cultural. This may be an early 21st century replay of the "white man's burden". Or this may be just megalomania. Either way, enshrined in a goal of the Bush administration, it cannot but frighten practically the whole world, from Asia to Africa, from "old Europe" to the conservative establishment within the US itself.

During the Clinton years, they were an obscure bunch - almost a sect. Then they were all elevated to power - again: most had worked for Ronald Reagan and Bush senior. Now they have pushed America - and the world - to war because they want it. Period. An Asia Times Online investigation reveals this is no conspiracy theory: it's all about the implementation of a project.

The lexicon of the Bush doctrine of unilateral world domination is laid out in detail by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in Washington in 1997. The ideological, political, economic and military fundamentals of American foreign policy - and uncontested world hegemony - for the 21st century are there for all to see.

PNAC's credo is officially to muster "the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests". PNAC states that the US must be sure of "deterring any potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" - without ever mentioning these competitors, the European Union, Russia or China, by name. The UN is predictably dismissed as "a forum for leftists, anti-Zionists and anti-imperialists". The UN is only as good as it supports American policy.

The PNAC mixes a peculiar brand of messianic internationalism with realpolitik founded over a stark analysis of American oil interests. Its key document, dated June 1997, reads like a manifesto. Horrified by the "debased" Bill Clinton, PNAC exponents lavishly praise "the essential elements of the Reagan administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities". These exponents include Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon made up of leading figures in national security and defense, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Reagan-era White House adviser Elliott Abrahms.

Already in 1997, the PNAC wanted to "increase defense spending significantly" to "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles". The deceptively bland language admitted "such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next".

The signatories of this 1997 document read like a who's who of Washington power today: among them, in addition to those mentioned above, Eliot Cohen, Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, William Bennett, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz and Dan Quayle.

The PNAC, now actively exercising power, is about to fulfill its dream of invading Iraq. In the PNAC's vision of Iraq, the only vector that matters is US strategic interest. Nobody really cares about Saddam Hussein's "brutal dictatorship", nor his extensive catalogue of human rights violations, nor "the suffering of the Iraqi people", nor his US-supplied weapons of mass destruction, nor his alleged connection to terrorism.

Iraq counts only as the first strike in a high-tech replay of the domino theory: the next dominoes will be Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The idea is to carve up Syria; let Turkey invade northern Iraq; overthrow the Saudi royal family; restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz in Arabia. And dismember Iraq altogether and annex it to Jordan as a vassal kingdom to the US: after all, Jordan's King Abdullah is a cousin of former Iraqi King Faisal, deposed in 1958. This would be one solution for the nagging question of who would have any legitimacy to be in power in Baghdad after Saddam.

Rumsfeld loves NATO, but he abhors the European Union. All PNAC members and most Pentagon civilians - but not the State Department - do: after all, they control NATO, not the EU. These things usually are not admitted in public. But Rumsfeld, the blunt midwesterner, former fighter pilot and former servant of presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, prefers John Wayne to Bismarck: even Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a staunch ally of Bush, complained out loud that diplomacy for Rumsfeld is an alien concept. Rumsfeld even has his own wacky axis of evil: Cuba, Libya and ... Germany. If Rumsfeld barely manages to disguise his aversion for dovish Secretary of State Colin Powell's views, one imagines to what circle of hell he dispatches the pacifist couple of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder.

Strange, no journalist has stood up and ask Rumsfeld, in one of those cosy Pentagon spinning sessions, how was his 90-minute session with Saddam in Baghdad in December 20, 1983. The fuzzy photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, observed by Iraqi vice premier Tarik Aziz, is now a collector's item. Rumsfeld was sent by Reagan to mend relations between the US and Iraq only one month after Reagan had adopted a secret directive - still partly classified - to help Saddam fight Iran's Islamic Revolution that had begun in 1979. This close cooperation led to nothing else than Washington selling loads of military equipment and also chemical precursors, insecticides, aluminum tubes, missile components and anthrax to Saddam, who in turn used the lot to gas Iranian soldiers and then civilian Kurds in Halabja, northern Iraq, in 1988. The selling of these chemical weapons was organized by Rumsfeld.

Washington was perfectly aware at the time that Saddam was using chemical weapons. After the Halabja massacre, the Pentagon engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, spinning that the massacre was caused by Iran. Cheney, as Pentagon chief from March 1989 onwards, continued to cooperate very closely with Saddam. The military aid - secretly organized by Rumsfeld - also enabled Saddam to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Between 1991 and 1998, UN weapons inspectors conclusively established that the US - as well as British, German and French firms - had sold missile parts and chemical and bacteriological material to Iraq. So much for the moral high ground defended by America and Britain in the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction controversy.

September 2002's National Security Strategy (NSS) document simply delighted the members of the PNAC. No wonder: it reproduced almost verbatim a September 2000 report by the PNAC, which in turn was based on the now famous 1992 draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG), written under the supervision of Wolfowitz for then secretary of defense Cheney. Already in 1992, the three key DPG objectives were to prevent any "hostile power' from dominating regions whose resources would allow it to become a great power; to dissuade any industrialized country from any attempt to defy US leadership; and to prevent the future emergence of any global competitor. That's the thrust of the NSS document, which calls for a unipolar world in which Washington's military power is unrivalled.

In this context, the invasion and occupation of Iraq is just the first installment in an extended practical demonstration of what will happen to "rogue" states alleged to have or not have weapons of mass destruction, alleged to have or not have links to terrorism, and alleged connections to anyone or anything that might challenge US supremacy. The European Union, China and Russia beware: the Shock and Awe demonstration that is about to be unleashed on Iraq is pure theatrical militarism, a concept already analyzed by Asia Times Online.

It's no surprise that Bush, on February 26, chose to unveil his vision of a new Middle Eastern order at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right-wing Washington think tank. The PNAC's office is nowhere else than on the 5th floor of the AEI building on 17th St, in downtown Washington. The AEI is the key node of a collection of neoconservative foreign policy experts and scholars, the most influential of whom are members of the PNAC.

The AEI is intimately connected to the Likud Party in Israel - which for all practical purposes has a deep impact on American foreign policy in the Middle East, thanks to the AEI's influence. In this mutually-beneficial environment, AEI stalwarts are known as Likudniks. It's no surprise, then, how unparalleled is the AEI's intellectual Islamophobia. Loathing and contempt for Islam as a religion and as a way of life leads to members of the AEI routinely bashing Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. They also oppose any negotiations with North Korea - another policy wholly adopted by the Bush administration. For the AEI, China is the ultimate enemy: not a peer competitor, but a monster strategic threat. The AEI is viscerally anti-State Department (read Colin Powell). Recently, it has also displayed its innate Francophobia. And to try to dispel the idea that it is just another bunch of grumpy dull men, the AEI has been deploying to the BBC and CNN talk shows its own female weapon of mass regurgitation, one Danielle Pletka. Lynn Cheney, vice president Dick's wife, a historian and essayist, is also an AEI senior fellow.

The AEI's former executive vice president is John Bolton, one of the Bush administration's key operatives as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. Largely thanks to Bolton, the US unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. Bolton has also opposed the establishment of the new International Criminal Court (ICC), recently inaugurated in The Hague. The AEI only treasures raw power as established under the terms of neoliberal globalization: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Its nemesis is everything really multilateral: the ABM treaty, the ICC, the Kyoto protocol, the treaty on anti-personal mines, the protocol on biological weapons, the treaty on the total ban of nuclear weapons, and most spectacularly, in these past few days, the UN Security Council.

The AEI's foreign policy agenda is presided over by none other than Richard Perle. As Perle is a longtime friend and advisor to Rumsfeld, he was rewarded with the post of chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board: its 30-odd very influential members include former national security advisers, secretaries of defense and heads of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Perle is also a very close friend of Pentagon number two Wolfowitz, since they were students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s. Perle now reports to Wolfowitz.

On September 20, 2001, Perle went on overdrive, fully mobilizing the Defense Policy Board to forge a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The PNAC sent an open letter to Bush detailing how a war on terrorism should be conducted. The letter says that Saddam has to go "even if evidence does not link him to the attack". The letter lists other policies that later were implemented - like the gigantic increase of the defense budget and the total isolation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), as well as others that may soon follow, like striking Hezbollah in Lebanon and yet-to-be-formulated attacks against Iran and especially Syria if they do not stop support for Hezbollah.

The Bush administration strategy in the past few months of totally isolating the PA's Yasser Arafat and allowing Israeli premier Ariel Sharon to refuse as much as a handshake, was formulated by the PNAC. Another PNAC letter states that "Israel's fight is our fight ... for reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism". The PNAC detested the Camp David accords between Israel and the Palestinians. For the PNAC, a simmering, undeclared state of war against Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran is a matter of policy.

Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under Reagan, is also a member of the board of the Jerusalem Post. He wrote a chapter - "Iraq: Saddam Unbound" - in Present Dangers, a PNAC book. He is very close to ultra-hawk Douglas Feith, who was his special counsel under Reagan and is now assistant secretary of defense for policy (one of the Pentagon's four most senior posts) and also a partner in a small Washington law firm that represents Israeli suppliers of munitions seeking deals with American weapons manufacturers. It was thanks to Perle - who personally defended his candidate to Rumsfeld - that Feith got his current job. He was one of the key people responsible for strategic planning in the war against the Taliban and is also heavily involved in planning the war against Iraq.

David Wurmser, former head of Middle Eastern projects at the AEI, is now special assistant to PNAC founder John Bolton, the undersecretary of State for arms control and a fierce enemy of multilateralism. Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's failure to defeat Saddam Hussein, a book published by the AEI. The foreword is by none other than Perle. Meyrav Wurmser, David's wife, is a co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

In July 1996, Perle, Feith and the Wurmser couple wrote the notorious paper for an Israeli think tank charting a roadmap for Likud superhawk and then-incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. The paper is called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". Perle, Feith and the Wurmsers tell Bibi that Israel must shelve the Oslo Accords, the so-called peace process, the concept of "land for peace", go for it and permanently annex the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The paper also recommends that Israel must insist on the elimination of Saddam, and the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. This would be the first domino to fall, and then regime change would follow in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This 1996 blueprint is nothing else than Ariel Sharon's current agenda in action. In November last year, Sharon took the liberty to slightly modify the domino sequence by growling on the record that Iran should be next after Iraq.

Bush's speech on February 26 at the AEI claimed that the real reason for a war against Iraq is "to bring democracy". Cheney has endlessly repeated that Iraqis - like Germany and Japan in 1945 - will welcome American soldiers with wine and roses. For Bush, Iraq is begging to be educated in the principles of democracy: "It's presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world, or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim, is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life." But this very presumption is seemingly central to the intellectual Islamophobia of both the AEI and PNAC.

The AEI and the PNAC shaped the now official Bush policy of introducing democracy - by bombing Iraq - and then "successfully transforming the lives of millions of people throughout the Middle East", in the words of AEI scholar Michael Ledeen. At his AEI speech, Bush did nothing else but parrot the idea. Many a voice couldn't resist to point out the splendid American record of encouraging native democracy around the world by supporting great freedom fighters such as the Shah of Iran, Sese Seko Mobutu in the Congo, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, the Somozas in Nicaragua, Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan and an array of 1960s and 1970s Latin American dictators. Among newfound American allies, Turkmenistan is nothing less than totalitarian and Uzbekistan is ultra-authoritarian, and among "old" allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have absolutely nothing to do with democracy.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, based in California, and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. A war veteran turned scholar, he could never be accused of anti-Americanism. His new book about American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans lost their Country, will be published in late 2003. Some of its insights are informative in confirming the role of the PNAC in setting American foreign policy.

Johnson is just one among many who suspect that "after being out of power with Clinton and back to power with Bush ... the neocons were waiting for a 'catastrophic and catalyzing' event - like a new Pearl Harbor" that would mobilize the public and allow them to put their theories and plans into practice. September 11 was, of course, precisely what they needed. National Security Advi Condoleezza Rice called together members of the National Security Council and asked them "to think about how do you capitalize on these opportunities to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th". She said, "I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947 when fear and paranoia led the US into its Cold War with the USSR".

Johnson continues: "The Bush administration could not just go to war with Iraq without tying it in some way to the September 11 attacks. So it first launched an easy war against Afghanistan. There was at least a visible connection between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime, even though the United States contributed more to Osama's development as a terrorist than Afghanistan ever did. Meanwhile, the White House launched one of the most extraordinary propaganda campaigns of modern times to convince the American public that an attack on Saddam Hussein should be a part of America's 'war on terrorism'. This attempt to whip up war fever, in turn, elicited an outpouring of speculation around the world on what were the true motives that lay behind President Bush's obsession with Iraq."

The Iraq war is above all Paul Wolfowitz's war. It's his holy mission. His cue was September 11. Slightly after Rumsfeld, on September 15, 2001 at Camp David, Wolfowitz was already advocating an attack on Iraq. There are at least three versions of what happened that day. As a reporter, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward (remember Watergate) used to bring down presidents; now he's a mere presidential public relations officer. In his book Bush at War he writes that Bush told Wolfowitz to shut up and let the number 1 (Rumsfeld) talk. The second version, defended by the New York Times, says that Bush listened attentively to Wolfowitz. But a third version relayed by diplomats holds that in Bush's executive order on September 17 authorizing war on Afghanistan, there's already a paragraph giving free reign to the Pentagon to draw plans for a war against Iraq.

Former CIA director James Woolsey, a certified five-star hawk, is a great friend of Wolfowitz. Woolsey is also the author of what could be dubbed "the high noon" theory that defines nothing less than Bush's vision of the world. According to the theory, Bush is not a six-shooter: he is the leader of a posse.

That's how Bush described himself in a conversation last year with then Czech president Vaclav Havel. As film fans well remember, Gary Cooper in High Noon plays a village marshal who tries by all means to convince his friends to assemble a posse to face the Saddam of the times (a lean and mean Lee Marvin) who is supposed to arrive in the noon train. In the end, Cooper has to face "Saddam" Marvin all by himself.

It's fair to argue that the Bush administration today is enacting a larger-than-life replay of a high noon. The posse is the "coalition of the willing". The logic of the posse is crystal clear. The US first defines a strategic objective (for example, regime change in Iraq). They propagate their steely determination to achieve this objective (an awesome worldwide propaganda and disinformation campaign combined with a major military deployment). And finally they assemble a posse to help them: the coalition of the willing, or "coalition of the bribed and bludgeoned", as it was dubbed by democrats in Europe and the US itself. A devastating report by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington has detailed a "coalition of the coerced". Whatever its name, those who do not join the coalition (the absolute majority of UN member-states, as well as world public opinion) remain, as Bush says, "irrelevant".

With missionary fervor, Wolfowitz has been pursuing his Iraqi dream step by step. In late 2001, James Woolsey roamed all over Europe trying to find a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. He couldn't find anything. But then in January 2002, Iraq was formally inducted in the "axis of evil along with Iran and North Korea. Rumsfeld went on overdrive: he said that Saddam supported "terrorists" (in fact suicide martyrs in Palestine, who have nothing to do with al-Qaeda). He said that Saddam promised US$25,000 to each of their families. The neocons embarked on a media blitzkrieg, and Wolfowitz's mission finally hit center stage.

During the Cold War in the 1970s, Wolfowitz learned the ropes laboring on nuclear treaties, the endless talks with the Soviets on nuclear armament limitations. At the time he also started a career for one of his better students, Lewis Libby - who today is Cheney's chief of staff. For three decades Wolfowitz has been involved in strategic thinking, military organization and political and diplomatic moves. Even former Jimmy Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the author of The Grand Chessboard - or the roadmap for US domination over Eurasia - allegedly allows Wolfowitz to figure alongside Henry Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy or Zbig himself: that select elite of academics who managed to cross over to high office and radiate intellectual authority and almost unlimited power by osmosis because of close contact with an American president.

Wolfowitz routinely talks about "freedom and democracy" - with no contextualization. His renditions always sound like a romantic ideal. But there's nothing romantic about him. During the First Gulf War, Wolfowitz was an undersecretary at the Pentagon formulating policy. Cheney was the Pentagon chief. It was Wolfowitz who prepared Desert Storm - and also got the money. The bill was roughly $90 billion, 80 percent of it paid by the allies: a cool deal. It was Wolfowitz who convinced Israel not to enter the war even after the country was hit by Iraqi Scuds, so the key Arab partners of the 33-nation coalition would not run away.

But Saddam always remained his nemesis. When Bush senior lost his re-election, Wolfowitz became dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Later, he was fully convinced that Iraq was behind the first attack against the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Wolfowitz and Perle, though close, are not the same thing. Perle is virtually indistinguishable from the hardcore policies of the Likud in Israel. Perle thinks that the only possible way out for the US - not the West, because he despises Europe as a political player - is a multi-faceted, long-term, vicious confrontation against the Arab and Muslim world. Wolfowitz is more sophisticated: he has already served as American ambassador to Indonesia. He definitely does not subscribe to the fallacious Samuel Huntington theory of a clash of civilizations. Wolfowitz even believes in an independent Palestine - something that for Perle is beyond anathema.

Wolfowitz, born in 1943 in New York, is the son of a Polish mathematician whose whole family died in Nazi concentration camps. It was Allan Bloom, the brilliant author of The Closing of the American Mind and professor at the University of Chicago, deceased in 1992, who steered Wolfowitz towards political science. Wolfowitz had the honor of being cloned by Saul Bellow in the novel Ravelstein: the Wolfowitz character shows up under a fictional name in the same role he occupied in 1991 at the Pentagon. Messianic, and a big fan of Abraham Lincoln, Wolfowitz is a walking contradiction: his fierce unilateralism is based on his faith in the universality of American values.

Wolfowitz and his proteges's are hardcore "Straussians" - after Leo Strauss, a Jewish intellectual who managed to escape the Nazis, died in 1999 as a 100-year-old and was totally anti-modern: for him, modernity was responsible for Nazism and Stalinism. Strauss was a lover of the classics - most of all Plato and Aristotle. His most notorious disciples were Chicago's Allan Bloom and also Harvey Mansfield - who translated both Machiavelli and Tocqueville and was the father of all things politically correct in Harvard.

Strauss believed in natural right and in an immutable measure of what is just and what is unjust. Thus the Wolfowitz credo that a vague "democracy and freedom" is a one-size-fits-all panacea to be served everywhere, even by force. Plenty of neo-hawks followed Bloom's courses at the University of Chicago: Wolfowitz of course, but also Francis Fukuyama of "end of history" fame, and John Podhoretz, who reigns over the editorial pages of the ultra-reactionary Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid the New York Post. As to Mansfield, his most notorious student was probably William Kristol, the editor of the also Rupert Murdoch-financed magazine Weekly Standard. In Kristol's own formulation, all these Straussians are morally conservative, religiously inclined, anti-Utopian, anti-modern and skeptical towards the left but also towards the reactionary right.

Ronald Reagan, because of his "moral clarity" and his "virtue", is their supreme icon - not the devious realpolitik couple of Richard Nixon and Kissinger. This conceptual choice is absolutely essential to understand where the neocons are coming from. Take the crucial expression "regime change": there's nothing casual about it. Strauss used to say that "classic political philosophy was guided by the question of the best regime". Here Strauss was talking specifically about Aristotle and his notion of politeia. The "regime" - or politeia - designates not only government, but also institutions, education, morals, and "the spirit of law". In the mind of these Straussians, to topple Saddam is a mere footnote. "Regime change" in Iraq means to implant a Western Utopia in the heart of the Middle East: a Western-built politeia. Many would argue this is no more than a replay of Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden".

Perle, also a New Yorker, is much, much rougher than Wolfowitz. No Aristotle for him. A dull man with a psychopath gaze, he recently accused New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh of being "a terrorist" - because Hersh, in a splendid piece, unveiled how Perle set up a company that will profit immensely from war in the Middle East. Perle has repeatedly declared on the record that the US is prepared to attack Syria, Lebanon and Iran - all "enemies of Israel". One of his most notorious recent stunts was when he invited an obscure French scholar to the Defense Policy Board to bash the Saudi royal family. He casually noted that if the invasion of Iraq brings down another couple of "friendly" Arab regimes, it's no big deal. At a recent seminar organized by a New York-based public relations firm and attended by Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and security officials, Perle proclaimed that France was no longer an ally of the US; and that NATO "must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance". This hawk, though, is no fool, and loves la vie en rose: Richard Perle spends his holidays in his own house in the south of France.

If you are a Pentagon senior civilian adviser, saying all those things out loud, they pack a tremendous punch in Washington: it's practically official. As official as Perle musing out loud whether the US should "subordinate vital national interests to a show of hands by nations who do not share our interests" by seeking the endorsement of the UN Security Council on a major issue of policy (that's exactly what happened on Monday). Perle has been saying all along that "Iraq is going to be liberated, by the United States and whoever wants to join us, whether we get the approbation of the UN or any other institution". And Bush repeated these words almost verbatim. As for the tremendous unpopularity of the US, "it's a real problem and it undoubtedly diminishes our ability to do the things that we think are important. I think that's bad for the world because if the United States, as the leader it has always been, has its authority and standing diminished, that can't be good for the Swiss or the Italians or the Germans. But I don't know how you deal with that problem ..."

Perle and Wolfowitz may shape policy, but that would not enhance their mundane status among the political chattering classes if they didn't have a bulldog to disseminate their clout in the media. That's where William Kristol, the chairman of the Project for a New American Century and the director of the magazine Weekly Standard comes in. Kristol's co-chairman at the PNAC is Robert Kagan, former deputy for policy in the State Department in the bureau for Inter-American affairs. Kagan is the author of Of Paradise and Power: America vs Europe in the New World Order - where, according to a fallacious formula, Europeans living in a kind of peaceful, Utopian paradise will be forced to stomach unbridled American power. Robert is the son of Donald Kagan, ultra-conservative Yale professor and eminent historian. Kagan junior is a major apostle of nation building, as in "the reconstruction of the Japanese politics and society to America's image". He cheerleads the fact that 60 years later there are still American troops in Japan. The same, according to him, should happen in Iraq. Any strategist would remind Kagan that in Japan in 1945 the emperor himself ordered the population to obey the Americans and in Germany the war devastation was so complete that the Germans had no other alternative.

William is the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrud Himmelfarb, classic New York Jewish intellectuals and ironically former Trotskyite who then made a sharp turn to the extreme right. Former Trotskyites have a tendency to believe that history will vindicate them in the end. Irving, at 82 a former neo-Marxist, neo-Trotskyite, neo-socialist and neo-liberal, today is officially a neoconservative and one of the AEI's stalwarts.

Kristol junior reportedly likes philosophy, opera, thrillers and is fond of - who else - Aristotle and Machiavelli, who not by accident were eminences behind the prince. Instead of rebelling against his parents, he sulked in his bedroom rebelling against his own generation - the anti-war, peace-and-love, Bob Dylan-addicted 1960s baby boomers. Although admitting that Vietnam was a big mistake, William did not volunteer to go to war, a fact that qualifies him as the archetypal "chicken hawk" - armchair warmongers who know nothing about the horrors of war. William wants to erect conservatism to the level of an ideology of government. His great heroes include Reagan - for, what else, his "candor" and "moral clarity". A naked imperialist? No, he's not as crass as Rumsfeld: he prefers to be characterized as a partisan of "liberal imperialism".

As media hawk-in-chief, William is just following up daddy's work: Irving Kristol was the ultimate portable think tank of Reaganism. Today, Kristol junior is convinced that the Middle East is an irredeemable source of anti-Americanism, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and an assorted basket of evils. Kristol of course is a very good friend of Wolfowitz, Kagan and former ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, who not by accident heaps lavish praise on The War over Iraq: Saddam's tyranny and America's mission, a book by Lawrence Kaplan and ... William Kristol. Woolsey loves how the book goes against the "narrow realists" around Bush senior and the "wishful liberals" around Bill Clinton.

Under Bush senior, William Kristol was Dan Quayle's chief of staff. Under Clinton, he was in the wilderness until he finally managed to launch the Weekly Standard. Who financed it? None other than Rupert Murdoch, whose tabloidish Fox News is widely known as Bush TV. The Weekly Standard loses money in direct proportion to the expansion of its influence. It remains invaluable as the voice of "Hawk Central".

Hawks, or at least some neoconservatives, seem to understand the importance of a lighter touch as a key public relations strategy. That's where David Brooks comes in. Brooks, former University of Chicago, former Wall Street Journal and now a big fish at the Weekly Standard, was the one who came up with the concept of "bobos" - bourgeois bohemians, or "caviar left" as they are known in Latin countries. "Bobos", accuse the neocons, do absolutely nothing to change a social order that they seem to fight but from which they profit. Bobo-bashing is one of the neocon's ideological strategies to dismiss their critics out of hand.

In his conference at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January, Noam Chomsky demistified the mechanism through which these people, "most of them recycled from the Reagan administration", are implementing their agenda: "They are replaying a familiar script: drive the country into deficit so as to be able to undermine social programs, declare a 'war on terror' (as they did in 1981) and conjure up one devil after another to frighten the population into obedience. In the 1980s it was Libyan hit men prowling the streets of Washington to assassinate our leader, then the Nicaraguan army only two days march from Texas, a threat to survival so severe that Reagan had to declare a national emergency. Or an airfield in Grenada that the Russians were going to use to bomb us (if they could find it on a map); Arab terrorists seeking to kill Americans everywhere while Gaddafi plans to 'expel America from the world', so Reagan wailed. Or Hispanic narco-traffickers seeking to destroy our youth; and on, and on."

For both the AEI and the PNAC, the Middle East is a land without people, and oil without land - and this is something anyone will confirm in the streets or power corridors in Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Ramallah, Damascus or Baghdad. The image fits the AEI and PNAC's acute and indiscriminate loathing and contempt for Arabs. The implementation of the AEI's and the PNAC's policies has led to the transformation of Ariel Sharon into a "man of peace" - Bush's own words at the White House - and the semi-fascist Likud Party becoming the undisputed number one ally of American civilization. The occupied Palestinian territories - see never-complied, forever-spurned UN resolution 242 plus dozens of others - became "the so-called occupied territories" (in Rumsfeld's own words). Jewish moderates, inside and outside Israel, are extremely alarmed.

One of the key excuses for the Iraq war sold by Washington was the elimination of the roots of terrorism by striking terrorists and the "axis of evil" that supports them. This is a total flaw. The excuse is undermined by the US themselves. Not even Washington believes war is the way to fight terrorism, otherwise the Bush administration would not have adopted the AEI and PNAC agenda of promoting "democracy and liberty" in the Arab world. But neither the Arabs nor anyone else is convinced that the US is committed to real democracy or to the "territorial integrity of Iraq" when key members of the administration, like Perle, signed "Clean Break" in 1996 advising Benjamin Netanyahu that Iraq and any other country which tried to defy Israel should be smashed. The message by the PNAC people to Netanyahu in 1996 and to Bush since 2001 has been the same: international law is against our interests; we fix our own objectives; we go for it and the rest will follow - or not. Even Zbig Brzezinski has recognized the American corporate press - unlike the European press - has not uttered a single word about the total similarity of the agendas. But concerned Americans have already realized the superpower has no attention span, no patience, no tact - and many would say no historical credibility - to engage in nation-building in the Middle East.

There's not much democracy on the cards either. Iraqis and the whole Arab nation view as an unredeemable insult and injury the official American plan to enforce a de facto military occupation. Iraq is already carved up on paper into three sections (just like the British did in the 1920s). Two retired generals - including Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-origin John Abizaid - and a former ambassador to Yemen - will control the three interim "civil" administrations. Abizaid studied the history of the Middle East at Harvard - and this is as far as his democratic credentials go. Everything in Iraq will be under overseer supremo Jay Garner, a retired general very close to Ariel Sharon and until a few months ago the CEO of a weapons firm specialized in missile guidance systems. Iraqis, Palestinians and Arabs as a whole are stunned: not only has the US flaunted international legitimacy in its push to war, it will also install an Israeli proxy as governor of Iraq and will keep pretending to finally be committed to respect the never-complied dozens of UN resolutions concerning Palestine.

As much as Israel is widely regarded by most 1.3 billion Muslims as the de facto 51st American state, many responsible Americans denounce the Iraq war as Sharon's war. Washington's Likudniks - the AEI and PNAC people - allied with evangelical Christians - are running US foreign policy in the Middle East. Since Autumn 2002, they have managed to convince Bush to increase the tempo - with no consultation to Congress or to American public opinion - betting on a point-of-no-return scenario in Iraq. Meanwhile, Sharon, in a relentless campaign, managed to convince Bush that war on Palestine was equal to war against terrorism. But he went one step beyond: he convinced Bush that the Palestinian Intifada, al-Qaeda and Saddam are all cats in the same bag, plotting a concerted three-pronged offensive to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization. Thus the subsequent, overwhelming Bush administration campaign to try to convince public opinion that Saddam is an ally of bin Laden. Few fell into the trap. But European strategists got the drift: they are already working with the hypothesis that the geopolitical axis in the Middle East is about to switch from Cairo-Riyadh-Tehran to Tel Aviv-Ankara-Baghdad (post-Saddam).

In a recent hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undersecretary of state for political affairs Mark Grossman and undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith talked for four hours and through 86 pages, apparently detailing how the US will rebuild Iraq after liberation through massive bombing. Feith has been on record saying that this war of course "is not about oil", while stating a few sentences later that "the US will be the new OPEC". A source confirms that it was clear at the Senate hearing both Feith and Grossman had absolutely no idea what the Arab world is all about. Senators asked how much the war would cost (Yale economist William Nordhaus said the occupation may cost between $17 billion and $45 billion a year): nobody had an answer. Feith and Grossman said it was "unknowable". Rumsfeld is also a major exponent of the "not knowable" school. The cost of war for American taxpayers - some estimates go as high as $200 billion - is "not knowable". The size of the occupation force - some estimates range as high as 400,000 troops - is "not knowable". The duration of the occupation - former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark has mentioned no less than eight years - is "not knowable".

Arabs, Asians, Europeans - and a few Americans - warn of blowback: the whole Middle East may explode in a violent, vicious anti-imperialist struggle. As this correspondent has been hearing for months from Pakistan to Egypt and from Indonesia to the Gulf, "dozens of bin Ladens" are bound to emerge. The strategy advocated by the evangelic apostles of armed democratization - overwhelming military force, unilateral preemption, overthrow of governments, seizure of oil fields, recolonization, protectorates - is being roundly condemned by the same educated Arab elites which would be the natural leaders of a push for democratization. Many question not Washington's objective, but the method: they simply cannot stomach the "imperial liberalism" version marketed by the hawks. The current absolute mess in Afghanistan is further demonstration that "democratization" via an American proconsul is doomed to failure. Moreover, 16 eminent British academic lawyers have certified the Bush doctrine of preemptive self-defense is illegal under international law.

Even a tragically surreal, zombie regime like North Korea's has retained one essential lesson from this whole crisis : if you don't want regime change, you'd better maximize your silence, speed and cunning to build your own arsenal of WMDs. Muslims for their part have understood that the unlikely Franco-German-Russian axis of peace was and still is trying to prevent what both al-Qaeda and American fundamentalists want: a war of civilizations and a war of religion. And the world public opinion's insight is that Washington may win the war without the UN - but it will lose peace by shooting the UN down. As a diplomat in Brussels put it, "The world has voted in unison: it does not want to be reordered by a posse in Washington."

The men in the AEI and the PNAC galaxy may be accused of intolerance, arrogance of power, undisguised fascist tendencies, ignorance of history and cultural parochialism - in various degrees. This is all open to debate. They may be "chicken hawks" like Kristol junior or attack dogs like Rumsfeld. But most of all what baffles educated publics across the world - especially the overwhelming majority of public opinion in Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain - is the current non-separation of Church and State in the US.

George W Bush is not ideologically a neoconservative. But he is certainly a man with a notorious lack of intellectual curiosity. Backed by his core American constituency of 60 to 70 million Bible-believing Christians, born-again Bush is setting out to do God's will on a crusade to Babylon to "fight evil" - personified by Saddam. Martin Amis, Britain's top contemporary novelist, argues that Bush, being intellectually null, had no other option than to adopt God as his foreign policy mentor. Amis wrote in the Observer that "Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful 'Texanization' of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions." For former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Bush is "a fundamentalist who does not respect international law. The United States is becoming a crusader state." For the absolute majority of 1.3 billion Muslims, a sinister crusader it is.

The endgame will reveal itself to be a cheap family farce: the Bush family delivers an ultimatum to the Hussein family. What Gore Vidal describes as "the Bush-Cheney junta" has won: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, the AEI and PNAC stalwarts. Paul Wolfowitz, above all, has won his own personal crusade. Colin Powell has lost it all. It does not matter that the State Department's classified report, "Iraq, the Middle East and change: no dominoes" was unveiled by the Los Angeles Times. Wolfowitz and Perle will play with their dominoes. By predictable mechanisms of power as old as mankind itself (and incidentally very common in the former USSR) it was Powell - the adversary of the new doctrine of preemption - who was charged to defend it in the face of the world. Sources in New York confirm he was told to get in line: his discourse, his body language, his whole demeanor changed. Seasoned American diplomats are appalled by the devastating political and diplomatic failure of the Bush administration. They know that by deciding to go to war unilaterally - and leaving the international system in shambles - the US has squandered its biggest capital: its international legitimacy. And to make matters worse there was absolutely no debate - in the Senate, or in the public opinion arena - about it.

Americans still have to wake up to the fact of how startlingly isolated they are in the world. The world, for its part, will keep deploying its weapons of mass democracy. There can be no "international community" as long as the popular perception lingers in so many parts of the world of a clash between the West and Islam. Always ready to recognize and love the best America has to offer, hundreds of millions of people would rather try to save it from the fatal unilateralism distilled by the American fundamentalists of the PNAC and the AEI. Everyone in Baghdad, the former great capital of Islam at its apex, is fond of saying how it has survived the Mongols, the barbarians at the gate. The evangelic apostles of armed democratization cannot even imagine the fury a new breed of barbarians may unleash at the gate of the new American century.

( ASIA TIME MARCH 2003)

My finishing comments on the present situation

War will never ever be good under any circumstance, the fact that we have to fight shows our shortcoming as human beings, and I mean this about all of us not just people in the states, we have a long way to go, we think we can pound people into submission, what has changed from the cave days, instead of clubs we now use smart bombs and missles, but we employ the same method. One minute we are arming the radical then the next minute we are trying to kill him

 Bin laden was trained by the CIA our people to kill and they trained him well, inadvertenly they trained him to kill us, Hussein was provided nerve gass and toxic agents by the US to use against the Iranians and then it was fine, when Bin laden and his men were killing Russians in Afghanistan it was fine. Almost every idiot radical out there, we have helped at some stage in his carreer and then we come in and say they are evil, we knew that long time ago, evil never just comes, its evil forever and it just shows itself more often when it has power. This war was a war in  a way that we helped create, we trained the worst terrorist leader in history why did we not kill him when we were done with, when he was starting the radical movment and when he was no one, and could have been easily killed, why did we not take out hussen in 1991 when in just 4-5 hours more they could have taken Hussein and all his top henchemen out, why do we have to fight a second war that is going to cost billions to do the same job that could have been done long ago,. Why did we and why do we constantly seek to arm crazy lunatics and then cry foul when they break loose there is a saying when you play with fire you will get burned.

We have been playing with fire for a long long time and we have finally got burned and know we want to cremate all those that burned us, we are using anger to rage to deal with anger and rage, result more anger and rage, and the war just keeps going on, hence the term forever was is very appropriate for this war. It will never end, at this rate we will probably end up attacking the whole middle east slowly by slowly attempting to take the key points. Remember the Roman Empire, one of the greatest and what happened it crashed and burned.

Whether this war is right or wrong is irrelevant, the main question is who made sure that this war was here, who trained and empowered the worst terrorist, who kept Hussein in power, and the list of nonsense goes on. You decide I personally think no war is a good war, in war everyone loses some lose their lives immediately while others are slowly killed.

In the end brains over brawn is what always won, so as long as we use brawn, we will never end anything but increase the hatred and hatred can never be bombed away, each bomb just feeds this seething cauldron of hatred even more, we have just increased our enemies 100 fold, we may have the politicians of the world on our side, but the people from those countries are against us.

England and Australian Politicians with us, people fully against us. Germany, France, China and Russia full against us from politicians to the people. Those 4 countries are very powerful, all u need is for china, Russia and India to join forces and you have a hell of  a power base. Or Russia and Europe forging together is another huge force to reckon with.

Once again it just my opinion, I did this special edition as some of you asked me why I was so silent as far as the war went.

In the end now that the war has begun, I can only hope those in charge have a good plan to finish it fast and take minimal amount of innocent lives, and also ensure that as few Americans get killed in this war, one innocent life lost is one to many.

Foot note, 10 US soldiers were wounded as a result of an attack on their camp in Kuwait, this is just the beginning.