The best way to understand "America's new war" is as a convenient legitimizing rubric to extend American economic and military power abroad, and to complete the repressive domestic agenda already set in motion during the post-cold war years in the guise of the "war on drugs."

In both instances, corporate globalization's increasingly intolerant attitude toward dissent of any kind is implicated. This is not so much a war against "terrorism," but a pre-emptive strike against domestic and international opposition to the hegemony of transnational capital in the early years of the twenty-first century.

In this most hyperreal of wars, nothing is as it seems. The most unprecedented repression of dissent and diversity of opinion at home is and will be accompanied by hollow echoes of borrowed liberal endorsement of multiculturalism and identity politics.
[read more]

thanks to wood s lot

It's discouraging when we find intelligent pieces like this in a Pakistani paper and not a U.S. paper. This page also had two other very good pieces.

America under siege

When Bush finally signed the ridiculously named PATRIOT ("Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism") Act, 2001, he surrendered the most vital component of the "American way of life" the whole world looked up to.

It appears now that on September 11, terrorists ended up doing a lot more damage to the United States than they could have imagined in their wildest dreams. In retrospect, the tragic deaths and loss of property seem the lesser casualties of that fateful day. The real damage has been caused to the American psyche. The US president's rhetoric calling the event an attack on the "American way of life" is coming true in a bizarre fashion. Only, the Americans have themselves set about destroying their own civil liberties, individual rights and basic freedoms they used to be proud of until now.
[read more]

Middle East impasse

With the bombs and missiles falling on Afghanistan in the high altitude US destruction of "Operation Enduring Freedom", the Palestine question may seem tangential to the altogether more urgent events in Central Asia. But it would be a mistake to think so, and not just because Osama bin Laden and his followers (no one knows how many there are in theory or in practice) have tried to capture Palestine as a rhetorical part of their unconscionable campaign of terror.

But so too has Israel, for its own purposes. With the killing of cabinet minister Rahavam Ze'evi on October 17 as retaliation by the Popular Front for the assassination of its leader by Israel last August, General Sharon's sustained campaign against the Palestine Authority as Israel's bin Laden has risen to a new, semi-hysterical pitch. Israel has been assassinating Palestinian leaders and militants (over 60 of them to date) for the past several months, and couldn't have been surprised that its illegal methods would sooner or later prompt Palestinian retaliation in kind.

But why one set of killings should be acceptable and others not is a question Israel and its supporters are unable to answer. And so the violence goes on, with Israel's occupation the more deadly, and the vastly more destructive, causing huge civilian suffering: in the period between October 18-21, six Palestinian towns re-occupied by Israeli forces; five more Palestinian activists assassinated plus 21 civilians killed and 160 injured; curfews imposed everywhere, and all this Israel has the gall to compare with the US war against Afghanistan and terrorism.

Thus, the frustration and subsequent impasse in pressing the claims of a people dispossessed for fifty-three years and militarily occupied for thirty-four years have definitively gone beyond the main arena of struggle and are willy-nilly tied in all sorts of ways to the global war against terrorism. Israel and its supporters worry that the US will sell them out, all the while protesting contradictorily that Israel isn't the issue in the new war. Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims generally have either felt uneasiness or a creeping guilt by association that attaches to them in the public realm, despite efforts by political leaders to keep dissociating bin Laden from Islam and the Arabs: but they, too, keep referring to Palestine as the great symbolic nexus of their disaffection.

In official Washington, however, George Bush and Colin Powell have more than once revealed unambiguously that Palestinian self-determination is an important, perhaps even a central issue.
[read more]

The Belligerent Bunch: Rabid Journalists and Pundits Push Bush to Extremes

A rabidly pro-war cadre of journalists and pundits have become cheer-leaders for an aggressive and expansive war, and increasingly draconian domestic policies, following the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11. As the Bush administration rapidly expands law enforcement power and national security authority, a phalanx of white male commentators with magazines of opinion like the New Republic and the Weekly Standard have become a steady bellicose chorus, flirting with macabre doomsday scenarios. Their voices urge the administration to escalate the battle beyond Afghanistan and to use more force.
[read more]

thanks to wood s lot