The Day After
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

As soon as American troops are rolling through Saddam Hussein's palaces, the odds are that this holy Shiite city 100 miles south of Baghdad will erupt in a fury of killing, torture, rape and chaos.

The Shiite Muslims who make up 60 percent of Iraq — but who have never held power — will rampage through the narrow streets here. Remembering the whispers from the bazaar about how Saddam's minions burned the beard off the face of a great Shiite leader named Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, then raped and killed his sister in front of him, and finally executed him by driving nails through his head, the rebels will tear apart anyone associated with the ruling Baath Party.

In one Shiite city after another, expect battles between rebels and army units, periodic calls for an Iranian-style theocracy, and perhaps a drift toward civil war. For the last few days, I've been traveling in these Shiite cities — Karbala, Najaf and Basra — and the tension in the bazaars is thicker than the dust behind the donkey carts.

So before we rush into Iraq, we need to think through what we will do the morning after Saddam is toppled. Do we send in troops to try to seize the mortars and machine guns from the warring factions? Or do we run from civil war, and risk letting Iran cultivate its own puppet regime? In the north, do we suppress the Kurds if they take advantage of the chaos to seek independence? Do we fight off the Turkish Army if it intervenes in Kurdistan? [read more]

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White Man's Burden
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Of course the new Bush doctrine, in which the United States will seek "regime change" in nations that we judge might be future threats, is driven by high moral purpose. But McKinley-era imperialists also thought they were morally justified. The war with Spain — which ruled its colonies with great brutality, but posed no threat to us — was justified by an apparent act of terror, the sinking of the battleship Maine, even though no evidence ever linked that attack to Spain. And the purpose of our conquest of the Philippines was, McKinley declared, "to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them."

Moral clarity aside, the parallel between America's pursuit of manifest destiny a century ago and its new global sense of mission has a lot to teach us. [read more]

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Forget the evidence
by Brendan O'Neill

But commentators' focus on The Evidence does indicate a worrying trend - namely, how everyone now accepts the right of America and Europe to interfere in Iraq's affairs. When people say that they're 'waiting for the evidence' or 'waiting for better evidence' or even that they're 'unconvinced by the evidence', what they're really saying is: we accept the West's right to intervene in Iraq and to effect regime change and to oust Saddam. You just need to convince us that it is necessary right now. This is anti-war opposition based on the pedantic rather than the principled.

Forget the 'facts against Saddam'. Forget asking Bush and Blair 'Where is the evidence?'. A far better question would be: 'What right do you have to gather evidence on foreign states, and to tell others how to run their affairs?' [read more]

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Mentioning the war
The German minister who likened Bush to Hitler was sacked. So what will happen to Al Gore?

In a speech this week, a senior western politician controversially compared the effects of George Bush's foreign policy to the conditions which created the rise of Adolf Hitler. But the politician in question was not the unfortunate former German justice minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who was sacked by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on Monday for saying much the same thing at the height of the German election. The man who drew the comparison this time was none other than former US vice-president Al Gore.

In his remarkable speech in San Francisco on Monday night - remarkable not least because Gore spoke there with a freedom and frankness that he disastrously abandoned during his presidential election campaign two years ago - Gore ripped into Bush's ideological opposition to "nation-building" as a catastrophically dangerous policy. "The absence of enlightened nation-building after world war one led directly to the conditions which made Germany vulnerable to fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler, and made all of Europe vulnerable to his evil designs," Gore argued. [read more]

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War is peace?
Ignorance is strength in Bush Security Strategy 2002
by Molly Ivins

No. This is not acceptable. This is not the country we want to be. This is not the world we want to make.

The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood. [read more]