No-War Fever

opinion by Ruth Wilson, the Free Press

“Stop the War. Feed the Poor.” That’s what people were chanting in London’s Trafalger Square on October 13. The police estimated that 20,000 people came to the peace rally, while organizers put the number at 50,000. The next day in Italy 200,000 people marched, saying “We want peace, not war,” and “Stop the terrorism against Afghanistan.” In San Francisco, more than 5,000 people rallied for peace on October 20, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle quoted a teacher from the Bronx who said, "We shouldn't be bombing innocent civilians because of what happened on September 11. It isn't going to help people in New York feel any better." The Seattle Times version of the story consisted of a photo of a counter-protestor against a blurry background.

Some people seem preoccupied with trying to come up with a solution to terrorism. There may be no simple solution. Those who oppose police brutality do not feel compelled to come up with the ultimate answer to crime. Perhaps they can think about this while they’re working on the problem of altering police methods. You can look at it from several perspectives. There are the individual criminals and their various psychological and moral histories. If you step back, you may observe societal factors, such as inequalities of wealth. Countries that have high levels of income inequality tend to have high crime rates. Similarly, gross global inequities and injustices may tend to produce terrorists. There is no excuse for local or international crimes of violence, but we can learn about and try to understand factors which may increase the chance of occurrence.

Officials Cry Wolf on Anthrax

US leaders have been interested in scaring the public with propaganda about anthrax, not in protecting people. If they were serious, they would have produced enough vaccine to treat everyone years ago. The thing they were serious about was finding new excuses to continue the sanctions against Iraq. Iraq’s absence or near-absence from the oil market has proved profitable for a number of American corporations, due to transfer of oil profits to Saudi Arabia. News stories about biological weapons mushroomed after the announcement by chief UN inspector Rolf Ekeus in 1994 that Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had been destroyed. It’s lucky that anthrax is relatively difficult to contract and hard to disperse efficiently.

The Saudi Prince in New York

The check for $10 million that Prince Alwaleed sent to New York was publicly rejected by Mayor Guiliani, after the prince issued a statement suggesting that the US treat Israel and the Palestinians in a more balanced way. The whole event may have been bit of political theatre designed to play to the Saudi audience. Prince Alwaleed made it look like the Saudi ruling family cares about Palestinians, and Mayor Guiliani made it look like New York has no connection to Saudi oil money. In fact, many banks and corporations with headquarters in New York or other American cities depend on Saudi petrodollars. Prince Alwaleed is famous for bailing out needy corporations. In 1991, he bailed out Citibank with an $800 million investment, at a time when it was feared the bank might fail (Business Week, Sept 25, 1995). He has also helped out Disney, Planet Hollywood, Netscape and many others. The Saudis spent tens of billions buying arms in the past decade, mostly from the US and Britain, to the benefit of Boeing, Lockheed and others. The situation for the Saudi ruling family is precarious. It depends on US support to stay in power, but is squandering much of the country's oil wealth to fuel the American economy. This situation is producing unrest among the Saudi people. As many as 12 of the suicide hijackers were Saudi Arabians.

Oops!

My apologies to Senator Maria Cantwell for accusing her of complicity in the soccer field bombing in Iraq [in the Sept/Oct 2001 issue of the Free Press]. I was unaware at the time that the soccer field was actually hit be an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile, which happened to be US-made.