Andrew’s Photos – Blog

Saul Williams sent out an email today that opened as follows:

We have overcome.

Except those of us now in Gaza. Except those of us whom police kill. Except those of us who are suspects. Except those of us whom the church hate. Except those of us damned to taste good. Except those of us held by fate. We are meeting in the capitol. Word is, freedom will not wait.

Visit his website too.

There’s an interesting op-ed piece up on The Nation today concerning the steps that Obama can and should undertake in order to roll back the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” Concerning the Bush administration’s policy it writes that:

Unfortunately, from the start the United States conflated its lone real enemy, Al Qaeda, with a panoply of unrelated states and organizations, some Islamist and some secular, creating a mythical bloc of evil-doers under the heading of what John McCain called, redundantly, “radical Islamic extremism.” In the mix, Bush rolled up Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, various Pakistani Islamist groups, and others into one big terrorist ball of wax. Predictably, and aided by the anti-Muslim prejudices of the Christian right, it became a Crusade against Islam, at least in as seen through the lens of people living in the Middle East and South Asia. No wonder that anti-American sentiment throughout the region reached all-time highs.

To me this seems to be the most significant thing that Obama can work toward changing. Regardless of whether he continues the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and irrespective of what his policy on the Israel/Gaza conflict is he needs to clarify that the United States is not waging a war against Islam, but rather a war against those that seek disruption and violence. This is something that the Bush administration left all too vague at points and consequently led to the perception that the U.S. was waging a “Crusade against Islam.”

Link via Obama and the Middle East, Part I.

Word comes today that two Israeli tank shells exploded outside of a UN school in Gaza. See the story here. From that article:

“There’s nowhere safe in Gaza. Everyone here is terrorized and traumatized,” said John Ging, the top UN official in Gaza, blaming the international community for allowing the violence to continue. 

“I am appealing to political leaders here and in the region and the world to get their act together and stop this,” he said, speaking at Gaza’s largest hospital. “They are responsible for these deaths.”

As atrocious as this attack is it’s refreshing to see someone stand up to world leaders and call on them to resolve this issue. I can only see Israel stopping this attack on Gaza if it is forced to do so by the U.S., U.K., France, or some other powerful country. Here’s hoping that Ging’s call does not go unanswered and that some country presses Israel to stop this violence.

Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, has an interesting article/essay (warning, its very long so be committed to reading it) about the conflict raging in the Gaza strip. What his piece does is look at the types of wars that Israel has fought with its Arab neighbors over time. In the opening he writes that:

With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have entered the age of micro-wars.

This is an interesting characterization to me for many reasons. Cole’s article made me think (in a somewhat unrelated tangent to this article) about the current conflict.

I agree with the term “micro-war” because it does seem that these wars are significantly different from conventional warfare. While these wars are different in the sense that they don’t necessarily involve the “infantry, artillery, armor and air forces [that] played central roles” in earlier conflicts their seriousness is still conventional. What I’m worried about is that by characterizing these conflicts as “micro-wars” the press (assuming that this term gets spread in mainstream media) may be creating a situation in which the public begins to believe that these are simply small conflicts that aren’t lasting and that if we just give them time they will resolve themselves. I know this is a little different from what Cole means by micro-wars, but this is just how I see the majority of the public interpreting this term.

Furthermore, I have become concerned that in this age countries have begun to think that wars that they engage in will be resolved quickly (i.e. U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.). What worries me is what happens if a “micro-war” that doesn’t necessarily have the full commitment of a nation’s military force becomes a much larger conflict that cannot be resolved quickly? We saw in Iraq what can happen when a country undertakes military force without a contingency plan for after the fighting. So long as Israel, and other countries for that matter, enter into these conflicts with plans for getting out and for stabilization then the problems can be mitigated. If they begin to enter into conflicts over religion, territory, etc. without thinking past getting what they want then these “micro-wars” could become “macro-wars” pretty quickly.

Link to Juan Cole article.