Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love,

Where there is injury, pardon

Where there is doubt, faith,

Where there is despair, hope,

Where there is darkness, light,

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console,

not so much to be understood as to understand,
not so much to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

it is in dying that we awake to eternal life.

- St. Francis of Assisi"

Democrats Fight Over Softening Stance On Abortion

After long defining itself as an undisputed defender of abortion rights, the Democratic Party is suddenly locked in an internal struggle over whether to redefine its position to appeal to a broader array of voters.

The fight is a central theme of the contest to head the Democratic National Committee, particularly between two leading candidates: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who supports abortion rights, and former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, an abortion foe who argues that the party cannot rebound from its losses in the November election unless it shows more tolerance on one of society's most emotional conflicts.

Roemer is running with the encouragement of the party's two highest-ranking members of Congress, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and incoming Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Dean, a former presidential candidate, is popular with the party's liberal wing.

If Roemer were to succeed Terry McAuliffe as Democratic chairman in the Feb. 10 vote, the party long viewed as the guardian of abortion rights would suddenly have two antiabortion advocates at its helm. Reid, too, opposes abortion and once voted for a nonbinding resolution opposing Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

Party leaders say their support will not change for preserving the landmark ruling. But they are looking at ways to soften the hard line, such as promoting adoption and embracing parental notification requirements for minors and bans on late-term abortions. Their thinking reflects a sense among strategists that Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry and the party's congressional candidates lost votes because the GOP conveyed a more compelling message on social issues.

But in opening a discussion about new appeals to abortion opponents, party leaders are moving into uncertain terrain. Abortion-rights activists are critical pillars of the Democratic Party, providing money and grass-roots energy. Some of them say they are concerned that Democratic leaders are entertaining any changes to the party's approach to abortion.

A senior official of one of the nation's largest abortion rights groups said she would be concerned if the party were to choose Roemer to head the Democratic National Committee.

``We want people who are pro-choice. Of course I would be disappointed,'' said the official, who asked that her name be withheld because of her close alliance with party officials.

Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said Democratic strategists who were pushing for the abortion discussion had misconstrued the results of the November election, by overstating the strength of ``values'' voters.

She said the party should remain committed to the ``women of America, and their health and their lives and their rights.''

Feldt said she had spoken to Kerry and Roemer on Wednesday, and both sought to allay her concerns. Both assured her that the party was not changing its stance on abortion, but merely wanted to be more ``inclusive.''

The debate among Democrats comes at a time when abortion rights supporters are feeling particularly vulnerable. Congress passed a ban on what critics call ``partial-birth abortion'' last year that Bush signed into law. Last month abortion opponents were emboldened when four new conservative Republicans were elected to the Senate. Also, anticipated retirements from the Supreme Court could give Bush the chance nominate justices that would tilt the court against Roe vs. Wade.

The race for Democratic Party chairman remains wide open among Dean, Roemer and several other contenders, including longtime operative Harold M. Ickes, New Democrat Network head Simon Rosenberg and South Carolina political strategist Donald L. Fowler Jr. The field of candidates is likely to remain in flux until days before the February vote.

In an interview, Roemer said he would not try to change the minds of abortion rights supporters. But he also said he would encourage the party to eliminate its ``moral blind spot'' when it comes to late-term abortions.

``We should be talking more about adoption as an alternative, and working with our churches to sponsor some of those adoptions,'' Roemer said Wednesday from his Washington office. He said he was calling 40 to 50 delegates a day to make his pitch. Most of all, he said, he thinks that abortion opponents would be more comfortable if the party talked about the issue in a more open-minded manner.

``We must be able to campaign in 50 states, not just the blue states or 20 states,'' said Roemer, referring to the most Democratic-leaning states.

Dean declined through a spokeswoman to talk about the issue, but earlier this month he signaled that he would maintain the party's defense of abortion rights, telling NBC's Tim Russert: ``We can change our vocabulary, but I don't think we ought to change our principles.''

Votes will be cast by 447 members of the Democratic National Committee, many of whom are among the party's most liberal members. These members are thought to be friendly to Dean and less receptive to Roemer. But the former Indiana congressman is getting attention amid reports that both Pelosi and Reid urged him to run.

Roemer has also highlighted his service on the independent panel investigating the government's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that credential builds his appeal to security-minded voters. He noted that he was an elected official from Indiana, a ``red state'' where Democrats want to make gains.

A Pelosi spokesman said the House Democratic leader likes Roemer because of his national security credentials. But a senior Democratic congressional aide said Pelosi also thought that Roemer's stance on abortion could be an additional benefit.

``She is pro-choice and very staunchly pro-choice,'' the aide said of Pelosi. But at the same time, the aide said, ``she supports showing that this is a big tent party.''

In the presidential election, Kerry, a Catholic, said he personally opposed abortion but did not believe in imposing that belief on others. He said he would not appoint antiabortion judges to the bench.

But after his election loss, the Massachusetts senator concluded that the party needed to rethink its stance. Addressing supporters at a meeting held by the AFL-CIO, Kerry said he discovered during trips through Pennsylvania that many union members were also abortion opponents and that the party needed to rethink how it could appeal to those voters, aKerry spokesman David Wade said.

On the other side of the debate, Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Conservative Women for America, which opposes abortion, said she thought it would be ``very smart'' for Democrats to elect Roemer chairman of the party.

``It would make sense for Democrats as a whole to recognize that Americans want protections for women and unborn children, want sensible regulations in place, instead of forbidding the law to recognize that an unborn child is a human being,'' Wright said. ``To not pass legislation just to keep the abortion lobby happy is nonsensical, and it appears that some Democrats have recognized that.''

Wright said it was too early to know whether Democrats wouldchange their votes on upcoming antiabortion legislation, or would only change the way they speak of abortion. She said the comments of some party leaders led her to believe that ``it would just be changing of wording, just trying to repackage in order to be more appealing -- really, to trick people.''

Some local Democratic leaders said they would be open to an antiabortion chairman under the right circumstances, but that it would be difficult to envision those circumstances.

``That would be a very large philosophical mountain for me to climb,'' said Mitch Ceasar, a Broward County, Fla., lawyer who is a voting member of the party's national committee.

Ceasar said he took note of Roemer's abortion stance when he received a letter recently from the former congressman. He said he was surprised to learn that abortion was an issue in the contest to succeed McAuliffe.

``It never occurred to me before his candidacy,'' Ceasar said. ``I never wondered whether Terry McAuliffe was pro-choice or not.''

Peter Wallsten and Mary Curtius / Los Angeles Times

Under Pressure, Qatar May Sell Jazeera Station

The tiny state of Qatar is a crucial American ally in the Persian Gulf, where it provides a military base and warm support for American policies. Yet relations with Qatar are also strained over an awkward issue: Qatar's sponsorship of Al Jazeera, the provocative television station that is a big source of news in the Arab world.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other Bush administration officials have complained heatedly to Qatari leaders that Al Jazeera's broadcasts have been inflammatory, misleading and occasionally false, especially on Iraq.

The pressure has been so intense, a senior Qatari official said, that the government is accelerating plans to put Al Jazeera on the market, though Bush administration officials counter that a privately owned station in the region may be no better from their point of view.

"We have recently added new members to the Al Jazeera editorial board, and one of their tasks is to explore the best way to sell it," said the Qatari official, who said he could be more candid about the situation if he was not identified. "We really have a headache, not just from the United States but from advertisers and from other countries as well." Asked if the sale might dilute Al Jazeera's content, the official said, "I hope not."

Estimates of Al Jazeera's audience range from 30 million to 50 million, putting it well ahead of its competitors. But that success does not translate into profitability, and the station relies on a big subsidy from the Qatari government, which in the past has explored ways to sell it. The official said Qatar hoped to find a buyer within a year.

Its coverage has disturbed not only Washington, but also Arab governments from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. With such a big audience, but a lack of profitability, it is not clear who might be in the pool of potential buyers, or how a new owner might change the editorial content.

Administration officials have been nervous to talk about the station, being sensitive to charges that they are trying to suppress free expression. Officials at the State and Defense Departments and at the embassy in Qatar were reluctant to comment. However, some administration officials acknowledged that the well-publicized American pressure on the station - highlighted when Qatar was not invited to a summit meeting on the future of democracy in the Middle East last summer in Georgia - has drawn charges of hypocrisy, especially in light of President Bush's repeated calls for greater freedoms and democracy in the region.

"It's completely two-faced for the United States to try to muzzle the one network with the most credibility in the Middle East, even if it does sometimes say things that are wrong," said an Arab diplomat. "The administration should be working with Al Jazeera and putting people on the air."

In fact, since the Iraq war, Mr. Powell and even Mr. Rumsfeld have been interviewed by Al Jazeera, though Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush have not. But when the interim government of Iraq kicked Al Jazeera out of the country last August, the Bush administration uttered little criticism.

The administration's pressure thus encapsulates the problems of "public diplomacy," the term for the uphill efforts by Washington to sell American policies in the region.

Some administration officials acknowledge that their "public diplomacy" system is fundamentally broken, but there is disagreement on how to fix it. Two years ago, the United States launched its own Arab television network, Al Hurra, but administration officials say it has yet to gain much of a following.

Among the broadcasts criticized by the United States were repeated showings of taped messages by Osama bin Laden, and, more specifically, the reporting early last year, before Al Jazeera was kicked out of Iraq, of the journalist Ahmed Mansour, that emphasized civilian casualties during an assault on Falluja. The network also reports passionately about the Palestinian conflict.

Some American officials said that Mr. Mansour was subsequently removed from that assignment, but a spokesman for Al Jazeera in Qatar, Jihad Ballout, said that was "utterly false." He said Mr. Mansour's two public affairs shows were still on the air.

Administration officials say debates within the American government over what to do about Al Jazeera have sometimes erupted into shouting matches.

"One side is shouting, 'We have to shut them down!' and the other side is saying 'We have to work with them to make them better,' " said an administration official who has taken part in the confidential discussions. "It's an emotional issue. People can't think of it rationally."

Part of the problem, that official said, is that much of what Al Jazeera does to inflame emotions over Iraq is standard fare on cable television, like endless repetition of scenes of civilian deaths. There have been occasions when Pentagon criticism focused on images that were also running on CNN and other stations at the same time, he said.

American officials have also charged that Al Jazeera has shown up suspiciously quickly after bombing attacks in Iraq, and they have suggested that the network's correspondents may have been tipped off in advance. But the administration official said recently that there was no evidence for such a charge and that it was no longer repeated, though it had not been formally withdrawn.

Al Jazeera officials denied that there had ever been any such collusion, noting that they have not had crews in Iraq since August in any case. They also said that they went out of their way to get American comment for stories and that they often broadcast briefings of Pentagon officials and Mr. Rumsfeld's news conferences.

"We understand that Americans are not happy with our editorial policies," said Ahmed Sheikh, the network's news editor. "But if anyone wants us to become their mouthpiece, we will not do that. We are independent and impartial, and we have never gotten any pressure from the Qatari government to change our editorial approach."

Leading the discussion with Al Jazeera, American officials said, was Ambassador Chase Untermeyer in Qatar and his press spokesman, but both declined to be interviewed. Mr. Sheikh said that he had heard complaints from them about incorrect information but that Al Jazeera "never puts anything on the air before we check it."

A recent decree from the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, said Al Jazeera would be converted to a privately owned "company of participation," which Mr. Ballout, the station spokesman, said would most likely be owned by shareholders in the Arab world. But little has happened since then, and now new people have been put on the board to facilitate its sale.

Mr. Sheikh said that Al Jazeera's budget last year was $120 million, including a subsidy of $40 million or $50 million from Qatar. Mr. Ballout said one reason for the shortfall was that businesses were afraid to advertise because of criticism they might get from Arab governments and the United States.

"We feel aggrieved that Al Jazeera's popularity has not been rewarded with the advertising it deserves," said Mr. Ballout. "The merchant families in control in the Persian Gulf feel they cannot sustain their position if they are not part of the status quo."

An American official noted that Al Jazeera had not only alienated the United States but had also angered officials in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and many other countries by focusing on internal problems in those nations. "They must be doing something right," he said.

STEVEN R. WEISMAN
Published: January 30, 2005
NY Times

'Iraq's Non-Election'

A real election cannot go on under foreign occupation in which the electoral process is managed by the occupiers who have clear preferences in the outcome.

Predictably, the U.S. news media are full of discussion and debate about this weekend's election in Iraq. Unfortunately, virtually all the commentary misses a simple point: There will be no "election" on Jan. 30 in Iraq, if that term is meant to suggest an even remotely democratic process.

Many Iraqis casting votes will be understandably grateful for the opportunity. But the conditions under which those votes will be cast -- as well as the larger context -- bear more similarity to a slowly unfolding hostage tragedy than an exercise in democracy. We refer not to the hostages taken by various armed factions in Iraq, but the way in which U.S. policymakers are holding the entire Iraqi population hostage to U.S. designs for domination of the region.

This is an election that U.S. policymakers were forced to accept and now hope can entrench their power, not displace it. They seek not an election that will lead to a U.S. withdrawal, but one that will bolster their ability to make a case for staying indefinitely.

This is crucial for anti-empire activists to keep in mind as the mainstream media begins to give us pictures of long lines at polling places to show how much Iraqis support this election and to repeat the Bush administration line about bringing freedom to a part of the world starved for democracy. Those media reports also will give some space to those critics who remain comfortably within the permissible ideological limits -- that is, those who agree that the U.S. aim is freedom for Iraq and, therefore, are allowed to quibble with a few minor aspects of administration policy.

The task of activists who step outside those limits is to point out a painfully obvious fact, and therefore one that is unspeakable in the mainstream: A real election cannot go on under foreign occupation in which the electoral process is managed by the occupiers who have clear preferences in the outcome.

That's why the U.S.-funded programs that "nurture" the voting process have to be implemented "discreetly," in the words of a Washington Post story, to avoid giving the Iraqis who are "well versed in the region's widely held perception of U.S. hegemony" further reason to mistrust the assumed benevolent intentions of the United States.

Post reporters Karl Vick and Robin Wright quote an Iraqi-born instructor from one of these training programs: "If you walk into a coffee shop and say, 'Hi, I'm from an American organization and I'm here to help you,' that's not going to help. If you say you're here to encourage democracy, they say you're here to control the Middle East."

Perhaps "they" -- those well-versed Iraqis -- say that because it is an accurate assessment of policy in the Bush administration, as well as every other contemporary U.S. administration. "They" dare to suggest that the U.S. goal is effective control over the region's oil resources. But "we" in the United States are not supposed to think, let alone say, such things; that same Post story asserts, without a hint of sarcasm, that the groups offering political training in Iraq (the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, International Republican Institute, and International Foundation for Election Systems) are "at the ambitious heart of the American effort to make Iraq a model democracy in the Arab world."

Be still my heart. To fulfill that ambition, U.S. troop strength in Iraq will remain at the current level of about 120,000 for at least two more years, according to the Army's top operations officer. For the past two years, journalists have reported about U.S. intentions to establish anywhere from four to 14 "enduring" military bases in Iraq. Given that there are about 890 U.S. military installations around the world to provide the capacity to project power in service of the U.S. political and economic agenda, it's not hard to imagine that planners might be interested in bases in the heart of the world's most important energy-producing region.

But in mainstream circles, such speculation relegates one to the same category as those confused Middle Easterners with their "widely held perception of U.S. hegemony." After all, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has dismissed as "inaccurate and unfortunate" any suggestion that the United States seeks a permanent presence in Iraq. In April 2003, Rumsfeld assured us that there has been "zero discussion" among senior administration officials about permanent bases in Iraq.

But let's return to reality: Whatever the long-term plans of administration officials, the occupation of Iraq has, to put it mildly, not gone as they had hoped. But rather than abandon their goals, they have adapted tactics and rhetoric. Originally the United States proposed a complex caucus system to try to avoid elections and make it easier to control the selection of a government, but the Iraqis refused to accept that scheme. Eventually U.S. planners had to accept elections and now are attempting to turn the chaotic situation on the ground to their advantage.

Ironically, the instability and violence may boost the chances of the United States' favored candidate, U.S.-appointed interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. While most electoral slates are unable to campaign or even release their candidates' names because of the violence, Allawi can present himself as a symbol of strength, running an expensive television campaign while protected by security forces.

He has access to firepower and reconstruction funds, which may prove appealing to many ordinary Iraqis who, understandably, want the electricity to flow and the kidnappings and violence to stop.

Of course the United States can't guarantee the favored candidate will prevail. But whoever is in the leadership slot in Iraq will understand certain unavoidable realities of power. As the New York Times put it -- in the delicate fashion appropriate to the Times -- the recent announcement by Shi'a leaders that any government it forms would not be overtly Islamic was partly in response to Iraqi public opinion. But, as reporter Dexter Filkins reminded readers, U.S. officials "wield vast influence" and "would be troubled by an overtly Islamist government." And no one wants troubled U.S. officials, even Iraqi nationalists who hate the U.S. occupation but can look around and see who has the guns.

The realities on the ground may eventually mean that even with all those guns, the United States cannot impose a pro-U.S. government in Iraq. It may have to switch strategies again. But, no matter how many times Bush speaks of his fondness for freedom and no matter what games the planners play, we should not waver in an honest analysis of the real motivations of policymakers. To pretend that the United States might, underneath it all, truly want a real democracy in Iraq -- one that actually would be free to follow the will of the people -- is to ignore evidence, logic and history.

As blogger Zeynep Toufe put it: "All these precious words have now become something akin to brand names: "democracy," "freedom," "liberty," "empowerment." They don't really mean anything; they're just the names attached to things we do."

Right now, one of the things that U.S. policymakers do is to allow Iraqis to cast ballots under extremely constrained conditions. But whatever the results on Jan. 30, it will not be an election, if by "election" we mean a process through which people have a meaningful opportunity to select representatives who can set public policy free of external constraint. The casting of ballots will not create a legitimate Iraqi government. Such a government is possible only when Iraqis have real control over their own future. And that will come only when the United States is gone.

Robert Jensen is on the board and Pat Youngblood is coordinator of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, TX.

Reprinted from The Progressive Trail:
http://www.progressivetrail.org/articles/
050128JensenandPatYoungblood.shtml