21st Century Vision

The Nakba in history

In an age of instant global communications we tend to think ourselves well informed about the recent past. Yes, it is open to reinterpretation, but the facts are reasonably clear. That is why Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" (One World 2006) is so startling, forcing readers to ask themselves why they knew so little of key events which took place in many cases in their own lifetimes. We reserve for a later blog the question of how and why the story Pappe brings to light has for so long escaped the glare of public attention. Here we concentrate on some of his findings.

A "vision of a purely Jewish nation-state has been at the heart of Zionist ideology from the moment the movement emerged in the late nineteenth century", he writes. The project for the de-Arabisation of Palestine gradually took practical shape, and detailed preparations for ethnic cleansing were made from the 1930s.

The catastrophe to come was clearly foreseen by many Palestinians, who rebelled against the British mandatory authority to prevent it, most notably in 1936. The Palestinians - like other peoples emerging from colonial domination - never accepted the partition of their land with a settler community.

The UN's 1947 partition of Palestine awarded the Zionists (who owned 5.8% of the land and made up perhaps 30% of the population) a highly disproportionate share (56%). Through their premeditated assault the Zionists aimed for 80% and took 78%. The UN did nothing to rectify this. In the 1967 war Israel conquered the rest.

Triggered by the UN partition, the physical destruction of Palestinian villages by the Stern Gang and Irgun, soon joined by the Hagana, began in December 1947. Under the mandate the British authorities were still responsible for the protection of the Palestinian people, but they did nothing. Was the attack provoked? Pappe emphasises that the Zionist leadership was "disturbed" precisely by the lack of Palestinian provocation.

Poorly armed and poorly organised Palestinian irregulars - later supplemented by weak Arab volunteer elements and half-hearted Arab League regular forces - acted in self-defence against the ethnic cleansing, which was carried out by a well-prepared and equipped force of about 50,000 troops with air and naval support. It is a myth that Israel was threatened with extinction by Arab forces, and Pappe's reading of Ben-Gurion's diaries and Israeli archives makes clear the Zionist leadership knew this at the time.

The violent destruction of 531 Palestinian villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods and towns was accompanied by atrocities, germ warfare, bombardment of crowds seeking escape, collective punishments and sometimes rape. No Israeli was ever convicted of participating in these war crimes.

One should appreciate that these unprovoked attacks were launched against Palestinian communities which had accepted Jewish settlers among them and with whom they had good relations, and sometimes business partnerships. Palestinian land, houses and possessions were simply stolen, by individuals or by the Israeli state. Hundreds of ancient villages were physically pulverised and today their memory is suppressed, abolished by a "fabricated" narrative of Israeli history.

UN resolution 194 (1948) demanded the right of return for the ethnically cleansed Palestinians. It has been ignored ever since.

Palestine remains at the core of conflict in the Middle East, with more recent events reinforcing memories of what Palestinians call the Nakba. More than just a contribution to Middle Eastern history, Pappe's book is critical to understanding the present day.

What is ethnic cleansing? Drazen Petrovic defines terms

They (still) have plans for you

Intellectuals in the United States have a refreshing habit of writing for a wide public: it is one of the strengths of American democracy. But letting it all hang out can be embarrassing, especially when it's the dirty (intellectual) linen that starts to show. Fans of neoconservative thinking will therefore have been more than a little apprehensive about the prospect of Francis Fukuyama's new book, "After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads" (Profile 2006).

As the dying delusions of the Iraq war rattle their chains at those who launched it, Fukuyama - author of that defining work of American ideology "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) - is the first avowed neocon to jump ship. We got it wrong, he thinks, and next time we must do it better. But where exactly did they go wrong, and how will they do it better in the future?

Many of the City College New York "crowd" who evolved into today's neocons were originally Trotskyists. Having made their peace with capitalism they retained one crucial notion, what Fukuyama refers to as the "Leninist view" that history could be accelerated. But instead of the communist party, with its "leading role" and "democratic centralist" structure, their proposal was that the privileged historical force - morally as well as politically - was none other than the United States itself. In a classic statement, the neocon ideologues Kristol and Kagan wrote: "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power". It is this exceptional status which gives the US its right to make the rules as it sees fit and ignore the UN and world community. An American heiress once said that taxes were for the little people. The neocons think likewise about international law.

For Fukuyama the US has failed to use its "soft power" to build institutions wherever it meets resistance and in particular in the Muslim world: the Bush neocons were caught out by their distrust of "ambitious social engineering projects" (cue President Bush: "we don't do nation building").  He knows that the sort of democracy the US seeks cannot be created solely by the gun and the bomb but must be rooted in the fabric of the society in question. His "realistic [Woodrow] Wilsonianism" is a formula for saying that the US must strive not only for military control, but also for reform of the culture and institutions of societies worldwide to conform to its purposes.

Because he cannot distance himself from the neocon belief in a virtuous America, Fukuyama accepts the US right to enunciate "clear criteria for when we believe preventive war is legitimate". Legitimacy however comes from debate and consent within the international community, not unilaterally from the US administration.  Likewise he wants the United Nations to be only one of "a multiplicity of international organizations that could provide both power and legitimacy for different types of challenges to world order", in other words for the US to choose whichever international body (perhaps NATO, perhaps some temporary coalition, perhaps on a good day the UN itself) will give backing to its aims.

Fukuyama never seriously questions whether the America he describes can be understood as an imperialist power bent on breaking down all barriers to commercial penetration in its own image and establishing domination for the benefit of its corporate rich and powerful. True, at one level he knows that Iraq to coin a phrase has "changed everything", but neocons need not have worried: in the end it is just the means he proposes to reform, not the ends.

Torturers, assassins and character assasssins

One theory of the peculiarity of the British state has it that its threefold origin created a democratically dysfunctional structure which is in urgent need of reform. This is nothing to do with its multi-national past as the fusion of  Scottish, Irish and English/Welsh states, but instead the result of its colonial history. The triune British state grew up on the basis of the colonial states, each with its relative independence in the dominions and possessions, the island British state, with its slow advance to universal suffrage if not democracy, and - linking them all together - the imperial state. The problem was, and to some extent still is, that while the colonial states have withered away, and the British state is at least to some extent publicly accountable, the imperial state marches on unchecked and unchallenged. Exercising those "prerogative powers" which the monarchic fiction preserves from normal scrutiny, it comprises military, intelligence, diplomatic and other functions which are not normally discussed before the servants, i.e. ourselves.

Of course we like to think of the assorted officers, spooks, uniformed ambassadors and other inhabitants of this self-governing demi-monde as motivated only by patriotic concern for the good of the country, tempered these days by a sense of European values and a regard for the rule of law in general and human rights in particular. OK, they get it wrong, but Suez was a terrible lesson and the mandarins and generals saw through WMD in Iraq and were extremely unenthusiastic about following the US in its rampage through the Muslim world. Like more or less everyone else they are waiting for better political times and an end to the increasingly bizarre leadership they get from Downing Street. Our recent post of an article by Oliver Miles (see below, 3rd August ) makes the point.

It is this unthinking assumption of the basic decency of the people who run the shadowy institutions of the imperial state which takes such a body blow from Craig Murray's Murder in Samarkand (published last month by Mainstream). No need to rehearse the whole story here of how as ambassador to Uzbekistan Murray took the UK's human rights agenda seriously and - with great persistence and courage - drove it forward in a country where legal, political and civil freedoms were and are almost non-existent and where extreme forms of torture are normal instruments of government (see our photograph). In 2003, however, Uzbekistan was being built up by the US as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism and an ally in the "war on terror", and Murray's very public pronouncements were not welcome. Nor was his forthright rejection of the policy of using information obtained under torture.

It is by now unsurprising that Downing Street moved immediately to rid itself of the embarrassment, but what does come as an unpleasant revelation is the extent to which senior figures in the Foreign and Colonial Office engaged willingly in every form of pressure, falsehood and character assassination to give the appearance of  due process. Their methods might be described as Stalinism without the Lubyanka, but when one considers that in stifling Murray they were in fact buttressing US cover for Uzbek and other torture chambers, the phrase is too kind.

The book is valuable in a number of ways. First it shows the extent to which when the Bush administration says so the UK's human rights rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. Second, it provides material of relevance to that eternally unanswerable question of how far, like Vichy France, the British would have collaborated with a Nazi occupation in the 1940s.

Finally, it shows the need for reform in the structures of the British state, with no more reserved areas beyond the reach of open parliamentary scrutiny.

Co-operating Constructively with Caesar

Twenty years ago the Church of England published Faith in the City, a stern rebuke to the excesses of rampant neoliberalism, with its mass unemployment, widespread poverty and talk of “the enemy within”. Thatcherism took it as a slap in the face and – never one to turn the other cheek – hit back by labelling the document “Marxist”. This year comes its successor, Faithful Cities (click here), a report of the church’s inter-denominational Commission on Urban Life and Faith. Faith and neoliberalism: reconciliation, or round two?

The document sums up the Christian view of human existence as the journey from Eden to Jerusalem: “Looking back to the beginning, perfection is embodied in a garden; looking forward to the end, perfection is seen as a city” (7.7). Rather than Jerusalem, however, its focus is on the role of faith communities in real British cities of today, and the dilemmas of engaging with state-sponsored regeneration.

                                                                                                                                            Since Faith in the City government urban policies have changed considerably, but for several reasons the overall results have been disappointing –

• Continuing regional unemployment, household indebtedness and the plight of the working poor mean that the corrosive impact of poverty has not been much reduced, while inequality has increased (chapter 4)
• There exists a “democratic vacuum” which may “allow the values of status, power, profit and security to dominate the agenda of urban regeneration” (5.1). All too often poorer populations are forced to make way for "the middle classes arriving to take residential control" (5.10)
• As regards its pursuit of the cheap, xenophobic headline, the report roundly declares it “inhuman and unacceptable that some asylum seekers are left homeless and destitute by government policies” (3.43)
• The dominance of the profit motive: “property is king in the regeneration game" (5.10).  Indeed, the government's approach to regeneration, emphasising economic competitiveness and accelerated growth, is economistic when it should be "person-centred and creation-minded" (6.39). Half a century of economic growth has produced no corresponding increase in happiness or “human flourishing” (4.52)

So deep goes the rot that it is time to question whether capitalism “can really promote the happiness or wellbeing of all” (4.49).

                                                                                                                                            Even a sympathetic critic might be moved to say that Faithful Cities’s prescriptions do not wholly live up to its often acute analysis. How, it reasonably worries, can “people of faith” engage with, humanise and even spiritualise the regeneration process? In taking state funds to deliver services, isn’t there a danger of becoming “unwittingly compromised as the powerful culture and demands of statutory bodies seep into previously independent institutions” (5.32)? Despite the report’s manifold examples of inspiring faith-based practical projects, this last question remains – as it does for civil society generally, not only the churches – decidedly moot.

                                                                                                                                              But as regards the largely uncontrolled accumulation of wealth and market power to which our cities bear such eloquent witness, and the withering away of state commitment to fairness and social justice, the document suggests few remedies. William Blake, where are you?

                                                                                                                                       Faithful Cities, Methodist Publishing House and Church House Publishing 2006, £9.99

Collapse of Globalism – a message of hope!

In an article written for Harper's magazine and published in the magazine's March 2004 issue under the title The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism, he argued that the globalist ideology was under attack by counter-movements. Saul rethought and developed this argument in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (2005). Far from being an inevitable force, Saul argued that globalization is already breaking up into contradictory pieces and that citizens are reasserting their national interests in both positive and destructive ways

John Ralston Saul, is a Canadian author, essayist and philosopher. Born in Ottawa, Saul studied at McGill University in Montreal and at the University of London, where he earned his Ph.D in 1972. After helping to set up the national oil company Petro-Canada, as Assistant to its first Chair, he turned his attention to writing.

These books deal with themes such as the dictatorship of reason unbalanced by other human qualities, how it can be used for any ends especially in a directionless state that rewards the pursuit of power for power's sake. He argues that this leads to deformations of thought such as ideology promoted as truth; the rational but anti-democratic structures of corporatism, by which he means the worship of small groups; and the use of language and expertise to mask a practical understanding of the harm this causes, and what else our society might do.

He argues that the rise of individualism with no regard for the role of society has not created greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation. He calls for a pursuit of a more humanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such as common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good, and he discusses the importance of unfettered language and practical democracy.

In the Collapse of Glabalism, Saul argues that the world now desperately needs a renaiisance of culture, thought and active citizenship. Most important of all he debunks the myth the world is governed by the inevitability of economics. Like Aristotle, he places politics centre stage as the master science – and thus encourages us to believe that by our actions, change is possible. 

Philosophy goes to war

A new book* by a leading academic philosopher invites us to do some thinking about war, terror and morality.

Anyone who thinks of moral philosophers as other-worldly beings developing abstract principles far divorced from the muddle and mess of ordinary life should read Ted Honderich. Here is the Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London mixing it in no uncertain terms on the battlefields of contemporary moral debate. What, he asks, are we to make of the rights and wrongs of Palestine, 9/11, Iraq and 7/7?  Honderich develops an innovative basis for answering these questions, with conclusions that are sometimes surprising and always challenging.

Some things help, but only a little: since international law, UN resolutions and human rights need themselves to be morally justified, they provide at best “moral data”, while just war theory poses every possible problem of interpretation (what is a “last resort”, what is “proportionality”?). Political perspectives are worse. Honderich regards conservatism as little more than disguised self-interest, while liberalism is morally vacuous. The idea that because it synthesises many points of view democracy itself (or democracies themselves) can be trusted to arrive at valid moral judgments falls at the first hurdle (the argument is circular). Even if it could get to its feet, it would then fall at all the remaining hurdles, particularly the fact that the vast inequalities seen in contemporary democracies make a mockery of any claim to inclusiveness.

For ourselves we all necessarily value “good lives” based on certain “great goods” (a reasonable length of healthy life, relationships with others, freedom from coercion, and access to forms of cultural expression), and we cannot escape that we are rational beings. Honderich thinks this commits us to what he calls the “principle of humanity”, the injunction “to take rational steps to the end of getting and keeping [other] people out of bad lives”. That in essence is the principle he applies to Palestine, 9/11, Iraq and 7/7.  It is the basis on which he thinks about terror and terrorism, war, negotiation and the moral standing of our leaders.

Where does it lead?  Terrorism - defined as violent, illegal, politically-motivated, on a scale smaller than war and prima facie wrong - may in some circumstances nonetheless be justified and command our outspoken support.  It may conform to the principle of humanity.  The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was “right”, and Jewish terrorism justified. However, as resistance has since demonstrated, the Zionist project violated nascent Palestinian national aspirations, and so was based on a mistake. One should distinguish between Zionism (honourable) and neo-Zionism (defined as the project of expanding beyond Israel's 1967 borders, and which offends the principle of humanity at every turn).  9/11 and 7/7 come close to wrongs so palpable they need no analysis.  However, if argument is needed, in neither case could it rationally have been believed that the wreckage they foreseeably made of other people's lives could possibly have led to better lives elsewhere.

And Honderich is quite clear that the horrors of an Iraq war repugnant in every way to the principle of humanity are part of the “moral context” of the 7/7 attack. Blair’s attempt to deny it only shows the bad faith to which he has resorted in evading his share of the responsibility.

* “Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War” by Ted Honderich (Continuum 2006)

Usable Strategic Nukes

As the world watches the developing confrontation between the United States and Iran, the ghastly spectre of nuclear war returns to haunt us. Are the Iranians seeking nuclear weapons? Is the US - as Seymour Hersh recently argued in the New Yorker - preparing a nuclear strike to smash any Iranian nuclear capability, real or supposed?  Or has the Bush Administration genuinely agreed to enter serious discussions with Iran in a multilateral framework involving the EU?

All this may however be a relative sideshow. A recent article* in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the US foreign policy elite, argues that more fundamental changes are occurring, changes which profoundly affect our security and the security of our children.

The argument can be summed up as follows –

• After Hiroshima the US possessed a nuclear monopoly which it used as a threat against the Soviet Union
• When the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons in the 1950s, US dominance evaporated. The world entered the period of MAD, mutually assured destruction, in which an attacker could not hope to destroy all his adversary’s missiles in a first strike and would inevitably be annihilated by surviving weapons
• The collapse of the Soviet Union still left Russia with massive nuclear capacity, while China had become a major nuclear power in its own right
• Today however MAD is "nearing an end", and the US is once again approaching nuclear supremacy.  This arises from three developments.  First, advances in US weapons technology and improved deployment have vastly enhanced its first strike capacity. Second, Russian nuclear capability has decayed to the point where it could realistically be eliminated by a first strike. Finally, Chinese nuclear assets are out of date and poorly deployed: they too could be knocked out in a first strike
• It is in this context that we should see the US missile defence project. Often promoted as a protection against so-called “rogue states”, it now seems a US first strike against major nuclear powers could realistically hope to reduce any response to a level so low it could be blocked by the missile defence shield. The US would emerge unscathed

Is this geo-strategic change merely an accidental byproduct of developing US technology combined with Russian decline and Chinese military weakness? The authors do not think so: “The weight of the evidence suggests that Washington is, in fact, deliberately seeking nuclear primacy ... The current and future US nuclear force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a pre-emptive disarming strike against Russia or China."

* The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy, by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006)

Read the article in full

Democratic crusaders

The start of an enlightening journey?  On 25^th May, no doubt with accompanying media fanfare, a group of self-proclaimed “democrats and progressives” is to launch the Euston Manifesto.

In 2,500 words the authors put the political world to rights on subjects from international law (they favour reform to allow the promotion of “global democratization”) to feminism (on which, despite a noticeable shortage of women members, the group supports “progress in relations between the sexes”). At the core, though, these uncompromising interventionist democrats want to pick a fight with the left, or at least with the left of their imagination. But such is their enthusiasm for the cause that they seem to find it hard to engage with ongoing debates central to the very issues they raise.

The left of the Euston imagination is relativist to the point of condoning oppression within non-Western cultures, viscerally anti-American and frequently anti-semitic (this last normally disguised as criticism of Zionism).  So great is the leftist hatred of the pro-war party at home that "many left opponents of regime change in Iraq … have been unable to understand the considerations that led others on the left to support it”. Leftists tend to “observe a tactful silence or near silence about the ugly forces of the Iraqi ‘insurgency’”, while some among them have "actively spoken in support of the gangs of jihadist and Baathist thugs of the Iraqi so-called resistance” (using Euston standards against the manifesto’s authors, one would probably call this “thinly veiled Islamophobia”).

Deaf to the defects of the West's enemies, this largely caricatural left is also blind to the benevolence of US and Blairite foreign policy.  True, for the Eustonians themselves the US has “problems and failings”, but it is primarily “a great country and nation” and “the home of a strong democracy with a noble tradition behind it”. Its culture is “the pleasure, the source-book and the envy of millions”. (Where this leaves the American left critical of Bush's policies is unclear.)  Guantánamo Bay and “rendition” are apparently among the problems and failings, but the manifesto’s authors “reject the double standards by which too many on the Left today treat as the worst violations of human rights those perpetrated by the democracies”.

Is this the same "inconsistent" left that campaigned against Apartheid and the many murderous Latin American dictatorships supported and often installed by the US, or which denounced Saddam when (after Dujail) Donald Rumsfeld was shaking his hand?

The frequent slides and smears in the document (the unnamed “many” on the left passed off as a dominant tendency, the critics of current US foreign policy depicted as deep-dyed anti-Americans, those who insist on protesting against Israeli actions in the occupied territories portrayed as anti-semites) do give way to specifics at one point. Who then epitomizes the attitudes most upsetting to Euston sensibilities? Amnesty International. And what is their offence? To have made a “grotesque public comparison of Guantánamo and the Gulag” and to have glossed over decades of undemocratic tyranny to underline the egregious nature of the attacks on human rights perpetrated by the West in the name of the “war on terror”.

Political enfants, certainly, but not perhaps so terribles as they would like us to believe.  This is a manifesto for a new attitude to world order which manages to avoid any discussion of climate change or resource depletion, or to mention neoconservatism, neoliberalism, nuclear proliferation or the United Nations. And herein lies the nub. For some years now there has been a difficult debate within the UN on intervention where a state fails to protect its people or some of them, culminating in April 2006 in Security Council resolution 1674, recognizing a (still inadequate) “duty to protect”. You would not know it from the Eustonian crusaders, and in the end you doubt whether they know it themselves.

Read the Euston Manifesto in full

The left and anti-semitism: read Paul Oestreicher and David Clark

The UN and the "duty to protect"

Authoritarian populism in America

Something for the bookshelf? You could do worse than Thomas Frank’s,“What’s the Matter with America?" (Vintage 2005)

Why was it a gaffe for the Guardian to get its readers to write personally to Ohio voters to persuade them to vote Kerry in 2004?  As Thomas Frank scathingly explains, it played into the hands of "backlash" America, that small town, Midwest, often poor and working class world in which the enemy is liberalism. Liberals are agnostic (if not downright atheist), unpatriotic, pro-choice, culturally relativist East (or West) coast Darwinists with a taste for latte and French wine. Their treasonable internationalism was more or less proved by the support the left-leaning European Guardian gave them: case closed.

For backlashers, though, the world is run by liberals.  It is they who make the films mocking homely values, write the books questioning unquestionable truths, undermine if not betray America in arms (from Vietnam to Iraq), and all the while flaunting a taste and style alien to religion and the Founding Fathers.  Drawing on the history of his home state Kansas, Frank describes how working people rejected the new world of the 1960s and after, and how they drew away from the Democratic Party and eventually formed the bedrock of a new Republicanism. Two things marked the party as it mutated from the GOP that had rid America of slavery, one of them the increasing dominance of religious belief.

Here in Frank's book is an embryology of the new American right, with its emphasis on fundamentalism in family values and biblical literalism.  Kansas is the token (though an important one) of a movement in which plain-dealing honest men and very often women stood up for their faith and traditions against the increasingly coarse and corrosive cynicism of self-appointed elites in American society. The more the liberal press derided home-spun backlasher certitudes, the more certain the self-proclaimed simple, honest people became. But of course – as we see wherever fundamentalism raises its head – models of the good life which sacralise the practices of some golden past tend to come to grief and violence. In America the flash points turned out to be abortion and evolution, the one an issue of ethics, the other a matter of science.  

The dominance of backlasher values is not however Frank’s main point. The second feature of the new Republicanism is the spectacle of a poor, working-class base toiling selflessly to elect politicians who – as he puts it – “never deliver”. That is, they never deliver a ban on abortion, or Darwinism or freer sexual expression. What they do deliver with utter predictability is on the one hand cuts in taxes (which benefit the educated, relatively moderate Republican corporate elite) and on the other hand cuts in welfare (which crush the very foot soldiers of the new Republican party). Not only that, it is corporate interests – the very thing guaranteed by a Republican Congress and presidency – which generate the coarse cynicism of the marketplace of which the backlashers so ceaselessly complain, and which their political efforts do so much to further. Frank’s analysis challenges rational explanations of political behaviour.

Could it happen here or elewhere in Europe?  Certainly, as traditional parties lose their grip, we have seen the French working class momentarily rally to the National Front, while in Britain the omens of disenchantment with the party system multiply by the day. As charismatic religious sects gain strength, the Church of England more and more struggles with such emblematic backlasher issues as sexual orientation among the clergy, abortion and now creationism. But for the moment the elites are holding on, Darwinism and climate science are not openly derided and public figures can espouse liberal values, drink latte, read the Guardian and support the United Nations without being denounced for lack of patriotism.

"What's the Matter with Liberals?"  Read Thomas Frank in the New York Review of Books

View From America

The Price We're Paying For This War

Don Mills who is a former editor of the Lexington Herald and the Sunday Herald-Leader wrote this article.. He has held a number of public positions including press secretary to former Gov. Edward T. "Ned" Breathitt and executive director of the state Public Service Commission. He has been visiting Europe this month. It was published in the March 9, 2005 by the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal

No one will probably ever know who was at fault when an Italian security officer was killed by U.S. troops in Iraq after an Italian journalist held captive by the insurgents was rescued by him.

Nicola Calpari died after negotiating a release of journalist Giuliana Sgrena who writes for a Communist newspaper. They were fired on by U.S. soldiers as their car approached the Baghdad airport, Calpari, covering her body, took a shot to the head.
The rescue debacle was the top story over the weekend in Italian newspapers -- the Expresso devoting its first four pages to the news -- and on TV shows.

Angry Italians hailed Calpari as a hero as he was buried Monday in Rome in a state funeral, highlighted by the unusual lighting of the Colosseum over the weekend. The left-leaning daily L'Unita blared in a headline: "Segrena: Why did they fire?" Other papers said the event would have serious political consequences.

A demonstration against the shooting and the Iraq war, among others, was held close to the U.S. Embassy and near the famous Trevi fountain, where the movie "Three Coins in a Fountain" was filmed in better times in 1954. "No one dislikes Americans -- they just don't understand you," said one protestor.

Italy, a staunch U.S. ally in Iraq despite strong domestic opposition to the war, has provided 3,000 troops and resisted growing pressure to pull them out. A clerk at the Morgana Hotel, where we stayed, declared: "I am still trying to figure out why we are there in the first place. It is not our war."

A lot of Americans are trying to figure that out, too. This incident is just one more of the many horrible tragedies that have taken place in this war. Some 1,500 American soldiers have died, some 10,000 wounded or with limbs amputated, and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. The costs to U.S. taxpayers continue to grow beyond $200 billion. The bombings, the killings, the kidnappings, the beheadings, the costs -- there seems to be no end.

The U.S. military said they used hand and arm signals, flashing lights and other visible means to stop the "speeding car" at the roadblock. Journalist Segrene disputes this account, saying it may have been done purposefully because ransom was included, a method disapproved by the American government, a charge ridiculed by top Italian officials.

Whatever the case, the Iraq war has cost this country dearly in European friends. Recent stops in Paris and London show a real disdain for our war policy and for President Bush despite his recent efforts in Europe to modify them.
In London, a movement is under way to impeach Prime Minister Tony Blair because he lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destructuion. The British Financial Times, a newspaper read in the United States as well, devoted a full page to the Blair story Sunday and said it was being led by the growing opposition to an increasingly unpopular prime minister.

Even when investigations of the Italian shooting are completed by both the U.S. government and the Italian authorities, it is doubtful we will know the full story. Maybe no one cares. But surely our hides have not become so thick that we no longer are concerned about life and our image in the world.

What a price we are paying for this war.