o closed caucuses, as the U.S. wants, the Shi'ites will turn to violence. Either way, tensions among all religious and ethnic factions are mounting. Iraq is edging closer to a civil war, and chaos could engulf the entire region.

Whether the UN can help to stabilize the situation remains unclear. Much depends on how much real independence and power it is granted, if any. Although Iraq is not beyond positive solutions, many knowledgeable observers worry that a UN intervention may be too little, too late. Time is running out, and the situation seems to deteriorate a bit more with each passing day.

To keep a lid on the violence, a new secret police force is being planned by the CIA. It will draw upon feared Mukhabarat (intelligence) operatives, the very ones who bolstered Saddam Hussein's thuggish regime. "They're clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam," said Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of CIA counter-terrorism. (The Phoenix program was investigated by a Senate committee in the mid-1970s after tens of thousands in Vietnam had allegedly been kidnapped, tortured and murdered.) As battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman has remarked, "With a heavy dose of fear and violence and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them."

Not everyone regards a new Phoenix program as compatible with official promises of democracy. The real intent seems to be to continue the occupation by other means. "The presence of a powerful secret police, loyal to the Americans, will mean that the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the U.S. wants to set," said John Pike, director of the Washington-based institute, Global Security. Under these circumstances, "the new Iraqi government will reign but not rule."...

...Erosion of support would not be surprising given the way that the case for the invasion is crumbling. What antiwar critics insisted before the war has been confirmed at every turn. This January, for example, within the course of one week, the Bush administration had to face the following:

--David Kay resigned after his inspection team, with nine months to search and a budget of $600 million, failed to turn up any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. (NYT, 1/08/04)

--The Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute issued a sharply critical report stating that the war on Iraq was a distraction from America's real security interests and that it had brought the U.S. army "near the breaking point." (WP, 1/13/04)

--The Washington Post published an extensive front-page report that "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only On Paper." Since the first Gulf War, illegal weapons "never got past the planning stage." (WP, 1/07/04)

--A study was released by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stating that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile program" by treating possibilities as fact and "misrepresenting inspectors' findings in ways that turned threats from minor to dire." (Boston Globe, 1/09/04)

--George Bush's former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that the president took office fully intending to invade Iraq. In January and February of 2001, at the first meetings of the National Security Council, Bush asked his advisors to find a pretext. "It was all about finding a way to do it," states O'Neill, a life-long Republican and former Alcoa CEO. "That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'" (Interview, CBS News, 1/11/04)

The O'Neill revelations are the most serious. Invading another country without provocation and without legitimate authority (in this case, explicit authorization from the UN Security Council) is the textbook definition of aggressive war. And aggressive war is a crime that has held a special place in international law as well as in the historic just-war tradition. As Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at Nuremberg, put it: "Our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, a war of aggression is "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." via Prof Mark Jensen,PLU Antiwar.com,January 24, 2004 http://antiwar.com/orig/hunsinger.php?articleid=1768

Illegal aligns increase under NAFTA

When NAFTA was signed (10 years ago) there were 2.4 million undocumented Mexicans in the U.S., yet now that number has more than doubled to 4.81 million. (1) "

As the U.S economy shed millions of jobs in 2001 and 2002, these two years were the biggest ever for illegal migration with more than 600, 000 Mexicans going north in 2002 alone (3)." U.S. border patrol agents has jumped from just over 3000 in 1993 to some 9000 in 2002. (4) We even built a huge fence all across southern California. In the 10 years between 1989 and 1998 the percentage of U.S. farm workers, mostly Mexicans, without legal working documents increased from less than 10% of the farm worker population to over 50%. (11) According to the Wall Street Journal, "hourly wages for un-documented farm workers fell from $6.98 in 1989 to $6.18 in 1998, in constant 1998 dollars. (12)

Money sent home (remittances) by Mexican migrant workers from the U.S. has surpassed tourism and foreign direct investment as the second biggest source of foreign currency to the country after the oil sector. Over 1 billion a month was being remitted in the first half of 2003, nearly 30% more than 2002($12 billion year). (15) The 700 000 Maquiladora jobs created during the first seven years of NAFTA, brought into the Mexican economy is $2.68 billion a year.

source: January 21, 2004, By Yves Engler

via Rancho Con Mucho Nopales and Rae M. Barnett

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