It's the oil, stupid.

What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks.

It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's.

Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire.

Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning.   more »

I have heard Iraqis make comparisons between their occupation and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but it wasn't until I saw families walking through the kilometer-long checkpoint, from a parking lot outside Falluja to one on the other side, that it seemed apt.

Once inside, seeing the life continuing amidst the rubble, it was harder still to ignore the physical similarities.

A child jumps into the Euphrates from a one-lane bridge, the same bridge from which angry residents hung the charred and beaten bodies of four American contractors in March 2004, the same bridge that connects the center of town to Falluja General hospital, the first objective taken by the Marines in November's invasion.

Doctors Ahmed and Salam, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their names be changed, lamented the condition of the city and its people.

In the last week, they have received three civilian casualties of US fire, and say that this week has been below average — normally, says Ahmed, they see one or two dead civilians every day, and that hundreds have been killed by coalition forces since the city was taken over by the US.   more »

The US has never been interested in particular territories - it has always been interested in global power. We have to see in the events unfolding an attempt, always, to construct a global regime of power with the US at the centre and able to pull the strings.

It worked out how to do this in the 1920s. To take a particular instance, in the 1920s the US sent marines into Nicaragua and attempted to occupy it.

They got bogged down in a sort of guerilla war. So the US decided to carry through what has become a familiar strategy. It found a local strongman, in this case a man called Somoza.

The US gave him the economic and military help he required and allowed him to become as rich as he liked. This was as long as he did the bidding of US corporate capital and helped the US in its strategic concerns to halt the spread of revolutionary movements.

This indirect method of imperialism became the fundamental way the US operated, particularly after the Second World War. It was system of indirect control, with the US constantly fighting low level guerilla warfare with special forces.   more »

Martyrdom is the outcome of a community which has been humiliated and oppressed. Unfortunately, and it is hard to admit, we are the oppressors in this story. In fact, martyrdom is a message addressed to each of us.

It is about time we try to confront this message. If we want to confront suicidal terror, we are obligated to attempt to understand it. We must learn what really motivates young people to sacrifice their lives.

If we want to challenge it, first we must recognise and respect it. As long as we have locked ourselves within a scientific technological discourse we will never be able to get to the bottom of this emerging problem.

Millions of CCTV cameras won't let us into other people's minds. Three million cameras won't help us to grasp the extent of the humiliation that leads human beings to take other people's lives as well as their own.

If we want to tackle those who are determined to kill us, we must look in the mirror first. Blair's rhetoric is all about stopping us from doing just that.   more »

One armed struggle begins and another comes to an end. That's how it seemed yesterday, as the anti-terrorist branch scoured the streets of Britain looking for the new enemy - just as the old one finally stood down.

It was as if one flag was lowered while another was raised. TV news channels alternated between pictures of the current battle - police cordons in Birmingham, CCTV images from London buses and archive footage of the old: the blood-spattered cenotaph at Enniskillen, the bandstand at Regents Park, the detonated carcass of Docklands.

Britons, Londoners especially, have spent the last three weeks learning to face a new threat. Yesterday they were told their old nightmares could finally be put to rest.

The IRA had last planted a bomb in 1996. And yet it still sounded remarkable to hear the words that came yesterday.   more »

There is unlikely to be peace in Iraq while US forces remain. Their presence fuels the war. There are frequent leaks from Washington and London about reducing the number of troops.

In the al-Rashid Hotel on the edge of the Green Zone, US officials meet repeatedly, to the annoyance of the Iraqi government, with the former Baathist leaders they were trying to arrest two years ago.

The Americans don’t have a long-term plan for Iraq. Their main priority is for the White House’s actions to be presented in the US as a success.

One Iraqi official complains that the Americans make up policy as they go along: ‘They make a mistake and then they try to correct it by making a bigger mistake.’

American policy in Iraq has always been disjointed, since it has always been determined by the domestic political needs of the White House. But, as the war enters its third year, the extent of American failure in Iraq is becoming more and more difficult to conceal.   more »

The "evil ideology" that underscores the war on terror is predicated on two basic theories; preemption and enemy combatants. Both of these run counter to fundamental principles of human rights and democratic governance.

Both must be met head-on and defeated. There is no wiggle-room for equivocating or appeasement; this ideology is the greatest manifestation of fanaticism in the world since the rise of Nazism in the 1930's and must be collectively challenged.

As Tony Blair says, "This is not an isolated criminal act" but "an extreme and evil ideology" thrusting us towards global war and ever-increasing human rights abuse.

The preemptive doctrine overturns the conclusions of the Nuremburg Tribunals that "War is the Supreme Crime" from which all the lesser crimes naturally flow.

It elevates war to a viable form of foreign policy; an acceptable means of establishing one state's superiority over another.   more »