Koa also lamented the re-election of George W. Bush and the "changes" that have taken place in the US since the Iraq invasion.

In their January 20 article, "Inauguration Day 2005: Imperial Delusions and Political Reality," writers Barry Grey and David North provide an insightful analysis of these "changes," noting that the Bush administration is "a government of permanent crisis."

They go on to note that the Bush administration "rests on a narrow and unstable social base and reflects the position of a ruling elite that is driven by mounting economic contradictions for which it has no rational solution. It exemplifies the aphorism: weak governments take strong measures . . . The turn by American capitalism to the use of military force as its primary instrument of foreign policy - summed up in the Bush doctrine of preventive war - is ultimately a reflection of the economic decline of the United States and its loss of industrial and financial hegemony. A desperate ruling elite seeks to reverse its declining world position, or at least retard the rate of decline, through provocation and military violence."

Such a situation prompted US Senator and constitutional scholar Robert Byrd to compare George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler. Writer Harvey Wasserman noted that as a result of Byrd's comments "the usual attack dogs are howling." Yet in a March 7 article in the Columbus Free Press, Wasserman insists that such critics are wrong and explains why "Americans must now face the harsh realities of an increasingly fascist and totalitarian Republican Party."

Writing in American Conservative, Scott McConnell, though more cautious, nevertheless comes to the same basic conclusion as the more leftist Wasserman. McConnell also sees "a sudden proliferation of fascist tendencies" in the US and notes that "the very fact that the word 'fascism' can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period." He goes on to note that "the invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table, and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms."

199. "I've never believed in the war," says Cassie. "It's basically an oil fight and it needs to stop." Reflecting on the political situation in the US, Cassie notes, "I don't see a lot of hope and so that's why I'm out here. I'm hoping to spread some."

Cassie's words remind me of the advice to those feeling frustration and grief over the situation in Iraq offered by journalist Chris Hedges in the Winter 2005 edition of Yes! magazine.

"First, remember that the opposition to the Vietnam War took ten years to build," Hedges says. "It's a long, slow process. Second, we can't be saved by what we can accomplish, because if we did, we'd fall into despair. I had a great theology professor who used to tell me that, for intellectuals, faith is an embarrassment. Focus on what you do this day: don't give in to cynicism, because then you are defeated. To get up and carry out an act that may seem not only insignificant but absurd gives you a sense of worth and meaning, and allows you to participate in an act (however small) of resistance . . . I think the cumulative effect of taking a moral stance, over time, is slow and hard and frustrating. If you go back and read Martin Luther King's autobiography, you see what kind of despair he faced in the early years of the Civil Rights movement. Sustain yourself through community and try not to become too focused on what you can accomplish, because it may very well be that, by the time we're gone, the world will be a worse place. But we have to validate our own existence, our own morality, our own life. And that comes by taking a stance, by standing up and remaining human. And there are times when remaining human is the only resistance possible."

200. A young member of Youth Against War and Racism - Minneapolis, March 19, 2005.

Youth Against War and Racism had started as a student group at Bloomington Kennedy High School but has since become a Twin Cities-wide movement with chapters in a number of high schools. Key objectives include getting youth involved in the anti-war movement and resisting military recruitment in schools.

201. "What Bush is doing in Iraq is just ruining all of them people over there," says Lauren during the March 19 rally and march in Minneapolis to mark the second anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.

Of course the Bush administration rhetoric insists that what the US is doing in Iraq is fighting tyranny and spreading freedom. Yet as Gary Younge noted in his January 24 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, "the Bush administration understands the words 'tyranny' and 'freedom' in much the same way as it understands international law. They mean whatever the White House wants them to mean. Bush is happy to support democracy when democracy supports America, just as he is happy to dispense with it when it does not. Likewise, when tyranny is inconvenient, he will excoriate it; when it is expedient, he will excuse it."

202. "I feel very strongly that we should not be in Iraq, that we should never have been in Iraq," says Mary. "It was a lie that our involvement there was related to 9/11. The real reason we went to war is to do with the ambitious of politicians and businesses. It's some kind of crazy idea about getting oil, getting power. And there are too many people who are dying and who have died. We're an empire trying to take over and get control over all different kinds of places. John Perkins' recent book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, made a lot of sense to me in explaining why we're over there. We're getting them into debt to us. They then have to go along with what we want them to do. It's a conspiracy to have power in lots of different ways."

Mary's words and her reference to the economic domination of Iraq by the US reminded me of the "100 orders" enacted by Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer III, before the so-called "transfer of sovereignty" in Iraq took place in June 2004 - and in particular, Order 81.

As the October 2004 article published jointly by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South documents, Order 81 "amends Iraq's original patent law of 1970 and unless and until it is revised or repealed by a new Iraqi government, it now has the status and force of a binding law." Specifically, the order prohibits Iraqi farmers from saving seeds and forces them to only plant seeds for their food from licensed, authorized U.S. distributors. The law thus deprives Iraqi farmers what they and many others worldwide claim as their inherent right to save and replant seeds. This particular "order," the authors note, serves to remind us that reconstruction work in Iraq "is not necessarily about rebuilding domestic economies and capacities, but about helping corporations approved by the occupying forces to capitalize on market opportunities in Iraq. The legal framework laid down by Bremer ensures that although US troops may leave Iraq in the conceivable future, US domination of Iraq's economy is here to stay."

203. "I think it's time for us to get out of Iraq and to prevent another war beginning in Iran," says Eleanor. Commenting on her sign, Eleanor says, "I'm afraid the Bush administration wants to build an empire."

Morford goes on to write that, "Iraq's fledgling democracy is a pleasant side effect, an bonus PR move, a heartwarming and patriotic patina of bogus humanitarianism [that Mr. Bush] is now trying to slather over one of the most disastrous and inept military efforts in recent history. It makes for terrific photo-ops. It makes for miserable and debilitating foreign policy."

207. Medea Benjamin, founding director of the San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange, co-founder of Code Pink, and a vocal advocate for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. - Minneapolis, March 26, 2005.

In an April 30, 2005 commentary in the Miami Herald, Medea observed that both in Iraq and the United States "there is a disconnect between the political leadership and the general public on the question of whether US troops should stay in Iraq."

"Having traveled to Iraq numerous times in the past three years," notes Medea "what strikes me is how different the opinions of Iraqi people on the street are from the opinions of Iraqis in the government. On the streets, Iraqis rail against the United States for creating the instability and chaos that plague the country, subjecting them to daily humiliations at checkpoints and in house raids and using their oil money to line the pockets of US companies like Halliburton instead of rebuilding Iraq. They often refer to the US occupation of their country as 'the new Saddam.'"

About the situation in the United States, Medea writes, "Surprisingly, while policy-makers are afraid to have a real discussion about leaving Iraq, a majority of Americans have come to the conclusion that it's time for the troops to come home. A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted April 21-24 found that 58 percent of Americans say that the United States has gotten bogged down in Iraq, 60 percent don't think that Iraq will have a stable, democratic government a year from now, and 54 percent say the war with Iraq was not worth fighting."

Concludes Medea, "The majority of Americans and Iraqis want to end the occupation. We now have to make our elected leaders - both in the United States and in Iraq - reflect our will. Our mission will truly be accomplished when our troops come home and Iraqis are given the chance to rebuild their beleaguered nation."

208. Barbara Frey, Cynthia Enloe, Vandana Shiva, and Naomi Klein at the "Globalization, Modernities and Violence" conference - University of Minnesota, April 15-16, 2005.

209. A research professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Ecology at Clark University, Cynthia Enloe's work has focused on the struggle for women in developing countries to gain a political voice. Her research on how militaries, governments, and corporations shape wmen's lives has received international recognition and acclaim.

At the April 15-16 "Globalization, Modernities and Violence" conference in Minneapolis, Cynthia explored the processes through which modernized militarized violence is globalized, and how a feminist analysis which takes women seriously enables us to see both the subtle and blatant forms of this militarized violence.

210-211. Internationally-renowned physicist Vandana Shiva founded and directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, an independent research center based in Dehra Dun, India, and dedicated to addressing significant ecological and social issues.

In 1991, Vandana founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seeds. She has worked extensively in the areas of intellectual property rights and bio-diversity. Biotechnology and genetic engineering comprise another dimension of Dr. Shiva's campaigning internationally, and she has helped movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria with their campaigns against genetic engineering.

Her work has contributed in fundamental ways to changing the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Her books, The Violence of Green Revolution and Monocultures of the Mind have become basic challenges to the dominant paradigm of non-sustainable, reductionist Green Revolution Agriculture. Other works she has had published include the books India Divided: Diversity and Democracy Under Attack (2005), Protect or Plunder?: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights (2002), and Water Wars (2001).

At the April 15-16 "Globalization, Modernities and Violence" conference in Minneapolis, Vandana stated that corporate-led globalization is war by another name, and that privatization of essential services, patenting of life forms and medicines, and liberalization of trade to promote corporate monopolies are pushing millions of people to the edge of survival.

Her presentation explored how, as economic democracy is subverted, representative democracy feeds on narrow cultural identities for electoral capital in a divide and rule strategy; and how the wars of globalization merge with the wars of empire in naked militarism.

Off-site Link: The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology

212. Naomi Klein, an award-winning journalist and author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, an international best-seller which has been translated into more that 27 languages - Minneapolis, April 2005.

At the April 15-16 conference on "Globalization, Modernities and Violence," Naomi observed that globally, many people and communities are discovering that the marriage of liberal democracy and free markets makes freedom an empty promise, with economic decisions made elsewhere and little left other that the freedom to agree. Her presentation examined the contradiction between the Bush administration's desire to control economic rules and resources and its claim to be spreading democracy globally.

Notes Nancy Sartor in the independent newspaper Pulse of the Twin Cities, "Looking at her lineage, it's no wonder that Naomi Klein found her calling in political activism. Her grandparents were radicals and her parents ditched the United States for Canada during the Vietnam War. Her mother was active in the anti-pornography movement . . . releasing the seminal anti-porn film This Is Not A Love Story. While still in her 20s, Klein published No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, a bestseller that challenged the growing power of international corporations. The book was dubbed the "movement Bible" by the New York Times, and Klein gained notoriety as a journalist and activist.

"She has traveled extensively throughout North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe, tracking the rise of anti-corporate activism. She spent a year in Argentina, researching the plight of factory workers in Buenos Aires after the country's economy collapsed in 2001. The resulting documentary, Take That, written by Klein and directed by fellow Canadian and journalist Avi Lewis, was released in 2004."

Interviewd by Sartor in April 2005, Naomi Klien was asked to reflect on the anti-corporate movement five years after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle.

"I think [the movement's] changed a lot," said Klein, "The significance of the Seattle protest was not that the movement was beginning, but that it was landing very decisively in North America because of opposition to the policies of [corporate-led] globalization, or what most of the world calls neo-liberalism, which is a package of policies that is based on privatizing essential central services. It's a belief that the role of government is essentially to facilitate investment for transnational corporations and create new investment opportunities - which is where privatization comes in - but also deregulation and downsizing of the state. There was certainly opposition to those policies in many forms pre-Seattle."

Commenting on the range of strategies available for opposing neo-liberal policies, Naomi noted, "I think political mass demonstrations are only one very small part of activism. The real work of political change is community-based and unglamorous - small meetings and organizing. And I think that's happening more and more in this country. You see it in campaigns for a living wage . . . or increasingly, in the national campaign against Wal-Mart and its effects on a living wage. There's also an interesting wave of activism going on now on university campuses and in high schools against military recruiting."

Asked to reflect on what it means to be a leader, Naomi said, "One of the things Vandana Shiva says is that every political leader worth their salt in history - from Gandhi to Martin Luther King - has expressed the same message, which is courage. Don't be afraid, be courageous in the face of fear. Real leaders don't tell people to be frightened. They help people find a place of courage, even in the face of very real threats."

Two weeks earlier in the July 17 edition of the Boston Globe, Bryan Bender reported that "new investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank - both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States - have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself."

As well as constituting "the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters," the studies also "cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the 'central front' in a battle against the United States," writes Bender.

He goes on to note that according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence, most of the nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks, were heeding the calls from clerics to "drive infidels out of Arab land."

"A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, 'the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq.'

" 'Only a few were involved in past Islamic insurgencies in Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya,' the Israeli study says. Out of the 154 fighters analyzed, only a handful had past associations with terrorism, including six who had fathers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, said the report, compiled by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel."

" 'The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created,' said Peter Bergen, a terrorism specialist at the non-partisan New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.

"[Nawaf] Obaid said in an interview from London that his Saudi study found that 'the largest group is young kids who saw the images [of the war] on TV and are reading the stuff on the Internet. Or they see the name of a cousin on the list or a guy who belongs to their tribe, and they feel a responsibility to go.'

"Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families, according to the two investigations. 'The vast majority of them had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with Al Qaeda today,' said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. 'I am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world.'

"Case studies of foreign fighters indicated they considered the Iraq war an attack on the Muslim religion and Arab culture, Paz said.

"For example, while the unprovoked attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were largely condemned by clerics as violations of Muslim law, many religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations have promulgated fatwas, or religious edicts, saying that waging jihad in Iraq is justified by the Koran because it is defensive in nature."

" 'To say [as President Bush says, that] we must fight [the terrorists] in Baghdad so we don't have to fight them in Boston, implies there is a finite number of people, and if you pen them up in Iraq you can kill them all,' said Bergen. 'The truth is we increased the pool by what we did in Iraq.' "

219. Joe and Marilyn Schmidt with their granddaughter, Mackenzie - September 2005.