Alternative Perspective
 Issue 27, April 9th, 2003
 Compiled by Madhukar Shukla

Introduction: Alternative Perspective is an attempt to widen our awareness about issues related to business, environment, role and influence of media, geo-politics, culture, etc. It aims to share, on a regular basis, some of those pieces of news and information, which do not find place in the highly monopolised mainstream media. Please feel free to share/ forward/ distribute this newsletter to others who may be interested.



Note: The URLs of sources used in the text are numbered and given at the end of the Newsletter.

In This Issue:
  • Coalition of the Willing?... well, almost
     Failing to garner support from the "international community", the US Defense dept apparently worked over-time to create an imaginative list of 45+ countries - including 15 countries, who wanted to remain unnamed!!! (dubbed by some as the "Coalition of the Unwilling to be Named":0)). The list included countries, such as Marshall Island, Palau, Soloman Island, etc. - which don't even have an army - and Columbia, Mongolia, Afghnistan, Iceland, Micronesia, etc. (which besides hardly having any military force, are even strategically far removed from the scene of action... imagine, Columbia or Mongolia opening their airspace for US planes to flyover on their way to Iraq!). What also did not get reported was that at least one of these countries - Soloman Island immediately dissociated itself from the list[1] - since it was unilaterly included in the list by the US as a "willing coalition partner".
    http://www.areporter.com/sys-tmpl/thecoalitionofthewilling/

  • International Relations: US Style
    When Craig Kilborn, the CBS late night talkshow host quipped: "Good news for Iraq. There's a 50 percent chance that President Bush will confuse it with Iran", he didn't know how close to truth he was. So, when President Bush got his $75bn war budget granted - of which $4.5bn was reportedly to go to the Alpine country, Slovania (the price/reward/bribe for supporting the war) the supposedly recepient country was shocked and surprised (perhaps "awed" also); after all, it had never accepted the offer to join the "coalition of the willing". Only later, in a hurriedly organised press conference, the State Department acknowledged the mistake: they had confused Slovakia with Slovenia!!!... after all, didn't Shakespeare say: "What's in a name"?
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39962-2003Mar27.html

  • The Second Superpower
    Are we living in a unipolar world (after the fall of Soviet Empire) or in a multipolar one (as manifested in a world of shifting political loyalties)?... And somewhere, in the meanwhile, (perhaps) there is an emerging new Second Superpower - which is able to mobilise people and opinions across the continents, has no visible leaders, works faster than governments, derives its strength, not from the top, but from the grassroot actions, and - as Naomi Klein points out - is more globalised than the global corporates[2]. On this crossroads of history, the lines are clearly drawn: on one side is the power nested in the nexus of politics/business/technology-as-divider; and on the other side is the emerging power which combines the evolutionary forces of collaborative technology and culture... and as we stand here, each of us will be making a choice - knowingly or inadvertantly.
    http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html

  • The Axis of Influence
    Behind every reported "Axis of Evil", one will find, there is an axis of influnece. While war and violence kills people, there are others who also make a fortune out of it. Here is a research report which gives the details of how the arms-lobby influences the policies and action of the government towards war... a long one, but pretty informative... read on...
    http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/reportaboutface.html

  • The logic(?) of War
    It was Mad Hatter in the Alice in Wonderland who is supposed to have said: "We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace" - but then, down the rabbit-hole, the world is full of such paradoxes... and down-the-rabbit-hole is where we are... trying to make sense of the paradoxical logic of war...
    http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/NPR_Illogical_Logic_Of_War_2.html


    Other Sources Quoted in the Newsletter:
    [1]: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3300727&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
    [2]: http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/27/02/feature1.shtml


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