Washington, DC, Jan. 07 — The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has issued a hard copy transcript of its Dec. 29 symposium “What Next: Towards a Responsible Iraq Policy.” The transcript has been delivered to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and to all Senators and United States Representatives.
The policy symposium featured Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., USN (Ret.), Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information (CDI); Denis Halliday, former United Nations Assistant Secretary General and head of the UN humanitarian relief efforts in Iraq; Phyllis Bennis, Middle East specialist and Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), and author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN (Interlink, 1996); and Dr. Clovis Maksoud, former Arab League Ambassador to the United Nations and the United States, currently Director of the Center for the Global South at American University.
This symposium was the first in what ADC plans as a series of interventions designed to broaden and uplift the debate on US policy on Mideast affairs. It is a measure of the poverty of the current discourse on Iraq policy that there are essentially only two available positions – that of the Clinton administration which restricts itself to an unwavering continuation of these policies, and the President’s Republican critics who do not challenge the policies, but simply call for more of the same. ADC’s aim is to not only make a serious contribution to the debate, but to help to break the spell of a discourse on Iraq that has reduced so many thoughtful people to repeating slogans and buzzwords rather than using their critical faculties. Hard copies of the transcript are available from ADC for $5 each. The transcript is also available free of charge on the ADC website. Video copies can be obtained from the C-Span archive service. An archived version of C-Span’s live coverage of the symposium can be viewed in Realvideo on C-Span’s website.