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Today's
Stories
October
27, 2003
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October
25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October
24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David
Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry
Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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October
27, 2003
Fundamentalist
Blunders in the Terror War
Banging
Your Head into Walls
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
We've all met them, people who stubbornly hurl
themselves in the wrong direction, stopping only when they violently
collide with reality. It is a painful way to learn, but those
afflicted with the disability seem unable to learn in any other
way.
This way of learning characterizes much
of America's effort at foreign policy since World War II. I was
forcefully reminded of this by a news story with its searing
memories of Vietnam.
It now appears that part of the 101st
Airborne Division, members of a so-called Tiger Force unit, dropped
grenades into bunkers where women and children hid and shot farmers
without warning. They killed blind peasants and old men. These
events happened in 1967, comparatively early in the war and about
a year before the well-documented mass murder by members of the
United States Army at the village of My Lai. No one knows how
many innocent people the Airborne slaughtered. One surviving
member of the unit is quoted saying he killed so many he lost
count. Although investigations were conducted, they went nowhere,
and it only now that we learn of the horror.
The full story of American savagery in
Vietnam will perhaps never be told. We have had other glimpses
of it, as for example when former CIA Director William Colby,
responding to a titanic power struggle inside the CIA, revealed
Project Phoenix, a secret program for the mass murder of civilian
leaders regarded as sympathetic to the enemy. There were the
revelations about a number of individuals engaging in barbarism,
most notably, former Nebraska Senator and Medal of Honor winner
Bob Kerrey having been part of a butcher-civilians operation.
The so-called Tail-Wind affair, whose
discovery cost some very reputable journalists their jobs, is
now consigned to the ever-handy conspiracy bin, but intelligent
skeptics can hardly doubt that with all the other savageries
of Vietnam, a secret operation to poison-gas American prisoners
of war cooperating with the enemy is totally plausible.
To this day, thousands of American veterans
attend meetings or counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder,
the bureaucratic term for minds deranged by the horrors they
saw or inflicted. War is always full of horror, but in the midst
of the brutality in Vietnam, it dawned on many that the war served
no good purpose and that most of its victims were civilians.
The military draft sent a lot of people to Vietnam who weren't
suited to
the business of serious killing. And
while the number of Americans killed was small for a long war,
it still proved too many for people enjoying ice cream and beer
at ballgames.
For years after Vietnam, Americans talked
of the war's lessons, but just what lessons were those? For a
while, many believed the lessons might concern the values of
the Bill of Rights, words so often abused as hollow marketing
slogans. America's armed forces would never again be sent to
kill and torture for colonial interests.
But that was a hasty conclusion, as we
see in Iraq. America perfected its technology for killing and
terrifying so that at least for a small county, it is able to
overwhelm fairly quickly. Relatively few American soldiers die,
those that do are professionals, and the whole thing is quickly
over.
Of course, there is a deep and jagged
pit along this smooth-sounding path to military dominance, and
it has to do with occupying and rebuilding a country, how you
assume responsibility for tens of millions of new dependants.
No people on earth today is less inclined or qualified for this
task than Americans. You only have to look at the individualistic,
selfish, and impatient nature of American society itself to understand
why this should be so. The word dependant in America often is
used as a term of abuse.
Recall Richard Nixon's "madman theory"
of the early 1970s. Nixon was trying to pressure the North Vietnamese
in Paris for a settlement, and he deliberately spread the idea
that he was a madman, quite capable of doing something irrational,
and that it would be better for everyone to reach a settlement
before he did so. The context that gave his suggestion force
included his shattering bombardment of civilians in North Vietnam
and Cambodia, as well as nightmarish programs like Project Phoenix,
started under him.
I'll set aside the fact that Nixon truly
was something of a madman--for, apart from his lifelong career
of promoting divisiveness, intense hatreds, and suspicions, who
else but a genuine madman relishes being credited as one? In
the end, Nixon was outfoxed by the Vietnamese, and America lost
a major war. A decade of shameful destruction, vast resources
consumed, rage, and riots were for nothing.
This did not go unnoticed by the American
establishment--the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, and all
the other arrogant, insatiably-rapacious people who've given
you war in Iraq. Their major lesson from Vietnam--apart from
the unreliability of conscripts, the need for tight news control,
and the need to improve the efficiency of killing with high-tech
weapons--was that threats not acted upon were useless. This lesson
comes packaged with a new release of the error-riddled Domino
Theory: that a decisive demonstration of power in the Middle
East would serve to stabilize the area. The Democrats' regrettable
Wesley Clark, among others, has pontificated along these very
lines.
Lost in the armchair toying with other
people's lives and countries you might think is the fact that
Nixon's threat was nuclear, but actually it is not lost. Bush
wants to develop and deploy a new generation of compact nuclear
weapons, the implication being that these somehow would be useable,
as for such wholesome crusade tasks as "bunker busting."
Please recall, the main bunker busted in the first Gulf War was
the Al Firdos bunker in Baghdad packed with over four hundred
civilians who were roasted alive by two "smart bomb"
direct hits.
Vietnam truly was a twentieth-century
version of burning witches, the witches in that case being communists
rather than people who were either demented or senile as in the
witch-burnings of a few centuries ago. Powerful people in the
17th century understood that witches were superstitious nonsense,
but they used the phenomenon to their own purposes. We've almost
run out of communist witches, so now the crusade has been redirected
against evil spirits far less well defined, terrorists.
Not that there is no such thing as genuine
terrorists. Of course, there are. Terrorism--from the Sons of
Liberty and the Klu Klux Klan to black street gangs and camouflage-obsessed
militia-nuts--is a rich part of American history. Please note
that it has not been dealt with by blowing up whole neighborhoods
of innocent people. (Except in Philadelphia.)
The communist-panic after World War II
was promoted and manipulated by the America's establishment,
that ruthlessly ambitious segment of American society that does
not consist solely of Republicans. American liberals today often
seem unaware that Democrats like Robert Kennedy gladly played
energetic and nasty roles. The establishment sought the immense
bounty of new military contracts, forced access to other peoples'
resources and markets, and the swaggering sense of exercising
vast power throughout the world. Note that the communist-panic
began with the precipitous decline in military spending after
the world war and with the opportunities for expansion represented
by the sudden decline of former colonial powers.
At the end of the Cold War, there was
a tendency for military expenditure to slide in real terms. America's
current terror-panic, manipulated and exploited relentlessly
by Bush, and always echoed by Sharon for his own dark purposes,
serves almost identical ends. The average American cannot even
grasp the unholy amounts of money now changing hands to almost
no good purpose.
I once described a scene in the wake
of 9/11 where some Americans in a bar hooted and pumped their
arms at the television image of ships equipped with cruise missiles,
as though the ships or the missiles had the slightest relevance
for individuals bent on killing others through their own suicides.
That televised image comes pretty close to symbolizing Bush's
entire policy on terror. He has spent tens of billions of dollars,
killed many thousands of innocent people, and made many Americans
feel intimidated in their own country, but he has done little
to end the threat of terrorism. He may even have increased its
long-term prospects.
Terrorism predates modern history, and
it generally comes as a result of great and oppressive injustice
against a definable group of people. Short of ruthlessly repressing
the group of people from whose ranks terrorists are drawn--something
attempted many times, as, for example, by Cromwell in Ireland
or Stalin in the Soviet Union--violence offers no effective solution.
Even Cromwellian repression fails over
the long term, Ireland being a potent example. An oppressor eventually
tires of repression. It may well have been some such dark thought
that helped motivate Hitler in history's greatest bloodbath,
the invasion of the Soviet Union and the simultaneous start of
the Holocaust (27 million and 6 million victims respectively).
He demanded utter ruthlessness in these vast murderous enterprises.
The people whose wealth and resources he was seizing, would not
get the chance ever to become terrorists.
Bush's policy is partway along the path
of repression, a virtual copy of Sharon's policy in Palestine,
but has Sharon ended terror? Does Sharon not almost weekly become
more violent and desperate, recognizing the futility of all he
has done to date?
Bush's prospects and opportunities are
in some ways even more limited than Sharon's, despite the immense
and terrible power at his disposal. Although Al Qaeda was a relatively
small organization--and nothing has come to light that contradicts
an early conclusion that Al Qaeda, though dispersed and having
some allies, was no bigger than a Chicago street gang--Bush's
tactics have created waves of sympathizers and new enemies, likely
even more determined through their confrontation with such a
bully. He is not opposed by a group of people confined to a tiny
place like Palestine. Rather, he faces opposition in many forms
in many countries with mobility across continents. You can't
just bomb it all.
The more verbal blunders Bush and his
associates make--consider the idiotic statements made recently
by Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a man associated directly with secret
activities in places like Pakistan, to gatherings of American
Christian fundamentalists--the more Bush's efforts come to be
viewed as broadly anti-Islamic. The word blunder here is only
appropriate because such statements are errors in managing public
affairs. They are not blunders in a more basic sense: these nasty,
narrow people do believe what they are saying, and although that
belief is not what launched Bush's crusade, it undoubtedly motivates
many along the way.
Terror is one response of those with
terrible grievances who lack effective conventional means to
fight for them, although if you listened to Bush you would think
there were mobs of natural-born terrorists out there, ready to
kill for no reason other than jealousy at America's great good
fortune and beneficence. As in the case of Northern Ireland,
terror can only be ended by redressing the grievances, and even
then, great patience and tenacity are required.
A general military action against terror
is an insane concept, too destructive and unfocused to have predictable
results. You cannot fight beliefs or grievances with armored
divisions. You can only have vengeance that way, but vengeance
can hardly be called policy and is unworthy of a great power
claiming high ideals.
The example of Sharon's brutality just
couldn't offer a clearer lesson. The Palestinians have immense
grievances that virtually the entire world recognizes as legitimate.
Assassinate all the leaders you please, bulldoze all the homes
and shops and orchards you can, bomb and shoot civilians time
after time as reprisals, the grievances not only remain, they
are intensified. The ultimate danger in a situation like this
is that Sharon's frustration will drive him to move beyond Cromwell.
And so, too, Bush, but note that I use
his name only as shorthand for that much bigger thing, the pitiless
greed and arrogance of a large segment of America.
John Chuckman
lives in Canada. He can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
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