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Today's
Stories
November 10, 2003
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
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
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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November
10, 2003
"They Were All
Non-Starters"
The
Thwarted Iraqi Peace Proposals
By GARY LEUPP
The breaking story about efforts by Iraq's Baathist
regime to avoid U.S. invasion and occupation reveals a scandal
greater than those which have preceded it: those involving lies
about the war's motives, vindictive treatment towards those telling
the truth about it, and pathetic efforts to prettify what is
in fact a wholesale bloody disaster. Four recent articles, in
the New York Times, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Guardian,
and by ABC News, while containing some slightly contradictory
information, inform us that the Bush administration was so hell-bent
on attacking Iraq (for reasons bearing no relation to the stated
casus belli) that it not only mislead the American
people, but resisted the abjectly humiliating efforts of Iraqi
authorities to comply with almost all stated U.S. demands. The
only demands Baghdad did not and could not concede to were those
for "regime change" (which international law does not
recognize as a grounds for war) and for the surrender of the
Iraqi military to American forces even without a fight.
The story has caused some stir, but not
nearly enough, I suspect because the details are complicated.
The mainstream media has generally treated the story with skepticism,
and the cable news anchor heads who have applauded the war all
along are having a real hard time with this one. The clearer
the picture becomes, I hope, the more enlightened we all will
become about the nature of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Here's my
sum-up of the reports.
Last-Ditch Iraqi Efforts
to Avoid War: A Chronology
December 2002:
Someone representing Gen. Tahir Jalil Habbush al Takriti, Saddam
Hussein's intelligence chief, made contact with CIA former counter-intelligence
head Vincent Cannistraro. This representative, according to Cannistrano,
stated that Saddam Hussein "knew there was a campaign to
link him to September 11 and prove he had weapons of mass destruction.
The Iraqis were prepared to satisfy these concerns. I reported
the conversation to senior levels of the state department and
I was told to stand aside and they would handle it."
[Cannistrano later learned that the offer
had been "killed" by the Bush administration. All the
offers "had at bottom the same thing---that Saddam would
stay in power, and that was unacceptable to the administration.
There were serious attempts to cut a deal but they were all turned
down by the president and vice president."]
Sometime soon after that: The national security advisor to Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak, Osama al Baz, sent a message through
intermediaries to the U.S. State Department that the Iraqis wanted
to discuss charges that Saddam had WMDs or ties with bin Laden.
Unidentified U.S. officials told the New York Times; "when
that approach went nowherethe Iraqis evidently tried to get through
to the Pentagon."
They also tried to make contacts through
Syrian intelligence, France, Russia, and Germany.
January 2003: F. Michael Maloof, a Defense Department official,
working in the Office of Special Plans (an office deigned to
"find" connections between Iraq and Sept. 11 or to
establish grounds for war with Iraq) with Douglas Feith and David
Wurmser, met with a Lebanese-American friend, Imad al-Hage
(in some reports, Imad Hage or Imad Haje). Hage is a Maronite
Christian who currently lives in Beirut and heads an insurance
company, American Underwriters Group. He had at some point been
recruited by Maloof to assist in the U.S. "war on terrorism."
The Lebanese-American had recently handled an insurance claim
for a Syrian citizen, who had introduced him to a senior Syrian
intelligence official named Mohammed Nassif. The latter, a close
aide to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, had expressed frustration
to Hage about the difficulties Syria faced in communicating with
U.S. officials. Nassif probably hoped to exploit Hage's ties
to Washington's neocons to deliver a message to them. Hage mentions
Syrian frustrations to Maloof, who arranges for Hage to meet
with none other than neocon-par-excellence, then Defense Policy
Board chair Richard Perle, as well as a top aide to Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Jaymie Durnan. (The Pentagon has confirmed
these meetings).
Early February:
An influential Muslim Lebanese friend of Hage's, knowing of his
ties to Maloof, requests that he meet with a senior Iraqi official
eager to talk to the Americans, and Hage cautiously agrees.
Soon thereafter, Hassan al-Obeidi, chief of foreign operations
of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, reaches Hage's Beirut office,
quickly collapsing from nervous stress, but after treatment,
he explains his mission. He says Baghdad cannot understand why
Iraq is being targeted. He insists the country possesses no weapons
of mass destruction, and suggests the U.S. send in 2000 FBI agents
to ascertain that fact to its own satisfaction. He offers the
U.S. oil concessions. He bristles in indignation that the U.S.
might order Saddam Hussein to give up power, but says elections
could be held in two years. A few days later, in a second meeting
in a Beirut hotel, he repeats these positions, and urges Hage
to travel to Baghdad for talks with high officials. Hage agrees.
Mid-February:
Hage visits Baghdad and has talks with Habbush as well as Deputy
Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. Habbush asks if it was a fact that
Hage had met Perle, which Hage confirms. The intelligence chief
then makes another offer to the U.S. (and implicitly, to Perle,
understood to be a chief operator in the U.S. war preparations):
oil concessions to U.S. companies, UN-supervised free elections,
and the handing over of al-Qaeda agent Abdul Rahman Yasin, in
custody in Iraq since 1994. On the Yasin offer, Habbush says
" we want to show good faith" He also tells Hage,
"Let your friends send in people and we will open everything
to them." (Hage has recently stated "[Habbush] was
conveying an offer Based on my meeting with his man, I think
there was an effort to avert war. They were prepared to meet
with high-ranking U.S. officials.") Habbush indicates that
the Iraqis were having various indirect talks with the U.S. government,
including one in Rome involving the CIA. (But perhaps because
these were having no results, he was going directly to the neocons.)
At some point, either before or after
this, a meeting is set up between Iraqi and officials in Morocco,
but it does not take place.
February 19:
Hage faxes a 3-page report on his Baghdad trip to Maloof. He
indicates that the Iraqis have pledged to (1) cooperate in fighting
terrorism; (2) give "full support for any US plan"
in the Arab-Israeli peace process; (3) give " first priority
[to the U.S.] as it relates to Iraq oil, mining rights;"
(4) cooperate with US strategic interests in the region; (5)
allow "direct US involvement on the ground in disarming
Iraq." (The acceptable number rises to 5000 troops.) Maloof
considers the offer sincere. He brings it to the attention of
Jaymie Durnan (but Pentagon officials have recently denied that
Durnan's bosses Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were aware of it).
February 21:
In an email Malook tells Durnan that Perle was "willing
to meet with Hage and the Iraqis if it has clearing from the
building [the Pentagon]." Durnan emails back: "Mike,
working this. Keep this close hold." Durnan separately emails
two Pentagon officials asking for background on Hage.
(This background check reveals that there
is "one blemish on" Hage's record: "In January
he had been briefly detained by the FBI at Dulles Airport in
Washington when a handgun was found in his checked luggage."
He was allowed to leave in a few hours.)
March 7: Hage
meets with Perle in the lobby of Marlborough hotel in Bloomsbury,
then an office in Knightsbridge about 2 hours. (Both men acknowledge
this happened.) Perle tells Hage he wants to pursue the matter
further with people in Washington; a few days later, he tells
Hage that Washington refused to let him meet with Habbush or
discuss any peace offers. ("He indicated," Hage stated
recently, "that the consensus was it was a no-go.")
Later in March:
Hage continues to pass on urgent messages from Iraq to Maloof
and others. Maloof in one memo to the Pentagon writes: "Hage
quoted Obeidi as saying this is the last window or channel through
which this message has gone to the United States. He characterized
the tone of Dr. Obeidi as begging." Iraq continues to try
to contact the Bush administration through Syrian intelligence,
France, Germany and Russia. Maloof relays a message to Perle
that Obeidi and Habbush are "prepared to meet with you in
Beirut, and as soon as possible, concerning 'unconditional terms.'"
Hage tells Perle "Such a meeting has Saddam Hussein's clearance."
Those in the Bush administration aware of the initiatives take
no action. Perle tells a Saudi Arabian contact that U.S. conditions
for peace include "Saddam's abdication and departure, first
to a U.S. military base for interrogation and then into supervised
exile, a surrender of Iraqi troops, and the admission that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction."
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
declares: "The American people can take comfort in knowing
that their country has done everything humanly possible to avoid
war and to secure Iraq's peaceful disarmament." All-out
war begins March 20.
Footnote (Early April): As the war rages, Iraqis propose a meeting
between retired CIA official Robert Baer and Gen. Habbush in
Ramadi, outside Baghdad, about peace, and the possibility of
US-French sponsored elections. On April 9, the house designated
as the site for negotiations is bombed by six precision-guided
bombs.
Footnote 2 (May): Maloof is stripped of his security clearance
and placed on administrative leave.
Commentary
So what is the response of the Bush administration
to this just-exposed narrative of Nazi-like ultimatums issued
a sovereign state? A "senior administration official, who
spoke only on condition of anonymity" explained it much
as Perle did to Hage. "They [Iraqi pleas for a deal]
were all non-starters because they all involved Saddam staying
in power." (A report in the Boston Globe by
Bryan Bender November 7 also states that it was State Department
policy that "any deal allowing Hussein to remain in power
was a nonstarter.") The Knight Ridder piece doesn't say
the unnamed official maintained anonymity due to any residual
sense of international legality or feelings of human morality;
rather, he/she did so "because intelligence matters are
classified." (Implication: the invasion of Iraq to remove
Saddam from power [and so to allow he U.S. to seize power], as
opposed to the official [widely discredited] reasons, is an intelligence
matter.) Given Perle's reported remarks to the Saudis, the
bend over-backwards Iraqi concessions/pleas for mercy were also
non-starters because they didn't involve the surrender of
Iraq's army (without even a fight) to the U.S., and a forced
confession of possession of those elusive WMDs.
Perle's central role here is obvious.
It is understandable that Saddam, Habbush and Obaid would have
realized by early this year that the State Department and CIA
had been marginalized by the Defense Department neocons, and
that if Baghdad were really to avert the threatened attack it
would be best advised to try to get through to the cabal and
try to cut a deal with that lot. They may have seen Maloof, as
an Arab-American associated with the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz-Feith-Bolton-Perle
war party, as a sympathetic intermediary. They wound up dealing
via Hage, who by all appearances is an honest broker, with Perle,
who is second to none in the bellicose Bush administration as
an advocate for ongoing Middle East regime change, and who (as
indicated above) was thoroughly disinterested in aborting his
cherished war.
But what's Perle's own explanation of
his actions? He told the New York Times, "I was
dubious that this would work, but I agreed to talk to people
in Washington." He told ABC News, "Although I was not
enthusiastic about the offer, I was willing to meet with the
Iraqis. The U.S. government told me not to." Ross and Vlasto
add: "Perle would not disclose which official or arm of
the government rejected the talks." The Guardian
states a "US intelligence source insisted that the decision
not to negotiate came from the White House, which
was demanding complete surrender." But to the New York
Times, Perle claims that CIA officials "told
him they did not want to pursue this channel." That's interesting,
since Perle's been dissing the CIA for quite some time, since
the Agency tends to really dislike his penchant for promoting
disinformation and wasn't really keen on the Iraq attack. I think
it likely that Perle was as inclined as any of his superiors
(upon some of whom he wields a nefarious influence) to say, "Screw
the peace prospects. No stepping back now. Let's just get in
there and follow the plan to secure the realm." http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
Afterwards, you can blame the Agency for any failure to pursue
peace possibilities, just as you can fault (as Condi does) the
Agency for the Niger uranium "intelligence failure."
* * *
CNN's coverage, centering on James Risen's
article and Hage's narrative, has been predictably tendentious.
While news anchor Aaron Brown did raise the theoretical prospect
that there might actually have been an effort by Iraq to avoid
invasion, he treated such an effort as somehow more insidious
than the invasion itself. Might the Iraqis, he asked, with their
history of duplicity, might just have been biding for more time?
(Questions: Time to do what? Amass WMDs while Americans,
following UN inspectors, in conditions of unparalleled intrusive
access to a thoroughly humiliated sovereign state, searched for
such weapons? Or just time to avoid a criminal assault? Is there
anything objectionable in principle in seeking to delay invasion?)
"Why should we believe you?" Hage was repeatedly
asked, as though he was trying to ignobly discredit the administration's
more reliable representation of events. Hage responded that he
had no personal axe to grind, but that the media had somehow
come across emails exchanged between him and Perle and others,
and that he'd been told that whether he would talk to the cameras
or not, his name would be brought into this. So he's just saying
what he knows or was told.
The Lebanese seems a guileless, honest
man who saw an opportunity to help Iraq avert war. But perhaps
a dangerous man to the Bushite historical revisionists
and their media cheerleaders. (Rather like Joseph Wilson, the
former ambassador who incurred Bushite wrath by exposing the
Niger uranium lie.) His simple narrative undercuts the official
history that Saddam's Iraq threatened the American people with
WMDs and worked with al-Qaeda terrorists. It underscores a theme
driven home by many in the antiwar community, and increasingly
entering mainstream discourse: the Bushites wanted the Iraq
war, wanted to use 9-11 to get the nation's permission for it,
and wouldn't allow any Iraqi action to thwart them in their determination
to attack and occupy the country.
"You're saying Iraq didn't want
war?" CNN's clueless Bill Hemmer, with a smugly quizzical
look on his cherub-face, asked Hage, as though any rational viewer
would just assume Iraq wanted to be attacked. (I seem
to recall Hemmer, prior to the Iraq attack, referred to CIA warmonger-analyst
Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case
for Attacking Iraq as "my friend" at the end of
an interview with the man; in any case, he hardly pretends journalistic
impartiality on the Iraq war issue.) Hage for his part---and
this goes to show how intimidated normal people can be in the
current atmosphere---stated he didn't know the answer to Hemmer's
question, but was just conveying what Iraqis had told him.
* * *
On Human Scum
The North Korean government has introduced
into political discourse the useful term "human
scum." It applied it to John Bolton, a neocon top State
Department official (Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
and International Security) in charge of accusing selected countries
of acquiring or seeking to acquire WMDs. He acknowledges that
Israel has nukes although he declares this is not a problem.
But he has a list of enemy states whose weapons programs, real
or imagined, justify the overthrow of their governments. He has
claimed that Cuba's biomedical industry, which provides cheap
pharmaceuticals and vaccinations sold worldwide, constitutes
a "biological weapons program," a charge rejected by
former President Jimmy Carter last year. He is the administration
point-man behind the "Syrian Accountability and Lebanese
Sovereignty Restoration Act" that imposes a U.S. trade embargo
on Syria, and is actively preparing for U.S. actions (in concert
with Israel) against Syria. (Perhaps the Syrians, following the
model of Iraq's Baathists, are now pleading for a deal with Bolton
as well as Perle and all the above-named scumbags.)
Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Wurmser,
Perle, Bolton, Feith, the whole lot of them are planning unjustifiable
attacks on poor weak countries, lying through their teeth every
step of the way, as they plan to deploy more American youth to
achieve their world-changing mission. Their Iraq imbroglio has
so far cost at least 389 U.S. lives (265 in combat, most of those
in "post-war" combat----if that makes any sense), officially
thousands injured (lots of head wounds and limb amputations);
and of course, 10s of 1000s of Iraqi civilians, and no less significantly,
Iraqi soldiers doing what soldiers are universally entitled to
do: resist invasion. What is scummier than to produce such suffering,
and to eagerly plan to inflict more? To scrupulously avoid human
combat for any cause in their own personal experience, yet gleefully
use others of their own countrymen to inflict death abroad? To
dismiss offers of peace, while demanding that sovereign states
grovel in their service? I would suggest that the "human
scum" appellation be applied very selectively, but the Bush
administration offers many appropriate designees. Human scum
rules at present, but decent people, once sufficiently irritated
by the toxicity and stench, can surely clean it up.
Gary Leupp
is a professor of History at Tufts University and coordinator
of the Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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