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in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
Recent Stories
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demostration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
13, 2003
Anti-Americanism
Too
Much of a Good Thing?
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
Many people throughout the world--leftists, Islamicists,
and nationalists--are far too anti-American.
It's not that they're wrong. Any impression
to the contrary comes from pitching anti-Americanism as the main
event in a Clash of Civilizations, jihad versus big mac, Floridian
democracy and tight-fittin' jeans. Anti-Americanism has more
to do with taking the US to be a grownup democratic nation, one
fully responsible for its 'mistakes' and 'collateral damage'.
These include its genocide-for-dummies 'blunder' in Vietnam,
and its support for our friends: dozens of satanically brutal
Latin American 'strongmen', the mass murderers of Indonesia,
and peasant-killers from India to Guatemala to Brazil. What America
actually intends, or 'stands for', or offers to the world as
a civilization, would not compensate for a millionth of this.
The extent to which America is oblivious
to its responsibilities is quite extraordinary. The overwhelming
majority of Americans manage no contrition for the millions--yes,
millions--their country slaughtered in Vietnam. Instead they
wallow in a maudlin, falsely populist and deeply racist compassion
for the terrible trauma 'our' soldiers endured while they killed.
America likes to search its soul for wrongs done to fellow-citizens--Indians,
blacks, Japanese-Americans--but not to those foreign victims
who make cameo appearances as stick-figures in the self-pitying
recitations of America's recent past. For most Americans, the
famous napalmed, naked Vietnamese girl, photographed in her terror,
is a symbol, not of an atrocity, but of some tragic drama in
which God or fate or the complexities of history obligingly pitch
in to let America off the hook for its cruelties. Even the American
left--so approving of the efforts to bring the criminals of Argentina
and Chile to justice--has never agitated for a war crimes tribunal
to judge all those implicated in the Vietnam war. Excoriating
Kissinger doesn't go very far towards calling to account the
soldiers and pilots who actually did the killing, much less the
politicians and generals who made the war, or the electorate
who cheered them on.
Faced with this disgusting spectacle,
what retribution would seem too severe? Yet any retribution is
unjustified, and an anti-Americanism that dwells on American
sins is unjustified as well.
Anti-Americanism is a political stance
which implies political action. As such, it must have some reasonable
prospect of being effective. If not, it is wrong: a truly tragic
misdirection of effort for which many innocent people will suffer,
just as they suffer in the aftermath of that quintessentially
anti-American act of September 11th, 2001. And this suffering
goes nowhere.
The futility of anti-Americanism becomes
apparent with the lightest consideration of history. World powers
do not disappear to make way for a cozy community of nations;
they make way for other world powers. (This may not be an eternal
law, but it's a pattern that shows no sign of changing for quite
some time.) All the primary states of Europe--England, France,
Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain--have in their day displayed
the very same mixture of gross ignorance, stupidity, sadism and placid racism that one
finds in America today: Colonel Blimp's blustery good spirits
and xenophobic irritability would fit right into the American
scene and, at one time or another, go down quite well in the
drawing rooms of the former colonial powers. The same may be
said for Japan. America, should it go, will not be replaced by
anything better.
But can American power be checked? Recent
events suggest otherwise. America is certainly in decline relative
to the rest of the world. Even the consensus about its 'crushing
military superiority' is quite unfounded: there can be no foundation,
because America has not, since its defeat in Vietnam, fought
anything but basket cases. And even though it is the Vietnamese
who deserve the credit for humiliating the US, they fought with
the backing--almost, one might say, in the shadow--of two great
military powers, the USSR and China. This imposed certain constraints
on American military plans. Today, no great power or alliance
is willing, or perceived as willing, to confront America militarily.
This is going to change eventually, but not in the near future.
America, for a good long while, will not have to answer to anyone
for what it does.
Perhaps individual small states can still,
in limited conflicts, defeat American aggression. Even so, we
onlookers can do little to contribute to such defeats, and we
are not about to try. It is not as if the American left, for
all its detestation of American power, would make any substantial
contribution to Iraqi resistance.
All this points to one great big ugly
fact: America, for the foreseeable future, is the only game in
town. Like all colonial powers, it is utterly immune to moral
appeals until, like the British in India, it blunders off, leaving
more agony in its departure than its arrival. This is not right;
it is not just; it is everything leftists critics say it is,
but so what? This is the world in which we must live.
If America will, more or less, do whatever
it likes, then the only possible effective check to America's
foolish and destructive policies lie in appeals to American self-interest.
The notion that there is no such interest, or that American policies
benefit only a ruling class, is so much posturing. Ordinary Americans
benefit greatly from America's military and economic dominance,
and will be harmed by its decline. (This dominance is established
by fair means as well as foul.) The fact that many Americans
suffer from America's atrocious domestic policies may obscure
the benefits of America's imperial ventures, but that hardly
means the benefits do not exist. America's wealth and power is
no less for being unequally divided, and if the pie were smaller,
ordinary Americans would of course have less, not more.
When America policy becomes obviously,
patently stupid--as in the case of Iraq--critics do not fail
to point out how America defies its own interests. But even then,
the case is diluted by moralizing and strained efforts to show
that, after all, American interests are being served. If, for
example, America is really going to get such a bonanza
of oil wealth and strategic power out of Iraq, how can this be
interpreted as anything but an encouragement to hang in there?
And how exactly will this supposedly enormous bonanza harm ordinary
Americans? Even if it strengthens some ruling class, even if
wealth does not trickle down to the bottom, how would a noble
rejection of advantage destroy American elites or improve the
condition of other Americans?
When American policy is not obviously
stupid, just terribly misguided, the moralizing complaints tend
to drown out any effective criticism. There is a deep inconsistency
underlying this approach. Any good anti-American ought to know
that Americans will never give a damn how many Palestinian children
are shredded by Israeli shrapnel. Any good anti-American ought
to know that, at best, the plight of other peoples will never
rate more than patronizing sniffles provoked by images of starving
kiddies, shoved onto TV by enterprising charities. Why bother
complaining or addressing the conscience of a public that respects,
not even all white folks, but only those--like Blair--who abase
themselves before American 'values', hoping for a pat on the
head and a future handout? Moralizing to Americans is worse than
irrational or futile; it is itself immoral. It is a counterproductive
waste of commodities we cannot afford to waste--of effort and
dedication.
The world can improve only if America
changes from the inside, and it will change only on the impulse
of self-interest. It doesn't matter if Americans seek wealth
and power. What difference does that make? some dominant nation
will always be doing this, always at great cost to others. What
matters is when America increases this cost for no good reason,
often against its own interests. That is something no American,
no matter how selfish or insular, can welcome, so that is something
that can be changed. Addressing such an audience requires no
new facts, but a rearrangement of old ones.
This means that Americans don't need
to be preached at. Americans need to be scared, just as they
were scared after 9-11. They need to realize that the invasion
of Iraq, for instance, is more than an unpardonable and stupid
mistake; it is a very dangerous one. While the left is fond of
talking about how America out to dominate the world, it isn't
important that America has these bad intentions. What is important
is that it can't realize them.
America, despite its pre-eminence, does
not have the military might to do what it wants. It wanted to
get Bin Laden and the Mullah Omar; it couldn't. Even if they
were both captured tomorrow, to elude the US for so long is a
victory that encourages others to follow in their footsteps.
America claims to have won the war in Iraq: quite apart from
the continuing resistance, can you be said to win the war before
you capture the enemy leader? Again, even if Saddam Hussein is
caught tomorrow, the record hardly encourages the leaders of
'rogue states' to tremble for their personal safety.
It is sometimes claimed that the US is
militarily unstoppable, but somehow politically squeamish about
war, or prone to errors of grand strategy. But everything that
contributes to victory or defeat in warfare counts in assessing
military capacity: poor planning and overconfidence weaken America's
military power just as they did France's when the French put
their faith in the Maginot Line. And many American 'mistakes'
were born of some sort of weakness. If the US didn't go on to
Baghdad in 1990, it was because the US felt it needed its allies,
and didn't dare offend them. If the US let itself get chased
out of Iran, Lebanon, and Somalia, it was because it felt unable
to react more forcefully. If America now has problems in Iraq,
it is because American intelligence had no very good idea of
what was going on there, and because America, for whatever reason,
feels unable to send in another 400,000 troops it should have
known would be needed. These sort of strategic and intelligence
failures are not something distinct from America's military incapacity.
In America's supposedly information-sodden warfare, they are
part of it.
In other words what matters is not the
extent to which America pushes everyone around, but the extent
to which it can't. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of
Israel. Pro-Israel lobbies have certainly been effective in promoting
the insane practice of paying Israel to make itself hated and
thereby draw hatred on the United States--all this to 'stand
by a valued ally' who must, at all costs, be prevented from helping
the US in any military conflict. But this is not the whole story.
The internal pressure to support Israel has been effective partly
because the US cannot do what it wants in the Middle East. Critics
of America's Israel policy seem to forget that, for the most
part, America's recent official position has been almost unobjectionable.
The US has pretty consistently: opposed any attempt to make Jerusalem
Israel's capital; condemned Israel's helicopter assassinations;
and, most important, opposed the settlements while promoting
the idea of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories.
In other words, despite all the efforts of the Israel lobbies
and all the Jewish neo-cons who supposedly guide US policy, America
has pretty consistently backed an approach which, stripped naked,
would fall well within the spectrum of left-wing views.
Why is this? It seems odd to suppose
that the lobbies are strong enough to make America lavish so
many billions on Israel, yet too weak to change basic official
policy. More likely, things are more or less as the American
government would probably claim them to be: America can't impose
a settlement on Israel, and is prevented by the lobbies from
abandoning it, so it backs Israel with mountains of cash instead
of providing the more lasting security that a settlement would
produce. The notion that this is all part of some sinister plan
runs aground on the simple fact that the US gets nothing from
Israel's continued war with the Palestinians.
In other words, here again, the US is
too weak to get what it wants. It knows that the Israelis should
pull out of the occupied territories, but it is in no position
to make that happen.
If that's the situation, what can be
done about it? If anything, America needs to be convinced of
its weakness. Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are not the strongest
enemies the US has. They are among the weakest, and the US can't
even deal properly with them. So the US needs fewer enemies
and more friends. Almost all its potential friends are seriously
anti-Israel, and will not align with the US until the US aligns
against Israel. But pro-Israel lobbyists block any such realignment.
So the US needs to understand two things: that the Israel lobby
is a serious threat to its security, and that it is the only
such threat the US can actually overcome at this point. Indeed
that very realization would alone make victory over the lobby
possible.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those
of his university. His book What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just
been republished by Broadview Press. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
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