Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 15, 2003
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
Recent
Stories
September 12, 2003
Writers Bloc
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
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.
|
September
15, 2003
The Occupation Runs
Out of Gas
It
Was the Oil and It Is Like Vietnam
By STAN GOFF
Apologists for Bush's little war in Iraq, whose
numbers are diminishing in the face of relentless reality, have
invested a mighty labor in dismissing two claims; that the war
in Iraq is about oil, and that there is a comparison to be made
between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War.
The war was never intended as a liberation,
the bullshit story that went center stage when the weapons lies
fell apart . It was always a re-colonization, now euphemized
even by many Democrats as "re-construction."
Nonetheless, the Bush administration
believed they would be welcomed as liberators, because Bush has
surrounded himself with people whose principle skill is self-delusion,
and whose principle aversion is hearing anything that doesn't
conform to their preconceptions. If Daddy supervised the tragedy,
Junior is supervising the deadly farce.
People who only want to hear good news
from their own perspective are easily taken in by con men, and
the con man this time was Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate
facing 22 years at hard labor in Jordan for embezzlement. This
is the character upon whom Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz--themselves
(neo)con men--relied for insight into Iraq, and who told them
they'd be welcomed by cheering,  flower-bearing, confetti-slinging crowds
not unlike Parisians in 1945. That Chalabi hadn't been in Iraq
for decades hasn't deterred our intrepid neo-con ideologues.
They still want to make Chalabi the Quisling leader of Iraq,
under the Kissinger-tutored Viceroy Paul Bremer's.
Neither were the neocons deterred by
intelligence summaries that told them there was no threat from
Iraq. They just made shit up, repeated it five million times
to a credulous, tele-hypnotic American majority, and we swallowed
it whole... sugar provided by the ersatz journalism of America's
entertainment media. Hearing only what we want is a generalized
cultural characteristic shared by leaders and followers alike.
If, as a child, I had told lies as transparent
as this administration's, Mother would have sent me out to the
privet hedge to get her a switch. But white America (Let's be
clear here. The Republican Party's single unifying principle
is white supremacy.) finds the real world just too much to bear,
and so clings desperately to the skirts of its simplified, racialized
world view . That's why even "liberal" white America
finds itself incapable of perceiving the Iraqis as capable of
self-governance, and now calls for a UN occupation, imagined
under the direction of European-extracted officials bearing the
white man's burden now recoded as "democratization.
In the real world, Bush's little junta
wanted control of the oil, and that was always the reason, and
it never changed. If Iraq's principle resource had been chick
peas, our troops wouldn't be there. There were never any mushroom
cloud ready to bloom over New York, and never any connection
between September 11th and Iraq. The only mushroom cloud was
the smoke blown straight up America's ass by these shameless
thugs. It was oil. It still is oil. They are waging economic
war on Europe and Asia, and oil is the lever. And so they repeat
the word "liberation, liberation, liberation" like
a mantra.
The repetition of words like 'remnants'
and 'foreigners' is another childish cover story (It's a good
thing my Mom isn't in DC, or she'd tear that ass up.) to conceal
the fact that the Iraqis are not conforming to the neo-con script.
In Vietnam, there was a huge effort,
once the US military was entrenched, to convince the American
public that foreigners were the aggressors, and that the resistance
to military occupation was not indigenous. But it was. The resistance
in Iraqi is indigenous, too. Operations like the ones being conducted
by Iraqi guerrillas can not happen without roots in the local
populations.
In Vietnam, troop morale plummeted as
the lies about the reasons for war became ever more apparent.
The morale of the troops in Iraq began to fall as soon as the
reality that they weren't liberating anything sank in. Most troops
are prepared to face danger and hardship. They just don't like
facing them for lies.
Since the political decision in August
to cut US casualties, the US has minimized operations and largely
drawn the troops back inside the concertina wire. They were tangled
up with pinprick strikes, and the slow, steady stream of US casualties
was harming Bush politically. It still isn't working. Fixed installations
need logistical support, and that means convoys, so the Iraqi
resistance is schooling itself on the art of ambush.
From an operational tempo that was lethally
strenuous, American troops are now subjected to mind-numbing
boredom, where they can concentrate on how slowly the calendar
pages turn, how hot it is, how bad the sand fleas are, how much
they miss home-cooked meals and making love and air-conditioning.
The occasional mortar attack gives them something to talk about.
The US is stuck right now, having lost the battlefield initiative,
and is losing the war. This is another parallel to Vietnam.
Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board has usurped
the Department of Defense, just like Lyndon Johnson's Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara's "whiz kids" that oversaw
the Vietnam defeat. If McNamara was Johnson's bad counsel, Rumsfeld
appears to be Bush's Rasputin. Another flim-flam artist, with
his silly robo-war doctrine. Even the generals despise this arrogant
pretender. The generals apparently still remember Vietnam, about
which Bush's cabinet has experienced a deep amnesia, but even
they--especially they--will protect their careers and remain
largely silent as they are led into the swamp.
Perhaps we need to revisit some good
advice from Vietnam. When asked how we could get out of Vietnam,
one simple answer was tragically ignnored: With ships and airplanes.
The Iraqis--a talented people with 5,000 years of experience
in civilization--are more qualified to determine their own future,
however painful that process may be, than Bush's cabinet, or
the UN for that matter. End the occupation. Bring the troops
home now.
Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member
of the BRING THEM
HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces
master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email
for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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