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Today's
Stories
November 7, 2003
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
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for More Stories.
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November
8, 2003
From Occupation to
Guerrilla War
A
New Kind of Dancing in Iraq
By DAVID LINDORFF
The Bush war plan has entered a new and much more
dangerous phase.
Before, it was all about refocusing Americans
on terrorism and patriotism, in hopes of getting our minds off
the dismal state of the economy and the massive transfer of wealth
to the rich that was and is still underway.
It was a bad bet, because the war, which
was supposed to be short and sweet, with happy Iraqis dancing
in the street, has turned into something else. (There has indeed
been dancing in the streets, but only around the burning hulks
of destroyed American military equipment and the charred bodies
of dead GI's).
So now, with occupation turning into
guerrilla war, the plan is to de-emphasize the ongoing war and
try to refocus Americans on the domestic economy, which, while
still in a mess, is at least less of a disaster at the moment
than the Iraq war.
The new plan is to try and present the
illusion of progress in Iraq, by at least temporarily "drawing
down" the U.S. troop levels there, from the current 134,000
to "just" 100,000 by  next May, when the presidential
campaign will have begun in earnest.
It's a seemingly bizarre strategy, to
be sure. How, one might ask, can the Pentagon be contemplating
a reduction in the U.S. military presence in coming months even
as the guerrilla resistance movement is growing in numbers, skill
and daring?
Not long ago, of course, the publicly
proclaimed strategy was to pull out American troops and replace
them with foreign troops. Initial plans called for Pakistani
or Indian soldiers, but those countries demurred. Then Turkish
troops were proposed, but Turkey, faced with popular resistance
and with fierce opposition to the idea within Iraq, also declined
the invitation. European countries (with the exception of Poland,
which may be reconsidering its decision after losing a major
to a guerrilla attack, and after polls showing 57 percent oppose
having troops in Iraq), were equally dismissive of the idea.
So now, taking a page from President Nixon's book ("Vietnamization"),
the Pentagon claims it will train 170,000 Iraqi soldiers to take
over some of the job of pacification from the Americans.
This is quite a task, building from scratch
in just half a year an army that, if successfully created, would
stand right up there in the top ranks of the world's military
forces, in terms of numbers. (Note that it takes that long just
to get that many draftees out of civvies and suited up and trained
in the U.S., a country over 10 times the size of Iraq, and with
a 1.4 million-person military machine already in place to train
and absorb the new recruits.)
The other surprising thing about this
new Pentagon scheme is that no one--even the famously self-confident
and vainglorious Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--could reasonably
predict how it would work. Would Iraq soldiers really aggressively
go after, and kill fellow Iraqis, fighting loyally on the side
of the American occupiers? Could they be entrusted with the heavy
arms and air support that U.S. troops have, or would they be
left to do the job with small arms? Would arming 170,000 Iraqis
end up simply being a way of inadvertently training and arming
a whole new cadre of anti-American guerrillas? Would the new
Iraqi recruits resist the temptation to funnel arms -- and information--to
guerrillas?
It seems incredibly premature, with the
establishment of this Iraqi army so speculative and untested,
for the Pentagon to already be talking about and planning for
significant U.S. troop reduction.
But then, this appears not to be a generals'
decision at all. Like the Vietnam War of yore, the military decisions
in the Iraq war are clearly being made not by the brass, but
by political operatives, headed by campaign "General"
Karl Rove.
What this new plan means is that Rove
and Bush's other political handlers are about to callously sacrifice
both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers in the interest of
winning re-election next November. It may be possible, that is,
for the U.S. to draw down the number of soldiers in Iraq during
the peak months of the presidential campaign, enabling Bush to
claim, with the help of a demonstrably compliant and unquestioning
media, that he is winning the war in Iraq, but this can only
be done by a) exposing remaining troops to much greater risk
of attack and b) having the remaining forces adopt even more
deadly and indiscriminate tactics against guerrilla attacks--for
example wider use of helicopter and fixed-wing gunships to spread
death and destruction over wide areas whenever there is an attack,
and a return to more aerial bombardment. Look, for example, for
carpet bombing of cities in the so-called Sunni Triangle, which
will soon become Iraq's "Mekong Delta."
Longer term, of course, such a scorched-earth
strategy will only lead to greater animosity towards the U.S.
war and occupation, and to a more powerful guerrilla movement.
But that doesn't matter to Bush's political
braintrust. Their goal now is clearly just to get past election
day.
After that, though, they, or Bush's Democratic
successor, will have to confront the old Johnson/Nixon dilemma:
keep sending in even more troops, or risk having the U.S. defeated
and driven from the country in a humiliating defeat.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 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
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