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Today's
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December 11, 2003
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
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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December
11, 2003
The Merchants of Blood
War
Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
By JAMES M. CARTER
While campaigning for President in 2000, George
W. Bush made clear his position on nation building saying, "I
don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation
building" adding that, if elected, he would "absolutely
not" engage in such open-ended commitments. He was sharply
critical of his predecessor's use of American troops in Haiti,
Somalia and Kosovo to "restore order," to bring about
"stable governments," all objectives of nation building.
Nevertheless, Bush and company find themselves scrambling to
otherwise define and control a conflict that looks increasingly
open-ended, costly and bent on building a very different Iraq.
What the Bush foreign policy team seems loath to consider are
the remarkable parallels between the circumstances they now face
in trying to remake a war-torn Iraq and the efforts of confident,
well-heeled American officials of the 1960s who believed they
too had history on their side in trying to remake the southern
half of Vietnam.
The United States began waging a war
in the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam in the early-1960s and
continued well into the 1970s, unleashing an unprecedented barrage
of firepower on the southern half of that country, below the
seventeenth parallel. What is perhaps less well known is that
the war in fact followed an equally enormous and failed nation
building project. Beginning in 1954, the United States attempted
to invent a nation below the 17th parallel, the dividing line
decided at the Geneva Conference that same year.
Immediately, the United States began
pouring money and expertise into Vietnam to bring off this transformation.
A staggering array of specialists and technicians, from civil
police, public administration, public finance, military, counterespionage,
propaganda, industry, agriculture, education and more immediately
descended upon Saigon, the southern city made the capital of
the whole project. These experts, along with the U.S. government
and military installed Ngo Dinh Diem, removed all viable opponents,
began a crackdown on dissidents killing tens of thousands and
jailing as many or more, and began to physically transform southern
Vietnam. United States government contractors, such as Michigan
State University and the construction firm Johnson, Drake and
Piper, went to work on the creation of a national communications,
transportation and police network. This "mission" built
or rebuilt hundreds of miles of roadways and dozens of bridges,
dredged hundreds of miles of canals, built airfields and deep
draft ports to receive a continuing and growing volume of economic
and military aid. They built roads connecting all parts of Vietnam
to Saigon, which they promised would result in greater access
for both government officials and peasants to sell their crops
to a larger market. They trained and equipped a rapidly expanding
military force to keep Diem in power and they began to piece
together a para-military security force and a Vietnam Bureau
of Investigation (VBI) modeled on the American FBI. They even
inaugurated an identity card program to catalog the identity
and keep track of every Vietnamese in the interest of maintaining
security. Nothing would be left to chance; no rogue force would
tip the expensive American apple cart. By 1960, the United States
had poured into this project over $1.4 billion.
The project failed. Ordinary Vietnamese
in concert with northern Viet Minh cadre began to openly resist
the whole campaign. By the early 1960s, the United States came
to rely almost exclusively on military solutions to put down
the growing opposition, soon a broad-based and popular insurgency
opposed to continued occupation and Diem's rule, now referred
to as My-Diem or American Diem. John Kennedy increased direct
American involvement from around 680 to over 16,000 troops as
"advisors" who, despite their title, participated in
combat. The administration, at the same time, vastly expanded
the military forces built earlier to defend Diem and insure he
remained in power. Opposition to the occupation grew at a steady
pace. The whole project continued to unravel. By late 1963, a
coup de tat finally removed Diem and his influential family from
power.
From 1964 into 1965, the experiment was
vastly militarized. From around 23,000 troops in Vietnam by the
end of 1964, the next year there were 185,000, and the next there
were over 385,000. American force levels peaked at around 542,000.
By all accounts a traditional society, southern Vietnam needed
an infrastructure to receive this influx of military aid. Responsibility
for building that necessary infrastructure was given over to
the largest construction entity ever, the RMK-BRJ (Raymond International,
Morrison-Knudsen, Brown & Root, and J.A. Jones Construction).
Calling itself "The Vietnam Builders" and receiving
highly lucrative "no bid" contracts, this consortium
of private corporations was to turn southern Vietnam into a modern,
integrated military installation that would enable the United
States to properly defend its client. The Vietnam Builders entered
into a contract with the federal government, via the U.S. Navy,
as the exclusive contractor for the huge military buildup that
was to come; there would be no open bidding or otherwise competitive
process.
Brushing aside the messy reality that
the nation of "South" Vietnam had yet to be created,
U.S. officials ordered a staggering volume of military projects
be begun immediately. The congress granted to the administration
of Lyndon Baines Johnson for 1965 $700 million for the expected
ramping up of a direct American military role. Of that sum, $100
million was earmarked for the Defense Department's construction
projects already begun. Soon, the figures ballooned far beyond
anyone's expectation. Initially contracted for around $15 million
prior to 1965, the lead corporation, MK, was shocked by the magnitude
of orders for rapid construction. As one MK executive said early
in 1965, "all we knew was that they wanted a lotta roads,
a lotta airfields, a lotta bridges, and a lotta ports, and that
they probably would want it all finished by yesterday."
(Fortune, Sept., 1966)
These demands outstripped the capacity
of any one of the corporations. Equipment requirements alone
for the Vietnam project far exceeded all equipment owned by MK
for all of its worldwide operations and all subsidiary companies.
The value of the project leapt from its 1964 starting point of
$15 million of work in place per month to over $67 million of
work in place per month within two years. The Builders could
hardly keep pace with the demand for more projects, which numbered
over one hundred concurrently at the peak of construction. Suppliers
in the US could hardly keep up either and backlogs of three to
six months became commonplace. Caterpillar Tractor Company's
annual report to shareholders intoned, "1965 was another
recording-breaking year and only the physical limitations of
production capacity kept sales and profits from being higher."
(ENR, Feb., 17, 1966; ENR, May, 19, 1966) Three of the four firms
making up the Vietnam Builders ranked in the top ten of four
hundred U.S. corporation doing business abroad for 1966. Collectively,
and individually, they gobbled up hundreds of millions in profits
for their efforts. In the process, Vietnam Builders employed
8,600 Americans and over 51,000 Vietnamese. They built six ports
with 29 deep-draft berths, six naval bases, eight jet airstrips
10,000 feet in length, twelve airfields, just under twenty hospitals,
fourteen million square feet of covered storage, and twenty base
camps including housing for 450,000 servicemen and family. In
short, they put on the ground in southern Vietnam nearly $2 billion
in construction of various kinds of facilities and infrastructure.
Military commanders called it the "construction miracle
of the decade." (Jones Construction Centennial)
In deciding to go to war rather than
withdraw from Vietnam, the Johnson administration had stepped
onto a slippery slope where foreign policy crises meet domestic
politics. At home just as in Vietnam, Johnson fought to control
inflationary pressures. Now, those pressures mounted as the war
in Southeast increased in scope and intensity. The soaring demands
on the construction industry certainly meant rising profits,
but it also threatened rising prices. Republicans in congress
began to criticize Johnson's handling of the Vietnam situation,
warning his policies threatened to over-heat the domestic economy
and drive prices up. Some also specifically criticized the way
in which aid, both construction/military and economic, was being
sent to Vietnam. In 1966, Illinois Representative Donald H. Rumsfeld
went perhaps further than most when he charged the administration
with letting contracts which "are illegal by statute."
He urged investigation into the relationship between the private
consortium working in Vietnam and the Johnson administration,
in particular the infamous "President's Club," to which
Brown & Root, one of the principle Vietnam contractors, had
given tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.
Rumsfeld argued on behalf of serious inquiry into the whole affair
saying, "under one contract, between the U.S. Government
and this combine, [RMK-BRJ] it is officially estimated that obligations
will reach at least $900 million by November 1967...why this
huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited
is beyond me. The potential for waste and profiteering under
such a contract is substantial." (Cong. Rec., August 30,
1966) Rumsfeld's alarm was echoed by others in the congress and
in the press as well, although will little affect. All the while,
the war in southern Vietnam continued to spiral out of control
despite the dramatic increases in firepower and troops and military
construction. The government's contract with the Vietnam Builders
ended only in 1972 shortly before the Nixon administration itself
quit the commitment to the long failed project.
In Vietnam, this process took years to
unfold. In Iraq, the time table seems dramatically sped up. Following
the rapid invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein, U.S. forces
quickly occupied key areas of Iraq. Officials and "embedded"
reporters gleefully trumpeted American successes after meeting
what was described as only token opposition. Postwar planners
and experts had been quickly flown into neighboring countries
to await a modicum of safety before entering Baghdad to begin
their work in stabilizing and rebuilding a ravaged country.
Twelve years of ruinous sanctions had
reduced Iraq to a traditional state in terms of its agricultural,
communications, transportation, public health and educational
infrastructure. Years of neglect as a desperate regime clung
to power and funneled its limited resources toward maintaining
itself and away from maintenance of the nation also contributed
to the erosion and decay of a modern state. (Iraq Under Siege,
ch. 2) This otherwise nightmare situation for the people of Iraq
actually aided the American military by reducing all kinds of
unseemly obstacles to invasion, conquest and occupation that
was to follow.
Within weeks, the federal government
began its bread line for business by handing out sweet deals
to American corporations to "rebuild" Iraq's infrastructure.
And, just as in Vietnam, those with the best relationship to
government officials quickly found themselves on an inside track
with greater access to the enormous sums of money pouring into
Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney's own Halliburton began riding
this "gravy train" even before the invasion was over,
building tent cities just outside of Iraq. Once the President
declared an end to combat, the big money quickly began to flow.
As of September, Halliburton had received
almost one quarter billion dollars in payment for work done so
far, with much more to follow. Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton
subsidiary, is also in the pipeline, having signed lucrative
federal contracts, reportedly worth $2.3 billion, to help in
the rebuilding of Iraq's oil producing infrastructure. Bechtel
Group, another corporation with solid government connections,
has lapped up another $1.03 billion. Even Morrison-Knudsen, now
calling itself Washington Group International following a merger,
has signed on for around $500,000,000 of the lucre. The contracts
through which these deals are codified are those old familiar,
certainly to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, "cost-plus-award-fee"
types that were used to give away huge sums of money to the Vietnam
Builders. The Center for Public Integrity's recently published
investigation into private contractors and the war on "terror"
reveals that over 70 American companies have secured close to
$8 billion in government contracts to rebuild Afghanistan and
Iraq. They also shared ongoing and close relations with the federal
government and provided more in campaign contributions to George
Bush than any other official over a twelve year period. Those
companies are currently building and rebuilding all of the infrastructure
destroyed over the past dozen years, and then some. They are
working on a police network, a military force, a communications
grid, transportation system, an integrated media system, the
oil production and transportation system, water and sewage treatment
systems, and so on. (<Aljazeera.net>, <CorpWatch.org>,
The Center for Public Integrity)
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground
inside Iraq has steadily deteriorated since the President's proclamation
of the "end of combat." A recent CIA analysis finds
that ordinary Iraqis are fast losing hope that the Americans
have come to help them. The Iraqi Governing Council is no closer
to legitimacy and yet remains hamstrung by occupation officials.
The war and its aftermath have now taken the lives of some 8,000
innocent civilians. Looking eerily like the situation in Vietnam,
albeit after several years of failure there, an insurgency now
flourishes in Iraq and the chaos and episodes of heavy-handed
American military actions have created fertile ground for greater
anti-American violence. President Bush has now called L. Paul
Bremer III, the top American official overseeing post-war Iraq,
hurriedly back to Washington to hasten the turning over of power
to the Iraqis themselves in response to the growing resentment
of and attacks on occupation forces. That may now happen as early
June, 2004. The situation is bad and getting worse, the congress
is now criticizing and investigating the money deals, and the
Bush administration wants desperately to distance itself from
the whole mess in the run up to the presidential election. (The
Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times) Ordinary Iraqis are
fast learning what ordinary Vietnamese peasants learned all those
years ago; namely, the United States, as George Bush says, does
not do nation building.
Rather than avoiding the lessons of such
disasters as the "nation building" war in Vietnam,
Americans, if not America's elected leaders, should look to that
tragic episode to explain the "quagmire" unfolding
in Iraq. This is not a humanitarian mission any more than was
the American mission to Southeast Asia forty years ago. It is
a fraudulent war that is now perpetuated by political ideologues
and war profiteers with much to lose. Without legitimacy among
the people, the whole project, including whatever "government"
is put in place, is doomed to failure. Iraqi resistance will
only grow. The cycle of answering that resistance with greater
levels of force is perpetual. It should come as no surprise that
the Iraqi people are no less impressed with this version of "nation
building" than were the Vietnamese people with the earlier
version.
James M. Carter
is a PhD. candidate at the University of Houston. He can be reached
at: jmcarter@ev1.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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