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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
The New Iraqi Police
Are Useless
Speeding
Up to Nowhere
By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
And everybody praised the Bush,
Who this great fight did win.
'But what good came of it at last?'
Quoth little Rummikin.
'Why that I cannot tell', said he;
'But 'twas a famous victory.'
[With apologies to Robert Southey
(1774-1843) : 'The Battle of Blenheim']
Last week AP reported that the US occupation administration
in Iraq "will speed up the training of Iraqi soldiers and
police to cope with new security threats following stepped up
attacks by insurgents...the chief administrator, L. Paul Bremer,
[stated] that new money from Congress would allow the coalition
to double the number of new soldiers trained for the new Iraqi
army in a year's time."
But it is not practicable to 'speed up'
training of soldiers in any meaningful way. Cutting corners or
reducing the length of training courses results in production
of bad troops. I know a bit about training soldiers. On returning
from Vietnam I was made a company commander in a recruit training
battalion, supposedly as a rest cure. Ho bloody ho. It was hard
work, but one of the most rewarding postings of my service. My
excellent officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers
trained hundreds of youngsters who then attended specialist courses
to start learning their trade, which took another six months
at least. Then they went to units where they began to learn sub-unit
tactics. At one time we were told by the pointy-heads to design
a shorter course without reducing the amount of instruction.
Of course this can be done : you simply increase the hours of
duty, which results in exhaustion all round. Tired soldiers don't
absorb instruction ; tired instructors lose their edge. The idiotic
slogan "achieve more with less" was trotted out, and,
I am pleased to say, was laughed at.
Bremer and his boss, Rumsfeld, don't
realise that training soldiers needs time and dedicated experts
: lots of both. Perhaps this will be another private profit-making
scam employing former soldiers on contract, because Rumsfeld
states no more US troops are to be sent to Iraq, and if there
is to be an adequately-trained army there will have to be hundreds
of instructors plus scores of interpreters and a large administrative
organisation. Figures provided concerning the size of the new
Iraqi army vary according to the spin being put on 'Iraqisation'
following the latest guerrilla attack, and nobody seems to know
what they want.
What is evident is that no sound planning
for raising an army has taken place. It could hardly be so when
the first idea (we can't call it a plan) of having 27 Iraqi battalions
trained in two years was suddenly modified by halving the time
frame. Might this have been decided on the basis that in a year
the Bush election campaign will be in full swing?
There appears little understanding of
'Raise, Train and Deploy' so far as these fundamentals apply
to a new Iraqi army. As for 'Supply, Administer and Command'
the problems seem even greater. Who is going to command at higher
levels? Americans? Impossible. Former Iraqi army senior officers?
Or, for want of anyone else, inexperienced and thus grossly over-promoted
officers? Who, indeed, is going to command at lower levels? Where
is the army nexus with the para-military 'civil defence corps',
a hybrid gendarmerie with unknown powers over the civilian population?
What laws govern employment of the army against fellow citizens?
(None, at the moment.) Is it legal for an Iraqi soldier to kill
an Iraqi civilian, as it is for a US soldier to do with immunity
from any legal process? And to whom or what does an an Iraqi
soldier swear allegiance? The rotating president of the Governing
Council controlled by Bremer?
Bremer says 60 percent of enlisted men
and all officers in the first two battalions to be trained by
the Americans are from the former army. That would appear satisfactory.
But what about the next 25 battalions, each 700 strong? What
are the officer training arrangements? And how are Bremer and
Rumsfeld going to produce 100 or so non-commissioned officers
for each unit from scratch? They have to receive basic training,
too, before moving on. They are then identified as potential
NCOs and in turn receive further training. And so it goes: selection,
training, experience ; selection, training . . . It takes years
to build an army of even moderate competence. But Rumsfeld and
Bremer think it can be done almost overnight.
Bremer, the man who ordered the sacking
of countless academics, doctors, soldiers, policemen, mayors
and administrators because they had Ba'ath party affiliation,
has a lot to answer for. It is amazing that a man of such ignorance
could have been appointed to any post of authority. His actions
were not just stupid, but immensely counter-productive. He didn't
realise that in order to be employed at the professional level
it was necessary for doctors and bureaucrats and others to have
party cards, just as in Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet
Union. Having your name on a list of Ba'ath members wasn't direct
evidence of loyalty to 'Saddam'. It was more often just a meal
ticket -- as was pointed out by the State Department, that much-maligned
and briefed-against body of experts whose wise advice was disdained
by Rumsfeld's boobies.
The most idiotic thing done after the
war on Iraq was to disband the former army. It was not beyond
human ingenuity to devise a system whereby former soldiers could
be registered, vetted and either pensioned-off or re-employed.
But no. There was an off-the-cuff decision to get rid of the
lot of them, which resulted in a large number of resentful (and
revengeful) former soldiers who blame the US for their plight.
The decision was belatedly changed, sort of, in the incompetent
fashion that is Bremer's hallmark ; but the damage was done.
(How many attacks on occupation troops are by unemployed former
soldiers?)
Rumsfeld, who in a parliamentary democracy
would have been sacked months ago, said on ABC's 'This Week'
on 2 November that although the number of U.S. troops in Iraq
has been reduced from 150,000 to 130,000 "the total number
of the security forces in the country has been going up steadily"
because the number of Iraqi forces has "gone from zero on
May 1st up to over 100,000 today." In his curiously buoyant
manner, so evocative of the disastrously incompetent Robert McNamara,
the destroyer of Vietnam and of the US Army, Rumsfeld added "it's
the totality of those three (army, police, para-militaries) that
needs to go up, and it is going up steadily. And there has not
been a need for additional US forces."
He is desperately trying to get himself
out of the corner he boxed himself into when his silly little
deputy, Wolfowitz, announced there would be no need for more
troops in Iraq than the number required for the invasion. These
two amateurs reviled the Army Chief, General Shinseki, for stating
that "hundreds of thousands" of soldiers would be needed,
and showed their contempt for his professionalism by failing
to attend his retirement ceremony. (This was a revealing demonstration
of their nature : mean, vindictive and vulgar.) Here is one example
of the "security forces" which Rumsfeld, cocooned from
reality, is so proud of. According to the AP's Charles Hanley
on November 3 : "As Spc Andrew Fifield [searched the load
on the back of a truck] he motioned to Iraqi policemen to join
him. None did." His commanding officer, Military Police
Lt-Colonel Dave Poirier said "A lot of them are not police
as we'd know police back home to be. Some of them were never
policemen before this". We get the message. The new Iraqi
police are useless.
But Rumsfeld and Bremer tell us these
people have been trained and are an important element of the
100,000 "security forces" consisting of the army and
all the other groups supposedly guarding Iraq. Whom do you believe?
-- ivory tower Rumsfeld or MP Lieutenant Colonel Poirier? No
contest, is there? And surely the Pentagon chief would not be
trying to deceive us about numbers by including in that 100,000
the thousands of privately employed guards responsible for individual
protection and installation security? Perish the thought.
Iraq is a shambles. Programmes for properly-structured
defence forces are subject to politically-motivated interference
caused by panic reaction to the latest killing of occupation
soldiers. Even as I write there is some half-baked scheme for
yet another raggy-baggy militia being considered by Bremer. These
people should tell the military what they want and leave them
to get on with it. The alternative is further chaos in a country
that didn't do America the slightest harm, and is paying a high
price for Bush's famous victory. Rumsfeld and Bremer are speeding
up to nowhere.
Brian Cloughley
writes about defense issues for CounterPunch, the Nation (Pakistan),
the Daily Times of Pakistan and other international publications.
His writings are collected on his website: www.briancloughley.com.
He can be reached at: beecluff@aol.com
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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