Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
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
Recent
Stories
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
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
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
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
5, 2003
Of Rumors, Plots and
Machinations
Fidel
and The Prince
By SAUL LANDAU
On August 25, El Nuevo Herald led with an incoherent
and fact free story about Cuba selling underage girls for prostitution
in Latin America. Earlier in August, The Herald also trumpeted
that 3 Cuban gymnasts had defected at the Pan American games
in Santo Domingo. They barely mentioned the 72 gold medals Cuban
athletes won. Other recent Herald stories assert that Castro
has lost his marbles because he seemed confused at a speech,
that Greece denied Castro's application for a visa for the 2004
Olympic Games and that Elian Gonzalez, the little boy rescued
off the Florida coast who was returned by the Clinton government
to his father two years ago to the horror of the Castro-hating
Cubans in Florida, has become Castro's "little puppet doll."
Aside from the irrelevance of these stories
to the issues of the world and the nation, they do demonstrate
the ability of Fidel Castro to twist the brain of his opponents,
-- as well represented by the Herald -- to reduce them to a cackling
gang of fixated or obsessed harpies.
Castro has infected his enemies with
obsession, a mental state that clouds the mind. The political
finesse of the Cuban leader have led some to call him Machiavellian.
Politicians and scholars still quote with reverence Nicolo Machiavelli's
The Prince, an early 16th Century treatise on political realism
-- lessons and rules for maintaining the status quo. Machiavelli
tried to advise his political leaders on the best methods of
dealing with conflicts without losing popularity.
I recommend that a publisher reissue
The Prince and contact Fidel Castro to write new chapters and
a forward. One chapter would be: How to Export Foolish Internal
Enemies and Confound Foolish External Enemies; another, How to
Convince Your Enemies to Place their Money in Your Treasury;
and  Obsession Leads to Foolish Behavior.
The forward would explain how Castro,
now in his 45th year as head of a revolutionary government, has
gone beyond Machiavelli. He has defied Washington and survived
for an unnatural length of time by practicing the equivalent
of political judo on his foes.
The world's most powerful nation, bent
on destroying him and the revolution he has led, imported Castro's
opposition. In 1959, US officials decided to allow entrance to
top officials and backers of fleeing Cuban dictator Fulgencio
Batista. Some of these men had committed murder; others had tortured,
stolen, engaged in political fraud and colluded with the Mafia.
After the initial exodus, Cuba's economic and professional aristocracy
came to Florida, followed by much of the upper middle and middle
class.
At the time, few strategists or pundits
saw these Washington moves (letting so many Cubans emigrate)
as politically foolish. The experts all agreed: the US government
would not allow disobedience to prevail 90 miles from the US
border. Since Washington would soon send the younger men back
as its soldiers to retake the island, Castro's days were numbered.
But, unfamiliar with Machiavelli, Washington strategists underestimated
the upstart who had taken power on the island that had been an
informal colony of the United States except for a small sector
(gambling, drugs and prostitution) controlled by the Mafia.
As if God was teaching us a lesson, many
of us watched in horror how they helped corrupt the US electoral
system in 2000 in Florida where they intimidated vote counters.
In addition, they have contributed countless acts of terrorism
to the domestic climate and have caused political problems for
several Administrations.
Cubans pressured successive presidents
until 1981, when the Cuban American National Foundation captured
US-Cuba policy. President Reagan liked the idea of privatizing
everything even Cuba policy. The State Department's Cuba Desk
officer routinely checked with Foundation chair Jorge Mas Canosa
before pursuing customary actions. Aside from backing an irrational
embargo and travel ban that have helped Castro maintain his legitimacy,
the Foundation has inserted Castro-hating into domestic US politics,
making Cuba policy an issue beyond its strategic importance.
They have failed to change Cuba, but they have influenced US
politics.
Kennedy assassination investigators like
Gaeton Fonzi and Anthony Summers offer evidence that some of
the Cubans trained by the CIA to kill Castro played a role in
the Kennedy hit. Three of the six Nixon "Plumbers"
who broke into the Watergate in 1972 were anti-Castro Cubans.
When President Carter challenged Castro
in 1980 on migration policy, Fidel opened the door for a migration
of 120,000 Cubans from the port of Mariel. Mauricio Ferre, then
mayor of Miami, told a TV reporter as he watched the arriving
Cubans: "Fidel has just flushed his toilet on us."
He referred to men with prison haircuts and others with "crazy
looks" on their faces. Indeed, Castro had emptied both his
prisons and asylums just before the exodus.
In the 1980s, when the Iran-Contra scandal
broke, the public learned that some of President Reagan's top
officials had gotten into conspiratorial bed with anti-Castro
Cuban terrorists, like Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch,
who had sabotaged a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados in
1976.
The United States, the strongest empire
in world history, had pursued a simple strategy toward Cuba and
other disobedient governments. As one former national security
official put it "Obey or we'll kick your ass."
This had worked in those nations that
lacked political leaders with Machiavellian instincts. In Korea
and Vietnam, however, US policies proved costly and the US government
withdrew, although they did not easily forgive. The Vietnam War
taught the Washington crowd not to fight anyone who could fight
back. This Vietnam Syndrome lives on, especially when the White
House hears the shrill demands of its anti-Castro friends to
attack Cuba while US forces find themselves bogged down in Iraq.
But did Castro employ Machiavellian tactics to confuse President
Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961? Did he do something
to cause Kennedy to not use US air power to support the CIA-backed
Cubans invaders? Or did political realism somehow inform Castro
that Kennedy, an intelligent young president, would not make
himself despised in much of the world by acting like a bully?
According to Kennedy biographer Robert
Dallek, writing in the August 26, 2003 Times of London about
"The Bay of Pigs: JFK's perfect fiasco," Secretary
of State Rusk had warned the president that: "We might be
confronted by serious uprisings all over Latin America if US
forces were to go in." Rusk worried that a move against
Cuba could trigger "Soviet and Chinese moves in other part
of the world."
Alternatively, if Kennedy decided to
call off the CIA-backed invasion, he would receive the "weak"
label from the Republicans. Going ahead with the plan would mean
that the young president would face condemnation from much of
the world just as he was trying to build a solid image.
Jump ahead to the 1990s when Castro's
Soviet sugar daddy imploded and left the Cuban economy in a serious
tailspin. Here, the Machiavellian instinct kicked in again. How
to extract from your enemy the necessary foreign exchange to
keep the economy viable? Castro gave the impression that he opposed
dollarizing the economy in 1991 allowing the dollar to exist
as acceptable and parallel currency.
From south Florida, where most of his
exported internal enemy resided, came the anticipated response.
The Miami Herald and its Spanish offspring furthered the rumors
of Castro's imminent demise. Andres Oppenheimer, the pontificating
columnist, called his 1992 book Castro's Final Hour. While waiting
for the regime's collapse, Cubans sent cash (remittances) to
their "starving" relatives, a term employed by Armando
Perez Roura, a well-known radio screamer in Miami, referring
to his brother. More than a billion dollars poured into Cuba
and ended up in the Central Bank, where Castro could allocate
it for the island's economic needs.
Castro dealt with the US attempt to support
dissidents by exposing their financial links to Washington and
then sentencing them to long terms. He responded to the US leniency
in dealing with hijackers of Cuban craft by executing three hijackers.
He got bad press, lost some aid and trade, but Washington backed
down from its aggressiveness. The Miami gang demanded harsh measures.
Bush offered a stronger TV Marti signal (still jammable), increased
aid to dissidents and indictment of two pilots and an air force
general in Cuba for having shot down two anti-Castro pilots in
1996. Once again, the US sets a legal standard that contradicts
its own policies about protecting US service men abroad by charging
three Cuban military officials. The Cubans, Sudanese, Cambodians
and many other peoples could charge American bomber pilots and
their commanders with murder.
Like the embargo itself and the various
bills that tightened it, the new measures are directed against
one man as if Castro was the lone resident of the island. By
producing rage and irrationality, Fidel has induced his enemies
to make foolish moves. He learns news ways. They don't. This
truly revolutionary Machiavellian, now 77 years old, still has
a few tricks up his sleeve. So, watch out Mr. Bush.
Saul Landau
is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at
Cal Poly Pomona University. For Landau's writing in Spanish
visit: www.rprogreso.com.
His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE
EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, will be published
in September by Pluto Books. He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for 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
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