Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
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
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
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
19, 2003
Sign Here, Mr. President
Power
to the Purse!
By BRIAN J. FOLEY
Few expect Congress to say No to President Bush's
$87 billion request for the war in Iraq that he said was over.
Decent Americans don't want to abandon the Iraqi people. But
we should get more for our money than a guerilla war, and we
should limit the risk of being misled into further, unnecessary
conflicts. One way is for Congress to attach conditions to any
funding:
- Fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. They cried - and lied - the loudest
for war. They promised an easy liberation and ridiculed experienced
military brass's warnings against underestimating the difficulties
of war.
- Ditto for Secretary of State Colin
Powell. He's portrayed as reasonable, but his February 5, 2003
speech to the UN Security Council has been exposed as lies by
the Associated Press. (See "Charles J. Hanley, "Powell's
Battle Cry Fails Test of Time: Six months after his case swung
opinion toward attacking Iraq, his intelligence file looks thin,"
August 10, 2003.)
- Eliminate the financial incentives
certain Administration officials and their friends may have for
advocating war. The Administration shovels cash to companies
such as Halliburton Corp., which Vice President Cheney CEOed,
to repair oil wells in Iraq, provide meals and deliver mail for
troops, build bases in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Jordan and prisons
in Guantanamo Bay. Such dealing calls into question whether the
Administration's hawkishness is based on patriotism or cronyism.
- Cancel President Bush's tax cuts, which
reward only the richest Americans. Must working people, whose
children are dying in Iraq, also foot the bill?
- Support the troops: let them come home.
They're fighters, not nation builders. Their presence outrages
many Iraqis and thus may pose the greatest obstacle to stability
and democracy. Military costs far outweigh rebuilding costs in
Bush's request. More important than saving money is that our
young men and women are in grave - and gathering - danger. How
long until a massive car bomb cripples and kills hundreds?
- Retract the Bush Administration's National
Security Strategy. The Administration's claiming the right to
invade other countries before they acquire nuclear weapons and
scrapping weapons-reduction treaties could doom humanity to an
atomic free-for-all. The "strategy" gives non-nuclear
nations incentive to go nuclear, simply to avoid Iraq's fate.
The more nuclear weapons in circulation, the harder it will be
to keep them from terrorists.
If we fail to clean our own house, the
rest of the world may try. Much of humanity now views the U.S.
under the Bush Administration as the greatest threat to peace.
And there's politics. Few forget how the Administration tried
to humiliate the UN last year, threatening that the world body
would be "irresponsible" and "irrelevant"
if it "failed" to rubberstamp a U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Of course, sweeping action by the UN
is probably unlikely, given U.S. veto power. Other nations may
well chip in. But imagine a "coalition of the willing"
deciding to go ahead anyway to enforce the UN's will, by adding
the following conditions to those set forth above:
- The U.S. must pay the majority of rebuilding
costs. Coalition countries could seize U.S. assets abroad and
hold them in trust for the Iraqi people.
- No oil contracts, no rebuilding deals
for U.S. companies. Nations should not profit from illegal wars
of aggression.
- Demand "regime change." Foreign
leaders could broadcast that they "have no quarrel with
the American people," but that our dangerous, lawless leaders
must go.
Such improvements are possible now that
we hold the power of the purse.
Brian J. Foley
is a professor at Touro Law Center in Huntington, NY. He can
be reached at BrianF@tourolaw.edu.
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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