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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
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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
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Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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November
8, 2003
Building a Vanguard
Against the Apocalypse
Stan
Goff's Full Spectrum Disorder
By MARK HAND
Stan Goff is using his 26-year career in the U.S.
Army as a sounding board for his communiqués on the necessity
of forming vanguards to inspire socialist revolutions around
the world. In his new book, "Full
Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century,"
Goff bristles at how revolutionary vanguards have been given
a bad name by a wide range of "Marxoid cults" that
essentially have become arcane debating societies.
"A revolutionary vanguard is an
organization that can mobilize mass movements to victories,"
he says. "The proof is in the pudding. Fidel Castro's 1950s
guerrilla army was a real vanguard. A sect that indoctrinates
its new members on a college campus and obliges them to hawk
newspapers no one wants is not."
It probably shouldn't come as a surprise
to anyone that a person who spent most of his adult life in a
mega-hierarchical organization such as the U.S. Army is peddling
the notion of a vanguard. Goff's career as a military trainer
involved barking instructions to domestic and foreign soldiers.
His new mission as Private Citizen Goff is to help the political
left leverage its frustrations so that it can build a formidable
movement to topple the established political and economic order.
One of the problems with Goff's grand
visions for a vanguard is that its members almost always turn
into facsimiles of the leaders of the old regime. Take a look
at the vanguard group calling the shots in Columbia's decades-long
guerrilla  insurgency. If the FARC came
to power in Colombia, as Goff predicts would happen if the United
States were to cut off aid to the reviled Colombia government,
there is little chance its leaders would discard their authoritarian
practices and embrace a benign democratic socialism.
Goff shares with his readers some attention-grabbing
ideas about the future of liberal democracy. For starters, he
sees no future for the current U.S. political system. "I
have not one iota of doubt that America - as it is now politically
constituted - will self-destruct," Goff writes. Visions
of Armageddon are common among the ex-military crowd, many of
whom view the shadowy architects of the phantom one-world government
as the greatest threat to freedom.
But Goff aims his bombast in a different
direction than the neo-John Birchers. America's "imperial
privileges will go by the wayside," he writes. "In
that convulsive process - closer than people realize - we will
see the naked face of internal colonial oppression as well, the
overt subjugation of Black and Brown peoples inside the USA,
and not long after, the open attack on the entire US working
class - working class divided by white privilege and susceptible
to the siren call of a new American fascism."
Goff is the quintessential ex-military
man who thinks he knows it all. After reading Full Spectrum Disorder,
I came to the conclusion that Goff probably does not know it
all, but he surely knows enough - especially about U.S. political
culture and military practice - to write a compelling book.
In his new career as a chronicler of
the criminal ways in which political leaders in Washington use
the U.S. military to subjugate parts of the world, Goff refuses
to scold the thousands of young men and women who keep the war
machine running by signing up for duty each year. Instead, Goff
attacks the self-righteous among us who have the nerve to point
out that today's soldier is under no compulsion to participate
in the preservation of empire. "Things are just never simple
enough for an ideologue who still believes that soldiers are
all robot killers, and that the world is divided into good and
evil," Goff writes.
Full Spectrum Disorder, Goff's second
book with Soft Skull Press, serves as a travelogue for Goff's
army adventures. He takes us to Haiti (the setting for his first
book, Hideous Dream), Somalia, Latin America and Vietnam. Goff
also offers prescient analysis of the U.S. invasion and ongoing
occupation of Iraq.
Full-spectrum dominance, Goff explains,
is the key term in a Defense Department blueprint issued during
the Clinton administration. "Full spectrum" refers
to three things: geographic scope, level of conflict and technology.
"This is a doctrine that implicitly aims at world military
domination, taking on everything from street riots to thermonuclear
war, accomplished with a blank check to weapons developers for
an array of highly sophisticated gadgets," Goff says.
This is also the doctrine from which
the Bush administration adapted the military strategy for the
invasion of Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added a few
new wrinkles to the theory, including substituting formulaic
digital thought for human leadership, Goff says. "This dramatically
increasing and ever more exclusive reliance on technology in
fact carries with it a corresponding increase of latent disorder
that can happen abruptly in a kind of tectonic shift," he
explains.
Goff describes how armies of resistance
around the world will increasingly become more brazen in their
confrontations with the U.S. military and its surrogates. "The
liberation fighters of the future will learn to make allies of
chaos and their enemy's ignorance, which feed each other,"
Goff writes.
Goff's macro assessment of resistance
aptly describes what's going on in Iraq today. As I write, the
Bush administration and the nation's media establishment are
still digesting the news about the latest exploits of Iraq's
resistance: shooting a U.S. Army transport helicopter out of
the sky near Baghdad, killing 15 soldiers and injuring a couple
dozen. Some members of Congress are lobbying for additional soldiers
to be sent to Iraq to help with the pacification of the Iraqi
population. But Rumsfeld says the U.S. casualties are a "necessary"
component in a war to liberate Iraq and that his commanders on
the ground are telling him there is no need to expand the occupation
army.
Despite the U.S. military's swift overthrow
of Saddam Hussein's regime, there were still thousands of tanks
and armored personnel carriers unaccounted for in Iraq "and
they didn't drive themselves away," Goff writes. The list
includes: hundreds of thousands of small arms; up to 3,000 wire-guided
anti-armor missiles; more than 1,500 artillery pieces; possibly
a half dozen SCUD launchers; more than 1,000 MOWAG light anti-aircraft
weapons; and a decent supply of unfired surface-to-air missiles.
Throughout the book, Goff never lets
the political establishment off the hook for the mess it has
caused. The neoliberals (the Democrats) and neocons (the Bush
administration) are equally devoted to preserving the status
and privileges of the U.S. ruling class, Goff explains. The differences
between the factions revolve around two opposing delusions: "[T]he
neoliberal delusion that there is a way to return to the multilateral
gluttony of the recent past - with the U.S. reassuming its role
of benevolent father - and the neocon delusion that the U.S.
can eat its economic cake and have it too by playing the part
of a global protection racket on energy markets. The neoliberals
cannot solve the problem of rebellion in the periphery and the
falling rate of profit. The neocons cannot solve the problem
of military costs - economic and political."
What may turn out to be the most controversial
portion of Full Spectrum Disorder is its intriguing analysis
of U.S. action in its own hemisphere. In Colombia, where Goff
trained that nation's special forces in the early 1990s, the
Clinton administration needed a rationale for boosting its military
presence there. "Drugs can fill in for the World Communist
Conspiracy only so far," Goff writes. With the success of
the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombianas, or FARC,
the country's largest leftist guerrilla group with ties to the
illegal drug trade, the United States could have its drug war
and its war against Communists together, "like rum and coke,"
Goff says.
But Goff explains that FARC has nowhere
near the same involvement in drugs as Colombia's military or
the country's network of right-wing paramilitary death squads.
The U.S. government's involvement with the Colombian military
represents another chapter in its "troubling history of
fighting alongside - not against - drug traffickers," Goff
says. The CIA's resume includes fraternizing with the masters
of the Golden Triangle heroin empires, opium traffickers in Vietnam
and Cambodia, the drug-trafficking anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan,
and the heroin traffickers of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Goff observes with approval FARC's ability
to operate a viable military organization. "[T]he Colombian
armed forces are largely conscripts, led by a venal and corrupt
officer corps, and suffering the daily stings of class resentment
and blistering racism," Goff says. "The FARC-EP [People's
Army] is racially diverse, and 30 percent women."
The "metropolitan anticommunist"
left, Goff says, claims that FARC has evolved into an authoritarian
monstrosity that oppresses the people of Columbia on the same
level as the government. "This is a classic case of the
left falling for the slanders of the mainstream press, assisted
in their fall by 'bourgeois right," or moral imperialism
- the convenient morality of the fed and fat of the imperial
center," he contends.
While the Zapatistas in Chiapas tend
to receive a fair amount of positive press among liberals and
leftists in the United States and Europe, FARC fails to elicit
the approval of the liberal media or the blessing of those who
should be its allies, Goff says. "At the end of the day,
the difference between the two, aside from those who are condoned
or condemned by those outside the conflict, is that one is winning
and one is losing because one understands the iron logic of war,
and the other does not," he writes.
Goff's message has resonated on the left
because it's not everyday that a retired U.S. Army NCO speaks
so bluntly about U.S. imperialism. In Full Spectrum Disorder,
Goff's writing style is colloquial but authoritative. It's the
perfect antidote to the scripted garbage produced by the retired
military officers who serve as paid analysts for the major U.S.
media outlets.
Goff's celebration of the FARC for its
ability to build and maintain an impressive fighting machine
in Colombia will raise some eyebrows. Given his deep roots in
the U.S. military, though, Goff will hold onto the type of reader
who would otherwise put the book down if the same material had
been written by an armchair intellectual.
And don't let Goff's seemingly harebrained
ideas of a revolutionary vanguard keep you from picking up a
copy of Full Spectrum Disorder. These passages only add to the
allure of the book, which actually is a first-rate analysis of
the U.S. military in the 21st century. Full Spectrum Disorder
not only will find an audience on the left but is likely to make
it onto certain course reading lists at the military academies.
Current and former members of the military
will appreciate how Goff takes an honest look at their work without
denigrating them. Members of the political establishment, on
the other hand, may not like the book's message about the looming
long, dark period of political and social chaos that is likely
to grip the United States and much of the rest of the world for
as long as the ruling class continues to avoid making systemic
changes to how it governs.
Mark Hand
is editor of Arlington, Va.-based Press
Action. He can be reached at mark@pressaction.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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