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July
7, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Draw
July
4 / 6, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
Standard
Schaefer
Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004
Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
Wayne
Madsen
A Sad Independence Day
John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
Poets'
Basement
Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
The Lipstick Librarian
July
3, 2003
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Meaning of Gettysburg
Thomas
W. Croft
There Was a Reason They Called It the Casino Economy
David
Lindorff
Outlawing Subversives: Hong Kong
and the US
John
Chuckman
Lessons from the American Revolution
Jackson
Thoreau
New Far-Right Scheme: Impeach Supreme Court Justices
Stan
Goff
"Bring 'Em On?": a Former
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to Attack US Troops
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July 2, 2003
Diane
Christian
Good Killing and Bad Killing
Richard
Falk
After Iraq, Does UN War Prevention Have a Future?
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
Justin
Podur
Uribe's Onslaught Across Colombia
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
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Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
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Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
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Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
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Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
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David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
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Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
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Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
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Wire
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Sheldon
Hull
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Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
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June
25, 2003
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Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
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Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
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Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
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June
24, 2003
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Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
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Roya
Monajem
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John
Chuckman
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David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
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Conn
Hallinan
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Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
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Standard
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The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
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The Pitstop Ploughshares
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Magnuson
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David Krieger
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Maria
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The Fat Man in Little Boy
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Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
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Madarasz
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Wire
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Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
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Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
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Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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July
7, 2003
"With Stupidity
Even the Gods Struggle in Vain"
The
Anti-Empire Report
By WILLIAM BLUM
The words and actions of the Bush administration
have so often been labeled "Orwellian" that it's become
virtually a cliché. But one can not resist adding to the
list.
At a July 1 White House press briefing,
a reporter asked spokesman Ari Fleischer: "Ari, the United
States just declared about 50 countries, including Colombia and
six prospective NATO members, ineligible for military aid because
they won't exempt Americans from the International Criminal Court.
My question is, why is this priority more important than fighting
the drug wars, integrating Eastern Europe?"
Fleischer replied: "Well, number
one, because the President is following the law. This is a law
that Congress passed that the President signed, dealing with
what's called Article 98 actions that would make certain that
American military personnel and other personnel who are stationed
abroad would not be subject to a court which has international
sovereignty that's in dispute."
So what do we have here? The Bush administration
drafts a law to serve its imperial and propaganda needs, pushes
it through Congress, and then, when the press expresses some
skepticism about the law's effect, the same Bush administration
justifies it by saying: "Well, the President is only following
the law."
As to the court's sovereignty being in
dispute, this is of course entirely centered in a city called
Washington, DC.
*
* *
For a dozen years, international groups
supporting the Iraqi people campaigned to have the UN (read US)
sanctions removed, sanctions which Clinton's National Security
Advisor, Sandy Berger, called "the most pervasive sanctions
every imposed on a nation in the history of mankind". The
United States, meanwhile, insisted that the suffering of the
population was not due to the sanctions, but was the result of
Saddam's lavish lifestyle. ("People of Iraq ... the amount
of money  Saddam spends on himself in one day would
be more than enough to feed a family for a year," said a
Pentagon radio program broadcast into Iraq). So then Saddam and
his regime were overthrown. But the suffering continued anyhow
in much the same ways. And then, with their usual lack of embarrassment,
Washington officials declared that the sanctions are actually
harmful and that they would have be removed in order to provide
humanitarian aid and rebuild the country.
* *
*
Reading about a horribly bloody suicide
attack upon a Shiite Muslim mosque in Pakistan on July 4 that
killed dozens, and which is blamed on members of the Sunni Muslims,
I imagined what many Americans would think about this: "That's
good, they should all just kill each other with their uncivilized
tribal violence if they can't learn how to get along any better
than that."
Then I thought about the American tribe
which recently killed thousands of the Afghan tribe and then
thousands more of the Iraqi tribe, for no discernible good reason
or purpose, cheered on by the many other members of the American
tribe at home waving their tribal flags.
* *
*
US military commanders in Iraq have branded
the guerillas as "subversives" and "terrorists".
Donald Rumsfeld said there are five groups
opposing US forces -- looters, criminals, remnants of Saddam
Hussein's government, foreign terrorists and Iranian-backed Shiites.
An American official there maintains
that many of the people shooting at US troops are "poor
young Iraqis" who have been paid between $20 and $100 to
stage hit-and-run attacks on US soldiers. "They're not dedicated
fighters," he said. "They're people who wanted to take
a few potshots."
Other members of the Bush administration
use terms like "well-trained militants" and "professional
operations".
What no American official dares to have
cross his lips is the idea that any part of the resistance is
composed of Iraqi citizens who do not like being bombed, invaded
and occupied and are demonstrating their resentment. Does that
thought at least cross the minds of these officials? Or do they
assume that United States moral authority is as absolute and
unchallengeable as its military power?
* *
*
The Bush administration is agreeing that
Charles Taylor, president of Liberia, can and should step down
from office and leave the country even though Taylor was recently
indicted by a UN-sponsored court in Sierra Leone for "bearing
the greatest responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity
and serious violations of international humanitarian law"
during Sierra Leone's civil war. This is in marked contrast to
consistent US government demands of recent years that all Serbian
officials indicted for similar crimes by the UN court in the
Hague be turned over to the court, or turn themselves in, with
no exceptions, no going into exile, no mercy. To show how serious
Washington was about this, they pressured the Yugoslav government
to kidnap President Slobodan Milosevic and hustle him off to
the Hague. But that's because the US had globalization designs
on Yugoslavia's considerable assets and required that Milosevic
and his team be replaced with others who would be more amenable
to such an objective.
In 1998, President Clinton sent Jesse
Jackson as his special envoy to Liberia and Sierra Leone, which
is next door and which was in the midst of one of the great horrors
of the 20th century -- You may remember the army of mostly young
boys, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who went around raping
and chopping off people's arms and legs. African and world opinion
was enraged against the RUF, which was committed to protecting
the diamond mines they controlled. Taylor was an indispensable
ally and supporter of the RUF and Jackson was a friend of his.
Jesse was not sent there to hound Taylor about his widespread
human rights violations. Instead, in June 1999, Jackson and other
American officials drafted entire sections of an accord that
made RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, Sierra Leone's vice president
and gave him control over the diamond mines, the country's major
source of wealth. (See New Republic of July 24, 2000)
And what was the Clinton administration's
interest in all this? It's been suggested that the US had to
deal with the RUF since they more or less militarily controlled
the Koidu Diamond Mine area whose exploitation contracts were
held by two Clinton cronies, Jean Raymond Boulle and Robert Friedland.
Moreover, there was Maurice Tempelsman, Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright's paramour at the time, whose Antwerp, Amsterdam and
Tel Aviv diamond marts arranged for Sierra Leone diamond sales
to Tiffany and Cartier.
* *
*
Take the children out of the room. What
follows is a kind word about Saddam Hussein. During his reign,
when the war with Iran and US bombings and sanctions made it
feasible, the Iraqi people had free education all the way through
university and medical school, free medical care, regular food
packages for those in need, women's rights superior to anything
in the Arab world, and religious toleration for Christians and
other non-Muslims.
* *
*
There are all kinds of intelligence in
this world: musical, scientific, mathematical, artistic, literary,
and so on. Then there's political intelligence, which might be
defined as the ability to see through the bullshit which every
society, past, present and future, feeds its citizens from birth
on.
Polls conducted in June showed that 42%
of Americans believed that Iraq had a direct involvement in what
happened on September 11, most of them being certain that Iraqis
were among the 19 hijackers; 55% believed that Saddam Hussein
had close ties to al Qaeda; 34% were convinced that weapons of
mass destruction had recently been found in Iraq (7% were not
sure); 24% believed that Iraq had actually used chemical or biological
weapons against American forces in the war (14% were unsure).
"If Iraq had no significant WMD
and no strong link to Al Qaeda, do you think we were misled by
the government?" Only half said yes.
One can only wonder what, besides a crowbar,
it would take to pry such people away from their total support
of what The Empire does to the world. Perhaps if the government
came to their homes, seized their first born, and took them away
screaming? Well, probably not if the government claimed that
the adored first born had played soccer with someone from Pakistan
who had a friend who had gone to the same mosque as someone from
Afghanistan who had a picture of Taliban leader Mohammed Omar
on his wall.
Many Americans, whether consciously or
unconsciously, actually pride themselves on their ignorance.
It reflects their break with the overly complicated intellectual
tradition of "old Europe". It's also a source of satisfaction
that they have a president who's no smarter than they are.
All this is bad news for the American
anti-war movement which needs to enlarge its ranks. "Mit
der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens,"
wrote Schiller. "With stupidity even the gods struggle in
vain."
* *
*
On several occasions I have been confronted
with the argument that powerful countries have always acted like
the United States, so why condemn the US so much? I respond that
since one can find anti-Semitism in every country, why do we
condemn Nazi Germany so much? It's a question of magnitude, is
it not? The magnitude of US aggression puts it into a league
all by itself, just as the magnitude of the Nazis' anti-Semitism
does.
* *
*
Cuba has recently been heavily criticized,
by various shadings of leftists as well as by those to the right,
for its sentencing a number of "dissidents" to prison
because of their very close political and financial connections
to American officials. Critics say that Cuba should not have
over-reacted so, that these people were not really guilty of
anything criminal.
While I personally think that the Cuban
trials were too quick and that some of the sentences were too
long, we have to keep in mind that before the United States invaded
Iraq there was extensive CIA and US military liaison on the ground
with Iraqi dissidents and lots of propaganda to soften up the
population -- propaganda beamed into Iraq with the indispensable
help of other Iraqi dissidents.
The United States has been on a ferocious
rampage of bombing, invasion, taking over countries and threatening
the same to others. The US ambassador to the Dominican Republic
declared: "I think what is happening in Iraq is going to
send a very positive signal, and it is a very good example for
Cuba." An advisor to Florida Governor Jeb Bush, speaking
of Fidel Castro, said: "The administration has taken care
of one tyrant already. I don't think they would vacillate about
taking care of another one." There was in this same period
a wave of violent hijackings of Cuban planes and boats.
Can Cuba be expected to ignore all this?
Is Washington's work with Cuban dissidents to be seen as a purely
harmless undertaking? Not done for a purpose? How can Cuba not
feel extremely threatened, even more than the usual threat of
the past 44 years? How can they not take precautionary measures?
* *
*
"The causes of the malady are not
entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities
of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great
nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is
a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility
for other nations -- to make them richer and happier and wiser,
to remake them, that is, in its own shining image." Former
US Senator William Fulbright, "The Arrogance of Power"
(1966)
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military
and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue
State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc
Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
Weekend
Edition Features
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
Standard
Schaefer
Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004
Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
Wayne
Madsen
A Sad Independence Day
John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
Poets'
Basement
Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
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