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Today's
Stories
November 5, 2003
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
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
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
Click Here
for More Stories.
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November
6, 2003
With a Peace Like
This...
Who
Needs a War?
By RON JACOBS
In what has to be a stunning blow to the forces
in country, the deaths of at least 15 GIs in the November 2nd
downing of a US Chinook helicopter may well mark a turning point
in the US public's perception of Washington's little war in Asia.
Add to this the daily toll of dead and wounded from both Iraq
and Afghanistan and even Donald Rumsfeld has got to wonder how
much longer the warmakers' PR machine can continue to fool the
American public. In my conversations with citizens at work and
elsewhere in my life, I find that more and more individuals are
increasingly skeptical about this occupation's purpose, cost,
and methodology. Unfortunately, most folks that I converse with
seem to feel that there is little they can do to stay the administration's
course of action, so the general outcome is one of growing cynicism,
not activism-which is fine with those who sent the soldiers into
the region in the first place. A cynical reaction still gives
the war hawks plenty of room to do their dirty work.
The growing skepticism is obviously well-founded.
No matter what rosy picture is painted by GW Bush's insistence
that things are going well and no matter what kind of twisted
logic he and his spokespeople use to explain away the growing
exposure to combat faced by the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the facts are clear (even through the milky lens provided by
the US mainstream media): there is a war going on in Iraq and
people are dying every day. No major combat is over. Nobody
won anything, except for Halliburton, Bechtel and a few other
corporations.
I just finished the recently published
book They
Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss. It is the brilliantly
narrated tale of seven days in October 1967 as experienced by
men serving in the Big Red Division of the US Army in southern
Vietnam and by students, faculty, and administrators at a protest
against Dow Chemical recruiting at the University of Wisconsin
in Madison. The book is detailed and complete, yet never rambles.
The author for the most part spares us his political opinions,
preferring instead to tell a story that is a spectacular piece
of reporting yet poignant and emotionally draining.
I mention this book not because of the
story Maraniss tells, but because of the story's background he
presents to the reader. This is a background that takes place
in the Oval Office, the officers' quarters in the field and the
Pentagon, and in the mindset of President Lyndon Johnson. It
is a background that sees victory in Vietnam as the only choice
for the US military, no matter what happens on the ground. It
is a mindset that demands that the battlefield realities be transformed
into the exact opposite of what they are in order to maintain
public support for the war. In other words, the disastrous ambush
that the Big Red Division was led into to fulfill some officers'
ideas of how to fight the Viet Cong became a victory for the
US Army, even though it was a clear defeat. Soldiers who saw
their friends and subordinates die were told to lie about what
happened to them. Central Command denied that an ambush occurred,
insisting that it was an "engagement" only. To add
insult to injury, they double-counted the enemy dead and de-emphasized
the 58 US deaths. Meanwhile, back in the US, we were being told
that the war was almost over, even though the administration
and its generals knew otherwise. In fact, they were getting
ready to send more men over to the jungle. Tet 1968 was still
over three months away. The light at the end of General Westmoreland's
tunnel was getting further and further away.
If there is such a light in the tunnel
that is Washington's current war in Iraq and on the world, it
better be a long-lasting light bulb, because this war is far
from over. The growing numbers of attacks on US forces are
not representative of a desperation being felt by the opponents
of the occupation. They are the exact opposite. The resistance
continues to gain strength and will probably continue to do so
until the American military leaves the country. It doesn't matter
what the composition of the resistance is, the important fact
is that they are resisting. Furthermore, they appear to gaining
substantial support among the Iraqi people. The Vietnamese resistance
was often described in language very similar to that used to
describe the opposition in Iraq: terrorists, foreigners and rabble
with little support. History proved otherwise.
It is unwise to make too much of the
similarities between Vietnam and Iraq, since they are quite different
on the ground. However, I believe it is important to examine
how the US government continues to characterize the war in Iraq
in terms very similar to those it used to describe the war in
Vietnam. If their lies are what they believe to be true, then
it is of utmost importance that we who oppose their war take
a look at history and expose the words emanating from the current
White House and its allies for what they are-lies designed to
convince the people of the US that this war is something other
than what it is. At the same time, we should take the lessons
learned by the movement opposed to the war on Vietnam and apply
them to ending the current war. Perhaps the most important of
these lessons is that this war was not a mistake, nor is its
aftermath. Despite the phony protestations of the Bush administration
and the wishful thinking of many of the war's liberal opponents,
the war planners were pretty certain that the US troops would
still be in Iraq killing and dying well after the fall of Saddam
Hussein. The stories we are told that state otherwise are just
more of the lies that this war came wrapped in. Wars of empire
are never accidents, they are part of the planning that maintaining
an empire demands.
Ron Jacobs
is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground.
He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
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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