Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
December 6 / 7, 2003
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
December 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
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.
|
December
6 / 7, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
The UN: It Should Be Late;
It Never Was Great
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his incomparable memoirs
that Soviet admirals, like admirals everywhere, loved battleships,
because they could get piped aboard in great style amid the respectful
hurrahs of their crews. It's the same with the UN, now more than
ever reduced to the servile function of after-sales service provider
for the United States, on permanent call as the mop-up brigade.
It would be a great step forward if several big Third World nations
were soon to quit the United Nations, declaring that it has no
political function beyond ratifying the world's present distasteful
political arrangements.
The trouble is that national political
elites in pretty much every UN-member country--now 191 in all--yearn
to live in high style for at least a few years and in some case
for decades, on the Upper East side of Manhattan and to cut a
dash in the General Assembly. They have a deep material stake
in continuing membership, even though in the case of small, poor
countries the prodigious outlays on a UN delegation could be
far better used in some decent domestic application, funding
orphanages or local crafts back home.
Barely a day goes by without some Democrat
piously demanding "an increased role" for the UN in
whatever misadventure for which the US requires political cover.
Howard Dean has built his candidacy on clarion calls for the
UN's supposedly legitimizing assistance in Iraq. Despite the
political history of the Nineties many leftists still have a
tendency to invoke the UN as a countervailing power. When all
other argument fails they fall back on the International Criminal
Court, an outfit that should by all rights should have the same
credibility as a beneficial institution as the World Bank or
Interpol.
On the issue of the UN I can boast a
record of matchless consistency. As a toddler I tried to bar
my father's exit from the nursery of our London flat when he
told me he was leaving for several weeks to attend, as diplomatic
correspondent of the Daily Worker, the founding conference of
the UN in San Francisco. Despite my denunciation of all such
absence-prompting conferences (and in my infancy there were many),
he did go.
He wrote later in his autobiography,
Crossing the Line, that "The journey of our special train
across the Middle West was at times almost intolerably moving.
Our heavily laden special had some sort of notice prominently
displayed on its sides indicating it was taking people to the
foundation meeting of the United Nations From towns and lonely
villages all across the plains and prairies, people would come
out to line the tracks, standing there with the flags still flying
half-mast for Roosevelt on the buildings behind them, and their
eyes fixed on this train with extraordinary intensity, as though
it were part of the technical apparatus for the performance of
a miracle.On several occasions I saw a man or woman solemnly
touch the train, the way a person might touch a talisman."
It was understandable that an organization
aspiring to represent All Mankind and to espouse Peace should
have excited fervent hopes in the wake of terrible war, but the
fix was in from the start, as Peter Gowan reminds us in a spirited
essay in the current New Left Review. The Rooseveltian vision
was for an impotent General Assembly with decision-making authority
vested in a Security Council without, in Gowan's words, "the
slightest claim to rest on any representative principle other
than brute force", and of course dominated by the United
States and its vassals. FDR did see a cosmopolitan role for
the UN; not so Truman and Acheson who followed Nelson Rockefeller's
body-blow to the nascent UN when, as assistant secretary of state
for Latin American Affairs the latter brokered the Chapultepec
Pact in Mexico City in 1945, formalizing US dominance in the
region through the soon-to-be familiar regional military-security
alliance set up by Dean Acheson in the next period.
These days the UN has the same restraining
role on the world's prime imperial power as did the Roman Senate
in the fourth century AD, when there were still actual senators
spending busy lives bustling from one cocktail party to another,
intriguing to have their sons elected quaestor and so forth,
deliberating with great self-importance and sending the Emperor
pompous resolutions on the burning issues of the day.
For a modern evocation of what those
senatorial resolutions must have been like, read the unanimous
Security Council resolution on October 15 of this year, hailing
the US-created "Governing Council of Iraq", and trolling
out UN-speak to the effect that the Security Council "welcomes
the positive response of the international community to the establishment
of the broadly representative council"; "supports
the Governing Council's efforts to mobilize the people of Iraq";
"requests that the United States on behalf of the
multinational force report to the Security Council on the efforts
and progress of this force". Signed by France, Russia, China,
UK, US, Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, Cameroon,
Angola, Pakistan, Syria. As Gowan remarks, this brazen twaddle
evokes "the seating of Pol Pot's representatives in the
UN for fourteen years after his regime was overthrown by the
DRV".
Another way of assaying the UN's role
in Iraq is to remember that it made a profit out of its own blockade
and the consequent starvation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
babies in the 1990s. As a fee for its part in administering the
oil-for-food program, the UN helped itself to 2 per cent off
the top.(On more than one account members of the UN-approved
Governing Council, whose most conspicuous emblem is the bank-looter
Ahmad Chalabi, are demanding a far heftier skim in the present
looting of Iraq's national assets.)
Two months before the October resolution,
the US's chosen instrument for selling the Governing Council,
UN Special Envoy Vieira de Mello, was blown up in his office
in Baghdad by persons with a realistic assessment of the function
of the UN. Please, my friends, no more earnest calls for "a
UN role", at least not until the body is radically reconstituted
along genuinely democratic lines. As for Iraq is concerned,
all occupying forces should leave, with all contracts concerning
Iraq's national assets and resources written across the last
nine months repudiated, declared null and void, illegal under
international covenant.
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|