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Today's
Stories
November 5, 2003
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
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
5, 2003
A Draft in the Forecast?
The
Pentagon Puts Out the Help Wanted Sign
By DAVE LINDORFF
With winter is approaching, it appears the White
House may start feeling a bit drafty. It's not a matter of poor
insulation, but rather the result of mounting evidence that the
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld war plan in Iraq is not going well, and
there may well need to be more U.S. troops sent to Iraq.
The shoot-down of a Chinook helicopter
earlier this week, causing the death of 15 soldiers and the wounding
of another 21, is a good example of the problem. It turns out
this military disaster was, in large part, the direct result
of a shortage of troops on the ground. With the military's 134,000
troops in Iraq spread so thin, there was nobody available to
secure the area around the helicopter landing zone in what is
acknowledged to be a high-risk area. Because helicopters are
particularly vulnerable to attack during their slow landings
and ascents, it is standard procedure to secure the perimeter
of landing areas, but in this instance, the military had to abandon
standard practice and take a chance. There were no soldiers available
to protect the area.
A New York Times column following the
shoulder-fired missile attack notes, correctly, that because
of the high numbers of personnel required for support, maintenance
and high-tech "back-office" functions in Rumsfeld's
"lean and mean" military, actually only some 56,000
of the 134,000 U.S. troops in country are available to carry
guns. Since these guys need to eat and sleep, at best there are
then only 28,000 U.S. troops available to patrol all of Iraq,
a hostile country the size of California, at any given time.
There were hopes at the White House and
in the Pentagon that Turkey would ride to the rescue with an
influx of armed troops, but, like India and Pakistan before it,
Turkey has  thought better of this
incredibly bad idea, and now says it will not participate in
the U.S. war and occupation. That announcement assures that the
U.S. will at a minimum have to call up more reservists and National
Guard soldiers for Iraq duty during this election year.
But besides the political problems of
calling up more weekend soldiers for active duty, the reality
is that there simply are not enough Americans in uniform to handle
a bigger war in Iraq.
It should come as no surprise then, even
as the president and his advisers continue to claim that everything
is going well and according to plan, that saner heads at the
Pentagon are taking steps to prepare for return to the draft.
As I reported on Monday in Salon
magazine, using a Defense Department news website called
DefendAmerica
that provides Pentagon reports about the so-called "War
on Terrorism" to "military communities," the government
put out a call for volunteers to help fill the hundreds of vacancies
in over 2000 local draft boards and draft appeals boards. Current
draft board members also report that last summer, they were urged
to go out and recommend people to fill those vacancies, which
currently run at about 16 percent nationwide.
The goal, according to a Selective Service
spokesman, is to have the draft machinery ready to go "at
the click of a finger."
Of course, the time between that "click"
and the delivery of the first cannon fodder to Army boot camps
for training would not be such a smooth or quick process. First,
Congress would have to pass a bill authorizing a draft. Then
it would have to be signed by the president. At that point, the
Selective Service law says the Selective Service System has 193
days to deliver the first draftees to the tender mercies of the
military.
A draft would be a political disaster
for the president, so most military experts say it is unlikely
that a return to conscription would occur before the November
2004 presidential election, but if the guerrilla war in Iraq
continues to get worse, the day after that election, the president
could well be forced to decide on either a phased withdrawal
or escalation--and a national call-up. Faced with the same choices
in Southeast Asia, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
both chose escalation over withdrawal. What Bush or a Democratic
successor would do (other than Dennis Kucinich or Al Sharpton)
faced with that choice is anybody's guess.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and the retiring
Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) have companion draft authorization
bills in the House and Senate. Rangle, for his part argues that
a universal draft based upon a lottery would be fairer than the
present system, which he calls an "economic draft,"
which forces low income people without job prospects into military
service. So far their bills have languished for lack of Republican
support, but as the rosy assumptions of the war advocates in
the Bush administration continue to be disproven, Republican
hawks in Congress and the White House could well begin pushing
for more troops to "do the job right."
According to Charles Peña, director
of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, the closest
model to the current Iraq occupation is Northern Ireland. There,
he says, British "pacification" efforts required a
force ratio of 10 soldiers to every 1000 citizens, and at the
height of the Northern Ireland conflict, a ratio of 20 soldiers
to every 1000 people. "If you transfer that to Iraq, it
would mean you'd need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many
as 480,000,, says Peña. The U.S. military, with a total
of 1.4 million in uniform, would have to strip every fighting
unit domestically and around the globe to come up with such numbers--an
impossible move that would leave the U.S. and many of its overseas
strategic interests, completely unguarded.
Recall that during the Vietnam War, when
the U.S. had a military about twice as large as today, fielding
a force of 500,000 soldiers required a major conscription program.
Clearly, if the war keeps getting worse,
there is a draft in the forecast.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
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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