Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
A Strategic Rhetorical
Retreat
Good
Morning, Vietnam!
By DAVE LINDORFF
As the American Democratic primary campaign heats
up with the addition of a general and second Vietnam veteran,
retired Gen. Wesley Clark, it is perhaps appropriate, and certainly
no surprise, that the situation facing the American invaders
and occupiers in Iraq would start to truly resemble that earlier
disastrous conflict.
It was only a last Wednesday that newscasters
were reporting that things had been "calmer" in Iraq,
with attacks seeming to let up. That, however, proved to be like
the calm along the North Carolina coast just before the arrival
of Hurricane Isabel. A day later, on Thursday, that deceptive
calm in Iraq was broken by an unusually heavy attack on an American
military convoy, which may have left as many as eight American
soldiers dead and more gravely wounded. A few hours later, there
was another attack, in which three more Americans were killed
and several wounded. (The U.S. has been unusually cagey about
the casualties in the first, larger attack. Eye witnesses had
reported eight-10 dead, while an AP reporter trying to get to
the scene was, suspiciously, fired upon by an American tank guarding
the site of the attack. Meanwhile American military has not confirmed
any deaths, suggesting that a cover-up may be underway, in which,
as in Vietnam, casualties might be "moved" to later
dates and attributed to other incidents so as to avoid evidence
of a calamity.)
The Bush administration, clearly rattled
now, both by the deepening quagmire it finds itself in in Iraq,
and by the prospect (now that there's a general among Democratic
ranks making some of the charges), of increasingly forceful political
attacks on its military and foreign policy fiascoes, has begun
a strategic rhetorical retreat. All key administration officials,
from the president on down to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
 Wolfowitz , have begun
backing off earlier assertions about weapons of mass destruction
and links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Caught
in a lie, they are hoping now that the notoriously ill-informed
and short attention span plagued American public will forget
what they were saying earlier.
They may be right in guessing that many
people will just hear what they're now saying, but certainly
some key people won't prove so easy to befuddle. You have to
wonder, for instance, what American soldiers, who had gone to
Iraq pumped full of adrenaline-inducing propaganda about Saddam's
complicity in the 9/11 attacks and his alleged preparations to
nuke or poison America, are making of word from the president,
the vice president and the secretary of defense that, well, they
never really did expect to find those WMD's and that well, they
never did really say that Saddam was involved in 9/11. What,
many of them must be wondering, including the over 100,000 now
dodging RPGs and mortars in Iraq, and the thousands now hospitalized
with missing eyes, legs or arms, what, the family members of
the several hundred dead soldiers must be wondering, have they
been fighting for?
If it was not for post-9/11 vengeance
and to prevent a WMD attack on America that they have been sweating,
fighting and dying, then what? It couldn't have just been to
overthrow an evil tyrant, or why would Iraqis be so angry at
them?
And what about the rest of us? Now that
Bush and his war cabinet are admitting that they snookered us
into supporting a war under false pretenses, what are we to think?
Do we go with the idea that, well, mistakes were made, lies and
exaggerations were fed to us, but now there's this big mess in
Iraq, and we can't leave, we just have to keep paying through
the nose and watching our soldiers get picked off--seemingly
in bigger and bigger numbers?
That's kind of what happened in Nam,
remember? By 1968, when Nixon came in with his "secret plan"
to end the conflict in Indochina, it was clear that the reason
given for the war--fighting the spread of Communism--was a fraud
or, if true, a failure. The war, if anything, was spreading the
fires of Communism and anti-imperialist nationalism through Laos
and Cambodia, and South Vietnam itself was a lost cause. Under
Nixon, the refrain became not defeating the Communist insurgency,
but "peace with honor."
Actually, what "peace with honor"
meant was giving Nixon some kind of a fig leaf to hide his shame
when America finally pulled up stakes and gave up the fight.
Providing Nixon with that little bit of greenery ended up costing
an extra 20,000 American and perhaps up to a million extra Vietnamese,
Khmer and Lao lives.
Now the situation in Iraq is starting
to look the same, even if the numbers of dead, so far, are mercifully
much lower on both sides.
It is becoming increasingly clear that
the longer the U.S. stays in Iraq, the bigger the insurgency
against the occupation will become, and the higher the casualty
figures will mount.
Bush's plan has to be to keep those casualties
down, while tamping down the insurgency temporarily, with increased
firepower, through the November, '04 presidential election. Like
Nixon before him, he cannot give up now, because the American
public would then hold him responsible for the pointless deaths
of its soldiers and for the incredible waste of over $200 billion
in taxpayer money.
Definition of Quagmire: a swamp from
which there is no escape, because the more you struggle, the
deeper you sink into the muck.
So once again, we pursue a bloody strategy
of "peace with honor," this time euphemistically called
"the rebuilding of Iraq." We'll pursue this criminal
strategy not because it has a chance of working, but because
our unelected president doesn't have the huevos to tell the American
people that he and his neo-con advisers made a colossal mistake.
It is then up to the public, and to the
Democratic presidential candidates, to put a halt to this criminal
madness. Don't expect too much from the Democratic presidential
candidates--at least not from the so-called front-runners. They
may blast Bush for starting the war, but except for the likes
of Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley-Braun, they won't be calling
for an immediate end to the occupation. Before any of them develops
the spine to issue such a call, they'll need to hear a public
outcry.
That makes the coming October 25 march
on Washington, so reminiscent of the 1967 march on the Pentagon
(something I remember well, having been arrested and beaten by
Federal martials on the mall of the Pentagon, and locked up in
Occaquan Federal Detention Center on that former occasion), so
important. Coming as it does on the run-up to the first presidential
primaries, a big turnout should give those timid Democratic presidential
wannabes some more spine, while boosting the chances of those
candidates who are willing to come out more strongly, demanding
an end to the war and occupation.
Unless we want another president to drag
on the occupation through another four- year-term looking for
"peace with honor," unless we want to wake up for four
more years to "Good morning, Iraq!", the Democratic
2004 campaign battle cry needs to become the slogan of the October
march: "Bring the troops home!"
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 Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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