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Today's
Stories
December 15, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Capture of Saddam
December 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
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
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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December
15, 2003
With Only a Whimper
The
Capture of Saddam
By PATRICK COCKBURN
For Saddam Hussein his capture is the moment of
supreme humiliation. He has always portrayed himself as the Arab
hero who would fight to the last bullet and die surrounded by
the bodies of his enemies. Instead he has fallen alive into the
hands of US troops after successfully evading them for over half
a year.
Saddam will wonder who finally betrayed
him in exchange for $25 million. It may be that there was no
betrayer and US soldiers were simply following up leads. But,
going by the paranoid way his mind worked during his long years
in power, Saddam will be thinking about the identity of the traitor
who led his enemies to his last hiding place.
The former Iraqi leader had put great
efforts into avoiding the American dragnet. He cut himself off
from his senior lieutenants at the time of the fall of Baghdad
in April. Just as US troops were entering the city he told his
two sons Uday and Qusay, later killed in a gun battle, that it
would be safer for him to go on the run by himself.
He probably envisaged blowing himself
up with a grenade at the last moment or being shot dead by US
troops in a final struggle. Instead, unlike Uday and Qusay who
died with guns in their hands, he will be presented by Washington
as a symbol of its military victory in Iraq and a sign that America
is winning the war despite its mounting casualties.
In the months since he fled his capital
Saddam has been preoccupied with avoiding capture. He has not
had time for much else. Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister
of the interim Iraqi government, told me several weeks ago: "Saddam
is very isolated. That is the only way he can avoid being captured.
He is not able to organise the resistance. He dare not communicate
with other people because he is frightened they will betray him."
From his hiding place Saddam was able
to send out cassette tapes which were delivered anonymously to
foreign media organisations in Baghdad. In these he called for
continuing resistance to the US, but he gave little sign that
he was organising guerrilla attacks himself. The CIA confirmed
the voice was probably his. They were probably right. Certainly
he spoke with same long-winded vagueness which made his speeches
so tedious when he was in power.
What was Saddam Hussein thinking about
in his hide-outs in and around Tikrit, the dusty city by the
Tigris where he first began to make his mark forty years ago?
He cannot have been too surprised by his new life-style. A remarkable
aspect of Saddam's life when he was the supreme power in Iraqis
was that he always behaved like a criminal on the run expecting
arrest by the police. His guards were executed for giving a hint
of his whereabouts. Three exactly similar convoys would leave
his presidential palace at the same time to confuse assassins
who would not know which vehicle to shoot at.
Saddam will feel himself uniquely unlucky.
He almost kept his grip on power despite his disastrous invasion
of two of his neighbors,Iran and Kuwait. Three years ago there
seemed to be no reason why he should not rule in Iraq for as
long as he  wanted. But the attack on the World Trade
Centre in New York in 2001, with which there is no evidence that
Saddam was connected, increased the influence of the those US
leaders who had always wanted to get rid of him. There was not
a lot he could do to stop them.
Saddam Hussein always lived in something
of a fantasy world. He believed in his own star and divinely
guided fate which had led him to rise from being an orphan in
an obscure village to supreme power in Iraq. Even in defeat he
remained an optimist always hoping that the political wind in
Iraq might change in his favour.
But he was also a fatalist. He once told
King Hussein of Jordan that ever since he had escaped after trying
to assassinate a former Iraqi President in 1959 he had treated
every day as a gift from God. Over the next forty years he escaped
so many attempts to kill him that his belief grew in his divine
mission.
The Iraqi leader has always had a deep
hunger for publicity and in captivity he may seek to exploit
this. He will feel humiliated by being captured alive but if
he is brought to trial - and it will be the trial of the century
- he will once again have a platform from which to speak to the
world. For him this may have advantages over the dark cellar
in Tikrit where he has been hiding. The capture of Saddam Hussein
is the end of era in Iraq but his capture may only expose further
how difficult and dangerous it is to govern Iraq. The glee in
Washington today resembles that felt by the US administration
in April when Baghdad fell more easily to American tanks than
any of its critics had supposed.
This is not to say that the US will not
be boosted by taking their main enemy prisoner. There is not
only the propaganda value abroad but it will impress Iraqis in
the street with the belief that the US does have a measure of
control. When the first audio tapes of Saddam Hussein speaking
were broadcast on television a few months ago I remember there
was almost a physical sense of apprehension in the streets of
Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein himself probably had very
littler control over the guerrillas who have killed or wounded
so many Americans and their allies in the last two months. The
resistance cells seem to be loosely organised and mostly home
grown in the towns and villages of central Iraq. There is also
the lesson of three wars - the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, the invasion
of Kuwait in 1990 and the war earlier this year - that Saddam
Hussein had peculiarly bad military judgment.
His capture does have one benefit for
the US and its allies. It is the first real success they have
had since the fall of Baghdad and it will puncture the atmosphere
that the US administration in Baghdad was a sort of Inspector
Clouseau figure, making mistake after mistake while confidently
claiming victory at every turn.
But the imprisonment of the former Iraqi
leader does not solve the most serious US problems in Iraq which
is that it does not have local allies with sufficient strength
to run the country. It is this which has sabotaged the US efforts
to pacify the country.
The only powerful allies of the US in
Iraq are the Kurds. They are the smallest of country's three
dominant communities - the other two are the Sunni and Shi'ite
Muslims - and they are not strong enough for the US to rely on
in future.
The US has had great difficulty in escaping
the consequences of its initial mistakes in Baghdad. It failed
to stop the looting though this was predictable. The Pentagon's
main priority seems to have been to make sure that the, whatever
else happened, the influence of the US State Department was kept
as small as possible.
The second great error was to dissolve
the Iraqi army and security services - together with their families
perhaps two or three million people - without working out how
these people would survive in a country where the unemployment
rate is about 70 per cent. The US then began to target members
of the Baath party without distinguishing between those were
leadership positions and those who had been compelled to join
the party because they held minor government jobs as doctors
or teachers.
Sometimes the US has tried to reverse
these mistakes, but the American administration in Baghdad is
a strange lumbering beast which usually only reacts very slowly
to events around it. For instance a centre piece of present US
policy is to create a new Iraqi army and police force loyal to
the new regime. It is then quite extraordinary that somebody
decided to pay the soldiers $70 a month for an exceptionally
dangerous job.
Indeed the headquarters of Paul Bremmer,
the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, is
one of the more bizarre institutions ever seen in the Middle
East. It is wholly divorced from the world around it. The last
time I was there I was stopped by a friendly Gurkha soldier who
was happy to talk about Katmandu but otherwise was determined
to let nobody into the building. Then a security officer from
Texas, so far as I could tell from the accent, stopped me belligerently
saying: "Journalists are always assassinating people. We
are not letting you in."
The US troops and commanders scattered
around Iraqi provincial cities and towns seem to have a much
better idea of what is happening in the country. They have told
anybody who was listening for months that the Iraqi resistance
was locally organised and not controlled from the top, either
by Saddam Hussein or his aging acolyte Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri.
In theory the US should be winning this
war. Its weakness - and this will continue despite the capture
of Saddam Hussein - is that they do not quite understand the
nature of the war they are fighting. The guerrillas are not very
strong. But they can inflict immense political pain in Washington
with very limited means and they know it.
One of the curiosities about US and British
attitudes to political events in Iraq is that it is often based
on the belief that ordinary Iraqis do not know what is happening.
In fact they are politically very sophisticated. For over a decade
many of them have had nothing to do but listen to foreign radio
broadcasts in Arabic from the BBC,Monte Carlo and Voice of America.
The quality of news they listen to is probably higher than that
viewed or heard by most people in Europe or the US.
Iraqis learned from an early stage after
the fall of Baghdad that the only thing that had an impact on
policy makers in Washington was physical violence. This does
not mean that they all favoured or would take part in guerrilla
war. Very few regretted the departure of Saddam Hussein. But
they knew that moderate opposition to US policy would get nowhere.
This is an important point. Many Iraqis were rather in the position
of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s who strongly
disliked the IRA, but had also noted that Westminster only listened
to the grievances of their community when it was accompanied
by violence.
The problem for the US is that it has
always made concessions too late. "They were drunk with
victory," said one Iraqi leader closely allied to the US.
It conceded power to the interim Governing Council only when
the guerrilla war had got underway. As it has intensified Washington
has agreed to a provisional government by the middle of next
year.
But it is still unclear who this provisional
government will represent. The indirect elections by local caucuses
would be open to fraud in any country in the world but particularly
in Iraq. For instance tribal leaders would play a role. But nobody
knows who is the leader of many of the tribes because the sheikhs
were often chosen by Saddam Hussein.
It would be much better from the US and
British point of view if regular elections were held using a
franchise based on the lists for food rationing. This is not
perfect but it is less flawed than anything else.
An election under such rules would probably
produce an administration dominated by members of the Shi'ite
community answering their religious leader Ali Sistani. The US
will not like this. It will not be a regime friendly to the long
term presence of the US and Britain in Iraq. But at least it
will be a government can claim to have mass support and has legitimacy
-- something which neither Saddam Hussein or the present occupation
has ever possessed.
If the US and Britain react, as Tony
Blair seemed to do yesterday, by exaggerating the impact of the
capture of Saddam Hussein then none of these fundamental problems
in ruling Iraq will be solved and the guerrilla war will only
escalate.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
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