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Today's
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January 1, 2004
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
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
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December
31, 2003
New Year's Day Thoughts
War,
Race and Elections
By STAN GOFF
Two hot little controversies are brewing among
progressive and anti-war Americans.
One is the question of how much energy
we--if there is a "we"--put into the 2004 elections,
and in what way.
The other is the question of whether
the movement--if there is ONE movement--should continue to put
forward the demand that we "Bring the troops home now,"
the word NOW being the bone of contention. I think these are
related.
The 2004 elections will determine two
things: Which party will control the executive branch and whether
the Democrats will be able to wrest control back in either the
US Senate or the House of Representatives. For reasons that could
take us far afield here, there are actually real and differing
consequences that accompany these electoral outcomes. But with
regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (odd how Colombia
and the Philippines have fallen off our maps even as they both
crawl with Green Berets), looking at the executive branch, it
seems fairly certain at this point (at least to me) that Howard
Dean will win the nomination for the Democrats.
Dean has not given the slightest indication
that he intends to withdraw from Iraq. He has said he would reach
out to bodies like the UN (and maybe, it is whispered by some,
the Arab League), and internationalize the occupation.
Sounds great on paper to someone, I'm
sure, but I have a news flash for the obtuse. What is going on
in Iraq is not merely an occupation. It is a very active war.
So long as there is a guerrilla war going on in Iraq, neither
the UN nor the Arab League nor anyone else with a shred of common
sense will  have anything to do with it. The prevailing
attitude toward the US, quite sensible from certain perspectives,
is "You fucked it up, you fix it."
The multi-form Iraqi resistance is making
it clear to anyone with eyes and ears that they are united around
at least one thing -- they do not want to be occupied.
So this UN "internationalizing"
thing is a pretty predictable demagogic device by Dean to get
elected. Dean seems to be a pretty smart guy, so he probably
doesn't believe this simplified bullshit any more than some of
us do. He is pandering--as politicians are wont to do--to two
beliefs that have taken root in the American mass consciousness:
(1) That the Bush administration is slightly
mad and has abandoned something sane called multilateralism,
and
(2) that someone other than Iraqis has
to oversee their future to prevent some amorphously defined but
nightmarish post-Ba'athist reckoning.
The first notion about Bush lunacy and
multilateralism fails to understand what the actual history and
nature of so-called multilateralism is, which is a form of cooperative
plunder by the Euro-American and Japanese North waged against
the under-developed global South. Multilateralism was the form
of cooperative imperialism agreed upon when the Marshall Plan
was being carried out--a Cold War relic now--in which the US
served as Big Daddy Umpire.
Multilateralism--dear people--gave us
savage neoliberalism, with the (US dominated) International Monetary
Fund as a global loan shark, and for billions of people multilateral
imperialism is precisely what has underwritten the suffering
that corresponds to their dollar-a-day existence.
The break with multilateralism is not
some break with a noble past; it is a falling out amongst gangsters
as the turf dries up. Bush's cohort is not insane. They are responding
quite logically to the exigency of a post-Cold War conjuncture
with the forestalled crisis of profit back upon them, the dollar-a-day
natives pissed off, and hydrocarbon energy preparing to exit
the world stage.
"Progressives," whatever the
hell that means, need to quit listening to NPR and confusing
it with critical analysis... "this program underwritten
by Archer-Daniels-Midland, Supermarket to the Universe, and Lockheed-Martin,
designing technology for the Aryan Future."
The second assumption--that the people
living within the former boundaries of the former state of Iraq
must have outside oversight to put them on the proper path--is
a dressed-up form of something that used to be called the "white
man's burden:" a notion that no-one is entitled to make
their own history except white Euro-Americans, with the rationalization
that "those people" are incapable of self-governance.
This racist assumption is exhibited about Iraq with amnesia about
the scale of death and destruction visited on "those people"
by thirteen years of war and sanctions, and with a dissociative
disorder about the present--with violence already part and parcel
of every day there, violence provoked by the presence and actions
of the occupiers.
Perhaps--as a counterweight to this perennial
liberal racism--we should be more forceful about making the point
that Iraqis are at least as smart as us, and a lot smarter about
how to go forward in the wake of the Anglo-American aggression.
There may be some civil strife. That
happens. But Iraq is subdivided into relatively homogeneous regions,
and it will not be the cataclysm that thrives in the lurid Islamaphobic
American imagination. Civil strife and even civil war is part
of history. The United States unleashed the most spectacular
bloodletting in history up to that time to resolve the struggle
between a system of chattel slavery or one of "free"
labor when the precocious Northern child rose up to conquer its
Southern mother.
That same racialized American history
leads us back to the question of electoral politics and the anti-war
movement.
At the height of the homegrown resistance
to the Vietnam War, we have to remember, Richard Nixon was re-elected.
The antiwar candidate George McGovern was defeated in a landslide.
Nixon was elected on the basis of his appeal to white supremacy,
which remains strong among the majority of whites in the US,
and Republicans have been working that angle successfully ever
since: the same white supremacy that still today underwrites
even so-called progressives' disbelief in the capacity of Iraqis
to determine their own future.
Elections didn't stop the Vietnam War.
The anti-Vietnam War movement stopped the war in spite of electoral
results. That administration crumbled from the inside. Yesterday,
John Ashcroft recused himself in the Wilson-Plame affair. But
I digress...
***
You cannot have a credible discussion
of US politics or of war, unless you are willing to put race
right there in the center of it.
Republicans and Democrats are maintained
in power by the same class. But they are not the same, because
the popular bases upon which they can draw are different, and
that is a real difference. There are some very good reasons why
African Americans will not vote for Republicans, even when everyone
knows how invertebrate and treacherous the Democrats can be.
When a party bases itself so fundamentally on white supremacy
the way the Republicans do, it matters. If the Republicans get
elected again, it is a direct reflection of the enduring power
of US white supremacy. So the elections matter.
But they probably won't change the situation
in Iraq.
That's a major point.
Aside from the US military, stuck there
in Iraq as the institution of the military rots internally from
Rumsfeld's neglect and stupidity, there are two players who will
determine the outcomes in Iraq: the international anti-war movement
and the Iraqi resistance. The latter has the dominant role, because
of three things; they are there, they have weapons, and they
have the battlefield initiative (all preposterous claims to the
contrary aside). All they have to do to win... is endure.
The Bush administration, on the other
hand, is retrenching daily, managing the spin as best they can,
and talking about something happening before July to "restore
Iraqi sovereignty," though, of course... the troops will
stay. This is their dilemma. They are now in a situation where
it is "politically impossible" to leave, but it is
militarily impossible to win. This is the central contradiction
we have to consider if anti-war forces are to understand what
the political situation is.
Political crises in the United States
do not take the form, at least not yet, of a domestic security
crisis (even if Tom Ridge is trying to create the impression
of one). The Republicans and Democrats are not going to take
up arms against each other. Dennis Kucinich's guerillas are not
building IED's to ambush Republican convoys. Political crises
in the United States happen when the intangible becomes tangible,
and that is in the form of a legitimacy crisis.
Legitimacy crises are not created by
elections.
On the contrary, elections are designed
to legitimize the rule of the dominant class. After each election,
political pundits and think-tank spokespersons all get together
and puff up on TV to congratulate America for another peaceful
transition, even as 2,000,000 people rot in prison, crappy factory
jobs that pay $13 an hour become crappier fast-food jobs that
pay $6 an hour, cops turn Miami into a paramilitary zone, thousands
of women are beaten half to death by controlling spouses, and
whole neighborhoods look more and more like the Third World.
Legitimacy crises are provoked by demands
from the people that are real demands, not yassa-massa requests
respectfully submitted to elected officials with our hats in
our hands. A demand that is really a request--this is what the
faux-radical "reformer" presents--is an acceptance
at the outset that the power relation will remain unchanged.
A real demand does not seek to make itself respectable or "realistic."
A real demand is an exercise of power that says we are not going
to accept, we are not going to shut up, we are not going to compromise,
we are not going to obey, and we are not going away. It is not
based on what we might be granted, but on the conditions we demand
be created before we stop struggling.
Everyone has heard the old Frederick
Douglas quote, that "power concedes nothing without a demand."
People love to repeat it, and they slap it on bumper stickers
and open conferences with it on the program to prove they are
down... but they have seldom studied it. And what he said merits
study.
Here's what he said: "Let me give
you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet
made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle...
"Find out just what any people will
quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of
injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these
will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows,
or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance
of those whom they oppress."
What?
"These will continue till they are
resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits
of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
oppress." Put THAT in your next foundation funding request!
He didn't say find the limits of what
the powerful are willing to do. He didn't say THEY draw the line.
He said that WE draw it. It is only when it is proven that state
power cannot stand us down, when their impotence is on display,
that we will have mid-wifed the crisis of legitimacy that translates
into a real change in the relations of power.
So here at last I come to the issue of
the slogan, "Bring the troops home NOW." If we allow
ourselves to be drawn by these charlatans and gangsters into
a discussion of how a decision will be implemented as a precondition
to the decision being made, then we have written them a nice,
fat blank check. We will have entered into negotiations before
our most fundamental demand is met. We will have surrendered
the initiative.
Our demand is not how the decision will
be implemented. That is a practical matter in any case, the circumstances
of which cannot be foreseen. Our demand is for the decision to
end the occupation. We will discuss the implementation of the
decision only after it is made. That is the "demand-position."
That is how WE draw the line.
"We don't care whether it is politically
'impossible.' We are not interested in your political survival.
[It is the "impossible" demand that gives birth to
the crisis.] Bring them home. Bring them home now. We are not
going anywhere, and we do not consent to be governed by you."
Our job in the US is not to direct the
history of Iraq. It is to take our own history in hand right
here at home, by prescribing "the limits of tyrants."
Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a
member of the BRING
THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special
Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.
Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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