Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
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.
|
September
19, 2003
General Hysteria
The
Clark Bandwagon
By DAVE LINDORFF
Judging from the hoopla and hype in the media,
from CNN to the NY Times, the decision by retired four-star general
Wesley Clark to throw his hat into the ring as a Democratic Party
presidential contender is something akin to the second coming.
He's a genuine hero, we're told, and Americans, particularly
in key states like Texas and the Southeast, will go for his military
background.
What is this passion for generals as
leaders, anyhow? There was the same kind of fawning adoration
being expressed about John McCain during the Republican primaries
last time around. (In fact, it was in a pathetic effort to capture
some of that adoration that George Bush, the National Guard deserter
and scofflaw, donned his now infamous flight suit and did an
orchestrated and carefully staged landing on an aircraft carrier
flight deck.)
What, it's fair to ask though, does Sen.
John McCain's Vietnam-era bomber flying and POW experience, or
Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam-era river patrol boat captaining experience,
offer in the way of presidential leadership skills? At least
Clark, as a former Supreme NATO commander, and former head of
the U.S. Army's Southern Command (Latin America), can claim some
executive experience.
But running a military operation, even
a small river boat, and certainly an army division, is nothing
like running a country, at least in what still passes for a democracy.
Generals run things by ordering people to do stuff. Presidents
must lead by  convincing both the public
and the Congress to do what they want done.
Is it courage people are looking for?
Well, presumably both Kerry and Clark have shown courage under
fire, as attested by their Silver Star medals from the Vietnam
War, but really, that is not the same as political courage. Political
courage is not about putting one's life on the line. It's about
being willing to stand for things that might lead to one's losing
an election, because it's the right thing to do. Has either Kerry
or Clark demonstrated that kind of courage? If anything, it was
Kerry's decision to come out against the war in Indochina, after
he returned from it, which showed some political courage, but
sadly, it's his legacy as a fighter, not an anti-war activist,
that candidate Kerry is touting on the campaign trail.
Candidate Clark's initial forays into
the public forum have not been encouraging in the political courage
area. In a CNN interview, he backed off of his earlier embrace
of the term 'liberal," saying instead that he preferred
to eschew labels. On the matter of the war, he now equivocates
and says in a New York Times piece today that he probably would
have voted with the congressional pack and authorized war (which
is no doubt true). This is courage?
Americans in the past have turned to
generals and military leaders of other rank many times to lead
the country, beginning of course with George Washington. There
were also, among others, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Theodore
Roosevelt, and of course more recently, Dwight Eisenhower. Their
records as presidents have been probably no better or worse than
civilian presidents. While opinions about Grant as a Civil War
general are mixed,, most historians agree his past-war presidency
was a disaster. Teddy Roosevelt, on the other hand, is rated
a success. Eisenhower, who is often credited with having had
the prescience to warn of a military-industrial complex, actually
oversaw the institutionalization of a permanent war economy,
set the country on its grim course in Indochina, deepened the
Cold War, and allowed America's malignant race crisis to fester
during his two terms of office.
In retrospect, America's experience with
soldier-presidents in the White House has been at best a mixed
bag.
Michael Moore says he looks forward to
a Clark candidacy. He cites Clark's observation that wars should
only be "a last resort," and his defense of liberalism
and political dissidence, as well as the ex-general's support
for abortion rights, affirmative action and his opposition to
the USA PATRIOT Act. Moore says we're at war in America, and
need to oust President Bush from office, and he suggests that
maybe a general is what the Democrats need to accomplish that.
It might be that Clark will turn out
to be one of the more liberal of the Democratic candidates (though
he's unlikely to take a stand against NAFTA, the way Rep. Dennis
Kucinich has done). More likely, he'll turn out to be a kind
of Clinton-style centrist--no surprise since it now appears that
it was Clinton who really pushed Clark into running, not, as
originally claimed, an internet draft movement.
It's safe to say that Clark's entry into
the Democratic primary race will enliven the contest. But leftists,
progressives and liberals should be on their guard, and avoid
allowing themselves to be sucked in by a Clark bandwagon.
A Democratic presidential nominee with
a four-star dress uniform hanging in his closet might be nice
to have for the 2004 presidential race against military poser
George Bush, but the man wearing it still has a lot of explaining
to do before he should get our support.
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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