Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 17, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
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
Recent
Stories
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
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
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
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demonstration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
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
17, 2003
Matchlessly Wrong
About Everything
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Since the breed is now being ripely abused as
the sponsors of the US debacle in Iraq, we had better be clear
about its political bloodlines. What exactly is a neo-con? The
label was first stuck on those Democrats classed as liberals
in the early 1970s who thought George McGovern, the anti-war
Democratic nominee in 1972 crushed by Nixon, represented an unacceptable
swerve to the left by their party, and who moved sharply to the
right,advocating a tough coldwar posture, reassertion of imperial
confidence after Vietnam, increased military spending and, above
all, uncritical US backing for Israeli intransigeance. They flocked
to Ronald Reagan.
Beating up on neo-cons used to be a specialized
sport without wide appeal. With all due false modesty I offer
myself as an early practitioner. Back in the mid-to-late 70s,
when I had a weekly column in the Village Voice I used to have
rich sport with that apex neo-con, Norman Podhoretz, editor of
Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee. I nick-named
him Norman the Frother and freighted him with so many gibes that
he made the mistake of publicly denouncing me in Commentary,
exclaiming that "Cockburn's weekly pieces have set a new
standard of gutter journalism in this country", a testimonial
I still proudly feature on the back of my books.
The neo-cons' political hero in those
days was US Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, much venerated
in Israel and the corporate offices of Being for his ardor and
constancy in sluicing the US taxpayers' money into their treasuries.
The neo-cons' great hope was Scoop for President but he failed
to impress the voters in the Democratic primaries in 1976. To
the neo-cons' chagrin the new occupant of the Oval Office was
Jimmy Carter, whom they construed to be soft on Communism and
an Israel-hater. Carter threw plenty of money at the Pentagon
and stoked up the cold war, but on a couple of occasions he was
downright rude to Menachem Begin so the neo-cons abandoned the
Democrats and threw in their lot with Ronald Reagan. For them
a hard-line Israel has always been the bottom line.
Now here we are on the downslope of 2003
and George Bush is learning, way too late for his own good, that
the neo-cons have been matchlessly wrong about everything. One
can burrow through the archives of historical folly in search
of comparisons and still come up empty-handed. The neo-cons
told Bush that eviction of Saddam would rearrange the chairs
in the Middle East, to America's advantage. Wrong. They told
him it would unlock the door to a peaceful settlement in Israel.Wrong.
They told him (I'm talking about Wolfowitz's team of mad Straussians
at DoD) that there was irrefutable proof of the existence of
weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq. Wrong. They told him
the prime Iraqi exile group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, had street
cred in Iraq. Wrong. They told him it would be easy to install
a US regime in Baghdad and make the place hum quietly along,
like Lebanon in the 1950s. Wrong.
And of course the neo-cons, who have
never forgiven the UN for Resolutions 242 and 338,(bad for Israel)
told Bush that he should tell the UN to take its charter and
shove it. Bush, who appreciates simple words and simple thoughts,
took their advice, and last Sunday night had it served up to
him by his speechwriters as crow, which he methodically ate in
his 18-minute speech, saying the UN has an important role in
Iraq.
Now many are gloating at the neo-cons'
discomfiture and waiting for their downfall. Click go Madam Defarge's
knitting needles as she waits beside the guillotine. Here come
the tumbrils, inching their way slowly through the rotting cabbages
and vulgar ribaldry of Republican isolationists. Here's a pale-faced
Douglas Feith. Up goes the fatal blade, and down it flashes.
Behold, the head of a neo-con! The next tumbril carries a weightier
cargo: Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams. Still not enough. Madam
Defarge knits on and her patience is soon rewarded. Here come
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, the latter defiantly jotting a coda to
Rumsfeld's Rules. They are cleanly dispatched and the crowd
moves off to torch the Weekly Standard and string up its editor,
Bill Kristol.
Maybe not all of them, but some neo-con
will surely pay the price for dropping President Bush's approval
rating into the low 50s. But will the basic neo-con political
line, dominant for so long in Washington, suffer a dent? Not
in any fundamental way. To appreciate this one only has to look
at the current posture of prominent Democrats. Are they glorying
in Bush's political embarrassment and the humiliating and costly
disaster for the US consequent upon its attack on Iraq? Take
US Senator Joe Biden. His immediate reaction to Bush's speech
last Sunday was to insist that the President would need, and
should get, more money than the $87 billion requested by the
White House.
Then Biden gave the neo-cons a lesson
in how to pay lip service to internationalism and "our allies":
"What we need isn't the death of internationalism or the
denial of our stark national interest. What I want to talk about
today is a more enlightened nationalism that understands the
value of international institutions but supports the use of military
force--without apology or hesitation--when we must. An enlightened
nationalism that does not allow us to be so blinded by our overwhelming
military power that we fail to see the benefit, indeed the need,
of working with othersTo begin moving this nation in the right
direction I believe we need to embrace a foreign policy of enlightened
nationalismFirst, we need to correct the imbalance between projecting
power and staying power. America's military is second to none.
It must and will remain second to none."
Study the zig-zag rhetoric of Governor
Howard Dean and you find the same essential approach, though
Dean has just outraged the neo-cons by calling for an "even-handed"
US role in any resolving of the Palestinian issue. (A posture
he arrived at, please note, after taking heavy fire from the
left, including this writer, for being a whore for AIPAC. On
Feb. 20, this supposedly antiwar candidate told Salon.com that
"if the U.N. in the end chooses not to enforce its own resolutions,
then the U.S. should give Saddam 30 to 60 days to disarm, and
if he doesn't, unilateral action is a regrettable, but unavoidable,
choice." The next day he said he said the UN had to do it.
In June, at the Council for Foreign Relations Dean said, "I
would add at least 50,000 foreign troops to the force in Iraq.
It is imperative that we bring the international community in
to help stabilize Iraq. If I were President, I would reach
out to NATO, to Arab and Islamic countries, to other friends
to share the burden and the risks." He's made trenchant
criticisms of Bush's rationale for the attack and of how it has
been conducted, but he still proclaims, "Failure in Iraq
is not an option."
With the exception of Dennis Kucinich,
Al Sharpton and Carol
Mosely Brown no Democratic candidate is calling for anything
other than that the US to "stay the course" in Iraq,
with more money, more troops and if possible the political cover
of the UN. Senator Kerry, who favored the US attack last spring,
won't commit to supporting the request for $87 billion but adds
carefully, "I believe we must do what we need to do"
to bring peace to Iraq. Edwards still justifies his support for
Bush's war. Don't even ask about Lieberman. A few neo-con heads
may roll, but the policy won't change. It's fun to demonize
the neo-cons and rejoice in their discomfiture, but don't make
the mistake of thinking US foreign policy was set by Norman Podhoretz
or William Kristol. They're the clowns capering about in front
of the donkey and the elephant. The donkey says the UN should
clean up after them, and the elephant now says the donkey may
have a point. Somebody has come out with a dustpan and broom.
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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