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Recent
Stories
April
7, 2003
David
N. Gibbs
Spying, Secrecy and the University:
The CIA is Back on Campus
Harry Browne
War and Peace Summit a Royal Farce
Gideon
Levy
America is Not a Role Model
Diane
Christian
A Scene from an Obscene War
Jules
Rabin
Remembering Deir Yassin
James Davis
Oddsmaking in Dublin: Will Bush
Shake Gerry's Hand?
Robert
Fisk
The Twisted Language of War
Patrick
Cockburn
Slaughter on the Road to Dibagah
John
Mackay
War and Art
Seth Sandronsky
Wars and the Color Line
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/7
April
5, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Iraqi Humanitarian Relief is
in Shambles
Anne
Gwynne
A Drowning in Salem
Uri
Avnery
Roadmap to Nowhere
Chris
Floyd
Hell for Leather: Bombs, Bullets, Bibles and Bush
William
Cook
Would You Have Sent Your Son (or Daughter) Off to War If...
Gila
Svirsky
A Busy Day for Bulldozers
Mike Ferner
Back from Baghdad: What Next for the Peace Movement?
Joanne
Mariner
Civilian Deaths and Official Apologies
John Stanton
Bush Takes His Killing Orders
from the Lord
Romi
Mahajan
Learning to Count the Dead
Aluf Benn
After Iraq, US Vows to Deal with
Other Mideast Regimes
Mary
Ellen Peterson
Gay Marine Refuses to Fight
William
MacDougall
Country Music and the Crimes of Patriotism
Ron
Jacobs
War and Occupation
Bernie
Pattison
Aborigines and the Different God
Mark
Engler
Iraq War as Arms Expo
Adam Engel
Li'l Box of Love: a Novelini
Poets'
Basement
Tripp, Albert, Katz
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flesh and Its Discontents: the Paintings of Lucian Freud
Norman
Madarasz
Canada and the War
April
4, 2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
Was Einstein Right About Israel?
David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
Prashad
There Are No More Arguments
Tom
Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
Pierre
Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
Show
Hammond
Guthrie
The Deadly Mihrab
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/04
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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April 9,
2003
America's
Sovereign Right
To Do As It Damn Well Pleases
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
I read that the U.S. is claiming a "sovereign
right" to try Iraqi officials as war criminals. I thought
it was a nice touch, including, as it does, an allusion both
to Bush's scholarly observations on Nazis and an assertion of
rights. Rights are always good, aren't they? Even when they are
the rights of conquest?
So, you attack a country for no other
reason than an arrogant demand for "regime change,"
overwhelm its relatively puny armed forces, kill thousands of
people, and claim a "sovereign right" to bring its
leaders to trial? This threatens to become the model for international
affairs in the twenty-first century, the banana-republic concept
applied on a world scale. America has refused to have anything
to do with the International Court for War Crimes, but then the
Creator never granted international institutions that purity
of essence that is America's peculiar birthright. International
institutions are corrupt. They are foreign. And they are not
inclined to do things in the American way.
America, blubbering endlessly about its
rights and the way it sees things, so often displaying impatience
over listening to the other 95% of the human race, easily forgets
the many incontestable horrors it has bestowed upon the world.
General Pinochet's murder of perhaps 15,000 Chileans plus a few
Americans who got in his way gets barely a nod of drowsy recognition.
The "boyz" chugging down frosty Cokes while napalming
Vietnamese villages or the blood-soaked savagery of Cambodia's
rice patties are mostly forgotten. Few Americans ever caught,
or cared to imagine, the screams of the Shah's victims having
their finger nails extracted.
There have been so many of these good
works that a full list would resemble a reference book rather
than an article. Dealing with them on American television would
make evening watching a drag, so they are forgotten, and America
lumbers on to its next bellowing claim that something about the
world stands in the way of its full enjoyment of rights and privileges.
Of course, none of America's chosen monsters
ever saw a trial or tribunal by the United States. A few of them
still live in quiet retirement. Why? Because they served American
interests faithfully. If Hussein is tried, it will be precisely
because he failed to do so. That's certainly an inspiring reason
for bombing the hell out of a country.
But America is doing its very best, with
precision missiles and gigantic bunker-busting bombs, to be sure
Hussein is murdered rather than captured. His trial, even if
it does happen to fall to America as a sovereign right, would
be exceedingly inconvenient for relations with the Arab world.
The United States asserts another arrogant
claim, wrapped in different words, to justify its mistreatment
of prisoners from Afghanistan. It ignored the Geneva Conventions,
shackled hundreds of them up, flew them, blindfolded and strapped
into cargo planes, to new homes in Cuba, which consist of cages
far away from everything they know, with no access to lawyers
or relatives, a form of slow torture used to extract information.
Never mind that information gathered in this way is more likely
to tell you what you want to hear than what actually is, and
never mind that treating people in this way violates every principle
America likes to say it holds sacred.
There is still another such claim, again
expressed with altered words, to proclaim its right to determine
who will govern Iraq when America's destructive tantrum is over.
After all, it has had such success in Afghanistan on which to
build. After killing thousands of innocent people there, wrecking
the country's infrastructure, and sending tens of thousands fleeing
their homes in terror, it set up a government whose key achievement
to date is monthly assassinations.
That dire concern over women's rights
in Afghanistan, something carefully tailored to the psychological
needs of soccer moms who might have had a doubt or two about
bombing villages, has faded into the mountain mists. An excellent
proxy measure of America's violent achievement in Afghanistan
is offered by a Canadian documentary film maker who observed
that outside Kabul, virtually 100% of women still wear the burka.
The figure in Kabul, the only place policed by foreign troops,
is about 70% and that comes with a great deal of abuse.
With a record like that, why wouldn't
you feel justified in violently reordering the affairs of the
planet? Quick success in Iraq will undoubtedly set Washington's
ideologues' glands pumping and mouths watering. There's already
talk about blasting Syria. Clearly, Iraq's shell game with weapons
of mass destruction was continued on a grander scale, with the
elusive weapons shifted to Syria for safekeeping, perhaps shipped
in milk trucks by night. Hussein wouldn't use them to protect
his life. No, after defeating the United States, he undoubtedly
planned to reclaim them for another diabolical plot.
The possibilities must seem endless to
Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, and Co. And, indeed, regretfully for
the rest of the planet, they undoubtedly are.
John Chuckman
lives in Canada. He can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org
Yesterday's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
Was Einstein Right About Israel?
David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
Prashad
There Are No More Arguments
Tom
Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
Pierre
Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
Show
Hammond
Guthrie
The Deadly Mihrab
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/04
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