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June
4, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Manufacturing the Iraq War
Mazin
Qumsiyeh
Summit: Peace or Pretense?
Issam Nashashibi
Sharon's Sword of Damocles
June
3, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and
the Slaughter in Aceh
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Tells All
Elaine
Cassel
We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message
from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!"
Tom
Crumpacker
The Politics of US Cuba Policy
William
S. Lind
Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq
Sam
Hamod
The Final Brick in the Wall
Uri
Avnery
The Altalena Affair
Hammond
Guthrie
Stepping into Some Deep DARPA
Steve
Perry
The WashTimes'
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June
2, 2003
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter
Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
Jason
Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
May
31, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
A Whiner Called Horowitz
Gary Leupp
The Frauds of War
Dave
Lindorff
Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment
Tom Stephens
Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Who Is Next?
Joanne
Mariner
Trivializing Terrorism
Wayne
Madsen
Ayatollah Ashcroft's Busy Week
Larry Magnuson
Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard?
Elaine
Cassel
Wake Up, America!
Gila Svirsky
Waiting for the Lament to End
Susan
Davis
Kitchen Dreams
Chris Clarke
Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite
Chris
Floyd
Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God
Adam Engel
Gravity's End Zone
Poets'
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May
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Tripp
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Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions
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Steve
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Bush Wars
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CounterPunch
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Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
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Popular Uprising, Inc.
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Vouchers for Jesus
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Watch
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Uzma
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Arrogant
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Gore Vidal
The
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Francis Boyle
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June
4, 2003
Blackmail as Policy
Banality, Bombast
and Blood
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
The saga of America's Private Lynch, no matter
what the details of her movie-set escape prove to be, adds only
banality to needless bloodshed in Iraq.
Another young American woman, Marla Ruzicka,
went largely ignored. Ms. Ruzicka runs a non-profit organization
that works to make accurate counts of a war's civilian dead.
It is small wonder Ms. Ruzicka is not given the same coverage
as Private Lynch, since, based upon detailed field work in Iraq,
she says that between five and ten thousand civilians were killed.
Generally in wars, total casualties,
which include wounded, crippled, and lost, are many times the
number killed, often as high as ten times. I do not know what
the appropriate ratio is for Iraq, but it's not hard to see that
the United States killed and hurt a great many innocent people
in a few weeks of "precision" war.
Of military losses, poor boys drafted
to defend their homes, we as yet have no good estimate. In the
first Gulf War, between sixty and one hundred thousand Iraqi
soldiers were slaughtered. With Iraq's population being less
than ten percent that of the United States, such losses must
be multiplied by ten to get some feel for their impact on the
society.
So while Americans, thirty years later,
still weep at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington--a monument
representing about sixty thousand deaths over ten years of war--they
have inflicted on Iraq, in just three weeks, that same proportionate
loss--all of them civilians. The one-sided slaughter of soldiers
in the first Gulf War represented the equivalent of the U.S.
having sustained between half a million and a million deaths
just over a decade ago. No society recovers easily from such
losses of its youth.
In a real war, a war in which most people
agree there is some powerful motivating cause, the fate of an
individual soldier like Private Lynch becomes almost unimportant.
Soldiers in real wars are reduced to just about the status of
soldier-ants in a war between two ant-nests.
But the public can be mercurial when
it comes to invasions with flimsy excuses and gas-bag ideology.
Public support can shift quickly or melt away entirely, so a
little juicing-up may be prescribed. Besides, when there is almost
no real news being reported, as was true in America for Iraq,
you need a little something to satisfy the chips-and-television
crowd anxious to be informed from their couches.
Since America's modern warriors are limited
to follow-up after missiles and bombs have reduced everything
to a vision of hell, much of the touching stuff that once inspired
the home front is missing. There are no more pitiful and tragic
images of young Americans falling in what seems a worthy cause.
So the Pentagon's prisoner-liberation
simulation, like its staged statue-toppling in Baghdad, so suggestive
of news photos at end of World War Two, served several purposes.
Is this how a great power behaves in
the early part of the 21st century? Especially a power that enjoys
reminding us at every opportunity--I suppose because it is so
easy for the rest of the world, just watching its actions, to
forget--that America stands for human rights and democratic principles?
Yes, unfortunately, that is exactly how it behaves. Only, the
complete picture is bleaker still.
Mr. Bush at the G-8 summit in Evian,
France--a summit he considered not even attending and at which,
in any event, he cut short his stay--made an effort at grand-poohbah
statesman with, "We can have disagreements, but that doesn't
mean we have to be disagreeable," a lifelessly trite line,
but one certainly ranking at the peak of this President's eloquence.
Just a few days before (May 30), Bush
abandoned the session with reporters that customarily precedes
a G-8 summit, perhaps reflecting advisors' concerns that he would
blow it with his anger when questioned about recent events. He
left the session for his tactful National Security Advisor, Condoleezza
Rice, to blow.
On the subject of Canada, Ms. Rice gave
us, "I think there was disappointment in the United States
that a friend like Canada was unable to support the United States
in what we considered to be an extremely important issue for
our security [Emphasis is mine]."
Does Ms. Rice read the newspaper? Her
words about security come within days of reports of an interview
with the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz in which he admits the business
about weapons was an excuse for invading Iraq. His admission
only punctuated weeks of reports about American forces not finding
anything remotely suspicious and America's hack chorus of national
columnists swelling their breasts to a theme about weapons not
being important after all.
Canada has never stinted in helping Americans.
Canada is the kind of neighbor any sensible people would want.
But helping a scheme for "regime change" in someone
else's country, unsupported by international law, is not quite
the same thing as helping Americans.
Canada was never called a poor friend
for not helping in the many shadowy "regime changes"
the United States has conducted across the Caribbean and Latin
America. Canada's values and interests do not lie that way. Why
was the situation suddenly so different for an unthreatening
small country on the other side of the planet?
The tough answer is that the United States
government felt alone and naked in what it was doing over Iraq.
It desperately sought international approval, which it did not
get, leaving the harsh ideologues in the White House both embarrassed
and angry at being embarrassed.
Ms. Rice went on to say differences with
Canada had put bilateral relations through "some difficult
times," and "that disappointment will, of course, not
go [away] easily. It will take some time, because when friends
are in a position where we say our security's at stake, we would
have thought, as we got from many of our friends, that the answer
would have been, 'Well, how can we help?' "
Does any honest person reading her words
find them in keeping with Bush's G-8 stuff about "not being
disagreeable"? They are clearly disagreeable, provocative,
and even petty.
But Ms. Rice went even further concerning
Germany, "I can't answer the question of whether personal
relations between the President and the Chancellor will ever
be the same. We will have to see."
As for France, "there were times
when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous
than perhaps Saddam Hussein," Ms. Rice said. "I'll
just put it very bluntly, we simply didn't understand it."
Well, to put it also very bluntly, American
power, when it is used to bully others, in fact is more dangerous,
far more dangerous, than Saddam Hussein ever was.
"We have been allies in great struggles
in world wars," Ms. Rice said of the French. "The United
States gave its blood to liberate France."
The United States gave its blood to defeat
rivals Germany and Japan. Liberating countries like France was
incidental, although the French have always scrupulously, respectfully
maintained America's battlefield cemeteries and commemorated
America's efforts as few others do.
The historical fact is President Roosevelt
considered governing postwar France in a very high-handed manner.
He pretty much detested De Gaulle, and France's empire was something
the Roosevelt people never stopped sneering at and preaching
about while merrily working to build one of their own. The situation
was far murkier and less heroic than Ms. Rice would have you
understand, but her purpose was to put another country on the
defensive, not to teach history.
Are the world's statesmen so dense they
do not understand true danger when they see it? Do they deliberately
embrace evil? Of course not. Then, why Ms. Rice's language if
the need for invading Iraq was clear? Precisely because the need
was not clear, and it has only become even less clear now. Manipulative
language here is a substitute for thought--we are given a form
of aggressive marketing rather than an honest product--a practice
to which this administration is addicted.
Just a week before the G-8 summit, another
Bush-administration bully, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, gave
us his version of "not being disagreeable." Rumsfeld
informed the French air force that it would not be welcome at
two upcoming international exercises.
Rumsfeld's version of "not being
disagreeable" included declaring that the United States
would heavily cut its involvement with the Paris Air Show, traditionally
the world's most important show for aviation technology. As a
Pentagon official so agreeably put it, "With troops eating
military rations in the dust in Iraq, it's not appropriate for
officers to be wined and dined in Paris."
Doesn't that sound reasonable? So, do
you think they've stopped wining and dining in expensive Georgetown
restaurants over all the fat new Pentagon contracts being handed
out these days? Or do they just quietly put aside that disagreeable
stuff about dust and rations on such happy occasions? Do you
think they served military freeze-dried rations at the President's
recent $18-million dollar fundraiser?
America's top diplomat, that disappointing
baritone of dissimulation, Colin Powell, has gone around for
weeks uttering threats and slights towards France. A couple of
weeks ago, he said the United States would reconsider its links
with France following disagreement over Iraq. Does that sound
anything like being "not disagreeable"?
On CBC Radio some weeks ago, there was
a fascinating little story. There is a manufacturer in Quebec
who actually makes some of the fancy cowboy boots beloved in
Texas. During the height of American irritation over Iraq, this
boot-maker was asked by his Texas customer to supply a written
statement that he did not personally support Canada's policy
towards war in Iraq.
Can you imagine an American's furious
response at being asked such an inappropriate, private, personal
matter in a business transaction? In effect, he was asked to
supply a kind of pledge of allegiance to someone else's foreign
policy.
Something corrupt, dirty, and destructive
is taking hold of America, choking even ordinary business with
the sewerage of ideology. How does one talk of neighborliness,
love of freedom, or democratic-mindedness while behaving like
a blackmailer?
John Chuckman
lives in Canada. He can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org
Today's
Features
Chris
Floyd
Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and
the Slaughter in Aceh
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Tells All
Elaine
Cassel
We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message
from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!"
Tom
Crumpacker
The Politics of US Cuba Policy
William
S. Lind
Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq
Sam
Hamod
The Final Brick in the Wall
Uri
Avnery
The Altalena Affair
Hammond
Guthrie
Stepping into Some Deep DARPA
Steve
Perry
The WashTimes'
al-Qaeda nuke "exclusive"
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