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Recent Stories
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
24, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
Ominous Signs
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The
timbre of war reporting changed on Sunday, from brazen hubris to a more
nervous posture. Typical was a report in the London Financial Times
by Victor Mallet, datelined the Iraq/Kuwait border, and titled, “Ominous
Signs for Coalition in Battle for Umm Qasr. “The sound of machine
gun exchanges and bombing raids by Royal Air Force Harriers was clearly
audible on Sunday from Kuwaiti territory,” Mallet wrote, “
in spite of repeated official assurances in recent days that control
of the port had been or was about to be secured. In an ominous sign
of the military and ultimately political - difficulties that may lie
ahead for the invasion force if it seeks to capture urban areas, the
word "guerrilla" was used at the weekend by Colonel Chris
Vernon, chief UK military spokesman in Kuwait, to explain the unexpectedly
stiff resistance encountered in Umm Qasr.
Mallet explained
that “The failure to bring calm to Umm Qasr is particularly galling
because the US-led coalition wants to bring in humanitarian aid through
the port as quickly as possible to demonstrate its good intentions to
the Iraqis and to world opinion, which remains overwhelmingly hostile
to the war.”
"Umm Qasr and
the port is absolutely vital to us and we're going to have to go in
and seize it," said Lt-Col Ben Currie of the British Royal Marines
in Umm Qasr on Sunday. "We're going through and clearing it street
by street, and house by house." The Iraqi regime of President Saddam
Hussein was quick to capitalize on the fighting, some of it televised
live by crews flown into Umm Qasr by the British.
“Events…suggest
the war will be much more complicated than President George W. Bush
had hoped,” Mallet wrote. “One problem for the Americans
is that however much the Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein, they do not appear
to be overjoyed in the Shia Muslim south, at least about the prospect
of a US occupation. Reporters traveling independently in southern Iraq
say some residents of Safwan, another town on the Kuwaiti border, were
openly hostile to the coalition forces, although others said they were
happy that President Bush was seeking to end the rule of President Hussein.
“
When they developed
plans for the attack on Iraq, Rumsfeld, General Franks and the others
were no doubt operating under the assumption that the US would be acting
with the support of the UN Security Council. Nor could they have anticipated
the antiwar movement that continued to organize powerful demonstrations
in New York and San Francisco through the weekend, with scarcely any
showing by the pro-war forces.
“Shock and
Awe” was over-hyped from the start. When you calculate the tonnage
of explosive dropped, the raids were far from being the Doomsday sorties
excitedly presaged by the Pentagon and denounced in every peace rally.
By World War 11 standards it was small in scale, compared with the payloads
of B-17s.
Add in the extraordinary
fragging attack on senior officers of the 101st Airborne, the Patriot
downing an RAF plane, the news of casualties and one can see why the
vainglorious predictions of the preceding week are dying down abruptly,
as the prospect of serious city fighting begins to come into focus.
Terror
Chief Quits
Another piece of
news that almost got lost in the onrush of events was the resignation
of Rand Beers, the top National Security Council official in the war
on terror. He timed his exit to the expiry of Bush’s official
ultimatum to Saddam (the US started sending Special Forces into Iraq
48 hours before the deadline UPI quoted “intelligence sources”
as saying “the move reflects concern that the looming war with
Iraq is hurting the fight against terrorism.”"Hardly a surprise,"
UPI quoted one former intelligence official as saying. "We have
sacrificed a war on terror for a war with Iraq. I don't blame Randy
at all. This just reflects the widespread thought that the war on terror
is being set aside for the war with Iraq at the expense of our military
and intel resources and the relationships with our allies."
James Bamford further demolished the rationales for the attack on Iraq.
“There is a predominant belief in the intelligence community that
an invasion of Iraq will cause more terrorism than it will prevent.
There is also a tremendous amount of embarrassment by intelligence professionals
that there have been so many lies out of the administration -- by the
president, (Vice President Dick) Cheney and (Secretary of State Colin)
Powell -- over Iraq."
These are damaging
quotes. There’ll be many more of things don’t go well.
Rumsfeld
Again
The most surreal
piece of hypocrisy belonged of course to DOD’s Rumsfeld, who threatened
the Iraqis with war crimes trials for displaying American POWs on TV.
So what were all the photos of Iraqis surrendering? For his part Bush
said, "I expect Iraq to treat the prisoners of war just like, uh,
we treat their prisoners." Like in Guantanamo?
More
on Baruch Goldstein
Roane Carey writes:
Goldstein committed the ’94 massacre of Palestinians on Purim,
or the eve of Purim, ostensibly as a kind of sick "celebration"
of it. He emigrated from the US, I think as an adult, and I think from
Brooklyn. As for intellectual inspiration: Goldstein was a follower
of the charismatic (now dead) Brooklyn Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel
Schneerson, and of his Chabad movement. The late Israel Shahak quotes
the rebbe at length to the effect of his racist pronouncements about
the genetic inferiority of all gentiles.
One interesting
aspect of the Goldstein case is that after he emigrated and joined the
IDF in the mid-1980s, as a doctor, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients.
This means not only Palestinians but Druse, who have always served loyally--usually
ferociously--in the IDF. Shahak points out that far from being severely
punished or possibly even court-martialed, as basic IDF ground rules
would have dictated, Goldstein was protected by high-level officers
and given plum (from his perspective) assignment in Kiryat Arba, the
extremist settlement outside Hebron.
The crucial point
about this story, as Shahak tells it, is that the extremist settler
ideology, as represented by the National Religious Party, had by the
1980s become a major influence in the IDF, at all levels, including
the very highest. (And now, of course, they're in Sharon's Cabinet:
the crackpot general Effi Eitam of the NRP is now Housing Minister,
which gives a good indication of what this government intends vis-a-vis
settlement expansion.) The high-level protection of Goldstein in his
refusal to treat non-Jews (which he grounded in halachic teachings)
reflects this. And not only was he a follower of the Lubavitcher rebbe--he
was an open and ardent follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Much of the settler
movement still consider Goldstein a kind of saint for what he did at
the Ibrahimi Mosque.
And
A Coda on the Chicks
To Alex & all
at Counterpunch:
I was disappointed
also that Natalie Maines apologized.
Her apology was pretty pro-forma, however, and didn't climb down too
far from her anti-war position.
Here is the text:
Statement from
Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks
March 14, 2003:
"As a concerned
American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark
was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be
treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing
a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to
war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want
to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American
soldiers' lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American."
On the whole, it's
not the worst. It certainly sounds like she wrote it herself, too. "I
feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost
respect": there's a backhanded apology for you.My bet is that they'll
still continue to top the charts and sell out their upcoming US tour.
We're going to get tickets to see them in Oakland. They're a good group,
and more power to them.
Best,
Aidan Wylde
Today's Features
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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