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Recent
Stories
April
2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
Pentagon
Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You
Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Stew
Albert
Total War
Steve Perry
War Web Log
April
1, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Rumsfeld: "Get Me Rewrite"
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
Website
of the Day
A Collectible War
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
Power": an Interview with Jeff Halper
Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
Ann Harrison
The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
Berserk Cops
Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
War Profiteer
Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
is Safe
Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
Shelter
David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
Continues
John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
Law
Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
Tom
Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
and Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
Onward
Embedded Soldiers: the Press and the War
Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
Genocide in East Timor
Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
Out of Billions
Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
March 26,
2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch
Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning
Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets
of Blood
Patrick
Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs,
Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert
Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A
Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria
Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The
Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25,
2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What
Democracy Looks Like: the Streets of Cairo
Bill and
Kathleen Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings
on the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood
Indicator: Casualties and the Stock Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless
Country
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
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
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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April 2,
2003
CounterPunch
War Diary
Medieval Sieges and
the Politics of Casualties; Which Side Will Give Up First?; Prescient
Counsel from Osama bin Laden; Hitchens in Huge Crystal Balls-Up;
Embunkered Bush: Scary Glimpse of C-in-C
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Through the murk of battle, the fog of US/UK military
communiques and the more deftly presented Iraqi bulletins, we
can begin to descry the shape of things to come, and the basic
question posed by war: the powers of endurance and capacity for
sacrifice of the two sides. If it comes to a medieval siege of
Baghdad (and other Iraqi cities to the south) can the US take
the casualties before the Iraqi defenders succumb to starvation
and thirst?
But wait! Surely the ferocious B-52 bombardments
of the Medina and other Iraqi divisions on the southern perimeter
of Baghdad is already degrading them seriously, and a few more
days of softening up will render them mere skeleton forces, shell-shocked
and ready to surrender?
This seems unlikely. Remember first what
happened in 1991. The Republican Guard was battered by six weeks
of bombardment, after which time these divisions emerged from
their foxholes and efficiently suppressed the Shi'a rebellion
in the South while George Bush SR ordered US forces to stand
aside.
Already in 1991 the Iraqis were showing
great skill in camouflaging their equipment and in deploying
dummy targets. Reports from various military sources suggest
that they didn't waste the following twelve years, either in
preparing for guerilla operations or in readying their defenses
around Baghdad by a vast system of trenches, dug-outs, decoys,
plus more robust communications networks.
In February came some very practical
words of advice and encouragement from Osama bin Laden, in a
tape regarded by many as authentic, discussing in vivid terms
the experience of being bombed in the Tora Bora fastness in eastern
Afghanistan:
"I will recall one part of such a great battle to prove
how much they (American soldiers) are cowards, in one side, and
how effective are these trenches in depleting them from another
side. We were 300 mujahideen (holy fighters). We were digging
100 ditches spread over an area of one mile only. The range is
one ditch for every three brothers. The American forces were
bombing us with smart bombs, cluster bombs, and bombs which invade
caves. B-52 aircraft were flying every two hours over our heads
and throwing each time, 20 to 30 bombs.
"The conclusion is an enormous defeat
for the coalition of the international evil with all its forces
facing such a small group of mujahideen, 300 only in ditches
in an area of one mile, in a temperature of 10 degrees below
zero. The result of that battle was six per cent injuries among
the individuals, whom we ask God to consider as martyrs, and
injuries inside the ditches were two per cent only, thank GodSo
go and dig many trenches as it was mentioned before in the holy
book, 'Take the earth as your shelter.' Such a way will deplete
all your enemy reserves in a few months.
"We advise about the importance
of drawing the enemy into long, close and exhausting fighting,
taking advantage of camouflaged positions in plains, farms, mountains
and cities. The enemy fears the most the town fights and street
fights. Such fighting would cause the enemy huge losses of souls.
We stress the importance of martyrdom operations against the
enemy"
At the start of this week the US-based
Stratfor site, reasonably well informed from military and intelligence
sources, abruptly changed its somewhat complacent "sure
and steady advance" theme, and directly challenged the U.S.
command's claims that bombing has degraded the Republican Guard
divisions' combat capabilities by 35 to 85 percent. Stratfor
cited "foreign intelligence services" as estimating
that air attacks have degraded the combat capabilities of the
Republican Guard Al Medina Division by 5 percent, the Hammurabi
and Nebuchadnezzar divisions by 5 percent to 10 percent and the
Baghdad Division by 10 to 15 percent. (Note as of April 2, the
Pentagon was claiming to have "destroyed" the Baghdad
division, an assessment vigorously disputed by Iraq's military
spokesman.)
Most targets in Baghdad available to
precision-guided missiles have already been hit more than once
in the enormously costly barrages that have now seriously depleted
the US missile arsenal. Furthermore the smoke from oil fires
is making it harder for US satellites to assess damage and assign
targets to the GPS satellites governing the missiles' trajectories.
So the target sets are being steadily
widened, with increased civilian casualties as a consequence,
which of course means a hardening in Iraqi civilian resentment.
But bombs alone, even if the US had enough, can't do the job.
As German military strategists, looking back at the siege of
Leningrad and at Stalingrad, are reminding the world, the only
way to take a large city with determined defenders is to fight
through it block by block, inflicting and incurring tremendous
casualties in the process. Saturation bombing in advance only
makes the task more difficult, with every pile of rubble offering
obstructions and foxholes.
The other way is simply to hunker down
outside the city, destroy the water supplies, try to prevent
food getting in, and install a medieval siege, while being harassed
by guerillas along that extended supply line.
The furious finger-pointing between the
uniformed military and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
his aides misses one fundamental point. Rumsfeld, a vain and
foolish man, may have made a huge blunder in forcing his concept
of a lighter force on Gen. Tommy Franks, despite the latter's
pleas for a far larger one. But even if Franks had prevailed,
it would have been next to impossible to have massed the numbers
that General Schwartzkopf was able to command in 1991.
The whole pattern of US military procurement
for many years, increasingly so since 1991, has been to degrade
basic fighting capacity in favor of the costly hi-tech systems
promoted by the "iron triangle" of defense contractors,
congressional boosters and their accomplices in the services.
Precision-guided missiles and kindred emblems of US technological
supremacy were supposed to render old-style battles and sieges
more or less obsolete. So has the US got the man-power?
Ultimately, yes. But there are political
constraints, starting with the casualty rate. By March 26 the
official coalition losses in Iraq were running at 57 dead, but
there's a time lag of three days and often more between a death
and its recognition in official statistics. Some estimates, including
one well informed Russian site, suggest that the coalition losses,
as of March 31, include no less than 100 killed US servicemen
and at least 35 dead British soldiers, plus a larger number listed
as missing. The normal multiplier for wounded is 10, which give
us a possible 1000 casualties for the second half of March, which
means a monthly rate of maybe 2000 casualties. (These figures
are, it should emphasized, somewhat speculative.)
Some comparisons. In World War Two, average
casualties ran at 28,000 a month killed and wounded. In the
Korean war the average was 3,000 casualties a month. In Vietnam
between 1966 and 1971 casualties averaged 8,000 a month. At the
peak of that war, out of a vast force, there were actually 40,000
US soldiers with rifles in their hands, meaning that the risk
for these fighters of getting wounded or killed was extremely
high, as would be the consequence of any attempt to attack Baghdad
by such as the 3rd US Army infantry division, with about 3,500
combat troops.
So the present, inferential casualty
US rate in Iraq, at a moment when, according to generals on both
sides, the "real fighting" is just beginning, is not
out of sight of the Korean rate, which allowed General Dwight
D. Eisenhower to run as a candidate who would extricate the US
from a costly war.
So even if the Bush administration is
ready for a long war, will political opinion around the world
and at home, allow him to wage it?
Hitchens in Crystal
Balls-Up
Pages from the Jampot
Files
(Just Another Middle-Aged Porker of the Right)
Harken unto Hitchens:
"There will be no war, but there
will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention to
remove the Saddam Hussein regime....What will happen will be
this: The president will give an order, there will then occur
in Iraq a show of military force like nothing probably the world
has ever seen. It will be rapid and accurate and overwhelming
enough to deal with an army or a country many times the size
of Iraq. That will be greeted by the majority of Iraqi and Kurdish
people as a moment of emancipation...and I say bring it on."
The barstool bombardier issued this ringing
prophesy in the course of a debate in Berkeley with the New Yorker's
Mark Danner, January 28 of this year. Hitchens has been  lecturing in Berkeley at the University's
widely despised Graduate School of Journalism, where students
have been able to use Hitchens as a petrie dish with which to
assay the dialectical relationship between alcohol and journalistic
production. Last year, amid early reports of US victory in Afghanistan,
Hitchens crowed in a London paper at the supposed discomfiture
of those who said (correctly, as it turns out) that Afghanistan
has always been a graveyard for optimistic forecasts of western
victory. "Ha ha ha", Hitchens vulgarly exulted. We'd
say "'Ha ha ha' to you, Hitchens", except that the
manner in which his forecast is being confuted involves death
and destruction on a terrible scale.
In the twilight of his drink-addled brain
Hitchens may not have remembered it, but his phrase "There
will be no war" is an echo of another notoriously wrong-headed
forecast, by London Daily Express, at the end of August, 1939,
when the newspaper proclaimed, "There will be no war, this
year, next year or any year." War broke out on September
3.
Embunkered Bush: Scary
Glimpse
We have no idea how Saddam Hussein is
holding up in his bunker, but the picture painted by Judy Keen
in USA Today for April 1 sure is distinctly scary. Excerpts:
"Bush believes he was called by
God to lead the nation at this time, says Commerce Secretary
Don Evans, a close friend who talks with Bush every day. His
history degree from Yale makes him mindful of the importance
of the moment. He knows he's making 'history-changing decisions,'
Evans says."
"Bush copes with anxiety as he always
has. He prays and exercises. Evans says his friend has a placid
acceptance of challenges that comes from his Christian faith."
"He knows that we're all here to
serve a calling greater than self," Evans says. "That's
what he's committed his life to do. He understands that he is
the one person in the country, in this case really the one person
in the world, who has a responsibility to protect and defend
freedom."
Mmmm.
Beginning of the USA TODAY article:
"People who know Bush well say the strain of war is palpable.
He rarely jokes with staffers these days and occasionally startles
them with sarcastic putdowns. He's being hard on himself; he
gave up sweets just before the war began. He's frustrated when
armchair generals or members of his own team express doubts about
U.S. military strategy. At the same time, some of his usual supporters
are concerned by his insistence on sticking with the original
war plan. Interviews with a dozen friends, advisers and top aides
describe a man who feels he is being tested."
Today's
Features
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
Pentagon
Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You
Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Stew
Albert
Total War
Steve Perry
War Web Log
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