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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
How
Sadr Won
The
Desert Fox
By
WILLIAM S. LIND
In Iraq and elsewhere, all eyes are
currently on Najaf. As I had guessed, the battle ended with a
whimper, not with a bang, as the Mahdi Army militiamen exfiltrated,
and Moqtada al-Sadr turned over the keys to the mosque to Ayatollah
al-Sistani.
But the real winner is likely
once again to be the new Desert Fox, Mr. Sadr. How can that be,
if in the end his militia could not stand against American troops?
First of all, Sadr and his
antics in Najaf showed all of Iraq that the new Iraqi "sovereign
government" is a false front. How? By making that government
rely on American, not Iraqi, troops. From Sadr's perspective,
the fact that he suffered an (inevitable) tactical defeat at
the hands of the Americans is far less important than the fact
he fought the Americans. Iraq and the world saw the same show
they witnessed before America "returned sovereignty to Iraq,"
namely Iraqis armed only with AK-47s and RPGs fighting American
tanks and aircraft. As always, when David fights Goliath, David
wins, at least on the moral level.
Second, Sadr positioned himself
even more strongly as the leader of Iraq's sans culottes, the
jobless, hopeless Shi'ite young men who make up the Mahdi Army
and any other Shi'ite army. In a recent article in my excellent
hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a University
of Michigan professor who specializes in Iraqi Shi'ism, Juan
Cole, described them as "a Shi'ite ghetto youth gang."
In fighting terms, that is a compliment, not an insult. Gangs
will be one of the most important forms of combatants in Fourth
Generation war (4GW). As the police in many an American city
can attest, gangs are not easy to defeat. And this particular
gang has both an endless source of recruits and a religious identity
for which dying is seen as worthwhile. Sistani may have the support
of most Shi'ites, but Sadr now has the support of most Shi'ite
fighters, and that is what is likely to count.
Third, Sadr may have moved
the Shi'ite areas of Iraq closer to what he seeks, a general
uprising against the Americans (with himself as its George Washington).
This is difficult to gauge from American news sources, because
they have focused on Najaf itself. But what has happened in Najaf
is less important in this regard than what has happened in the
numerous other Shi'ite cities and towns, and in Baghdad's Sadr
City, which is Sadr's home base (another reason he can easily
afford a tactical defeat in Najaf). As is often the case in 4GW,
the 9/10ths of the iceberg we cannot see is the dangerous part.
Meanwhile, the U.S. finds itself
fighting a two-front war, one front against the Shi'ite Mahdi
Army, the other against the Sunnis in Anbar Province. The U.S.
Marine Corps has blanked out the news from that front, but the
reported toll of Marine casualties seems to be rising. To a student
of German military history such as myself, two-front wars can
bring unhappy memories.
Of course, Moqtada al-Sadr
may prove to be a new Desert Fox in more than one way. Rommel
was a brilliant tactician, one of the best division commanders
of all time. But at the operational and strategic levels, he
faltered. As Mr. Sistani knows, the best strategy for yielding
a Shi'ite-dominated Islamic republic of Iraq is to wait for an
election, where Shi'ite numbers will tell. Sadr, more interested
in his own future than Iraq's, may be jumping the gun. At any
future time he also could get himself captured, which might spur
the general uprising he seeks, or killed, which might spark the
revolution but leave him awkwardly placed to take full advantage
of it. But the probability is that he will be as safe, hale and
hearty as old bin Laden himself.
Professor Cole summed up the
situation well. "The Americans will win militarily,"
he said. "But I think they are losing politically,"
because by fighting Sadr and his Mahdi Army they "made him
a symbol of national resistance." It seems that we are damned
if we do fight and damned if we don't. That's just how Fourth
Generation war works, folks.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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