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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
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
29, 2003
Dead People
Don't
Go There
By KURT NIMMO
Naturally,
most Americans dread the prospect of US soldiers coming home in body
bags. It's not something Americans do well, this coming to terms with
engineered mass murder -- and yet large numbers of Americans support
Bush and his decision to invade Iraq.
How
many dead GIs will America accept?
"I'm
not going there, because I don't know," said Dan Bartlett, White
House communications director.
"The
president looks at this knowing that when the commander in chief talks
about the use of force, the American people understand that it may entail
the sacrifices he has spoken of. And the president also views this in
the post-9/11 context, in which failure to act could lead to the taking
of even more lives," explained White House press secretary, Ari
Fleischer.
You
know you're in trouble when they start talking about sacrifice. It usually
means a there will be a whole lot more dead people, maybe even a few
you know.
Numbers
are abstract. 24 US soldiers killed. No names, no faces. That's why
the Iraqis broadcast images of POWs and the dead bodies of US soldiers
on TV the other day. It's both a propaganda war and a numbers game.
Even so, Americans don't like to see their dead treated disrespectfully.
Good chance the Iraqis don't like to see their dead treated badly, either,
but apparently the message has not made it to the corporate media. Images
of dead Iraqi soldiers are all over newspapers, television, and the
web.
The
"coalition" -- of two and one quarter -- bombed Iraq TV after
it showed the disrespectful video in question, but that will not staunch
the uncomfortable imagery. It leaks all over the place, if you bother
to take a look.
Such
images rapidly deconstruct all abstractions the Bushites care to make.
It suddenly gets personal, emotional. People begin to ask questions,
ask if this invasion is worth it. How many American kids need to die
for Bush, for Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Bolton, the Kristols and Kagans
and Ledeens? 500? 5,000? 10,000? Somebody said the invasion might cost
12,000 US lives, ten percent of 120,000 troops.
How
many dead Iraqi children and grandmothers are acceptable?
How
many lives and how much money will this ill-defined and generally considered
illegal invasion cost?
Bush
and Ari and Dan Bartlett want to avoid these questions. In fact, Bush
has called such questions "silly" and he refuses to answer
them. If you're worried about your kid in the military, how long he
or she will be in Iraq and what he or she are up against, let it be
known that Bush considers you silly.
Mass
murder bothers most people, especially when it involves their loved
ones.
Bush
is apparently not human, maybe he's a robot. Sometimes he looks like
a robot. Only robots feel nothing when they issue orders to kill thousands
of innocent humans.
Some
people say Saddam's dead, he died from cancer four years ago. But then
it's obvious this whole thing is not about Saddam Hussein. It's about
Iraq and Israel, it's about oil and sending a message to the Arabs.
It's about the will of the Iraqi people who are now resisting invasion
and the theft of their country.
As
a Christian (or rather a professed Christian) you'd think mass murder
would creep Bush out, considering the Ten Commandments and all. But
then the Old Testament is chock full of unreasonable violence and murder.
The God Bush listens to struck down all the firstborn in Egypt.
Bush's
selected religion -- Christian Zionism -- embraces mass murder in the
name of the so-called Rapture and Second Coming of Christ. In short,
countless numbers of people are required to die for these selfish Christian
Zionists so they can get a free pass to heaven.
It's
the Arabs now, but later it will be the Israeli Jews who face extermination.
Naturally, the Israelis exploit this sort of delusional nonsense and
use Christian Zionist support against their implacable enemies, the
Arabs.
Christian Zionists don't care about dead people, especially Palestinian
Arabs, all of who must die for the sake of their schizoid end-of-time
theology fantasies.
"It's
a matter of victory and the Iraqi people have got to know that, you
see," explained Bush the other day. "They have got to know
that they will be liberated and Saddam Hussein will be removed no matter
how long it takes."
In other words, if it takes a dozen or more market bombings, or a medieval
siege of Baghdad, it's in the best interest of the Iraqis for the US
to blow them into cluster bomb crisscrossed chunks.
Did
Bush even ask the Iraqis if they want to be liberated? No, because liberation
is not the issue here -- the wholesale looting of Iraq is the issue.
Bush
and his neo-con school of global piranhas don't care about the Iraqis
who will die of thirst, starvation, and disease as a result of this
criminal invasion and the eventual medieval siege of Baghdad. It's the
oil and the racist interests of the Israelis that matter, not the fate
of a few million Iraqis.
More
practical types envision gushing oil wells, spanking new strip malls,
and a passel of IMF loans designed to loot not only the Iraqis of their
water and natural resources, but also their self respect.
Bush
doesn't think like most of us.
Dubya's
a lot like his daddy, like Clinton and Nixon and Reagan and all the
others -- mass murder, death squads, genocide, starvation, torture,
fixed elections, none of this cruel and heartless stuff bothers him.
It's
simply another set of pliers in the New World Order toolbox.
I was
just following orders, said Adolf Eichmann.
Millions
of people were killed on the direct orders of Hitler and his sadistic
Nazi crew. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do and not look
back in order to get things done, or so the Nazis reasoned. Millions
of Germans agreed -- and apparently millions of Americans now agree
with Bush. Some of them even find him admirable.
It
helps that Saddam and Osama are now the same person.
It
wasn't until the very end that the German people were forced to confront
what the Nazis had done in their name. It will be much the same for
Bush and the Americans.
It's
the job of CNN and Fox News to make sure we're not tainted by the blood-drenched
reality of this invasion. Truth must be bottled up, locked away.
Only
one version of events will be allowed -- and that version consists of
the deceptive and cynically self-serving propaganda cranked out by the
Bush White House, the Pentagon, and duly relayed to a gullible public
by the corporate media.
This
week both YellowTimes and the English-language version of al-Jazeera
lost their internet presence.
Remember,
the US put one of its precision-guided missiles down the smokestack
of an al-Jazeera office in Kabul during the invasion of Afghanistan.
It
has threatened to target the radio and satellite signals of independent
journalists in Iraq, those not "embedded" (or entombed) in
the Pentagon's media charade and pre-packaged lie factory.
The
pictures of dead Brit soldiers shown on Arab TV reportedly outraged
Tony Blair, Bush's sidekick and co-conspirator. Of course, if the images
were of gassed Kurds and the finger was pointed at Saddam, Blair's outrage
would be turned in a different direction.
It's
a stage-managed and fake outrage Blair invokes.
Tony
Blair, like Bush, has no compassion for the victims of the neo-con scheme
to reorder the world -- beginning with the Middle East. Blair is a robot,
too. He is programmed for murder and devastation. Clinton -- who bombed
both Yugoslavia and Iraq -- taught his protege Tony Blair well.
More
specifically, it's not dead people that irk Blair -- not even dead Brits,
per se -- but rather the reaction of common and mostly decent British
citizens to these horrific images and what they mean.
It's
all about how photos and video negatively impact support for the illegal
Bush-Blair invasion of the Iraqi people, a people already suffering
from more than a decade of sadistic and cruel Anglo-American imposed
sanctions. More than 500,000 Iraqi children perished as a direct result
of those sanctions. It's a crime of Hitlerian dimensions.
In
Britain, some people are talking about packing Tony off to The Hague.
I support them, with one caveat: George W. Bush must be handcuffed to
Blair when he boards the plane.
It
was the UK Sun that reported the death of Private Jessica Lynch, 19,
a US Army supply clerk who joined the US military because she couldn't
find a job in the Bush-Enron economy.
Lynch was one of 12 US soldiers killed by Iraqi soldiers in the ambush
of a supply convoy.
Jessica's
cousin, Lorene Cumbridge, told the media for "West Virginia children
in some of the more rural areas, the military is the one good chance
of getting an education and making something of themselves."
"The
path we are taking is not easy, and it may be long," Bush told
several thousand working class and poor kid-soldiers at MacDill Air
Force Base. "Every day has brought us closer to our objective."
Ah,
yes, the all-important objective.
Shall
we summarize?
Jessica
Lynch died for a) oil and the destruction of an increasingly euro-based
OPEC, 2) the Israelis -- who stand to benefit from this criminal invasion
more than anybody beyond multinational corporations -- and 3) because
the Bushites want the world to know in no uncertain terms that the US
will bomb and slaughter "vassals" -- as neo-con swami Zbigniew
Brzezinski calls people in the third world who resist New World Order
gangsterism -- the rest of humanity must understand that we are indeed
a nation of merciless robot killers in hire of Halliburton and Exxon
and the Enrons of the future.
Oh,
and let's not forget those 40 million or so Christian Zionists who demand
the Middle East be swept clean of unChristianized Arabs -- and, eventually,
Jews and all other non-believers -- so they can go to Heaven while the
rest of us burn in Hell.
Final
price?
Possibly
a half million or more innocent Iraqis and a few -- dozen, hundred,
thousand? -- working class kids like Jessica Lynch, not to mention a
few hundred billion dollars.
Bush
is doomed to failure, maybe (hopefully) even criminal charges, because
neo-cons such as Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen are unable to understand
a very simple and human behavior pattern -- when attacked, most people
will defend themselves. Ask the Vietnamese peasants who kicked the ass
of the baddest and most deadly military force in the world.
It's
called a home court advantage and Bush doesn't get it.
Some
of us knew it would turn out this way, but there's no time to say we
told you so.
We're
at a very dangerous intersection in this invasion -- the US is stalled
against the sheer intestinal fortitude and anger of the Iraqi people,
many of whom are resisting the invasion violently.
It's
not Saddam they fear at this moment, but the global vampire crew of
Bush and his "thinkers" -- fat-ass wealthy "thinkers"
such as Richard Perle who seem to believe people in the third world,
especially Arabs, can easily be rolled over with clanking tank treads,
their aspirations crushed without much effective resistance.
Once
again, history teaches.
Once
again, history shows the Richard Perles of the world up for what they
are -- amazingly stupid, arrogant, racist, reckless, and criminal.
Bush
and his Pentagon planners want to avoid bombing Iraq's already decimated
infrastructure -- not because they wish to avoid the human cost associated
with such a brutal act, but rather because bombing Iraq to a Stone Age
condition will make it more difficult to lord over the country, set
up military bases in short order for future invasions in the neighborhood,
and steal the oil. As well, killing too many Iraqis makes for resentful
vassals and uncooperative near-slave laborers.
But
then so does occupation, as the Israelis have learned. Instead of learning
from history and understanding human behavior, both the Americans and
the Israelis plod heavily toward defeat. In this way they are like Afrikaners
and other miserable colonialists of the not-too-distant past.
Iraqis
will continue their violent resistance to the criminal invasion. So
the real Shock and Awe phase may now begin in earnest. It's serious
now, infrastructure be damned. The Israelis and Christian Zionists demand
no less than pre-Armageddon devastation.
In
other words, more dead people, and a whole lot of them.
As
a result, more Iraqis missing a father or mother or brother and sister
will now pick up a gun or a suicide bomb and take out American kids
from West Virginia, Nebraska, and South Dakota. One foot in the quagmire,
the US begins its intractable and predictable descent. The sum total
will be nearly unimaginable suffering and death.
It
will be the end of America as we know it.
No
doubt, emboldened and driven by a shot list cobbled together by demented
and immoral neo-con overseers, Bush will attack Iran and Syria next
-- in fact, he has already lobbed missiles into both countries.
Arabs
remember the Crusades all too well. Bush's Christian Zionist philosophy
is not lost on them.
They
also listen to what the Israelis have to say, especially the crazed
settlers who seem to be running the government there now. Ethnic cleansing
is a casual topic of discussion in Israeli cafes at this very moment.
For
millions of Arabs, this is nothing short of a religious war -- a high-tech
continuation of the Crusades.
Is
it logical to conclude that as the US military attacks Kerbala and Najaf
-- towns Shia Muslims consider infinitely holy -- the average Muslim
will effortlessly reach the conclusion that the Crusader infidels and
the Israeli colonizers have finally arrived to eradicate Islam?
It
doesn't help when neo-cons start talking about editing the Koran after
they domesticate -- or is it democratize? -- the primitive vassal Arabs
and Iranians.
Did
George Bush sincerely believe the Arabs would simply give up and welcome
their self-proclaimed liberators with open arms?
It's
the racist elitism of Bush and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
and the PNAC think tank white paper writers and scriveners in the Pentagon
and so-called intellectuals over at JINSA and AEI that are cajoling
and shoving the American people into protracted and unsustainable war.
The ultimate result of all this traitorous collusion will be more dead
people.
In
the months ahead more and more average Americans will find themselves
distressed by increasing numbers of dead people -- and many of these
usually peace-loving Americans will recognize the names of the dead
-- and maybe they will do something decisive, something capable of unseating
the neo-con and Christian Zionist ideologues before they torch the entire
planet with their self-destructive ideas and devious plans.
It
may take something more than 500,000 people gathered in New York and
San Francisco and Lisbon and Paris and nearly everywhere else.
It
will take direct action from this point forward -- and we know what
that means, as do the men surrounding the George Bush, the unpresident.
He
doesn't want you to go there.
Kurt Nimmo is a regular CounterPunch contributor. Bookmark
his excellent website Another Day in the Empire http://nimmo.blogspot.com/
Yesterday's Features
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
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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