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Recent
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April
9, 2003
Doug
Lummis
Saving Private Lynch: Hollywood and
War
Susan
Davis
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
David Vest
Smoking Gun? You're Watching It
John
Chuckman
America's Sovereign Right to Do
as It Damn Well Pleases
Akiva
Eldar
Gary Bauer and AIPAC: an Unholy Alliance
with the Christian Right
Ray
Hanania
Suicide Bombers without the Suicide:
Racism, Hypocrisy and the War on Iraq
David Lindorff
Secret Bechtel Docs Reveal: Yes,
the War Is About Oil
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/9
April
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Killing the Messengers: It Doesn't
Matter If It's Deliberate or Accidental
Richard
Lichtman
Dr. Phil in the Trenches
John
Brown
Why Uncle Ben Hasn't Sold Uncle Sam:
a Former Foreign Service Staffer on Bush's Policy Failures
Ben
Terrall
Report from the Oakland Docks: "The
Cops Had No Reason to Open Up on Them"
Jason Leopold
FERC and Wall Street: Conversations
May Have Violated Federal Law
Anthony
Gancarski
Conyers Heeds the Call on Perle
Linda Heard
Journalists Die, the Networks Lie, Iraqis Ask "Why?"
Ahmad
Faruqui
Wallowing in Hypocrisy
Wallace
Gagne
Baghdad Babble
Harry
Browne
Report from the Protests at the Bush/Blair
Summit
Larry Kearney
I Understand There's a Boy in
a Baghdad Hospital
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/8
M. Shahid
Alam
The Israelization of America
April
7, 2003
Todd
Chretien
Wooden Bullets & Grenades: Oakland
Cops Attack Peace Protesters and Dock Workers
David
N. Gibbs
Spying, Secrecy and the University:
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Harry Browne
War and Peace Summit a Royal Farce
Gideon
Levy
America is Not a Role Model
Diane
Christian
A Scene from an Obscene War
Jules
Rabin
Remembering Deir Yassin
James Davis
Oddsmaking in Dublin: Will Bush
Shake Gerry's Hand?
Robert
Fisk
The Twisted Language of War
Patrick
Cockburn
Slaughter on the Road to Dibagah
John
Mackay
War and Art
Seth Sandronsky
Wars and the Color Line
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/7
April
5, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Iraqi Humanitarian Relief is
in Shambles
Anne
Gwynne
A Drowning in Salem
Uri
Avnery
Roadmap to Nowhere
Chris
Floyd
Hell for Leather: Bombs, Bullets, Bibles and Bush
William
Cook
Would You Have Sent Your Son (or Daughter) Off to War If...
Gila
Svirsky
A Busy Day for Bulldozers
Mike Ferner
Back from Baghdad: What Next for the Peace Movement?
Joanne
Mariner
Civilian Deaths and Official Apologies
John Stanton
Bush Takes His Killing Orders
from the Lord
Romi
Mahajan
Learning to Count the Dead
Aluf Benn
After Iraq, US Vows to Deal with
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Mary
Ellen Peterson
Gay Marine Refuses to Fight
William
MacDougall
Country Music and the Crimes of Patriotism
Ron
Jacobs
War and Occupation
Bernie
Pattison
Aborigines and the Different God
Mark
Engler
Iraq War as Arms Expo
Adam Engel
Li'l Box of Love: a Novelini
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Tripp, Albert, Katz
Jeffrey
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Madarasz
Canada and the War
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4, 2003
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Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
Was Einstein Right About Israel?
David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
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Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
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Prashad
There Are No More Arguments
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Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
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Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
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Perry
War Web Log 04/04
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3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
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David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
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Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
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Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
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Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
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War's First Week
Steve
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War Web Log 04/03
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April 10,
2003
The Dance of
Lawlessness
Last Tango in Baghdad
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Then trample and dance, thou
Oppressor!
For thy victim is no redressor;
Thou art her sole possesor
Of her corpses and clods and abortions--
they pave the path to the grave.
Hearest thou the festival din
Of death and destruction and sin,
And Wealth crying Havoc! within?
Tis the bacchanal triumph that makes Truth dumb,
Thine Epithalamium.
Lines Written During the Castlereagh
Administration
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819
There's a ritual scene in many westerns of the
50s. A drunken gunslinger picks out a frail bar patron, bullies
him into the street and barks, "Dance". When the befuddled
man doesn't respond immediately, the smirking gunslinger fires
his six-shooter at the feet of the unlucky dupe until he is forced
to dance a sadistic jig. The nervy townsfolk clap to the beat
of the bullets. They'd better.
So it goes in Baghdad. Iraqis dance in
the streets. Flowers are piled on top of M-1 tanks. The bronze
idols of a power maddened regime are smashed.
Is it jubilation over the fall of Saddam?
Or relief because the American bombs have finally stopped falling?
Is the outcry one of genuine gratitude for liberation? Or a sensible
attempt to ingratiate themselves with their conquerors? Or a
mixture of the above? Remember the Shi'ia cheered the entry of
the Israelis into Lebanon.
The war was a cakewalk after all: the
path paved by the bodies of Iraqi civilians and conscripts, who
died defenseless against a storm of remote control bombs.
The three week invasion offered barely
a battle to speak of: a few small arms firefights, a couple of
wobbly Scuds launched harmlessly into the Kuwaiti desert, an
ambush or two. That was about the most the Iraqis choose (or
could) mount. Even the gurus of 4th Generation Warfare must feel
cheated that the much-ballyhooed asymmetrical street fight never
really materialized. The Americans killed nearly as many American
and British soldiers as the Iraqis did.
This begs the question: if it was so
easy, why was it necessary? How big of a threat was the Beast
of Baghdad, after all? Did his rusting army, even the supposedly
fearsome Republican Guard, really pose any kind of the threat
to the US? Or even the pampered sheiks of Kuwait?
The relentlessly hyped arsenal Weapons
of Mass Destruction were never used, if they even existed in
any militarily useful condition to begin with. The long-range
rockets were never launched. The oil wells and dams were never
dynamited, despite Rumsfeld's pompous claims about "environmental
terrorism"-surely one of the crudest hypocrisies yet uttered
by this apex hypocrite.
Why was it necessary? Who benefits? What
will happen once the military moves on?
These are questions that will never get
serious answer over here. Indeed, the questions may even never
be asked, in the scripted kabuki shows that are passed off as
Bush press conferences.
Too bad. They are the only questions
that really matter.
So Bush and Blair wallow in their triumph,
the Beavis and Butthead of the new Imperium. Blair at least seems
harried, a bit chastened by the bitter upheaval against him in
Britain and by acting as a hatchet man for the Dauphin from Crawford.
Bush drifts deeper and deeper in messianic
stupor each day. He has assumed a new pose: chin lifted, eyes
fixed on the heavens as if waiting on his next communication
from God. Where is the Goya of Los
Caprichos when you need him most?
Meanwhile, American war profiteers and
fundamentalist preachers are poised to descend on Iraq like carrion
feeders. US troops have been instructed to pray before they begin
their daily routine of destruction and death-making. Army chaplains
withhold water to parched civilians in exchange for Christian
baptisms. Franklin Graham, minister to the President, hovers
in Jordan, like a vainglorious Rasputin, itching to unleash his
robotic minions on the people of Iraq to desecrate their religion
and rack up conversions to his apocalyptic brand of Christianity
like a body count for the Lord.
Halliburton executives are no doubt dejected
that Saddam's men didn't torch more oil wells in southern Iraq
and must be pinning their hopes on errant smart bombs to make
up for the shortfall by doing damage to the northern oil fields
outside Kirkuk. Billions are at stake. The war must go on.
One of the other corporate sponsors of
the Iraq invasion is Fluor-Daniel, the southern California-based
company staffed by former Pentagon and CIA officials. Fluor is
a front-runner in the quest to get the $600 million contract
to rebuild Iraq's roads and public buildings. It has a financial
stake in wide-spread looting.
Fluor bills itself as an environmental
services company though its track record is more harrowing than
Dow Chemical's. In the mid-90s, Fluor took over the management
of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, arguably
the most polluted site in North America. Aggressive cost-cutting
measures and radioactive waste don't mix, as the people of the
Pacific Northwest discovered to their horror when Fluor's mismanagement
of the site nearly caused an explosion that would have spewed
radioactive debris from Spokane to Portland. Fluor's flirtation
with a real dirty bomb makes Saddam's nuclear program look like
a high school chemistry lab.
But it gets worse. Fluor's tactics are
as vicious as any American company since the days of Anaconda
Copper. In a lawsuit filed last week, a lawyer for South African
workers details how Fluor brutalized and exploited its black
workers. "This company has a long history of human rights
violations in South Africa," says John Ngcebetsha, a lawyer
for the workers. "It cares nothing about the society's in
which it works and its involvement in Iraq would be disastrous."
The lawsuit claims that Fluor hired former
members of the South African secret police to work as security
guards and then dressed them up in Ku Klux Klan robes to smash
a strike by workers protesting meager wages and horrid working
conditions. Good morning, Baghdad: Let freedom ring.
Over at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and his
loathsome henchman Paul Wolfowitz busily plot a new round of
threat inflation and target other recalcitrant regimes. Lately,
the talk has been of smashing Syria and the old whipping boy,
Qaddafy, in Libya. Iran and North Korea are already on the hit
list as part of the infamous Axis of Evil. One wonders what lesson
they've taken from all this? Will preemptive wars send a "use
it or loose it" message to Pyongyang and Teheran. Does it
make a nuclear strike on South Korea or Japan a near certainty?
Also watch for the war-plotters to shift
the crosshairs back closer to home, back to the other obsession
of the Reagan era: Central and South America. Of course, they've
never really stopped.
The Pentagon's proxy war continues unabated
in Colombia. In Venezuela, the CIA tried to topple Chavez once
and failed. They will try again. Bolivia is becoming unruly.
Lula must be taught a lesson. And, in a regime fixated on settling
old scores, the biggest prize of all sits only 90 miles away:
Castro's Cuba, another nation emaciated by a cruel embargo. Already
there are reports of renewed CIA mischief in Havana. Rest assured,
the Bush gang doesn't want Castro to die in power. His toppling
would be their ultimate glory.
Early on I held out some hope that the
fatuous Rumsfeld might be forced out as a result of his incessant
meddling with the war plan. But now he preens in triumph, like
Scipio Africanus overseeing the final humiliation of Carthage.
His mania has been only been whetted. Rumsfeld is man of overweening
vanity. He publicly relishes each big blast, scoffing as the
corpses pile up in rotting mounds in the morgue at Al-Kindi Hospital,
like the Vincent Price character in Roger Corman's darkly prescient
masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death. Rumsfeld's rationalizations
for war are a facile game of three card monte.
Why did Rumsfeld make the assassination-
by-bunker- buster-bomb of Saddam and his family such an unyielding
obsession? The bungled hits cost tens of millions each, put US
pilots at risk and slaughtered dozens of nameless innocents.
It seems obvious that the Bush gang desperately wants to avoid
a war crimes trial, where the legitimacy of their invasion might
be put to a fatal legal test.
Official lawlessness is the new order
of the day and corporate looters roam the globe, packing cruise
missiles as their dance card.
So heed to the music and step fast. The
dance of death has only just begun.
Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Been Brown So Long, It Looked Like
Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, will be published in
September by Common Courage Press.
Today's
Features
Doug
Lummis
Saving Private Lynch: Hollywood and
War
Susan
Davis
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
David Vest
Smoking Gun? You're Watching It
John
Chuckman
America's Sovereign Right to Do
as It Damn Well Pleases
Akiva
Eldar
Gary Bauer and AIPAC: an Unholy Alliance
with the Christian Right
Ray
Hanania
Suicide Bombers without the Suicide:
Racism, Hypocrisy and the War on Iraq
David Lindorff
Secret Bechtel Docs Reveal: Yes,
the War Is About Oil
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/9
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