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Recent
Stories
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
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
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
Stew Albert
Total War
Website
of the Day
Traitor List: Sign Up Now!
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 4,
2003
A Dishonest
Reality Show
Pinocchios
of G-Rate War Hide Scars of the X-rated Battlefield
By PIERRE TRISTAM
Dehumanizing the enemy is the first unwritten
rule of war. The impulse is psychologically excusable, because
it is easier to kill a subhuman thing than it is to kill a mirror
image of yourself (a father, a lover, a son). Thus America's
rich gallery of slur-infected enemies over the years: krauts,
wops, greasers, slants, yellow bastards, yellow monkeys, reds,
pinkos, gooks, ragheads, sand-niggers, and, every mom and pop's
current favorite, terrorists. Except in their fixation on race
and color, Americans aren't unique at this. They're Islamdom's
Great Satan of choice, remember, and the lusty stocks of porn
and bared bellies on American streets (not to mention Geraldo
and Bill O'Reilly on American airwaves) are a godsend for the
other side's muezzins of poisoned euphemisms.
To dehumanize assumes that the aim is
always to make something seem evil. But it's also possible to
dehumanize something by making it seem saintly, by placing it
beyond human reproach. Americans in this latest war are managing
to be unique in that one respect. They have "positively"
dehumanized their own troops, their own campaign, and consequently
their own means and ends in Iraq. Soldiers are not grunts or
jarheads but heroes on a mission of mercy. They won't sack or
loot on their way to victory like soldiers in every war since
Homo Sapiens first took up sticks. They're liberators who kiss
babies and treat enemy wounded. They're innocents positively
amazed that the enemy would shoot at them.
They're also pawns in the most dishonest
reality show since the Vietnam War's nightly crawl of waste on
the evening news. We are told daily of the Ba'ath Party's total
control of Iraqi society from Baghdad down to every village street
corner. But the American war effort is a study in total control,
too, of a war positively dehumanized at every level: Politicians,
military leaders and their media lackeys, in bed with the military
rather than embedded within it, are daily producing a scripted
war of advances and virtue more divorced from reality than Max's
dream in "Where the Wild Things Are."
News stories from the front for the most
part are clips for the military's "Army of One" ads,
produced in a void of analytical perspective and to the drone
of self-important reminders of inflated secrecy: "I can't
tell you where we are..." "I can't tell you where we're
going" "I can't tell you what they're doing" Of
course not. You've not only been embedded. You've been captured.
A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words. In this war,
a picture is worth a thousand veils. At home, the networks' anchored
news streams have been closest in kind to porno movies: A little
meaningless chatter sets things up, and then money shots of bomb
blasts over Baghdad or the Pentagon's latest dirty videos of
things being blown up. The human and emotional cost is an afterthought.
There is purpose behind the veil. When war is so positively dehumanized,
the possibility of defeat is eliminated. Setbacks become narrative
devices, stepping tombstones for America's moral superiority.
It is war as magical realism. But it isn't real.
Contrary to Donald Rumsfeld's G-rated
previews, the invasion of Iraq hasn't been a different kind of
war, or a more "humane" war, as he put it last week
after the "shock and awe" show. The bombs are fancier
but the blasts are their same dumb and dumber selves. Civilians
are dying by U.S. and Iraqi hands. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
have yet to make their American debut. But B-52s unloading 2,000-
and 5,000-pound bombs by the Dresden-dozen aren't quite weapons
of mannerly destruction, either. And the fiercest duels since
day one have pitted Americans against Iraqis in daily briefings
of lethal Pinocchios. Between President Bush, Rumsfeld and Gen.
Richard Myers on one side and Tarik Aziz, Taha Yassin Ramadan
and Saddam's ghost on the other, it's difficult to tell whose
noses stretch to Sodom and whose to Gomorrah.
Americans are incensed at Al-Jazeera's
broadcasting of piles of bloodied civilians and American POWs.
But it's not sensitivity. It's self-righteous cowardice. It's
also quite simple: If viewers are not disgusted by the images
they see, if they're not sick to their stomachs and wracked with
insomnia, if their faith in humanity isn't shaken to the core
from watching the war news, then they're not seeing the war.
They're watching a version as dehumanized as those blurry green
shapes scurrying across a night-vision device before being evaporated.
They're watching high-tech propaganda. In that sense, the coverage
of Al-Jazeera has been more honest than most of American media's
Goebbels-gobbled reporting. Al-Jazeera's coverage disturbs. It
angers. It keeps you up nights. As it should. War isn't "The
Tonight Show" with bombs. Nor is an Iraqi victim any less
sacred, any less deplorable, than an American.
It isn't obscene to report war's inhumanity
no matter how repellent. It is obscene to romanticize soldiers,
to sanctify the war and sanitize its consequences in order to
make it more acceptable. And that's one obscenity Americans are
happy to live with, to peddle in schools, to hang on the rustle
of yellow ribbons, to preach in church or at the next civic club
meeting, and to doze off to at night when CNN's latest from the
battlefield is as good as warm milk for a good night's sleep.
Pierre Tristam
is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at
ptristam@att.net.
Today's
Features
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
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
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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