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Recent Stories
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
27, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
From
"Plain Sailing" to "Where the Hell Are We?" to "Up
the Creek"
By ALEXANDER
COCKBURN
Barely
into its second week Operation Easy Sailing is in big trouble. One simple
way of measuring just how big is by adding up all the time you hear
the phrases “all according to Plan”, and the “Our
strategy is sound”.
That’s the
captain of the Titanic speaking. At the military level the US/UK force
has been forced to suspend its advance on Baghdad. Every single dire
prediction of the critics is coming to pass. The stretched lines of
communication and supply running up west of the Euphrates past Nasiriya
and Najaf, or further east , west of the Tigris past Basra towards Amarah
are proving vulnerable to determined harassment by Iraqi forces. The
Apache helicopters have taken a fearful beating, as have the Abrams
tanks. The Shock and Awe overture saw around 400 cruise missiles, running
at half a million dollars a copy achieve less than significant damage.
Already there’s fierce hand-to-hand infighting inside the Pentagon,
as Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s numerous enemies in the military
seek out favored journalist to inflict punitive retaliation for what
they describe as his arrogance and folly. Those old lines from the Vietnam
era, such as “light at the end of the tunnel”, “credibility
gap” and the other scarred veterans are back in active service.
Politically, the
damage is equally, if not more serious. The entire strategy of Bush
and his counselors, the relatively small military force, the “roll
north” (or “roll south” until the Turkish people,
bolstered by the world peace movement decreed otherwise) scenario, were
premised on disintegration of the Saddam regime and amiable surrender
of all enemy forces once the first missiles fell on empty palaces in
Baghdad and tanks rolled across the Iraqi border towards Umm Qasr.
That political strategy
lies in ruins as instructive as the gravestones of the British force
caught and wiped out at Kut by the Turks almost a century ago. From
Umm Qasr through to Najaf towards Baghdad Iraqis are resisting fiercely.
The credibility of the Iraqi exiles, on call as figleaf leaders has
dwindled to zero. Back in the homelands of the US/UK invaders the peace
movement proved its durability, with huge demonstrations. Much of the
world is revelling in Imperial Reverses, and that in itself is an event
of vast political significance. The supposed news monopoly of the American
Empire has similarly collapsed. The European audience of subscribers
to Al Jazeera surged by four million in the first week.
Anyone with a laptop
can find their way to informed sources, such as the daily bulletins
of Russian military intelligence, or the knowledgeable commentary of
US veterans, that demolish the parrot babble of the Embedded Ones.
Even the core
Spokesfolk of Empire like the Washington Post are facing reality.
Here’s how the Washington Post addresses the political elites
today, with a report by Thomas Ricks:
“March 27 — Despite the rapid advance of Army and Marine
forces across Iraq over the past week, some senior U.S. military officers
are now convinced that the war is likely to last months and will require
considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in Kuwait,
senior defense officials said yesterday.
“The combination
of wretched weather, long and insecure supply lines, and an enemy
that has refused to be supine in the face of American military might
has led to a broad reassessment by some top generals of U.S. military
expectations and timelines. Some of them see even the potential threat
of a drawn-out fight that sucks in more and more U.S. forces. Both
on the battlefield in Iraq and in Pentagon conference rooms, military
commanders were talking yesterday about a longer, harder war than
had been expected just a week ago, the officials said.
“Tell me
how this ends,” one senior officer said yesterday. While some
top planners favor continuing to press north, most Army commanders
believe that the pause in Army ground operations that began yesterday
is critical. A relatively small force is stretched thin over 300 miles,
and much of the Army’s killing power, in more than 100 AH-64
Apache attack helicopters, has been grounded by persistently foul
weather or by battle damage from an unsuccessful pre-dawn raid on
Monday. To the east, the Marine Corps advance on the city of Kut was
also hampered by skirmishing along its supply line and fuel shortages
at the front.”
And amid these reverses,
the battle for hearts and minds inside Iraq is taking familiar forms.
Here’s Patrick Peterson of the Knight Ridder news chain, dateline
Nasiriya,
“U.S. Marines,
moving through this still-contested city, opened fire at anything
that moved Tuesday, leaving dozens of dead in their wake, at least
some of them civilians. Helicopter gunships circled overhead, unleashing
Hellfire missiles into the squat mud-brick homes and firing their
machine guns, raining spent cartridge cases into neighborhoods. Occasionally
a tank blasted a hole in a house. Several bodies fell in alleys. It
was impossible to know which casualties were civilians and which were
members of the Iraqi militias that have ambushed Marine convoys here
for days as the Marines tried to cross the Euphrates River on a rapid
march north to Al Kut, where they are expected to engage elements
of Iraq's Republican Guard….”
We are, remember,
just past the anniversary of the My Lai massacre, March 16, 1968, when
American Gis, part of Operation Phoenix, machine-gunned hundreds upon
hundreds of women and babies and old men in a trench in Vietnam, where
US forces tried to suppression resistance in an area far smaller than
what they propose to control in the Fertile Crescent today. Now roll
fast forward to today’s US excursion: “’I saw a lot
of bloodshed,’ said Sgt. Ken Woechan, 23, a reservist and assistant
Wal-Mart manager from Ocean Springs. Miss. Woechan said at Nasiriya
he saw what he believed were militiamen hiding behind women and children.
‘A family would run across and there would be a guy behind them,’
he said.”
It doesn’t take any imagination to see what’s going to unroll
in the next days and weeks, as the US/UK forces try to consolidate their
lines through south and central Iraq.
The old Scorched
Earth Strategy is already beginning to unfurl, as the talk of Precision
Attacks fades, and the B-52s slowly widen their attack patterns, and
“softening up” the Republican guard means bombing neighborhoods
in Baghdad. Three hundred miles south, the British are already committing
war crimes by cutting off the water supplies of Basra, an attack on
a civilian population that has not gone unnoticed back in London, where
Tam Dalyell, Labor MP for Linlithgow and Father of the House of Commons
writes today in the Guardian of Blair as a war criminal who should be
sent for trial in the Hague.
“My constituency
Labour party has just voted to recommend that Tony Blair reconsider
his position as party leader because he gave British backing to a
war against Iraq without clearly expressed support from the UN .I
agree with this motion. I also believe that since Mr Blair is going
ahead with his support for a US attack without unambiguous UN authorisation,
he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague. I have
served in the House of Commons as a Labour member for 41 years,and
I would never have dreamed of saying this about any one of my previous
leaders. But Blair is a man who has disdain for both the House of
Commons and international law. This is a grave thing to say about
my leader. But it is far less serious than the results of a war that
could set western Christendom against Islam.The overwhelming majority
of international lawyers, including several who advise the government
(such as Rabinder Singh, a partner in Cherie Booth's Matrix Chambers),
have concluded that military action in Iraq without proper UN security
council authorisation is illegal under international law. The Foreign
Office's deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, resigned on precisely
this point after 30 years' service. This puts the prime minister and
those who will be fighting in his and President Bush's name in a vulnerable
legal position. Already lawyers are getting phone calls from anxious
members of the armed forces.”
One final quote,
from a Knight Ridder story describing the Pentagon in-fighting, quoting
an anonymous officer:” He added ruefully: ‘As in Operation
Anaconda in Afghanistan, we are using concepts and methods that are
entirely unproved. If your strategy and assumptions are flawed, there
is nothing in the well to draw from… If these guys fight and fight
hard for Baghdad, with embedded Baathists stiffening their resistance
at the point of a gun, then we are up the creek,’ said one retired
general. Dr. John Collins, a retired Army colonel and
former chief researcher for the Library of Congress, said the worst
scenario would be sending American troops to fight for Baghdad. He said
every military commander since Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist,
has hated urban warfare. "Military casualties normally soar on
both sides; innocent civilians lose lives and suffer severe privation;
reconstruction costs skyrocket," Collins said, adding that fighting
for the capital would cancel out the allied advantages in air and armor
and reduce it to an Infantry battle house to house, street by street.”
It all comes from
political arrogance. Here’s a story from The Guardian last August,
re-run gleefully by LSN. “The biggest war game in US military
history, staged this month at a cost of 165m with 13,000 troops, was
rigged to ensure that the Americans beat their ‘Middle Eastern’
adversaries, according to one of the main
participants. General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine lieutenant-general,
told the Army Times that the sprawling three-week millennium challenge
exercises, were "almost entirely scripted to ensure a [US] win".
And
Hitchens?
We always have a
little space for him. Here’s a story from the British Daily Telegraph
by Tony Harndon in Washington DC, March 20.
"Last week,
in a private and unpublicized lecture at the White House, Hitchens,
a former Trotskyite who has called for Henry Kissinger to be indicted
as a war criminal, addressed officials about the moral imperative
to unseat Saddam Hussein.”
Gee, maybe soon
we’ll be able to script The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. And
here’s a note of mine that the Washington Times just published.
From Alexander
Cockburn
To Washington Times Letters editor
March 24, 2003
Sir, In their
piece of March 21 about Christopher Hitchens' transition to the right
your reporters Galupo and Wattenberg write that "Mr. Cockburn
is publicly accusing his old friend of homosexuality." This is
entirely untrue. I did recently comment on Hitchens' notorious enjoyment
of alcohol, a taste on which he dwells at some length in a recent
column in Vanity Fair, saying (optimistically in the view of many
of his acquaintances) that it is his servant, not his master. Maybe
in the virtuous offices of the Washington Times the two tastes are
regarded as synonymous. In an effort to account for Hitchens' increasing
seclusion in fantasy I discussed Korsakoff's syndrome, a condition
of advanced drinkers where delusions attain paramountcy in the drinker's
brain. Back in Clinton-time when Hitchens tried to get his close friend
Sid Blumenthal nailed by Congress on a perjury rap I did allude in
a column to Hitchens' habit of greeting friends with a proffered kiss
on cheek or even lips, but my allusion there was to Judas Iscariot,
not to Athenian practices.
Yours,
Alexander Cockburn
Yesterday's Features
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
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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