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Recent Stories
March 28, 2003
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
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
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Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
28, 2003
When Bombs Replace Reason
Technological
Massacre
By SAUL LANDAU
We
must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen
leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they
started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial
of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or
policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced
and condemned as an instrument of policy.
--Supreme
Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, U.S. Representative to the International
Conference on Military Trials, August 12, 1945
Bombs
rained on Baghdad.
Buildings
I had visited in September 2002 had disappeared in fire and smoke. I
hoped that the smiling Iraqi janitors and maintenance staff who had
said welcome in heavily accented English had not remained on the premises.
In Tariq Aziz's office, now obliterated, the Deputy Prime Minister resisted
former Senator Jim Abourezk and Congressman Nick Rahall's persuasive
arguments to allow the UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq. "Without
guarantees that he [Bush] will not attack, why should we concede?"
he asked. The inspectors, after all, had given President Clinton the
coordinates for targets to bomb and had provided US and British intelligence
with data on military matters far a field from weapons of mass destruction.
"If you're doomed if you do [let the inspectors in] and doomed
if you don't," said Aziz, "you'd better don't." Iraqi
leaders overruled him and the inspectors returned. I don't know if they
will find evidence of the much touted hidden weapons, but Aziz has proven
correct.
The
liberation of Iraq, announced the president on March 19, was underway.
I watched the improved rerun of the TV light show of bombs and missiles
destroying property, followed by truly shocking and awesome shots of
flames and smoke, while an embedded voice prattled on with details of
the coalition's progress. The 103rd captured blah blah, while the 74th
marched northward with little opposition. Corporal Smith of the 3rd
infantry wrote a letter to his wife, while Private Jones talked with
tears in his eyes about his newborn baby girl.
A
few marine casualties, no reports of the numbers of Iraqi dead, some
speculation as to the number of Iraqis who had surrendered, rumors of
Saddam being dead or wounded. Then, some war footage of US technology
obliterating the primitive Iraqi forces. Yes, truth becomes war's first
victim. Indeed, it had suffered near fatal wounds before the war. But
how do we separate the big lies from the innocuous ones?
The
lies about how many dead and wounded, how many Iraqis surrendered and
in which direction the 104th was moving pale in comparison with the
foundation of lies established before the technological massacre began.
In December 2002, the White House declared that ''the greatest danger
our nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology.''
As David von Drehle quoted a security document in the March 21, 2003
Washington Post, "Our enemies have openly declared that they are
seeking weapons of mass destruction. . . . The United States will not
allow these efforts to succeed.''
Instead
of using verbal logic, Washington now relies on the logic of bombing
the shock and awe method of reasoning. It has invented a cause dethroning
tyrants, liberating oppressed people and assuring that our enemies or
potential enemies do not possess weapons of mass destruction that they
can use or deliver to terrorists.
The
United States doesn't have a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction
but it can certainly out-compete the rest of the world combined as it
has demonstrated over the last dozen years in the 1991Gulf War and in
serial bombings of various third world targets since then. No matter
how short or warped memories have become, surely some people will recall
that the United States is unique among nations for its use of atomic
weapons, that the United States and England engaged in firebombing entire
cities in Germany and Japan, that the United States has just tested
a MOAB (mother of all bombs) and remains the only nation that has threatened
to use nuclear weapons in pre-emptive strikes against nations it defines
as potential threats. Britain, by the way, introduced poison gas as
a weapon in the Middle East after World War I to suppress nationalist
uprisings.
One
of the most pernicious lies that Bush has told has the terrorists who
operate in many countries linked to Saddam Hussein. He had repeated
references to Iraq and the 9/11 ghouls so often that according to polls
nearly half the US public believed such ties actually existed. If they
do, one wonders, why doesn't he show us or our skeptical allies some
solid evidence of these connections? In Iraq I heard nothing but hatred
and contempt for the Wahabbi sect members who crashed planes into buildings.
From officials and people on the street, the universal attitude of contempt
for those terrorists prevailed. And, of course, bin Laden himself has
expressed his contempt for Saddam Hussein. You would not know this if
you restricted yourself to watching TV news or reading newspaper headlines.
In
my fantasy I see a day when courageous editors fashion headlines or
TV teases: "Bush Repeats Same Old Crap!" Instead, they uncritically
repeat his lies and then cut to the next un-related story or commercial.
Similarly,
when the Administration used forged documents to try to show that Saddam
had an on-going nuclear program, the media remained un-skeptical. After
the war began, the following appeared.
"On
the eve of Mr. Bush's ultimatum, it came to light that a key piece of
evidence used by the Bush administration to link Iraq to a nuclear weapons
program is a forgery," wrote the conservative Craig Paul Roberts
in the March 21, 2003 Washington Times. Roberts reports that Sen. Jay
Rockefeller of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, has asked the FBI to investigate the origin of the forged
documents that the Bush administration used to make its case that Saddam
Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State Colin
Powell denies that the Bush administration created the phony documents.
"It came from other sources," Mr. Powell told Congress. But
he could not identify the source.
On
March 22, after the bombs had destroyed Baghdad, Washington Post reporters
Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung wrote that CIA officials now say they
communicated significant doubts to the administration about the evidence
backing up charges that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa for
nuclear weapons, charges that found their way into President Bush's
State of the Union address, a State Department `fact sheet and public
remarks by numerous senior officials.
According
to several officials, decisions about what information to declassify
and use to make the administration's public case have been made by a
small group that includes top CIA and National Security Council officials.
"The policy guys make decisions about things like this," said
one official, referring to the uranium evidence. When the State Department
"fact sheet" was issued, the official said, "people winced
and thought, 'Why are you repeating this trash'?"
But
these officials don't resign and the media does not emphasize the Administration's
duplicity. Indeed, Fox and CNN reporters continued to repeat lies about
Saddam's nuclear program and underplayed the revelation about the forged
documents. Lies become headlines. Truth screams silently in pain!
Lies
told by the fathers, lies told by the sons. Remember how Daddy George
had liberated Panama by arresting the arch villain of 1989, Manuel Noriega,
for narco-trafficking? At his subsequent trial in Florida the US government
presented fifty-two witnesses, all of them convicted felons to attest
to Noriega's illegal drug dealings. I don't recall any DEA or CIA agents
testifying that Noriega had given them major tips to arrest big-time
drug cartel heavies and bust whole drug labs or that he had for years
provided the United States with crucial intelligence information on
the region. Yes, truth gets lost in war and in rigged court trials.
After
Panama, Bush 41 freed Kuwait, and then decided to stop his imperial
adventures. The presidential elections, after all, were too close to
risk having a US occupation force in Iraq.
Baby
Bush launched his war or Technological Massacre II to disarm Iraq. Using
massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction to level a city of
five million people, the US armed forces will now seek out Saddam's
tiny quantity of biological and chemical weapons. I have every reason
to believe they will find it whether or not Saddam really had it.
A
few journalists might raise skeptical questions, but most will accept
whatever proof Bush offers to justify his first vicarious taste of combat,
which he continues to speak with several tongues. The shock and awe
display of carnage will intimidate dictators who harbor terrorists and
direct non-harborers in the region toward democracy.
The
elated Iraqi people will now build a free society. This means, I suppose
that they will now join the corporate global order as proper factory
workers and consumers. People of Iran, North Korea, Libya, Cuba etc.
take note!!!
Iraq
will soon shine as an example of freedom to all other Islamic societies,
the President has promised. Above all, the massive tonnage dropped on
Iraq should signal the entire world: don't mess with the United States
of America. Ironically, of course, Iraq did not provoke the United States
or threaten it directly or indirectly. That little fact no longer matters.
The victors don't need to worry about facing war crimes tribunals yet.
In
the past two years, the always vague meaning of "national security"
has changed. "The struggle against global terrorism is different
from any other war in our history," wrote the authors of the September
2002 National Security doctrine paper. The paper warned that the war
against the elusive enemy will be fought on many fronts and over an
extended period of time.
So
if you've still retained a modicum of human sensibility, don't expect
your feelings of horror to abate. The authors of the new doctrine declare
that "progress will come through the persistent accumulation of
successes some seen, some unseen." Remember the words of Bush to
Congress on September 20, 2001:
''Americans
should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other
we have ever seen,'' Bush declared. The American people need to know
we're facing a different enemy than we have ever faced. The United
States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy.''
Bush
targeted not just terrorists but also sovereign nations that ''harbor''
terrorists. And the mission continued to expand. By September 2002,
a year after the attacks, the new security strategy cast the net broadly,
declaring that ''America will hold to account nations that are compromised
by terror.'' He has yet to define ''compromised'.
The
overreaching strategy behind the ''shock and awe'' bombing of Baghdad
aims at the masses of Middle Eastern people who now hate America more
than ever.
As
Joe Stalin purportedly asked after an adviser told him of the Pope's
opposition to his policies, "how many divisions does the Pope have?"
We shall soon find out how many divisions the Arab streets have, how
many world public opinion can wield and how many the anti-war protestors
inside the United States and England can put into play. Divisions can
boycott US products and make life seriously uncomfortable for US and
British business travelers, emissaries and tourists. This is democracy.
What
the President speaks of democracy he means its opposite.With his beady
eyes rolling in reverie, Bush praises the virtues of democracy as if
oblivious to the fact that he consorts with anti-democratic tyrants
in host of countries, like Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Kuwait. He talks
of spreading freedom and liberty abroad while Attorney General Ayatollah
Ashcroft reduces our domestic liberties.
If
that's not enough, prepare for a world in which the authors of the war
will try to kill the United Nations or reduce it to the benign status
of the League of Nations before World War II. If you doubt this, see
Richard Perle's column, reprinted in the March 21, 2003 Guardian. The
headline reads: "Thank God for the death of the UN."
In
1964, Mario Savio exhorted students at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
His words remain the appropriate response to the Perles and the imperialists
in the White House.
"There
is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes
you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon
all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.”
Saul
Landau is the Director of Digital Media and International Outreach
Programs for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences at Cal
Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Get his latest film, IRAQ: VOICES FROM THE STREETS. Call Cinema Guild
1-800-723-5522. He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org
Today'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
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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