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February
12, 2002
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
February
8, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ashcroft
the Bigot
Molly
Secours
Racism
and Real Estate
Wole Akande
World
Economic Forum:
The Aftermath
Cockburn/St.
Clair
Dita
Sari Tells Reebok
to "Shove It"
February
7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Taliban's
War on Chess
John Chuckman
Howdee,
Dick!
Tariq
Ali
Mullahs
and Heretics
February
6, 2002
Amira
Hass
On
the Edge of the
Non-Violent Demonstrations
Vivian
Berger
Sentenced
to Rape
Vladimir Georgiyev
Russian Intelligence:
War on Iraq Begins in Sept.
Tom Turnipseed
"Axis
of Evil" a Cover for Corporate Corruption?
David
Vest
The
Enron Creature
February
5, 2002
Norman
Madarasz
Dispatch
from Pôrto Alegre
Tom Malinowski
What
to do with
Our "Detainees"?
Dita Sari
Why
I Rejected the
Reebok Human Rights Award
February
4, 2002
Eric Miller/Beth
Daley
Five
Weapons Systems
That Bilk the Taxpayers
Kenneth
Roth
Dear
Condoleezza,
You've Misstated the
Geneva Convention
Robert
Jensen
The
Occupation Must End
Shahid
Alam
How
Different Are
Islamic Societies?
David
Vest
Everybody
Says I Loathe You
John Chuckman
American
Politics of Grief
February
3, 2002
Zoltan
Grossman
War
and New Military Bases
February
2, 2002
Francis
Schor
Carlucci's
Strange Career
February
1, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
The
Great Ashcroft Cover Up
Jeremy
Voas
Why
We're Suing Ashcroft
David
Vest
10
Things I Know About Him
January
31, 2002
Rahul
Mahajan
The
State of the Union:
A New Cold War
Dave Marsh
Miles
Copeland, War
and the Future of Music
John Pilger
The
Colder War
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal:
Killer Dog, Weird Couple
Dr. Susan
Block
Blowback
and Daniel Pearl
January
30, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Linda
Lay, Hill and Knowlton and the Tears of a Clown
Jack McCarthy
Free
Noelle Bush!
Michael
Ratner
Memo
to Bush: Adhere to
the Geneva Convention
Jay Moore
Proud
to be an American?
Susan
Block
The
Great Pretzel Swallower
and Guantanamo Porn
January
29, 2002
Gary Leupp
Why
This War Was, and Remains, Utterly Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Birds of Kandahar
Patrick
Cockburn
Afghan
Opium Trade
Back in Business
January
28, 2002
Larry
Chin
Brosnahan
for the Defense
Mokhiber/Weissman
Tyranny
of the Bottom Line
George
E. Curry
Civil
Rights Nominee Called Affirmative Action "Racist"
Sen. Russ
Feingold
Campaign
Finance Reform?
Think Enron
John Chuckman
Liberal?
Media?
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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February 12,
2002
America's Imperial War
Liberals
Who Backed the Afghan War are Now Lined Up with Rampant US Militarism
By George Monbiot
Never was victory so bitter. Those liberals who
supported the war in Afghanistan, and so confidently declared
that their values had triumphed in November, must now be feeling
a little exposed. Precisely who has lost, and what the extent
of their loss may be, is yet to be determined, but there can
now be little doubt that the dangerous and illiberal people
who control the US military machine have won. The bombing of
Afghanistan is already starting to look like the first shot
in a new imperial war.
In 30 years' time we may be able to tell
whether or not the people of Afghanistan have benefited from
the fighting there. The murderous Taliban have been overthrown.
Women, in Kabul at any rate, have been allowed to show their
faces in public, and readmitted into professional life. Some
$3bn has so far been pledged for aid and reconstruction. But
the only predictable feature of Afghan politics is its unpredictability.
In the absence of an effective peacekeeping force, the tensions
between the clan leaders could burst into open warfare when
the fighting season resumes in the spring. Iran, Russia and
the US are beginning, subtly, to tussle over the nation's future,
with potentially disastrous consequences for its people.
In the meantime, 7 million remain at
risk of starvation. Some regions have been made safer for aid
workers; others have become more dangerous, as looting and banditry
fill the vacuum left by the Taliban's collapse. Already, some
refugees are looking back with nostalgia to the comparative
order and stability of life under that brutal government. For
the Afghan people, the only certain and irreversible outcome
of the war so far is that some thousands of civilians have been
killed.
But other interests in Afghanistan are
doing rather nicely. On January 29, the IMF's assistant director
for monetary and exchange affairs suggested that the country
should abandon its currency and adopt the dollar instead. This
would, he explained, be a "temporary" measure, though,
he conceded, "when an economy dollarizes, it takes a little
while to undollarize". The day before, the administrator
of the US Agency for International Development revealed that
part of its aid package to Afghan farmers would take the form
of GM seed.
Both Hamid Karzai, the interim president,
and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy, were formerly employed
as consultants to UNOCAL, the US oil company which spent much
of the 1990s seeking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
UNOCAL appears to have dropped the scheme, but smaller companies
(such as Chase Energy and Caspian Energy Consulting) are now
lobbying for its revival. In October the president of Turkmenistan
wrote to the United Nations, pressing for the pipeline's construction.
More importantly, the temporary US bases
in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Caspian states appear to be
putting down roots. US military "tent cities" have
now been established in 13 places in the states bordering Afghanistan.
New airports are being built and garrisons expanded. In December,
the US assistant secretary of state Elizabeth Jones promised
that "when the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave
central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this
region."
This is beginning to look rather like
the "new imperium" which commentators such as Charles
Krauthammer have been urging on the US government. Already there
are signs that confrontation with the "axis of evil"
is coming to involve more than just containing terrorism. Writing
in the Korea Times last month, Henry Kissinger insisted: "The
issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack
on the United States, though no doubt there was some intelligence
contact between Iraqi intelligence and one of the chief plotters.
The challenge of Iraq is essentially geopolitical."
An asymmetric world war of the kind George
Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, have proposed
provides the justification, long sought by the defense companies
and their sponsored representatives in Washington, for a massive
increase in arms spending. Eisenhower warned us to "guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought
or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
But we have disregarded his warning, and forgotten how dangerous
the people seeking vast state contracts can be.
In October I wrote that "the anthrax
scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington
were losing the public argument about extending the war to
other countries, journalists start receiving envelopes full
of bacteria, which might as well have been labeled 'a gift from
Iraq'. This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may
have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there
are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from
a shift in public opinion." The suggestion was widely ridiculed.
This week's New Scientist reports that
the FBI has yet to catch the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks.
"Investigators are virtually certain of one thing, though:
it was an inside job. The anthrax attacker is an American scientist
- and worse, one from within the US's own biodefense establishment...
If he wished to scale up US military action against Iraq, he
almost succeeded - many in Washington tried hard to see Saddam
Hussein's hand in the attacks. If he wished merely to make the
US pour billions into biodefense, he did succeed."
Now Bush has secured a further $48bn
for the defense contractors who helped him into office, and
those who contested the first phase of his war are still reviled,
by people such as the British foreign office minister Peter
Hain, as "rejectionists" and "isolationists".
In truth, it is those who supported the war who have endorsed
US isolationism.
Hain insists that Britain will use its
influence to restrain the "hawks on Capitol Hill",
but I fear that Henry Kissinger comes closer to the truth when
he suggests that "Britain will not easily abandon the pivotal
role based on its special relationship with the US that it has
earned for itself in the evolution of the crisis... A determined
American policy thus has more latitude than is generally assumed."
Jack Straw's newfound enthusiasm for the US missile defense
program (which necessitated, of course, the unilateral abandonment
of the anti-ballistic missile treaty) suggests that Dr Kissinger
is rather better versed in British politics than Mr Hain.
Over the past few weeks, the men who
run the military-industrial complex have shoved aside the government
of the Philippines, dispatched 16 Black Hawk helicopters to
Colombia, arrested the Cuban investigators seeking to foil a
bomb plot in Miami, alarmed Russia and China by scrambling
for central Asia, begun developing a new tactical nuclear weapon,
and all but declared war on three nations. Yet still the armchair
warriors who supported their bombing of Afghanistan cannot understand
that these people now present a threat not just to terrorism
but to the world.
George Monbiot
writes for the London Guardian. Monbiot's past columns
are collected on his website.
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