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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
Najaf
Ceasefire Good for Iraq
But
Allawi and the US have been Weakened
By
PATRICK COCKBURN
Ceasefires in Iraq are notoriously fragile
but the agreement to end the fighting in Najaf may work because
it is underwritten by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most
powerful religious leader in Iraq.
The winners and losers in the
crisis in Najaf, where for three bloody weeks Muqtada Sadr,
the radical young Shia cleric, and his Army of Mehdi fought
the interim government of Iyad Allawi and the US army, are becoming
clear.
Chief among the losers are
the people of Kufa and Najaf, who have seen their cities devastated
during the fighting and their hospitals and cemeteries filled
with the maimed and the dead.
The main winner is Grand Ayatollah
Sistani, who showed that he alone has the authority among Iraqis
to bring the battles to an end.
The lesson for the US and Britain
should be that they ignore his views at their peril and need
to meet his demand for elections which will produce a legitimate
and credible Iraqi authority.
For the government of Mr Allawi
the outcome is a setback. "Their failure to finish Sadr
is a defeat," says Ghasan Attiyah, the Iraqi commentator
and historian. "If they couldn't eliminate him, why did
they get into this crisis in the first place?"
Mr Allawi, two months after
he was appointed head of an interim government by the US, has
narrowed rather than expanded his already limited base of support.
There are signs of divisions
within his cabinet, with the Islamist parties not giving him
full backing in his assault on Najaf. The Kurds, the one Iraqi
community still in favour of the US presence, have also distanced
themselves from the government. Jalal Talabani, the powerful
leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, had called for a
peaceful solution.
The problem for Mr Allawi is
that his most important support is the US army, but this is
a two-edged weapon. The Iraqi army, police and National Guard
are unreliable, ill-disciplined and prone, as was seen in Kufa
in the last few days, to fire into crowds of demonstrators.
There is no doubt about the
strength of the US army. But it continues to behave as if it
was fighting the Soviet Army. Its main consideration is to keep
its casualties low. It does not count Iraqi casualties. In Najaf
it demolished any building from which it suspected gunfire was
coming. US planes have dropped 2,000lb bombs near the holy shrine.
Americans have been killing Iraqis in large numbers and this
is unlikely to add to their popularity. Once again, Washington
should learn that in Iraq military power does not necessarily
turn into political influence.
Sadr and his militiamen may
now withdraw from the shrine in the centre of Najaf but they
have won a victory by surviving. Before last March, when the
American envoy, Paul Bremer, had the disastrous idea of confronting
him, Sadr was a significant but by no means a central figure
in Iraqi politics. By attacking him the US has given credibility
to his blend of nationalism and religion.
The Mahdi Army may now give
up some of its light weapons in Najaf but nothing is easier
to obtain in Iraq than a machine-gun or a rocket- propelled
grenade launcher.
There are other shadowy players.
The Iranians are seen by well-informed Iraqis as stoking political
fires in Najaf and in southern Iraq to make sure that Washington
never has a moment to fulfil its threats to overthrow or destabilise
the Iranian government. The Iranians have been giving quiet
support to Sadr and they will be pleased to have shown they can
make life difficult for the US and Britain.
If theceasefire sticks there
may be a few weeks in which the different players in Iraq can
modify their policies. The preoccupation of Washington is to
win the US presidential election in November. It may want to
avoid further confrontations to persuade US voters that President
George Bush knows what he is doing in Iraq.
Mr Allawi is more closely linked
to the CIA than the State Department and the latter may become
more influential within the divided US administration in shaping
what the US does. An extraordinary aspect of the latest crisis
is that it is the third time since April that the US has confronted
Sadr, and each time has discovered that it dare not pay the
political cost of eliminating him.
Ayatollah Sistani comes out
of the crisis with his authority enhanced. The government of
Iyad Allawi has suffered a defeat, shown its weakness, but has
not collapsed. Dr Attiyah argues that the only solution to the
permanent crisis in Iraq is for the US and its allies "to
convince Iraqis that there will be free elections which will
produce a legitimate government".
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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