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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
29, 2003
Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
The
Verdict of History
By TOM STEPHENS
We've
entered a new era of history. The troops and tanks rumbling toward Baghdad
take with them the ashes and dust of international law, diplomacy, human
rights, civil liberties, democratic self-governance, and much else.
But, as Arlo Guthrie famously said about his convictions for littering
and creating a nuisance during America's last major imperial disaster,
"That's not what I came here to talk about."
The
verdict of history will have to await developments in the fog and chaos
of this criminal war. A war sought and pursued by the Bush gang in Washington
for oil and power, in the name of liberation and disarmament. It is
now just a week after the opening salvos of "shock and awe."
This is the time period of journalism, not yet history. But obvious
contradictions and shortcomings of US military strategy are already
becoming glaringly clear, even through the pillow talk of "embedded"
US corporate media. What we hear from such sources is essentially propaganda,
not journalism. The confusion reflected in roller coaster public opinion
polls comes from this lack of reliable information, from the constant
refusal to ask any hard questions about historical context that would
lead to real understanding, and from the apparent confusion of the "flexible"
war plan itself.
Rumsfeld
and his underlings seem to have based their entire strategy on either
a magic bullet hitting Saddam Hussein, or on the psychological impacts
of the initial bombing runs, without regard to the brutal realities
of war. Perhaps that's because, having successfully avoided any personal
sacrifices in their rise to the top, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co.
don't understand war.
Generals
are reputed to always be effective in "fighting the last war."
The Iraqis mostly cut and ran in Gulf War I. Today their country is
prostrate, practically starving, and their weapons even more out of
date. US military power reigns supreme. How dare they fight back? We
were told that it would be a relatively quick and easy war, and we are
still being told that victory is assured. But life (and death) is strange.
No matter what the short-term issues in any particular case, you have
to use power wisely or you can get yourself in trouble quick. That's
when you call the guerilla forces attacking your supply lines "terrorists,"
to cover up the gross inadequacies of your own ideas and actions.
Is
there a Bush administration playbook (since football analogies for war
are all the rage these days) on these things? The government "spin"
on the ground war sounds just like the way they avoided any investigation
into their incompetent failures to deal with the known threat of al-Quaida
before September 11.
And
fuck the football analogies. These are our brothers and sisters
risking their lives and dying. This is no game. The judgment and decisions
of US war leaders should produce tactics and strategies designed to
minimize casualties. They have apparently failed to do so. This conduct
of the massacre of modern war by selfish political and economic criteria
is only the latest obscenity in the Bush junta's so-called "war
on terrorism."
First
they failed to put enough troops in the field to ensure victory with
minimal losses through the application of overwhelming force, as dictated
by the Powell doctrine. Then they sent the ground troops rolling hundreds
of miles into the desert, without adequate protection against the Iraqi
forces on their flanks threatening their supply lines. Now April is
expected to be the worst month for sandstorms. They ordered the troops
into the environmental catastrophe of burning oil wells, the kind of
hazards that resulted in approximately one out of five veterans of Gulf
War I being granted benefits for Gulf War syndrome (and many others
have made such claims and been denied). In the teeth of these tactical
dilemmas, they boldly promise a campaign of "shock, awe, and flexibility,"
as if war was simply an exercise in mass marketing, based on the lure
of great sex. And they piously call on Americans to "support the
troops" in their mad project.
These
political leaders and their imperial aggression are the ones who are
really and seriously failing to "support the troops."
If
I can look at a map on the internet and see how US troops are now unreasonably
exposed to danger, spread out for hundreds of miles from Umm Quasr to
Baghdad, then Iraqi military commanders can do it. US/UK military forces
didn't begin to destroy their communications facilities until a week
into the ground war, and did not use air power effectively against the
enemy forces before sending ground troops into the battle.
Maybe
it's because they want to use Iraqi oil and communication facilities
and other infrastructure, even Iraqi military forces, to pacify the
country and market its oil. Maybe the troops were sent into Iraq earlier
than planned, because the Iraqis were burning their oil wells, thus
threatening the real objective of this whole rancid operation. Maybe
the US chickenhawk command is simply drunk and over-confident with their
own power. They don't care if their poor tactical choices cost more
lives, whether the lives of US service men and women, or those of Iraqi
civilians caught in the middle of Stalingrad/Jenin-style house-to-house
warfare. There should be an especially hot place in hell for such hypocrites,
who exhort us to "support the troops" while they bugger and
sacrifice young working class Americans from the relative safety of
Washington and Quatar.
There
is no certainty in war. Even given this government's apparent willingness
to get large numbers of young American soldiers unnecessarily killed,
the People of Iraq will probably die at rates of hundreds or thousands
to every one US casualty. And that's not counting Iran, North Korea,
Syria, or whichever country is next up on the US "regime change"
agenda. For now the life-threatening risk to everyone involved on the
ground, on all sides of this totally unnecessary war of US aggression,
dominates everything. But in the long run the chickenhawk architects
of this desert slaughter will not escape the verdict of history. See
you at Nuremberg, Mr. Bush.
Tom
Stephens is a lawyer from Detroit. He can be reached at: lebensbaum4@earthlink.net
Yesterday'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
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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