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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
"My Empire for a Map!"
Circumventing
the Globe
By BEN TRIPP
It
has come to my attention that some Americans are concerned Iraq might
bodily invade the United States unless all of Iraq’s women and
children are killed. This seems about as likely as the Anaheim Angels
winning the World Championship, but stranger things have happened. Upon
enquiry about this and other concerns said citizens of our Great Nation
have waxed fretsome o’er, I realize there is a common thread to
these alarums (aside from bone stupidity): Americans don’t know
their geography. I am not an expert on the subject, although able to
locate most of the continents as long they’re clearly marked,
but I may be able to help allay some of the fears which grip this nation
as its armed forces hack their way through distant lands.
First,
picture the Earth itself (that’s the large, heavy thing you’re
standing on). Let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s
spherical, or in other words the shape of a basketball. Not a football,
which is a symmetrically tapered ovoid. Now let’s pretend that
if you stand on one spot on the surface of this sphere (and let’s
face it, standing in two spots requires a virtuoso), there will be a
spot on the opposite side of the sphere which we can call the ‘far
side of the Earth’ because it is on the far side of the Earth.
Are you with me, people? Praise Jesus. So now we have in our tiny brains
a mental picture of a plump object with a front and back and no corners-
sort of a globe. All that is required now is to locate the land masses
known as continents because they are shaped like continents (from the
Latin ‘Ländernamen’, meaning ‘flabbergast’)
and that protrude from the moist areas known as oceans. The continent
directly beneath you if you’re in North America is called ‘North
America’ primarily to distinguish it from Europe, which isn’t.
South America is to the south of North America, or the west if there’s
something wrong with your compass. Try moving farther away from the
large electromagnet.
Now
if you’re in North America, and the sun is setting (perhaps you’d
better wait until this occurs, just to make absolutely sure we get this
right… is it setting? Now!) the place where the sun touches the
horizon is more or less West. The place it rises, which I won’t
ask you to wait for although certainly you can if you want, is East.
Have we got this firmly fixed in our minds? What really matters is West
and East, in terms of politics of even date. So follow your finger –I
did tell you to point in the direction of East, didn’t I?—and
pretend your finger wiggles right across the Atlantic Ocean (which is
the ocean to America’s East, or right-hand side). The first thing
your finger will reach, assuming it’s not devoured by a perspicacious
fish halfway across, is a bit of land called Europe. This is where cheese
comes from, and also England, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and
Hans Blix. You can’t miss it. Europe is about a quarter of the
way around the Earth from America. Not far enough, maybe, but it’s
one hell of a swim.
Now if you were to go straight south from Europe, you would notice eventually
a large land mass that some people call ‘Africa’, because
the afro hairstyle originated there and ‘Africa’ sounds
a little bit like ‘afro’.
Unfortunately
for Americans, most people in Africa are black, have AIDS, or both.
On top of that there are elephants and things wandering around there,
and deserts, and a country called ‘Niger’, which sounds
kind of rude. So we’ll forget all about Africa for the time being-
just like the American government. This is geography for white people.
Most black people already know where Africa is. What’s important
is this: right where Europe and Africa don’t connect is the Mediterranean
Sea, and if we follow that intrepid finger southeast (it has turned
southeast by now, drawn by the rich mysteries of Africa but frightened,
vulnerable) we discover a far less impressive sea called the ‘Red
Sea’ on account of it’s blue. If the Mediterranean separates
Africa from Europe, the Red Sea separates Africa from the ‘Middle
East’ or ‘Near East’, so called because it’s
not as far as some East, such as the Far East for example, but is somewhat
in the middle of the areas considered to be easterly. If you’re
in China, it’s actually to the west, which is why men start so
many wars: nobody knows where they are, and they sure as hell aren’t
going to ask for directions. Better to just kill everybody and then
say, “We’re here!”
The
Middle East is where the present troubles are centered, if we don’t
consider the imminent nuclear attack by North Korea trouble, which apparently
we don’t. The Middle East is below Russia, to the left of China,
and above Africa. Got that? Maybe you should do a little sketch.
Iraq
is a Middle Eastern country. It is located pretty much in the middle
of the Middle East, which is easy to remember; Afghanistan, which you
may recall we carpeted with exploding tax dollars recently, is not next
to Iraq. But it is much closer than North America. The country between
Iraq and Afghanistan is Iran, and boy are they sweating it right about
now. Saudi Arabia, which is where the terrorists actually came from,
is directly south of Iraq. This part of the world, just to put it in
perspective, is about halfway around the sphere or globe from America,
latitudinally speaking (ask your mother) although if you want to be
completely safe you will move to the island of Rapa in the South Pacific,
which is on the opposite side of the world from Iraq. The chances of
Iraq invading our shores is extremely slim, partially because there
are a dozen nations, an ocean, and 6,000 miles between Baghdad and Hackensack,
NY; and partially because all the Iraqis will soon be either dead or
too hungry to travel more than a few hundred feet before they swoon.
Iraq
left in smoking ruins, we continue to follow our finger eastward, and
now we cross Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the northernmost bit of
India before arriving in Tibet, which was pummeled a long time ago,
and is part of China, which keeps on happening for ages and ages. By
now we’re so far around the world that we’re actually headed
for California, which my Confederate readers may be interested to learn
is a country to the West of the United States. Right after China is
a peninsula of land in what I am very embarrassed to report is called
the Yellow Sea, although it is in fact a similar shade to the Red Sea.
This peninsula contains North and South Korea. North Korea is to the
North, and it has missiles with which it can ostensibly reach North
America via a secret route called the North Pole, or in other words
while we’re facing East they sneak up on us from the Northwest,
probably disguised as Santa Claus. After Korea you’re in Japan,
and then there’s bugger all for 5,500 miles except water. This
water is called the Pacific Ocean because it is in the Pacific.
So
there we are, all the way around the globe with our finger a little
battered by the trip but otherwise intact, having made three fascinating
discoveries:
1.
We are very, very far away from all the naughty countries we fear,
2.
The Kurds are once again screwed, and
3.
We still don’t know where Australia is.
Ben
Tripp is a screenwriter, cartoonist and political satirist.
He can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
Yesterday's
Features
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Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
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Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
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