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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
28, 2003
Bush's Blueprint for a Remade Middle
East Reeks of Colossal Hubris
Icarus
on Crack
By PIERRE TRISTAM
In
gothic novels the bombshell princess is typically shackled to the whims
of nasty men and foul-mouthed step-mothers and suffers indignities by
the bushel until she's liberated by Prince Charming. The novels always
cue The End before Princess discovers that her Fabio look-alike is actually
twice the bastard her tormentors had been, and a serial womanizer: He's
the guy hopping between Harlequin covers while she ends up dog-eared
and spineless at the secondhand bookshop.
The
gothic novel has its real-life equivalent in geopolitics. Instead of
a helpless, persecuted bombshell, you have a beleaguered, persecuted
country that dreams of deliverance. Deliverance may come, but The End
doesn't conveniently follow. The story must go on. The next chapter
often reads like a morgue manifest.
I speak
of experience here. When I was a boy in the early years of Lebanon's
civil war, all we dreamed about was some kind of savior to liberate
us from mayhem. In 1976 we got the first in a series. The Syrian army
marched in to keep us Christians from being slaughtered by a coalition
of Palestinians and Muslims. We welcomed the Syrians with the ritual
rice-throwing, although it was probably minute rice, not something fancy
like Basmati: We didn't trust the Syrians.
Sure
enough, a minute later, relatively speaking, they turned their guns
on us and became the occupying army they have remained ever since. So
we started dreaming of new liberators, and for a time we were convinced
Israel would oblige. Looking back, that was like wishing for Huns to
liberate you from Visigoths, us poor beleaguered Christians being no
less Vandals for wear. Between one bombardment and another I was ferreted
out of the country and have kissed and licked every day's peace ever
since, but obviously kept an eye on Lebanon's torments. In 1982 the
Israelis did finally invade. They got the rice treatment, too, because
the Palestinians had turned south Lebanon into their private little
Idaho, militia-style.
Sure enough, the
Israeli occupation, one of Ariel Sharon's Guernicas, proved no less
grotesque than the Palestinians'. The Christian-inspired, Israeli-managed
massacres of a few thousand Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila
camps precipitated yet more foreign interventions. This time it was
the multinational force of Italians, French and Americans. For that
one the Lebanese sprung for Uncle Benz.
They thought America
would finally save them as no one could. Then America got in the nation-building
business. And as it did, it took sides -- siding with the Israeli-backed
Christian government of Amin Gemayel, a playboy with brie for brains.
And then, in quick succession, those quiet Americans met the unquiet
wrath of Arab savagery. The American embassy in Beirut was suicide-bombed,
killing 63. On Oct. 23, 1983, the Marines' barracks south of Beirut
was suicide-bombed, killing 241. A simultaneous bombing of the French
barracks (remember those "surrender monkeys"?) killed 58.
At the time the bombers were from a little known faction of renegade
Shiite Muslims called Hezbollah. Little known no more: Hezbollah is
today's al-Qaida's spiritual mistress.
Themselves defeated, the Americans left shortly after the barracks bombing.
I was glad. Not because I wanted them out of there as a Lebanese chauvinist,
but because by then I was reacting as an adopted American. My allegiance
was wholeheartedly with those Marines, who never should have been put
in such a wasteful situation in the first place. I happened to know
the Lebanese -- the Arab -- mentality of the moment. It isn't worth
the fight, and it is certainly not worth a drop of American blood, no
matter the idealistic quest then or now.
Freedom? Liberation?
Democracy? Arab nations wouldn't know what to do with any of it. As
Charles Glass, once a reporter with ABC news, wrote a dozen years ago,
they're not nations. They're "tribes with flags."
And it is into that
mayhem, that Lebanon writ large, that President Bush is sending his
army. American soldiers will probably get the rice treatment. They'll
get the hugs and the roses. The pictures will be grist for a month of
Bush-pumping propaganda back in the "homeland." But the gratefulness
of liberation doesn't outlast the afternoon nap. Those trigger-happy
Shiites the Marines last knew in Lebanon, incidentally, form Iraq's
majority, and the country is crawling with Balkan-tempered minorities.
Planning the California-scale
creation of a pro-American nation out of Washington Beltway blueprint
in the Arab heartland is science fiction with a death wish. It is colossal
hubris. It is Icarus on crack. With Afghanistan still smoldering with
chaos, the Anglo-American country-hoppers don't know what gothic nightmare
they're getting into in Iraq, what they're getting us all into. And
it won't end well no matter the bushels of rice riddling Americans'
welcome along Mesopotamia's shimmering, shifty sands.
Pierre Tristam
is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net
Yesterday's Features
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
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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