Today's Stories

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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"Ambitious, Idealistic Vision of Freedom"

How McClellan Prettifies Bush

By GARY LEUPP

Former Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan’s accomplishing several things with his “blockbuster” book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. He’s making a lot of easy money, as befits an opportunist of flexible morality who admittedly stuck with the Bush administration even as its amorality and penchant for lying to the American people became clearly apparent to him. He’s earning praise, not just from “leftist bloggers” as some of his quasi-fascist former friends allege, but from objective journalists and scholars in general. He thus partially redeems his own historical legacy as a minor figure in what will be remembered as a notorious administration. But he’s prettifying that administration rather than appropriately damning it.

According to the former press secretary, in going to war on Iraq Bush misled the nation, hyping dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. But he did so, McClellan declares, out of a naive commitment to the ideal of democracy in the Middle East. And he didn’t deliberately lie. He was merely the victim of bad advice, his own intellectual limitations, his disinclination to ask questions and his belief that being a wartime president was his ticket to greatness. McClellan states repeatedly that he continues to feel “affection” for the man responsible for perhaps a million Iraqi deaths and over 4300 American and other “Coalition” ones. 

McClellan attributes Bush’s relentless push for war on “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom.” So his worst sin was a naïve effort at do-good-ism! McClellan doesn’t note the Bush administration’s rejection of the results of free democratic elections in Palestine, consternation at relatively “free” electoral results in Egypt and Lebanon, or continued intimacy with Saudi Arabia’s theocratic absolute monarchy. He doesn’t mention the more plausible reasons for Bush’s assault on a sovereign country described by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as “illegal.” He doesn’t mention oil, the administration’s push for the privatization of Iraq’s oil industry (which will result in U.S. control), or the geopolitical importance of controlling the flow of oil from Iraq in future crisis situations including war. He doesn’t mention the advantages to U.S. imperialism of permanent military bases in the heart of the Middle East.

McClellan in one recent interview cited Paul Wolfowitz’s remark in July 2003 that “for bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason that people could agree upon.” In that interview Wolfowitz added that an “almost unnoticed but huge” additional reason was the prospect of being able to withdraw U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence was highly unpopular.  (In 1990 U.S. officials lied to the Saudis, claiming Saddam was amassing forces to attack them, and persuaded them to accept a U.S. military presence in the country. By 2003 the Saudis were urging a withdrawal of the 5000 U.S. troops.)  For the neocons there is no question but that the U.S. should have bases in the Middle East, and Cheney is known to favor their establishment preparatory to a future confrontation with China. McClellan doesn’t discuss these matters.

It’s all well and good for the world for McClellan to turn on his former boss and join such insiders as Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, and Lawrence Wilkerson in documenting Bush’s mendacious pre-war use of fear-mongering. But isn’t he engaging in perverse apologetics of his own? Alluding to the passage cited above, a blogger on Oprah.com Community writes, “I guess this knocks the wind out of the sales [sic] of the Bush haters, and blows the ‘conquer Iraq for oil’ theory, doesn’t it?”

Actually, the “conquer Iraq for oil” theory has always been simplistic, since it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, which isn’t oil company profits or even U.S. consumers’ access to cheap oil. It’s the enhancement of the geopolitical position of U.S. imperialism vis-à-vis any potential rivals during what the neocons call the “New American Century” and (as a corollary to that project) the enhancement of the “security” (regional hegemony) of Israel. In any case, the idea that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to encourage “freedom” in Iraq only surfaced after the fact, in August 2003, as all the earlier stated reasons for invasion had become discredited. That’s when Condoleezza Rice gave a speech in Dallas cynically associating the “liberation” of Iraq with the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.

The suggestion that this was Bush’s priority all along just isn’t plausible. Had he been committed to democracy, he would have conceded the election to Al Gore in 2000; had he been committed to freedom, he would not have shoved the “PATRIOT” act down the throats of Congressmen in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 nor gleefully endorsed “rendition” and the indefinite detention and torture of “noncombatants” captured (or bought from bounty hunters) in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the Bush supporters like the blogger quoted above will take comfort in McClellan’s book. They’ll think it lets their man off the hook.

Finally, McClellan damns the news media for being “complicit enablers” of the march to war. Having performed a central role in the dissemination of disinformation, he chastises the Fifth Estate for “covering the [administration’s] campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it…” He notes accurately enough that the media neglected “their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding.”

He notes that “the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam Hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere--on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war. In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

As my kids would say: “Well, duh….!” Of course the corporate media was complicit in the prewar propaganda campaign, just as it is now complicit in the Cheney/neocon drive towards war on Iran and Syria. But McClellan, who played a central role in the disinformation campaign (the psychological warfare against his own people) is now engaging in shameless scapegoating. It reminds me a little bit of the administration’s scapegoating of the CIA beginning in the fall of 2003. It had become clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The mainstream intelligence community had in fact questioned the evidence for them all along, but been brow-beaten by Dick Cheney and his sidekick “Scooter” Libby into signing onto the bogus content of Colin Powell’s infamous UNSC presentation on February 5, 2003. That drew on false reports from Ahmad Chalabi and neocon asset “Curveball” vetted through Douglas Feith’s “Office of Special Plans.” When it became obvious that there were no Iraqi WMD, Cheney & Co. blamed the CIA for getting the story wrong and used the occasion to reorganize an organization they mistrusted precisely because of its commitment to objective intelligence gathering.

When it’s become obvious that Bush lied about Iraq, and that McClellan was a key conduit of lies himself, what does he do but blame the media for believing him! So in sum: Bush deserves affection, as a well-meaning if misled guy. (McClellan writes that Dick Cheney “always seemed to get his way” and was thus the chief misleader.) Freedom” was a good objective but maybe not obtainable (too “idealistic”) in the Middle East. McClellan thinks we should all feel sorry for he himself due to all he’s been through, realizing that his critical reasoning deficits were the result of trust and affection and that he, just like other Americans (who weren’t in positions to mold public opinion), changed his view about the war and the administration over time. Most of all we should buy his book, in order to access what he calls “my truth” (p. xi). It’s Number One on the New York Times’ best seller list at $ 27.95.

Ain’t it grand how telling your personal “truth” can make you look good, make you a fortune, and obfuscate the real issues all at the same time? The Bush people pronounce themselves “puzzled” and “sad” about their former colleague’s confessions. But I think they should be relieved, considering the alternatives. Instead of depicting Bush as a well-meaning democratic idealist he could have expressed the real truth: Bush is a child of privilege, indifferent to human suffering, energized by a deep cruel streak, dangerously affected by religious delusions, contemptuous of ideas and intellectuals, disdainful of international law, still at large and dangerous as he plans an unjustifiable assault on Iran. Instead of depicting the Iraq War as an act of criminal aggression McClellan does the administration a big favor by merely terming it a “strategic blunder.”

Yeah. Like the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was a strategic blunder. Like the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 was a strategic blunder. Like the German invasion of Poland in 1939 was a strategic blunder. Idealistic visionaries in power, just making mistakes.

Should there ever be war crimes trials, McClellan will be called to testify on behalf of the defense, if only as a character witness.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

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