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June 25, 2002
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F--Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti--Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker--Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9--11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli--Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 25,
2002
Bush: Off With Arafat's Head
by Sam Bahour and Michael
Dahan
Last night's long--awaited speech by President
Bush was to set the pace for the Palestinians and Israelis to
step back from the vicious and bloody cycle of violence that
has gripped them for nearly two years. Instead, President Bush
and his administration have publicly adopted the Israeli agenda
of battering the Palestinians into submission. President Bush's
illusion that the Palestinian--Israeli conflict may be 'talked
away' in a series of speeches is not only a poor example of leadership
but seriously places U.S. interests in the region at high risk.
President Bush's administration has utterly
failed to comprehend the Palestinian--Israeli conflict and in
particular the Palestinian predicament today which is an Israeli
re--occupation of the small parcels of land that were transferred
to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Peace Accords. To
add insult to injury, President Bush continues to mismanage U.S.
policy with unprecedented unaccountability to the U.S. Congress
or the world community. Bush's chronological attempts to address
the crisis are as follows: ignore the conflict ---- failed, send
Powell to the region -- failed, the Mitchell Report -- failed,
the Tenet Plan -- failed, Bush's UN speech -- failed, Secretary
of State Powell's policy speech in Kentucky -- failed, send General
Zinni on multiple missions -- failed, and the most recent call
for an international conference (completely ignored in Bush's
latest speech) -- failed. If the creativity applied to avoiding
real U.S. action were used to put an implementation mechanism
in place to end the Israeli occupation the region would be well
out of the conflict by now.
To a naive audience President Bush's
speech may have sounded like a sensible framework for progress,
but for anyone with any understanding at all of the Middle East,
it was clearly a shallow attempt in diplomacy that amounts to
U.S. surrender of its Middle East foreign policy to the ranks
of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Israel's lobby in
the U.S. Indeed, the speech was praised by Israel's right, which
has rejected Palestinian statehood outright.
President Bush continues to be blinded
by the events of 9--11 and refuses (or deceitfully avoids) to
see the Palestinian issue outside the framework of the yet undefined
phenomena of "terrorism". Palestinians were stripped
of their national, civil, and human rights decades before the
word terrorism became a buzzword. By placing the Palestinian
struggle for freedom and independence in a 9--11 mold, the U.S.
is only prolonging a solution and feeding the bloodshed, exactly
as Israel has been doing for 36 consecutive years now. Today
the U.S. is ideally positioned to finally take real action and
use its global leverage to end Israeli occupation, instead it
has succumb to an extremist Israeli government that views the
fate of illegal Israeli settlements the same as it views the
fate of Tel Aviv.
By reducing the entire conflict in the
region to the existence of an individual Palestinian leader,
or set of leaders, the Bush Administration has fallen for the
red herring that was designed, produced and marketed by Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. President Bush needs to remember
that Former President Carter was part of the international election
monitoring team that gave the Palestinian Presidential elections
a stamp of approval. Furthermore, the Palestinians are fully
aware of the weaknesses in their leadership and have been working
to correct it for many years now. Instead of supporting Palestinian
reformist the U.S. has chosen to make their efforts more difficult
by making them look as if they are aligned to an Israeli strategy
of reform before freedom. A U.S. led international campaign to
mettle in internal Palestinian politics will only setback the
efforts of those Palestinians that have already started making
concrete steps for change.
To craft U.S. policy in an entire region
around new elections for an already expired Palestinian Authority
is yet another display of Israeli setting of U.S. policy. More
frightening is President Bush's criteria for the new leadership
to be "not compromised by terror." We can only assume
that this will be translated by way of Jerusalem to mean that
only those Palestinians who have not been involved in resistance
against occupation would be accepted. This is a clever way to
say that no Palestinian is eligible for acceptance into this
U.S. policy and thus give Israel more time to destroy Palestinian
communities and any hope for co--existence.
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, President
Bush's advisors, the powerful pro--Israel lobby in the U.S. and
the U.S. Congress have clearly provoked President Bush to become
a martyr in the name of continued Israeli military occupation
of Palestinians. As with most martyrs who fail to see how their
emotionally charged act will negatively reflect on the real issues
at hand, President Bush stands proud and tall in support of Israel
while the U.S. economy, U.S. allies in the region, U.S. homeland
security and the U.S. global leadership position all take the
brunt of his misaligned and ill advised policy, if it can even
be considered "policy".
The authors of this article have written
throughout the last two years on every one of the issues the
President spoke about in his speech. We predicted each failed
U.S. step. Every time we have advised the U.S. on the way out
of the crisis -- to put forth action, not words, in ending the
Israeli occupation. We still strongly believe that as long as
Israeli occupation is permitted to survive, the U.S. can revisit
the issue in 10 days or 10 months or 10 years and would face
the same -- Palestinians, stripped of their rights, dignity,
land and freedom will continue to struggle, with Arafat or without,
to end their predicament, and Israelis will continue to suffer.
It is time -- past time, to use Secretary
of State Powell's words -- for the U.S. to put actions behind
its policies. Until then we await the next speech by President
Bush and brace ourselves for the next series of bombings.
Sam Bahour
is a Palestinian--American businessman living in the besieged
Palestinian City of Al--Bireh in the West Bank and can be reached
at sbahour@palnet.com.
He is co--author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and
Palestinians (1994). Dr. Michael Dahan is an Israeli--American
political scientist living in Jerusalem and can be reached at
mdahan@attglobal.net.
Today's
Features
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
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