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January
8, 2002
Joan Hoff
The
Nixon You Haven't Heard
January
7, 2002
Lawrence
McGuire
Confusing
Economic Tales About Argentina
Wael Masri
They
Are Taking
Our Rights Away
Philip
Farruggio
Better
Medicine
January
6, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Students
Put the Heat on Foreign Sweatshops
Tariq
Ali
Battleground
Kashmir
January
5, 2002
Mark Schneider
Kifah:
The Movie Star
Israel Killed
Edward
Said
Is
Israel More Secure Now?
January
4, 2002
CG Estabrook
Anti-War
= Anti-Globalization
Jordan
Green
What's
Changed in New York
January
3, 2002
Walt Brasch
Exit
Cheney, Enter Ridge
Mokhiber
and Weissman
The
10 Worst Corporations
of 2001
Robert
Hunter Wade
America's
Empire Rules an Unbalanced World
Shahid
Alam
Is
There an Islamic Problem?
January
2, 2002
Ross Regnart
Patriot
Act Redefines the Mob as "Terrorist Associates"
John Chuckman
The
Republicans' Secret Plan X
David
Vest
Turn,
Turn, Turn
January
1, 2002
Kathy
Kelly
Iraq's
New Year
December
31, 2001
John Absood
An
Alternative to War in Iraq
Ramzi
Kysia
Iraq
Goes Radioactive
December
28, 2001
John Chuckman
Observing
George Bush
Suren
Pillay
Civilian
Bodies
Aaron
Lehmer
Inviting
Future Terrorism
December
27, 2001
Patrick
McNamara
Palestinian
Children Bear Brunt of Mideast Violence
Nelson
Valdés
A
Possible Scenario on the Location of bin Laden
Jensen
and Mahajan
Remember
the Afghan Dead
Philip
Farruggio
A
New Year's Resolution
Ramzi
Kysia
The
People of the Valley
December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
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
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Reviews of Gore:
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January
8, 2002
Dark Tales from the Ministry
of Truth
By John Chuckman
Wars always have their propaganda, but it is often
not very subtle. In the first world war, the Germans bayoneted
babies, and nearly a century later, in a rework of the same false
story, the Iraqis tore babies from respirators. But if you want
to study the techniques of effective propaganda, you could hardly
do better than the War on Terror.
For many, the word propaganda raises
an image of ham-fisted Soviet commissars insisting that black
is white. But effective propaganda is far more subtle than that.
And who should understand better the dark art of planting suggestions
than the most practiced people on the planet at advertising and
marketing?
The most effective propaganda theme during
the Afghan phase of the War on Terror was the status of women
under the Taliban. Almost as if by magic, when the B-52s were
ready to make those Afghan heathens understand what red-blooded
Christians really mean by hell, articles and broadcast commentaries
sprang up like mushrooms after a humid spell to enlighten us
on the plight of women in Afghanistan. The subject seems to have
been of rather marginal interest before saddling up the B-52s
with their thirty-ton loads of high explosive and shrapnel.
Now, please don't misunderstand, women
were treated hideously under the Taliban. But women were treated
horribly anywhere during the fourteenth century, and that is
approximately the phase of development in which the average Afghan
lives. Women fared little better under some of the thugs in the
Northern Alliance when they ruled previously.
And women do not exactly thrive under
the absolutism of Saudi Arabia, a country whose important financial
support of the Taliban has been more or less expunged from the
record by America's informal-but-effective Ministry of Truth.
Women are not treated well in Pakistan either, a vital supporter
of the Taliban now redeemed by a cornucopia of bribes.
Wherever economies are poor and backward
and wherever religious fundamentalism plays a significant role,
women are not treated as full human beings. My goodness, just
think of all those old Virginia planters, Thomas Jefferson among
them, using their young female slaves for sex.
An interesting sidelight to the Jefferson-Hemmings
story, one that gives you a good raw whiff of life under American
slavery, is that Sally was the half sister of Jefferson's dead
wife, and she resembled her closely. The existence of half-brothers
and sisters by slave women was an ordinary fact of Southern plantation
culture, but it was not one discussed at Sunday dinner after
church.
The American notion that you can just
sweep political players off the board and change the basic patterns
of a society has no basis in history. It is wishful thinking
at best. Advanced societies evolve over long periods of economic
growth in which large numbers of people gain the influence that
comes with economic resources. This is the way democracy and
modern attitudes towards human values develop. This is the story
of civilization since the dawn of the modern era about five hundred
years ago.
The record of political revolutions when
societies were not ripe for their results is one of utter failure.
After the American Civil War - a truer political revolution in
many respects than the original American Revolution - blacks
were fitted into a new, more sophisticated form of bondage for
another century. As late as the 1930s in the American South,
lynchings were an occasion for family picnics. Only long-term,
solid economic growth bringing an end to rural stagnation made
it possible to change the status of America's blacks.
Now America has just about achieved its
limited purpose in Afghanistan. America is not about to try occupying
the place as the Russians tried doing, nor does it seem likely
that truly generous financial assistance will be given to these
very poor people once our dirty work is done. No, that kind of
generosity is saved by the State Department for places we need
to bribe.
Does anyone believe that the status of
Afghan women will change greatly after the first photo-op schools
for girls, with a few hundred token students, have been adequately
featured in our press? Or that we will ever hear much about anything
in Afghanistan once we have destroyed what we came to destroy?
I hope I am wrong, but history doesn't
support optimism here. Afghanistan - like Haiti, following a
more elaborate, showboat intervention - will recede from our
view and sink back more or less to the same early state of economic
and social development that characterized it before.
The point of the propaganda effort on
women's rights was that the subject should be on people's minds
when it counted, when our bombs were blowing the limbs off peasants.
Aroused concern in America over those rights blunted potential
criticism by middle-class women to the bombing. It made the sensibilities
of soccer moms safe for Bush. And, like all the best propaganda,
it started with truth.
Another line of propaganda in Afghanistan,
less subtle and less truthful, has been that familiar refrain,
"weapons of mass destruction." This phrase, so overused
in the case of Iraq, is beginning to sound a bit tinny and hollow,
but it proved still serviceable for Afghanistan. Although coming
as it does from the only nation that ever totally incinerated
two cities full of civilians, it is remarkable that the speakers
have not choked on the words.
One cannot help recalling Secretary of
Defense Cohen at a pulpit in the Pentagon a few years ago, preaching
to us about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.
In his best, earnest vacuum-cleaner salesman's style, he held
up a bag of sugar to illustrate how small a quantity of some
nasty things could destroy American society.
The truth is that there is only one weapon
of mass destruction, and that weapon is a nuclear or thermonuclear
device. Biological agents, while all advanced countries have
experimented heavily with them, are not effective weapons of
mass destruction.
The actions of our own armed forces support
this assertion. The Pentagon never saw a weapon it didn't like,
so long as it does a good job of killing people - and that is
the very reason it strongly opposes the international treaty
against land-mines. But the Pentagon is not uncomfortable with
existing international regimes concerning biological warfare.
Sophisticated delivery systems are essential
to any success with these weapons - we saw with the anthrax scare
that crude distribution methods render biological agents to be
anything but weapons of mass destruction. Even with such delivery
systems, weather and other factors make using these weapons full
of uncertainty.
Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War did
not use his supply of biological and chemical weapons. American
and Israeli nuclear weapons provided a complete check against
his paltry arsenal. The calculation is easy enough to make: inflict
some highly uncertain and limited damage on your enemy in exchange
for the certainty of being obliterated. Even a man often called
mad was unwilling to take those odds.
Now, anyone with a fully-functioning
brain knows that a true terrorist would relish having a nuclear
weapon. I am sure Timothy McVeigh dreamed dreams of possessing
such power. And the boys who were to die slaughtering their fellow
students at Columbine High School undoubtedly enjoyed such fantasies.
But what has that to do with reality? Reports of pieces of paper
with such dreams found in al Qaida caves are meaningless, except
to scare people by combining the words nuclear and bomb and al
Qaida in the same statement.
The only kind of bomb involving nuclear
material that an organization like al Qaida would be remotely
capable of making is a conventional bomb wrapped in radioactive
material. Such a bomb would leave an area littered with radioactive
debris, but it is not a particularly effective weapon. Discussing
it in the same breath with a device capable of a nuclear explosion
is confusing and dishonest.
Nuclear weapons still represent a massive
technological and financial undertaking, far beyond the resources
of an al Qaida, and Washington's experts know this. Even Iraq,
with all its oil wealth and the kind of government that can direct
resources without answering to anyone, working very hard to develop
a nuclear weapon, remains at least a few years from getting it.
John Chuckman
is a columnist for YellowTimes.
He can be reached at jchuckman@YellowTimes.ORG
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