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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
The "Trashing" of the Troops
Never Happened
We
Never Spit on Any Babykillers
By CHRIS CLARKE
While
I don't like to criticize any expression of opposition to our current
imperial designs in the Middle East, I'm a bit puzzled by what seems
to be a new shibboleth among some opponents of Bush's war.
It's
one of those statements that is both obligatory and essentially bereft
of meaning, akin to the ritual request at the end of Republican Convention
speeches that "God Bless America," which generally makes me
wonder just what the speaker means by any of the three of those words.
The
phrase I'm thinking of, of course, is "I support the troops."
Such tepid luminaries of loyal opposition as Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi,
have invoked the phrase, as have any number of well--meaning grassroots
activists thrust unexpectedly before the cameras of local TV news stations.
What
do these people mean when they say they'll "support the troops"?
Do
they mean they'll shut up once the war in progress? Clearly, some have,
but others who mouth the words seem still to be opposing the war, some
of them loudly.
Do
they mean they endorse whatever military tactics it takes to keep US
soldiers alive, regardless of cost to the people of Iraq? Again, it's
clear that some do so mean, but others -- fettered by such traitorous
notions as adherence to the Geneva Convention and a personal sense of
morality and justice, don't intend their support to entail justification
for carpet--bombing residential neighborhoods.
Of
course, some use the slogan to turn it on its head. In these very pages,
Ron Jacobs has eloquently pointed out that the best way of supporting
the individual people who make up the troops is to bring them home right
away. What better support can there be than to give a person a better
chance of a long, full, happy life, replete with love, family, and a
full complement of limbs, devoid of battle nightmares and tortured waking
conscience?
But
it's clear that's not what most people mean when they pledge their support
to our troops. There's a certain mental shrug, an Altermanish "oh,
well, our side lost, let's make the best of this war" fatalism
that goes with the phrase that makes it clear people aren't talking
about putting all the kids on troop transports and shipping them back
to San Diego.
No,
it would seem in fact that what people generally intend by the phrase
is a defense against an old story told about those of us who opposed
an earlier war now fading from the public consciousness. Thirty or so
years ago, the story goes, poor beleaguered GIs returning from Vietnam
were met with torrents of abuse from anti--war protesters. We called
them "babykillers," we called them "Nazis," we spat
on them, we contributed to the general sense of alienation that fostered
the well known phenomenon of the Psychotic Vietnam Vet. If not for the
antiwar movement, Vietnam vets would have folded neatly and unobtrusively
back into society just as their Greatest Generation daddies did after
Anzio.
Counterpunch
readers are more likely than most to know that this story is at best,
an ideologically--driven exaggeration of one or two unfortunate incidents.
At worst, it's a damned lie.
In
the 1960s and 70s, antiwar activists opened coffeehouses near military
bases, to provide soldiers with troubled consciences places to spend
a few off--duty hours in like--minded company. We harbored deserters
and AWOLs. We wrote letters to GIs, sent them care packages, grieved
over them when they joined the damnable body counts announced on the
Five O'Clock Follies.
And
-- not to put too fine a point on it -- antiwar activists also fought
in the goddamned war.
The
Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization was the
very heart of the antiwar movement in the US, that is, before a lunatic
sectarian coup gutted it in the process of forming the Revolutionary
Communist Party.
Resistance
within the military is credited by some analysts as having been a factor
in the ultimate rout of the US, and subsequent fall/liberation of the
South. Many of the troops, after all, were there involuntarily, not
a few of them as a result of civilian anti--war activity.
That's not to say there weren't those who, for one reason or another,
conflated their distaste for the war with their feelings for the grunts
who fought it. There are morons in every movement, after all. And there
were, in fact, national organizations that made habits of lambasting
returning Vietnam vets, in some cases actually denying them membership
or services regardless of the vets' personal views. (The VFW comes to
mind, as does the VA.)
The
fabled massive anti--war trashing of "our troops" never happened:
it's nothing but a goddamned lie. Still, it's a convenient lie for those
who want to cast opposition to this new war as treasonable, as somehow
more deleterious to the average Specialist First Class than it was to
ship him into combat in the first place.
Chris
Clarke is editor of Faultline, California's Environmental Magazine.
He can be reached at: cclarke@earthisland.org
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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