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Recent
Stories
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
April
2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
Pentagon
Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You
Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
Stew Albert
Total War
Website
of the Day
Traitor List: Sign Up Now!
April
1, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Rumsfeld: "Get Me Rewrite"
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
Website
of the Day
A Collectible War
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
Power": an Interview with Jeff Halper
Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
Ann Harrison
The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
Berserk Cops
Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
War Profiteer
Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
is Safe
Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
Shelter
David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
Continues
John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
Law
Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
Tom
Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
and Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
Onward
Embedded Soldiers: the Press and the War
Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
Genocide in East Timor
Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
Out of Billions
Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
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
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
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
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The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
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April 5,
2003
CounterPunch War Diary
The Relief Shambles in Iraq;
Makiya Hails Bombs As "Music"; Will Any Puppet Regime
Have A Future; US Hawks Invoke Iraq's "Sickness" as
Rationale for Jackboot; Saddam: Did He Pre-record Everything;
More on Blitzer's Voice; Pig Lovers Rage at Hitchens Slur
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Meet and Greet
Within a very few weeks
of the United States' occupation of Japan the civic leaders of
Nagasaki, eager for good relations with the conquerors, were
boosting a Miss A-Bomb contest. Can a Miss Daisy Cutter contest
be far behind for the people of Baghdad?
Meanwhile on the homefront,
newspapers such as the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle
have been tactful in reporting the motivation of conscientious
objector Lance Cpl. Stephen Funk, a Marine Corps reservist based
in San Jose. For some reason, the reporters from the Times and
Chron failed to relay Lance Cpl. Funk's energetically expressed
statement: "My moral development has also been largely effected
by the fact that I'm homosexual." For a full account read
Mary
Ellen Peterson's excellent story on this site.
Relief in Shambles
There's
no "fog of war" concerning the disaster of daily life
in Iraq (what's now swaddled in that virtuous bureaucratic phrase
"humanitarian crisis") is concerned. Reports confirm
what all sane forecasts predicted of a US attack: it is a catastrophe
for Iraqi people, particularly the poor.
Last Thursday the BBC featured a vivid
interview with
Patrick Nicholson of the British charity CAFOD. He's just returned
from Umm Qasr, where he found the humanitarian effort in the
British occupied area to be a "shambles".
"From the TV pictures of Umm Qasr, I had been led to believe
it was a town under control, where the needs of the people were
being met. The town is not under control. It's like the Wild
West. And even the most major humanitarian concern, water, is
not being adequately administered. Everywhere I went, the local
people asked me for water. I went into the two rooms occupied
by a family of 14, they were drinking from an oil drum half full
of stagnant, dirty water. It was water I certainly would not
have drunk. The little girl was very malnourished, skeletal,
and in my experience as an aid worker I would say she had less
than a week to live.
"The coalition has installed a water
pipeline in Umm Qasr and sends out water tankers, but the Iraqi
lorry drivers go off and sell the water. Most people have no
money to buy it. The hospital has been without water for three
days. Inside people were very angry with me because I was a westerner.
They felt angry, frustrated and let down by the coalition. Many
had come to Umm Qasr from Basra because they had been told in
American radio broadcasts that they would be looked after. They
now say the coalition lied to them.
"Adu Sulsam had brought his four-year-old
daughter, Fatima, to the hospital and pleaded with me to help.
He said that I was her only hope. I told him I was not a doctor.
There is only one doctor at the hospital. The little girl was
very malnourished, skeletal, and in my experience as an aid worker
I would say she had less than a week to live. Another man had
brought his 12-year-old son, Farahan, to Umm Qasr because the
boy had been hit in the head with shrapnel in Basra, but had
not got better after being operated on. This father also thought
his child would receive better treatment in Umm Qasr.
"Both men were completely disappointed.
One young man angrily said to me: 'You support us when the TV
cameras and newspapers are here, to show the world you like us.
When they have gone you change. You have changed Saddam for another
kind of imperialism. Umm Qasr was taken 10 days ago and it was
deemed safe for aid agencies to enter on Monday, and yet it is
still a shambles. If the coalition has trouble looking after
such a small town, then what are they going to do about the city
of Basra or, my God, Baghdad? If the coalition is trying to win
the battle of hearts and minds in Iraq, then it is not winning
by the evidence of the people of Umm Qasr."
Makiya Hails Bombs
As "Music"
Given this, plus the sort of horrors
reported from near Al Hillah about Iraqi civilians sliced to
ribbons by US cluster bombs, can one imagine that an Iraqi puppet
government is going to b greeted with cheers and bunting by Iraqis.
Take Kenan Makiya, head of the Iraqi Documentation and Studies
Center, Harvard University and professor at Brandeis University.
He is one of the more prominent people in Chalabi's group of
exiles, the Iraqi National Accord.
On March 24 Makiya described his emotions
at the news that Baghdad was being bombed:
"The bombs have begun to fall on
Baghdadthose bombs are music to my ears the explosion of a JDAM
can sound beautiful." Probably more beautiful when contemplated
from the sanctuary of Harvard Yard, than in the maternity hospital
in Baghdad a US missile hit last week.
"My friends in the opposition,"
Makiya went on, "are gathering in Kurdistan with the Iraqi
National Congress and in Kuwait with Jay Garner's office.[The
retired US general, intended as postwar Iraq's proconsul, noted
for the public vehemence of his support for Israel.] I should
be there with them, but I am told I have to stay. I am needed
here, to keep touch with Washington. I cannot stand it. All I
have to think about is whether or not the U.S. government is
going to once again betray the Iraqi opposition."
Makiya is right to be apprehensive. It
was he who personally assured George Bush before the US/UK attack
that the invaders would be greeted with cheers and roses, and
the US high command has no doubt adjusted its estimate of exactly
how close people like Chalabi and Makiya are attuned to the sentiments
of the people of Iraq, who probably do not appreciate the scenario
Makiya recently shared with the American Enterprise Board (at
a symposium), of a "federal, non-Arab demilitarized Iraq"
. Such a federal Iraqi government, Makiya went on, "cannot
be thought of any longer, in any politically meaningful sense
of the word, as an Arab entity."
The "rolling victory" scenario
means the US will declare Saddam defeated even if he survives
as leader and Baghdad remains uncaptured. So long as the oil
fields are secured, who cares? Some in the US administration
want a US puppet regime to be proclaimed as soon as possible,
as an effort to legitimize the invasion. (The UN is similarly
eager to re-legitimize itself as the humanitarian guarantor of
postwar Iraq, with France, Germany and Russia all now calling
for speedy US victory.)
So Chalabi or someone of his ilk could
soon be sitting in a tent in a US military compound, hymning
Iraq's new day and keeping a wary eye out for suicide bombers.
He won't be a good insurance risk.
Assessing the surprising extent of resistance,
the US ultra-hawks are now circulating the idea that Iraq is
a "deeply sick" society, not yet ready for "western
style democracy", which will require purgation through lengthy
occupation, with all appropriate theft or exploitation of Iraq's
assets. Assuming the demise of Saddam's regime, Iraqi national
resistance will be presumably led by Dawa, which is the Shi'ite
resistance group, by the Iraqi Communist Party and perhaps the
pro-Syrian elements of the Ba'ath Party, which has retained through
years of repression, a surprising amount of strength.
How long will US occupation last, given
lethal assaults of the sort that killed over 200 US marines in
Lebanon in the Reagan years, prompting rapid withdrawal? The
Iranians are pretty good at this sort of game, and of course
will be eager to speed US departure. So a flickering US casualty
rate (note the disclosure last week of 175 casualties among US
special operations forces, post 9/11), as now occurring in Afghanistan,
could prompt a Bring The Troops Home call from Democratic contenders
such as Kerry, currently too prudent to do anything but wag the
flag.
For historical background on such prospects,
read any good account of the great uprising of 1920 against the
British forces occupying Mesopotamia, which unified Sunni, Shi'a
and Kurd.
Paula and Andrew
More than one viewer of CNN called me
excitedly last week to ask if it was indeed me who was interviewed
by Paul Zahn, Friday evening. Actually it was a look-alike, known
informally as Andrew Cockburn, sometimes described as Alexander
Cockburn's "younger brother". (Yet another Alexander
Cockburn-look-alike known informally as Patrick is currently
deployed in Arbil, in northern Iraq. These two look-alikes have
authored a very useful book, Saddam, An American Obsession, published
by Verso, which has been assiduously pillaged by ravening journalists
for the past few months.)
Zahn cross-examined "Andrew"
closely on whether or not Saddam Hussein was alive. He, "Andrew",
not "Saddam", allowed as how such stories were most
likely US disinformation, designed to sow confusion in Iraq,
also get Saddam to appear in public, at which point the US could
try to kill him.
The next morning Iraq released a tape
of Saddam surrounded by cheering fans, in the course of which
the Iraqi leader said, "Perhaps you remember the valiant
Iraqi peasant and how he shot down an American Apache with an
old weapon." Zahn asked CNN's Pentagon man whether this
could have been prerecorded, and he said that indeed that indeed
could have been so.
This raises a scenario worthy of the
pen of Borges, proposing that Saddam, some time over the past
few years, pre-recorded video and audiotapes designed to reflect
every conceivable contingency in foreseeable history. Tape number
3045 praised the old peasant bringing down an Apache. Tape 3046
praised a lad who felled it with a slingshot. Tape 5421 contains
Saddam's exultant commentary on the demise of the US aviation
industry. Tape 6032 features his discussion of SARS as the retribution
of Allah. Tape 8003 welcomes the onset of the Kucinich administration.
Regulate Him To Death!
Here in Humboldt county, northern California
political debate on the wisdom of invasion has been keen. At
a recent meeting of the county's Board of Supervisors one Vietnam
vet was quoted by the Independent as saying that war was not
the best way to subdue Saddam Hussein.
"Why not regulate the guy to death,
it works in America", the vet cried, adding that "despite
the blather, bluster and BS of the AM radio crowd, Iraq is surrounded
by US troops and doesn't pose a threat. "Saddam has more
enemies than Gray Davis. If we pile the paperwork on him, he'll
blow his brains out."
"Blitzer's Voice"
Strikes a Nerve
We knew Bruce Jackson's piece Hating
Wolf Blitzer's Voice was going
to be popular. And now Bruce tells us he's gotten more email
from CounterPunch readers for "Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice"
than any other article he's had on our site (even "Queen
Dershowitz," which was about Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz's
advocacy of torture as an interrogation technique). A sample
of Bruce's mailbag:
"Thank you more than I can tell
you for this article. The man is a purveyor of serious language-virus,
the kind William Burroughs spoke of; in Wolf's case, words are
drained utterly of their power, which is a kind of reverse of
Burroughs's dictum but true nonetheless."
"I THINK MOST OF THE MAIN STREAM
MEDIA THINK WE ARE ALL IDIOTS OUT HERE. I THINK NOT!!WE ARE NOT
ALL BOOT LICKERS, FAWNERS AND LEMMINGS."
"I read your article about Wolf
Blitzer. I've been thinking the same thing about his voice for
a long time. It's so monotone . .it's like the drone of "coalition"
airplanes flying in Iraq.... Have you noticed that the only time
the major news networks show injured Iraqis is when there is
an American soldier conveniently helping tend to their wounds?
Why do I even watch?"
"Occasionally I go to work at a
clients office, where my workstation is positioned right next
to the conference room. The TV in there is on all day long, tuned
to CNN. My wife and I took the TV out of the house just before
all this nonsense started. But at this office I cannot get away
from it."
"Your article cleared up something
for me and I had such a hard time finding the adjective. it was
day two of the war with CNN on--and for about two minutes--al-Jazeera's
Arabic broadcasting was on. there were massive explosions--skies
lit in orange blaze.. and al-Jazeera's commentator was waiting
for someone else to come on. he said simply in Arabic; "Baghdad
burns. What can one say?" then Mr. Blitzer's monotone voice
takes over with other apparently immediate concerns that had
no relevance to the image. al-Jazeera respected the moment of
silence that allowed for that one image to speak for itself."
"I read your piece about hating
Wolf Blitzer's tv-performance voice (and George Bush's unscripted
tv voice) with much pleasure. Quite right; they're both awful.
"I have no explanation to offer
for George Bush, whose speech is so dysfunctional that it defies
description, making your piece even more admirable. I can offer
one clue regarding the way that Wolf Blitzer talks, however.
Long ago, there was a widely used method for training radio and
tv journalists -- the one that used the "How Now Brown Cow"
recording. The method included a technique for talking in a fashion
that would make it almost impossible for anyone to interrupt
you, and it revolved around never taking a breath at the end
of a sentence. The journalist was supposed to divide up every
sentence into constituent chunks after which a breath could be
drawn. I believe Blitzer is using that method -- badly. It has
given him a distinctive delivery that serves him well because
it sets him off from the herd.
"That doesn't explain why he seems
unable to adjust his intensity levels to match the seriousness
of what he's reporting.
"Finally, the CNN person that I
find _really_ infuriating is the young woman-- her name escapes
me now [Could this be the ineffable Rudy Bakhtiar? Be still my
heart! AC] -- who is so blasted "perky" at all times.
It makes no difference whether the story she's reporting is the
most horrific of tragedies, she stays perky. She sounds like
one of those telephone operators trained to smile at all times,
with a mirror in the cubicle to provide feedback.
"For a country that portrays itself
as so good, so powerful and so down-home right all the time,
the collective intelligence of the mainstream media is sadly
lacking. Any other foreign publication, even mainstream, sounds
much more reasonable and thoughtful in its' analysis of any subject.
I feel as if we are all taking part in a bad theater production
with no final act. Sad, sad times these are but you all give
me hope."
"I just read your article on CNN
and Wolf Blitzer. The physics analogy is well chosen, but incomplete.
Two most important thermodynamic quantities of enclosed gas are
its energy (or heat) and its entropy. What you seem to be irritated
about, if I may offer a sympathetic meaning to it, is the dramatic
increase in entropy (or inability to differentiate the states
of the system) which also prompted me about 10 years ago to stop
reading papers and watch TV. The ordinary commercials are becoming
indistinguishable from the political or socio-engineering ones.
I should stress that there are two entropies that are often mixed,
one is thermodynamic, the other is informational."
Hitchens and Pigs:
Porker Fans Protest
CounterPuncher Adam Engel writes thus
re body counts and the Porker:
'I'm swearing off "body counts."
The descriptions of wounded and dying in Iraqi hospitals was
enough for me. As far as I'm concerned, if even one person is
killed -- and that number has been exceeded -- for no damn reason
(and there is no damn reason), Bush Inc. are war criminals. Playing
the body count game is their thing anyway.
'But I'm actually writing to you regarding
that pig Hitchens. Maybe it's because you were once colleagues
and you've seen a better part of him, but I think you're too
lenient on the bastard. I've seen booze and drugs change people's
personalities, but never to the point of betraying former friends,
colleagues, and an entire worldview. This would be unfortunate
in a sportswriter, but Hitchens is literally calling  for
death and destruction of people who have nothing on earth to
do with him or his ridiculous "celebrity" kick. In
"civilian life" those who instigate murder are usually
punished accordingly. John Gotti didn't personally murder all
that many people, he merely "suggested" that the world
might be a better place (for him) if they disappeared. Hitchens
is only one of many "word criminals," but I find his
"I've seen the light and it shines on the Right" routine
particularly galling. Alcohol? Or just an odious person? It's
one thing to write bad copy; it's quite another to openly call
for the murder of thousands of plain-old-folks just trying to
live their lives.'
Now this:
Dear Mr. Cockburn,
Please stop putting down pigs by comparing
Christopher Hitchens to them. Pigs are clean, intelligent, and
sober animals.
Sincerely yours,
Mary Zoeter
Alexandria, Virginia
I answered:
Dear Mary, You're right. I withdraw the
slur (on pigs). Apologies, AC
But then I remembered that Mary's porker
allusion is to Ben Tripp's delightful little drawing, below our
Jampot File heading (Just Another Middle-Aged Porker of the Right).
This is too good to drop. The pigs will understand and, I trust,
forgive.
A couple of sedate souls have deplored
our criticisms of Hitchens, arguing that debate should be conducted
on the lofty plane of ideas and insinuations that he is a drunken
hack lower the tone.
Frankly, we're all for tone lowering.
Besides, how do you engage with this sort of thing on the loft
p. of i. I quote frojm a recent Lord Haw-hawtchens column in
the British Daily Mirror: "I enjoyed seeing them supervise
the delivery of food and water as well, even though it was sometimes
haphazard...And I can hardly say what I feel when I see them
risking casualties rather than run the risk of inflicting them.
But all of this--all of it--argues for more intervention and
more steadfastness and not less."
Today's
Features
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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