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Why Most Kids Are Left Behind

In a radical probe of the functions of US education, Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross define the role of schools and of the bipartisan "No Child Left Behind" law in a rotting, militarized, imperial system. How educators should resist. Alexander Cockburn on why and how Wall Street and the Feds finished off Eliot Spitzer. Eamonn McCann on hiow the bel tolled for Ian Paisley. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great holiday presents.

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Today's Stories

March 19, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
A War of Lies

March 18, 2008

David Price
The Military "Leveraging" of Cultural Knowledge

Paul Craig Roberts
The Collapse of American Power

Tim Wise
Of National Lies and Racial America: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth

Patrick Cockburn
One of the Most Disastrous Wars Ever Fought

Conn Hallinan
Afghanistan, a River Running Backward

James T. Phillips
Monsters: Past, Present and Wannabe

Uri Avnery
The Killing in Bethlehem

David Macaray
Could Wal-Mart Revive the Labor Movement?

Marjorie Cohn
Beware an Attack on Iran

Peter Zinn
Obama in New Orleans

Dan La Botz
The Economic Crisis, Labor and the Left

Monica Benderman
Where are We Going?

 

March 17, 2008

Pam Martens
The Fed's Wall Street Dilemma

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The US, Iran and the Policy of Dual Containment

Nelson P. Valdés
The Imperial Branding of Simon Bolivar and the Cuban Revolution

Peter Morici
The Corrosive Consequences of the Trade Deficit

Wajahat Ali
Disrobing the Nine: a Conversation with Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court Since 9/11

Ronnie Cummins
Beyond Progressive Malpractice: Taking Down Big Pharma

Shaun Harkin
Saint Patrick's Day in Fortress America

Ali Khan
No Pardon for Musharraf

Robert Jensen
Beyond Peace

P. Sainath
Oh, What a Lovely Waiver!

Greg Moses
Jeremiah was a Bullhorn

Dr. Susan Block
Advice for Eliot Spitzer

Website of the Day
No Cowboys

 

March 15 / 16, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
How to Destroy a Country in Five Years

Mike Whitney
Bearly Alive: Investment Giant Rushed to ICU by Panicky Fed Chief

Ralph Nader
Of Laws and Men

Robert Pollin
It's Still the Economy, Stupid

Diane Christian
The Poetics of Perversity: From Boccaccio to Spitzer

Wajahat Ali
Faking the Hood: a Conversation with Ishmael Reed

Tom Wright /
Therese Saliba

Rachel Corrie's Case for Justice

Alan Farago
Back to Florida: Where Bushtime Began

Greg Moses
Raiding the Family Room in Texas

Michael Hudson
A Grand Global Bargain?

Martha Rosenberg
Why Hillary's Favorite Chicken Company is Eying China

John Goekler
Fourth Generation Warfare in a Fifth Generation Conflict

Uzma Aslam Khan
A Letter to Barack Obama: Where's the Change, Barack?

Oren Ben-Dor
The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon

David Underhill
Mammon, Morals and the Mobile Tanker Deal

Fred Gardner
The Education of Eliot Spitzer

David Michael Green
Why Spitzer Should Have Resigned (and Why He Shouldn't Have)

Rev. William E. Alberts
Jesus, Entombed in Heaven

Gail Dines
It's All About the John: Prostitution and Male Power

David Yearsley
Conducting, Anarchy and the Problem of When to Begin

Chris Clarke
Walking with Zeke: the Luckiest of Dogs

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Lodge & Subiet

Website of the Day
Deviant Art

 

March 14, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching the Dollar Die

Don Santina
Vichy Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Mother Vows Revenge on US: How She Lost Her Husband and Her Sons

Tim Rinne
StratCom Rules! The Next War Will Start in Nebraska

Robert Fantina
In Torture We Trust

Saul Landau
Letter to the Presidents-in-Waitings

David Macaray
Common Myths About Labor Unions

Franklin Lamb
Is the Bush Administration Switching Horses in Lebanon

Michael Neumann
The One State Illusion: Reply to My Critics

March 13, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Republicans and "Free Market" Zealots Bring Disaster to America

Mike Whitney
Meltdown Looms Larger As Credit Markets Freeze

Assaf Kfoury
"One-State or Two State?"- Sterile Debate on False Alternatives

Andy Worthington
Afghan Hero Who Died in Guantánamo: The Background to the Story

Adam Federman
From Autopia to Autogeddon: Cars Reach the End of the Road

March 12, 2008

Dave Lindorff
Bringing Down Spitzer: It's the Big Brother Who Should Bother US

R.F. Blader
The Spitzer Backlash

Yonatan Mendel
How to be an Israeli Journalist. Never Write "Murder" or "Palestine"

Jonathan Cook
One State or Two? Neither. The Issue is Zionism

Bill and Kathy Christison
Fallon and Gates -- At Least One Cheer

James J. Brittain
Was the U.S. Involved in Killing the FARC-EP Leaders

Ron Jacobs
"All the Money You Make Will Never Buy Back Your Soul"

March 11, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
How to End the Subprime Crisis

Ed O'Loughlin
How Israeli Troops Invade Homes in Gaza, Brutalize, Smash and Steal

Ramzy Baroud
'Unwavering Commitment' to Inequality

Kathy Christison
One State or Two? The Debate Over Israel and Palestine

China Hand
PRC Plays it Cool, as U.S. Tries to Amp Up Pressure on Iran

John Joslin
Thank You, Nafta! Welcome to Weirton, Home of the Discount Cigarette

Mike Averko
Serb Politics, Kosovo and the Moscow-Washington Divide

Ben Rosenfeld
Gavin Newsom's Kneejerk Plan

Thierry Paquot
High Rise, Low Spirits:The Curse of the Tower Block

March 10, 2008

Uri Avnery
"Kill A Hundred Turks and Rest": The Five-Day War in Gaza

Col. Dan Smith
Scoring the "Surge" and What Lies Beyond

R.F. Blader
Why "Lock Them Up and Throw Away the Key" is Losing its Sheen

Michael Neumann
The One-State Illusion: More is Less

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Did the Republicans Give Hillary Her Victory in Ohio?

James J. Brittain
Anti-Uribe Protests in Colombia and the World

Missy Comley Beattie
The Passion of John McCain

March 8-9, 2008 Weekend Edition

JoAnn Wypijewski
The Only Way to Fight the Clintons

Mike Whitney
Sorting Through the Rubble in Post Bubble America

Peter Morici
Fed and Treasury Fiddle as Economy Plummets

Ralph Nader
The Silent Violence of Gaza's Suffering that Candidates Ignore

Jonathan Cook
The Meaning of Gaza's Shoah

Steve Niva
Behind the Israeli Escalation in Gaza

Bill and Kathy Christison
Crisis over Teheran's Alleged Nuclear Plans Nearing Climax

Hervé Do Alto and Franck Poupeau
Bolivia: Morales is Checked

Eric Walberg
To Leave and Stay at the Same Time: Putin to Medvedev to…?

Scott Johnson
City of A Thousand Foreclosures

Mark Scaramella
James Brown's Gate

Bill Clinton
President Clinton's Remarks on Naming William M. Daley as NAFTA Task Force Chairman

Poet's Basement
St. Thomasino, Engel, Davies and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Hillary Blackens Barack

March 7, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Why Iraq Could Blow-Up in John McCain's Face

Robin Blackburn
Question for Barrack Obama: Why Afghanistan is the 'Right War'?

Saul Landau
The Stupid Economy

Binoy Kampmark
When Competition is Good: McCain and the Muddled Democrats

Chris Floyd
Crushing the Ants: Admiral Fallon and His Empire

Andy Worthington
Spanish Drop "Inhuman" Extradition Request for Guantánamo Britons

Will Potter
Before the Smoke Even Clears in Seattle: Bringing Out the T Word

March 6, 2008

 

March 6, 2008

Vincent Navarro
The Next Failure of Health Reform

Forrest Hylton
High Stakes in the Andes: Colombia's Cornered President

Peter Morici
Why the Dollar is So Cheap

George Ciccariello-Maher
Counter-Attack of the Bureaucrats

John Ross
Taxi! Taxi! The Dark Side of the Oscars

Jacob Hornberger
No Standing to Lecture on Justice

Paul Watson
Illegal Japanese Whaling by the Numbers

Dan Bacher
Off the Deep End

Website of the Day
A Katrina Reader Online

 

March 5, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
A Great Day for John McCain (and Maybe Nader)

Joanne Mariner
After Guantanamo

Fidel Castro
The Raid on Ecuador: Underestimating Rafael Correa

Christopher Brauchli
The Turkish Invasions

Steven Sherman
Obama and the Prospects for a Renewal of the Left

Dave Lindorff
Busting Bush & Co. in New England

James Murren
Bombing Somalia

Adam Engel
Necropolis Now

Website of Day
Remember Song

 

March 4, 2008

Wajahat Ali
Mumbo Jumbo: Naming Names with Ishmael Reed

William Blum
How Could Hillary Have Known?

Bill Quigley
The Cleansing of New Orleans

Ralph Nader
The Prince Harry Solution

Patrick Irelan
Oil and Health in Venezuela

James J. Brittain /
R. James Sacouman

Uribe's Colombia is Destabilizing a New Latin America

Norman Solomon
The War Election

Jacob Hornberger
Hillary in Waco: the Missing Apology

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the European Parliament

Mike Averko
Kosovo and the Press

Website of the Day
Tex-Mex Primary

 

March 3, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Gazan Holocaust

Alan Farago
American Politics and the Faltering Economy

Richard Gott
Colombian Deaths in Ecuador

Wajahat Ali
Who Speaks for a Billion Muslims? Analyzing the World Gallup Poll with John Esposito

Paul Craig Roberts
The Mukasey Conspiracy: a Bi-Partisan Attack on the Constitution

Robert Weissman
When Multinationals Say Adieu

Uri Avnery
Good Morning, Hamas

Martha Rosenberg
When Your Meat is a Downer

Eva Liddell
Leave the Next Dance for Bill

Michael Donnelly
Will Ferrell Does Flint

Website of the Day
Muddy Waters: Train Fare Home Blues

 

March 1 / 2, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Race Card

Paul Craig Roberts
The Political Trial of Don Siegelman

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Nader the Best Antidote to American Imperialism

Nelson P. Valdés
Cuba After Fidel

Christopher Brauchli
Meet Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev: Friend of Bill, George and Dick

Ron Jacobs
Inside the Secret City: Bomb Making at Oak Ridge

John Ross
The New Conquistadores: Spain's Reconquest of Mexico

Robert Fantina
Posturing Over Patriotism: Obama and Those Lapel Pins

Robert Weissman
Hidden in Plain Sight: Human Rights Hypocrisy

Mohammed Omer
Fear in Gaza

Remi Kanazi
Barack Obama and the Politics of Xenophobia

Bob Jackson
Why is Yellowstone Destroying Its Bison Herd?

Richard Rhames
Casual Threats: Loaded with Mercury

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Awaits the Arrival of the USS Cole

Rannie Amiri
Showboat Diplomacy: US Warships Steam Toward Lebanon

David Michael Green
The Three Faces of Hillary: the Politics of Flim-Flam

Conn Hallinan
Notes from the Southern Cone

Faheem Hussain
Prince Harry of Afghanistan and the Meaning of Normalcy

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Gardner and Ford

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Help!

 

 

February 29, 2008

Matt Gonzalez
The Obama Craze

Jonathan Cook
Academic Freedom? Not for Arabs in Israel

Joshua Frank
Obama and Israel

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unilateral Presidency: Signing Statements and the Rollback of American Law

Linn Washington, Jr.
Cop Abuse in America

Binoy Kampmark
Hubris and Nemesis

Robert Bryce
Energy Efficiency May be a Good Thing, But It Won't Cut Energy Use

Sonja Karkar
Australia's Government Continues Its Love Affair with Israel

Dave Lindorff
A Manchurian Candidate in the White House? Obama or Bush?

Website of the Day
Olduvai George

 

February 28, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
"Iraq" Falls Apart

Fred Gardner
The Birth of NAFTA

Michael Levitin
The Crisis in Kosovo is Just Beginning

William S. Lind
The Fake State of Kosovo

David Macaray
A Ray of Hope for Organized Labor

Stephen Fleischman
Nader's Latest Run: Monkey Wrench or Cattle Prod?

George Wuerthner
The Myths of Forest Health: Why Ecological Logging is an Oxymoron

Laura Carlsen
The North American Union Farce

Carl Finamore
Why the Delta-Northwest Deal Hasn't Taken Off

Michael Dickinson
The Day I Bombed the House of Commons

Website of the Day
Plane Stupid

 

February 27, 2008

David Rosen
Playing the Race Card: Obama, Love Across the Color Line and Political Dirty Tricks

Vijay Prashad
Bomber John: McCain and the 100 Year War

Harvey Wasserman
Incident at Turkey Point: Did Florida Go to the Radioactive Brink?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Shambolic Trials: Pentagon Boss Resigns, Ex-Prosecutor Joins Defense

Wajahat Ali
Pakistan for Sale: an Interview with Ayesha Siddiqa on Pakistan's Military Economy

Peter Morici
The Auction-Rate Securities Fiasco: a Drama of Greed and Betrayal

Stephen Philion
Conspiracy Theory, Fears of Betrayal and Today's Anti-War Movement

Michael Donnelly
Obama by Unanimous Decision

Erica Rosenberg /
Janine Blaeloch
After the Land Deals: Will There be Any Wilderness Left to Protect?

Website of the Day
Dress Blues

 

February 26, 2008

Debbie Nathan
Confessions of a Gitmo Guard

Alan Dershowitz
v. Frank Menetrez

On Finkelstein

Harvey Wasserman
How Ohio Got Nuked

Michael Colby
Ralph Nader vs. the Fundamentalist Liberals

Gary Leupp
Condi vs. Putin on Bullying Belgrade

David Orchard
The New Conquistadors: Canada in Afghanistan

Martha Rosenberg
The Big HRT

Fran Shor
The Electoral Circus and Nader's Sideshow

Serge Halimi
The Dom Perignon Socialist Manifesto: Bernard Henri-Levy's Plan for the French Left

Global Balkans
Neo-Liberalism and Protectorate States in the Post-Yugoslav Balkans: an Interview with Tariq Ali

Website of the Day
Texistentialism

 

February 25, 2008

Roger Morris
A Death in Damascus

Anthony DiMaggio
Military Bases, the Media and the Democrats

Ralph Nader
Why I'm Running

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Broils

Paul Craig Roberts
Kosovo and the Empire Crazies

Peter Morici
Bernanke's Failing Policies: a Long Recession Looms

Dave Lindorff
General Welch's Whitewash: What We Still Don't Know About That Minot Nuke Incident

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassen

Fanatics, Mountebanks and Drillers: a Bloody Oil Film

Heather Gray
James Orange, Civil Rights Legend

Robert Weitzel
Accomodating Torture

John Halle
Kucinich Goes Down

Website of the Day
Do the Trunk Monkey!


February 23 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Mushrooming Clouds That Hang Over McCain

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama and Global Trade

Wajahat Ali
Omissions of the Commission: an Interview with Phillip Shenon on the 9/11 Commission

Ralph Nader
Neutering the FDA

Jürgen Vsych
"What Was Ralph Nader Thinking?"

Fidel Castro
Watching the US Presidential Campaign from Havana

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo

David Macaray
Unions Under Assault

Jeremy Scahill
The Real Story Behind Kosovo's Independence

David Krieger
Stanley Sheinbaum
Caging the Cold War Monster

Ron Jacobs
Building for the Future

Michael Garrity
The Last, Best Hope for the Northern Rockies

Brian McKenna
Higher Ed's "Civic Engagements" Get Dumbed Down

Missy Beattie
Over the Hill with John McCain

Fred Gardner
American College of Physicians Takes Pro-Cannabis Stand (Mostly)

Boris Kagarlitsky
The Growth of the Russian Labor Movement

Mike Ferner
Kick That Barrel

Dan Bacher
On the Trail with the Border Angels

Christopher Ketcham
Hillary Goes Where Obama Fears to Tread

Poets' Basement
Davies and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Obama Mariachi

 

February 22, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Bonfire of Capital

Jason Hribal
Elephants and the Circus: The Story of Janet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Arresting Musharraf

Joshua Frank
That Obama Glow: the Nuclear Industry's Golden Child

Dave Lindorff
Vicki's John: Ask Not What She Did for Him, Ask What He Did for Her!

Liliana Segura
When Torture is Old News: McCain's Blonde Diversion

Robert Fantina
Castro, Bush and Cuba: a Fiasco Waiting to Happen?

Yifat Susskind
The ABCs of Death: Bush vs. Africa's Women

Norm Kent
Pushing 60 with Pot

Website of the Day
Bush Gets Down in Liberia

February 21, 2008

Saul Landau
Fidel Steps Aside

Elizabeth Schulte
Left Behind, With No End in Sight: America's Long-Term Unemployed

Helen Redmond
Health Care as a Human Right

Benjamin Dangl
Undermining Bolivia

Michael Levitin
Kosovo's Dilemma

Liam Leonard
Fear and Loathing on the Emerald Isle

Patrick Irelan
Land and Food in Venezuela

Linn Cohen-Cole
Poor Ohio: a Second Letter to Hillary on Her Ties to Monsanto

Michael Simmons
Daydream Believer: John Stewart, the Miles Davis of Folk Music

CounterPunch News Service
A Message from the Women of Okinawa to US GIs

Website of the Day
Cop Abuse in Shreveport

 

 

 


 

 

 

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March 19, 2008

The Little Men and the Inferno

The Hell-Disaster of Iraq

By ROBERT FISK

Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".

But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry--but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.

Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people--the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world--not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?

Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning--of which more later--but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.

As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror--I recommend the Battle of Borodino--along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.

On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia--"Mission Accomplished"--and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians--ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents--annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.

To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair--as we should always have called this small town lawyer--should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war--and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper--daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship.

Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie?

Question 2: How did he get away with it?

But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us--be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism"--are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.

Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.

But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".

Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".

On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved--even just a few tears for a minute or so--for the Iraqis?

For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies"--they did, by the way--and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.

Of course, when I was at school, our leaders--Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States--had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen--Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz--have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.

Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.

It is a grotesque truism that today--after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago--we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).

They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq--176--is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq--29,395--is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).

Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead--they range from 350,000 up to a million--these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom--60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded--from 1940 to 1945.

Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or--more terrible still--two Hiroshimas.

Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.

America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?

We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto--in Afghanistan--unheard of suicide bomber.

And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror--yes, our terror--of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.








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