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Recent Stories
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
25, 2003
A Superpower
on Credit
Iraq and the
Death of the West
By ANTHONY GANCARSKI
Those
who assume that the military action in Iraq will end with Hussein's
capitulation are grievously mistaken, according to the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Bob Novak. Novak asserts that "a special envoy of the president
of Iran traveled to Ankara for talks with Turkish leaders" regarding
the division of "northern Iraq between them in advance of an anticipated
U.S. military victory."
As Novak puts it,
that runs against American war aims. To say the least, Bob. When Ken
Adelman predicted a cakewalk, when Hitchens depicted the Iranian "street"
as essentially pro-American, and when Mike Ledeen cashed his advance
for his tome about the terror masters, they were putting their credibility
on the line to argue that a war has seldom been so necessary and easy
as the one on Iraq. Those worthies, paraded from cable news set to cable
news set like herd animals, indulging such as Rumsfeld in claims [like
the one made last week at a DOD "briefing"] that the Iraqis
will be "liberated. . . from repression."
Granted, the Defense
Secretary generally is careful to refer to the Iraqis as "oppressed"
rather than "repressed". But why quibble over semantics? Either
way, the Iraqi people end up objectified, their alleged passivity in
the face of overwhelming force somehow interpreted as consent. The en
masse surrenders of Iraqi forces suggest that, far from being a threat
to its neighbors, the Iraqi military has been fundamentally unable to
defend the nation's territorial integrity since well before the current
campaign started.
In other words,
the US military hasn't attacked the new Hitler. Hussein is -- was? --
a Third World President For Life. A trusty of Europe, a former trusty
of the US, functionally a manager of western interests in the region.
The problem now,
from which many future intrigues will spring, is what exactly are Western
interests. The schism between the Franco/German/Russian axis -- who
would've imagined that in the 80s? -- and the US/British/Spanish alliance
strikes independent observers ranging from Walter Cronkite to Joe Sobran
as irresolvable. Talk abounds about the ends of OPEC and the UN. Clearly,
we are at the end of an epoch, as a power struggle has ensued for control
of the international order.
As a result of that
power struggle, we can dispense with talk of the West. It no longer
exists in any tangible sense. Perhaps those who advocate US restructuring
of "the Arab World" understand better than most of us that
there is no such thing as shared interests between the US and Europe
anymore. Their reasoning seems to run that US interests must consolidate
control of the world's petroleum if the US is to have any hope of stemming
its inevitable eclipse by the last standing "tiger economy"
-- that of China.
China! A billion
people, and an economy growing at ten percent per annum. Hundreds of
millions of people whose only exposure to direct marketing so far has
been missives from the ruling Party.
But that will change.
The sheer bulk of the Chinese population inevitably will make the Asian
giant the economic superior of the United States. Americans simply don't
have the money even to service their credit anymore, much less to fuel
an economic recovery. Americans, compared to three decades prior, work
more hours and make less money than they did in what Chomsky called
"the golden age of state capitalism." Uncoincidentally, he
describes the last three decades as the "leaden age."
As usual, Chomsky
parses an uncomfortable truth about such matters. This has been a leaden
age for those affected by the aggressive state capitalism that now drives
the American economy. Small towns vie to be the homes of penitentiaries,
under the impression that the incarceration industry will replace the
farms or the factories that once fed their families. That sort of misguided
logic, perhaps rooted in a conviction that there is no other option,
drives our nation's apparent need to protect the Middle East from itself.
Whatever else can be said for the military-industrial complex and the
prison industry, those are two industries exempt from downsizing.
Anthony
Gancarski is a regular columnist for CounterPunch. He can be
reached at: ANTHONY.GANCARSKI@ATTBI.COM
Today's Features
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
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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