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August 8, 2002
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
August 7, 2002
Anis Shivani
The First
21st Century
Police State
Jeffrey St. Clair
Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US Navy Killing
Children in Nevada?
Robert Fisk
For the
Forgotten Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
Dr. Susan Block
Rigas in
Cuffs
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
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Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
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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
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August
8, 2002
Gameplanning:
Team AIPAC's
2002 Season
by Anthony Gancarski
A couple of interesting tidbits appear on the
"new this week" section on the website of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee:
"Take Action! Urge Bush to Approve
$200 Million to Israel A $29 billion homeland security bill that
recently passed in Congress with strong bi-partisan support includes
$200 million in anti-terror aid for Israel. These funds would
provide vital additional resources to help Israel fight its war
on terror and protect its population from future conflicts in
the region. Since Israel's allocation was added to the bill by
congressional appropriators, President Bush must designate the
$200 million for Israel as an "emergency" in order
for Israel to receive the funding. Urge President Bush to approve
the "emergency" designation of the money for Israel's
war on terror."
Emergency! Quite the loaded word to use,
given the current "2 Weeks to Judaism" program being
used to convert and import converts to said faith from the Andean
mountains. One imagines that if there were such an "emergency"
worthy of our President's notice in a foreign country, said foreign
government would do what is logical in wartime and curtail immigration
rather than encourage new folks to move in and settle the land
of those who had been on it for centuries. One wonders if those
proselytizing are up front at all about what goes on -- the checkpoints,
the bombs dropped on residences from US made aircraft, the complete
perversion of Yahweh's message in the service of geopolitical
objectives.
But I digress. No one wants to discuss
God except for the so-called "congressional appropriators",
a gaggle of rubberstampers who occasionally shuffle out of their
chambers en masse to expound their solidarity for one linkage
of God and the destruction of his creation or another. And speaking
of rubber stamps, another item from the website of America's
Pro-Israel lobby.
"In a vote of 95-3, the Senate last
week passed the fiscal year 2003 Defense Appropriations bill,
which provides substantial funding for U.S.-Israel strategic
cooperation. The Arrow Missile Defense Program received $80 million
above the administration's request for a total of $146 million.
Additional funding includes the following: $23.5 million for
the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL); $64.9 million
for the Litening II Targeting Pod; $35 million for Bradley Reactive
Armor Tiles; $22 million for the Hunter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle;
and $20 million for the Improved Tactical Air-Launched Decoy
(ITALD). Learn more about these defense programs by visiting
our interactive strategic showroom."
Leaving aside the absurdity of a phrase
like "interactive strategic showroom", I'd like to
focus on one other aspect of this vote. Ninety-five to three.
That's the kind of result that used to be disparaged in the US
press when it would pop out of some rogue state's parliament.
Of course, back when middle-class folks read and mothers stayed
home to raise their children, folks in the "mainstream"
may have questioned numbers like that, as they would've questioned
the inhumanity of some of the phrases that come out of the White
House to justify their use and dealing of "weapons of mass
destruction."
Only in the United States would we accept
wars being given names as glib as those given to mixed drinks
in an ersatz Irish theme bar. Take your pick of either of these
euphemisms being bandied about on the cable channels, describing
a US floorshow in Iraq: "Afghan Redux", which suggests
an earthily intoxicating blend of subdued flavors and "Desert
Storm Lite", a Kahluaesque concoction that gets you crunked
up -- but not at the expense of your girlish figure. "Infinite
Justice" has come and gone, way back in the rearview mirror
as we mutely watch the military-industrial complex and the relevant
lobbies and moral compasses "game plan" the war on
Iraq. Meanwhile, there are those among us who accept formulations
like "We have to hunt down every terrorist to prove how
much we love freedom" as evidence of serious thought from
the self-styled born-again Christian who quotes Black Sabbath
lyrics in moments of levity. The leader of the free world.
Elementary logic suggests that if people
should be punished for transgressions against others that can
be proven, then the burden of proof rests with the party who
accepts the burden of imposition of his moral code. The US Government,
who proclaims its moral superiority with every propaganda instrument
available to it, enjoys the benefits of imposing its moral code
but rejects the burden of proof of its claims. We speak of invading
Iraq as almost an afterthought, under the pretext of the possibility
that Iraq may someday possess weapons of mass destruction. The
underlying claim is that a nation's sovereignty is at the will
of the United States government, which makes one feel swell if
he somehow accepts people like Richard Perle and John Negroponte
as products of a vibrant representative democracy.
And there apparently are people who accept
those very claims, and others besides. The State Department's
contention that Iraq didn't in fact "gas its own people"
in 1988 was taken seriously during the Herbert Walker era but
is now remembered solely by members of the lunatic fringe like
Jude Wanniski. The constant reshuffling of historical facts in
favor of the present policy makes us understand that the phrase
"The End of History" was actually prescriptive, intended
to create a population with no idea of what their representatives
are doing on their behalf.
Why is it so important to go into Iraq
to install Ahmed Chalabi or someone of his unctuous ilk as leader?
The answer to that question seems obvious, if one examines the
relationship between Israel and Iraq in the same context as that
of others historically where a weaker state accepted protection
from the US, which sought to counteract the growth of a regional
power and to consolidate its global domination. Given the extent
to which the US Government has socialized the costs of Israel's
existence, we should be able to understand who benefits from
the dehumanization of Palestinians and the lurid, unsubstantiated
"details" about Iraqi atrocities. The people who benefit
are those who deal in death and its implements, and we can choose
to deal with that question honestly only when we understand that
Israel's use to the US is like that of any other "cop on
the beat", intended to counteract any pretensions toward
actual national sovereignty in the region.
The destruction of Iraq, the turmoil
on the "Arab Street", the desolation of a people held
in lockdown and exile for generations; all these are part of
the "game plan" for a cycle of plunder, where the plunderers
are too gutless even to call the process by anything close to
its proper name. Appropriators, indeed.
Anthony Gancarski is the author of Unfortunate Incidents and
currently a student at Gonzaga Law School in Spokane, Washington.
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
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