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Recent
Stories
July
2, 2003
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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July
3, 2003
A Former Special Forces
Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis to Attack US
Troops
"Bring
'Em On?"
By STAN GOFF
In 1970, when I arrived at my unit, Company A,
4th Battalion/503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, in what
was then the Republic of Vietnam, I was charged up for a fight.
I believed that if we didn't stop the communists in Vietnam,
we'd eventually be fighting this global conspiracy in the streets
of Hot Springs, Arkansas. I'd been toughened by Basic Training,
Infantry Training and Parachute Training, taught how to use my
weapons and equipment, and I was confident in my ability to vanquish
the skinny unter-menschen. So I was dismayed when one of my new
colleagues--a veteran who'd been there ten months--told me, "We
are losing this war."
Not only that, he said, if I wanted to
survive for my one year there, I had to understand one very basic
thing. All Vietnamese were the enemy, and for us, the grunts
on the ground, this was a race war. Within one month, it was
apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every
reason that was being given to the American public for the war
was not true.
We had a battalion commander whom I never
saw. He would fly over in a Loach helicopter and give cavalier
instructions to do things like "take your unit 13 kilometers
to the north." In the Central Highlands, 13 kilometers is
something we had to hack out with machetes, in 98-degree heat,
carrying  sometimes 90 pounds over our body weights,
over steep, slippery terrain. The battalion commander never picked
up a machete as far as we knew, and after these directives he'd
fly back to an air-conditioned headquarters in LZ English near
Bong-son. We often fantasized together about shooting his helicopter
down as a way of relieving our deep resentment against this faceless,
starched and spit-shined despot.
Yesterday, when I read that US Commander-in-Chief
George W. Bush, in a moment of blustering arm-chair machismo,
sent a message to the 'non-existent' Iraqi guerrillas to "bring
'em on," the first image in my mind was a 20-year-old soldier
in an ever-more-fragile marriage, who'd been away from home for
8 months. He participated in the initial invasion, and was told
he'd be home for the 4th of July. He has a newfound familiarity
with corpses, and everything he thought he knew last year is
now under revision. He is sent out into the streets of Fallujah
(or some other city), where he has already been shot at once
or twice with automatic weapons or an RPG, and his nerves are
raw. He is wearing Kevlar and ceramic body armor, a Kevlar helmet,
a load carrying harness with ammunition, grenades, flex-cuffs,
first-aid gear, water, and assorted other paraphernalia. His
weapon weighs seven pounds, ten with a double magazine. His boots
are bloused, and his long-sleeve shirt is buttoned at the wrist.
It is between 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. He's been
eating MRE's three times a day, when he has an appetite in this
heat, and even his urine is beginning to smell like preservatives.
Mosquitoes and sand flies plague him in the evenings, and he
probably pulls a guard shift every night, never sleeping straight
through. He and his comrades are beginning to get on each others'
nerves. The rumors of 'going-home, not-going-home' are keeping
him on an emotional roller coaster. Directives from on high are
contradictory, confusing, and often stupid. The whole population
seems hostile to him and he is developing a deep animosity for
Iraq and all its people--as well as for official narratives.
This is the lad who will hear from someone
that George W. Bush, dressed in a suit with a belly full of rich
food, just hurled a manly taunt from a 72-degree studio at the
'non-existent' Iraqi resistance.
This de facto president is finally seeing
his poll numbers fall. Even chauvinist paranoia has a half-life,
it seems. His legitimacy is being eroded as even the mainstream
press has discovered now that the pretext for the war was a lie.
It may have been control over the oil, after all. Anti-war forces
are regrouping as an anti-occupation movement. Now, exercising
his one true talent--blundering--George W. Bush has begun the
improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he
depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the
world by arms.
Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad,
there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing
this war."
Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He retired
in 1996 from the US Army, from 3rd Special Forces. He lives in
Raleigh.
He can be reached at: stan@ncwarn.org
Weekend Edition
Features
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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