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Today's
Stories
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
August
31, 2004
Will
He Pursue Even-Handedness?
Kerry
and the Middle East
By
NEVE GORDON
As Democratic presidential nominee John
Kerry formulates his Middle East policy, he would do well to
learn from the mistakes of both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Former President Bill Clinton began his tenure after the demise
of the Soviet Union, and thus he was the first president to enter
office following the establishment of U.S. hegemony around the
globe. Accordingly, maintaining the status quo became the cornerstone
of his foreign policy, which meant that U.S. interests would
best be served so long as the Middle East remained stable. Recently,
former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk pointed out that
the Clinton administration promoted the peace process between
Israel and the Palestinians not for its own sake, but rather
as a means to uphold stability. Thus, stability was the goal
and peace became merely the instrument to achieve it.
After 9/11, Clinton's Middle East policy was radically transformed.
Instead of stability, the Bush administration wanted change.
The existing American hegemony was deemed insufficient by Bush's
advisors, who sought to expand and strengthen U.S. control over
the region's oil and natural gas resources. Bush accordingly
decided to change the configuration of a few Middle Eastern countries
so as to advance these objectives, camouflaging his actions with
noble terms like "democratization" and "freedom."
If for Clinton the peace process became an instrument to promote
stability, Bush has employed war as a means to bring about change.
Whereas Clinton was content with the hierarchical power relations
created following the end of the Cold War, Bush set out on a
crusade to extend U.S. control. The wars waged in Afghanistan
and Iraq are the most evident manifestations of this policy transformation.
Despite apparent differences distinguishing the two administrations,
Clinton's and Bush's Middle East policies share a few common
denominators, which are ultimately inimical to vital long-term
U.S. interests. Rhetoric aside, the two administrations have
mistakenly conceived authentic democratization of the Middle
East as a threat to U.S. hegemony, both in the domestic and international
spheres.
This, more or less, is why both administrations have opposed
grassroots democracy. A democratic Saudi Arabia, for example,
might ask the U.S. to dismantle all American military bases operating
on its soil, or may even curtail the business of U.S. oil corporations
stationed in the country. Such actions would, according to the
prevailing logic, endanger U.S. control over the world's resources
and therefore should not be tolerated. The solution, therefore,
has been to support authoritarian regimes, simply because they
appear to be more predictable and easier to handle.
Along the same lines, both administrations have been against
the democratization of the international realm, excluding such
bodies as the United Nations and the European Union from playing
a meaningful role in the Middle East. Again, the rationale is
that the international democratization of power would threaten
U.S. hegemony.
The anti-democratic strain informing U.S. foreign policy is,
however, shortsighted for it does not take into account what
Cornell University political scientist Susan Buck-Morss has called
the "dialectic of power." In her book, Thinking
Past Terror Buck-Morss shows how power actually produces
its own vulnerability. The ongoing occupation and control of
Middle East countries, alongside U.S.'s unflinching support for
brutal military dictators, oppressive feudal kings, and the occupation
of Palestine, will eventually engender violent forces that will
end-up attacking the U.S. Think of Osama Bin Laden, who was
initially trained by the U.S. to attack Soviet troops. Isn't
he a clear manifestation of the idea that power creates its own
vulnerability?
The U.S.'s long-term goal should not be to violently control
the Middle East, but to help it go through a process of democratization,
which will ultimately lead to the promulgation of egalitarian
values, human rights, and freedom.
Democracy, though, must come from below and not from above, if
only because at the root of all definitions of democracy lies
the idea of popular power, a situation in which power, and perhaps
authority too, rests with the people. So if, for example, the
Turkish citizenry oppose taking part in the war against Iraq,
it is a critical mistake to bribe and pressure their government
until it acts against its own constituency's will. In due course
this constituency will wind up directing its anger against the
U.S.
Finally, the democratization of power in the international sphere
may seem at first to limit the U.S., but from a long-term perspective
this is surely not the case. Consider President Bush's unsuccessful
attempt to enlist countries to help the U.S. find a way out of
the Iraqi debacle. One can now appreciate the shortcomings of
his soloist approach.
Thus, to make a meaningful difference in the Middle East, John
Kerry would have to reduce the gap between words and deeds, and
actually pursue democracy. Such a policy might limit U.S. hegemony
in the short term, but in the long run will make the world a
better and safer place and in this way strengthen the U.S. itself.
Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University,
Israel. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Human Rights
Center and Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University
of California, Berkeley. His book From
the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human
Rights is scheduled to appear next month (Rowman and
Littlefield). He can be reached at neve_gordon@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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