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June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
Alexander Cockburn
Tourism
in Ancient Rome
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
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Reviews of Gore:
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June 17,
2002
Rhetoric Distorts Realities:
In today's bizarre
political climate, a relativist is someone who argues for moral
consistency
by Robert Jensen
A history professor of mine once returned essay
exams with the comment that some students' attitude seemed to
be, "Don't bother me with the facts--I'm going for the
bigger picture."
George W. Bush wasn't in that class,
but I thought of the professor's sardonic comment as I read
the commencement address the president delivered at West Point
earlier this month.
In addition to restating the Bush Doctrine
(the United States has the right to destroy any society anywhere
for whatever reason it chooses regardless of international
opinion, law, or basic morality), Bush at West
Point used one of the popular contemporary buzz phrases, "moral
clarity."
Given that no one really argues for moral
unclarity, claiming moral clarity is really just a cheap way
to dismiss other points of view without providing a compelling
argument or dealing with the messy world of facts. The West
Point speech shows just how morally murky the president is.
In that speech, for example, Bush endorsed
John F. Kennedy's and Ronald Reagan's refusal "to gloss
over the brutality of tyrants" during the Cold War. That's
accurate, if Bush meant the brutality of tyrants on the other
side. American leaders have always been quick to condemn the
crimes of enemies, which is perfectly appropriate.
But the United States has not only glossed
over the brutality of tyrants on our side; it has often actively
supported and funded such brutality. Where was the moral clarity
when Kennedy backed an authoritarian regime in South Vietnam
that had almost no support among its people? Where was it when
Reagan supported vicious military dictatorships in Central America
that killed tens of thousands of innocent people? In both cases,
some moral clarity on the part of U.S. leaders would have saved
lives.
"Targeting innocent civilians for
murder is always and everywhere wrong," Bush continued.
No disagreement there, but what about the U.S. military's direct
attack on the civilian population of Vietnam through massive
bombing and chemical warfare, or Reagan's support for the Contra
army in Nicaragua that focused on what were called "soft
targets" (undefended civilian targets)?
Or, what about the record of Bush's father,
our commander in chief during the Gulf War? The U.S. military
deliberately destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure of
Iraq, including sewage- and water-treatment plants and electrical-generation
facilities far from the supposed battle theater in Kuwait. The
military itself predicted such attacks would kill civilians,
as they were designed to do and did. The resulting civilian
deaths continued long after the war, exacerbated by the cruel
economic sanctions the United States demanded.
The point is simple: Calls for moral
clarity, if they are to be more than empty rhetoric, require
that we bother ourselves with the facts and pay attention to
history.
Great powers have always gone about the
business of conquest while explaining it was in the interests
of the conquered. So, when the British ravaged India and extracted
much of its wealth, it wasn't described as greed but as the
grand enterprise of bringing civilization and religion to the
natives--the white man's burden. The United States used similar
rhetoric in its nearly complete extermination of indigenous
people in the conquest of North America.
These days, we no longer talk of civilizing
the natives, but about bringing freedom and democracy. Such
a goal, if pursued in humane and lawful ways under the appropriate
international institutions, would be to the good. But simply
because politicians say that is their motivation for foreign
and military policy does not make it so.
Upon examination of those messy facts,
it becomes clear that the United States goes to war for the
same reasons great powers have always fought--to secure markets
and resources, to extend and deepen domination of strategic
regions of the world. Old-style colonialism and conquest have
been replaced with new modes of control through economic domination
and the selective use of military power, but the goals remain
the same.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in
the Middle East and Central Asia. Although sold to the public
as a war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan and the war the
Bush administration is planning against Iraq are about control
of those strategically crucial, energy-rich regions. The United
States seeks not to own the oil outright, but rather control
the flow of oil and oil profits.
The plans for Iraq make this painfully
clear. Given that no one has produced evidence connecting Iraq
to al-Qaida, it's hard to understand how Iraq is the next phase
in the war on terrorism, as Bush officials proclaim. While it
is true that Saddam Hussein's regime is brutal and repressive,
he was every bit as brutal throughout the 1980s when he was
our valued ally (because he was waging war on Iran, our enemy
at the time). Officials warn that Hussein is a threat to the
region, but ignore the fact that the Arab nations have rejected
U.S. plans for war and apparently don't feel threatened.
It's not morality or a concern for the
safety of people that leads Bush to decry Hussein's brutality,
but an interest in replacing a hostile government with a client
regime in a major oil-producing nation.
So, moral clarity, as the president uses
the term, means just the opposite: the amoral--and sometimes
immoral--self-interest of the powerful. An even more curious
inversion of reality comes when those of us raising critical
questions are accused of being moral relativists.
I am not a moral relativist. While I
believe that we should be open-minded when considering the moral
claims of others and humble in our own claims to having nailed
down moral truth, I believe in the project of articulating and
defending universal human rights. What seems to make me a relativist
in the eyes of politicians such as Bush and intellectual attack
dogs such as William Bennett is that I believe the United States
should be as accountable to those standards as other nations.
In other words, in this odd political climate, a relativist
is someone who argues for moral consistency.
If moral judgments are applied consistently,
it's clear that the United States, like other great powers,
has much to answer for. Making this simple point these days
leads to further accusations that I must hate America, another
curious claim. How is it hateful to apply moral standards to
one's own nation? If I articulate clear moral standards and
try to apply them to myself as an individual, it is usually
taken as a sign of maturity. But when done at the level of a
nation, it is widely condemned as a sign of insufficient love
of country.
So, to avoid confusion, here's what I
believe: All human life has equal value, whether rich or poor,
American or not. The United States has long pursued policies
in the world that work for the interests of the rich against
the poor and that sacrifice the lives of non-Americans for the
affluence and comfort of Americans. Those policies are wrong,
and American citizens have a moral obligation to stop them,
using all the political freedoms that dissidents have struggled
for and won throughout American history.
That seems both moral and clear to me.
Robert Jensen
is an associate professor of journalism at the University of
Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective, and author
of the book Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
and the pamphlet "Citizens of the Empire." He can
be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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