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The Democrats Bow to Bush on War: How the Anti-War Movement Failed
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Today's Stories June 4, 2007 Diana Johnstone June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Marc Levy Martin Smith Diana Johnstone John Ross Uri Avnery Sunsara Taylor Richard Neville P. Sainath Missy Comley
Beattie Nisrine Abiad Rannie Amiri Margot Pepper Eric Stewart Ralph Nader Dan Bacher Shaun Harkin Richard Rhames Frederick Hudson Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
Dave Marsh Saul Landau David Phinney Robert Jensen Stanley Heller Yifat Susskind Robert Weissman Paul Buchheit William S.
Lind Sherwood Ross Stephen Lendman Website of the Day
Robert Bryce Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Kathy Kelly Marjorie Cohn Chris Kutalik
Corporate Crime Reporter Dave Lindorff Website of the Day
May 30, 2007 James Ridgeway Franklin Lamb Terrence E. Paupp Uri Avnery Alan Maass Rock and Rap
Confidential Ralph Nader Nirmal Ghosh Jean Daniels Tom Barry Website of the Day
Stephen Soldz Eliza Ernshire Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Mike Whitney David Swanson John Holt Cynthia McKinney Martha Rosenberg Website of the Day
Bill Quigley Col. Dan Smith Cindy Sheehan Dr. Susan Block Jeeni Criscenzo Douglas Valentine Website of the Day
May 26 / 27, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Franklin Lamb Jean Bricmont Gary Leupp James Petras William Peace Judith and John Sharpe Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Democracy in Iraq, Tyranny at Home? Jonathan M.
Feldman Dave Lindorff Missy Beattie Mike Whitney Badruddin Khan Ron Jacobs Zoe Blunt Arjun Chowdhury, Heather Gray N. D. Jayaprakash Joe Allen Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
Robert Jensen David Vest John Stauber Evelyn Pringle Corporate Crime Reporter Susan Rosenthal,
MD Roberto Rodriguez Steve Fournier Patrick McElwee Robert Weissman Website of the Day
Franklin Lamb Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fantina Norman Solomon Dave Lindorff Sen. Russell
Feingold Fred Gardner Mike Whitney Kevin Parsneau, Arjun Chowdhury
and Mark Hoffman Caroline Paul Eva Liddell Website of
the Day
Patrick Cockburn Rev. William
Alberts Joe DeRaymond Sudhanva Deshpande
Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Rannie Amiri China Hand Zoe Blunt Nivien Saleh Website of the Day
Robert Fisk Joshua Frank Harvey Wasserman David Mos Masumoto Sonja Karkar Conn Hallinan Dave Lindorff Jeffrey Kolakowski Evelyn Pringle Jim Baumer Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Nicole Colson John Ross Stephen Fleischman M. Shahid Alam Ron Jacobs Peter Rost, MD Alan Farago Paul Buchheit Website of
the Day
May 19 / 20, 2007 Andrew Cockburn Uri Avnery Peter Gelderloos Saul Landau Robert Fantina Fred Gardner Ralph Nader Jean Daniels Reza Fiyouzat Missy Beattie Robert Alvarez Sonja Karkar Dave Lindorff Jeff Sher Julian C. Holmes Clancy Sigal Prairie Miller James Murren Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 18, 2007 Adam Jones Sharon Smith Christopher Brauchli Peter Rost,
MD Denise Maloney Pictou David Swanson Ali Khan Susan Rosenthal,
M.D. Samer Assad CP News Service Website of the Day
May 17, 2007 Tariq Ali Yifat Susskind Dave Zirin Brian J. Foley W. John Green Eric Johnson-DeBaufre Badruddin Khan Martha Rosenberg China Hand Dan Vojir Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Ashley Dawson Joshua Frank Corporate Crime
Reporter Ray McGovern Glen Ford Joe Bageant Sonja Karkar Mickey S. Huff John Chuckman Kaz Dziamka Website of
the Day
May 15, 2007 Michael Neumann Patrick Cockburn Ashley Smith Marc Gardner Dave Lindorff Ben Terrall Ron Jacobs Harvey Wasserman Marcus Mabry Dr. Susan Block Website of the Day
May 14, 2007 Jennifer Roesch Jeffrey St.
Clair George Bisharat Diane Wachtell Ramzy Baroud Rosemary and
Walter Brasch Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Roberto Rodriguez Jonathan Culp Website of
the Day
May 12 / 13, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Diane Farsetta Ralph Nader Jean Bricmont Marcus Breen Joe Bageant Conn Hallinan Fred Gardner Juan Santos
Eve Bachrach Missy Comley
Beattie Ron Jacobs Niranjan Ramakrishnan Susie Day Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend May 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Kathleen Christison Mike Ferner John Holt Laurie Hasbrook Christopher
Brauchli Margaret Kimberley Dave Lindorff Nicole Colson John V. Walsh Website of the Day
May 10, 2007 Tariq Ali Patrick Cockburn Neve Gordon Marjorie Cohn David Rosen Alan Farago John Hellman Kathy Rentenbach BANCO Richard Rhames Website of the Day
Jeff Leys Patrick Cockburn Glen Ford Paula Rothenberg Kathryn Weber John Chuckman Jordan Flaherty Dave Lindorff Stephen Lendman Website of
the Day
May 8, 2007 Dave Lindorff Patrick Cockburn Corporate Crime Reporter Ralph Nader Malini Johar Schueller Juan Santos Dave Zirin Joshua Frank Evelyn Pringle Eamonn McCann Website of the Day
May 7, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Monica Benderman Greg Moses Rannie Amiri Fitrakis / Wasserman Fred Wilhelms Ramzy Baroud Bruce K. Gagnon T. W. Croft Sonja Karkar Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn William Blum Uri Avnery Franklin Lamb Fred Gardner Lawrence R.
Velvel Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Carla Blank Linn Washington,
Jr. Stephen F. Jackson P. Sainath Anthony Papa James T. Phillips John Ross Stephen Lendman Ben Terrall CounterPunch
Newswire Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 4, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Azmi Bishara Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Bob Fitrakis Janet Kauffman Website of
the Day
May 3, 2007 Jeff Halper Christopher
Brauchli Dave Zirin Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fisk Mike Ferner Mike Whitney Pham Binh Dave Lindorff Michael A.
Johnson Website of the Day
May 2, 2007 Saul Landau Dr. Susan Block Carla Blank Margaret Kimberly Kevin Zeese Carlos Villareal Michael Dickinson Tim Shorrock Alevtina Rea William S.
Lind Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn Fred Gardner Chase Madar Ralph Nader John V. Walsh Joshua Frank Leslie Radford Shaun Harkin Dave Lindorff Peter Rost,
MD Peter Linebaugh Website of
the Day
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Weekend
Edition Bernard Kouchner: Media Doc of "Humanitarian Intervention"Sarko and the Ghosts of May 1968By DIANA JOHNSTONE Paris. In the last major speech of his successful presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy launched into a bizarre attack on May 1968. "May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relativism on us all," he declared. The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. "The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics." Sarkozy even blamed the legacy of May '68 for immoral business practices : the cult of money, short term profit, speculation, the abuses of finance capitalism. The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses". Did this mean that the new president plans to lead France back to its stodgy, morally pristine pre-May '68 past? Certainly not. Nicolas Sarkozy, who was an apolitical, television-addicted teenager in May 1968, living in a bourgeois milieu aghast at the disorder in the streets, is himself an exemplary heir of the ambiguous May '68 he castigated in his electoral diatribe. May '68 in France was a social
explosion that shook the country into its own version of the
contemporary phase of Western development. Whatever the diverse
intentions and illusions of its participants, the most extraordinary
aspect of May '68 was its own reflection in the media. The most
potent lesson was the extraordinary power of media images. Nobody
has absorbed that lesson more thoroughly and profitably than
Nicolas Sarkozy. The most fundamental of the many contradictions crisscrossing the French May '68 upheaval opposed the disciplined Communist Party to the radical students. The students' discovery of their own power to shake the very structures of the state created the widespread illusion of an imminent revolution. With seven million workers on strike, the Communist Party used its influence to steer the massive workers' strike into a compromise deal with de Gaulle's panicky government. Whether or not their own revolution was a fantasy, the May '68 generation blamed the Communists for betraying it by settling for mere wage raises and union benefits. As a result, anti-communism is a significant part of the ideological heritage of the May '68 generation. A serious strand of the radical movement tried to carry the revolution into the factories. A more successful strand went into the media. The "revolution" moved its center of gravity from the working class and third world liberation to the more personal and middle class issues of a "new left" focused on sexual liberation, identity politics, ecology and human rights. The new Right takes over the old New Left In his first days as President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy has demonstrated that new left values are perfectly compatible with the modern right. Sarkozy has grabbed hold of those "values" and run away with them.
The good news is that the world has changed so that even the right embraces such progressive causes. The bad news is that universally accepted values can, by their very nature, be used for a range of purposes, even as pretexts for oppression and war. Kouchner: from medicine to media Presenting Kouchner's appointment as a generous "opening to the left" is the bitterest joke Sarkozy has played so far on the Socialist Party. If the French Socialist Party is embarrassed, it has only itself to blame. Because of Kouchner's media fame, the Socialists have let him use the party to advance his career, even though his "socialism" has consisted in advising them to drop socialism completely, and once into the European Parliament on a Socialist ticket he joined another group, the Left Radicals. Kouchner has not "gone over to the right": that is where he has been for about three decades, but the Socialist Party has been too opportunistic to pay attention. May 1968 was probably the last time Kouchner was really on the left, but he has been dining out on that reputation ever since, as charter member of the media elite known as the "caviar left". In May 1968, Kouchner jumped into the political fray as a strike leader in the medical faculty of the University of Paris. His opposition to the establishment did not last long. Four months later, he joined a medical team organized by the French government to provide humanitarian aid to the short-lived secessionist republic of Biafra. This medical mission was the humanitarian side of an undercover French intervention that also provided military aid to the Biafra rebels, whose breakaway region in southeastern Nigeria happened to include the country's vast oil resources. In May 1967, following escalating conflict between Nigerian army officers belonging to the Christian Igbo (or Ibo) ethnic group and Muslim Hausas, Igbo leaders proclaimed their own independent Republic of Biafra. A bloody civil war ensued. Biafra received covert military and other aid from France, South Africa, Portugal and Israel. Armed by Britain and the Soviet Union, the Nigerian army succeeded in imposing an economic blockade to starve Biafra into submission. By January 1970, the Igbo resistance collapsed, and the oil-rich area was reincorporated into Nigeria. Kouchner rapidly shifted from
doctoring to propaganda. Back in Paris in 1969, he cooperated
with French intelligence services to found a Committee against
"genocide in Biafra". Certainly the civilians of Biafra
suffered a terrible famine, but the use of the term "genocide"
serves a political purpose by portraying a conflict over control
of territory as a one-sided assault aimed at exterminating a
population. Initially, under the impact of comparisons with Nazi genocide in World War II, this new approach was welcomed as more moral than the old Red Cross discretion. The catch is that it is based on two questionable assumptions. First, the assumption that in every conflict, there is a "good" side made up of victims and a "bad" side that wants to kill them all. And second, that Western intervention, aroused by the media, can solve these problems by force. Little by little, the "realistic" school of thought that casts doubt on these assumptions has been discredited as immoral. The Biafra tragedy set a pattern. One or more Western powers back a minority secession. The existing regime cracks down brutally on the rebels, all the more in that it suspects the Western backers of trying to exploit the rebellion in order to rip off territory or resources for their own purposes. Humanitarian workers sound the alarm and photographers send heart-rending images of human suffering to Western media. Western humanitarians describe the tragedy as "genocide" and call for military intervention. Whether or not intervention ensues, the populations involved continue to be victims of mutual hatred, which is intensified by the media dramatization. Throughout the 1970s, a decade during which an array of far left grouplets wore themselves out, preparing the way for the anticommunist ideological offensive led by the "new philosophers", Kouchner discovered the political usefulness of catastrophe journalism. The climax came in 1979, when he joined with the new philosophers in an ostensibly humanitarian gesture, "a boat for Vietnam". By calling media attention to the plight of Vietnamese "boat people", fleeing the economic misery of their war-ravaged country, the French humanitarians made no significant contribution to the wellbeing of the long-suffering Vietnamese. However, they had found an acceptable way to denounce what they called "the Vietnamese gulag", thus turning sympathy away from the Vietnamese liberation movement that had won almost universal admiration during its resistance to the U.S. war. By ignoring the factor of economic hardship caused by years of U.S. bombing, the gesture was a significant step in redefining "the left" as concerned exclusively and militantly with "human rights", regardless of context. It is scarcely an accident that this coincided with the "human rights" campaign led by President Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski to recover U.S. moral standing after the Vietnamese disaster. By this time, Kouchner's exploitation of his role as co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières as humanitarian credentials for his political propaganda had caused a fierce rift within the organization. Kouchner left MsF to create a rival group, Médecins du Monde (MdM, World Doctors), which has pursued the Kouchner line of espousing "humanitarian intervention", including military intervention. In January and February of 1993, Médecins du Monde spent around two million dollars in a publicity campaign, including some 300,000 posters and TV spots featuring film stars Jane Birkin and Michel Piccoli, designed to identify Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic with Hitler and the Bosnian Serb prison camps with Nazi extermination camps. (See my book Fools' Crusade, Monthly Review Press, p.74.) This advertising campaign was replete with factual lies. But for Kouchner, moral zeal clearly outranks truthfulness on the value scale. The original idea to identify temporary Bosnian Serb prison camps as the equivalent of Nazi death camps came from the leader of the Bosnian Muslims, Alija Izetbegovic. In 2003, Kouchner visited Izetbegovic on his death bed, where the following exchange, (as recounted by Kouchner in his Les Guerriers de la Paix, Paris, Grasset, 2004, pp.373-374.) took place in the presence of Richard Holbrooke: Kouchner: "You remember President Mitterrand's visit? In the course of that conversation you spoke of the existence of 'extermination camps' in Bosnia. You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked considerable emotion throughout the world. François sent me to Omarska and we opened other prisons. They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that? Izetbegovic "Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps whatever the horror of those places." Kouchner concludes: "The conversation was magnificent, that man at death's door hid nothing from us of his historic role. Richard and I expressed our immense admiration." For Kouchner, the fact that an "historic role" is based on falsification elicits only admiration. The Yugoslav wars of disintegration were the ideal occasion to put into practice what by then had become his trademark doctrine of "humanitarian intervention". This coincided perfectly with the United States need to provide NATO with a new post-Cold War doctrine allowing the military alliance to survive and expand. The doctrine went into full action in March 1999, when NATO began its two and a half month bombing of Yugoslavia. As his reward, Kouchner was given the post of United Nations high commissioner in charge of civil administration of occupied Kosovo (UNMIK). As virtual dictator of Kosovo from July 2, 1999, to January 2001, Kouchner demonstrated the nature of his "humanitarianism": fawning favoritism toward the NATO-designated "victims", that is, the Albanian majority, along with sporadic efforts to use his dashing charm to placate representatives of the besieged Serbs. The result was disastrous. Instead of promoting reconciliation and mutual understanding, he allowed the province to slip ever further under the control of armed clans and gangsters, who have terrorized non-Albanians with impunity ever since. Kouchner is a selective humanitarian. The victims who arouse his indignation always just happen to be favored by French or U.S. imperial interests: the Biafrans, the non-communist Vietnamese, the Albanians of Kosovo. He never got so excited by the plight of Nicaraguan victims of U.S.-backed Contra murders and sabotage in the 1980s, nor about ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma in Kosovo after he took over, much less about Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing. Nor do the victims of harsh
military rule in Myanmar inspire his crusading zeal, at least
not in 2003, when he was paid 25,000 euros by the French petroleum
company Total to write a report on Total's activities in that
country. The 19-page report, written after a short guided tour
through Total facilities, defended Total's construction of a
gas pipeline in Myanmar from accusations that the company was
profiting from the government's use of slave labor in construction
projects. Now, it may be that the company was as innocent as
Kouchner said. But it is certain that Kouchner was not chosen
for his investigative thoroughness, but for his "humanitarian"
reputation. A Franco-American axis of good? The prospect of this lightweight publicity-hound as foreign minister of France is both alarming and comical. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. If you want someone to justify a military intervention, Kouchner is your man. Had he been running the Quai d'Orsay in March 2003, his contribution to the Iraqi débacle would have been to advise George W. Bush to drop the "weapons of mass destruction" stuff, and wage his war for "human rights", in order to "get rid of the dictator, Saddam Hussein". At least, that it what he has said repeatedly since. Kouchner thinks it's a shame GWB used the wrong pretext for destroying Iraq. He even blamed France for "forcing" the United States to speed up the invasion by brandishing the threat of a UN Security Council veto. It doesn't occur to him that the Cheney-Wolfowitz crowd considered that scaring the American people into the illusion of "self-defense", would work better than appealing to their altruism. In either case, Iraq is in ruins, which doesn't seem to disturb France's most famous career humanitarian. So far, there is no clear indication that Sarkozy wants to involve France in a war. So what, then, is the use of Kouchner? Certainly, his experience as head of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) did nothing to alter the impression that he is much less gifted at administration than at self-promotion. But that is the main talent of his new boss, who is not one to want to share the limelight. Aside from helping Sarkozy's party sweep the forthcoming parliamentary elections, it is not certain what is the use of Kouchner or how long he may be kept on the job. He has started off in typical
fashion, making off-the-wall statements designed to sound good
in the media. The creation of a special international tribunal
to try the (unidentified) assassins of former Lebanese prime
minister Rafik Hariri, "shows the will of the international
community to reinforce the stability of Lebanon", according
to Kouchner. In reality, the international politicization of
the case is almost certain to further destabilize that country.
Kouchner went on to say that the special tribunal corresponded
to "the wishes of the Lebanese people, of all sides and
all religious beliefs", which again is simply not true.
Perhaps up to half the Lebanese people suspect that an international
tribunal sponsored by the Western powers is being set up to be
used as an instrument for blaming Syria, as a pretext for war
and to incriminate Hezbollah, constantly described as "Syria's
ally". This Western-sponsored tribunal will certainly not
take into consideration the widely held suspicion that the Israelis,
or Hariri's right-wing domestic enemies, or both, had more to
do with the recent wave of assassinations than Syria, which has
been the main loser in the Hariri affair. Denis Lemasson of Médécins sans Frontières, which currently has 2,000 workers aiding civilians in Darfur, called Kouchner's proposal "dangerous", because of the confusion it would create between military and humanitarian operations. Any military intervention would force the withdrawal of most aid organizations and make the situation worse than it is today, he stressed. All the French aid organizations MsF, Action contre la Faim, Solidarités and even Médecins du Monde (MdM) -- agree that the only possible way to end the civil war between the Sudanese army, Janajaweed militia and various rebel groups must be a political settlement, not military intervention. MdM president Pierre Micheletti points out that the population is scattered "like leopard spots" across a region the size of France, in enclaves controlled by one side or another, with no front lines. Lemasson observes that past experiences of "humanitarian interference" confirm their worries. The American "military-humanitarian" operation in Somalia in 1992, the "security zones" in Bosnia, all created illusions and led to disaster. And, adds Alain Boinet, the head of Solidarités, the failure in Iraq proves that peace cannot be imposed. So Kouchner has arrived too late. He is too late to jump on the Bush bandwagon to hell in Iraq. He is already thoroughly discredited among those who know what "humanitarian intervention" is really all about, and who have tended to revert to the old Red Cross model of neutrality in order to gain access to victims. He retains his popularity in the general public only because his carefully cultivated media image has not been put to a publicly scrutinized reality test. Kouchner may be a comic figure, but his comedy conceals two tragedies. One is the tragedy of the hopes for genuine social change that flourished in May '68, only to be dashed forty years later by the alliance between a Sarkozy who repudiates them and a Kouchner who is their parody. The other is the tragedy of what French foreign policy could and should have been, briefly glimpsed during the memorable February 14, 2003, speech of Dominique de Villepin to the United Nations Security Council. Contrary to rules and to custom, the gathering burst into applause. It seemed, for a moment, that France could be a voice for reason, for realism, for peace, and for a better world. hySuch a France was and is desperately needed. But what we've got instead is another poodle. Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She lives in Paris and can be reached at dianajohnstone@compuserve.com
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