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Today's Stories November 7, 2005 Jeff Halper Israel as an Extension of American Empire November 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Storm Over Brockes' Fakery: Guardian Fabricates Chomsky Quotes Lawrence R. Velvel Lying, Law Schools and Executive Power: What Senators Should Ask Alito Diana Johnstone Srebrenica: a Response to Certain Criticisms of My Essay Roosa / Nevins The Mass Killlings in Indonesia, 40 Years Later Niranjan Ramakrishnan Missing the Bus: When Conscience Bows to Calculation John Ross The Zapatistas' Otra Campaign for Mexico's Presidential Elections Mike Whitney Globalizing Sadism: the United States of Torture Mark Engler Will Big Business Turn On Bush?: the Economic Nightmare Unfolds Juliano Mer-Khamis They Shoot at Children, Too Ron Jacobs When Gen. Westmoreland Visited Jill S. Farrell Bird Flu and the Posse Comitatus Act Missy Comley Beattie Trent Lott's Untroubled Sleep Mitchel Cohen People of the Dome, Revisited Evelyn J. Pringle Bush-Cheney and Big Oil's Big Summer Reza Fiyouzat Signs of Life or Last Gasp? Structural Problems in the Democratic Party Charles Sullivan When Courage Fails: a White Southerner on Rosa Parks Zachary Richard Return to Louisiana Ben Tripp Beginning of the End? Don't Start Cheering Just Yet St. Clair / Vest Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week   November 4, 2005 Jeffrey St. Clair Blood on the Tundra, Betrayal in the Rotunda: Losing ANWR Dave Lindorff A Majority Now Favors Impeachment: If He Lied, He Must Be Tried Phillip Cryan Crackdown in Colombia Christopher Brauchli Katrina and Tax Breaks for the Very Rich William S. Lind Exit Strategy: You Can't Stay the Course in a Lost War Daryl G. Kimball Of Madmen and Nukes George Beres Laurels for Negroponte? Peter Montague Why We Can't Prevent Cancer   November 3, 2005 James Petras The Libby Affair and the Internal War Saul Landau Torn Families and Shot Down Planes: a Cuba Story Rep. Cynthia McKinney An Occurrence at Gretna Bridge Michael Dickinson Bang! Bang! You're Deaf! Sonic Weapons Over Palestine Joshua Frank Sham Behind Closed Doors Remi Kanazi Dancing with Perseverance Reza Fiyouzat Taxation or Racketeering? Website of the Day CIA Leak Investigation: Bigger Fish, Deeper Water?   November 2, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Holy Alito!: Not as Crazy as Scalia, But Just as Bad Robert Oscar Lopez Saving Rosa Parks from American Hypocrisy John Walsh The Philosophy of Mendacity: From Leo Strauss to Scooter Libby Brian J. Foley Why Most Americans Don't Care About Gitmo (and Why They Should) Ramzy Baroud Rolling Back Syria M. Junaid Alam What Moral Values? Todd Chretien Judgment Day for the Governator Bruce K. Gagnon The Democrats' Slap Happy Day Website of the Day Hands Off Dave!   November 1, 2005 Ron Jacobs An Interview with Kent State's Dave Airhart Gary Leupp The Plame Affair Leads to Rome John Ross Days of the Dead on the Border Bill Quigley Why Are They Making New Orleans a Ghost Town? Joseph Nevins From a Boundary of Death to One of Life Dave Lindorff Thinking About Impeachment Linda S. Heard Bashing Syria: Another Trojan Horse from the UN? Heather Gray Thank You, Mrs. Parks Michael Dickinson To Di For: Charlie and Camilla Cross the Pond Jeffrey St. Clair Kent State: Wise Up and Back Off   October 31, 2005 Elaine Cassel Libby's Lies Mark Weisbrot Pop Goes the Bubble: Bernancke and the Fed Mike Whitney Carry On, Patrick Fitzgerald Norman Solomon After the Libby Indictment, the Press Acquits Itself Farooq Sulehria Trading Weapons While Kashmir Burns Nicole Colson Scapegoating Immigrants Madis Senner Dhafir Sentenced to 22 Years: Another Erosion of Civil Rights Paul Craig Roberts Scooter and the Neocons October 29 / 30, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair The Libby Indictment: Gotterdammerung for the Bushies? Peter Linebaugh The Wedges of Hephaestus Tim Wise Framing the Poor: Katrina, Conservative Myth-Making and the Media John Chuckman Bushspeak: Dark and Garbled Words Steven Higgs Green Hoosiers: Forging a New Democracy in the Heartland Brian Cloughley The Fifth Afghan War M. Shahid Alam Israel and the Consequences of Uniqueness Nikki Robinson Crack Down at Kent State Ralph Nader Let the PIRGs Begin!: Student Activism Thrives Joe DeRaymond Requiem for Bethlehem Steel? Joshua Frank Karl's Great Escape: Did Rove Rat on Scooter? Laura Santina Tongue-Tied on Iraq: Why Aren't the Dems Screaming Bloody Murder? Fred Gardner Death of an Organizer Michael Dickinson Insult Your Country Ron Jacobs Autumn in America Dr. Susan Block Fear and Sex: a Halloween Greeting Vanessa S. Jones Self-Portrait, 1994. Bronte Beach Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Marbet, Gardner, Ford, Albert, Engel, Krieger & St. Clair Website of the Weekend Red State Update   October 28, 2005 Jared Bernstein Inflation Up; Wages Down: Fastest Decline in Wages on Record Virginia Tilley Embracing the Anti-Aparthied Movement in Israel/Palestine Phil Gasper The Race to Execute Tookie Williams Jennifer Matsui It's Mardi Graft Time! Manual Garcia, Jr. Is the US Really Against Torture? Monica Benderman In the Name of Justice Jason Leopold Fitzgerald Focuses on the Forgeries Dave Lindorff Suddenly, Bush Endorses Right of Fair Trials Otober 27, 2005 Saul Landau The Scandal Isn't the Leak, But the Illegal War Stuart Hodkinson Bono and Geldoff: "We Saved Africa" Oh No, They Didn't! Ingmar Lee Stop the Troops!: No Glory or Honor in Iraq Lila Rajiva License to Bill: Gates Does India Ilan Pappe The Last Moment of Hope Niranjan Ramakrishnan Waiting for Fitzgerald Michael Donnelly Look Who's Talking Now: the GOP on Perjury Ron Jacobs Escape the Weight of Your Corporate Logo Cockburn / St. Clair White House in Meltdown   October 26, 2005 Kathy Kelly For Whom They Toll Gary Leupp Dialectics of the Plame Affair Mike Marqusee Empire of Denial Eric Ruder War Crimes in Afghanistan Patrick Cockburn Iraq: a Constitutionally Divided Nation Joshua Frank Fitzgerald v. the Bushies: Hold Your Elation in Check J.L. Chestnut, Jr. The Legacy of Rosa Parks Website of the Day Decent Work in America: the 2005 Work Environment Index     October 25, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Condi and Syrian Regime Change: Could Somebody Recommend a President? Ken Sengupta / Patrick Cockburn Attack on the Palestine Hotel Conn Hallinan Sleight of Hand: Iran, India and the US Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Pulling the Court Strings Jackie Corr Barbara Bush: Poster Gorgon of the Houston Astros Robert Day Talk to Strangers John Sugg Judith Miller and Me   October 24, 2005 Dave Lindorff Revoke Judy Miller's Pulitzer Michael Donnelly Shades of Iran/contra Patrick Cockburn A Nation Stands on Trial Mike Whitney Apres Rove Norman Solomon Iraq is Not Vietnam, But... Bill and Kathleen Christison US Foreign Policy and Palestine   October 22 / 23, 2005 Alexander Cockburn When Divas Collide: Maureen Dowd v. Judy Miller Billy Sothern Letter from the Circle Bar, New Orleans Saul Landau Bush, an Assessment Ralph Nader An Open Letter to Bush on Harriet Miers Behrooz Ghamari Whose Justice Does Saddam's Trial Serve? Brian Cloughley Bush the Strategist: Pyrrhus Without a Victory? Diana Barahona Venezuela's National Workers' Union Fred Gardner Dershowitzed! Lee Sustar What the War on Terror is Really About Patrick Cockburn Murder of Saddam Trial Defense Lawyer Laura Carlsen Mexico City Seamstresses Recall 1985 Quake James Petras China Bashing and the Loss of US Competitiveness Joshua Frank Invading Iran: Who is to Stop Them? Manuel Garcia, Jr. Disasters are Us Michelle Bollinger When Abortion Was Illegal Missy Comley Beattie CSI: Iraq Kona Lowell Intelligent Design: Making High School Fun Ben Tripp Tanks for the Memories Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening To This Week Poets' Basement Albert and Engel Website of the Day Indictment Watch   October 21, 2005 Dave Lindorff The Democrats' Abortion Hypocrisy Winslow T. Wheeler Paying for Their Mistakes: Incompetence, Deception and the Defense Budget Col. Dan Smith The Destruction of the National Guard Norman Solomon Media at Crossroads: 25 Years After Reagan's Triumph Madis Senner Abusing Katrina Michael Donnelly Richard Pombo: DeLay in Cowboy Boots October 20, 2005 Dave Lindorff Impeachment Comes to NYC Ray McGovern 16 Fatal Words: Cheney's Chickens Come Home to Roost Jeremy Brecher / Brendan Smith Attack Syria? Invade Iran?: By What Constitutional Right? Patrick Cockburn Saddam Refuses to Recognize Court Kevin Zeese Was the Iraqi Constitution Vote Fixed? Ross Eisenbrey Millions Would Lose Pay and Protections Under Enzi Amendment Randy Shields James McMurtry Makes It in Dayton Justine Davidson Prosecuting Bush in Canada for Torture: a Small Victory After Lucas Cranach Judy and Holofernes Joe Allen The Scandalous History of the Red Cross   October 19, 2005 Christopher Reed Koizumi and the Rape of Nanking Stephen Soldz Bush and Avian Flu: the Excuses Begin to Fly Chet Richards War and Intelligence Patrick Cockburn Saddam on Trial Scott Richard Lyons Multicultural Columbus? Ralph Nader An Interview with Rev. William Sloane Coffin Website of the Day Shocking Video: Why Birds May Be Taking Viral Vengeance on Humans   October 18, 2005 Chet Flippo Merle Haggard: "Let's Get Out of Iraq" Ron Jacobs Dual Devotions: the Catholic Church and the US Flag Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A Tale of Two Cities: From DC to Toledo Dave Lindorff Judy Miller: Little Miss Run Amok Virginia Rodino A Winter Patriot: Reflections on the Antiwar Movement Thomas Healy The Weather in Goshen: Still Radical After All These Years Ralph Nader A New New Orleans Stephen Lendman The Sorrows of Haiti Patrick Cockburn On the Eve of Saddam's Trial: a Divided Iraq   October 17, 2005 Peter Linebaugh Spinoza and the Black Limos Norman Solomon Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State Cockburn / Sengupta "If the Sunnis Don't Like It, That's Their Problem" Mike Whitney Miller's Confession: Last Gasp Before Indictments? Uri Avnery Iraq Now: What Awaits Samira? Harold Pinter Torture & Misery in the Name of Freedom Website of the Day Al Joudi v. Bush   October 15 / 16, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Ayatollahs of the Apocalypse Patrick Cockburn "This Constitution Won't Get Me a Job" Saul Landau Two Terrorists and a Lush: Osama, Posada and Bush's Drinking Neve Gordon "Beyond Chutzpah": Exposing Grave Moral Distortions Moshe Adler Poverty in New York City Christopher Brauchli Lynndie England's Burden Diane Farsetta The Emperor Doesn't Disclose: the Fight Against Fake News Sam Husseini Notes on Current Reporting About Judith Miller Monica Benderman From Chaos to Conscience to Peace Mickey Z. POW Abuse by US: Nothing New Going On Here Douglas C. Smyth George W. Bush, the Honorius of Our Time Lee Sustar Will Delphi Bust the UAW? Fred Gardner Cannabinoids Arrive in Realm of Established Fact Elizabeth Schulte A Former Panther's Georgia Campaign: an Interview with Elaine Brown Joshua Frank Will the Democrats Save Harriet Miers? David Vest Down with Formalism! Up with Values! Ben Tripp Epistle II: the Reawakenign Poets Basement Engel, Albert, Ford and Louise Website of the Weekend The Hidden Canyon   October 14, 2005 Farrah Hassen A Somber Ramadan in Syria Ron Jacobs The Black Panthers: They Haven't Forgotten; Neither Should We Sasha Kramer USAID and Haiti: the Friendly Face of Imperialism? Katrina Yeaw The Student Struggle in Italy Nicole Colson Bird Flu: Militarizing Health Care Raúl Zibechi Survival and Existence in El Alto Nikolas Kozloff Hugo Chávez and the Politics of Race Website of the Day LA Filmmakers Cooperative October 13, 2005 Jeremy Scahill Mr. Bush Goes to Tikrit (Sort Of) Jeff Birkenstein A Thoreau for Our Time: Why Cindy Sheehan Matters Brendan Smith / Jeremy Brecher Harriet Miers: Bush or the Constitution? Stan Cox Did You Know This About Iraq? Anis Memon The Curious Case of Russ Feingold Gary Leupp Miller, Libby and the June Notes Dave Zirin A Tribute to August Wilson Matthew Koehler America's Endangered Forests Werther The Two-Headed Monster Website of the Day Hurricane Song October 12, 2005 Omar Waraich Britain and the Quake: Mean and Stingy William Cook Voices Behind the Entombment Wall Phil Gasper Countdown to a Legal Lynching Dave Lindorff Impeachment Now and Then: Clinton, Bush and the Polls Matt Vidal Capital, Power and Class John Gautreaux New Orleans will Never be the Same Diana Johnstone Srebrenica Revisited: Using War as an Excuse for War Mark Weisbrot The IMF Has Lost Its Influence Brian J. Foley Gitmo Tribunals Endanger Public Safety Website of the Day Columbus Day Lies   October 11, 2005 Roger Morris / Steve Schmidt Strategic Demands of the 21st Century Lila Rajiva Live from New Orleans: Abu Ghraib Bill Quigley New Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again Paul Craig Roberts Natural Born Liars Dave Lindorff Recruiters in Schools: No Lie Left Untried Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Suspect Thy Neighbor Mitchel Cohen Showdown at Chuck E. Cheese Tariq Ali Pakistan will Never Forget This Horror Website of the Day L'Heure Americaine   October 10, 2005 Cindy and Craig Corrie Rachel's Words Live Joshua Frank Washington's War Dems Gideon Levy The Beautiful Life Without Arafat Alan Wallis The Fight for Free Speech at Union Square Mickey Z. In Defense of Liars CounterPunch News Service Vermont Independence Convention Paul Craig Roberts The Police State is Closer Than You Think Website of the Day Dylan's Chronicles   October 8 / 9, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Rhetoric and Reality in the Business of Getting Rid of Black People Ralph Nader Katrina and the Growls of Greed Jennifer Van Bergen New American Law: Legal Strategies in the Dharfir Case Saul Landau An Oily Religious Dream Jeff Halper Setting Up Abbas Lenni Brenner The Millions More Movement and Zionism Nikolas Kozloff Bird Flu and Bush Brian Cloughley Training Soldiers in Iraq Alice Slater A Nobel Prize for Chernobyl? John Gautreaux A View from Cajun Country Fred Gardner Does the Controlled Substances Act Mean What It Says? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Leveethan Approach M.G. Piety Rot in the Ivory Tower: Collusion, Cover-Up and Kierkegaard Tom Gorman The Hitchens Doctrine Mike Whitney Bunker Days with George Aseem Shrivastava Beyond the Wasteland: Lessons from Afghanistan Ben Tripp Religion, an Epistle Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Ford   October 7, 2005 Larry Johnson The Plame Case: the Real Issues Will Youmans Why Do We Hate Our Freedom? Recruiters and Thugs on Campus Dave Lindorff Bird Flu: Evolution or Intelligent Design? Judith Scherr Haiti's Children's Prison Russell D. Hoffman Nukes for Peace, Revisited?: Nobel Prize Debacle Jared Bernstein Katrina and Jobs Jennifer Van Bergen New American Law: the Case of Dr. Dhafir Website of the Day FBI Witchhunt October 6, 2005 P. Sainath "Take That, Tom Friedman": Indian Masses Reject NYT's Neoliberal Idol Again Scott Parkin When Antiwar Activists Get Mugged Paul Craig Roberts Blundering into Syria Andréa Schmidt Haiti's Biometric Elections: a High-Tech Experiment in Exclusion Dave Lindorff Easy Money in the Big Easy Joshua Frank In Defense of Lew Rockwell M. Junaid Alam Jackboots at George Mason Matthew Koehler Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot Robert Pollin Is the Dollar Still Falling?   October 5, 2005 Heather Gray Militarization is Not an Answer for Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines Robert Jensen Is Bush a Racist? Ramzy Baroud Bush's Final Choice: America or the Empire Col. Dan Smith Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything is Bad" Dave Zirin Barry Bonds Laughs Last Paul Craig Roberts Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons Took Over Alan Maass Doing the Right Wing's Dirty Work   October 4, 2005 Nikolas Kozloff Shocking the Two Party System: a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt. Mike Roselle Houston, You've Got a Problem Joshua Frank The Scoop on Harriet Miers John Chuckman War Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say Alan Farago Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers, Hurricanes and the Keys Mickey Z. An Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski Christine & Ethan Rose Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims Gary Leupp An Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History Website of the Day Rodney Crowell on Bob Dylan   October 3, 2005 Vijay Prashad Desperation at Holyoke Paul Craig Roberts Condi Rice: Gunslinger Joshua Frank An Interview with Cindy Sheehan Seth Sandronsky The Hiring Crisis for Black Teens Jeffrey St. Clair The Great Green Scare             Subscribe Online

More Than Half Way Home! Annual Fundraising Appeal We interrupt your regular reading habits to bring you the following important announcement: CounterPunch needs your financial support! We're not in the habit of making idle threats and this isn't one. Either we meet our fundraising goal of $60,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website. It's near the end of our year and the wolf is at the door. CounterPunch's website is supported almost entirely by subscribers to the print edition of our newsletter. We don't clutter the site by selling annoying popup ads. We tried getting money out of Google, but they gave us the boot. We aren't on the receiving end of six-figure grants from big foundations. George Soros doesn't have us on retainer. And we don't sell tickets on cruiseliners. The continued existence of CounterPunch depends solely on the support and dedication of our readers. And we know there are a lot of you. 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To contribute by phone you can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683 Onward, Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva November 7, 2005 An Interview with Stan Goff A Special Forces Officer Turned Anti-War Socialist By M. JUNAID ALAM Stan Goff is a former US Special Forces Master Sergeant with three decades of military experience, now heavily involved in anti-war work with Military Families Speak Out and the Bring Them Home Now campaign. He is also the author of two books, Full Spectrum Disorder, an analysis of the US military action, and Hideous Dream, a memoir based on his military experience. Below, in an extensive interview, Goff discusses the current configuration of the American political landscape in light of all the scandals exploding around the administration, and what the Left can do to take advantage of them. He also talks about the politics of the anti-war movement, why liberals refuse to endorse immediate withdrawal, and on a personal note, how is own son came to sign up for the military. Finally, Goff offers his thoughts on the Venezuelan revolution, its achievements, and its implications for neo-leftist ideas that declaimed against the state as a site for social change after the USSR's demise. Alam: A political sandstorm is brewing for the Bush administration on so many fronts: Iraq, Plamegate, Katrina, gas prices, the Delay indictment and the judicial debacle. Broadly speaking, do you think the left will be able to capitalize on Republican weakness, or does the centrism of the Democrats stand in the way of significant gains? Goff: The crisis of the Bush administration has just been further deepened by the mass protests and political cold shoulder he got when we visited Latin America to flog the FTAA. Hugo Chavez declared that the agreement would be buried in Mar de Plata, Argentina. And huge, militant street actions ripped the costumes off the perception management act. A Zogby poll now shows that the majority of military personnel in the US armed forces disapprove of their commander in chief's performance. The CIA gulag is being exposed. More Abu Ghraib photos will soon be released, just as Janis Karpinski's expose is released. While we don't hear about it here any longer, the incident in Afghanistan where Special Forces troops burned the bodies of dead Muslims remains a source of seething fury in the region. A little-reported Shia rebellion is gaining strength in Basra, while Sistani talks about the new government demanding American withdrawal. And Karen Hughes, Bush's PR flak, recently had her head publicly handed to her when she tried to lecture Indonesians on democracy as she tried the kind of historical mythologizing that she gets away with in the US. The crisis here is one of legitimacy. There is no immediate threat to the general stability of US imperial power. There is a threat, however, to the Republican Party that is being borne into the party by a fairly reckless lame-duck government, and the latent threats to imperial power are growing everywhere. If the US left doesn't encumber itself with unrealistic expectations, there is ample room to make some headway in the next period. But we have to understand which points we push on will give way and which won't. Standing on the sidelines during the Republican terramoto to show how above bourgeois politics we are strikes me as pretty foolish and self-indulgent. We definitely have to unite with this gathering storm surge of resistance to the seated government, even when it does provide some short-term opportunities for the Democratic Party. Internationally, this crisis of legitimacy is not perceived as a Republican issue, but a US issue. Most of the rest of the world has some real sense of what US policy internationally translates into for them, and the distinction between Republicans and Democrats is fairly meaningless except to a few pet NGOs. I think these perceptions abroad are more accurate than our perceptions here. The left in the US is clearly out of the left-sectarian sandbox right now with regard to the war against Iraq. At least the majority in the US now believes it was a bad idea--for a whole host of reasons--and that it's time to get out. So mass organizing has created a huge new discursive space here for the left, and we need to ensure we don't blow it by using shotgun propaganda--that is, approaching every sector in the movement and every audience with the same message, couched in the same terms. It always amazes me that the same people who can explain something as nuanced and philosophically complex as commodity fetishism can fail to appreciate the formidable epistemological barriers that prevent most other people from understanding the same things. But if we learn to do public pedagogy effectively, beginning with the reduction of these barriers through popular education and the development of different approaches for different sectors, there is a huge potential to consolidate the left itself, and to win over key new layers of the mass movement to at least an anti-imperial consciousness. This is a crucial step along the path to refounding a US left that has the power to go beyond the demonstration dynamic and actually begin to put down local roots in communities where they can develop some institutional infrastructure. This seems like an organizational development imperative. But the left also has the responsibility to weaken the obstacles to progress toward refoundation of a vital left in the US, and my own feeling is that this involves the eventual euthanasia of the Democratic Party even though I don't think we should underplay the risks of this for polemical advantage. It is very risky, and so we need to calculate those risks, then move forward. The key is to expose and isolate the opportunistic leadership of that party without attacking its rank and file. Calling people stupid for voting Democrat is a fine cathartic outburst, but it doesn't seem like a very good strategy for wining over the next layer of people to an anti-imperialist consciousness. We are already dong a fairly good job of exposing the Democratic Party on the war against Iraq right now, or rather, the Democratic Party is dong a fine job of exposing itself. But there are two points of vulnerability that haven't been taken up as aggressively as they should be and that is making the connections between the social conditions of oppressed nationalities in the US and the Palestinians. Many people want to make a preposterous case that the Republican neocons are in the pay of Israel and that the US is somehow subordinate to Israel. This is not only idiotic, it is often anti-Semitic world Jewish conspiracy stuff. The problem is that people in the US are spectacularly ignorant about Palestine and the state of Israel. The more dominant belief is that Israel is an island of white civilization in a sea of Arab deviance, of course, and an alarming number of Republican partisans have convinced themselves that the Israeli state is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in the end times. The political reality is that the Republicans have seized on Zionism so aggressively to undermine the Democratic Party, whose Zionism is almost legendary. So I guess I believe that we should be working three fronts hard. On a practical level, relating to the Iraq war, we have to up the ante in terms of war resistance and strengthen our efforts at counter-recruitment. This materially weakens the war effort, and the US military failure in Iraq is an advance for the whole world. It also means attacking Republicans, and uniting with mass disillusion about Republicans. On an organizational level, it seems we have to consolidate the left wing of the movement, isolate the reactionaries who are trapped in this legitimacy crisis, and work a lot harder and smarter to win over new layers of the antiwar movement and oppressed nationalities to an anti-imperialist orientation. Finally, we need to develop durable, local social and political infrastructure I'm thinking here of three groups I know, the People's Organization for Progress in Newark, and the whole city block in Chicago developed around the Puerto Rican Cultural Center--where I recently had the honor to visit. Black Workers for Justice here in North Carolina has always looked in this direction, too, with a workers center, clinics, the World Cultural Center, and so forth. Alam: Turning to the anti-war movement: Cindy Sheehan has been a remarkable symbol of the anti-war movement--mother of a soldier lost to the war, active, principled, and outspoken. However, the anti-war left still seems trapped in the same kind of circular, sporadic protest-conference dynamic. What could the hard left do in terms of its own behavior that could change this circle into an upward spiral of action? Goff: Just for myself, I don't see the process as an upward spiral, and I'm not trying to quibble over metaphors here. I see it as moving into abandoned spaces. That's why though I believe the demonstrations are important, the real work to consolidate the advanced activists has to happen at the local level. I'm thinking here about the ten-point program of the Black Panther party, and how that was paired with the development of local social and political infrastructure. Yusuf Nuruddin recently wrote a good piece on this for Socialism and Democracy. Symbolic politics has great catalytic value, but a limited life expectancy. Locally-rooted, and culturally homogenous organizations with an anti-imperial consciousness are not only more effective at pursuing counter-recruitment work and pressuring elected officials on the war, they are on the front lines against the attack against their own living standards. Katrina is showing us, if we care to look, an accelerated version of what may be the most important issue facing Black and Brown communities in the US, and that is gentrification. Alam: Liberals who express disillusionment and anger with the war--like Juan Cole - nevertheless object to immediate US military withdrawal because they argue it would result in total anarchy and chaos. They also say the US has certain obligations to Iraqis in light of its policies the past two years. Are these objections valid, or are they cover for a more visceral concern about the US losing "credibility" if it leaves? Goff: They are an expression of white supremacy. I don't think there is any way to sugarcoat this. The racism of reactionaries has been isolated to a large degree. We can start a fight over the Minutemen or the Daughters of the Confederacy and pretty much win the public debate. Liberal racism is a far more destructive force in this society, largely because it is still unacknowledged. The argument to stay the course from liberals is based directly and absolutely on a latter-day version of the "white man's burden to civilize the darker races." The political cover is not to protect US credibility. The leadership of the Democratic Party wants to stay in Iraq for the same reason the Republicans do. This is, from the point of view of the US state, an absolutely necessary re-disposition of the post-Cold War American military. The argument between D's and R's is about how to accomplish it. The reason we saw next to zero official Democratic Party participation in September 24th was that the Democratic Party leadership disagrees with us. They want those permanent bases in Iraq every bit as much as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz do. There is simply no other way to explain why the most visible leaders of that party continue to argue for expanding the war with more troops and garnering more international support for it, when the polls show this to be an increasingly unpopular position like free trade agreements, another issue where the public opposes, and both parties agree. This is a pretty good indicator that transnational capital operating through the US state regards these positions as non-negotiable. Alam: Turning personal for a moment: you've been very active in the anti-war movement as a member of Military Families Speak Out, you spent about 30 years in the Special Forces before you became a socialist, and you have a son who served in the military Iraq. The question sort of presents itself: how did the son of a Master Sergeant-turned-Marxist end up joining the military? Goff: My son grew up on a military installation. That was a good life, from his standpoint. Military installations are socialist societies. Everything on them is held in common, and almost every facility and support activity is available universally to all members of the armed forces. Good schools, health care, housing allowance or free housing, recreation facilities, and for inter-racial kids like my son, a whole population of kids like him. Inter-racial marriage is far more common in the Army than in US society generally. He saw me get a check twice a month, and I never had to worry about being fired. His own child had just been born, and he was working at McDonalds. So he went to what he knew. Fort Bragg is where my kids have their most enduring sense of place. And Fort Bragg is a nice place. It is well kept, and it is not cluttered up with commercial billboards. There are all sorts of things to do--fishing, swimming, craft shops, gyms, theaters, libraries, walking trails, and so on. I won't speak for him on the question of the war, because I do not have his permission to do that. But if he never had to go back to Iraq, I doubt he'd be calling for an appointment with mental health to deal with his disappointment. He's 22. He likes to fish and dance and play video games and hang out with his pizos. My kids are aggressively apolitical it's a separation thing, I suspect. Alam: One of the often unrecognized consequences of resistance in Iraq is the US government's inability to direct its full wrath at an enemy much closer to home: Hugo Chavez. What are your thoughts about Chavez's progress in cultivating what he calls 21 century socialism? Goff: How can I not like Hugo Chavez? He was a paratrooper like I was, who learned to love the people and got political. He represents a nation where the armed forces fused with the masses to disrupt a US-supported coup d'etat. He is exploiting his assets and minimizing his liabilities to stick his finger in the eye of the Imperium. He has accomplished so much, but there are a couple of things in particular that resonate with me. He led the process to rewrite a bourgeois constitution and make it an instrument of popular sovereignty. Women's equality was written straight into that document, and he destroyed the most undemocratic political institution in the country, the Senate. I wish we could do that. But the other thing he did was to organize a nationwide literacy program around that constitution, making this document a weapon that was handed to the masses. Now he is taking on a leadership role in the whole region, where we are seeing what I call a political version of continental drift. Latin America is awake again, and it is trying to gain its feet. That process is strengthened by US overstretch in Iraq. I don't have a crystal ball to see where all this will go, but I do know that when I visited the very independista Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago that I mentioned earlier, they had sent their youth to Venezuela, and his picture was everywhere. That all seems very positive. As to how the Venezuelans feel their way into the future, I am neither informed enough nor close enough to Venezuela to make any kind of critique. That the Venezuelan state is the instrument for returning power to the masses is enough to make me smile. Alam: You've been one of a handful of leftists who has spoken strongly against the romanticization of Zapatistas and the dismissal of the state as a means of social change--positions long championed by John Holloway and Michael Hardt and others post-USSR. Does Venezuela present a definitive answer to their neo-Marxist/anarchist formulations, or is too early to tell? Goff: I don't know if I'd characterize the Zapatistas themselves as anarchists. I just don't know enough about their internal processes to make a judgment like that. They are immensely popular, however, with petit bourgeois radicals in the US, precisely because of the stalinophobic simplicity of thinking by semi-leftists who are still trapped in a consumer-capitalist episteme. They want to divorce themselves from the history of the left because it doesn't square with the good-guy/bad-guy thinking of metropolitan progressives. They are interested primarily in a moral evaluation of the 20th Century instead of a critical one. I find this metropolitan hyper-idealization of the Zapatistas almost orientalist, a kind of fawning over the charming natives who are seen as modern-day Robin Hoods. And they hardly ever actually use their guns, which further endears them to American progressives who vicariously dress up like revolutionaries in a film script, but who can't seem to handle the moral ambiguities of any active armed struggle that actually shoots anyone. The left has to critique 20th Century state socialism, no doubt. But you can't enter that process with a moral agenda, or even an ideological one. That isn't just an issue I have with anarchists, who are stunningly ahistorical except to pronounce moral judgments on specific events without the least concern for context. I have the same issue with anyone who engages in this critique to attempt the apotheosis of his or her favorite dead communist. Here is a news flash. We are not living in Russia in either 1917 or 1937. We are not living in China in 1950 and neither are the Chinese and Russians. In that process of studying the 20th Century, not only do we have to ask how the Soviet bloc was defeated or how capitalism is being restored in China, but how has Cuba managed to preserve so many of its accomplishments until now and what about Cuba makes its strategies uniquely Cuban. The Zapatistas seem to have adopted a strategy that focuses on civil society as a means of influencing the state. That might be anarchist, or it might be Gramscian, or it might be something else. That doesn't seem to be the issue, at least to me. The issue to me is what works. Has this project advanced the interests of the indigenous people involved, or has it been defeated, or where is it along that continuum? I won't compare it directly to Venezuela for a number of reasons anyone could infer with a moment's thought. But I will say that having state power provides a lot of advantages in advancing the interests of the masses. If it didn't, the US wouldn't be so hell-bent on contesting it, either through interference in the elections of other countries, or with coups like those in Haiti and Venezuela. Having clear territorial boundaries, access to public revenues, control over the legal interpretation of what property means, the ability to openly and legally maintain armed forces, international diplomatic recognition, trade agreements with other nations these are clear. If anyone tells me these are not useful in the hands of a popular government to protect the people from imperialism, then I want him or her to share what they are smoking. On the other hand, Venezuela is not just a challenge to anarchist and liberal orthodoxy, it is a challenge to leftist orthodoxy of the more adventurist kind that says the only way to state power is through revolutionary civil war. I don't think Venezuela is teaching us anything about "models," except that there are no models. It's teaching us a lot more about the value of embeddedness for social movements and the need for tactical agility. M. Junaid Alam is co-editor of the leftist youth journal Left Hook, where this first appeared, and a journalism student at Northeastern University.   What You're Missing in the Special Expanded Print Edition The War So Far: a Failure Worse Than Vietnam by Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad "The need for the White House to produce a fantasy picture of Iraq is because it dare not admit that it has engineered one of the greatest disasters in American history. It is worse than Vietnam because the enemy is punier and the original ambitions greater." Get the answers you're looking for in the subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. 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