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Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories May 14 / 15, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Join the 14 Per Cent Club! May 13, 2005 Tom Stephens A Chronology of US War Crimes and Torture, 1975-2005 Patrick Cockburn "They Destroyed Everything" Mike Whitney Tom Friedman, Imperial Chronicler Chris Floyd Miami Vice: the Sleazy World of Jeb Bush Jenna Orkin Ground Zero's Toxic Dust Dave Lindorff Googling for Fun Joshua Frank Yale Fires an Acclaimed Anarchist Scholar: an Interview with David Graeber Website of the Day Botero: Pinta El Horror de Abu Ghraib May 12, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts America is Losing: More Phony Jobs Hype Uri Avnery Death of a Myth Greg Moses Neo-Con Logic at the Border Carolyn Baker The Politics of Dominionism: the New Religious Right in America Pat Williams Amateurish High Jinks on Roadless Areas William S. Lind Reality Gap: the Myth of US Invincibilty Jack Random The Dubious Wisdom of George W. Bush Gary Leupp Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey Goldberg   May 11, 2005 Patrick Cockburn The Rise, Fall and Rise of Ahmed Chalabi: King of Jordan to Pardon His $300 Million Bank Swindle Kevin Zeese The Occupation Gets More Saddam-like Every Day Christopher Brauchli Coffee, Tea or Torture?: A One Way Ticket to Uzbekistan Zalman Amit The Collapse of Academic Freedom in Israel: Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University Robert Shull Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops: Senate Gives DHS Power to Waive All Laws Mike Whitney God, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Anti-Arabic Week at a Southern High School Norman Solomon Political Bluster and the Filibuster   May 10, 2005 Richard Drayton The Imperial Mythology of WW II: an Ethical Blank Check Dave Zirin Steve Nash's Brilliant Year: Anti-War Hoopster Wins NBA's MVP Jackie Corr The Medicare Catch: Mrs. O'Hara's Windfall Dave Lindorff Silence of the Scams: Economists on China Michael Donnelly From Roadless to Clueless: the Great Stillborn Eco Victory Reza Fiyouzat Nomadic Abstracts Scott Parkin Taking Direct Action Against Halliburton Stephen Babcock The Burden of Knowing Better Alan Farago Florida, Water and Lobbyists Michael Neumann Naomi's Courage Website of the Day One Nation Under Plagiarism   May 9, 2005 Louis Proyect Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond, Greenwasher Robert Fisk "Mission Accomplished": the Occupation, Year Two Kevin Zeese Concientious Objection on Trial: the Court Martial of Keith Benderman Joshua Frank Kerry Bashes Gay Marriage Sasha Kramer A Mother's Day Call for Justice in Haiti's Prisons Andrew Wimmer Create and Resist Jeffrey Webber Back to the Streets in Bolivia? Jeffrey St. Clair Straight to Bechtel   May 7 / 8, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Who Beat Hitler? Gary Leupp Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism Saul Landau Pope Torquemada: Purges, Pedophiles and Cover-Ups Joe DeRaymond Autumn of the Revolutionary: Another Look at Daniel Ortega Daniela Ponce Seeing Chile in Nepal Heather Williams Hollywood Does Enron Gregory Elich Zimbabwe's Fight for Justice Anis Memon To Cuba and Back John Chuckman The Peculiar State: "Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism" Mike Whitney Hard Right Rage Against the Truth Ron Jacobs Re-Reading "Born on the Fourth of July" as the Iraq War Grinds On Colin Kalmbacher Whither Disorder? Ann Coulter and the Texas Police State, Cont. Lance Selfa Uprising in Mexico City Fred Gardner "Getting High is a Little Like Cuba" Ben Tripp Letters on Wittgenstein Mickey Z. The Mother of All Days Richard Joseph Those Patriotic Magnets Dr. Susan Block Come As You Are: Masturbation 101 Poets' Basement Smith-Ferri, Louise, Nettnin, Engel and Albert   May 6, 2005 Patrick Cockburn Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood Erin Yoshioka Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison? Sam Husseini Talking with Syrians Dave Lindorff Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters Kevin Zeese Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty Joshua Frank An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War Dan Bacher Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid P. Sainath India's Bloody Water Wars   May 5, 2005 Carles Mutaner Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?" Carl G. Estabrook Is There Any Hope for the Pope? Farrah Hassen The US's Syrian Obsession Kevin Zeese "Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta Michael Leonardi May Day with an American Soldier in Rome Bennett Ramberg The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You Ray McGovern The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit Norman Solomon Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran Nicole Colson The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights Brian Concannon, Jr. Clearing the Fences in Haiti     May 4, 2005 Colin Kalmbacher Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested John Walsh Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War Greg Moses Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation" Ali Khan Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart Chris Floyd Ring Them Bells Linda S. Heard D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics Dave Zirin The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle William S. Lind Fool's Paradise Gary Leupp Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution Website of the Day Kent State, May 4, 1970   May 3, 2005 Dave Lindorff Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice Brian Cloughley Halliburton's War Loot Ira Kurzban Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers Seth Sandronsky Towards Debtors' Prisons? Gilad Atzmon The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More Michael Donnelly Branding Eco Collapse Alex Sanchez Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush? Peter Linebaugh Magna Carta and May Day   May 2, 2005 Ron Jacobs Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement Stan Goff The Case of Hasan Akbar Karyn Strickler Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics Joshua Frank Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly Kevin Zeese Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam Vicente Navarro Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician       April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility" Gabriel Kolko Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later Jennifer Loewenstein The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood Lee Sustar City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago Saul Landau The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power T.W. Croft The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy Nikolas Kozloff Fox News v. Hugo Chavez William Blum Never-Ending Double Standards Dave Lindorff Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly Joshua Frank The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls Doug Giebel Saving Jane Fonda Steven Erlanger A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief Fred Gardner Washington State Doctor Harassed Mike Whitney Another Mad Bush Press Conference Kurt Nimmo Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine Joe DeRaymond A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania Michael Dickinson Flags Mickey Z. May Day at Yankee Stadium Justin Taylor The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy Poets Basement Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair Website of the Weekend Save Barbados's Cowpastor                                             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.     Subscribe Online

May 14, 2005 Wars Kill Empires as Well as People Lessons from Vietnam By SAUL LANDAU In 2005, the United States has become Communist Vietnam's single-largest trading partner. Vietnam's products permeate US stores. But the "Vietnam War trauma" remains central to US politics. Note how the Vietnam service record of presidential candidates became a contentious issue in the 2004 elections. People don't overcome traumas unless they understand them. Since public education provides citizens with minimal context, we rely on mass media to reach into its collective attic and drag out "Fall of Saigon" stories. However, when the commercial press pushes the anniversary method of history teaching, the public tends to divorce rather than engage with its past connections. Personal anecdotes overwhelm analysis. Relatives of dead soldiers weep at Washington's Vietnam Wall; others relive battles and deaths of comrades. Few media presentations offer the past as a way to learn for the future. As the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue down their bloody paths, we should study the lessons of The Vietnam War. Vietnamese refer to that period between the early 1960s and April 1975 as "The American Phase." They suffered periods of foreign domination by Chinese, Japanese and French occupiers who, unlike the Americans, learned the painful lesson of trying to subdue and occupy that land. US leaders adamantly refuse to learn that some people, like Koreans, Vietnamese and Iraqis, for examples, do not submit to force and brutality. How to teach that simple lesson? Teachers will have shared the experience of trying to educate students who have not ingested their own history. Instead of inculcating historical context from first grade on, US students learn a kind of patriotic mythology disguised with words like "unbiased" ­ as if along with critiques of US behavior in Vietnam ­ or Iraq -- one had to present the good side of torture, mass murder and the napalming of villages. A Voice of America reporter sympathized with US historians who "have struggled for years to find a fair and balanced way to teach students about the Vietnam War - and the atrocities committed there by U.S. soldiers" (Maura Jane Farrelly, April 28, 2005 ). "Fair and balanced" sound discordant in the era of Fox News and CNN. Teachers should show students news clips of the inglorious US retreat from Saigon in April 1975. Military helicopters took off from the Embassy with desperate Vietnamese clients clinging to them and falling to the ground. The high school texts don't tell that story. Steve Jackson, an Indiana University of Pennsylvania Political Science professor, found that students in his Introduction to American Politics course "have little if any knowledge about the Vietnam War and its lessons. He finds that appalling, especially in light of the U.S.'s current involvement in Iraq." (Michael A. Fuoco, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette April 28, 2005). Gore Vidal calls this syndrome "The United States of Amnesia." As memorials abound and the media teemed with veterans recalling fallen comrades and anecdotes of combat, many school boards want history taught as lessons of right and wrong in which our leaders might make mistakes, but don't do evil. As a result, my college students don't know that the US military dropped more bombs on Southeast Asia than they did in World War Two. General Curtis LeMay, wanted to bomb Vietnam "back to the Stone Age." How Christian! Despite overwhelming military superiority, the US lost in Vietnam. When American forces departed in 1975, the US puppet army in Saigon "had over three times as much artillery, twice as many tanks and armored cars, 1400 aircraft and a virtual monopoly of the air and "a two-to-one superiority of combat troops" (Kolko, Anatomy of War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience." See Counterpunch April 30, 2005). Seven years earlier, the North Vietnamese lost a major battle and won the war. In late January 1968, the armies of the North and National Liberation Front of the South staged an armed uprising during Tet, the Vietnamese holiday. General Giap and the other Hanoi leaders had decided that the levels of casualties exacted by massive US artillery shelling and bombing had become intolerable. Giap's quick military victory plan called for coordinated attacks on targets near the South Vietnam border to lure US troops away from the cities, where dramatic assaults took place by Viet Cong (the pro Communist forces in the South and by regular North Vietnamese troops who had infiltrated South Vietnam's urban areas). Giap predicted that such bold and large scale initiatives would inspire citizens to revolt against the puppet South Vietnamese government. The fall of this US-backed regime would remove the last pretext for US occupation and the Americans would withdraw. The puppet government, however, didn't fall. US forces took about 1,100 casualties and many more wounded, but then retaliated, inflicting heavy casualties on Giap's troops ­ some 35,000 killed and 60,000 wounded. But Giap's plan did lead to an unanticipated victory in the propaganda war. One TV news clips showed Viet Cong fighting their way inside the heavily-guarded US Embassy in Saigon, thus dramatizing the gap between official statements of optimism about the enemy's weakness and the real battlefield facts. The Tet Offensive thus revealed the absurdity of President Lyndon Johnson's boasts of how much "the enemy" had been permanently weakened. The fact that the offensive took place after repeated official assurances of impending victory ­ seeing light at the end of the tunnel, according to Defense Secretary McNamara -- so undermined the war propagandists' efforts that public opinion swayed convincingly against the war. Despite their immense losses, the North Vietnamese won the propaganda war. Seven years after Tet, the TV public saw images of US embassy officials burning documents and US money to prevent the rapidly advancing Communists from getting them. These pictures and the commentaries that accompanied them induced disgust and doubt in the wisdom of US leaders. Three years later, if doubts persisted about the duplicity of US officials, Daniel Ellsberg, a former national security official, released a massive archive of documents that the New York Times printed. The thousands of documents in the Pentagon Papers confirmed that the government had lied and covered up important facts about both the origins of the war. They also showed that the United States had made little "progress" in winning the "hearts and minds" of Vietnam's people. The Pentagon Papers also revealed that Lyndon Johnson had lied repeatedly and that neither he nor any other official had devised a plan to end the war and leave. The credibility gap between government and people became unbridgeable. Most Americans don't remember or know why the United States intervened and then got deeper into Vietnam. Its leaders had not learned from Korea, where another tough Asia foe fought US troops to a bloody standstill. Bush has repeated the murderous scenario in Iraq. In each war, the US killing machine slaughtered many more natives than Americans. In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson confessed to his National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy that he didn't "think its worth fighting for." But he continued to send hundreds of thousands of troops to kill and die ­ and ultimately lose. On May 1, the paper of record featured a particularly foolish account. Stephen J. Morris of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies blamed anti-war lobbying for convincing Congress to cut funding, thus assuring the Communist victory in Vietnam. How many of the NY Times readers will recall the instant collapse of the militarily superior, US-trained South Vietnamese army when they had to fight? How many will remember that the United States invented South Vietnam in 1955 as a way to avert a national electoral victory by President Ho Chi Minh? Or that rampant corruption characterized all the US-picked regimes. How many will know that the US chose Catholics to rule a predominantly Buddhist population? Morris' sour grapes scenario belies the facts: South Vietnam in early 1975 showed all the signs of decomposition. The Times does not print historian Gabriel Kolko's vital lessons. "Successive administrations in Washington have no capacity whatsoever to learn from past errors. Total defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago should have been a warning to the U.S.: wars are too complicated for any nation, even the most powerful, to undertake without grave risk. They are not simply military exercises in which equipment and firepower is decisive, but political, ideological, and economic challenges also. The events of South Vietnam 30 years ago should have proven that" (Counterpunch, April 30, 2005). In Iraq, Bush repeats Lyndon Johnson's sinful stupidity of wasting a surplus on military and security madness. Congress' new budget froze domestic spending, but not military and "security" funding. Bush's advisers should read him Pat Buchanan's lines from A Republic, Not an Empire: "all the empires had disappeared. How did they perish? By war ­ all of them." Saul Landau's newest book is THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA: HOW CONSUMERS HAVE RELACED CITIZENS AND HOW WE CAN REVERSE THE TREND. He is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University.