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Should the Left Cheer the Dollar's Drop? How to make the bankers scream: Robert Pollin, world's best obituarist of Clintonomics, explains it all for you. Do police states make people feel safer? Vicente Navarro on Franco's Spain, Cockburn on Ireland in the Fifties under the Catholic Hierarchy, Alevtina Rea on growing up in Brezhnev-time. Capitalism's true utopia? St Clair on the Pentagon's no-bid arms contracts. How's the press doing in Iraq? Patrick Cockburn tells all to Omar Waraich. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest 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. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories May 12, 2005 Greg
Moses Gary
Leupp
May 11, 2005 Patrick
Cockburn Kevin
Zeese Christopher
Brauchli Zalman
Amit Robert
Shull Mike
Whitney Dr.
Teresa Whitehurst Norman
Solomon
May 10, 2005 Richard
Drayton Dave
Zirin Jackie
Corr Dave
Lindorff Michael
Donnelly Reza
Fiyouzat Scott
Parkin Stephen
Babcock Alan
Farago Michael
Neumann Website
of the Day
May 9, 2005 Louis
Proyect Robert
Fisk Kevin
Zeese Joshua
Frank Sasha
Kramer Andrew
Wimmer Jeffrey
Webber Jeffrey
St. Clair
May 7 / 8, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gary
Leupp Saul
Landau Joe
DeRaymond Daniela
Ponce Heather
Williams Gregory
Elich Anis
Memon John
Chuckman Mike
Whitney Ron
Jacobs Colin
Kalmbacher Lance
Selfa Fred
Gardner Ben
Tripp Mickey
Z. Richard
Joseph Dr.
Susan Block Poets'
Basement
May 6, 2005 Patrick
Cockburn Erin
Yoshioka Sam
Husseini Dave
Lindorff Kevin
Zeese Joshua
Frank Dan
Bacher P.
Sainath
May 5, 2005 Carles
Mutaner Carl
G. Estabrook Farrah
Hassen Kevin
Zeese Michael
Leonardi Bennett
Ramberg Ray
McGovern Norman
Solomon Nicole
Colson Brian
Concannon, Jr.
May 4, 2005 Colin
Kalmbacher John
Walsh Greg
Moses Ali
Khan Chris
Floyd Linda
S. Heard Dave
Zirin William
S. Lind Gary
Leupp Website
of the Day
May 3, 2005 Dave
Lindorff Brian
Cloughley Ira
Kurzban Seth
Sandronsky Gilad
Atzmon Michael
Donnelly Alex
Sanchez Peter
Linebaugh
May 2, 2005 Ron
Jacobs Stan
Goff Karyn
Strickler Joshua
Frank Kevin
Zeese Vicente
Navarro
April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gabriel
Kolko Jennifer
Loewenstein Lee
Sustar Saul
Landau T.W.
Croft Nikolas
Kozloff William
Blum Dave
Lindorff Joshua
Frank Doug
Giebel Steven
Erlanger Fred
Gardner Mike
Whitney Kurt
Nimmo Joe
DeRaymond Michael
Dickinson Mickey
Z. Justin
Taylor Poets
Basement Website
of the Weekend
April 29, 2005 W.
John Green Luke
Brothers Norman
Solomon M.
Junaid Alam Jackie
Corr Hunter
Greer Sharon
Smith Website
of the Day
April 28, 2005 Omar
Waraich Kevin
Zeese Dave
Lindorff Greg
Moses Toni
Solo Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Werther
April 27, 2005 John
Ross Joshua
Frank Ray
McGovern Mark
Donham Dan
Smith
April 26, 2005 Dave
Lindorff Alevtina
Rea Greg
Moses Joshua
Frank Diana
Johnstone
April 25, 2005 Uri
Avnery Alison
Weir Lee
Sustar Leonardo
Boff Gary
Leupp
April 23 / 24, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gary
Leupp James
Petras Harry
Browne Fred
Gardner Ron
Jacobs Elizabeth
Schulte Chris
Floyd
April 22, 2005 Saul
Landau Kevin
Zeese Joshua
Frank Mike
Whitney Michael
Flynn Lee
Sustar Website
of the Day
April 21, 2005 Bill
Quigley Dave
Lindorff Jason
Leopold Kathleen
Christison
April 20, 2005 John Ross Kevin Zeese Uri Avnery Website of the Day
April 19, 2005 Jean-Guy Allard Dave Lindorff Neve Gordon Brian Concannon, Jr Murray Hudson Frank B. Ford Monty Python Michael Dickinson Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
Linda Schade
/ Kevin Zeese John Ross Brian McKenna Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Dave Zirin Eli Stephens Harry Browne Website of
the Day
April 16 / 17, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Mark Dow Omar Waraich Robert Buzzanco Sherry Wolf Fred Gardner Ron Jacobs Mark Weisbrot John Pardon Yoshie Furuhashi Mike Roselle Ralph Nader Ramzy Baroud Jackson Thoreau Michael Dickinson Richard Neville Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
April 15, 2005 Brian Cloughley Bill Glahn Mickey Z. Stephanie McMillan Josh Mahan David Russitano Jorge Mariscal Rodolfo "Corky"
Gonzales Tom Reeves
April 14, 2005 Karyn Strickler Pat Williams Jessica Pupovac Joshua Frank Jerzy Mankowski Talli Naumann Antony Loewenstein Virginia Rodino Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Website of the Day
April 13, 2005 Maria Carrión Mike Whitney Terry Jones Dave Lindorff Nathaniel Livingston, Jr. Kurt Nimmo Don Fitz Tom Crumpacker JG Jack McCarthy Kevin Zeese Jeffrey St.
Clair
April 12, 2005 John Wheat
Gibson Kevin Zeese Alan Farago Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Nelson P. Valdes Dave Zirin Website of the Day
April 11, 2005 Tom Barry Saul Landau Monique Dols Phil Gasper Mike Whitney Edwin Krales Paul de Rooij Website of the Day
April 9 / 10, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair William A. Cook Gary Leupp Alan Maass Laura Carlsen Joe DeRaymond Nikolas Kozloff Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Fred Gardner Justin Smith Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Ira Kay Elizabeth Schulte Jackie Corr Christopher
Brauchli Leslie A. Fiedler Ben Tripp Poets Basement Website of
the Weekend
Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
Marcos Norman Finkelstein Steve Niva Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams Steve
J.B. Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber Wendell
Berry CounterPunch
Wire Cindy
Corrie Gore Vidal Francis Boyle
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May 12, 2005 "What's the Answer to the Holocaust?"Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey GoldbergBy GARY LEUPP A revealing article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker, based on an interview with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who has announced he will leave his post by the end of the year. Feith is on the hot seat because of the Franklin Affair, and is frequently mentioned in connection with the Plame Affair. But the powerful neocon faces the greatest amount of criticism for his role in producing the thoroughly bogus case for war on Iraq. Goldberg's article comes out at a time when the British press has published a secret report of the minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair, MI-6 chief Richard Dearlove, and Jack Straw dated July 23, 2002 in which, to quote the document, "[Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In other words, the "facts" that Bush was presenting to the American people and the world, conveyed most frighteningly in Bush's state of the union address in January 2003 and Colin Powell's United Nations speech on February 5, were spurious and bore no relation to the basic decision to attack Iraq in violation of international law that March. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear this information is not new. Individual neocons themselves have conceded, with the smug casualness of those who think they're immune from judgment, that this was the case. Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in May 2003 that, "For bureaucratic reasons [the administration] settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction," as the justification for war on Iraq, "because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." Richard Perle astonished a London audience in November 2003 by declaring that "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing," and that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone." Those most responsible for the war have all but shouted from the rooftops what a Boston Globe cartoonist noted early on: what for most was a tragedy was for them an opportunity. But one that required disinformation to implement, since normal people require reasons for war other than those that can honestly be offered in most instances. "The first casualty in war is the truth," as they say. Feith complains to Golberg that administration critics on Iraq think "we were a bunch of people intent on going to war with Iraq no matter what. September 11th was a pretext. We believed that it would be easy, that we were linked up to Chalabi who was arguing that it would be easy and there would not be problems in the aftermath, and so for that reason nobody planned for anything hard, and when it turned out to be hard we were left without a plan." But he offers no refutation of these claims that his bunch indeed wanted war, used 9-11 as a pretext, and was intimately connected to Chalabi's disinformation apparatus. He merely acknowledges the criticisms as so many irritations, reminding me of Wolfowitz's breezy change of the subject when asked about the absent weapons in July 2003. "Well, we've liberated people from a dictator, right?" said Donald Rumsfeld's top deputy while on a visit to conquered Iraq. "I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction. I'm concerned about getting Iraq on its feet. I didn't come (to Iraq) on a search for weapons of mass destruction. If you could get in a relaxed conversation with Iraqis on that subject they'd say why on earth are you Americans fussing so much about this historical issue [!] when we have real problems here, when Baathists are killing us and Baathists are threatening us and we don't have electricity and we don't have jobs. Those are the real issues. I'm not saying that getting to the bottom of this WMD issue isn't important. It is important. But it is not of immediate consequence." Feith, also seeking to shove the unimportant past under the rug, is focused on the future. He emphasizes all the good the U.S. is doing in Iraq following the invasion, whatever it happened to be based on way back all those historical months ago. "The Marshall Plan," Feith told Goldberg, "didn't get going until 1948. Here we are less than two years after the liberation of Baghdad, and an enormous amount of reconstruction has been done." This has become the main post-facto rationalization for the war: We must reconstruct Iraq! But for this rationalization to have any efficacy, the popular mind must be hypnotized to imagine that the deposed Saddam and his regime, rather than sanctions and war, destroyed all that which must now be rebuilt. This is, as General Tommy Franks once said of Feith (this also mentioned in the Goldberg article) just "fucking stupid." A new UN study published last week states that 84% of Iraq's higher education establishment was "destroyed, damaged and robbed" since the beginning of the U.S. invasion. That's why "an enormous amount of reconstruction" is required---although it's hard to do it in an atmosphere of ongoing violence, the predictable outcome of the invasion itself. Recall that during the second month of the invasion about 15 schoolboys, protesting the seizure of their primary school in Fallujah, were killed by U.S. troops sent there to destroy weapons of mass destruction, fight al-Qaeda and maybe towards the end of an official list of reasons lengthening like Pinocchio's nose, liberate oppressed boys like them. Can we now rejoice with Feith that the damaged building's been all fixed up? Probably not, since by all reports, the whole city of Fallujah's in ruin. That was the city's fate because it refused to capitulate to the invaders. Feith's longstanding advocacy of unprovoked war on Iraq, and support for war in general as a way of defending something, is explained in part by the following autobiographical material imparted to Goldberg:
In Feith's fevered, confused mind, war on Iraq---a Third World country that never attacked the U.S.---is the moral equivalent to the U.S.'s response to Pearl Harbor, to resistance to Nazism. It's an "answer to the Holocaust," in which for all I know he may genuinely feel that Iraqis were somehow deeply implicated. What should it matter to such a mind that 1600 Americans and up to 100,000 Iraqis have died in a war based on lies---lies that he himself as a main operative of the (still not investigated) "Office of Special Plans" systematically collected and foisted on the public to justify? Goldberg in 2002 published an article in the New Yorker praised by former CIA director and leading Iraq war enthusiast James Woolsey as a "blockbuster" providing a better rationale for an Iraq attack than what could then be culled from the cautious CIA intelligence reports. He claimed that al-Ansar, a group variously described as mostly Kurdish or mostly Arab and generally shrouded in mystery, was producing weapons of mass destruction on the Iranian border. The area was so pummeled by U.S. bombing that there can be no verification of the pre-war claims. Woolsey stated at the time that the CIA "got beat on this story by the New Yorker and Jeff Goldberg." I asked at the time: "How likely is that, and who is likely to be feeding whom here---the CIA Mr. Goldberg, or Mr. Goldberg the CIA?" I should apologize to the CIA for my implication. It probably wasn't them, but Feith's own Special Office. Interesting now in any case to find Feith, in the privacy of his library in his suburban Maryland home, unburdening his soul to this trusted journalist. And in the interview so plainly confirming Gen. Frank's assessment. Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu |
