Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
Recent
Stories
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
5, 2003
"Iraq Must Not
Remain Occupied. We Can Build Iraq as God Wants"
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
By GARY LEUPP
"The occupation force is primarily
responsible for the pure blood that was spilt in holy Al-Najaf,
the blood of al-Hakim and the faithful group that was present
near the mosque. This force is primarily responsible for all
this blood and the blood that is shed all over Iraq every day.
Iraq must not remain occupied and the occupation must leave so
that we can build Iraq as God wants us to do."
The remarkable funeral oration by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim,
brother of Iraq's most prominent Shiite cleric and political
figure, the slain Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, might just
prove the death-knell of the occupation and even the neocons'
whole world-changing project. Last month's horrific car-bombing
of the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, which may have taken the lives
of up to 125 people, was itself, as the BBC put it, "a massive
setback for coalition forces" regardless of who did it.
But for the dead cleric's brother, who (still) sits on Iraq's
U.S.-appointed Governing Council, to tell a crowd of half a million
grieving Shiites Sept. 1 that occupation forces bear primary
responsibility for all the bloodshed is perhaps an
equal setback. Embarrassing, too, that two Shiite members on
the 25-member puppet council (Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum and Mohsen
Abdul Hamid) have stepped down over the Najaf episode. They like
most Iraqis protest the lack of security, electricity and water
resulting from the invasion. When even those most willing to
cooperate with you start publicly dissing you---and bringing
God into it---you know you're in trouble.
Earlier, at the shrine of Hussein in Karbala, where al-Hakim's
coffin was placed for the night August 31, a cleric boomed through
the loudspeaker: "Yesterday we faced the tanks of Saddam
Hussein. Today the tanks of the Americans. We are not afraid
of the Americans, who are not innocent of the blood of"
al-Hakim. This couldn't have sounded good to the occupying forces.
Nor the chant of mourners marching through Baghdad, beating their
chests: "We will humiliate Saddam, we will humiliate Bush"
(New York Times, Aug. 31). Some perhaps remembered how
Bush Sr., having encouraged the Shiites to rise up after the
first Gulf War, left them stranded as Saddam's forces slaughtered
them in their thousands.
To date, the "coalition forces"
have met with particular hostility in the "Sunni Triangle,"
while enjoying more cooperation from the Shiites and Kurds. But
the Kurds (who are ethnically distinct from the Iraqi Arabs,
and while mostly Sunni also include some Shiites) may also be
souring on the occupation. The new "foreign minister"
appointed by the Governing Council, Hoshiyar Zebari (who is Kurdish),
is already at loggerheads with the U.S. over plans to invite
Turkish "peace-keeping" forces into Iraq, warning "it
could lead to destabilization." (The Turkish government
has treated its large Kurdish population brutally, and has repeatedly
engaged Kurdish guerrillas on Iraqi soil. While Washington might
think it useful to deploy some Muslim troops in Iraq to prettify
the occupation, the complexities of relations within the Muslim
world seem lost upon it.) Again, when your own quislings, who
stand between you and masses of (armed) angry people, start raising
objections to your plans, you're in trouble.
While the entire Iraqi population poses
a problem for the "coalition," the Shiites pose some
particular problems. About 15% of the world's billion plus Muslims
are Shiites. They are the majority population in only five countries:
non-Arab Iran (93%), which is half the Shiite world, and Azerbaijan
(61%); and the Arab nations Oman (75%), Bahrain (65%), and Iraq
(60%). The Shiite world thus cuts a swath down from the Caspian
Sea to the Gulf of Oman and way up to the borders of Central
Asia. There are also millions in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan,
Turkey, and in South Asia. There are over twice as many Shiites
in Pakistan (27 million) as in Iraq (11 million), and 26 million
in India, although they represent fewer than three percent of
the Indian population. Shiism (with smaller presence in Africa
and Southeast Asia) thus straddles the Arab and Indo-Iranian
worlds, and southeast Iraq is precisely where those worlds intersect.
Iraq is the only sizeable Arab country with a majority Shiite
population, and those Shiites have historical ties to neighboring
Iran. There are almost two million Arabs on the Iranian side
of the border with Iraq. During the Saddam years tens of thousands
of Iraqis, including Shiite clerics, took refuge in Iran. In
1980, Saddam Hussein expelled 40,000 ethnically Iranian Shiites.
Despite the brutal war between the countries during the 1980s,
their Shiite communities, while differing in language and culture,
enjoy close ties. The mullahs in Teheran (if they aren't overthrown)
will thus probably expect to have some say in Iraq's future.
So of course, near term, will the U.S.
occupiers, who indeed in Colin Powell's words, demand the "dominant
role." Their attitude towards Shiism is conditioned primarily
by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The overthrow of the Shah
resulted from the most genuine, mass-based revolutionary movement
ever to occur in the Islamic world. Its spiritual leader was
the Ayatollah Khomeini, but its foot soldiers included a wide
ideological spectrum: the "Islamic Marxists" of the
Mujahadeen Khalq; the Fedayeen; the Maoist Sarbederan; the pro-Soviet
Tudeh; and of course the Shiite groups led by the clerics. Their
revolution was quickly hijacked by the mullahs, who crushed the
secular left. The Carter administration, shocked by the revolution,
allowed the Shah (viewed as a murderous criminal by most Iranians)
refuge in the U.S., and was thus confronted with the protracted
"Hostage Crisis" ending only on the day of Ronald Reagan's
inauguration.
Of course, Shiism under the mullocracy
was fundamentally no different from Shiism under the Shah, with
which the U.S. picked no quarrel. But the Shah, placed in power
by the CIA in one of its best-documented and well-known escapades
in 1953, stripped lands from the mosques in his "White Revolution,"
and otherwise alienated the Shiite clergy. With his fall, they
obtained their revenge, creating the present regime, which has
come to rival the Shah's in its unpopularity. In any case, the
"loss" of Iran was an incalculable blow to U.S. policy
in the region, and subsequent U.S. policy towards neighboring
Afghanistan and Iraq has to be understood in that light. The
defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan somewhat reduced the bitterness
of the Iranian setback, while U.S.-abetted Iraqi successes against
Iran in the bloody 1980s war reduced the threat posed by the
mullahs' regime.
U.S. officials, analysts and journalists
castigated the "Islamic fundamentalism" in Iran (a
specific form rooted in Shiism) long before they attacked
Sunni Muslim movements under that rubric. Indeed, while Carter
was president, his administration actively encouraged (mostly
Sunni) Islamic fundamentalists to wage jihad against the
pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, nurturing the very forces (such
as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) that now confront the U.S.-installed
regime in Afghanistan. As recently as 1996, Zalmay Khalilzad,
one-time Bush adviser and now top U.S. representative in Afghanistan,
was writing that the Taliban's Sunni Islam did not pose a threat
to the U.S. comparable to the Shiite variant of Islam
found in Iran! But now the focus is on Sunni schools (like
the Wahhabi, historically very hostile to the Shiites), while
ironically the U.S. procurator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III,
must try to win local Shiite support.
Problem is, maybe he can't. He's
already stated very clearly that the U.S. will not allow an Iranian-type
Shiite Islamic state. Not even if that's what the local folks
want. It would, he avers, be a threat to U.S. security. He's
telling the Shiites, in effect: We want your support.
We really do. We want to work with you. Over half our handpicked
local leadership team is Shiite. But we (like Saddam)
insist upon a secular state. Unlike Saddam, we'd like two or
more freely competing parties, committed to parliamentarism and
free enterprise, just to make sure that all voices are
heard, like in the American model political system. But the last
thing we want is for you to link up with Iran.
So any Iraqis agitating for such a state,
and, angered by the unending occupation and its manifest inability
or unwillingness to meet popular demands (only some of them rooted
in Shiism), motivated to join the growing resistance movement,
will be tarred as "terrorists." They will be "Shiite
terrorists," supported of course by the neighboring country
and center of the Shiite world, Axis of Evil lynchpin, Iran.
Meanwhile, supposedly "fanatical" aspects of Shiite
religious practice (notably, the ritualistic breast-beating and
self-flagellation) might be emphasized to dehumanize these particular
"terrorists" in the low stooping American media.
Still, since Washington doesn't want
to alienate 130 million or so Shiites, we'll be told that, no,
of course, Shiism itself isn't the problem. "We know that
Shiism's a religion of peace," Bush will announce pleasantly
to Shiite children invited to the White House to commemorate,
say, the Yom Ashura holiday that marks the death of Hussein ibn
Ali, as the Defense Policy Board discusses how to prevent another
Iran. Meanwhile, the three million Shiites in Yemen, the 1.4
million Shiites in Lebanon (where in 1983 a Shiite truck bomber
blew up a U.S. military barracks, killing 243 Marines), and the
1.3 million in Syria (which supports the Shiite Hezbollah organization
in Lebanon) will be watching carefully. The 3.5 million Shiites
in Afghanistan (mostly Hazzaras) have their own problems, but
events in Iraq might affect their perception of the U.S. forces
in their still unstable country. Most importantly, the 61 million
Iranian Shiites will be watching how their coreligionists deal
with the occupation of Iraq.
Meanwhile, work on the Bushehr nuclear
reactor continues, and the U.S. as global hegemon has made clear
that Iran must not follow in the footsteps of Israel, Pakistan
and India in developing nuclear weapons, or if defiant, face
the consequences. Imagine what might happen if either the U.S.
or Israel (which bombed Iraq's French-built Osiraq reactor in
1981 in an action condemned by the U.S. and the whole UN), were
to conduct a "pre-emptive strike" on Bushehr, ostensibly
to protect its (nuclear) self. Or if Israel were to re-invade
Lebanon to crush Hezbollah. The Shiite world would not react
well. Such actions might affect Yemen's "anti-terrorist"
cooperation with the U.S. and efforts to cultivate the 600,000
Saudi Shiites, who happen to live around the oil fields and whom
some neocons wanted to exploit as allies against the Wahhabi-based
regime in Riyadh, creating a client state Republic of Eastern
Arabia.
So in the unfolding geopolitical drama,
Shiites really matter, and as the Shah learned, when millions
of them are out in the streets, they can indeed humiliate those
who have humiliated them. The "Sunni triangle" causing
U.S. forces so much trouble at present is a mere detail within
the surrounding Shiite map. If (as many are predicting) Iraq's
Shiites rise up against the occupation, the neocon's dreams might
soon be reduced to rubble, like the mix of stone and wasted humanity
they're still cleaning up outside the mosque in Najaf.
* * *
Note on the Shiite belief system: The key difference between Shiism and Sunni
Islam is that the Shiites (who are divided into a number of schools)
believe that a terrible historic injustice occurred in the early
history of the Muslim community. After the Prophet Muhammad's
death in 632, they believe, leadership of the emergent community
ought to have passed to his son-in-law Ali. (This is the Ali
entombed in the Imam Ali Mosque.) It didn't. Ali's son, the Imam
Hussein, and 90 of his followers then perished in the battle
of Karbala, fought against forces of the sixth caliph, in 680.
Annual commemorations of this death, accompanied by dramatic
mourning rituals, are believed to generate merit; Fatima, the
Prophet's daughter, will at the end of time gather the tears
of the Karbala mourners' into her apron, rewarding those who
have shed them. Shiites believe that the Twelfth Imam, successor
to Hussein, was hidden by God in a cave below a mosque in Samarra
in 874.
He was only seven years old at the time;
he remains there until God reveals him and he, the Hidden Imam
or Mahdi, comes to guide humankind. In the interim, various figures
have claimed to be representatives of the Hidden Imam or even
the Mahdi himself. Most of the key religious figures revered
by the Shiites died as martyrs; Baqr al-Hakim will be counted
as another. Thus deep grief and sense of victimhood, a will to
martyrdom, millenarian expectations, and the occasional appearance
of charismatic leaders that build upon these feelings, characterize
the Shiite faith. Surely some of the neocons, including a few
brilliant academics, know all this, and only sheer arrogance
can account for their expectation that the Shiites might, like
the ridiculous and discredited Ahmad Chalabi, be drawn en
masse to embrace their own re-colonization rather than attempt
some eschatological breakthrough following years of victimization
by the U.S., the UN, and Saddam.
The Anglo-American troops in the field,
meanwhile (some of whom still really believe Iraq caused 9-11)
can't be expected to grasp the religious context, or the geopolitics
of Shiism. If they did, going about their duties, they might
have even greater cause for anxiety. For their sake, their families'
sake, the Iraqis' and the world's sake, they should (as the dead
man's brother urges) be brought home now.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor in the Department of History at
Tufts University and coordinator of the Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for August 30 / Sept. 1, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
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