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March
14, 2002
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
March
10, 2002
Thomas
Croft
Year
of Living Dangerously
March
9, 2002
Bill Cook
Sharon's
Bulldozer
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Nightmare in Israel
March
8, 2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
When
Business Men
Make Boo-Boos
CounterPunch
Exclusive
Enron's
Spooky
Image Consultant
Rep. Ron
Paul
Stop
the War on Colombia
Andre
Achong
The
Failed War on Drugs
John B.
Kelly
Michael
Moore and Me:
Disability Rights and
a Big Stupid White Guy
March
7, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Congressman
McInnis Equates Enviros to al-Qaeda
Mike Rogers
Will
the Battle of Shah-i-Kot Become the Taliban's Alamo
Walt Brasch
Patriot
Act and Free Speech
John Jonik
Insurance
Scams:
Who Are the Scofflaws?
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Bumper
Crop: The Politics
of Afghan Opium
March
6, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
A
Beautiful Mind:
Another Dangerous Lie?
Tom Turnipseed
War
Is Wrong
David
Vest
Billy
Graham and Nixon:
Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Bombings That
Made Putin a Hero
CounterPunch
Wire
Berezovsky
Fingers Putin
in Bombings
Edward
Said
Thoughts
About America
March
5, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ann
Coulter At It Again:
Race-Baiting Norm Mineta
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
Delkhasteh and Wright
What
Should We be Fighting For? An Open Letter
to Pro-War Academics
Mariya
Tsvekova
Putin's
Georgian Gambit
March
4, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Dick
Cheney: A Dinosaur
in the Age of Mammals
Uri Avnery
How
Israel Will Torpedo
the Saudi Peace Plan
Southern
/ Kubrick
Stangelove
Scenario
for Shadow Govt. Bunker
David
Vest
Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
March
3, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
War
on Terrorism for Dummies
Paul Cox
Boycott
Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"
Frederick
Hudson
Toward
a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest
Eric Schaeffer
Dear
Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It
John Chuckman
Why
the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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CounterPunch
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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by Cockburn
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March 15, 2002
Neo-Con
Collusion
The National Review is
(Mis)leading the Nation's Much Vaunted Turn to Self-Examination
By Norman Madarasz
Newspaper articles filled with neuroscientific
lingo to explain the panic wave that has spread through America
following 9/11. Television pseudo-documentaries seeking out
the 'terror' gene. Radio shows interviewing think tank experts
on the inbred drive among academics to betray the hand that
feeds by criticizing government. Science has not been so efficiently
used for propagandistic purposes for a very, very long time.
(On that matter, see Counterpunch Wire: March 13, 2002.)
In this output, one of our most eminent
Middle-East scholars proves to be the worst possible impetus
to be informed about, let alone to read, al-Qu'ran. Bernard
Lewis at times musters up important details to better understand
the US's role in the Middle-East: "Did You Say 'American
Imperialism'?" (National Review, December 17, 2001, pp.
26-30). But he also confirms from an expert's vantagepoint
the tone of Western Christian superiority in so much talk on
Islam. Under the guise of the supposed critical merits and
obviousness of the 'secular' strain of Western sciences, expressed
in no less of a proud 'secular' journal as the National Review,
he damns an entire civilization for its deep religiosity. Faced
with scientific representation used to justify a hodge-podge
amalgamation of dictators, oligarchs and the faithful, what
is so utterly surprising, then, about the residents of the Middle-East
projecting President W. Bush's grin onto the face of your average
North-American?
There must be charity in dialogue, as
academic standards do require. Then, begin with Professor Lewis's
balancing out of the geopolitical equation. Notwithstanding
the military campaign waged against Iraq in 1990-1991, and sporadically
up until late August 2001, Lewis correctly points out that
the US is not imperialist in the sense the British and French
were. Admittedly, not only did America lack the will for direct
rule over Iraq, it also lacked the skill. Now, freshly confident
on the heels of a relatively easy victory in Afghanistan, made
easier once both Pakistan and Russia submitted to the radical
American choice of being against terrorists rather than 'with'
them, America will soon be pulling out again from the land of
their conquest before spreading their well-known seeds of benevolence
elsewhere.
Even so, as the feedback from the first
bin Laden/al-Quaeda press conference broadcast on al-Jazeera
last fall demonstrated, the presence of the American military
in Saudi Arabia is an affront to many a Muslim sensibility,
not just to that of extremists. The naivete of many Americans
regarding the implications of occupying foreign lands meets
up quietly with stupor when asked how they would react to the
presence of the Israeli Defense Forces stationed here to protect
the interests of the ruling political and business class from,
say, the anti-globalization movement. In bin Laden's view, the
presence of America does not so much equal imperialism as it
does a crusade. Likewise, what W. Bush must keep quiet in public
cannot betray the influence of Samuel Huntington's monolithic
analyzes on the megalomaniacs in his cabinet.
To his credit, Professor Lewis doesn't
substitute 'crusade' for the purported misuse of 'imperialism'.
And while not referring explicitly to the author of our best
circulating propagandistic slogan, he does go on to demolish
the 'clash of civilizations' argument on empirical grounds.
Which provides the basis on which he can see the US in the Middle
East as ultimately bringing stability. Still, this does not
fail to align his thinking with some rather dubious instances
of historical self-interest. Top on the agenda is protection
of Israel and the flow of oil to Europe and the Americas. Despite
its relatively modest ambitions, as Lewis would have it, the
US is surrounded by the seething instability of Sadam Hussein's
weapons program and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in
a politically, if not always economically, strapped transnational
Muslim population. Which leads him to contend that "the
real threat to the peace of the region is not the American presence,
but the possibility of an American loss of interest and withdrawal."
As always among defenders of the US's
peaceful business-only interests, fissures allow forgotten figures
to stream into the foreground. First among them is Lewis's claim
that the only confirmed cases of chemical weapons use since
WW2 have been in the Middle East. Even were we to lack accuracy
in claiming that Napalm and Agent Orange are chemical weapons,
both used extensively by the US in Vietnam, by splicing off
Hiroshima and Nagasaki Lewis's time-scale appears as truncated
as a leg redesigned by the explosion of an anti-personnel landmine
'Made in the USA'. What's important cannot only be, as Politically
Incorrect would have it, what the threat is 'now' or who wants
to kill us 'now'. Far from being spurious facts, what ought
to be negotiated in the general media under the guise of the
freedom to express dissent, is precisely this legacy of aggression.
Furthermore, in his continuous stance
of refuting accusations that America conducts imperial practices
in the Middle East, Professor Lewis sides entirely with public
appearances in Washington against the analysis of Middle Eastern
intellectuals. There would be no "deep-laid, long-term
American strategy pursued relentlessly over decades" in
the Middle East, as the latter hold. Which is where Lewis drapes
himself with Hitchens's hues: "For anyone with even a minimal
acquaintance with how Washington works and how Washington officials
deal with problems, such a view is not only absurd; it is grotesque."
Accusations leveled at the US about wielding the big democratic
and human-rights stick with a between-the-lines Keynesean-inflexed
international trade policy carrot, or by funding dictatorships
known for their brutal population control with weapons purchased
from the funder, are all dismissed as effects of faulty reasoning.
In democratic Muslim calls for "evenhandedness" and
halting the "double standards", all Lewis hears is
a plea for more imperialism-of the old variety, instead of complaints
regarding the real 'Empirism' of a newer, subtler one.
How the old variety is transformed is
that, contrary to the British and French invasions of earlier
times, America has established bases in Saudi Arabia. The implications
of this reality Lewis prefers to silence under the buzzword
of "American Interests". Had the State Department
employed him, instead of the finest university in the land,
his performance would have fared no better.
As he does speak from such an institution
and with such impressive breadth of historical knowledge, one
has no choice but to consider Professor Lewis as convinced of
the rationality of the policies America has led in the Middle
East. He seems to forget, though, that the oil barons now running
the country politically have little if any education in world
history, and that the question of interest may belie a truthful
hole twistedly confirming his argument. In the British and French
sense, imperialism this is surely not. Instead it's the bullish
tactics the Soviet Union were known for in the buffer states
of central and eastern Europe, as it also managed to keep natural
resources at bargain basement prices.
If the charges against the West's "inconsistencies"
are irrelevant as a general and overall accusation it does not
rule out that they correspond to an essentially self-serving
ambition in some Middle East countries, at least some of the
time. Anyone specialized in historical analysis betrays weakness
of method when suggesting that a rival argument only makes claims
for all countries all of the time. It's in the detail of American
actions that critics hold it accountable for the rage sweeping
the region. Still, America's consumer society is a model for
any number of Arabs-the veritable inventors of modern trade.
But Lewis falls short of emphasizing that America has had the
opportunity to support democrats in Arabic countries instead
of brutal oligarchs and monarchies.
In exchange for stability, and by keeping
the general population from within reach of the region's enormous
wealth, as well as excluding the UN from the region, the US
Army has fallen prey to mercenary functions. As anyone can
see with the little sympathy shed for the dead and imprisoned
al-Quaeda fighters, mercenaries are hated without condition.
The days of George F. Kennan and the
post-WW2 aristocratic posture in diplomacy are long gone. Professor
Lewis should be among the first to realize that when the uncultured,
self-interested American oil and arms barons throw their weight
around internationally, it's not just definitions that fall
short of accuracy. The very theoretical models by which to manifest
the meaning behind facts end up being shriveled on the scrap
heap of critical inefficiency. There's no greater conclusion
to a neo-con science, as promoted by the National Review, than
that.
Norman Madarasz
is editor and translator of Alain Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy
(SUNY Press, 1999). He can be reached at N_Madarasz@hotmail.com.
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