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October
4, 2001
Robin Blackburn
Road
to Armageddon
Noam
Chomsky
Chatting
with Chomsky
Tony
Blair
The
Dossier on bin Laden
Norman
Madarasz
Canada
Kow-Tows to US
Lorenzo Ervin
No Palestinian
Ever
Called Me Nigger
October
3, 2001
Peter Bell
Hitchens
and Coulter:
Love at Last?
Patrick
Cockburn
Waiting
Is the Hardest Part
Jeff
Chang
Clear
Channel Fires
Davey D!
John Chuckman
War
on Terror:
Crusade Without a Definition
Mahajan/Jensen
Tough
Talk Won't Solve
Problems of Terrorism
Ariel
Dorfman:
America
the Wounded
Lennie
Brenner
Dr.
Watson in Afghanistan
Steve
Perry:
Ashcroft's
Scare Tactics
October
2, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn:
Inside
an Afghan Hospital
Richard
Manning:
A
Vietnam Vet on Patriotism
St. Clair/Cockburn:
Tarnished
Star,
Tom Ridge in Vietnam
October
1, 2001
Noam
Chomsky:
Memo
to Hitchens
Hizam
Bitar:
Refuting
Michael Kinsley
David Grenier:
The
Good, The Bad,
and the Ugly
Douglas
Valentine:
Homeland
Insecurity
Carl
Estabrook:
Stop Bush's Killing
Mahajan/Jensen:
Food,
Fear and War
Patrick
Cockburn:
Ready
to Strike
Cockburn/St.
Clair:
Things
Could Be Worse
Terry
Allen:
Early
Profit-taking and 9/11
September
29, 2001
Steve Perry:
The
Pentagon's Blueprint
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
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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Published Oct. 3, 2001
8-Page Special
Issue
Aftermath
Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
on
Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for
Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids
Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
Vietnam
Same as Kerrey's?
A CounterPunch
Journey
to Ramallah
A Word About
God
Nostrodamus
Jam-maker
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CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas
Valentine
Al
Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
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New Stories:
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October
4, 2001
A Suspect's Perspective
By Babak Nahid
As the Bush Administration promises
to provide Americans with a sense of security as well as an overt
and covert series of military spectaculars in answer to this
week's appalling terrorist attacks, we should expect our post-Manhattan
world to become a policed, security-obsessed place. We should
also expect our tolerance for super-governments and cultures
of public control--surveillance, harassment, even persecution--to
be tested. Terrified of appearing vulnerable, Americans may,
in pursuit of a lopsided but immediate answer to last week's
tragedy, find themselves in the watchful, suspicious, and militarized
world of totalitarian regimes, however unlikely the scenario
may seem at this moment of shock, grief, and patriotism.
So before we embark, Noah-like,
to build a fortress-West against the coming flood of terrorism,
we might recognize that an obsession with security will only
breed an equal sense of insecurity in this nation, as it has
in other nations in the world that refuse to engage constructively
and fairly with their enemies. Providing ourselves, our corporations,
and our governments with security will depend on our not eradicating
terrorists but addressing the root causes of terrorism. And as
we hunt for those responsible, we might include ourselves among
the list of the usual suspects. We should seek the roots of much
of the world's frustration in our insistence that we in the West
remain the world's foremost priority.
Terror will define our future
unless we learn that our profound insecurity in this last century
derives precisely from our demands as Americans and members of
a multinational club of first-worlders to maintain our unsustainable
medley of privileges. Bin Laden is not our only enemy, a lone,
turbaned Goldfinger seeking world domination. Bin Ladenism is
a hydra-headed symptom of modern history and our special role
in it, a sad, living fact that thrives in the world we insist
on manipulating in order to secure our own exclusive interests.
The American Way of Life may be precious but not to the disenfranchized,
humiliated, and traumatized people of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.
To them, who exist even if we refuse in our self-congratulatory
media to broadcast their voices, we may as well be colonizers
from space.
On September 11, America was
itself globalized for the first time and Americans brutally shocked
into self-examination. Unimaginable as it may have been to our
carefully cultivated sensibilities as Americans, but many in
the world feel a morally-twisted yet perfectly human satisfaction
at the wounding of a hyper-power whose military, industrial,
technological, and financial obesity is maintained by controlling
the planet's destiny, especially of those whose nations and regimes
stubbornly sit on the resources we want for cheap. From their
perspective-and not all of them wear turbans or speak Arabic-our
material and ideological gluttony in the West makes us as inherently
unreasonable as the suicidal individuals who attack our many
Achilles' heels.
Terrorism is despicable and
terrorists unacceptable messengers who must be tried by a world
court that the US might now want to quickly ratify. But if we
were problem-solvers rather than ideologues, we would learn that
the arrogance of our super-affluence, the injustice and extreme
disparity to which we expect the rest of the world to get accustomed,
and our insistence on defining terrorism according to our own
agendas, can only guarantee a permanent insecurity, however much
we survey and suspect each other or erect real and imaginary
fortresses. A fundamental insecurity will haunt us unless we
start the conversation between civilizations and world-views--as
Khatami suggested last year--until, in short, we allow the democratization
of global politics to truly begin.
How to begin? We can start
by laying off of the millions of people in Iraq and elsewhere
that we force into subhuman subsistence. We can start by demanding
from our governments a saner, more humane foreign policy towards
the non-West, especially Islamic nations who refuse to be client-states.
We can start by not sabotaging or walking out of key Third World
conferences on global issues. We can start by no longer pretending
that we are a neutral partner in the Israeli-Palestinian peace
fiasco and allow Israelis and Palestinians to grow up and act
straight according to international law and under international
scrutiny. We can start by paying Africa's hopes and horrors some
real attention. We can start by refusing to help create political
Frankensteins that we must later disavow. We can start by not
humiliating others simply because we can, by shedding the supremacist
discourse that infects our sense of identity and power. We can
ask ourselves genuine questions as we recall, without practising
selective amnesia, the track record of our foreign policy in
the world since the Second World War. We can start thinking.
Killing Nat Turner did not
forestall the end of slavery. Killing Osama and his clan will
not stop terrorism. Americans can not afford to criminalize the
world's discontent by calling it Osama, nor will it help matters
for the world's mightiest super-power to pulverize the people
of Afghanistan, a nation commonly known as one of the world's
most wretched. Neither will an occupation of the Middle-East
by proxy or military strikes against nations we demonize as "rogue"
yield positive results. History and common-sense tell us that
violence only breeds resistance, crusades, jihads, humiliation
a trans-generational thirst for justice. We mustn't allow such
basic facts to be drowned in screams for infinite justice in
our new Hobbesian world. In the final analysis, real security
results from a contract of coexistence and equity between people,
an agreement about shared responsibilities and agendas, between
the world's affluent minority and the world's marginalized majorities.
Bombings, assassinations, military bases, occupations, political
puppeteering, and years of jingoism and policing here and elsewhere,
will save neither us nor future generations any grief.
Let's start the conversation
before we return to doing business-as-usual and embarrassing
ourselves before history. Let's refrain from continuing the shame
of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Let's acknowledge,
at least to ourselves, that until we connect our privileges to
the unchecked forces that are terrorizing the rest of the world,
we shall remain fundamentally--and perhaps in the knowing eyes
of some in the world, deservedly--insecure. CP
Babak Nahid,
an Iranian resident in the US, teaches in the English Department
at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles.
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