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Recent Stories
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
Gilad
Atzmon
Strategic Blunders by American Generals
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
26, 2003
The Moral Foundation Crumbles
Watch Their
Lips
By PABLO MUKHERJEE
Now
that their long-cherished war has started, Bush and Blair feel they
no longer need to spit and polish their carefully fabricated moral arguments
any more.
The
boys have gone in. The ‘shock and awe’ is being delivered
after the surgical strikes. The battleground has been prepared to Pentagon’s
satisfaction. So why bother with arguments?
Jingoism
will have its own momentum, as banners carried in counter-demonstrations
against the anti-war activists in San Fransisco showed yesterday --"Support
the US or Shut up". Here in Britain, I watched a veteran of WW2
being heckled as a traitor as he spoke about why he was against this
war. As my students occupied the centre of Newcastle yesterday, I saw
their fellow students abuse them and proclaim "How do you think
Britain got to where it is now? We need war to show them who is boss."
Misinformation,
fear and a potent mix of racist supremacism have been stoked carefully.
No wonder the aggressors have abandoned the arguments for a while. Instead,
they gloat openly about their true aims.
Take
the US defence analyst assessing the action on BBC on the morning of
March 21. He ended by saying he couldn’t see how Iraq’s
army could stop the Anglo-American, sorry,‘coalition’ troops
from taking Basra and Baghdad shortly. The Iraqi force, he said, was
mediocre and had been cut off from military technology for 12 years
while the US had invested more than any country in the world in hardware
for the new millennium. It could not be a contest.
So
true, and everything that the anti-war activists have been saying all
along. That Iraq is not a military threat to its own neighbours, let
alone Britain and the US. But did we see the analyst in the countless
debates held on television and radio in the six-month build up to war?
No. then we were treated with the spectacle of sometime-historians like
Andrew Roberts in Britain who said on Newsnight programme that Iraq
was a greater military threat to the West than Soviet Union ever been
(admittedly to guffaws by Jeremy Paxman and British army officials).
So,
if Iraq is not a military threat, then maybe it had to be attacked to
uphold the authority of the UN? Have we not been told, till we were
sick, that Tony Blair had tried to drag the US down the UN route? If
only it weren’t for those cheese-eaters across the channel? Now
we must support the US attack because it was in the interest of the
UN and resolution 1441?
But here comes Richard Perle in the Guardian on March 21st with 20 point
bold headline above his article --‘Thank God the UN is dead’.
Perle,
to his credit, has never hidden the fact that one of the aims of this
American war is to kill the UN in its current form. In the article he
gives a succinct summing of the views of this American administration
--that it refuses to be bound by international treaties, to tolerate
any rivalry from ‘friendly powers’, that it will use military
might and initiate regime change whenever it feels like, that it will
use its position to buy off nations to construct the figment of coalitions
of the willing.
All
this, of course, has been public knowledge and clearly outlined on the
website of the Project for the New American Century --the think-tank
of which Perle and most of Bush’s inner circle were founding members.
It fell to poor Tony Blair to try and sell it to the rest of the world
that US and Britain were attacking Iraq to uphold UN authority. Within
a week, first Rumsfeld and now Perle has not even pretended to be aware
of Blair’s lies.
So,
not about military threat and not about the UN. Perhaps the war is about
‘liberating’ and restructuring Iraq then? Handing over the
administration of the country to its people? Affirming Kurdish autonomy?
Along comes the vote in Turkish parliament on the 20th . The long-awaited
agreement to let US aircrafts use Turkish airspace is achieved. Now
the B-52s taking off from Britain don’t have to go over Africa
and mess up their lethal timetable. In exchange, of course, the Turkish
troops get ready to move into northern Iraq to secure the Kurdish autonomous
area against disturbances.
The Pentagon has initiated ‘surrender talks’ that will spare
the Iraqi regular army and the Generals, as well as key members of the
Ba’ath party. They will be needed as the new collaborators who
will assist General Tommy Franks in his occupation of the country. Dick
Cheney’s brazen lies about his company Halliburton’s trade
with Iraq from 1998-2001 have recently been exposed in Counterpunch
and other US newspapers. Surprise, surprise, the company is now at the
forefront of the foreign company’s rushing in to ‘hold the
oilfields of Iraq in custody for its people’.
Tony is still trying, of course.
In
last night’s laughable and irrelevant declaration of war (the
war had started the night before with the US ‘surgical’
strikes, and Blair was awakened from his sleep after being alerted by
a ITV reporter), he gave us his solemn word that the oil revenues of
a free Iraq would be held in a UN trust fund for its people. Listen
to your American controllers, Prime Minister, the UN is dead.
Tony
has also promised the Iraqis, those who can still hear after tonight’s
episode of ‘shock and awe’, that they will have democracy.
Just like Afghanistan, where since yesterday, the US stepped up its
air campaign of bombing ‘suspected Taliban villages’ on
behalf of the extremely popular and freely elected leader Hamid Karzai.
One
by one, the empty shells of Bush and Blair’s moral arguments are
being casually ejected from their smoking guns. The calculation is they
need not bother anymore. The lies now shine bright. And they wonder
why the protests show no sign of ending!
Pablo Mukherjee
teaches at the University of Newcastle. He can be reached at: Pablo.mukherjee@ncl.ac.uk
Today's Features
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gilad
Atzmon
Strategic Blunders by American Generals
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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