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Today's
Stories
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's Sizzling
New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular Patricipation"
and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the Rest
of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition to Iraq
War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs
in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement
in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
| Weekend
Edition
July 24 / 25, 2004
"Don't
Enter or You Will be Shot"
The Struggle
for Iraq is Just Beginning
By
PATRICK COCKBURN
It
is tempting to see the so-called handover of power from the US to
the Iraqi interim government on 28 June as a fake. The few attending
the ceremony at which sovereignty was legally transferred had to
pass through four American checkpoints. Iyad Allawi, the new prime
minister, worked for years for MI6 and the CIA. He is kept in power
by 138,000 US troops. The ministers in the new government live isolated
from the rest of Baghdad in palatial villas inside a secure compound.
Many of them have spent most of their lives outside Iraq.
The
pre-trial hearings for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen had the same
artificial flavour -- not allayed by US censorship, which removed
pictures of Saddam in chains from the footage, as well as the legal
submissions of his 11 senior lieutenants. The censors tried to excise
the moment when Saddam said ‘this is theatre -- Bush
is the real criminal,’ and failed only because they didn’t
understand how the sound equipment worked. US officials made little
effort to hide the fact that they were running the trial, and that
the target audience wasn’t Iraqi. The only foreign reporters
allowed in were American and the timing of the hearing coincided
with US breakfast television shows.
What
America does in Iraq is determined by November’s presidential
election as never before. If George Bush can pretend for four months
that he has Iraq under control then he may well be re-elected. If
disasters from Iraq continue to dominate front pages then he will
probably lose. In April 150 soldiers were killed: the White House
now needs to show voters that casualties are on the way down.
The
appointment of Allawi is itself a demonstration of how far the balance
of power in Iraq has swung against the US over the last year. Twelve
months ago Paul Bremer, the US viceroy, was blithely talking about
continuing the occupation for two years. His first act on arriving
in Iraq was to disband the Iraqi army and security forces. The state
machinery was deliberately dissolved. Direct imperial rule seemed
feasible to Washington. Young Republicans with the right connections
to the White House or the Bush family were sent off to rule Iraq
like the offspring of British gentry dispatched to loot India in
the 18th century. A 24-year-old Republican who applied for a job
at the White House was instead sent to Iraq to reopen the Baghdad
stock exchange. It stayed shut. At first Bremer planned only an
advisory role for even such a tame organisation as the Iraqi Governing
Council -- until last summer, when American losses began to
mount.
Inside
the heavily protected Green Zone, the US enclave in the heart of
Baghdad, Bremer and the uniformed American military were cut off
from what was happening on the ground. US generals claimed at briefings
that the number of hostile incidents was falling. I began to wonder
why, if there were only sixteen or so attacks on American soldiers
a day, I seemed regularly to witness a quarter of these whenever
I drove out of Baghdad. American soldiers in the field told me that
they no longer reported guerrilla attacks unless there had been
US casualties. It was a bureaucratic hassle to make out the reports
and their commanders were keen to hear that resistance was petering
out.
By
November it was impossible to conceal the bad news any longer. I
was in the dusty truck-stop city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, when
we heard that a giant Chinook helicopter had been shot down. We
drove across an old iron bridge over the Euphrates to look at the
wreckage. On the way we saw a burned out vehicle that had been hit
by a rocket; the American contractors inside had been killed. On
the far side of the river, farmers were handing round twisted pieces
of metal from the helicopter’s fuselage: 16 soldiers had died.
Shortly after that incident, the White House began making its plans
to dilute full imperial control by installing the interim government.
The
American problem was simple -- though there is no evidence that
Bremer and the US military saw it that way. Iraqi politics revolve
around the relations between the three main communities: Sunni Muslim
Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds. The base for Saddam’s regime
was the Sunni community from the towns and cities around Baghdad.
By disbanding the army and persecuting members of the Baath party,
Bremer alienated the Sunni, who make up 20 per cent of the population.
The US occupation could have survived without them if they had been
prepared to give power to the Shia (60 per cent of the population);
they already had the Kurds (20 per cent) in their corner. But Bremer
was ambivalent about elections. The US didn’t really want
to share power with anybody, Sunni or Shia.
Bremer
and his Coalition Provisional Authority weren’t able to see
that their political strength was diminishing by the month. In April
the US took two disastrous decisions which led to simultaneous confrontations
with both Sunni and Shiite communities. Four American private security
contractors had been killed, their bodies burned and hung up from
the bridge at Falluja; US marines quickly besieged the city. Six
hundred people were killed. With ludicrously bad timing, Bremer
had also decided to pursue Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric
whose father had been martyred by Saddam Hussein in 1999. Both ventures
failed. The marines dared not storm Falluja for fear of a general
Sunni uprising. Sadr had retreated to the holy cities of Kufa and
Najaf but the US army could not send its tanks into Shiite shrines.
In both Falluja and Najaf American soldiers were forced to withdraw.
Power
was already seeping away from the US before it was nominally handed
over to Allawi. A year after Bush famously declared major combat
in Iraq over, insurgents have their own capital in Falluja, thirty
miles from Baghdad. In April, I was caught in an ambush of US petrol
tankers at Abu Ghraib. The US military, unprepared to recognise
that they had lost control of the road, were still sending convoys
down it. By early June the road to the airport, the main US base
near Baghdad, was no longer safe. Four security men who had been
staying two floors above me in the Hamra Hotel were killed as they
drove to the airport by men armed with machine-guns and grenade
launchers. In the past I had often travelled with Dan Williams of
the Washington Post -- but he was almost killed when his car was
attacked on the road between Falluja and Abu Ghraib. Gunmen in another
vehicle fired AK-47 rounds into his car at point-blank range. He
was saved only because his car was armoured, had bullet-proof glass,
and because his driver kept going when the two back tyres were shot
out.
Suicide
bombers, car bombs and rocket attacks have paralysed Baghdad; the
US army are building increasingly elaborate fortifications to defend
their bases. At the entrance to the 14 July Bridge over the Tigris,
which leads into the Green Zone, the road is blocked by sandbags
and razor wire. A notice hanging from the wire reads: ‘Do
not enter or you will be shot.’ US soldiers in Baghdad are
trigger happy and they like Iraqis to know it. All over the city,
streets are closed, sometimes isolating whole districts, by the
concrete defences of buildings housing American troops, foreigners,
Iraqi police and Iraqi officials.
Twenty
years ago I used to eat mazgouf, fish from the Tigris grilled over
a wood fire, in the open-air restaurants that lined Abu Nawas Street.
They were badly affected when Saddam, to emphasise his Islamic credentials,
banned the public consumption of alcohol. After his overthrow, the
restaurant owners hoped their customers might return. These days,
Abu Nawas is largely a ghost town, deserted even in the middle of
the day and used mainly by military vehicles. The street can be
entered only from one end and culminates in a checkpoint defending
the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. These are full of foreigners,
who know that Abu Nawas is too dangerous for them to venture into.
I
talked to Shahab al-Obeidi, the manager of the Shatt al-Arab restaurant
on the bank of the Tigris. Dark grey fish swim in a circular pool
decorated with blue tiles at the entrance to the restaurant (the
river is polluted now and the fish come from fish farms). Shahab
says business isn’t good: in the past three-quarters of his
customers came in the evening. Now he shuts at 6 p.m. because the
nights are unsafe. One night he broke his rule, staying open because
he had a large table of customers who seemed to be enjoying themselves.
‘When I did present them with the bill,’ he said, ‘they
laughed and took out their pistols and fired them into the ceiling
and through the windows.’ He pointed to numerous bullet holes,
still not repaired.
Foreigners
in Baghdad and other cities all now live in the Green Zone or mini-Green
Zones outside it. The concrete blocks, razor wire and guards spread
in all directions. I no longer carry a camera in Baghdad because
anybody taking photographs is suspected of carrying out reconnaissance
for an attack. Paranoia runs high. A member of a newly arrived French
camera crew caught in a traffic jam idly took a photograph of the
enormous concrete blockade defending the street leading to the Baghdad
Hotel, which Iraqis believe to be a centre for the CIA. Iraqi guards
immediately arrested the crew and kept them in a prison cage for
two nights.
The
Baghdad Hotel is close to Saadoun street, a four-lane road that
is one of the city’s main arteries. A few weeks ago the road
was narrowed to two lanes in the section near the hotel. There is
now another permanent traffic jam in the centre of Baghdad, and
around thirty shops inside the hotel’s cordon sanitaire face
closure.
Nadim
al-Hussaini, sitting in a chair outside his empty shop, said: ‘My
business has completely disappeared, first 30 to 40 per cent when
they put up the concrete barrier, and 100 per cent when they closed
the road.’ Next door, Zuhaar Tuma says his café is
not so badly affected: he still has regulars who come to smoke hubble-bubble
pipes and play dominoes. ‘I don’t want to get blown
up any more than the Americans do,’ he says. ‘But the
real solution is simply for the Americans staying at the hotel to
leave.’
Neither
the suicide bombers nor the US army care very much how many ordinary
Iraqis get killed. The entrances to the Green Zone provide no protection
for Iraqis queuing for jobs or to have their documents checked.
They are frequently caught in bomb blasts; there are many casualties.
On 17 May a suicide bomber assassinated Izzedin Salim, the head
of the Iraqi Governing Council: his fleet of cars was waiting to
enter the Green Zone. An Iraqi minister told me that Salim might
have been safe if US soldiers at the gate had not delayed the convoy
by declaring that some of the documents were not complete. There
is an Iraqi conspiracy theory which sees foreign suicide bombers
and the US acting in unison to prevent Iraq regaining its independence.
The
suicide bombers have gone some ways towards discrediting the resistance:
this ought to be an opportunity for Allawi’s interim government.
Most Iraqis see the blue uniformed Iraqi police in their elderly
white and blue patrol cars as a defence against crime rather than
as allies of the occupation. The attacks on police stations are
not popular. Even al-Sadr told his militiamen to co-operate with
the police in Sadr City, ‘to deprive the terrorists and saboteurs
of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness’. Some
of the resistance groups in Falluja complain that they are losing
popular support because the bombers were killing Iraqis and not
Americans. Ministers in the new government speak of restoring order
by ‘cutting off the hands’ and ‘slitting the throats’
of the insurgents. This is the sort of rhetoric once used by Saddam.
Iraqis
are desperate for the return of some sort of security. Among the
better off there is a pervasive fear of kidnapping. Over the last
year this has become a local industry, now so common that new words
have been added to Iraqi thieves’ slang: a kidnap victim is
al-tali, or the sheep; the person who identifies the potential target
is al-alaas.
I
recently visited Qasim Sabty, a painter and sculptor who owns a
gallery near the Turkish embassy. I wanted to ask him about an exhibition
he had held of works depicting the torture of prisoners by guards
at Abu Ghraib. But the first thing he spoke about was kidnapping.
‘So many of my relatives have been kidnapped,’ he said.
‘I fear I am going to be next.’ He mentioned another
gallery owner who had just paid $100,000 for the return of her son.
Last
year a rumour went round the city that Kuwaitis were seizing Iraqi
girls and taking them back to Kuwait. This year the kidnapping is
real. A businessman friend living in Jordan has just paid $60,000
to have his brother-in-law returned. Doctors are a favourite target.
Operations are postponed in hospitals because specialist surgeons
have fled the country.
At
the dilapidated Shatt al-Arab restaurant, it turned out that the
owner had disappeared to Syria after his son was kidnapped. I asked
Lieutenant-Colonel Farouk Mahmoud, the deputy head of the forty-member
police kidnap squad, how to avoid being kidnapped. ‘Go abroad!’
he said brightly, to laughter from his officers.
It’s
not only the well-off who feel threatened. Gangs of thieves hop
on and off buses in Rashid Street in the city centre and rob passengers
at gun and knife-point. Ali Abdul Jabber, a driver at the al-Nasser
bus station, has been robbed three times. ‘On the last occasion,’
he said, ‘the thieves jumped on board because the doors have
to be open in this hot weather. Two of them stood guard at the back
while two others walked down the bus looking in people’s handbags
and stealing money and jewellery.’ Jabber didn’t dare
glance back: he thought that if the thieves suspected he could identify
them they would kill him. After the robbery nobody went to the police.
‘The passengers didn’t even discuss it among themselves
because this sort of thing is so much part of daily life in Baghdad.’
Most of them thought that he was in league with the gang.
After
the disasters of the past year the Americans know they cannot, even
in the short term, occupy Iraq without the support of local allies.
The problem for the US is that most Iraqis would like Allawi and
the interim government to get rid of the suicide bombers and kidnappers
-- and of the US occupation as well. But the US shows no sign of
abandoning its plans to keep Iraq as a client state. It would have
a weak army, devoted entirely to counter-insurgency. It would have
no tanks, aircraft, missiles or artillery. The Iraq of the future
would resemble a Latin American state of the 1960s with an army
and security forces controlled largely by Washington. This was the
message brought by Paul Wolfowitz in June when he turned up in Baghdad
-- accompanied by Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the
Ministry of Defence -- just before the supposed handover of power.
The US will allow Iraq to rearm, but only against its own people.
It
was a tellingly low-profile visit. Wolfowitz and his entourage kept
out of tall buildings visible from a distance. When he visited the
city eight months ago he stayed in the al-Rashid hotel, a tall block
dominating the skyline. Guerrillas interrupted his sleep by firing
a volley of rockets from an improvised launcher into the upper stories
of the hotel, killing an American colonel and sending Wolfowitz
stumbling down an emergency staircase to safety. (Even then some
of the American pundits accompanying him wrote that the occupation
seemed to be on track and the forces of the resistance on the retreat.)
If
he is to survive, Allawi needs to convince Iraqis that he is not
an American stooge. He has to persuade the US to withdraw within
a year, but at the same time he is for the moment wholly dependent
on the American army. The difficulty he will have in facing both
ways was illustrated by the declaration of his spokesman earlier
this month that guerillas who had fought the Americans before the
transfer of sovereignty would be eligible for amnesty since their
actions were legitimate acts of resistance. A Kurdish member of
the government, known for being close to the US, said he found this
outrageous. At the same time, Allawi was offering an amnesty to
al-Sadr, the Shiite leader, whom the US was trying until a few weeks
ago to kill or capture.
The
struggle for Iraq is only beginning. The Shia want elections and
real power. The Sunni want the US out and will not accept being
marginalised. The Kurds want a greater measure of autonomy, very
close to independence, than the Iraqi Arabs will give. The Islamic
resistance think the US is vulnerable in Iraq as the Soviet Union
was in Afghanistan. The nationalist guerrillas will not stop killing
American troops. Above all the US is still not convinced that it
has lost its great gamble to keep control of Iraq, a country it
made the test-case of its power as the world’s single imperial
overlord.
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
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