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Today's Stories September 9/10, 2006 Weekend Edition Jeffrey St. Clair The Remaking of Cataract Canyon: In the Footsteps of Vladimir Putin (Part Six) Greg Grandin Good Christ, Bad Christ: Testament of the Death Squads Peter Stone Brown Bob Dylan's Swing Time Waltz in the Face of the Apocalypse Ralph Nader X-Raying Greed Brian Cloughley Rumsfeld at the American Legion: Dead Babies and Nazi Propaganda Col. Chet Richards Crossroads at the Litani David Model Tailoring the Case Against Iran: Cut from the Same Old Pattern Dave Himmelstein From Bil'in to Birmingham Ron Jacobs War and the Power of Words Fred Gardner Is Medical Pot Image a Turn-Off to Teens? Daniel Gross / Joe Tessone An IWW Story at Starbucks Joe Bageant Inside the Iron Theater   September 8, 2006 Uri Avnery "I'm a Leftist, But ...": the Liberals' War on Lebanon Paul Craig Roberts Books Are Our Salvation Bill Quigley Judge Says: "No Clowning Around Our WMDs!" Robert Jensen Parallel Purges: Academic Freedom in Iran and the US Norman Solomon Perception Gap: The War on Terror as Others See It Keith Bolin The Future of the Family Farm Kristin S. Schafer The Global Trade in Deadly Pesticides Jeffrey St. Clair The Remaking of Cataract Canyon (Part Five) Patrick Cockburn Gaza is Dying Website of the Day Help the Bismark 3! September 7, 206 Marjorie Cohn Why Bush Really Came Clean About the CIA's Secret Torture Prisons Sharon Smith Downward Mobility: No Recovery for Workers René Drucker Colín The Fraud in Mexico Michael Donnelly Bush Family Values: About Those Nazi Appeasers John Borowski Scholastic Peddles a Fictitious Path to 9/11 to Kids Lucinda Marshall Bombing Indiana Charles Sullivan Katrina and the New Jim Crow: Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans Jeffrey St. Clair The Remaking of Cataract Canyon: Part Four Jonathan Cook How Human Rights Watch Lost Its Way in Lebanon Website of the Day Rasta! Reggae's Joe Hill   September 6, 2006 Stephen Soldz Protecting the Torturers: Bad Faith and Distortions frm the American Psychological Assocation Dave Zirin Cops vs. Jocks: the Shooting of Steve Foley Ramzy Baroud The Gaza Maze: Who Gained Most from the Fox Reporters' Kidnapping Noel Ignatiev Democrats, Pwogs and the Lesser Evil Folly Dave Lindorff Bombing Without Regrets: The US and Cluster Bombs Norman Solomon Spinning Troop Levels in Iraq Binoy Kampmark The Death of Steve Irwin and the Politics of the Zoo Jeffrey St. Clair A Premature Burial: the Remaking of Cataract Canyon (Part Three) John Ross The Death of Mexican Presidency Website of the Day Flaming Arrows   September 5, 2006 Jonathan Cook Will Robert Fisk tell us the whole story? Time For A Champion of Truth to Speak Up Patrick Cockburn Better Not Meet at the Casbah Mike Whitney The Worst Secretary of Defense in U.S. History? You Be the Judge Roland Sheppard The Civil Rights Movement is Dead and So is the Democratic Party James Petras As Bush Regime Faces Twilight Slide, How Much Havoc Can Paulson Wreak? Alexander Cockburn Will Bush Bomb Teheran?   September 4, 2006 Clancy Sigal The Women Who Gave Us Labor Day Jeffrey St. Clair The Remaking of Cataract Canyon: Part 2 Anthony Alessandrini The Great Debate about Aroma Coffee: Why I Boycott Dennis Perrin The Great Debate in Tarrytown: Straight Zion, No Chaser Daniel Cassidy 'S lom to Slum Paul Craig Roberts The War Is Lost   September 2 / 3, 2006 Uri Avnery When Napoleon Won at Waterloo Jeffrey St. Clair A Premature Burial: the Remaking of Cataract Canyon Ralph Nader The No-Fault White House Noam Chomsky Viewing the World from a Bombsight Allan Lichtman Arrested Democracy: Letter from the Baltimore County Jail Stanley Heller When Criticism of Cluster Bombs is "Anti-Semitic" Rana el-Khatib Invasion's Child: the Making of Issa Peter Montague Taking on the Pentagon: Chemical Weapons to Burn Laura Carlsen Mexico on a Collision Course Dr. Susan Block Bush Hate Rising Joe Bageant Roy's People: Why Progressives Need to Listen to Orbison, Not Policy Wonks Scott Stedjan / Matt Schaaf A New Generation of Landmines? Gary Leupp The Emperor Has Been Exposed Stephen Fleischman The Great American Oligarchy Paul Balles Has Ahmadinejad Already Checkmated Bush? Ingmar Lee Canada's $450 Million Gift to Bush: the Softwood Lumber Slush Fund Jane Stillwater Burning Man: the Good, the Bad and the Evil Twin Ron Jacobs Dylan Faces the Apocalypse, Again St. Clair / Bossert Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Grima, Engel, Orloski and Davies Website of the Weekend To New Orleans: a Photo Journal   September 1, 2006 Uri Avnery Olmert Agonistes Paul Craig Roberts Of Wolves and Men (and Impotent Democrats) Bill Ayers Exclusionary Signs of the Times Kevin Zeese The Best War Ever Xochitl Bervera The Forgotten Children of New Orleans Norman Solomon Bush vs. Ahmadinejad: a TV Debate We'll Never See Alexander Cockburn Hezbollah Denounces Nasrallah Interview as a Fake Richard Neville Rupert Murdoch's Victims Website of the Day The Uranium Flood

Weekend Edition September 9/10 , 2006 Breaking the Lycurgan Law Crossroads at the Litani By Col. CHET RICHARDS As its tanks file back from the Litani River, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) joins the club of advanced military forces that have failed against non-state enemies. It’s a growing fraternity that already includes France, Britain, India, the USSR, and, of course, the United States. What happens next, however, is more interesting than the loss itself. In the near term, Israelis can be forgiven some pessimism. They will have to expect that Hezbollah will reconstitute. Given the level of destruction Israel has wreaked on non-Shiite targets, it is a good bet that some new Hezbollah supporters will be Sunni, Druze, or even Christian. The Maronite Catholic Patriarch of Lebanon has already convened a religious conference that condemned Israeli “aggression” and praised the resistance. Because these non-state groups—and only these groups—have successfully waged war on Israel, and, by continuing the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the West, they are gaining legitimacy with the Arab street. This legitimacy comes at the expense of existing Arab state governments because these governments are seen as de facto allies of Israel: they aren’t going to confront the IDF and they keep non-state resistance organizations under a tight leash. If popular sentiment continues to swing towards Hezbollah and the other resistance groups, some Arab governments will be overthrown. As the foreign minister of Qatar recently lamented, “The street is not with us.” Legends will arise to inspire and sustain this new generation of fighters. In place of “Remember the Alamo!” it will be “Remember Aitaroun!” Muslim children had been taught the tales of heroic figures, from Khalid ibn al-Walid, who led 7th century Arab armies during multiple conquests, to Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders. Now they will have contemporaries to emulate. Perhaps most worrying of all, after some 60 years, an effective opponent to the IDF has finally evolved. The Israelis have fought the Arabs so long that they have violated an ancient rule of strategy: Don’t train your enemies. The Lycurgan Law of Sparta explicitly warned against repeated attacks on the same enemy. It served them well for centuries, but when Sparta flouted this rule against emerging rival Thebes, it lost so decisively at Leuctra (371 B.C.) that it never recovered. On the other hand, none of this has to prove fatal. In the arena of strictly military issues, Israel should come out fine after some hard self-examination. Tactically, the war was no great surprise. Advancing armies have always had problems against dug-in and tenacious defenders armed with modern weaponry. But well-prepared forces know how to deal with this situation—the Marines did take Iwo Jima—and the IDF can recover its competence. Strategically, there was also nothing new. Country-wide bombing campaigns have never delivered on their promises. Kosovo, which the IDF took as its inspiration, dragged on 76 days longer than its advertised three and ended only when NATO cobbled together a ground threat and Russia pulled the rug out from under Milosevic. Whether Israel will emulate the United States, which absorbed the lessons of Vietnam, or the USSR, which did not long survive Afghanistan, will depend on how well they solve higher-level problems: • Israel must get over its fixation with state opponents. It now needs neighbors who can control the non-state groups that are its real nemeses. In particular, the Palestinians either need to be formed into a state of the type that Israel can deter or easily defeat, or they need to be given to such a state. • Israel must also abandon the idea that war is a play in some rational chess game of states. One move they should foreswear immediately is the notion of using acts of war to “send signals.” They’ve been sending signals since 1949, and anybody interested in receiving them already did long ago. In any case, it should be clear by now that military force is more often effective when kept as a threat. • Finally, when Israel must show the knife, it needs a more sophisticated military doctrine than attrition warfare. It’s very difficult to win a war of attrition against groups that espouse martyrdom. And even when it is successful, the resulting death and destruction are certain to create new enemies. Oddly, an Israeli historian and strategist, Martin van Creveld, wrote the seminal work on non-state/”fourth generation” warfare, The Transformation of War. The Israeli leadership might dust it off. To some degree, these three points apply to the United States. We also run an immediate risk with our smallish (135,000) occupation force isolated in Iraq, and every day we stay, we’re rolling the dice against longer odds. Iraq is a country of 27 million people, 60 percent of them Shiites who were thrilled about Hezbollah’s victory. It is not fortuitous that our supply lines from Kuwait run for hundreds of miles though predominantly Shiite provinces. Chet Richards writes for the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. He is a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and the author of Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead.

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