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March
5, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
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
Terry
Diggs
Why
Twain's Pudd'nhead
Wilson Still Matters
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
February
28, 2002
James
T. Phillips
Baghdad,
Spring 1992
Gideon
Samet
Sharon
Must Go
Rep. Ron
Paul
Before
We Bomb Iraq
M. Shahid
Alam
Samuel
Huntington:
Peddling Civilizational Wars
St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
from the Jungle:
Ecuadorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar
February
27, 2002
Eric Hobsbawm
The
Future of War and Peace
John Troyer
About
that WTC Memorial
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Wired
for Democracy
or Business?
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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About 9/11
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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:
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and Osama bin Laden
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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 5, 2002
Thoughts About America
By Edward Said
I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American
who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp,
and that being in the United States at this moment provides
us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and
widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite
the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims
and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else
about the current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds
of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning
and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI.
Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand
aside for special attention during airport security checks.
There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour
against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic
document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And
of course, the media have run far too many "experts"
and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs
whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile
and so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the
media itself has become little more than an arm of the war
on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be
the case with the projected attack to "end" Iraq. There
are US forces already in several countries with important Muslim
populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against
Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective
punishment of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like
great public approval in the United States.
While true in some respects, this is
quite misleading. America is more than what Bush and Rumsfeld
and the others say it is. I have come to deeply resent the notion
that I must accept the picture of America as being involved
in a "just war" against something unilaterally labeled
as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned
us the role of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants
who should be grateful to be allowed residence in the US. The
historical realities are different: America is an immigrant
republic and has always been one. It is a nation of laws passed
not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated
native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives
here as an American citizen originally came to these shores
as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld.
The Constitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness,
nor for approved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour,"
including things that have come to be called "un-"
or "anti- American" statements or attitudes. That
is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech
and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted
former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on
the importance of religion in America, he is not authorised
to enforce such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone
when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God
and America and himself. The Constitution expressly separates
church and state.
There is worse. By passing the Patriot
Act last November, Bush and his compliant Congress have suppressed
or abrogated or abridged whole sections of the First, Fourth,
Fifth and Eighth Amendments, instituted legal procedures that
give individuals no recourse either to a proper defence or a
fair trial, that allow secret searches, eavesdropping, detention
without limit, and, given the treatment of the prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay, that allow the US executive branch to abduct
prisoners, detain them indefinitely, decide unilaterally whether
or not they are prisoners of war and whether or not the Geneva
Conventions apply to them -- which is not a decision to be taken
by individual countries. Moreover, as Congressman Dennis Kucinich
(Democrat, Ohio) said in a magnificent speech given on 17 February,
the president and his men were not authorised to declare war
(Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit
or reason, were not authorised to increase military spending
to over $400 billion per year, were not authorised to repeal
the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he added -- the first such
statement by a prominent, publicly elected official -- "we
did not ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished
on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers
in Afghanistan." I strongly recommend that Rep. Kucinich's
speech, which was made with the best of American principles
and values in mind, be published in full in Arabic so that people
in our part of the world can understand that America is not
a monolith for the use of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but in
fact contains many voices and currents of opinion which this
government is trying to silence or make irrelevant.
The problem for the world today is how
to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the
United States, which in effect has made no secret of the fact
that it does not need coordination with or approval of others
in the pursuit of what a small circle of men and women around
Bush believe are its interests. So far as the Middle East is
concerned, it does seem that since 11 September there has been
almost an Israelisation of US policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon
and his associates have cynically exploited the single-minded
attention to "terrorism" by George Bush and have used
that as a cover for their continued failed policy against the
Palestinians. The point here is that Israel is not the US and,
mercifully, the US is not Israel: thus, even though Israel commands
Bush's support for the moment, Israel is a small country whose
continued survival as an ethnocentric state in the midst of
an Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on an expedient if not
infinite dependence on the US, but rather on accommodation with
its environment, not the other way round. That is why I think
Sharon's policy has finally been revealed to a significant number
of Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more Israelis are
taking the reserve officers' position against serving the military
occupation as a model for their approach and resistance. This
is the best thing to have emerged from the Intifada. It proves
that Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting occupation
have finally brought fruit.
What has not changed, however, is the
US position, which has been escalating towards a more and more
metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his people identify themselves
(as in the very name of the military campaign, Operation Enduring
Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest
destiny, its external enemies with an equally absolute evil.
Anyone reading the world press in the past few weeks can ascertain
that people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast
at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itself the right
to imagine and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute
wars on them without much regard for accuracy of definition,
specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst of all,
the legality of such actions. What does it mean to defeat "evil
terrorism" in a world like ours? It cannot mean eradicating
everyone who opposes the US, an infinite and strangely pointless
task; nor can it mean changing the world map to suit the US,
substituting people we think are "good guys" for evil
creatures like Saddam Hussein. The radical simplicity of all
this is attractive to Washington bureaucrats whose domain is
either purely theoretical or who, because they sit behind desks
in the Pentagon, tend to see the world as a distant target for
the US's very real and virtually unopposed power. For if you
live 10,000 miles away from any known evil state and you have
at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft carriers, and
dozens of submarines, plus a million and a half people under
arms, all of them willing to serve their country idealistically
in the pursuit of what Bush and Condoleezza Rice keep referring
to as evil, the chances are that you will be willing to use
all that power sometime, somewhere, especially if the administration
keeps asking for (and getting) billions of dollars to be added
to the already swollen defence budget.
From my point of view, the most shocking
thing of all is that with few exceptions most prominent intellectuals
and commentators in this country have tolerated the Bush programme,
tolerated and in some flagrant cases, tried to go beyond it,
toward more self- righteous sophistry, more uncritical self-flattery,
more specious argument. What they will not accept is that the
world we live in, the historical world of nations and peoples,
is moved and can be understood by politics, not by huge general
absolutes like good and evil, with America always on the side
of good, its enemies on the side of evil. When Thomas Friedman
tiresomely sermonises to Arabs that they have to be more self-critical,
missing in anything he says is the slightest tone of self-
criticism. Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities of 11 September
entitle him to preach at others, as if only the US had suffered
such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in the
world were not worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large
moral conclusions from.
One notices the same discrepancies and
blindness when Israeli intellectuals concentrate on their own
tragedies and leave out of the equation the much greater suffering
of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or an
air force, or a proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose
suffering at the hands of Israel continues minute by minute,
hour by hour. This sort of moral blindness, this inability
to evaluate and weigh the comparative evidence of sinner and
sinned against (to use a moralistic language that I normally
avoid and detest) is very much the order of the day, and it
must be the critical intellectual's job not to fall into --
indeed, actively to campaign against falling into -- the trap.
It is not enough to say blandly that all human suffering is
equal, then to go on basically bewailing one's own miseries:
it is far more important to see what the strongest party does,
and to question rather than justify that. The intellectual's
is a voice in opposition to and critical of great power, which
is consistently in need of a restraining and clarifying conscience
and a comparative perspective, so that the victim will not,
as is often the case, be blamed and real power encouraged to
do its will.
A week ago I was stunned when a European
friend asked me what I thought of a declaration by 60 American
intellectuals that was published in all the major French, German,
Italian and other continental papers but which did not appear
in the US at all, except on the Internet where few people took
notice of it. This declaration took the form of a pompous sermon
about the American war against evil and terrorism being "just"
and in keeping with American values, as defined by these self-appointed
interpreters of our country. Paid for and sponsored by something
called the Institute for American Values, whose main (and financially
well- endowed) aim is to propagate ideas in favour of families,
"fathering" and "mothering," and God, the
declaration was signed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan among many others, but basically written
by a conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Its
main arguments about a "just" war were inspired by
Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied
with the pro-Israel lobby in this country, and whose role is
to justify everything Israel does by recourse to vaguely leftist
principles. In signing this declaration, Walzer has given up
all pretension to leftism and, like Sharon, allies himself with
an interpretation (and a questionable one at that) of America
as a righteous warrior against terror and evil, the more to
make it appear that Israel and the US are similar countries
with similar aims.
Nothing could be further from the truth,
since Israel is not the state of its citizens but of all the
Jewish people, while the US is most assuredly only the state
of its citizens. Moreover, Walzer never has the courage to state
boldly that in supporting Israel he is supporting a state structured
by ethno-religious principles, which (with typical hypocrisy)
he would oppose in the United States if this country were declared
to be white and Christian.
Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies
aside, the document is really addressed to "our Muslim
brethren" who are supposed to understand that America's
war is not against Islam but against those who oppose all sorts
of principles, which it would be hard to disagree with. Who
could oppose the principle that all human beings are equal,
that killing in the name of God is a bad thing, that freedom
of conscience is excellent, and that "the basic subject
of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of
government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for
human flourishing"? In what follows, however, America turns
out to be the aggrieved party and, even though some of its mistakes
in policy are acknowledged very briefly (and without mentioning
anything specific in detail), it is depicted as hewing to principles
unique to the United States, such as that all people possess
inherent moral dignity and status, that universal moral truths
exist and are available to everyone, or that civility is important
where there is disagreement, and that freedom of conscience
and religion are a reflection of basic human dignity and are
universally recognised. Fine. For although the authors of this
sermon say it is often the case that such great principles are
contravened, no sustained attempt is made to say where and when
those contraventions actually occur (as they do all the time),
or whether they have been more contravened than followed, or
anything as concrete as that. Yet in a long footnote, Walzer
and his colleagues set forth a list of how many American "murders"
have occurred at Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the
Marines in Beirut in 1983, as well as other military combatants.
Somehow making a list of that kind is worth making for these
militant defenders of America, whereas the murder of Arabs
and Muslims -- including the hundreds of thousands killed with
American weapons by Israel with US support, or the hundreds
of thousands killed by US- maintained sanctions against the
innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither mentioned
nor tabulated. What sort of dignity is there in humiliating
Palestinians by Israel, with American complicity and even cooperation,
and where is the nobility and moral conscience of saying nothing
as Palestinian children are killed, millions besieged, and millions
more kept as stateless refugees? Or for that matter, the millions
killed in Vietnam, Columbia, Turkey, and Indonesia with American
support and acquiescence?
All in all, this declaration of principles
and complaint addressed by American intellectuals to their Muslim
brethren seems like neither a statement of real conscience nor
of true intellectual criticism against the arrogant use of
power, but rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war declared
by the US in full ironic cooperation, it would seem, with those
Islamists who have argued that "our" war is with the
West and with America. Speaking as someone with a claim on America
and the Arabs, I find this sort of hijacking rhetoric profoundly
objectionable. While it pretends to the elucidation of principles
and the declaration of values, it is in fact exactly the opposite,
an exercise in not knowing, in blinding readers with a patriotic
rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it overrides real politics,
real history, and real moral issues. Despite its vulgar trafficking
in great "principles and values," it does none of
that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed
to cow foreign readers into submission. I have a feeling that
this document wasn't published here for two reasons: one is
that it would be so severely criticised by American readers
that it would be laughed out of court and two, that it was designed
as part of a recently announced, extremely well-funded Pentagon
scheme to put out propaganda as part of the war effort, and
therefore intended for foreign consumption.
Whatever the case, the publication of
"What are American Values?" augurs a new and degraded
era in the production of intellectual discourse. For when the
intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of
the world align themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing
that power's case instead of urging restraint, reflection,
genuine communication and understanding, we are back to the
bad old days of the intellectual war against communism, which
we now know brought far too many compromises, collaborations
and fabrications on the part of intellectuals and artists who
should have played an altogether different role. Subsidised
and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially, which
went as far as providing for the subvention of magazines like
Encounter, underwrote scholarly research, travel and concerts
as well as artistic exhibitions), those militantly unreflective
and uncritical intellectuals and artists in the 1950s and 1960s
brought to the whole notion of intellectual honesty and complicity
a new and disastrous dimension. For along with that effort
went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate
critics, and restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself,
this is a shameful episode in our history, and we must be on
our guard against and resist its return.
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