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Recent Stories
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
25, 2003
Wails of Yanqui Power
Life During
Wartime
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Wars
come to be defined as much by the first shot fired as the last. Bush’s
invasion of Iraq, unprovoked and unwarranted under international law,
started with an illegal attempt at group assassination, as 40 Tomahawk
cruise missiles and satellite-guided JDAM bombs pulverized a block of
suburban Baghdad. Supposedly, the target was Saddam Hussein and the
leadership of his regime. Although the Pentagon and the White House
continue to coyly suggest to a credulous press corps that Saddam may
indeed have died or been injured in the air raid, it now seems evident
that the Beast of Baghdad remains in control, defiant as ever, his stature
bolstered even more by surviving yet another blitz on his life.
This is nothing
new for Saddam. During the first Gulf War, nearly 60 percent of the
missile strikes in Baghdad by some accounts were attempts to zero in
on the Iraqi despot. Saddam survived. Indeed, there’s no evidence
those attacks even came close to killing him. Others weren’t so
lucky, of course. Thousands of Iraqi citizens perished, victims of laptop
bombardiers operating with flawed intelligence and a blind disregard
for the potential human carnage. No one knows yet how many Iraqis died
in the first night of this war. Who they were or what kind of lives
they lived.
Like the opening
night of a bad Hollywood movie, the initial strike on Saddam was propaganda,
a two billion dollar demolition job designed to give the impression
that Bush was merely interested in annihilating Saddam’s bloodlines,
not occupying Iraq and its oil fields. Whacking Saddam has been an obsession
for Bush for some time. Kill Saddam prove your manhood. In a story that
reads like the transcripts of John Gotti talking to Sammy “the
Bull” Gravano, Time magazine reports that for more than year the
Bush banter in the White House has been spiced with vows to knock off
Saddam. “Fuck him,” Bush snarled. “We’re taking
him out.” This murderous apostrophe was uttered more than a year
before his precious UN resolution.
So this war has
already lost its pretext. To all but the most gullible, it must now
be clear that this has nothing to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction
or liberation. It’s a clumsily scripted revenge play. Bush is
playing the role of the slightly mad and half-witted son out to avenge
his father from some play by John Webster. Indeed, this strange war
pits a pair of lesser sons against each other, each trying to rack up
a bigger body count than their fathers.
The botched assassination
bid on Saddam and his junta was followed up by the much-hyped debut
of Shock and Awe. Geared to play before the cameras, missiles and bombs
shattered Baghdad, in what looked for all the world like a real-time
ad for defense companies, like you might see in some arm dealer convention
in Bahrain. This was psychological terrorism at its most pornographic
and the western media wallowed in it. Of course, the missile and bomb
strikes on the governmental buildings were choreographed to pound fear
into the minds of the citizens of Baghdad (and billions into the ledger
sheets of Boeing, TRW and Raytheon). There was no strategic or military
objective to these fire and light shows. The gaudy targets were Potemkin
Palaces, emptied out weeks, if not months, ago. Only a maintenance crew
of young boys had been left behind to keep up the grounds and wait for
the missiles to fall.
These unfortunate
young men weren’t part of Iraqi command and control and they weren’t
human shields. Now they are just human debris, bit parts in Bush’s
ongoing snuff film.
It’s becoming
impossible for me to watch the war on American television. The reporting
isn’t just embedded; it’s in bed with the Pentagon. And
CNN is the worst of all. The most useful thing the Iraqis have done
so far is to boot the CNN crew out of Baghdad. Now if they could only
do something about Aaron Brown. The preening Brown is the most unappetizing
anchor on television. His coy editorializing sets new standards for
smugness. Worst of all, he’s done the near impossible by making
Christiane Amanpour seem thoughtful. British reports are only marginally
more enlightening. So I stick to the papers and prowl the web for news
from Europe and the Middle East.
The deeper the US
cavalry divisions (units of which have vilely appropriated the names
of Indian warriors, including Crazy Horse) drive into the swirling deserts
of Iraq, the farther the US media gets from giving us any context for
how or why this war started. Let’s be clear. Bush and his gang
targeted Iraq because they knew it was a defenseless nation, crippled
by sanctions, looted by a dictatorial class, weary from two decades
of war, disarmed and dismantled. This was going to be a show, all flash
and light and easy triumph. Bush was ready to bray like Caligula after
his phony conquest of Britain. You could see it in his eyes on the first
night of the war, the visage of a smirking butcher.
It hasn’t
turned out that way. There’s nothing like nights of remote control
bombing to congeal a resistance, even among the most unlikely citizens,
people who have endured decades of repression from their own regime.
But this war has come to be about more than just bombs and missiles.
Iraqis have lived with those pinpricks from the sky for 12 years.
Bush’s war
of liberation looks more and more like a home invasion by the biggest
bullies left on the block, who’ve snipped the alarm system and
left cruise missiles as a calling card. It’s no wonder the Iraqis
are fighting back now in a way they didn’t during the battle for
control Kuwait and its oil fields.
Already the Bush
brain trust is playing the blame game. First, the warlords at CentCom
suggested that Iraqi resistance was being beefed up by the Russians,
which must come as a relief to France. When in doubt, revert to the
well-worn script of the Cold War.
Then, and most comically,
they accused the Iraqis of cheating. They weren’t wearing uniforms.
They suckered troops into ambushes. They holed up in towns and villages.
A nation that won its revolution using guerrilla tactics is suddenly
prudish about the Iraqis defending their nation the same way.
Now there’s
a distant, confused look in Bush’s eyes. Always a tenuous creature
in public at best, Bush was clearly rattled by the initial resistance
of the Iraqi soldiers. The smirk is still there, but it quivers nervously
now as he mumbles his bi-syllabic catch phrases.
The managers of
the White House have cordoned off Bush from the press. This war has
already gone off script. As they always do. We’ve already seen
the revival of fragging, Patriot missiles shooting down a British Tornado
jet, a US fighter firing on a Patriot missile battery, errant bombs
hitting Iranian oil fields, Turkish villages and a busload of Syrians.
Less than a week into the war and parents of dead US soldiers have already
denounced Bush for sending their son to their deaths in an illegitimate
war.
The parents of captured
US soldiers must be just as unsettled. Bush has instructed the Iraqis
to obey the Geneva Convention guidelines for the treatment of POWs.
Iraq says it will comply. Yet at the same time, the Pentagon continues
to defy those very same rules at Camp X-Ray on Guantanamo and in Afghanistan
where Taliban foot soldiers have been tortured to death by American
interrogators. Why should the Iraqis treat US soldiers any differently?
What does the professor of torture Alan Dershowitz have to say now?
The families of the American POWs should open a back channel to Baghdad
and to arrange a hostage swap, Dershowitz and Ann Coulter for those
captive soldiers.
The Turks have moved
across the border, ready to annihilate the Kurds. The Kurds are already
lashing out in frustration that they’ve received little support
from the Americans to fight the Iraqis on the northern front or defend
themselves against the Turks. It’s an old story for the Kurds,
who saw the Americans permitted Saddam’s attack helicopters put
down a rebellion in 1991. Like father, like son.
So it goes. The
war will be longer and bloodier than expected. Iraqis will resist because
they must, as any of us would under remotely similar circumstances.
And they will die in great numbers. At least 500 (and perhaps more than
1000) Iraqis will perish for every US or British casualty. The environment
of Iraq will be left a smoldering ruin, strewn with the toxic debris
of modern warfare, inflicting death and pain for generations to come.
Still, there’s
a reason for hope. The real resistance to this war isn’t to be
found with the butchers in Saddam’s Republican Guard, but on the
streets of Cairo, Paris, New York, Madrid, London, Nablus, San Francisco
and hundreds of other cities and towns around the globe. This is the
face of the new internationalism. Forget the UN, which exposed its impotence
by failing to stand up to the bullying of Bush and Blair and pulled
its workers out of the war zone. The globalized and sustained opposition
to this war dwarfs the lethal pyrotechnics of Shock and Awe. This is
a movement that was born in Seattle, tempered by tear gas, truncheons
and the blood of Genoa. Now it has come of age with a vibrancy and exuberance
few could have imagined and none predicted. Instead of abating, the
movement grows daily. As Subcomandante Marcos said, “We have arrived.”
Deal with it.
Now, let’s
roll.
Yesterday's Features
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
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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