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March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
March
10, 2002
Thomas
Croft
Year
of Living Dangerously
March
9, 2002
Bill Cook
Sharon's
Bulldozer
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Nightmare in Israel
March
8, 2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
When
Business Men
Make Boo-Boos
CounterPunch
Exclusive
Enron's
Spooky
Image Consultant
Rep. Ron
Paul
Stop
the War on Colombia
Andre
Achong
The
Failed War on Drugs
John B.
Kelly
Michael
Moore and Me:
Disability Rights and
a Big Stupid White Guy
March
7, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Congressman
McInnis Equates Enviros to al-Qaeda
Mike Rogers
Will
the Battle of Shah-i-Kot Become the Taliban's Alamo
Walt Brasch
Patriot
Act and Free Speech
John Jonik
Insurance
Scams:
Who Are the Scofflaws?
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Bumper
Crop: The Politics
of Afghan Opium
March
6, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
A
Beautiful Mind:
Another Dangerous Lie?
Tom Turnipseed
War
Is Wrong
David
Vest
Billy
Graham and Nixon:
Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Bombings That
Made Putin a Hero
CounterPunch
Wire
Berezovsky
Fingers Putin
in Bombings
Edward
Said
Thoughts
About America
March
5, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ann
Coulter At It Again:
Race-Baiting Norm Mineta
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
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:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
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:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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March 16, 2002
The New Empire Loyalists
Former Leftists
Turned US military Cheerleaders are Helping Snuff Out Its Traditions
of Dissent
By Tariq Ali
Exactly one year before the hijackers hit the
Pentagon, Chalmers Johnson, a distinguished American academic,
staunch supporter of the US during the wars in Korea and Vietnam,
and one-time senior analyst for the CIA, tried to alert his
fellow-citizens to the dangers that lay ahead. He offered a
trenchant critique of his country's post-cold war imperial
policies: "Blowback," he prophesied, "is shorthand
for saying that a nation reaps what it sows, even if it does
not fully know or understand what it has sown.
"Given its wealth and power, the
United States will be a prime recipient in the foreseeable future
of all of the more expectable forms of blowback, particularly
terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed
forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States."
But whereas Johnson drew on his past,
as a senior state-intellectual within the heart of the American
establishment, to warn us of the dangers inherent in the imperial
pursuit of economic and military domination, former critics of imperialism found
themselves trapped by the debris of September 11. Many have
now become its most vociferous loyalists. I am not, in this
instance, referring to the belligerati - Salman Rushdie, Martin
Amis and friends - ever-present in the liberal press on both
sides of the Atlantic. They might well shift again. Rushdie's
decision to pose for the cover of a French magazine draped in
the stars and stripes could be a temporary aberration. His new-found
love for the empire might even turn out to be as short-lived
as his conversion to Islam.
What concerns me more is another group:
men and women who were once intensely involved in leftwing activities.
It has been a short march for some of them: from the outer fringes
of radical politics to the antechambers of the state department.
Like many converts, they display an aggressive self-confidence.
Having honed their polemical and ideological skills within the
left, they now deploy them against their old friends. This is
why they have become the useful idiots of the empire. They will
be used and dumped. A few, no doubt, hope to travel further
and occupy the space vacated by Chalmers Johnson, but they should
be warned: there is already a very long queue.
Others still dream of becoming the Somali,
Pakistani, Iraqi or Iranian equivalents of the Afghan puppet,
Hamid Karzai. They, too, might be disappointed. Only tried and
tested agents can be put in power. Most one-time Marxists or
Maoists do not yet pass muster. To do so they have to rewrite
their entire past and admit they were wrong in ever backing
the old enemies of the empire - in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan
or the Arab East. They have, in other words, to pass the David
Horowitz test. Horowitz, the son of communists and biographer
of the late Isaac Deutscher, underwent the most amazing self-cleansing
in post-1970s America. Today he is a leading polemicist of the
right, constantly denouncing liberals as a bridge to the more
sinister figures of the left.
Compared to him, former Trotskyists Christopher
Hitchens and Kanaan Makiya must still appear as marginal and
slightly frivolous figures. They would certainly fail the Horowitz
test, but if the stakes are raised and Baghdad is bombed yet
again, this time as a prelude to a land invasion, how will
our musketeers react? Makiya, recently outed in this paper as
"Iraq's most eminent dissident thinker", declared that:
"September 11 set a whole new standard... if you're in
the terrorism business you're going to start thinking big, and
you're going to need allies. And if you need allies in the
terrorism business, you're going to ask Iraq."
Makiya's capacity to spin extraordinary
spirals of assertion, one above another, based on no empirical
facts and without any sense of proportion, becomes - through
sheer giddiness of fantastical levitation - completely absurd.
Not a single US intelligence agency has managed to prove any
Iraqi link with September 11. For that reason, in order to
justify a war, they have moved on to other issues, such as possession
of "dangerous weapons". Not even Saddam's old foes
in the Arab world believe this nonsense.
Hitchens reacted more thoughtfully at
first to the New York and Washington attacks. He insisted that
the "analytical moment" had to be "indefinitely
postponed", but none the less linked the hits to past policies
of the US and criticised George Bush for confusing an act of
terrorism with an act of war. He soon moved on to denounce those
who made similar, but much sharper criticisms, and began to
talk of the supposed "fascist sympathies of the soft left"
- Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Edward
Said et al. In recent television appearances he has sounded
more like a saloon-bar bore than the fine, critical mind which
blew away the haloes surrounding Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton
and Mother Teresa.
What unites the new empire loyalists
is an underlying belief that, despite certain flaws, the military
and economic power of the US represents the only emancipatory
project and, for that reason, has to be supported against all
those who challenge its power. A few prefer Clinton-as-Caesar
rather than Bush, but recognise this as a self-indulgence. Deep
down they know the empire stands above its leaders.
What they forget is that empires always
act in their own self-interests. The British empire cleverly
exploited the anti-slavery campaigns to colonise Africa, just
as Washington uses the humanitarian handwringing of NGOs and
the bien pensants to fight its new wars today. September 11
has been used by the American empire to re-map the world. European
continental pieties are beginning to irritate Cheney and Rumsfeld.
They laugh in Washington when they hear European politicians
talk of revitalising the UN. There are 189 member states of
the UN. In 100 of these states there is a US military presence.
For UN, read US?
Neo-liberal economics, imposed by the
IMF mullahs, has reduced countries in every continent to penury
and brought their populations to the edge of despair. The social
democracy that appeared an attractive option during the cold
war no longer exists. The powerlessness of democratic parliaments
and the politicians who inhabit them to change anything has
discredited democracy. Crony capitalism can survive without
it.
At a time when much of the world is beginning
to tire of being "emancipated" by the US, many liberals
have been numbed into silence. One of the most attractive aspects
of the US has always been the layers of dissent that have flourished
beneath the surface. The generals in the Pentagon suffered a
far greater blow than September 11 in the 1970s, when tens of
thousands of serving and former GIs demonstrated in front of
it in their uniforms and medals and declared their hope that
the Vietnamese would win. The new empire loyalists, currently
helping to snuff out this tradition, are creating the conditions
for more blowbacks.
Tariq Ali
is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His most recent book
is The
Clash of Fundamentalism, published by Verso.
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