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November 29, 2001
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
November 25, 2001
Ralph Nader
The Crisis
in Leadership
Sam Bahour
Israel's
Choice
November 24, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
He Who
Has
the Guns Rules
November 23, 2001
Phyllis
Pollack
Long
Live The Clash
Cockburn/St. Clair
The Press
and
the Patriot Act
November 22, 2001
Oscar
Gonzalez
A
Homeland Thanksgiving
November 21, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Rep. Chambliss
Calls for Arrest of Every Muslim That Enters Georgia
Tom Turnipseed
Broadcasting
and Bombing
David Price
Academia Under
Attack
Molly
Secours
Modern
Day Witch Trials
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
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War Diary
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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:
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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
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November 29,
2001
Rebuilding Afghanistan?
By William Blum
"U.S. Meeting Envisions Rebuilding
Afghanistan" read the headline in the Washington Post of
November 21. After a one-day meeting in Washington of leaders
from two dozen nations and international organizations, US and
Japanese officials said they had developed an "action program"
for the long-term rebuilding of the war-ravaged country.
This should throw another log on the
feel-good-about-America fire that's been warming the frazzled
citizenry since September 11. But like much of that fuel, there's
likely a lot more propaganda here than substance.
It's a remarkable pattern. The United
States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire
neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure,
ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And afterward
doing nothing to repair the damage.
On January 27, 1973, in Paris, the United
States signed the "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring
Peace in Vietnam". Among the principles to which the United
States agreed was the one stated in Article 21: "In pursuance
of its traditional policy [sic], the United States will contribute
to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout
Indochina."
Five days later, President Nixon sent
a message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam in which he
stipulated the following:
"(1)The Government of the United
States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction
in North Vietnam without any political conditions. (2)Preliminary
United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs
for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction
will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5
years."
Nothing of the promised reconstruction
aid was ever paid. Or ever will be.
During the same period, Laos and Cambodia
were devastated by US bombing as unrelentlessly as was Vietnam.
After the Indochina wars were over, these nations, too, qualified
to become beneficiaries of the America's "traditional policy"
of zero reconstruction.
Then came the American bombings of Grenada
and Panama in the 1980s.
There goes our neighborhood. Hundreds
of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization
of American States as well as American courts, all the way up
to the US Supreme Court, for "just compensation" for
the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek
name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got
just nothing, as did the people of Grenada.
It was Iraq's turn next, in 1991: 40
days and nights of relentless bombing; destruction of power,
water and sanitation systems and everything else that goes into
the making of a modern society. We all know how much the United
States has done to help rebuild Iraq.
In 1998, Washington in its grand wisdom
fired more than a dozen cruise missiles into a building in Sudan
which it claimed was producing chemical and biological weapons.
The completely destroyed building was actually a pharmaceutical
plant which was producing about 90 percent of the drugs used
to treat the most deadly illnesses in this desperately poor
country. The United States effectively admitted its mistake
by unfreezing the assets of the plant's owner it had frozen.
Surely now it was compensation time. But as of October 2001,
nothing had been paid to the owner, the government, or those
injured in the bombing.
The following year we had the case of
Yugoslavia; 78 days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming
an advanced state into virtually a pre-industrial one; the reconstruction
needs were breathtaking. Two years later, June 2001, after
the Serbs had obediently followed Washington's wishes to oust
Slobodan Milosevic and turn him over to the kangaroo court in
the Hague that the US had pushed through the Security Council,
a "donor's conference" was convened by the European
Commission and the World Bank, supposedly concerned with Yugoslavia's
reconstruction. It turned out to be a conference concerned
with Yugoslavia's debts more than anything else.
Serbian premier Zoran Djindjic, regarded
as highly pro-Western, said, in a July interview with the German
newsmagazine Der Spiegel, that he felt betrayed by the West.
"It would have been better if the
donors-conference had not taken place and instead we had been
given 50 million DM in cash. ... In August we should be getting
the first installment, 300 million Euro. Suddenly we are being
told, that 225 million Euro will be withheld for the repayment
of old debts which in part were accumulated during Tito's time.
Two thirds of that sum are fines and interests, accrued because
Milosevic refused for ten years to pay back these credits.
We shall get the remaining 75 million Euro in November at the
earliest. Such are the principles in the West, we are being
told. This means: A seriously ill person is to be given medicine
after he is dead. Our critical months will be July, August and
September."
It's been more than two years since Yugoslavian
bridges fell into the Danube, the country's factories and homes
destroyed, its roads made unusable. As of yet, the country
has not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect
and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United
States.
Whoever winds up ruling Afghanistan will
be conspicuously unable to block the establishment of US military
bases, electronic listening posts, oil and gas piplelines, or
whatever else Washington would like to build there. As to the
United States doing some building for the Afghan people, they
may have a long wait.
William Blum
is the author of "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II" and "Rogue State: A Guide to the
World's Only Superpower" Portions of the books can be read
at: http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm
(with a link to Killing Hope)
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