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Today's
Stories
January 17 / 18, 2003
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
No Stan
for the Kurds
Norman Solomon
The
Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South
Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq
Uri Avnery
Syria's
Peace Proposal
January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's
Non-existent WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fog of War
Vietnam
and Iraq
By SAUL LANDAU
American leaders don't easily learn lessons from
the past. Before choosing war in Iraq, the Bush leadership might
profitably have consulted former Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons
of Vietnam or seen Fog of War, the carefully made Errol Morris
documentary featuring the former Kennedy Administration Whiz
Kid. In his own words McNamara "put before the American
people why their government and its leaders behaved as they did
and what we may learn from their experience."
To free himself from three decades of
accumulated guilt and simultaneously flail and defend himself,
McNamara offers the inside story from the man who ran the Vietnam
War under the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies (1961-8). Both
his horror of war itself and the response of the anti-war movement
motivated this former Harvard genius and Ford Motor Company CEO
to speak out. But the negative reaction to the Vietnam War, more
than the war itself, pushed McNamara to let the outsiders have
a peek at the elite decision-making world.
"I have grown sick at heart,"
he wrote, "witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with
which so many people view our political institutions and leaders."
McNamara's film and literary memoir,
I fear, may only increase that cynicism and contempt. I wonder
how parents of dead soldiers or civilians, Vietnamese, American
and Iraqi, as that scenario rings with repetition, feel when
they read that as  early as 1966 McNamara had become "increasingly
skeptical of our ability to achieve our political objectives
in Vietnam through military means." Nevertheless, he continues,
"this did not diminish my involvement in the shaping of
Vietnam policy"
At age 85, McNamara gropes for the elusive
coherence that can offer a graceful endgame. I recall him in
1965 examining body counts on TV, as if they comprised the essence
of his daily business report as Ford CEO. In TV appearances he
explained why the President's decision to send more U.S. troops
to Vietnam signaled impending victory. During this time, he now
admits, he knew the war was both wrong and un-winnable. But not
until his 1995 visit to Vietnam, he now avers, did he understand
that the Vietnamese fought their war for independence, not as
part of the Cold War scheme.
This revelation offers insight into McNamara's
moral learning disability, that ethical gap that allowed him
to order missions of death without questioning his own integrity.
He told the public as he dispatched young men to kill and be
killed that he saw "light at the end of the tunnel."
Vietnam was "McNamara's War"
as much as Iraq is Rumsfeld's. But thanks to the movie, we know
that McNamara has a strong emotional side--unlike Rummy, whose
distorted haiku speech and irritable manner create the image
of a thick-skinned executive.
When Norman Morrison burned himself to
death in 1965 to protest the war outside of McNamara's Pentagon
office window, as Buddhist monks had done in Vietnam, McNamara
"reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions
and avoided talking about them with anyone, even my family. I
knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison's feelings
about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my
cabinet colleagues. And I believed I shared some of these thoughts.
There was much that Marg and I and the children should have talked
about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead-it
is a grave weakness."
McNamara sensed that his soul was at
stake, but the glimmers of humane feelings that he allowed himself
to acknowledge confronted a stronger, deeper commitment to servicing
power, an "obligation" that vitiated his ability to
see right and wrong.
McNamara continued to support the Vietnam
War in public because his loyalty to the President demanded it.
Indeed, he interpreted his constitutional oath to include obedience
to Presidential dictates.
He also owed the President his business
assessment: the Vietnam War was unprofitable. Ironically, McNamara
used this formula to arrive at his moral judgment: unprofitable
means wrong. The brilliant accountant and business visionary,
however, could not see demarcate clear moral lines between his
"logic of figures" and life and death.
In Fog of War, he notes that US fire
bombing Japanese cities and dropping two nuclear bombs over civilian
targets might fall under the category of war crimes. He sermonizes
about the seeming inability of humans to stop making wars. Yet,
for all of his lesson-teaching in the film and book about the
barbarism of war, McNamara reluctantly admires the clarity of
men like General Curtis Lemay, the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff
(1961-65).
LeMay, by his own words, was a psychopathic
killer, a man eager to use nuclear weapons against Cuba and the
Soviet Union in the 1962 missile crisis, a commander who didn't
hesitate to risk the lives of his own pilots during World War
II by having them fly at lower altitudes thus exposing themselves
to anti aircraft and fighter attack in order to increase their
accuracy.
LeMay had no moral dilemmas. War meant
killing the enemy and losing as many of your own as you had to
lose. Period! The more complicated McNamara had to choose: power
versus conscience. In the film he took the Defense Secretary
job because it would benefit his family. And he defends that
decision, even though his wife got sick and his kids became estranged
from him. Not until the end of the Cold War did he find it convenient
--and maybe necessary --- to save his soul. He maintains, however,
a gray line between mistakes and sins, a kind of moral fuzziness
that doesn't quite coincide with atonement or soul saving.
McNamara presents himself as a moral
man. Among his axioms of faith was the assumption that the United
States undertook overseas actions only for noble purposes. Through
this obfuscating lens, he could not--and cannot -- see himself
as an imperialist. Since he served the elected president of a
democracy, how could he possibly make imperial policies?
Because of this epistemological failing,
he could not understand that Vietnamese nationalists had been
fighting for independence from China and then France for centuries.
So this often brutally self-critical man remains in his political
thinking an unacknowledged imperialist.
I'm glad he wrote the book and appeared
in the film. His personal testimony dramatizes the deceit of
the past and should make those in the present generation very
skeptical about all Bush claims about Iraq.
But one must proceed with caution about
the lessons McNamara teaches. He has sinned and seeks atonement.
That is good. But the depth of his evil eludes him. By not acknowledging
that the United States intervened for non-democratic motives
to try to defeat a legitimate nationalist force in Vietnam, he
falls short of achieving a platform for atonement.
Indeed, he still maintains that "the
United States of America fought in Vietnam for eight years for
what it believed to be good and honest reasons ... to protect
our security, prevent the spread of totalitarian communism, and
promote individual freedom and political democracy."
Such cliches ring so hollow in the face
of 3.4 million dead Vietnamese and 58 thousand dead Americans.
The stubborn McNamara still maintains that those who launched
the war had nothing but venerable aims--as do the defenders of
the Iraq War and occupation.
McNamara might write a guide book on
the morality of power--an oxymoron? He simply blurred distinctions
between intentions and poor war strategy. As Defense Secretary
for seven years he simply ignored the incongruities between Washington's
trite expression of noble goals and the bestiality in Vietnam
"required" to achieve them. He pressed on, as he admits
"ravaging a beautiful country and sending young Americans
to their death year after year, because they [the war planners]
had no other plan."
The war could have and should have been
halted, McNamara concedes, but he and fellow Johnson senior advisers
failed to do so "through ignorance, inattention, flawed
thinking, political expediency, and lack of courage."
Yes, lack of courage! Top government
officials apply a logic of intervention that insulates them,
places a wall between questions they should ask and answer before
ordering bombing missions against cities--in Vietnam or Iraq.
In his modified mea culpa, his presumably
last public thrust, McNamara attempts to both expiate guilt and
teach lessons. Have President Bush and his advisers learned from
these memoirs? The unscrupulous continue to counsel the amoral
Crown. The Secretary of State lacks the courage to demand the
King change his erroneous course. Like McNamara, Colin Powell
plays the obedient servant to power. Recall that Cyrus Vance
resigned and set an example for integrity because he understood
that President Carter's hare-brained "rescue" mission
in Iran could lead to truly devastating consequences.
In his book, McNamara strives for grace,
citing T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets": "And last
the rending pain of reenactment/ Of all that you have done and
been; the shame/ Of motives late revealed, and the awareness/
Of things ill done and done to others' harm/ Which once you took
for exercise of virtue."
The repentant but still strangely arrogant
McNamara might better have used Goethe's words from Faust. "The
worm am I, that in the dust does creep."
Landau will be speaking on Sat. January
17 at Portland State University's Millar Library at 7:30 PM.
Admission is free.
Saul Landau
is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at
Cal Poly Pomona University. For Landau's writing in Spanish visit:
www.rprogreso.com.
His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE
EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, has just been published
by Pluto Press. He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
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