Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 29
/ 30, 2005
Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian
and Neoconservative Myths
Linn Washington, Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism
January 28,
2005
Rachard Itani
Tsunami
Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser
Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's
Non-Election
Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth
Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead
Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"
Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?
Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?
Jorge Mariscal
Fighting
the Poverty Draft
January 27,
2005
Seymour Hersh
We've
Been Taken Over By a Cult
Cockburn /
Sengupta
The
US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush
Ignacio Chapela
/ John F. García
The Laws of Nature
Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!
Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney
Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
Website of
the Day
Informed Eating
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies
January 25,
2005
Brian Cloughley
Iraq
as Disneyland
Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot
Josh Frank
/ Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties
John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Party Without Virtue
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
The
Intolerance of Christian Conservatives
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
Read How the
Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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.
|
Weekend Edition
January 29 / 30, 2005
Why Would God Behave Like Rumsfeld?
Why
the Children in Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall
By
BERNARD CHAZELLE
No one said that dying had to be dull.
"Screaming with fear, paralyzed children at a shelter for
the physically disabled and mentally ill in Galle, Sri Lanka,
lay helplessly in their beds as seawater surged around them."
The CNN report read like the screenplay of a horror film. A crippled
girl grows up destitute in a home for the deaf, the blind, the
insane, and, for good measure, the disabled elderly (what more
could a kid wish for?) At the end of a short life spent wondering
why no one ever looked out for her, the child reaches the final
punctuation mark of her blessed existence and drowns glued to
a wheelchair.
Tragedy should not be too clever.
Mourning embraces the solemnity of death but recoils at an overzealous
script. When fate appears to cross the thin line between cruelty
and sadism, grief turns to anger. We expect the church organist
at the funeral mass to interrupt Bach in mid-measure, look up
to the sky, and shout "Come on!"
Voltaire had his "come
on" moment in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, suggesting
that God's supreme goodness perhaps was not all it was cracked
up to be. Religious irreverence is not much in fashion these
days. But piety was not always so docile. History has been improbably
kind to all sorts of figures who've had cross words with the
Almighty. Think of Job, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Jesus on the cross-and
that's only for the J's. Once or twice, the dispute even got
out of hand: Nietzsche killed God; and Richard Rubenstein saw
in Auschwitz confirmation of his death. Admittedly, to reconcile
the Holocaust with a just and omnipotent god is an interesting
variation on squaring the circle-or, since Miklós Laczkovich
actually succeeded in doing just that [1], let us say, merely
a reminder that gods may die but theological debates just never
do.
My own reaction to the CNN
report was not nearly as elevated. "Why would God behave
like Don Rumsfeld?" I wondered. As the crippled child writhed
in agony, I pictured God murmuring "Stuff happens."
Woe unto me. To compare God
to Rummy is worse than blasphemous: It's unfair. After all, God
did not cow the media into decorating our TV screens with the
beatific smiles of preening peacocks reassuring us that smart
waves drowned the terrorists, spared the innocent, amused the
children, and provided much needed water to drought-prone regions.
God gets accused of many things, including being dead, but lying
is rarely one of them.
Mendacity, on the other hand,
is the reserve currency of this administration. Its marketing
hook: "You give us your votes; we give you our lies."
From the fictitious Saddam-al Qaeda axis to the rosy updates
on the Switzerlandization of Iraq, from the bogus tales of WMD
to the assurance that democracy is the future of the region (and
always will be, would add the cynics), the giving has been, shall
we say, generous.
The taking has been no less
effusive. Although the hysterical rantings of prowar voices rarely
exceeded, in dignity, the yapping of a chihuahua attacking a
meatball, they met only the meekest resistance from an oleaginous
mainstream media. The war hawks found powerful enablers in The
New York Times, which was more than happy to echo the delusory
yarn spun by the White House and pimp for Judith Miller's Best
Little Whorehouse in Babylon (where bling bling spells WMD).
Pimping being the fickle business
that it is, it won't be long before the In-Bush-We-Trust media
gets in touch with its inner peacenik and points an accusing
finger at the posse of visionary mediocrities who gave us a nasty
case of Iraq syndrome. No doubt some of the neocons will balk
at going to their graves with the word "loser" carved
on a brass coffin plate; so watch for them to pull a McNamara
on us and humbly beg for forgiveness. Being good souls, ie, suckers
for smarmy group hugs, naturally we'll oblige.
Were it so simple.
The abject surrender of the
media fed a slew of illusions to the public, none more craven
than the belief that he whom we kill must be killed. Yeah, yeah,
we occasionally obliterate the wrong house and incinerate its
occupants, but that's just "friendly fire." (A lovely
phrase if there's one: Let's hear the surgeon who amputates the
wrong leg inform his patient of his "friendly amputation.")
Minus the friendliness, however, our whiz-bang weapon wizardry
never fails to separate the wheat from the chaff, the nursing
mother from the crazed beheader. So goes the creed, anyway.
The Lancet-that well-known freedom hating rag-begs
to differ. It estimates that our high-IQ, mensa-schmensa bombs
have killed 100,000 civilians [2]. Iraq Body Count, which plays
the lowballing game by shunning projections, reports the deaths
of 600 non-combatants during our latest goodwill tour of Fallujah
(by now primed to be renamed Grozny on the Euphrates) [3].
And then there is the Iraqi
girl, hands soaked in her dead father's blood, whose little brother
does not yet understand that his childhood has just come to an
end.
Fearing for their lives, US
soldiers killed the parents in the front seat of the family car.
Demons will likely haunt their nights. Stuff happens. Rumsfeld
and Wolfowitz, bless their souls, will sleep well tonight.
Wars never fail to produce
their share of pithy lines. Tommy Franks made sure this one would
be no exception. "We don't do body counts," crowed
the general, who really meant to say that he does not do "dark-skinned
body counts" (he counts the others just fine). Lucky for
us that he doesn't run a Swedish newspaper, or it would have
splashed the headline: "Tsunami kills 2,000 Swedes-and a
few locals." To be fair, Franks remembered the last time
he did body counts, Vietnam, and how well that ended. But today's
tactical thinking packs a wallop of self-righteous denial. We
don't tally the children we kill for the same reason monsters
don't buy mirrors: That's how they go through life thinking they're
angels.
We've snuffed out innocent
lives in numbers that insurgents and terrorists could only dream
of. But we avert our eyes. We bury our heads in the sand and
turn a blind eye to our moral cowardice, thus pulling off the
amazing feat of being ostriches and chickens all at once. We
owe this marvel of ornithology to the inexorable fragility of
human illusions. To quote James Carroll, "we avert our eyes
because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche
said, the abyss stares back." George Bush, the philosopher,
has updated Berkeley's riddle: Do Iraqi children scream when
the bombs fall if there is no one in the White House to hear
them?
The celebrity of the month,
the tsunami victim, has hogged newspaper headlines nationwide
with stomach-churning photo spreads of wailing mothers and floating
cadavers. Like his unsung Iraqi brethren, the victim has reminded
us that calamity always strikes the poor, the sick, and the helpless
first. It's invariably those with the least to lose who lose
the most. At the great banquet of cataclysms, rich Westerners
get served last. Bush would have us believe that we've suffered
so much from terrorism the world owes us undying compassion.
In truth, our induction into the Misery Hall of Fame is still
a long way off. With our sustained assistance, however (coddling
Saddam while he was gassing Iranians, slapping sanctions that
killed half a million children, and fighting two wars in twelve
years), Iraq made it on the first ballot. Who ever said that
we didn't have a big heart?
Not Condoleezza Rice: "I
do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show
not just the US government, but the heart of the American people,
and I think it has paid great dividends for us" [4]. And
I just can't wait for the next one, our top diplomat might have
added.
While watching Colin Powell,
pocket calculator in hand, add up the geopolitical benefits of
our generosity and tell us how shocked, shocked he was by the
tsunami's devastation, I could almost hear the Beatitudes from
The Gospel According to Dubya: "Blessed are the children
whom the sea swallows, for they shall tug at our heartstrings.
/ Cursed are the children whom our bombs blow up, for they shall
roam the dark alleys of our indifference." We've been Iraq's
tsunami. But expect no charity drive, no minute of silence, no
flag at half-staff: nothing that would allow shame to rear its
ugly face.
With Bush's reelection, America
now has the president it deserves. And should you find that Lady
Liberty, all dolled up with the latest in fashion from Abu Ghraib
and Guantánamo, looks a bit like a used up hooker, you
won't need to ask who hired her pimp: We did.
The liberation of Iraq began
with smart flying bombs crashing over Baghdad. We should have
known better. Liberations that start with a reenactment of 9/11
rarely end well.
Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science
at Princeton University and author of The
Discrepancy Method: Randomness and Complexity. He can be
reached at: chazelle@CS.Princeton.EDU
This article and others are
available on Professor
Chazelle's website.
Notes
[1] Laczkovich, M. Equidecomposability
and discrepancy; a solution of Tarski's circle-squaring problem,
J. Reine Angew. Math. 404 (1990), 77-117.
[2] 100,000
Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq, by Rob Stein, Washington
Post, October 29, 2004.
[3] Iraq Body Count Falluja
Archive, www.iraqbodycount.org, 2004. http://www.iraqbodycount.net/resources/falluja/
[4] Dr. Rice's senate confirmation
hearing, Agence France Presse, Tuesday, January 18, 2005. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0118-08.htm
|