Yesterday was tragedy followed by farce as our brave politicians,
partying in Gleneagles and Singapore, bravely leapt to our verbal
defence. “The security response plan was performing perfectly!” – at
least the bit that involves mopping up body parts was. Actually for an
hour after the first bomb the “authorities” persisted in the fable that
it was a “power surge” and loaded everyone onto buses. Fortunately only
one of those exploded.

By Juliet Ucelli

One of the ironies of recent politics is that while white mainstream journalists, pundits and ordinary people are more willing to acknowledge the existence of white privilege, some sections of the predominantly white socialist left remain resistant to it. Some socialists see class as all-encompassing and dismiss all discussion of racial privilege as falling into “identity politics” and therefore “divisive.”

BY Stan Goff

15 April 2004

The Globe and Mail –

“U.S. warplanes and helicopters firing heavy machine-guns, rockets and cannons hammered insurgents Wednesday in the besieged city of Fallujah, and the commander of U.S. marines warned that a fragile truce was near collapse. In central Baghdad, a rocket hit the Sheraton Hotel, where foreign contractors and journalists are staying, breaking glass but causing no casualties. A second rocket failed to fire and remained lying in the street outside.

By Stan Goff

9 April 2004

The US assault on Fallujah, met with increasingly sophisticated tactics, fearless resistance, and a home court advantage, stalls.

By Stan Goff

25 March 2004

Paul Bremer brusquely and arrogantly announces that the US intends to maintain its 14 bases in Iraq for as long as it desires, regardless of what any ‘sovereign’ Iraqi government says.

By Stan Goff

Soon, a new town would gain recognition in American popular discourse: Fallujah. In Afghanistan, the U.S. refused to send stabilization forces into the hinterlands. There is no oil there. In Fallujah (and every other key city), U.S. soldiers were sent there whether anyone wanted it or not.

By Stan Goff

Reprinted from From the Wilderness

It is always important to ask why we start history when.

For example, most commentators start the history of Iraq with the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. There is also an occasional reference to the chemical attacks at Halabja, in Iraqi Kurdistan on March 16, 1988 (now condensed to “Saddam used weapons of mass destruction against his own people”). The latter has to be boiled down considerably, because the chemical attacks were part of a massive and pitched battle with Iranians, which becomes a mitigating factor, and more importantly because the US had actively and materially supported the development and deployment of these weapons just a couple of years earlier, when none other than Donald Rumsfeld was Ronald Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East.

An op-ed for tomorrow, July 2.

On July 2, 2003, George W. Bush, caught up in his own bluster, uttered the words, “Bring ‘em on,” in response to a reporter’s question about the dismaying frequency of a supposedly vanquished foe in Iraq.