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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to  

By Peter Chamberlin

8/7/7

It should be clear to America, by this point in the “war president’s” reign, that American foreign policy has always been to create its own enemies. Like all of Bush’s predecessors, his “mistakes” in foreign policy have usually strengthened those we are fighting, or those whom we are about to fight. The enormous arms packages that Bush has proposed for Israel and every Sunni state in the Middle East region (except for Shiite Iran) are meant to be used in a planned regional expansion of the war in Iraq. Congress has basically authorized a massive expansion of the war that the People want to be terminated, with the recent votes against Iran that read like the Iraq war resolution. The creation of covert forces to be used inside of Iran and the torrent of weaponry that is now flowing to the Sinoura government in Lebanon are leading elements of the strategy to make war against Iran and all of its allies, even those in Iraq.

The most sinister part of the new strategy to use proxy Sunni forces to fight Iran can be found in the much ballyhooed co-opting of Sunni insurgents as “security contractors” in Iraq. This is a blatant effort by our government to empower the people who are responsible for killing the most Americans and Iraqis. This effort is strengthening the Sunni hand, while it undermines the legitimate democratic Maliki government. The policy of buying off our enemies in Iraq, in order to buy Petraeus a little more time, is still a policy of aiding our own enemies to fight our other enemies. It is the sinister policy of our economic “overlords,” actually playing-out on the battlefield, using American troops as guinea pigs and shock troops to create a state of permanent war in the world – the ultimate marketplace for the “Lords of war.”

As Americans and the puppet Congress bicker over a great drama called, “ending the war,” the real governing powers are giving form to the “terrorist haven” in Anbar Province (that they have been warning us about), which will justify continuing the war there forever. Instead of dealing with both Iran and Saudi Arabia in a search for order inside of Iraq, the government has sided with Saudi Arabia (the birthplace of Al Qaida) in aiding the real enemy in Iraq, to wage an even bigger war against the friends of Iran there. They chose to make Iraq a central front in the ever-changing, politically useful, war on “terrorism,” without regard for the Iraqis who would be caught in the middle. Do we even care if any of them will survive the planned escalation that is coming to their neighborhoods very soon?

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Usman Khalid

8/3/07

The entire world was shocked beyond belief when the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon building were struck on 9/11 by US planes hijacked by Arab young men. There was sympathy for the victims and justifiable anger in America. But the US response in invading the already devastated country of Afghanistan was excessive. More important, the USA did not obtain the endorsement of the UN Security Council and the invasion violated International Law. A military attack is permissible only in response to an invasion or imminent aggression. The Afghans did not invade the US nor were capable of doing so. That the 9/11 attacks had been planned and executed by Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan, did call for action, perhaps even punishment, but not the wanton bombing that resulted in the death of over 40,000 mostly innocent non-combatants.

The invasion of Afghanistan set the stage for the “US war on terror” that is still going on. There is little point in quarrelling about this name which many consider misleading. What is important is that it is a new type of war, with new rules. When President Bush said, “You are either with us (the USA) or with the terrorist”, he propounded a new doctrine of war the chief features of which are: 1) strategic ‘pre-emption’ and 2) ‘unilateralism’. Both of these features constitute a violation of international law. America has assumed the right to invade or bomb any country which it accuses of providing refuge or assistance to terrorists. America makes demands to hand over to them persons it accuses of being terrorists. A country that refuses on the plea that it does not have an extradition treaty with America, or that legal procedures should be followed before extradition, or that they cannot hand over a person to be sent to a dubious jurisdiction like Guantanamo Bay, or that the accusation made by America does not constitute a crime in their country, earns the wrath of the USA. Most countries take the threats from America seriously and comply. Those countries that resist are demonised, isolated and sometimes even invaded. Three countries have been invaded since 9/11 - Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon – and thousands have been incarcerated in many countries without trial or handed over to America by their own governments because of dire American threats.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Pablo Ouziel

8/2/07

In the 1994 drama film based on a novel by Winston Groom, the world was captivated by a simple man called Forrest Gump and his journey through life. In a famous scene, he starts running and he explains his reasons for running in the following way: ” That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So I ran to the end of the road… to the end of town… across Greenbow County… across Alabama… clear to the ocean. When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going.”

Forrest Gump was running because of a broken heart, and along the way thousands of people began to join him; one man with a broken heart and a whole march for hope was started. Those were the days, at least in the movies.

Back to reality, on July 25th the International Herald Tribune ran a piece titled; “Teens march across America in lonely opposition to war.” The article talked about nineteen year old Ashley Casale and eighteen year old Michael Israel who started their 3,000-mile walk from San Francisco to Washington opposing the war in Iraq and hoping that others would join them. The pair did pick up a third marcher, nineteen year old Tom Garrett, but the masses were absent; What happened to them? What happened to all those Americans opposing the war?

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BY CHALMERS JOHNSON

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration’s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term — and lost. What people don’t agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy — or remedies — ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: “None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances…. The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.”

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SPECIAL: From our classic archives

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of propaganda, would have admired the American system’s ability to tell big lies and keep telling them year in year out to fool most of the people.

The presentation of an illegal invasion of a foreign country as a “preventative” or pre-emptive war did not originate with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld…It had ample precursors in Nazi Germany. The ongoing US aggression in the Middle East raises the most serious questions about the role of the mass media in modern society. In the period leading up to the invasion, the American [corporate] media uncritically advanced the Bush Administration’s arguments, rooted in lies, distortions and half-truths, for an attack on Iraq. It virtually excluded all critical viewpoints, to the point of blacking out news of mass anti-war demonstrations and any other facts that contradicted the propaganda from the White House and Pentagon.

The obvious aim was to misinform and manipulate public opinion, and convince the tens of millions within the US who were opposed to the Administration’s war policy that they constituted a small and helpless minority…[READ THE REST OF THIS IMPORTANT ESSAY]

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

“BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq - The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It’s outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.

The Reaper is loaded, but there’s no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.

The arrival of these outsize U.S. “hunter-killer” drones, in aviation history’s first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.” — Associated Press, July 16, 2007.

(http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,142437,00.html?ESRC=dod.nl)

By Adam Engel

7/25/07

So BushCo solved the PR problem that might possibly have grown into a credible anti-war movement by alleging to guarantee less American casualties which, let’s face it, is all Americans really care about anyway. Otherwise, we would have protested the massacre of the first “Gulf War” in which Iraqi soldiers and civilians were slaughtered in their cars while trying to escape Baghdad. Forget all that “military honor” nonsense. What kind of monsters fire on retreating troops AND fleeing civilians? Despite all the movies and TV shows referring to “American casualties” in 1991, including that movie with Meg Ryan, only about 200 Americans died in that war as opposed to 150,000+ Iraqis, mostly civilian. The movie, JARHEAD, unique among Gulf I movies, depicts burnt corpses on a highway crammed with cars and trucks bombed fleeing American air power and “smart bombs.”

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Ramzy Baroud

7/20/07

The news of recent weeks emanating from Washington and Baghdad point to one clear, if not final, conclusion: The Bush administration’s adventures in Iraq have been a complete failure.

What the media have eagerly dubbed as the Republican Revolt is now reinforced by two of the most distinguished Republican senators: John Warner of Virginia and Richard Lugar of Indiana. Before the Democrats’ takeover of the two positions in Congress, Warner was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee whereas Lugar presided over the Foreign Relations Committee. Their significance in the party in national security and foreign policy issues is simply uncontested.

Both senators proposed a measure requiring troop redeployment from frontline combat as early as January 1, 2008. The measure, unveiled on July 13, 2007, would require the White House to come up with a plan for realignment by October 16, 2007.

One only needs to consider the timing of that proposed realignment to appreciate the seriousness of the proposal. The head of the US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, along with US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, are expected to furnish a report to the Congress assessing how the war has progressed and whether the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has lived up to the conditions imposed by the Congress and signed by Bush. If Al-Maliki and his circle, which many see as sectarian-based, fail to show competence, there will be an aid cut.

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“The Decider Guy says he listens to the generals while ignoring any who practice reality instead of fantasy. Meanwhile, lives are lost, bodies are scarred, futures are blighted and American treasure and reputation are wasted.”

By Horace Coleman

7/19/07

The Los Angeles chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) picked Friday the thirteenth as the July date for its first LA area event. It was held in Venice, California at the Venice United Methodist church.

Speakers included Army Sergeant Ronn Cantu, home on leave from his second Iraq deployment, who was a spark plug in the Appeal to Redress petition given to Congress.

Iraq veteran Jabar Magruder, president of LA’s IVAW chapter and a California National Guard member, delivered that petition in Washington. Magruder gave a presentation that outline IVAW’s goals and methodology. Cantu and Magruder have been on CBS’ Sixty Minutes program.

Tim Goodrich, an Air Force veteran who served in the Middle East during the pre war bombing of Iraq, was the evening’s master of ceremonies. After being discharged, he was part of a civilian fact finding delegation to Baghdad. Goodrich is a founder of IVAW and a member of its national board.

Other members of the Los Angeles chapter also spoke. Several common points emerged. Patriotism. Disillusionment as no weapons of mass destruction were found. Routine military practices during what often amounted to “police work” that lead to the inevitable (desensitization, fear and callousness of war that made all Iraqi lives cheap). More than once the general indifference of the “(I)Pod people,” hedonistic and uncaring Americans, was mentioned.

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By Ed Ciaccio

7/14/07

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”

—-“The Hollow Men” - T.S. Eliot

“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”

–Hannah Arendt

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is ‘not done.’ Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

–George Orwell

‘We face a dire reality. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight. A nuclear strike on Iran may occur at any moment, based on a “false flag” terrorist attack to be blamed on Iran, as noted by Brzezinski and others. The neoconservative mania of the White House breeds war and hatred abroad. Secret prisons and torture have become routine.”

–Cindy Sheehan, July 4, 2007

Among the many rare species endangered by the Cheney/Bush regime over the last six years, too often with the complicity not only of Congressional Republicans, but many Democrats as well, is one which too many of us take for granted: our Constitutional system.

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By Rand Clifford

7/16/07

Who are we? We’re the winners—America loves a winner. In America there are winners, and everybody else. Remember that old saying, “It’s not if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”? Turns out that’s the motto for suckers, for losers. Winning is all that matters. Imagine if instead of glorifying lottery winners, the media paid homage to the losers? Be even more tedious than celebrity hijinks, eh, takes millions of losers to support one winner. Maybe that “how you play the game” motto is one reason you’ve lost your country, something to do with, perhaps, considering government a spectator sport. Remember the price of liberty being eternal vigilance? We know, that’s so history. One might think Americans are real history buffs; after all, the standard defense for having hundreds of moronic television channels remains: “There are good things, like the History Channel.” Well, for all of you spectators that actually watch the History Channel, instead of merely crowing about it, we’ve peppered it with propaganda, so the joke’s on you. Something else you might’ve snoozed away is the crucial truth: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” (George Orwell, from 1984)

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