Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive wars is creating a new deep divide in U.S. politics. On one side, Bush and his backers see the Iraq War as the start of an American global empire built around unparalleled military power. On the other, a scattered grouping of skeptics dig in for what they see as a fight for the soul of the American republic.
Without doubt, the Bush side now owns the strategic high ground, asserting vindication in the U.S. ouster of Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush also can claim near total mastery of a U.S. news media that shed any pretense of “objectivity” as it flooded the nation with heroic images of American soldiers and heart-warming scenes of grateful Iraqis, while downplaying civilian dead and growing signs that many Iraqis resent the U.S. occupation.
The anti-empire side finds itself pinned down, too, by accusations that its opposition to the three-week war was naïve and even disloyal. Plus, it's a disorganized mix of political interests, ranging from old-time conservatives to traditional liberals, from the likes of Pat Buchanan to Howard Dean. Yet as imbalanced as this struggle now appears, both sides agree that it holds in its outcome the future of the American democratic experiment.
The pro-empire side argues that only a militarily assertive United States can address what Bush calls “gathering dangers” facing the nation – even if that means tighter constraints on liberty at home and freer use of U.S. troops abroad. The pro-republic forces say Bush’s imperial strategy is a sham – false security that cedes life-and-death national decisions to the dictates of one man.
Shallow Media
To the pro-republic side, part of the price for empire is the increasingly shallow U.S. news media that largely sanitized the war. Rather than troubling Americans with gruesome images of mangled and dismembered Iraqi bodies, including many children, the cable networks, in particular, edited the war in ways that helped avoid negativity and gave advertisers the feel-good content that plays best around their products.
Fox News may have pioneered this concept of casting the war in the gauzy light of heroic imagery, where Iraqi soldiers were “goons” and interviews with Americans at war were packaged with the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the soundtrack.
But the supposedly less ideological MSNBC may have carried the idea to even greater lengths with Madison-Avenue-style montages of the Iraq war. One showed U.S. troops in heroic postures moving through Iraq. The segment ended with an American boy surrounded by yellow ribbons for his father at war, and the concluding slogan, “Home of the Brave.”
Another MSNBC montage showed happy Iraqis welcoming U.S. troops as liberators and rejoicing at the toppling of Hussein. These stirring pictures ended with the slogan, “Let Freedom Ring.”
Left out of these “news” montages were any images of death and destruction. For instance, there was no scene of a newly orphaned 12-year-old Iraqi boy waving the stump of what’s left of his arms. No sense either of the unspeakable pain of a father who was injured in a U.S. bombing and was about to learn that his three young daughters, who were the center of his life, were dead.
The happy montages also sanitized out the horror of a mother who found her 20-year-old daughter in the ruins of a bombed-out restaurant, first her torso and then her head. The U.S. had bombed the restaurant in a residential area thinking Hussein was there.
Cable news also downplayed evidence that many Iraqis, while glad to see Hussein gone, were angered by the U.S. invasion and its aftermath, which brought widespread destruction, arson and looting, including the loss of priceless antiquities of Mesopotamia dating back more than 5,000 years. The reaction to the U.S. occupation has included marches by thousands of Iraqis demanding withdrawal of U.S. troops and calling for an Iran-like Islamic state.
The Wall Street Journal took note of the dueling coverage presented by domestic CNN and its CNNI Networks, which broadcasts to international viewers. While domestic CNN focused on happy stories, such as the rescue of U.S. prisoner-of-war Jessica Lynch, CNNI carried more scenes of wounded civilians overflowing Iraqi hospitals.
“During the Gulf War in 1991, [CNN] presented a uniform global feed that showed the war largely through American eyes,” the Journal reported. “Since then, CNN has developed several overseas networks that increasingly cater their programming to regional audiences and advertisers.” [WSJ, April 11, 2003]
Left unsaid by the Journal’s formulation of how CNN’s overseas affiliates “cater” to foreign audiences was the flip side of that coin, that domestic CNN is freer to shape a version of the news that is more satisfying to Americans and to U.S. advertisers.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/042103a.html
By James Carroll, 4/22/2003
EVEN BEFORE conclusions can be drawn about the war in Iraq (Saddam? Weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi stability? Cost to civilians? Syria?) a home front consensus is jelling around a radical revision of America's meaning in the world.
Centered on coercive unilateralism, the new doctrine assumes that the United States not only stands apart from other countries but above them. The primitive tribalism of boys at football games -- ''We're number one!'' -- has been transformed into an axiom of strategy. Military force has replaced democratic idealism as the main source of US influence.
Formerly conceived of as essentially defensive, US armed services are now unapologetically on the offense. Aggression is prevention. Diplomacy is reduced to making the case for impending war and then putting the best face on war's denouement. The aim of all this is not world dominance but world order. That world order in the new age requires American dominance is an unintended consequence of America's power-altruism. That ''We're number one'' makes the world safe for everybody -- if only they accept it.
This new vision is clear, its advocates are powerful, and with Iraq its main blocks are in place, with obvious implications for countries as geographically dispersed as Iran and North Korea. What are the elements of an alternative vision? In a world traumatized by terrorist threat, weapons proliferation, and the sensationalism of Fox and CNN, disruption is infinitely magnified.
When such horror strikes, whether from twin towers collapsing or twin snipers shooting strangers, can human beings put faith in something other than overwhelming force? What strategies should critics of the new US doctrine of coercive unilateralism employ in opposing it? Learning from the past, I think of several:
Don't cede the language of morality to the right wing. Manichaean bipolarity oversimplifies good and evil, banalizing both. Still, some things should be done because they are right or opposed because they are wrong.
Critics of the intended new Pax Americana should not hesitate to say that long-agreed ethical principles are being violated. It is wrong to break treaties, as the United States is doing in its treatment of POWs in Cuba. It is wrong to wage aggressive war, as the United States now openly does. To make decisions for or against such policies on supposedly pragmatic grounds is to break the crucial link between means and ends, as if an outcome (''regime change'') can justify whatever was done to accomplish it. In the long run, the only truly pragmatic act is the moral act.
Be skeptical of ''homeland security.'' The American tradition prefers the risks associated with liberty to the risks associated with bureaucratic control. The new homeland security state threatens the kind of excess that came with the national security state after World War II. It was the National Security Act of 1947, after all, that laid the groundwork for the univocal bureaucratizing of government based in the Pentagon that marginalized debate and eliminated the natural checks of multiple power centers.
''National security,'' defined by anti-Communist paranoia at home and abroad, was false security. ''Homeland security'' promises to be a paranoid reprise.
Be suspicious of foreign policy based on ''worst case'' thinking. During the Cold War, the United States made fearful assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions that turned out to be entirely false -- assessments that shaped policy. Low-level intelligence estimates regularly reported mere possibilities of hostile threat, which, reported up the chain of command, were transformed into certain facts. Thus, Soviet troop strength was wildly overestimated in the beginning of the era; Soviet missile strength was overestimated in the middle; Soviet political strength was overestimated at the end. The result was a US-driven nuclear arms race, the effects of which still threaten the world.
The worst case for the Soviet Union existed only in Washington's fantasy. And now it seems that the Saddam worst case resides in the same place. A nation that is so driven by fear will always find things to be afraid of. That nation's gravest threat arises, of course, from what it then does to defend itself.
Beware of war as an organizing principle of society. It should be a source of alarm, not pride, that the United States is drawing such cohesive sustenance from the war in Iraq.
Photographic celebrations of our young warriors, glorifications of released American prisoners, heroic rituals of the war dead all take on the character of crass exploitation of the men and women in uniform. First they were forced into a dubious circumstance, and now they are themselves being mythologized as its main post-facto justification -- as if the United States went to Iraq not to seize Saddam (disappeared), or to dispose of weapons of mass destruction (missing), or to save the Iraqi people (chaos), but ''to support the troops.'' War thus becomes its own justification. Such confusion on this grave point, as on the others, signifies a nation lost.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 4/22/2003.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/112/oped/A_nation_lost+.shtml
Ask not what you can do ...
VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney still receives paychecks from Halliburton. This money is “deferred compensation” from his time as the conglomerate’s CEO. Apparently, taking deferred compensation when he resigned, instead of a lump sum, offered “tax advantages.”
No one likes paying taxes. And lots of people use creative means to lower their tax bite. But there is something unseemly about the vice president of the United States remaining on the payroll of a private company in order to elude taxes — especially considering that Cheney is awash in money after his rocky tenure at Halliburton.
He made $10 million in salary and bonuses, plus something like $30 million in stock options. That’s for five years of work. You’d think Cheney could afford to share a little of that wealth with the government he’s helping to lead, especially to avoid the ethically questionable situation of remaining on the payroll of a company that gets billions of dollars in government contracts.
We’ve come a long, long way from “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Then again, under Cheney’s leadership, Halliburton found plenty of “tax advantages.” The number of Halliburton subsidiaries establishing offshore headquarters to evade federal taxes increased from nine to 44 during Cheney’s five years.
The company went from paying $302 million in taxes in 1998 to receiving an $85 million rebate in 1999. Meanwhile, much of the income Halliburton didn’t pay taxes on was coming from billions of dollars in government contracts Cheney helped secure.
Halliburton isn’t the only company sneaking offshore to ease or erase its tax burden. The IRS estimates that eliminating the offshore loophole would bring in $70 billion annually. Coincidentally, that’s almost enough to pay for President Bush’s war in Iraq.
Legislation to outlaw this practice, called the “Corporate Patriot Enforcement Act,” is going nowhere, perhaps because so many of these companies use a small fraction of their ill-gotten gains to shower money on Congress.
Republicans in Congress even derailed an attempt to simply prevent corporate “ex-patriots” from winning homeland security contracts.
Tax cheats shouldn’t get government contracts. And a person more interested in “tax advantages” than in honorably, honestly and ethically serving his country shouldn’t be vice president of the United States.
http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Editorials/200304201/
by Maureen Farrell
"Oh, man, look here. Look, look, down here," exclaimed the ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dreaded.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.
'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom. . . ." -- Charles Dickens
* * *
By now, many are familiar with Operation Northwoods, the U.S. plan to wage terrorist attacks against American citizens and blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for war. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document read. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," it continued. Developed through the far-right stewardship of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, in an early '60s atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia, Operation Northwoods was approved by all Joint Chiefs of Staff, but nixed by the civilian leadership. "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will," Body of Secrets author James Bamford told ABC News "and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html
Sound familiar? Just wait.
Though President Kennedy assured Lemnitzer that America would never overtly attack Cuba, military ideologues met one month after submitting Northwoods and wrote a memo to Robert McNamara claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw "no prospect" of Castro being overthrown through "internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures," felt that "military interventions [would] be required to overthrow the present Communist regime." The memo indicated that the Joint Chiefs believed that this could be "accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunity for solicitation of U.N. action" and that after U.S. forces assured "rapid essential control of Cuba, continued police action would be required." In other words, they would bypass the U.N. and America's military would keep Cuba's peace. "[W]hat Lemnitzer was suggesting," Bamford wrote, "was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.-controlled police state."
Our Ignorance, Their Want
by Maureen Farrell
"Oh, man, look here. Look, look, down here," exclaimed the ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dreaded.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.
'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom. . . ." -- Charles Dickens
* * *
By now, many are familiar with Operation Northwoods, the U.S. plan to wage terrorist attacks against American citizens and blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for war. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document read. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," it continued. Developed through the far-right stewardship of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, in an early '60s atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia, Operation Northwoods was approved by all Joint Chiefs of Staff, but nixed by the civilian leadership. "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will," Body of Secrets author James Bamford told ABC News "and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html
Sound familiar? Just wait.
Though President Kennedy assured Lemnitzer that America would never overtly attack Cuba, military ideologues met one month after submitting Northwoods and wrote a memo to Robert McNamara claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw "no prospect" of Castro being overthrown through "internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures," felt that "military interventions [would] be required to overthrow the present Communist regime." The memo indicated that the Joint Chiefs believed that this could be "accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunity for solicitation of U.N. action" and that after U.S. forces assured "rapid essential control of Cuba, continued police action would be required." In other words, they would bypass the U.N. and America's military would keep Cuba's peace. "[W]hat Lemnitzer was suggesting," Bamford wrote, "was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.-controlled police state."
Thursday, February 27, 2003
As the 2000 Presidential Campaign drew to a close, the Bush Campaign confidently promised a foreign policy that would call upon seasoned veterans of the diplomatic corps, many of them old hands that had served back as far as the Nixon/Ford Administration. Things were going to be different. No more of those ill-defined "nation building" or "peace keeping" missions in countries we'd never heard of.
The grown-ups were going to be back in charge of foreign policy.
What we've seen so far is a foreign policy that is stunningly reckless, one which may yet cause the United States, the nominal leader of the free world and sole remaining super power, to become an international pariah. The Administration's "won't take 'no' for an answer" stance on war with Iraq will damage our standing in the world community for a generation – and that's only if we somehow manage to avoid an invasion. War with Iraq could have dangerous repercussions.
The Bush Administration dug its own grave in many respects. It started by rejecting the Kyoto Accords on the global environment and by repudiating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that the United States signed nearly thirty years ago. The Administration also rejected an international ban on land mines, a pact to limit the sales of small arms in Third World countries, and the International Criminal Court.
Even a momentary flood of international sympathy for the United States after the World Trade Center attack couldn't erase the basic belief among our allies that the Bush Administration was going to go its own way. Signing treaties and cooperating across national boundaries were not a priority for the Bush Administration.
When the West Bank erupted into violence in the fall of 2001, the Bush Administration did nothing. It wasn't until the body count had reached levels too high too ignore that Secretary of State Colin Powell made a belated – and completely ineffectual – visit to the region. Since both sides knew that the Bush Administration was not going to spend political capital on finding a peaceful solution, it was time to lock and load the minute Powell's plane went wheels up from Tel Aviv.
The most telling moment in the Bush Administration's foreign policy came when the UN Human Rights Commission voted to boot the United States off the panel. The U.S. was restored to the Commission the following year, but only after the Bush Administration threatened to withhold a quarter billion dollars in funding from the perennially cash-strapped United Nations.
'What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands'
On February 25 1991 the war correspondent Leon Daniel arrived at a battlefield at the tip of the neutral zone between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Daniel was one of a pool of journalists who had been held back from witnessing action the previous day, when Desert Storm's ground war had been launched. There, right where he was standing, 8,400 soldiers of the US First Infantry Division - known as the Big Red One - had attacked an estimated 8,000 Iraqis with 3,000 Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees and armoured personnel carriers.
Daniel had seen the aftermath of modest firefights in Vietnam. "The bodies would be stacked up like cordwood," he recalled. Yet this ferocious attack had not produced a single visible body. It was a battlefield without the stench of urine, faeces, blood and bits of flesh. Daniel wondered what happened to the estimated 6,000 Iraqi defenders who had vanished. "Where are the bodies?" he finally asked the First Division's public affairs officer, an army major. "What bodies?" the major replied.
Months later, Daniel and the world would learn why the dead had eluded eyewitnesses, cameras and video footage. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them firing their weapons from first world war-style trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets into Iraqi troops.
"I came through right after the lead company," said Colonel Anthony Moreno. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."
Two other brigades used the same tank-mounted ploughs and Bradleys to obliterate an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches. They moved swiftly. The operation had been rehearsed repeatedly, weeks before, on a mile-long trench line built according to satellite photographs. The finishing touches were made by armoured combat earth-movers (ACEs). These massive bulldozers, with armoured cockpits impervious to small-arms fire, smoothed away any hint of the carnage. "A lot of guys were scared, but I enjoyed it," said PFC Joe Queen, an ACE driver awarded a Bronze Star for his performance in the battle.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Plan could kill millions in 48 hours -- why don't Americans care?
Exactly a month ago Pentagon planner Harlan Ullman, in a CBS-TV interview, publicly revealed for the first time the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" plan for its assault upon Iraq, should (or when) George W. Bush orders it.
Ullman's information was subsequently confirmed by a number of sources; it's for real. Here is what I wrote about it in my column of January 30:
"The plan includes simultaneous ground invasions from north and south... It also includes a sudden decimation of Baghdad by raining down on its people, in two days, over 800 cruise missiles -- more than were used in the entire Gulf War. Ullman... characterized the Baghdad assault thusly: `You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons of Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.' It would be a firestorm, a Dresden or Tokyo with 60 years of new technology. It would be a war crime of quick and staggering proportions.
"Such a plan, of course, makes a mockery of Donald Rumsfeld's ritual insistence that the Pentagon takes enormous care to avoid civilian casualties; the plan apparently is to kill a staggering percentage of Baghdad's civilian population in the first day alone. ... The name refers to the demoralizing effect such an attack would have on Iraqis, an effect, presumably, similar to the instant (although already planned) surrender of Japan after the gratuitous bombing of Hiroshima (and even more gratuitous bombing of Nagasaki. But those were, both military and diplomatically, demonstration attacks -- suggesting what could be done to the imperial rulers themselves and to Tokyo, a city far more valuable and populous than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
"If they had killed us once, it would not be so bad. But what the Americans have brought upon us is not only depriving us but our future generations of our basic god given human right, the right to live. They will be killing us for generations to come" (An Afghan Victim of US-UK bombing)
In Afghanistan, elders used to cite an ancient saying "we are made for death and death is made for us" to point to the inescapable reality of facing death sooner or later. However, when this natural phenomenon changes form from its natural course to one tailored by humans, it becomes a tool of life deprivation. This tailored and forced deprivation of life on millions of people took a form of its own when used for cleansing generations of people of their basic human right, their right to live. Specifically, for millions in Afghanistan, their natural course of life and death took a sharp turn when US-UK military used uranium based weapons. This violation of immense proportion transformed the natural process of birth, growth and death into the inescapable horrors of perpetual death.
Perpetual death is characterized by continuous murder of people of a community, state or nation. It takes several forms. It could be exercised by conventional means of imposing war and destruction on people. The Russians have institutionalized this horror in Afghanistan by its invasion of the country in 1979 and sustained perpetual death there by planting millions of mines scattered all over country. The United States government also shares this responsibility after it abandoned the Afghans, leaving them to death and despair and refused to help them by clearing the millions of mines left behind after the Sovietsí retreat. These mines have been maiming and killing Afghans daily since the early 1980s.
However, the form that is exercised currently is the indiscriminate use of the Weapons of Mass Destruction, namely the usage of uranium based weapons. This mode of the perpetual death lives up to its name because it continues to foster deaths of thousands silently and indiscriminately. In fact, the usage of the Weapons of Mass Destruction alters the texture of the ecosystem wherein the victims reside. This ultimately condemns the people living there and future generations to death, and deprives them of their fundamental human right, the right to live.
The perpetrators of this horrible crime are the governments of the United States and that of the United Kingdom. The US and the UK are the only two countries used these horrible weapons indiscriminately in Iraq during the Gulf War and Balkans in the 1990s and in Afghanistan from October 7th, 2001 onward. Meanwhile, based on past experiences with victims of the US-UK bombing in Iraq and the Balkans, every informed source suspected to have similar situation in Afghanistan. Tragically, the US-UK armed forces have used three times more uranium based weapons in Afghanistan than they did in Iraq or in the Balkans. In fact, the types of Weapons of Mass Destruction used in Afghanistan are more potent than those used in Iraq.
Losing Democracy?
LOS ANGELES -- There is a subtext to what the Bushites are doing as they prepare for war in Iraq. My hypothesis is that President George W. Bush and many conservatives have come to the conclusion that the only way they can save America and get if off its present downslope is to become a regime with a greater military presence and drive toward empire. My fear is that Americans might lose their democracy in the process.
By downslope I'm referring not only to the corporate scandals, the church scandals and the FBI scandals. The country has gone kind of crazy in the eyes of conservatives. Also, kids can't read anymore. Especially for conservatives, the culture has become too sexual.
Iraq is the excuse for moving in an imperial direction. War with Iraq, as they originally conceived it, would be a quick, dramatic step that would enable them to control the Near East as a powerful base - not least because of the oil there, as well as the water supplies from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers - to build a world empire.
The Bushites also expect to bring democracy to the region and believe that in itself will help to diminish terrorism. But I expect the opposite will happen: terrorists are not impressed by democracy. They loathe it. They are fundamentalists of the most basic kind. The more successful democracy is in the Near East - not likely in my view - the more terrorism it will generate.
The only outstanding obstacle to the drive toward empire in the Bushites' minds is China. Indeed, one of the great fears in the Bush administration about America's downslope is that the "stem studies" such as science, technology and engineering are all faring poorly in U.S. universities. The number of American doctorates is going down and down. But the number of Asians obtaining doctorates in those same stem studies are increasing at a great rate.
Looking 20 years ahead, the administration perceives that there will come a time when China will have technology superior to America's. When that time comes, America might well say to China that "we can work together," we will be as the Romans to you Greeks. You will be our extraordinary, well-cultivated slaves. But don't try to dominate us. That would be your disaster. This is the scenario that some of the brightest neoconservatives are thinking about. (I use Rome as a metaphor, because metaphors are usually much closer to the truth than facts).
What has happened, of course, is that the Bushites have run into much more opposition than they thought they would from other countries and among the home population. It may well end up that we won't have a war, but a new strategy to contain Iraq and wear Saddam down. If that occurs, Bush is in terrible trouble.
They're hoping Americans won't notice.
Indeed, in late February a "senior administration official" presented The New York Times with a masterpiece of obfuscation and avoidance of responsibility. Speaking of the administration's plans to push users of Medicare and Medicaid into the hands of for-profit corporations, this "official" said, "We're looking at two programs that have worked, that have provided health coverage to people who need it, and we want to help them work better."
Ted Kennedy was more straightforward in his objection to the Bush scheme. "Medicare is a firm commitment to every elderly American," Kennedy said, "not a profit center for H.M.O.s and other private insurance plans."
Robin Toner and Robert Pear of The New York Times wrote in an understated tone that, "The magnitude of the Bush proposals is only gradually dawning on members of Congress."
It's also dawning on mainstream Americans.
When you look closely, you discover that what so many are calling the "conservative agenda" would be shocking and alien to historic conservatives like Republicans Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater. It really has nothing to do with conservative or liberal, left or right, war or peace. It doesn't care about abortion, prayer, or flags, although these are useful props to bring in fringe groups to "fill the big tent." It's not even about liberty, freedom, or prosperity.
Today's so-called "conservative agenda" is, very simply, about ownership.
Specifically, ownership of the assets of the United States of America - things previously owned by "We, The People." And, ultimately, ownership of the United States government itself.
The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They came to power by means of national elections which possess, at least, the potential to represent the will of their people. Their citizens can dismiss them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation that, if enough people join in, they will be obliged to listen.
Internationally, they rule by brute force. They and the global institutions they run exercise greater economic and political control over the people of the poor world than its own governments do. But those people can no sooner challenge or replace them than the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out of office. Their global governance is, by all the classic political definitions, tyrannical.
But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny are limited, it seems to be creating some of the conditions for its own destruction. Over the past week, the US government has threatened to dismantle two of the institutions which have, until recently, best served its global interests.
On Saturday, President Bush warned the UN security council that accepting a new resolution authorising a war with Iraq was its "last chance" to prove "its relevance". Four days before, a leaked document from the Pentagon showed that this final opportunity might already have passed. The US is planning to build a new generation of nuclear weapons in order to enhance its ability to launch a pre-emptive attack. This policy threatens both the comprehensive test ban treaty and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty - two of the principal instruments of global security - while endangering the international compact that the UN exists to sustain. The security council, which, despite constant disruption, survived the cold war, is beginning to look brittle in its aftermath.
On Wednesday, the US took a decisive step towards the destruction of the World Trade Organisation. The WTO's current trade round collapsed in Seattle in 1999 because the poor nations perceived that it offered them nothing, while granting new rights to the rich world's corporations. It was relaunched in Qatar in 2001 only because those nations were promised two concessions: they could override the patents on expensive drugs and import cheaper copies when public health was threatened, and they could expect a major reduction in the rich world's agricultural subsidies. At the WTO meeting in Geneva last week, the US flatly reneged on both promises.
The Republicans' victory in the mid-term elections last November was secured with the help of $60m from America's big drug firms. This appears to have been a straightforward deal: we will buy the elections for you if you abandon the concession you made in Qatar. The agri-business lobbies in both the US and Europe appear to have been almost as successful: the poor nations have been forced to discuss a draft document which effectively permits the rich world to continue dumping its subsidised products in their markets.
Conceived in Israel
In a lengthy article in The American Conservative criticizing the rationale for the projected U.S. attack on Iraq, the veteran diplomatic historian Paul W. Schroeder noted (only in passing) "what is possibly the unacknowledged real reason and motive behind the policy — security for Israel." If Israel's security were indeed the real American motive for war, Schroeder wrote,
It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state. [1]
Is there any evidence that Israel and her supporters have managed to get the United States to fight for their interests?
To unearth the real motives for the projected war on Iraq, one must ask the critical question: How did the 9/11 terrorist attack lead to the planned war on Iraq, even though there is no real evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11? From the time of the 9/11 attack, neoconservatives, of primarily (though not exclusively) Jewish ethnicity and right-wing Zionist persuasion, have tried to make use of 9/11 to foment a broad war against Islamic terrorism, the targets of which would coincide with the enemies of Israel.
Although the term neoconservative is in common usage, a brief description of the group might be helpful. Many of the first-generation neocons originally were liberal Democrats, or even socialists and Marxists, often Trotskyites. They drifted to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as the Democratic Party moved to the antiwar McGovernite left. And concern for Israel loomed large in that rightward drift. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg puts it:
One major factor that drew them inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right's hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel's security. [2]
BUSH SAYS HOW HIGH?
This article is going to be about Jews. So if you're uncomfortable with the subject I suggest you bail out right now.
Several months ago I wrote an article for our daily newspaper that I shouldn't have written if I were promoting my career.
It seems that I had the unmitigated gall to question what America was getting in return for the 3 to 5 billion dollars we are "investing" in Israel every year.
The article got me blackballed. Well, not exactly blackballed. But along with being demonized as an anti-Semitic, the paper never accepted any further articles I wrote. Naïve me, I couldn't understand what I had done wrong. Now I know better.
So let's connect a few dots.
A short while back I read a report that at a Knesset meeting Ariel Sharon had said to his deputy, Shimon Peres---Don't worry about the Americans. We own America. And all along I thought WE owned it.
Not willing to accept that at face value, I contacted a reporter in Hebron to try to verify Sharon's outburst. Sure enough, the reporter told me that news of Sharon's offhand remark had, in fact, been broadcast from an Israeli radio station, and that both Israelis and Palestinians had heard it and were talking about it.
Are the dots connecting?
And now, it was just reported by Aluf Benn and Sharon Sadeh, correspondents for Israel's Haaratz newspaper, that Sharon told a delegation of American congressmen that Iran, Libya and Syria should also be stripped of their weapons, after we deal with Iraq.
"These are irresponsible states," cooed Sharon, "which must be disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq will make that easier to achieve."
The dots are forming a picture.
Some time later, Sharon told a certain Mr. Bolten that Israel was concerned about the security threat posed by Iran, and thought it important to deal with Iran even while America's attention was focused on Iraq.
For a minute, I thought Bush was our president.. Mr. Bolten mentioned in a meeting with Israeli officials, that there was no doubt that America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats from Iran, Syria and North Korea. You heard right, North Korea.
To get everybody in the loop, Mr. Bolton also met with Israel's Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky, Housing and Construction Minister.
Not to discuss the price of concrete, I'm sure.
And who is this mysterious Mr. Bolten that is so cozy with Sharon and other Israeli officials that he has no qualms about sinking America deeper into the Middle East quagmire, and even designating where American troops will have to fight after Iraq is defeated?
Is he an Israeli power broker? I'm afraid not. He is Joshua B. Bolten, President Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff, policy director for the Bush 2000 campaign, and one of about 25 Jews in the highest offices in the Bush administration. One of YOUR esteemed government officials.
The dots have produced an ugly picture.
You may have heard that Israel is calling the shots in Americas foreign policy, and have asked yourself, why are there so many Jews in the Bush administration, and what are they doing there?
Historian Paul W. Schroeder probably wondered that too when he wrote: "If Israel's security were indeed the real American motive for war, it would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state."
Is that a classic switch or what?
Recently the novelist John le Carré wrote in the Times of London that the United States has entered a “period of madness” that dwarfs McCarthyism or the Vietnam intervention in intensity. One generally would not pay much attention to the cynical British spy-tale weaver, never especially friendly to America. But concern about America’s mental health is more broadly in the air, spreading well beyond the usual professional anti-Americans. It is now pervasive in Europe, and growing in Asia, and when Matt Drudge posted le Carré’s piece prominently on his website, it got passed around and talked about here in ways it never would have five years ago.
The proximate cause of le Carré’s diagnosis is Washington’s plan for a pre-emptive war against Iraq, a nation whose weapons pose no threat to the United States and that has no substantial links to al-Qaeda or 9/11. The U.S. would fight this war virtually without allies, though a few countries might be dragged into the fray against the will of their populations. But mad or not, this drive toward war is not mania of sudden onset but ratification of a neo-imperialist strategy that has been germinating in neoconservative circles since the end of the Cold War.
A new war against Iraq was a gleam in the eye of a small but influential group long before 9/11. In 1998, the newly established Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an advocacy group chaired by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, began sending open letters from prominent foreign policy hawks. First, it wrote to the Clinton administration calling upon the United States to “remove Saddam’s regime.” When its advice was ignored, PNAC asked Republican Congressional leaders to push for war. The signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (now number two at the Pentagon), Elliott Abrams (recently appointed to the National Security Council as a director of Mid-East policy), William Bennett, John Bolton (now Undersecretary of State), and the ubiquitous Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board and often considered the central figure the interlocking web of neoconservative think tanks.
Does the Bible foretell regime change in Iraq? Did God establish Israel's boundaries millennia ago? Is the United Nations a forerunner of a satanic world order?
For millions of Americans, the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes. For many believers in biblical prophecy, the Bush administration's go-it-alone foreign policy, hands-off attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and proposed war on Iraq are not simply actions in the national self-interest or an extension of the war on terrorism, but part of an unfolding divine plan.
Evangelical Christians have long complained that "people of faith" do not get sufficient respect, and that religious belief is trivialized in our public discourse. So argues Stephen L. Carter, a Yale University law professor and an evangelical Christian, in his 1993 "The Culture of Disbelief." Carter has a point, at least with reference to my own field of American history. With notable exceptions, cultural historians have long underplayed the importance of religion in the United States, particularly in the modern era. Church historians have produced good work, but somewhat in isolation, cut off from the larger currents of cultural and intellectual history. That is changing, as evidenced by Mark A. Noll's magisterial "America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln" (2002). But, over all, the critics are on target.
However, I would vigorously challenge Carter's related complaint that religious belief plays little role in shaping public policy. In fact, religion has always had an enormous, if indirect and underrecognized, role in policy formation.
And that is especially true today, as is illustrated by the shadowy but vital way that belief in biblical prophecy is helping mold grassroots attitudes toward current U.S. foreign policy. As the nation debates a march toward war in the Middle East, all of us would do well to pay attention to the beliefs of the vast company of Americans who read the headlines and watch the news through a filter of prophetic belief
February 20, 2003—A Washington-based watchdog group uncovered recently proposed legislation authored by the sociopaths in the Bush administration that would steal even more of the nation's civil liberties.
A Georgetown University Law professor and author of "Terrorism and the Constitution," Dr. David Cole, said the legislation, called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, "raises a lot of serious concerns. It's troubling that they (the Justice Department) have gotten this far along, and they've been telling people there is nothing in the works."
Cole warned that this proposed law "would radically expand law enforcement and intelligence authorities, reduce or eliminate judicial oversight over surveillance, authorize secret arrests, create a DNA database based on unchecked executive suspicion, create new death penalties and even seek to take American citizenship away from persons who belong to or support disfavored political groups."
The Center for Public Integrity (CPI), the Washington-based watchdog group, obtained a draft of what analysts call a sequel to the USA PATRIOT Act or PATRIOT II. The Bush administration rammed the onerous USA PATRIOT Act down the throat of a spineless Congress in the hysteria that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Most of the lawmakers never even read the lengthy bill that civil libertarians warned compromises the nation's 215-year-old constitution.
LAKE OSWEGO — Tony McPeak, a four-star general who headed the U.S. Air Force during Desert Storm, believes that President Bush should publicly admit personal failure and restart diplomatic negotiations for a possible war against Iraq.
McPeak, who retired to Oregon in 1995, says Bush has botched the crucial process of building a coalition, of enlisting the United Nations and of rebuilding Afghanistan as a model of reconstruction.
“The world would breathe a sigh of relief, and we’d go back and do it right” if Bush admitted failure, says the 67-year-old McPeak. “I mean, the world would fall in love with this guy. It’s not that hard to fix.”
McPeak served four years on the Joint Chiefs of Staff advising Bush’s father and then President Clinton after flying 269 Vietnam combat missions and participating in the Thunderbirds, the elite aerobatic team. He is also a graduate of Grants Pass High School.
Despite his military career, McPeak questions Bush’s priorities as the president confronts terrorism, North Korea and Saddam Hussein. It makes him worry about a return to federal budget deficits and about declining goodwill toward the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
“I pray that America will last another thousand years, and during all of that time we’re a pre-eminent power,” says McPeak. “To do that, you have to understand the world in a more sophisticated way. You make your friends many and your enemies few.”
As chief of staff from 1990 to 1994, McPeak accomplished the biggest reorganization of the Air Force in its history. He believes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be dramatically transforming the military to confront the new terrorist threat, slashing redundancy and cutting heavy Army divisions in favor of agile special forces.
Guarding the Washington Monument with Stinger missiles, McPeak says, is “amateur hour.”
McPeak thinks U.S. forces may well encounter biological weapons in Iraq but not chemical munitions, which are difficult to deploy.
Airstrikes would wipe out Baghdad’s communications system again, McPeak says.
Close combat in Baghdad would be stupid, he says, despite what Army generals may advocate.
“We’ve already radicalized 99 percent of the Arabs in the world,” he said. “We’ll get the holdouts if we start doing hand-to-hand combat in Baghdad.”
FEBRUARY 25. The American Gulf War Veterans Association, led by Joyce Riley, has issued a press release that accuses US forces of setting huge oil fires in Kuwait at the end of Gulf War One.
At the time, those fires---blamed on Saddam---burned a billion barrels of oil over a seven-month period and raised a poisonous lingering cloud over the Persian Gulf nations.
The ecological/health disaster persists to this day (see a story posted by CNN on Jan.3, 2003).
From Riley’s release: “One [US] veteran has now stepped forward and given a detailed account of how he and others in special teams moved forward of the front…and then set charges on the [Kuwait oil] well heads.”
This veteran, as yet unnamed, states, “We were mustered into the briefing tent at which point a gentleman who I first had thought to be an American began to brief us on the operation [to burn the oil fields]. I was concerned because he was not wearing a US uniform and insignias.”
A new CNN system of 'script approval' suggests the Pentagon will have nothing to worry about
Already, the American press is expressing its approval of the coverage of American forces which the US military intends to allow its reporters in the next Gulf war. The boys from CNN, CBS, ABC and The New York Times will be "embedded" among the US marines and infantry. The degree of censorship hasn't quite been worked out. But it doesn't matter how much the Pentagon cuts from the reporters' dispatches. A new CNN system of "script approval" – the iniquitous instruction to reporters that they have to send all their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure it is suitably sanitised – suggests that the Pentagon and the Department of State have nothing to worry about. Nor do the Israelis.
Indeed, reading a new CNN document, "Reminder of Script Approval Policy", fairly takes the breath away. "All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval," it says. "Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved... All packages originating outside Washington, LA (Los Angeles) or NY (New York), including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW in Atlanta for approval."