4,100 Plus
When the Democrat-majority, 110th Congress was sworn in, and was election-
mandated to end the war, the toll of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq stood at 2,994.
Direct responsibility is now shared by Republicans in Congress, without excuse or equivocation, for
more spilled blood and lives lost in an occupation harmful to the nation, unjustifiable, and unjust.
An independent judiciary is the dam against tyranny, insuring the Constitution is reenforced by the rule of law.Since James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution,
On the last day of October, in election year 2006, and for many days prior to that, Bush has continued his assault upon the courts and the Constitution, saying, “For decades, activist judges
The fact that such threats have been made by Bush and other conservative Republicans in the Bush government, and that veteran Supreme Court justices are seriously voicing concerns about those threats and the perceptions of those who so engage them, and the public, a condition of instability in the constitutional system has been identified that requires correction by means of a constitutional amendment, to further insure the future independence of the judicial branch and the consequent preservation of the Constitution and the democratic process.
The concerns expressed by some justices regarding problems of public perceptions and support are, in part, their own making. It is the Court that mandates it will be shielded from public view in the performance of its business, rather than operate in the sunshine. The reasons for this “private club” attitude are contrary to democratic process, unnecessary, somewhat egotistical, and a dated norm of tradition. Perhaps their more practical concerns about public perceptions, as relates to the valid need for independence, will cause them to reconsider their outdated closed-door attitudes. In this, the time has passed for them to follow the lead of Congress and open the bench to the public eye.
Funding
Funding for the courts should be stipulated to be a fixed percentage of the appropriation Congress authorizes for itself. Funding to enforce decisions must be either automatic or mandated, not a matter of political choice. The courts must not be dependent upon any other branch to be funded or see its decisions set aside by the political funding choice of another branch. The failure to fund the rulings of the Court is inherently unconstitutional, since it renders the judiciary moot, which is the antithesis of the intention of the Founders as well as to any practical, logical means of upholding rule of law or insuring the protections of the Constitution. It is an abuse that has no place and must be blocked. For legitimate concerns on the legality of judicial performance, “good behavior” is a subjective and actionable term that has a proper place in the checks and balances of things.
Appointments Appointments are addressed because the imbalance in the judiciary is also problematic from within. The source of the problem is in the political fever to “load” the court whenever the power in the other two branches changes hands. With such an overbearing priority for loading that there is foaming at the mouth for perceived other-side-aligned judges to die or retire, it is no wonder that among the nine justices and the numerous trial judges there will be loaded some bad apples, resulting in rulings that are contrary to the Constitution, such as the recent rulings that upheld the seizure of private property intended to be turned over to developers under the power of eminent domain, and the ruling that independent citizens have no standing to challenge executive orders that violate the Constitution’s prohibition of laws violating the principles of religious equality and autonomy. Others will point to police roadblocks—checkpoints, a restriction of movement and unreasonable search with no probable cause, which is really a tilt on the balance between individual rights and public welfare, in favor of the latter. Right and rights are not absolute, but a better appointment process will increase the chance that the balances made are on a constitutional scale, not a political one.
Ideally, the appointment process should be free of political influence of either party. Rather, bipartisan panels should be formed to process nominations and confirmations, and I would submit that those panels should borrow from Irish democratic process and also include invited tenured professors of constitutional law, whose assessment of candidates would be more objectively to the point of law and advisory to the senators, oversight to the public.
Alternatively, in those times when the same party controls both the Senate and the White House, appointees to the federal courts should require a greater majority of votes in the Senate for ratification, and/or, the president should be required to make his nomination in concurrence with the Senate majority and minority leaders.
Enforcement If the Supreme Court finds its rulings are not being enforced, it shall initiate a hearing on the charge by notice to the senate which will be answered by the solicitor general. The executive and the senate will each select one judge sitting on the federal bench to join the panel of nine justices. Any subsequent ruling on the hearing by the panel which finds the president to be in defiance of enforcement of the Court’s ruling must be unanimous to be sustained, and must then result in immediate compliance by the executive, an impeachment proceeding to automatically be initiated in Congress upon notice by the Court that such compliance has not been forthcoming, requiring only a simple majority to convict.
When considering the far-reaching, almost prophetic thought of the men who created the Constitution,Madison, in particular, held little trust for those in power and was very outspoken in warning that all power corrupts. He was especially mindful of too much power in the hands of the president, despite that he was Washington’s
“Listen” to Madison’s words and think of how they apply to today’s incarnation of his government. It begins with multiple expressions regarding the abuse of power, and then goes on to address the careless relinquishing of power in trying times, an issue very much alive with the concerns of the Patriot Act, the attempts by Bush to grab power with his legislative sign-offs, the attacks against the judiciary, and the use of fear to gain support for accumulating ever greater and farther-reaching powers.
“Tyranny” meant the more subtle abuse of the minority by the majority—not so much a Nazi or Genghis Kahn type of violent repression and control, though that would be the possible result of an excess allowed to go too far. Nip it in the bud would be Madison’s strong warning. He went on:“All men having power ought to be mistrusted.”“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
These quotes of Madison all have bearing upon today’s choices for citizens. And to Bush’s claims—that power in his hands will keep fighting away from U.S. streets—all are a stern warning.“The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.”“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Madison also envisioned the distancing of the government from the people by the induced complexities of those elite who work at its strings. Think of the myriad of codes for taxes and the internal rules that govern process in the houses of Congress, none from the Constitution, that have become as weeds choking and obscuring the cleanly constructed tripod legs of government they now encase when Madison says:
And if ever there was doubt that the Congress has failed in its responsibilities under the Constitution, that it has dangerously ceded its power and its oversight, then look at what the Congress has allowed Bush to do to America with Iraq, from the viewpoint of the words from the Constitution’s supreme mind:“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”
To senators and congressmen running for office and defending whether or not they voted to support the war in Iraq, the quote above would be Madison’s instruction that it was not the role of Congress to sign off on Bush’s initiative in Iraq. It is for the executive to seek and obtain the initiative for war from the Congress! The inverse of Madison’s stated intent also leaves it to the judgement of Congress, not the president, to decide whether there is or is not cause for terminating a war, as is written in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution. The course to war in Iraq is a travesty of power as twisted as Madison would be after rolling over in his grave from witnessing it.“The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.” — James Madison
Countering the stance of those who argue the meaning of the Constitution’s War Powers clause from the perspective of presidential power, that declaring war is different from the undeclared use of force, the Supreme Court expressly ruled, in 1862, that the Constitution’s exclusion of executive power to “declare” war also extends to “initiate” without declaration. The presidentialists’ stance that the role of Congress to declare does not exclude undeclared presidential force initiatives because the congressional role to declare was intended simply to be a trigger mechanism for other domestic and international war-related laws is equally invalid. The legal basis against this view and against the president’s sole authority without congressional declaration is also supported by the Founders, especially Madison’s expressed caution against vesting too much power in one person, and there is no more affecting power than the direction of force of arms, which is assumed to follow a declaration, and which the president is then authorized, by the larger body of the minds and hearts of the elected representatives of Congress, to conduct. Who can contrive or construe that the Founders, so fearful of the power of force they saw so ruthlessly directed against them by England’s King, would ever conceive to construct a government where that power, for domestic or international purpose, would ever again be vested within one man to threaten? No, their words and their Constitution bars that, even in the case of an authorized use of force by the president to counter an attack (defend), where, the attack suppressed, any extended, continued use of such force to pursue the enemy would only be constitutional when authorized by Congress. The further specificity with which the Constitution withholds related war powers from the president (Marque and Reprisal, and the Captures Clauses of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11), vesting them, as well, only in Congress, reinforces the intent of the Founders that all powers of armed conflict, save initiating immediate defense responses, be so specifically and solely within the power of Congress and not the president. In Iraq, there never was any element of the 911 attack forces, present or directing, against which any defensive-initiative authority could have constitutionally applied. And look, there, at the death and mayhem, and at home, the resultant damage, grief, and sorrow one man’s abuse of such power has wrought, as the Founders knew it could!
And to the conservative Republicans and their moral right, Madison has left this:
It goes on and on, gems of wisdom, gifts from American history,“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”
All good sportsmen know
State of the Union
Isolationism? Bush uses the label merely to deflect and disguise the ugly truth that defines his actions in the White House. Every statistic that you can assess, in business, foreign exchange—both cultural and educational, diplomacy, aid and volunteerism, points to America as a nation deeply involved in the world. In Bush’s context, based on his record, isolationism can only mean refraining from the unnecessary and unwarranted use of force and from giving away American jobs.
Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Vietnam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another (1965). ~ And throughout this entire long period I have been sustained by a single principle: that what we are doing now in Vietnam is vital not only to the security of Southeast Asia but it is vital to the security of every American. — Lynden Johnson, 1968.These were quotes of fictional prophesy, not fact, repeated again and again, along with, “...so that they shall not have died in vein.”For the future of peace, precipitate withdrawal would thus be a disaster of immense magnitude. A nation cannot remain great if it betrays its allies and lets down its friends. Our defeat and humiliation in South Vietnam without question would promote recklessness in the councils of those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest. This would spark violence wherever our commitments help maintain the peace... Ultimately, this would cost more lives. It would not bring peace; it would bring more war. For these reasons, I rejected the recommendation that I should end the war by immediately withdrawing all of our forces. — Richard Nixon, 1969.
To withdraw would be betraying our friends. ~ We will continue the fight of those who have already died so that they will not have died in vein. ~ We’ll complete our work in Afghanistan and Iraq. An immediate withdrawal of our troops in Iraq, or the broader Middle East, as some have called for, would only embolden the terrorists and create a staging ground to launch more attacks against America and free nations. — George Bush, 2005.
How do those statements of politics and public relations measure up, ring true, against the other historic quotes of truth, determination, and heart that you remember?
“Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” — Abraham LincolnLeaving Iraq would not emboldening the enemy, who would need only look to Afghanistan, which is where outsiders in Iraq would go, or to Iran, if the U.S. invades and remains; nor would it be running from a challenge, or cutting and running. Nor would it, as Rumsfeld stated in Senate hearings, cause Iraq to become a breeding ground for terrorists, since, under a sane program for U.S. security, any such policy by the regime there would, they would know, result in their removal by U.S. forces, without the burden of troops remaining to build nations or corporate playgrounds.“Conquest [take possession of by force, as after an invasion] is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.” — Thomas Jefferson
“That’s one step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong
“Can’t we all get along?” — Rodney King
“I will return.” — Douglas MacArthur
It would be allowing the U.S. the capacity to focus on that which really threatens its future and security.
It would be correcting the criminal transgression of invading—no matter that the regime was an immoral dictatorship. It would be correcting the mistake of, once that regime was removed, remaining after the sweep for WMD and intelligence was complete.
And it would be relieving those, and the families of those who have already died there the burden of being a magnet—another self-motivated administration excuse to justify more unnecessary deaths.
Ethics, dirty tricks, truth and lies?Bush knows everything... but doesn’t understand it all.
Cheney knows and understands everything.
They will both do Nixon impressions.
“I am not a crook!”
Bush continues the policy of hijacking the media mantle to gain unwarranted credibility. Both the use of the Recovery Channel by F.E.M.A. and the selling of material to the Iraqi press by D.O.D., without source disclosure, to create a deceptive outlook on reality, are repeats of a tactic described in the first-term report on Bush below, that has been a standard unethical practice. But, oh, how the lies we weave... and the saying was revealed true when another lie fell away, exposing an inescapable piece of damning logic. The late August 2005 concession by Bush, most recently confirmed by a September 2006, classified, 16-agency NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) report, was that he has turned Iraq into a training ground for the radical-Islamist Army of Jihad (he didn’t give them that title; “insurgents” has been the word), a long-time criticism he denied, played down, underestimated and ignored. And he also said that the experience gained by [the Islamists’ army] coming to Iraq will threaten the West beyond the occupation of American troops there. This is an admission of a truth that he knew as soon as the first critic brought it up. And now, it is impossible for him to continue repeating the fall-back-from-WMD reason for the invasion: to fight for the freedom of Iraqis from insurgents, who are only a small segment of that multi-national mix of zealots. But, he probably will continue to say that he fights for freedom because the phrase is so high-sounding. So does another deflecting justification from the past, another Vietnam oxymoron that he has already fallen back to, uttering it before a VFW group, in late August 2005: that continued deaths will justify the unjustifiable deaths already on his hands, the We will continue the fight of those who have already died so that they will not have died in vein. Carrying forward the logical extension (truth) of a mobile, imported army into his rhetoric is proving problematic for Bush. He blatantly ignored the lack of connection between what he says and what the truth of fighting the admitted mobile army of jihad is, when he tried, also, in August 2005, to argue continuing to waste troops in Iraq, saying “The only way to defend our citizens where they live is to go after the terrorists where they live.” For an enemy that goes after America wherever it occupies, that is a non sequitur. It is patriotic, sloganistic, emotive propaganda.
But in his speech, Bush ended a laundry list of already mentioned reasons to keep troops in Iraq with “...building strong allies.” That is the closest thing to the truth that is likely to cross his lips. But it is code for installing and influencing and benefiting from a politically and economically friendly regime, which in the case of Iraq will require troops to maintain. Building allies is in America’s diplomatic history, not its military history, unless you consider the good will that soldiers are always willing to extend to the people in places they must do their jobs. The troops in Iraq are far too much at risk to indulge freely in that infrequently presented opportunity to play that gratifying role. And most important, building allies is not a justification for invasion and the death of 4,100 soldiers. It was a busy day for Bush-speak.
“Iraqi Freedom” and “Enduring Freedom,” the names of the military missions to install Bush’s corporate-friendly regime, are also noble-sounding lies. Bush took the Iraqi’s freedom away when he ordered the troops to remain in occupation after it was “confirmed” there were no W.M.D. The continued presence of troops cannot be compromised or contorted by Bush to support any motive not based in greed. But that compromise is already showing its head in the media.
A speculative, Lou Dobbs closing question to the intro of CNN Newsday/Newsnight broadcasts that opened with the story about the second set-back of the Iraqi constitutional conclave was, “Will it [Iraq] be the place we went to war to create?” Where does a question and assumption like that come from? Are CNN and Dobbs Bush spokespersons? Bush was not given license to invade Iraq to create a place of grand expectations for Iraqis. Troops were sent to remove a threat to America. That was their legitimate purpose, except that it was a lie.
Another broadcast, NBC, preambled a report on Nightly News, questioning the attaining of “lofty” going-in expectations for Iraq. These reports fail to note, first, that the troops accomplished their mission with spectacular result and equally spectacular low casualties. The best of “lofty” expectations were realized when the head of Saddam’s statue hit the pavement. The hell on Earth in Iraq, and in the homes of dead soldiers’ families, that has existed since that day is the “creation” of Bush, and there never was any expectation from anyone, with a rudementary memory of what happened after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, that there would be no good expectations if occupation was to follow, and no expectation, aside from defense, provided the needed, illicitly gotten, public and conditional Congressional consent. Where ever this untrue, “commentary” segment to the news about Iraq comes from, the only “lofty” expectation was to make America safer, remove a rogue regime and its weapons. Freedom would follow that, without Bush’s greed and the occupation it subsequently requires. 4,100 lives were not sacrificed for these media-voiced, post-invasion, imaginary expectations. Those soldiers went in believing, above anything else, that they were going in to remove weapons that threaten America and the regime responsible for them. There is no other, lower, standard that would be accepted by them for risk of life, unless it was humanitarian, and in defense of life. The media helps Bush to lower the standard for putting troops on the line when it speaks in any way toward motives, or advantages, or benefits of any use of force, for any reason, voiced by anyone, especially Bush, that does not rise to the level of humanitarian salvation (defeating a regime that is causing an ethnic segment of its population to starve to death, or murdering same) or national defense.
In August 2005 speeches, how did Bush gain credibility, or answer for the consequences of his greed, or justify extending those consequences with more death by making obvious statements of description that even the militants who killed the soldiers realize: “each of these [dead soldiers] left loved ones and families at home.”? Because he realizes this, it certainly doesn’t mean he has any qualms about continuing it. Before this, Bush had never mentioned the deaths, instead, burying them, again and again, to avoid the ugly meaning they finally bring to his words, and the cost he can never justify or explain away with slogans and hollow echoes from the past. This was pathetic pandering to the emotional pain of families of dead soldiers, to gain support and to lead into the old "they had a legacy that must be preserved by continuing so it won’t be lost" reason to spend more lives. The continued service of soldiers in Iraq is a disservice to America, a service to al Qaeda. Greed knows the harm it does and cares not of the values it destroys to meet its need. Here, Bush is only deflecting, hiding greed’s face behind other obvious truths with old, dead-ended statements that say nothing, demonstrate no worth for the losses or reason for them to continue.
Prior to mid-August, Bush’s P.R. line to justify troop deaths has always claimed that the “enemy” was there to be defeated. Now he has admitted that the “insurgents” are there because they came to confront the occupation force that remained after Baghdad fell, which critics have always said was the reason for the calm period immediately after: the Islamist army was en route, infiltrating from all over the Arab world, setting up, supplying, and Bush is also finally saying that no matter where the troops go, Iran, Syria, this army will follow them. But Bush is now ignoring this with his contradictory and manipulative rhetoric.
Perhaps, some general defining of “insurgent” is in order. An “insurgent” is resistence or rebellion that rises from “within,” so as has always been said, there is no insurgency. There is the army of Allah, the radical Islamist’s army, the jihadists, which is a force from “without.” And Bush has now acknowledged them. But an important thing to note, as it relates to other lies used by the administration to drum-up, with threat levels and warnings, and use fear, particularly the “fight ‘em over there or here” variety, this army has no navy. And Bush would like nothing better than for Americans to believe that operations in Iraq are turning up intelligence that prevents attacks in America. Any such, unsupported, claims must be taken, from Bush administration sources, with a molecule of salt.
More lies and hopefully, forever, a very tired slogan, are cast aside.
Another evidence for the treachery of 4,100+ dead is confirmed. How the fabricated story Bush has been spinning is changing, as the truth becomes impossible to hide. It could no longer be said that U.S. troops were being so confronted and hampered and bled by a mere local rebellion.
Whether he knows it or not (and his death-of-logic statements indicate he does not), when Bush admits the enemy is really an imported, regional-mobile, army of infiltration, he also admits that, like WMD, there was no enemy to fight for Iraqi freedom after Baghdad fell, and that he could just as easily be killing them, Jihadists, in Iran “for freedom,” where there is a threat to America, but he isn’t doing anything about that. Why not? Shouldn’t he just move on as has been argued, forcing the jihadists to disburse back to their countries or Afghanistan? If Bush does go to Iran, they will have to go to Afghanistan or wait until the Iranian military is defeated before they begin to fight again. So why keep the troops there in Iraq, to keep dying, if instead the dying could be temporarily suspended until the search-and-destroy phase of a possible Iranian action, and the same jihadists dying now would begin dying again in Iran, as will also begin the attrition of American or coalition troops, but at least they’ll be dying in Iran to get something done that America and the West needs to get done. The only thing there ever was in Iraq is the wealth, and that’s what the dying has been all about, there.
Bush’s greed, which brought him and a death toll of 4,100+ soldiers to Iraq to build a corporate-friendly regime is keeping him there to try and finish putting it in place. Then, and only then, will his greed permit him to turn to Iran for the same black gold bubbling up there; oh, and coincidentally, also remove some bad guys and their nuclear, chem, and bio-weapons programs, so that when he says he invaded Iran for American security (and freedom for anyone), it will at least be a half-truth, but putting in the new corporate-friendly regime will be the driving force for remaining there. But, America will no more be able to afford remaining there than in Iraq, and if Bush keeps troops there, the same things happening now will be replayed there, during the search-and-destroy phase, and if troops remains in Iran after WMD are removed, the lives lost from that point on will be as uselessly thrown away for the greed of Bush and his circle as they are now.
Bush’s admission of the imported army, combined with his manipulation of intelligence data, his criminally negligent determination of a threat to America’s interests (not industrialists’ interests) to justify an illegal invasion, backs Bush and his circle into a box where greed and 4,100+ dead troops are their only company.
All of the P.R. and spin and patriotic slogans in the world can’t change that.
On August 11, 2005, an Iraqi-citizen pilot was buried in conjunction with U.S. Air Force pilots, the first Iraqi citizen to be interred at Arlington National Cemetery, which is space-limited, despite its recent acquisition of additional acres. A smart move by the administration, made to re-enforce it’s political, public-relations storyline that the Iraqis are somehow tied to America’s people. Iraq has been tied to America’s problems (America as much to blame), and now it is a ball and chain that, because of the resistence Bush is forced to counter—the kind of fight he must have American troops fight—in order to force his corporate-industrial blueprint for the Middle East (and anywhere else in the world) into existence, has the potential to bring the ultimate disaster upon the West, because it detracts from attacking the real threats that are actively seeking the capability to use America’s most terrible technology against it. That is not a remote-possibility threat. Remember that the militants have already been successfully using very sophisticated communications technology in command and control as well as finance.
None of this invokes any disrespect at all for the dead Iraqi pilot, who was an obvious aid to America’s soldiers in the most critical times, performing his duties in their interests with the same courage and dedication that is characteristic of a U.S. flight officer. But Arlington is a poor place to choose as a political, public-relations tool to make synapsis links in the public mind between the Iraqi and American people that don’t exist, except for very rare exceptions, as this honored Iraqi pilot. It is a poor choice to use the nation’s cemetery as a P.R. tool in any case, but it is only “as usual” for Bush’s administration, as evidenced below. It is not an ethical problem at all for them to create the possibility, with the approval of the possibly dreamed-up application (Hey, Scott! Scott McClellan! Go find some dead Iraqi soldier that died with our soldiers, who was on our side, and we’ll put them in Arlington together. Make sure it gets high coverage.), meaning, go out and find the circumstances that fit (a lot of dying going on to look through) and do it; or it was just a windfall, leaving them only to draw-up the news release, and then make sure it gets to the media outlets with a stressed priority. Very smart. Subtle, too. It makes you wonder why they were not so clever to prepare their public-story path into Iraq. But mistakes, unlike birdshot carelessly peppered into a friend’s skin, (4,100+ dead) and consequences (4,100+ dead and climbing fast) are hard teachers, and this is an eloquent display of public-communication manipulation.
But if this is the quality of deceptive manipulation that you get after the mistake, be very afraid of the creative uses that will be dreamed up if they ever suffer the consequences, given the chance. The past attempts have been bold, but the latest Republican-delivered D-Day simile insults. Remember that this police action in Iraq started with Bush as an illicit war and is not to be confused with the war in Afghanistan against the Islamic militant leadership, which actually began long before Bush’s response to 911, and which should immediately be expanded to remove the regime in Iran, if they do not quickly dismantle their WMD and accede to unrestricted inspections. But Bush is still using all of the long and far-reaching tentacles of government to control public perceptions, instead of focusing them on the real threats.
Also in August 2005, Bush held an unremarkable press conference in which he used his familiar sophistries, repeating his latest reason for troops being in Iraq, adding: “The main condition for removing troops is the capacity of the Iraqi military to take the fight to the enemy.” An enemy he in August 2005, finally admits will fade away or follow if he abandons the nation-building and troops pull out, leaving nothing for the Iraqis to fight. His lie is confirmed to be both misleading and faulty, because if America were not there, nation-building for his economic goals, there would be only Iraqis fighting amongst themselves for their national power. He also used the same, false disengegement-bolsters-enemy justification that two presidents before him used to justify continuing to pour troops into the stinging failure of Vietnam’s extended, French-abandoned civil war, for which America still bleeds. Actually, the reverse is true. The Islamic-militant leadership which uses the U.S. in Iraq would be impressed and worried if Bush started acting in the national interest instead of the interests of his agenda. They count on his greed-driven motives. These attempted defenses for the indefensible are Bush’s pure line of propaganda, the same false claims used to answer the swell of opposition to Vietnam. It was wrong then, because although corporate-expansionism has begun to take hold, Communism hasn’t taken over Asia, and it’s just as wrong now, and now another lie has been admitted.
The militants kill because Bush is there trying to gain influence over their land. They have motives more substantial than those Bush told reporters to evoke emotion. How can they “drive free nations out” as Bush lies, when there is no nation there, except America, trying to bring Bush’s puppet show to life. Because no matter who is in that government, they will be the industrialists’ boys, because the U.S., under Bush, will guarantee their existence so that they can keep on fueling the economic engine Bush builds. If anyone believes that the high-and-right-sounding lies Bush uses to justify his crime represent the true motives and reasons for the soldiers dying, they would find the castle at Disney World to be a comforting home. The mid-August 2005 admission of the true nature of the force opposing America’s toops in Iraq should dispell such fancy.
Another sophistry of Bush’s, is that America owes anyone in Iraq anything in order to be able to “betray them,” as he says would be the result of leaving. This is just as false as the rest of his out-of-storage responses to the present state of the situation. America OWES Iraq nothing, so no one can be betrayed, except, under Bush, America’s own people. Iraqi revolutionists were betrayed, years ago, when there was the hope of a revolt, because the rebels were made promises that weren’t kept. That was then. This is now. The only promise made was to use force if Saddam ignored non-proliferation demands, and as the evidence demonstrates, he did not ignore.
Until that mid-August admission of the nature of the real enemy in Iraq, according to Bush, everything was rosy and getting better, like Vietnam, yet meanwhile, oddly at counter with that... contradiction, the troop numbers are going up, not only in death, but also in deployments, and why? Because as the pressure on Bush to stand down increases, the need of greed also increases the pressure to get the system in place that keeps the money flowing, on the bet that if the government can at least be installed, Bush will then be able to claim that freedom has been brought to Iraq and America has a new partner for freedom and growth in the region, despite that assassinations of government officials will be continuing, that government will be housed in a fortress bristling with guards and barriers and barbed wire, and despite that the bombings and deaths and deployments will continue rising. Of course, the admission that there was no enemy to defeat inside Iraq cancels the ability to continue saying freedom was or will be brought to anyone.
Circle of Greed
Bush will still use any slogan, any appeal to blind patriotism, any deceptive spin on any fact that his circle comes up with to keep the troops in Iraq and the money flowing, and their plan has the reward of vast amounts over a long period of time, worth any betrayal they can devise and disguise to make it happen, considering their motives. It would be easy to ignore and accept, except that in their greed, and their betrayal, they went in illegally and are paying to gain their cash cow for the future, and perhaps a crack into spreading it beyond Iraq, with the lives of the average citizens who die in uniform to do it. Continuing to remain, when the magnet-effect reality has been conceded, both confirms the crime and reveals the greed.The Bush push is to mine the treasure in Iraq with the lives of front-door-protester Sheehan’s son and the sons and daughters of other grieving parents, who matter not an iota to him or his gang of industrialists, who in the past drank 22-year-old scotch in wood-paneled club rooms, paid for with the sweat of coal miners, and lives lost to unsafe mines and black lung, and murder in the Colorado coal-field war with the Ludlow Massacre,
Those abuses are history, documented, and they are reality today. Greed does not die or fade away.
If Bush Senior’s decision not to take Baghdad the first time out seems a contradiction, it is not. It correlates. The decision to play patty cake with Saddam was wrong from the very beginning. He invaded, he forced the West to arm and mobilize against him, and his army should have been pursued back to its highest commander, there and then. That’s the cost of starting a war and should be the objective of finishing it. But Bush Sr. didn’t do it because that operation was under U.N. sanctions, and they wouldn’t have politically been able to set up their own sandbox. The invasion of Iraq by Junior was probably a father-son discussed, “if we get you elected, we may be able to...” type of contingency plan ever since, one that will never appear in the post-term library being contemplated now.
Like polo, or the foxhunt, chess is a game of pride for the corporate-elite/industrialist; planning ahead to take the board. So do politics and military operations plan.
And history records. History is a gift for a better future. It is a guide and a map that says, “Here, take this, your civilization’s journal, and look for what has failed and what caused the failures of the past, and watch carefully for the signs that it begins to happen again.”
Reject that gift, and you have another Nazi Germany, where history shows that people who were officials of the highest respect and position aided Hitler in taking that nation’s power to serve greed and hate, if not by their delusion or active support by word and action, then by their passive compliance and silence.
Nothing has changed. That selfish and abusive industrialist elite is alive, and has grown from the largest interest group and lobby in Washington into the heart and soul of America’s government, alive inside Bush’s circle. And, where else is there to look, in the highest and seemingly most unlikely places of trust, for the boundaries of Bush’s Circle of Greed? Look first where there is the greatest power, the greatest capacity to assist or defeat the desires of the Bush-lead military-industrial complex and stand up for soldiers’ lives: the powerful senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, John Warner. How do the actions and words of this senator, with an impressive military background, fit in with the administration line of manipulated and spun statements of policy and justification for Iraq and the killing?
Senator Warner is at least guilty by what he hasn’t done.
Or, look to Virginia’s Republican senator, George Allen, who even after the admissions of the mobile, jihad army were made by the White House, justified the invasion of Iraq by equating it to D-Day, in an attempt to support the philosophy of greed in Iraq upon the courageous, do-or-die strike to break through the Nazi wall of Hitler’s Fortress Europe! Allen’s statement takes the award for outlandish spin and patriotic-synapsis manipulation away from any that Bush, Cheney et al ever released since they began raining their propaganda in such magnitude on the people and allies of America that the likes of their volleys hasn’t been seen since Hitler’s V2 rockets and bombers rained terror, death, and destruction upon the thick-skinned and unyielding British.
Senator Allen is guilty by support of word and association, alone.
Look to Utah’s Republican senator, Orrin Hatch, who is so deeply sewn to the Bush cloth that he can find no fault with the Bush administration’s preparation or response to hurricane Katrina.
Senator Hatch is a religious rightist, who indulges in the fineries of life, and is guilty by the hypocrisy of his inhumanity.
The former, indicted, Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay (Texas), has been the most effective of all in deflecting criticism and accountability for the do-nothing response away from Bush. On September 6, he turned the question of Bush accountability, for the rout of civilization in New Orleans, on its ear by praising the performance of the FEMA and first responders’ rank and file, knowing full well that it is not the rank and file relief and rescue workers, or FEMA workers, who are being blamed for the tragic, even callously negligent lack of response by Bush and his appointees; yet DeLay stains that rank-and-file, by association, with the failure for which he uses them to spin an answer.
Congressman DeLay is a guilty party to Bush’s Circle of Greed by his use of the good to shield the bad and the ugly, and by being the hub in a multi-spoked wheel of connections to Republican abuse and corruption and consequent legal proceedings.
The Circle of Greed extends to the courts, as well, where rulings in favor of the corporate-industrialist blueprint include the increasing “economic” basis for upholding eminent domain, which is the method by which that blueprint avoids its own commercial premiss of supply and demand. This segment of the blueprint, that also operates in Iraq, seeks to use the government to take property at their price, instead of the market price, because in almost every case, the owners whose rights are being brutalized would have sold out, but only for the right price.
And in the forefront of court issues is ethics, where Bush’s Supreme Court chief-justice nominee, John Robert’s failure to recuse himself from ruling on a case, in which Bush was a defendant, is being defended by Republicans on the basis that there is no requirement for judges to do so when being considered for higher positions. “No requirement” was also the reason Justice Antonin Scalia (former counsel in Nixon’s administration) used in the Bush energy-meeting case, where he also failed to recuse himself from hearings in which he is historically and politically biased in favor of administration case parties, where recusal is a requirement because only that removes the possibility for “beholdin’,” since standards of law applied objectively is the ethical standard, and although Bush and his circle do not demand ethics, the American people still do.
Bush’s circle also attacks the American working people. The unions are diluted and made more ineffective by the off-shore export of jobs and plants and the tumbling salary scale, and anything that’s done to preserve a minimum quality of life for average Americans is done because now it’s the law, but Bush is changing those laws as well, and the American troops are, to them, no different than the coal miners were to the mine owners of the early 1900’s; theirs to abuse and use to gain wealth upon wealth. The only way in which anything good can be seen coming from the continuing death of troops in Iraq is through the eyes and motives of greed.
The motive behind Bush’s determination in Iraq, no matter the cost in average taxpayers’ funds and lives, is very clear when you consider that the ambition of the corporate-industrial lobby that controls the White House is to make the world into a house of cards where they hold all the aces... and the jokers, and Iraq, with its oil and cheap-labor resources, will make for a profitable playground if the politics can be surmounted and controlled, and that’s what’s costing lives and the misuse of America’s various resources, not national security. Bush’s Circle of Greed is using this America and its troops in Iraq to expand and grow the corporate-industrial design of his circle, his base, and that theology has no national allegiance. Its allegiance is to the dollar, and share price, and the profit margin, and to the control of the economic power to dictate the way people will live and work. Bush is a thief, stealing lives and the future of America by squandering its resources, created and maintained for national defense. There is no national defense involved with spraying lead through the heads of “insurgent” after “insurgent,” sent there for that very purpose. There is only the Bush expansionist agenda. That’s what is being bought with the soldiers’ lives he abuses the power of his office to spend.
Media, a most-prized asset, was among the early long-term priorities in the chess game, removing controls that leave too many media markets in too few hands, easing the ability to increase influence over thought and culture. Thought control is the P.R. of Bush’s politics... and of greed. When Bush or McClellan speak about the freedom of Iraqis, and their ability to market their oil, and to have power and roads and... freedom (always tie the word “freedom” to the list in order to re-enforce the connection, because “freedom” is the lynchpin, the key word, the emotional lever), they are already beginning to subterfuge a belief by the public that the corporate-industrialist motives for themselves and America (they won’t include themselves in the speech) is worth the death of troops, worth making America into an aggressor nation, and worth risking the detonation of a nuclear device in a Western city. That will end the final argument.
Subterfuge, Baseball, and Bush + Cheney = Don’t Impeach
And why should this circle of abusers and fast-talkers in the shallow end not try to argue their real truth? Why should anyone be impeached, tried? Baseball players who violate their trust to their fans and the game with drug use are forgiven, allowed to keep on playing, perhaps a slap on the wrist, while Pete Rose, who messed with the money, corrupting the odds-making for gamblers in the game, hit them where they live... Yeerrrrrr OUT!!! But, baseball abuse doesn’t betray the trust of spent lives; or, does it? In the case of any fan who took drugs to play the game and died, it does!
The values by which Baseball judges crime cannot be allowed to become the values that judge crime in government. The spin-kings and power brokers believe that the science of media and public relations can pave the path for their Iraqi project and the means by which it was put in motion, and that it can answer for the lives it will cost. And if Baseball is any judge, with no protests at the gate, the fans accepting the lack of example made to youth, the devalued, already date-split stat record, and the thinking that says athletic ability is more important than moral value and fair play, then the circle of greed in the White House will get away with it, and the useless dying will continue, and America will continue to regress at every level—except the part that gets leveled by the bomb that Bush is letting the Iranian’s try to build now. It’s difficult to set the stage to present the threat, to make the priority, and enforce the demand for compliance by these rogue nations to the terms of America’s non-proliferation policy, when you are so busy trying to set the stage for the enduring flow of billions of dollars in Iraq, while you still can, and avoiding the growing call for explanation and accountability.
Bush and his circle should pay Doorstep Sheehan and the other parents who also looked to their sons for their future, an annuity, personally, for the rest of their days, for starters. Remember that this woman has always represented more than just one parent. And Bush knows that what he says to her, he says to all others. Bush’s refusal to face her is a result of his greed, because facing her means taking accountability, face-to-face, with all the victims of that crime. It means confronting his inner self and the victims, directly, for the true reasons her son and others died. It must be somewhat, at an extremely elevated level, like the scared, precocious kid who busts a window and is called to answer by the angry shout of his father from within the house, knowing he is determined to lie and say he didn’t do it, because Bush knows he can only lie, saying the same things from the political bag of reasons that laid in the Oval Office closet across from Johnson and Nixon, where Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Scalia also lurked. And Bush’s PR people know, even if the old bag men don’t, that old baggage doesn’t fly and can’t be reused too often, especially without qualifying it, which is impossible to do. His only other alternative would be to tell her, as a consequence of the guilt for the deaths that overcomes him, the real reason, knowing that she would attack him and claw his eyes out. But it is unlikely that Bush’s kind of people (affected by grandiose plans based in greed) are capable of feeling guilt, any more than the fat-cat industrialists of the early 1900’s felt guilty about coal miners who fell dead and were regularly buried all around them, from black lung and cave-ins, while they comforted themselves in the excesses of their wealth.
The first rule of public relations (Bush PR, not ethical public relations) is a modified parrot of the old proverb, “If you have nothing good to say, [lie or] say nothing.” This is the rule now in effect with Cindy Sheehan, and she already has Bush on trial for the criminal invasion by being there in his face without having to take on the IRS to attempt legally trying his administration.
Bush being impeached leaves Cheney... with more adverse determination and no change for the good, so the only way to end the useless killing and look to the, possibly, necessary killing, is to apply so much pressure to Congress that it takes action to bend Bush away from Baghdad and toward Tehran, and there are, thankfully, signs that this has begun, and Bush is becoming more desperately unrelenting. But Bush will be easier to bend then Cheney, and when the term of this administration is over, there should be severe accountability, not libraries.
Graphic design/FX by Silkscape Arts
What Bush’s beliefs will bring—homeland devastation, fissile or dirty.
The Nuclear Enemies — Not in Iraq
The words Bush spoke that didn’t wither in the blazing, summer, Texas sun at that mid-August mini-conference, were that it is the president’s responsibility to console the families of dead soldiers, which he hasn’t, and that the effort of the troops has been “incredibly noble,” which of course, with few exceptions, it has been, in Bush’s wholly selfish cause. But every soldier who has died worthlessly in Iraq for the greed of Bush’s circle would pick themselves up out of their graves and march right into Iran or North Korea to die again for the goal of removing those rogue regimes, their criminal, petty, greed-mongering leaders, and ridding America and the world forever of the WMD non-proliferation threat that they represent.The newly released, largely classified, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report extends its previous-year report’s countdown to Iranian detonation of a nuclear device by double, to ten years. With North Korea much closer, the perspective on the lack of priority given the W.M.D. threat by Bush is dim, when considering that, on August 20, 2005, General of the Army Peter Schoomaker told Associated Press that the Army is planning for more than 100,000 troops to remain in Iraq for nearly half that time! That was 1,900+ lives and counting, plus four more years, or ten, while the real enemies are left...unconfronted. But is the new NIE estimate reliable? Why would anyone believe that it should be? One report says five years, their next says ten, and those contributing to it admit, as before, that they just don’t know; it’s all a big guess. And Bush has gone from no time to less than that, again pushing aside the government’s assessment, still holding that Iran is a near-term threat, which at least is the safe perspective, in a case where the presence of a threat is not in doubt. But then the question begs as to why he is doing nothing about it. The reason, of course, is greed, and the need to install the game his circle has already begun to play in Iraq, before going to Iran to do the same thing. But at least, in Iran, while causing unneeded death of soldiers in the unnecessary, greed-motivated, build-and-control phase, he will coincidentally also be doing a service to America’s security, where consequently, everything he will say will be a half-truth instead of a lie.
But the other factor that should drive Bush and his greed to get to Iran quickly, and the evidence of this pressure is already evident, is that there may be a popular uprising there in a month, or a year, or two, which brings about a progressive government, happy to abide by non-proliferation demands. Like the timetable for teeth in Iran’s nuclear blackmail, no one can say when, for sure, a revolt may detonate.
The subtle invitation that the new NIE report makes: to extend the time to do anything about the threat—must not be accepted. To focus on the deadline for Iran is to miss the point, and the problem. Bin Laden’s plan for acquiring a weapon isn’t tied to Iran’s schedule any more than it is to Bush’s, or to Putin’s for that matter, who also has a life-or-death stake in preventing bin Laden from ever succeeding. Bin Laden is so deliberate and patient, that just setting off a dirty bomb would not satisfy him. He could have radioactive materials to do it now, but would prefer to apply it to something more deadly and destructive. Not all fissile materials are accounted for, either, and Bin Laden has a valid strategic reason for waiting to obtain two devices, or three, and to detonate them all within a few days, one in Europe, Russia, and America. The tactical strategy for this is based in his greed to hit America, which with only one weapon, he would be taking a far-greater risk of losing it to discovery than if he instead targeted Russia or Europe. If he only had one, with no real prospect to obtain another anytime soon, he would probably detonate it in Europe, Paris or London, knowing well that the shockwave would reach across the Atlantic to deal severe economic and social upheaval, rather than risk losing it by trying to send it to America. So his profile would say to get two or three to insure success while also taking a shot at the long shot. No one can say that there isn’t already a device in his control, and that he’s not just biding his time, working to get a second. And Bin Laden’s tentacles are slithering through the dirty underworld of arms and drug dealers, and in India, Pakistan, and the former Soviet Union, searching for those with the connections and the will or greed to sell-out their country or the West to deliver him his weapons. Armies alone won’t stop that in time. Intelligence and law enforcement may, if they are given the tools and the emphasis they deserve, and if the central focus of government is kept on the enemy, not on mining the wealth in his countries.
The Department of Defense’s Joint Chiefs of Staff’s draft doctrine, titled, “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,” is a policy statement regarding the situations where authority to use nuclear weapons exists. It is written under the direction of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, who commented that the changed, post-Cold-War threats from proliferation of mass destruction “raises the danger of nuclear weapons use.” The intelligence contributed to the report claims that there are “about thirty nations with WMD programs,” along with independent or state-sponsored non-state threats (Islamic militants and other terrorists). The gift of history holds a tool that should be considered to insure security in the streets of America, in the communities and with the resources the radical-Islamic militants will hide in and use when they try to detonate a biological, chemical, or nuclear device. History records the last use of this tool by the commander of allied troops in WWII, after he retired from the Army and was persuaded to step up and lead the country. President Eisenhower, and his so-called “Red Scare” executive action, stripped Communist organizations of rights and protections, and this action, justified in the late 1950’s by his responsibility to protect American citizens, is more than ample precedent for a president to take the same action today with Islamic organizations, because in this century, the threat is real, not any scare, and that threat has already cost almost 3,000 lives in New York City, hundreds more overseas, and with Bush’s complicity, 4,100 soldier’s lives in Iraq, and this threat holds the potential to add millions more to that list, cripple the nation’s economy and regress its culture.
Hezbollah soldiers on parade bear a striking similarity to Nazis.
In its hard-line response to Hezbollah’s unprovoked attacks against its civilians, Israel is driving home the point that the Lebanese, and the citizens of its other neighbor states, cannot expect to live in peace or prosper in progressive, growing countries and also tolerate terrorists (Islamic-militant militia) operating in their midst. Those who have accepted Hezbollah or other terrorist groups and done nothing are not “innocent,” have put their own children at risk (as has Hezbollah by intentionally using civilian-populated emplacements) and they cannot expect to be free of the consequences of their misplaced tolerance.Those Arab factions that do not recognize Israel’s existence, who, through their mindless hatred, seek to remove Israel from the map with missiles and bombs, are invoking violence without purpose or effect, except the aftermath of which is disaster for themselves and those among whom they live and operate, which is the burial of the future that they condemn and destroy for themselves and their children. They make themselves the losers in the span of life that is theirs to use or, which, by their choice, they abuse. Despite tearful protestations of the Lebanese prime minister, they are empty, in light of the fact that he does control a military that is nowhere in sight and is not attempting to suppress Hezbollah rocket launches from within its territory. These launches are acts of war that the government, by its lack of action, is supporting. While Israel decimates Iran and Syria’s tentacles in Lebanon, the U.S. should be attacking the head of the monster in Tehran (instead of pursuing the corporate agenda in Iraq) which would benefit both the peace in the Mid East and immediately insure American security against the radical Islamist nuclear threat.
Children, killed in Israeli air strike in Qana, Lebanon. The blame is not Israel's alone.
Had Bush used the military to pursue national interests against Iran, instead of the corporate-industrialist interests he serves in Iraq, the nuclear threat from Tehran would no longer exist, and Iran would not have been able to supply the missiles to Hezbollah that provoked the conflict with Israel, causing the deaths of the children in Qana and other civilians. But Israel also cannot expect to be free of the consequences of inadequate intelligence supporting targeting decisions. The use, by Hezbollah, of offensive emplacements amidst civilians who ignored Israeli warnings to evacuate is not sufficient basis to attack those emplacements without determining that the weight of the harm will not befall women and children; otherwise, no matter the right of its purpose, the weight of the harm falls most severely upon Israeli interests and darken its future.Since Hezbollah cannot defeat Israel, their rocket attacks, which do not take consideration for women and children, and the kidnapings, were obviously no more than provocations, incited by the Iranians and Syrians to deflect attention away from the real threat: Iran’s and (by association) Syria’s nuclear ambitions, and as a means to compound the diversion by destabilizing the democratic government of Lebanon. This suggests that Iran is buying time and that it is on a shorter time-line to actually becoming a nuclear asset to Islamic extremists than is widely believed. It is no coincidence, either, that the violence is intensifying in Iraq, since the jihadists communicate to fan the flames and believe that the Bush administration will only become more and more recalcitrant as the cost rises, and that the probability is that Iraq will only be an effective shield against action targeting Iran’s nuclear development for the remainder of Bush’s term.
To kill or control a snake, one must attack the head. The U.S. and its allies must keep their eyes on the ball, but they are constrained in confronting Iran, in large part because of the resources being diverted to Iraq, a diversion which far outweighs Hezbollah’s writhing in Lebanon, and one which brings no benefit to U.S. or Western security, quite the contrary, only benefitting U.S. industrialists tied to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld (Bechtel-Halliburton), weapons purveyors on all sides, and Islamic terrorists throughout the region. The only value of Iraq to U.S. security is as a staging and jump-off point for operations to remove the Iranian government and destroy its nuclear R&D infrastructure, operations for which Iraq provided sound tactical practice, albeit unjustified, yet which should necessarily be begun, disengaging from Iraq without further delay or distraction to move against the hate-driven radicals controlling Tehran, and Hezbollah.
The world’s current squabbling over Israel’s reaction to the tolerance of Hezbollah’s operational residency in Lebanon will be properly trivialized in the hindsight that will follow the detonation of the first Iranian or Korean supplied radioactive dirty bomb or fissile device, which could well happen without any test-blast warnings, within a few short years, in Israel, Europe, Russia, or the U.S., if Iran is allowed to continue unopposed and defiant as it is now. Isolating these threats is not the answer. They must be confronted—directly, promptly, and unwaveringly, with full commitment and readiness to use any force necessary to remove the threat they fully intend to pose at their first opportunity.
In testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services committee, yesterday (August 3, 2006), the most significant statement that was made, uncontradicted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Pace and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, both men also at the table, in terms of threat to American security interests, was that voiced by four-star General Abiziad, the commander of American forces in the region, when he said that if the threatening forces are “left unchecked, it is possible that... chemical and nuclear weapons will be transferred to non-state militias.” This site has long recognized that threat as being paramount, and as restated above, that America is not keeping its eye on the ball where U.S. security interests in the Mid East are concerned, and the aftermath of this testimony demonstrated that neither is the press or the Senate.
In post-hearing interviews with Armed Services committee chairman, Senator John Warner (R-VA), already described as a subject of questionable purpose because of his lack of effort to halt the abuse of the military Bush’s Iraq ambitions impose, and Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), neither the press nor the senators addressed Gen. Abiziad’s nuclear warning or gave any indication of even hearing it, instead focusing on the “dire and ominous consequences,” said Sen. Reed, of the increasing Iraqi violence, and, in Sen. Warner’s words, the “very significant statement” made by the generals testifying on the “chance for Iraqi civil war,” which he stated “is not around the corner, yet.” Aside from the lack of reference to terrorists (no surprise, since their presence in Iraq has never been a factor in the excuses for invasion or for U.S. security), one must wonder how bad things have to get before the senator and his colleagues will feel a need to act, or to change an ill-conceived policy, because civil war between the ethnic factions in Iraq and its predecessors has been a many-centuries fact of life Bush ignores. By what perspective does one make a judgement of the imminence of a threat? Yet, the day after the testimony, ex-oil executive and crisis-fashion-shopper Secretary of State Rice says there is no danger of civil war.
Secretary Rice General Abiziad General Pace
From the perspective of the time-frame that has passed since India’s first atomic test, and then Pakistan’s, the threat in Iran is around the corner. From what intelligence knows/doesn’t know, the threat can only, wisely, be considered imminent, or foolishly pushed aside because it isn’t yet around some distant corner of the Warner Senate’s Iraq-focused peripheral vision. While the senators stretched the timeline for troop presence and stressed the need to risk and lose more American lives to save Shi’i and Sunni lives, the fact is that there was nothing said in testimony about Iraq, and there is nothing that can happen in Iraq, that is more significant than the nuclear threat for the region, and the U.S., finally voiced into the record by General Abiziad, and which was ignored by both the press and the senators on the committee. Like with illegal immigration and the diluting of the American economic base by the exporting of jobs and plants, the Senate demonstrates that it is not connected to the reality of what America faces and where it must be focused if the way of life that has been in its history is to in any semblance remain in its future.Do you believe the generals, committed to the welfare of their troops and the country, or Rice, a corporate-industrialist, Bush spokesperson doing damage-control P.R. for an administration which has a record of deception and lies, documented in the press and on this site since before the illegal, greed-motivated invasion of Iraq? How many times has she been cornered into answering to apparent conflicts between the administration and the military? It is a recurring and increasing circumstance. Where there is smoke, is there not fire?
It is again reminded that Vietnam was a civil war, where not a single American death of the more than 58,000 mattered to the outcome. Senator Warner forgets that he owes his first allegiance to the people and the military of the U.S., not to Bush’s Iraqi policy, or his own convoluted definition of constitutional authority for Bush’s deployment of troops, to which, in Iraq, he is so blindly tied and for which he is so wrongly motivated. It remains a policy that is more and more obviously degrading the military his committee oversees, as well as America’s capacity to deal with real threats to its security and effectively guide other nations in an effort to insure real global security. Warner’s own generals are now testifying to that effect and to the real future threat that is continuing to be ignored on all fronts, even as Tehran, as late as yesterday, again defied U.N. threats of sanctions, which it recognizes, even if the U.S. does not, are meaningless devices to deal with the threat its regime poses.
The American Founding Fathers created a thoughtful and unique system for governance that was intentionally set apart from those that shaped the leading nations of the world in their time. Global integrations of commerce and war and culture were not a part of their plans or meant to be a factor of the system they created to build a new nation, which through vastly changing time and circumstance evolved into a greatness they never imagined, but which, since the conflict in Korea, has begun to diminish, and since Vietnam, has entered a more rapidly accelerating decline. They would likely view the military travesties of Vietnam and Iraq, of government-encouraged illegal immigration, of the exporting of jobs and manufacturing, and of the Bush vision of America as a tool for overseas-democratic revolution, by force (creating a corporate-economic landscape), as unadulterated insanity. And, even if a civil war in Iraq, Abraham Lincoln
The Founders, and Lincoln, would certainly view the control of government by the corporate-industrialist lobby Bush leads, and its manifestations (beyond Iraq), like the Bush-loaded Supreme Court’s ruling on the use of eminent domain to turn privately-owned homes over for the benefit of developers, and the Bush administration’s excesses of execution of the Patriot act, and his slap at the Constitution with legislative-signing statements, and the idle acceptance by Congress of all of this, and more, as the incarnation of their worst fear: minority tyranny.“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
It is a terrible circumstance that at a time quickly becoming as critical as any in the past, when the confident strength and leadership of a Franklin Roosevelt
Where these regimes that are positioning to threaten U.S. security are concerned, in so preparing, their threat is direct and immediate, and there is very little time left for more obstinate silence, unbacked and open-ended talk, diverted and wasted resources and further erosion of the military, or for more mistakes in analysis and judgement. For America, the crisis to be confronted and defeated is not in Iraq, or Lebanon, where Israel can and will act to take care of itself. The first crisis point, directly threatening all of America’s vital interests and way of life, that must be rapidly disposed of (after Bush, because he will not rightly act, and there may not be two more years to spare) is the nuclear-determined, radical-Islamist regime in Iran. If Americans must die fighting, Iran is where the fight will have cause and meaning, and Iran, not Iraq, is where the deaths will have value for insuring the future of the nation, the safety and security of its people, and the preservation of its civic and cultural heritage. All of these national virtues are at risk by Iran’s proclaimed, practiced, continuing, and unswaying nuclear intentions—through even the multiple of repercussions that fall short of a detonation in the West should they be allowed to succeed with the development. None of these virtues are threatened by anything in Iraq, except Bush’s ambitions.
In non-proliferation, instead of saying that there is some time because Iran won’t have the capability for ten years, it would be far better to take the preemptive-retaliation initiative back, that Bush both created and destroyed with his greed, to insure that these weapons and the regimes determined to obtain and use them no longer threaten. If this is done, it can instead be said that there will be no non-proliferation threat from rogue nations within ten years, or less. That is a far better statement and plan for security, and a worthwhile goal for which soldiers’ lives can justifiably be put on the line. But it still leaves the problem of the untrustworthy individual or operative who is or becomes well placed and well motivated, as was Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, Abdul Khan, who illegally sold nuclear secrets and materials to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, and who remains a Pakistani hero who was never punished, except to be placed under house arrest in his estate. That kind of national-enforcement irresponsibility to non-proliferation cannot be trusted to safely maintain a nuclear-weapons capability, and no one can guarantee that another Pakistani, or Indian, highly placed in their weapons program, can be prevented from doing it again, with critical-mass success.
But America is lacking in responsibility under Bush, not only in Iraq, but, as hurricane Katrina reveals, socially, among its people, which does not go unnoticed by communist or socialist factions in world governments, who hate the economic exploiters. A more socially responsible American government, meaning a more Democratic government, removes the foundation of threat that supports what’s left of world communism and that Russia teeters away from and back toward. The Chinese and Korean brand of communism has become free-market dependant, and for the Chinese, socially responsible, in the global sense, though still, internally, strictly controlling, and a more Democratic America eases the path to cooperation and trust with European countries that have communist and extreme-socialist factions. The only real threat to America, (and less so, Europe, Russia, and most of the industrial world) are Korea, the radical Islamists, most immediately the radicals in control in Iran and Qaeda-like organizations, and criminals. The U.S., thanks to its superior military personnel, command and control, and weapons, is now in a position to dictate a new standard for social responsibility, globally, among the world’s dictatorships and monarchies. But not if it continues to be an aggressor nation, as it has been since the Iraqi invasion, as Bush has insisted, after Katrina and Rita, it shall continue to be. America will lose a necessary resource enabling the dictating of a higher standard: the good will of its free-world and globally responsible partners and competitors, which will only exist when America acts with lethal force justly, in true defense of its citizens or, elsewhere, humanity. Difficult enough work lies ahead in creating the cooperation that is needed to come to terms with protecting the environment as its resources are exploited for the global market, and in better protecting the place of Americans in that market than Bush has done with his corporate-industrialist tilt. Iraq is really Islamic radicals fighting right-wing corporate elitists, with the help of everyday American citizens in uniform and tax dollars, and the American military is not supposed to be one of the tools of market exploitation, as Bush’s circle believes it is and as they use it in Iraq, where nothing threatens and where the only killing of the civil population is because American troops are there on Bush’s agenda. America needs more soldiers in state attorneys’ offices uncovering and fighting against crime, and in police and intelligence agencies to prevent attacks at home.
On June 28, 2005, Bush’s speech was little more than public-relations hype in support of his errant Iraq policy, delivered before some 700 soldiers at Fort Bragg and telecast to the nation. Covering it was a poor programming choice by the media.
But the complete silence and lack of applause as he appeared and stiffly walked some 20 feet to the podium was delicious and made it all worthwhile. One could imagine that all who were present finally had enough of seeing this man strut before the troops and make false claims. He’s bad news. More than ten soldiers died in Iraq in the 48 hours before the president said his first word. The silence greeting him was more than appropriate for a man who callously and lightly sent those soldiers and their comrades into Iraq to fight and die in a war that should have never been fought, and then, that should have ended with the fall of the government, and a war for which, after that, there was no military foresight or planning, no thought of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, or of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Vietnam. The soldiers watching this ex-reserve, sometimes-fighter-jock walk into the room were already called to and standing at attention, and so could not applaud, as respect of the office would call so many to, otherwise. A public-relations mistake, it would seem.
He praised the troops, his innocent pawns, and repeated the slogans, “We’ll fight ‘em there, we’ll fight ‘em everywhere.” He did not repeat the fictitious weapons-of-mass-destruction excuse that he started with when he sent the nation’s military into this nightmare. Then, it was the WMD turned to the now worn-out and debunked spread-freedom line, alone, as the way to secure America’s freedom. History is recording other reasons, because that one is no longer viable and is now widely known not to be the truth. Freedom would really have been only a side benefit.
And his anti-terrorist program has more enemies to confront, and they need confrontation, but he can’t get to them just now. Milking Iraq is full-time work. Remember the terrible axis of evil? But it’s still okay to say we’ll fight ‘em everywhere, because in some sense and at some level, we will. But he didn’t say it factually. He was making it into an emotional media tool. It was his version of a national pep talk. Yet, the way we choose to fight terrorists, radical Islam, everywhere, is so important because, unlike the emotion-eliciting expression of the president, the factual fight on the world front has limited resources and limited time as the death and destruction climbs, and as the enemies that can hurt America grow stronger and more dangerous. Now and into the future, it must be the right level with the right force and the right resources in the right place. If the motive for military force is defense, the answers are a lot easier than when the motive is control. Bush and his circle want control in Iraq, political and economic, and the one thing his speech made clear, is that they are as determined as ever to get it, despite the deaths, says Bush, and despite that Rumsfeld is backing up so often now that he’d be better off wearing his pants backwards.
While Bush tries to lock down “freedom” in Iraq, he has killed the life of its people, with the death and maiming of thousands upon thousands—the elderly, women, children, these along with the militants who come to fight what they believe are invaders and who stand and die by their sincere beliefs, no matter how misguided and deadly. And Bush only reinforces the fear and hatred of America, not only in Iraq, but throughout the region, because he is introducing them to the same expansionist patterns that are written into America’s history, of which they are familiar. America does have a history of taking, with force or economic strength, simply because the technology and economic capabilities of its society, developing (after the revolution) free of European distraction and turmoil, have made it possible to do so. Louisiana and the land north to Canada was taken for a song from the French under the auspices of great political pressure and geopolitical circumstance, the land south and west of the Indian nations was taken from the Spanish, Alaska was bought from the Russians, and the Pacific Islands are more like the Iraqi situation, where occupation led to acquisition or a detached form of control. Arabs will point to this and emphasize the Indian nations, whose way of life was destroyed and heritage taken by the juggernaut of American technological and economic expansion.
And America is an invader in Iraq. How would you feel if China invaded Canada over fishing rights or some such? How many American “insurgents” would go north to help that neighbor, fearing America would be next? Or just for the fight? The Arabs see that same juggernaut threatening their region now, and in the case of the goals of the Bush circle, they are right. A Coca Cola sign on every block, a pornography store in every urban neighborhood, and all that goes with it. Let the Islamic Arabs point at Florida as one small example, among far too many, repeated in many places from coast to coast, where in Miami a sex-toy store has been open for years directly across the street and within eyesight of the classroom windows of the Coconut Grove Elementary School, proof that it is a mistake to cloud the issue of cultural friction with the delusional notion that the Arabs don’t have any true substance to their concerns! Or that they don’t find out about America’s and other western nations’ cultural underbellies through the media or the Islamic communities that have migrated into western cultures. On the contrary, the conversion of segments of these communities to “Americanism” has been loudly denounced. Ignore this and you are contributing to the problem and avoiding the kinds of issues that must be addressed, along with corporate-expansionist policies, to bring about the end of radical Islam’s perverted ideology in the future.
The media reports with unobjective appal at the brutality of “insurgent” attacks, and brutal though they are, there should be no surprise, not when brutality is all that can be expected from people who have been raised to mutilate and kill their own wives, daughters, and sisters for a deluded, yet inbred caste of honor, believing it to be dictated from their Bible. A man who will kill his daughter will make jihad, will cut off heads, kidnap and kill women, Americans, will be... predictable. These are the same types, the very same, that the Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan, fought with every considerable resource they had, and with far-greater ruthlessness than American public relations in an open society could ever permit. Afghanistan turned out to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. How could Bush ever have thought, ever have been counseled that Iraq would be a quick-and-easy path to freedom or corporate-resource development?
But Bush has a history of the quick and easy, according to his reserve military record, and his coattailed business and political records. Even without the fabrications of libel, his military record is not one of sufficient dedication or achievement in the face of threats at the front to merit his P.R. team using it to support his policies.
