This pretty much sums up the Village Idiot from Texas.
The Project for A New American Century
Educate yourself on the mission that shapes our U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East
by Ragu
This is the website for The
Project for A New American Century. This is a Neo-conservative Political
Action Committee thinly disguised as non-profit think tank. This website
was originally launched around the 2000 elections as a platform for
the politcal rhetoric of the neo-con's cabal of right wing heavy hitters.
Namely William Kristol, editor of The
Weekly Standard and chairman of the PNAC, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy
Secretary of the DoD, Richard Pearle, senior advisor to Dubya, Rumsfeld,
Cheney, Ashcroft, Bush Jr., basically the whole crew. The site used
to be heavy on the stars-and-stripes motif, with nice full color photos
of all the boys, smiling and smirking like foxes in a henhouse. I notice
recently it has been toned down considerably, so as to appear more non-partisian
and more credible. The names and pictures of Cheney, Pearle, Rumsfeld,
Bush and Ashcroft have been removed, as well as most/all mention of
their association with the PNAC. Don't be fooled, the Bush Junta is
still firmly esconched in the mix, and their dumbass policies are still
driving the bus at the PNAC.
If you actually take the time to read the mission statement of the PNAC,
you will most likely end up with with one of two impressions. Either
you will be so Gung-Ho about American World Domination you will gladly
sign off on the next 2-3 decades of U.S. imperialist military intervention
in the Middle East (and the inevitable global Jihad that goes with it),
or you will be so terrified you will do anything to see that George
W. Bush and his administration never comes close to getting elected
or appointed to any government office ever again. Seriously, if you
truly fathom the cause of the PNAC, it will be one or the other.
Surprisingly, not too many people, especially conservative Republicans,
have ever even heard of the PNAC. If they had been paying attention,
they would know the PNAC proudly advocates long term American military
presence in the Middle East in order to regulate the worlds oil distribution
and therefore the world economy. As a bonus of the military presence,
the PNAC advocates the spreading of democracy thoughout the Arab Middle
East, at the end of a gun if necessary, in order to ensure that stability.
That's it in a nutshell.
All i can say is, Militaristically Imposed Democracy seems someone paradoxical
at best. But mark my words, regardless of the outcome of the current
Iraq War and its aftermath, our military is never coming home from the
Middle East. Iraq will become the new Korean DMZ, and never-ending occupation,
only it will be exponentially uglier and more costly to the U.S., our
economy, our culture, and our credibility abroad.
The PNAC manifesto was taken in large part from a White Paper written
by Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol during the waning days of Bush
Sr's term in office. The paper, entitled "Defense Strategies for
the United States, 1991-1992", advocated the overthrow of Iraq
and the establishment of long-term military bases there, in order to
control the acquisition and distribution of a large percentage of the
world's oil reserves, and thereby provide for long term stability of
the global and U.S. economy. I used to have a link to a pdf of this
policy report, but it has since been moved/removed. Gee, i wonder why.
To surmise the situation, Wolfy couldn't sell Bush Sr. on the overthrow
plan near the end of the 1st Persian Gulf War, so it was shelved during
the Clinton admin's, only to be dusted off in the 2000 election as the
plan that would turn an eventual Dubya presidency into an American Mission
to Save the World. Noble cause? Maybe. Incredible Hubris? Most definitely.
What i'm getting at here is that the Iraq War was on the menu in the
Bush Jr. White House from Day One. The catastrophe of 9/11 just made
it easier to sell to the gullible and/or blindly allegiant segment of
the American populace on the need to go fuck up Iraq.
And that's just what we've done. We've fucked up a situation in Iraq
that we had a relatively good hold on. Sure, Saddam defied some 17 UN
resolutions during the twelve year period of US/UN sanctions, but it
didn't really mean all that much whether he complied or defied them.
The US still held air control of over half of the country of Iraq during
that period, we could still bomb and cruise missle strike anywhere in
the country at any time with relative impunity, as was proven dozens
of times during the Clinton Admin. During the sanctions, Saddam worked
some backdoor oil deals to line his pockets, but his showed no military
aggression to any of his neighbors, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
or even Israel. He had no more influence on events in the Middle East
than any other leader of an Arab nation, and quite arguably he wielded
less influence. And as is becoming more apparent all the time, he wasn't
willing to leverage what little control he did have by joining forces
with Al Qeada....but that's a whole 'nuther rant.
So read about The Project for a New American Century, and decide what
you think. Maybe it will make a difference in your understanding of
our U.S. Foreign Policy decisions of late, and the motives behind the
Bush Doctorine and the War on Iraq. Maybe not, but at least you will
understand this administration and it mission for what it really is.
Here are a couple of sites worth checking out if you're
looking to vent a little anti-Bush sentiment.
http://www.sickofthiscrap.com/
http://www.bushforpresidentofiraq.com/
6.19.04
Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday June 19, 2004
The
Guardian
A senior US intelligence official is about to publish
a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing
that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious,
premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin
Laden's hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror,
due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the
Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run"
and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous",
described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation
than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably"
acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.
He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his
organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror"
yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was
one of al-Qaida's protectors in Waziristan.
But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden,
said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes
forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez
Musharraf cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without
endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt. "He walks a
very fine line," he said yesterday.
Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking
the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however,
were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented
in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience
in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.
The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and
without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing
frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration
has taken.
Peter Bergen, the author of two books on Bin Laden and al-Qaida, said:
"His views represent an amped-up version of what is emerging as
a consensus among intelligence counter-terrorist professionals."
Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House
and its policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious,
premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat
but whose defeat did offer economic advantage.
"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure
to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of
the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat
has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."
In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida
leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead
of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied
on surrogates who proved to be unreliable.
"For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous
said.
Yesterday President Bush repeated his assertion that Bin Laden was cornered
and that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American
justice".
Anonymous said: "I think we overestimate significantly the stress
[Bin Laden's] under. Our media and sometimes our policymakers suggest
he's hiding from rock to rock and hill to hill and cave to cave. My
own hunch is that he's fairly comfortable where he is."
The death and arrest of experienced operatives might have set back Bin
Laden's plans to some degree but when it came to his long-term capacity
to threaten the US, he said, "I don't think we've laid a glove
on him".
"What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation,"
he said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more
professional group.
"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly
more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate,
more comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they're much
less prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They're just much
more careful across the board in the way they operate."
As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does
not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.
The most likely source of a nuclear device would be the former Soviet
Union, he believes. Dirty bombs, chemical and biological weapons, could
be home-made by al-Qaida's own experts, many of them trained in the
US and Britain.
Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through
Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating
strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with
the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the
Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.
"I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them
than the one they have now," he said.
"One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack
that would rally the country around the president."
The White House has yet to comment publicly on Imperial Hubris, which
is due to be published on July 4, but intelligence experts say it may
try to portray him as a professionally embittered maverick.
The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the stridency
of his warnings about al-Qaida led him to be moved from a highly sensitive
job in the late 90s.
But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA counter-terrorism
centre, said he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well
respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."
Anonymous believes Mr Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction
Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the
banner of spreading democracy.
He said: "It's going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before
we say to ourselves: 'What is going on'?"
In the immortal words of Dragnet's Joe Friday,
"Just the facts, maam."
Indeed. Here is a nonparisian website devoted
to debunking the political spin you hear from Presidents, pundits and
politicians from both sides. Just because you like the messenger, that
doesn't mean the message is necessarily true. Educate yourself, then
vote your conscience.
http://factcheck.org/default.aspx/
If you've been following the testimonies before
the 9/11 Commision,
I highly recommend you read this.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18368
Calling of a Generation
By Bill Moyers, AlterNet
April 7, 2004
President Bush spoke eloquently the other day about what the war on terror requires of us. He said, "The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation."
Those words ring true. Whatever drives them, whatever grieves them, Islamic fanatics have declared war and seem willing to wage it to the death. If they prevail, our children will grow up in a world where fear governs the imagination and determines the rules of life. Mr. Bush clearly believes what he said: The war on terror is an inescapable calling of the generation now in charge.
Like most Americans, I want to support him in that work. I want to do my part. But the president makes it hard. He confused us by going after Saddam Hussein when the villain behind the mass murders of 9/11 was Osama bin Laden. He seems not to realize how his credibility has been shredded by all the false and misleading reasons put forth to justify invading Iraq.
Lyndon Johnson never recovered from using the dubious events at the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to go to war in Vietnam. Even if Mr. Bush wins reelection this November, he, too, will eventually be dragged down by the powerful undertow that inevitably accompanies public deception. The public will grow intolerant of partisan predators and crony capitalists indulging in a frenzy of feeding at the troughs in Baghdad and Washington. And there will come a time when the president will have no one to rely on except his most rabid allies in the right wing media. He will discover too late that you cannot win the hearts and minds of the public at large in a nation polarized and pulverized by endless propaganda at odds with reality.
So what to do? How to assure we win this war?
The hearings in Washington suggest a start. It is clear now that the Bush White House bungled the warnings about Al Qaeda. But it's also clear that the Democrats under Bill Clinton made plenty of mistakes, as well. Why can't both parties come clean, apologize and start over? Either party could lose this war but both parties together just might win it. Why not a wartime cabinet to serve a wartime nation? Al Gore as head of Homeland Security. Gary Hart at Defense. The independent-minded John McCain or Warren Rudman at State. The world would get the point: This time we mean it, all of us – the war on terror no longer a partisan cause.
Surely, too, there are ways to subject all of us to the moral equivalent of the draft. The president put it well in another speech last week when he said, "I've seen the spirit of sacrifice and compassion renewed in our country. We've all seen our country unite in common purpose when it mattered most."
Those words ring true, as well. But so far sacrifice has been asked only of the men and women in uniform and their families: Nearly 600 dead since the war began – over 400 of them since the President landed on that aircraft carrier under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished."
Even now the privates patrolling the mean streets of Baghdad and the wilds of Afghanistan, their lives and limbs constantly at risk, are making less than $16,000 dollars a year in base pay. Here at home, meanwhile, the rich get their tax cuts – what Vice President Cheney calls "their due." Favored corporations get their contracts, subsidies and offshore loopholes. And as the president praises sacrifice, he happily passes the huge bills that are piling up debt on to children not yet born.
My thoughts started running on this track a couple of weeks ago when my wife Judith came across a relic of the past in our attic – a ration book issued by the OPA (the Office of Price Administration) with stamps for the purchase of essential goods. It's dated 1943 and it's aged so much you can barely make out the name on it – "Billy Don Moyers," the alias my mother gave me at birth. I was nine years when this ration book was issued, and America was fighting a war on two fronts, against both Nazis and Japanese warlords. Just about everything vital was going to feed the war machine, so just about everything was rationed: gasoline, tires, sugar, butter, meat, tea, diapers, kitchen utensils, lawnmowers. When stockings became scarce, women painted seams down their calves to simulate the real thing. You stood in line to get scarce items; and all of us were called upon to eat less, drive less, and do without.
Kids weren't exempt. I took this book with me to the store, and tore off exactly the number of stamps required to buy something. I never used all the stamps in this one book – that's how parsimonious people were. Or maybe it was patriotism. Anyway, I think of this now as a kind of war souvenir, a keepsake to remind me that victory on the home front began at 801 East Austin Street.
Where does the home front begin today? President Bush hasn't told us. I believe him when he says the war on terror is the inescapable calling of our generation. But it is one thing to say it, and yet another to lead all of us, and not just a partisan few, to answer it.
Bill Moyers is the host of the PBS program "Now with Bill Moyers."
The Junk Science of George W. Bush
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The
Nation
February 26, 2004
As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus
and Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth
revolved around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano
Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science. With
the encouragement of our professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the
capacity of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power
had caused the Catholic hierarchy to subvert the church's most central
purpose – the search for existential truths.
Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration – aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals – are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own. Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring, and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration's corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda. Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact "for partisan political ends."
I've had my own experiences with Torquemada's modern successors, both personal and related to my work as an environmental lawyer and advocate working for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Waterkeeper Alliance. At the time of the World Trade Center catastrophe on September 11, 2001, I had just opened an office at 115 Broadway, cater-corner from the World Trade Center and within the official security zone to which access was, afterward, restricted for several months. Upon returning to the office in October my partner, Kevin Madonna, suffered a burning throat, nausea and a headache that was still pounding twenty-four hours after he left the building. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency's claims that air quality was safe, Kevin refused to return and we closed the office.
Many workers did not have that option; their employers relied on the EPA's nine press releases between September and December of 2001 reassuring the public about the wholesome air quality downtown. We have since learned that the government was lying to us. An Inspector General's report released last August revealed that the EPA's data did not support those assurances and that its press releases were being drafted or doctored by White House officials intent on reopening Wall Street. On September 13, just two days after the terror attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the area was "very low" or entirely absent. On September 18 the agency said the air was "safe to breathe."
In fact, more than 25 percent of the samples collected by the EPA before September 18 showed presence of asbestos above the 1 percent safety benchmark. Among outside studies, one performed by scientists at the University of California, Davis, found particulates at levels never before seen in more than 7,000 similar tests worldwide. A study being performed by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine has found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose and throat problems in the months following the attack and that about half still had persistent lung and respiratory illnesses nine months to a year later. Dan Tishman, whose company was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West Street, required his crews to wear respirators but recalls seeing many rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected – no doubt relying on the government's assurances. "The frustrating thing is that everyone just counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health," he says. "When that role is compromised, people can get hurt."
I also recall the case of Dr. James Zahn, a nationally respected microbiologist with the Agriculture Department's research service, who accepted my invitation to speak to an April 2002 conference of more than 1,000 family farm advocates and environmental and civic leaders in Clear Lake, Iowa. In a rigorous taxpayer-funded study, Zahn had identified bacteria that can make people sick – and that are resistant to antibiotics – in the air surrounding industrial-style hog farms. His studies proved that billions of these "superbugs" were traveling across property lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their herds.
I was shocked when Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the conference under orders from the Agriculture Department in Washington. I later uncovered a fax trail proving the order was prompted by lobbyists from the National Pork Producers Council. Zahn told me that his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study and that he had been forced to cancel more than a dozen public appearances at local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about health impacts of industry mega-farms. Soon after my conference, Zahn resigned from the government in disgust.
Ignoring Bad News
The Bush Administration's first instinct when it comes to science has
been to suppress, discredit or alter facts it doesn't like. Probably
the best-known case is global warming. Over the past two years the Administration
has done this to a dozen major government studies on global warming,
as well as to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
in its own efforts to stall action to control industrial emissions.
The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government's
National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, and by scientific
teams at the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
and NASA, and a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three
of those agencies.
The Administration has taken special pains to shield Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, which is part of an industry that has contributed $58 million to Republicans since 2000. Halliburton is the leading practitioner of a process used in extracting oil and gas known as hydraulic fracturing, in which benzene is injected into underground formations. EPA scientists studying the process in 2002 found that it could contaminate ground-water supplies in excess of federal drinking water standards. A week after reporting their findings to Congressional staff members, however, they revised the data to indicate that benzene levels would not exceed government standards. In a letter to Representative Henry Waxman, EPA officials said the change was made based on "industry feedback."
As a favor to utility and coal industries, America's largest mercury dischargers, the EPA sat for nine months on a report exposing the catastrophic impact on children's health of mercury, finally releasing it in February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The bloodstream of one in twelve US women is saturated with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children. The list goes on. In October 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton, responding to a Senate committee inquiry on the effects of oil drilling on caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that the caribou would not be affected, because they calve outside the area targeted for drilling. She later explained that she somehow substituted "outside" for "inside." She also substituted findings from a study financed by an oil company for some of the ones that the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared for her.
In another case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressed for changes that would allow diversion of substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to benefit local supporters and agribusiness contributors. Some 34,000 endangered salmon were killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists altered their findings on the amount of water the salmon required. Environmentalists describe it as the largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike Kelly, the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who drafted the biological opinion, told me that under the current plan coho salmon are probably headed for extinction. According to Kelly, "The morale is very low among scientists here. We are under pressure to get the right results. This Administration is putting the species at risk for political gain. And not just in the Klamath."
Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, told me that the alteration and deletion of scientific information is now standard procedure at Interior. "It's hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the Administration's politicization of the scientific process," he said, "its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public."
Getting the Right Answer
But suppressing or altering science can be a tricky business; the Bush
Administration has found it easier at times simply to arrange to get
the results it wants. A case in point is the decision in July by the
EPA's regional office overseeing the western Everglades to accept a
study financed predominantly by developers, which concludes that wetlands
discharge more pollutants than they absorb. There was no peer review
or public comment. With its approval, the EPA is giving developers credit
for improving water quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf
courses and other developments.
The study was financed by the Water Enhancement and Restoration Committee, which was formed primarily by local developers and chaired by Rick Barber, the consultant for a golf course development for which the EPA had denied a permit because it would pollute surrounding waters and destroy wetlands. The study contradicts everything known about wetlands functioning, including a determination by more than twenty-five scientists and managers at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program that, on balance, wetlands do not generate nitrogen pollution. Bruce Boler, a biologist and water-quality specialist working for the EPA office, resigned in protest. Boler says the developers massaged the data to support their theory by evaluating samples collected near roads and bridges, where developments discharge pollutants. "It was like the politics trumped the science," he told us.
In a similar case, last November the EPA cut a private deal with a pesticide manufacturer to take over federal studies of a pesticide it manufactures. Atrazine is the most heavily utilized weedkiller in America. First approved in 1958, by the 1980s it had been identified as a potential carcinogen associated with high incidences of prostate cancer among workers at manufacturing facilities. Testing by the US Geological Survey regularly finds alarming concentrations of Atrazine in drinking water across the corn belt. Even worse, last year scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Atrazine at one-thirtieth the government's "safe" 3 parts per billion level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including multiple sets of organs. And this year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri found reproductive consequences in humans associated with Atrazine, including male semen counts in farm communities that are 50 percent below normal. Iowa scientists are finding similar results in a current study.
The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening findings not by banning this dangerous chemical, as the European Union has, but by taking the studies away from EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move, giving the chemical's manufacturer, Switzerland-based Syngenta, control over federal research. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a spokesperson for Syngenta, praised without irony the advantages of having the company monitor its own product. "This is one way we can ensure it's not presenting any risk to the environment."
In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy, the Bush Administration now plans to systematically turn government science over to private industry by contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profits. The National Park Service is preparing a first phase of contracting reviews, involving about 1,800 positions, including biologists, archeologists and environmental specialists. Later phases may entail replacement of 11,000 employees, more than two-thirds of the service's permanent work force. At least federal employees enjoy civil service and whistleblower protection intended to allow them to operate professionally and independently. Private contractors don't enjoy the same level of protection. "You can shop for the right contractor to give you the kind of result you want," says Frank Buono, a retired Park Service veteran who now serves on the board of a nonprofit whistleblower protection organization.
As a Last Resort, Fire the Messenger
Most federal employees have gone along with the Bush Administration's
wishes, but a few have tried to stand up for sound science. The results
are predictable. When a team of government biologists indicated that
the Army Corps of Engineers was violating the Endangered Species Act
in managing the flow of the Missouri River, the group was quickly replaced
by an industry-friendly panel. (In an unexpected – and fortunate
– development, the new panel ultimately declined to adopt the White
House's pro-barge-industry position and upheld the decision to manage
the river to protect imperiled species.) Similarly, last April the EPA
suddenly dismantled an advisory panel that had spent nearly twenty-one
months developing rules for stringent regulation of industrial emissions
of mercury.
Or consider the case of Tony Oppegard and Jack Spadaro, members of a team of federal geodesic engineers selected to investigate the collapse of barriers that held back a coal slurry pond in Kentucky containing toxic wastes from mountaintop strip-mining. The 300-million-gallon spill was the largest in American history and, according to the EPA, the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern United States. Black lava-like toxic sludge containing sixty poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks and poisoned the drinking water in seventeen communities. Unlike in other slurry disasters, no one died, but hundreds of residents were sickened by contact with contaminated water.
The investigation had broad implications for the viability of mountaintop mining, which involves literally lopping off mountaintops to get access to the underlying coal. It is a process beloved by coal barons because it practically dispenses with the need for human labor and thus increases industry profits. Spadaro, the nation's leading expert on slurry spills, recalls, "We were geotechnical engineers determined to find the truth. We simply wanted to get to the heart of the matter – find out what happened and why, and to prevent it from happening again. But all that was thwarted at the top of the agency by Bush appointees who obstructed professionals trying to do their jobs."
The Bush Administration appointees all had coal industry pedigrees. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (the wife of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate's biggest recipient of industry largesse) appointed Dave Lauriski, a former executive with Energy West Mining, as the new director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which oversaw the investigation. His deputy assistant secretary was John Caylor, an Anamax Mining alumnus. His other deputy assistant, John Correll, had worked for both Amax and Peabody Coal. Oppegard, the leader of the federal team, was fired on the day Bush was inaugurated in 2001. All eight members of the team except Spadaro signed off on a whitewashed investigation report. Spadaro, like the others, was harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In April of 2001 Spadaro resigned from the team and filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Labor Department. Last June 4 he was placed on administrative leave – a prelude to getting fired.
Bush Administration officials accuse Spadaro of "abusing his authority" for allowing a handicapped instructor to have free room and board at a training academy he oversees, an arrangement approved by his superiors. An internal report vindicated Spadaro's criticisms of the investigation, but the Administration is still going after his job. "I've been regulating mining since 1966," Spadaro told me. "This is the most lawless administration I've encountered. They have no regard for protecting miners or the people in mining communities. They are without scruples."
Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world. At their best, scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth. Over the past two decades industry and conservative think tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt science. They distort the truth about tobacco, pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and global warming. In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public action (by positing that all opinions are politically driven and therefore any one is as true as any other), they also undermine belief in the integrity of the scientific process.
Now Congress and this White House have used federal power for the same purpose. Led by the President, the Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets and politicized science within the federal agencies. The very leaders who so often condemn the trend toward moral relativism are fostering and encouraging the trend toward scientific relativism. The very ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have now institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning culture of America's federal agencies.
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, is working on a book about President Bush's environmental policies, Crimes Against Nature, to be published this spring by HarperCollins.
Scientists: Bush Distorts Science for Political
Gain
© By Kristen Philipkoski, Wired.com
Feb. 18, 2004
The Bush administration has distorted scientific fact leading to policy
decisions on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear
weaponry, a group of about 60 scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates,
said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, an
independent organization, also issued a 37-page report,
"Scientific
Integrity in Policymaking," detailing the accusations.
The statement
and the report both accuse the Bush administration of distorting and
suppressing findings that contradict administration policies, stacking
panels with like-minded and underqualified scientists with ties to industry,
and eliminating some advisory committees altogether.
The scientists listed various policy issues as
being unfairly influenced by the administration, including those
concerning climate change, mercury emissions,
reproductive health, lead poisoning in children, workplace safety and
nuclear weapons. New regulations and laws are necessary to fix
the situation, the statement says.
"We found a serious pattern of undermining science by the Bush
administration, and it crosses disciplines, whether it's global climate
change or reproductive health or mercury in the food chain or forestry
-- the list goes on and on," said Kevin Knobloch, president of
the Union of Concerned Scientists.
President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, said he was disappointed
in the report, and called it biased.
He said he was troubled by the fact that some very prestigious scientists
signed the statement.
"We have to find a way to reach out to them and try to come to
an understanding, because this administration has in fact been very
supportive of science," Marburger said. He noted the administration
has doubled the National Institutes of Health budget and increased the
National Science Foundation budget.
The Union of Concerned Scientists began investigating the Bush administration's
scientific policy-making last summer in response to numerous complaints
from members of the scientific community, Knobloch said. The report
documents various instances of the administration undercutting science,
scientists and the public welfare, he said.
For example, the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention on lead poisoning was recently planning to strengthen
the lead poisoning regulations, in response to science showing that
smaller amounts than previously understood could cause brain damage
in children, Knobloch said.
Before the panel could act, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy
Thompson rejected the recommendation and replaced two members of the
panel with individuals tied to the lead industry, Knobloch said.
Marburger said he wasn't familiar with the details of the panel changes,
"but I'm pretty sure there were other reasons for making changes
on the panel," he said. "I think there are reasonable explanations
for nearly all the things in the report, and rather than look for what
those explanations might be, I think the (researchers were) somewhat
biased in favor of a sweeping opinion of what this administration is
all about, and I just don't think that's justified."
The researchers also took issue with a White
House Office of Management and Budget bulletin regarding peer
review, a process fundamental to science by which researchers check
each other's work for accuracy and balance before it's published. The
bulletin
(PDF), drafted in August 2003, would allow the government to hand-pick
scientists to second-guess scientific research, opponents say.
The text of the bulletin says its purpose would be to ensure that all
research affecting federal regulations, such as environmental or health
advisories, would be thoroughly peer-reviewed by unbiased researchers.
But opponents say the bulletin's guidelines would scrutinize only academic
researchers for bias, not industry scientists.
(What the rest of the
world is saying on the second anniversary of 9/11...)
Two Years On, World Media Sympathy Comes With Warnings
By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff
Thursday, September 11, 2003
On Sept. 12, 2001, the Parisian daily Le Monde
ran a famous banner headline: "We are all Americans now,"
a sentiment that resonated in media around the world.
Two years later, the international media commentary on the anniversary
of the devastating and humiliating attacks on New York and Washington
is distinctly less sympathetic. Wariness and warnings are the rule.
"Compassion has been replaced by the fear that ill-considered actions
will make things worse, and that the fight against terrorism could be
a pretext for the extension of American hegemony," says Le Monde
(in French) in today's editorial.
The view from Paris is that "the
United States cannot, by itself, 'make the world safe for democracy',
according to the expression of their President Woodrow Wilson in 1917.
It must listen to its allies, take into account the differing situations
in which it intervenes, comply with the international rules that it
has helped enact. The reckoning of the last two years sounds like a
recall of these principles."
Peshawar, Pakistan is about as
far away from Paris as you can get. It is an impoverished, often lawless
city near the border of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is thought to be
hiding somewhere nearby. But the editors of the Peshawar Post see things
much the same as Le Monde.
"Perhaps this is not the time to criticise a country that is observing
the mourning of the second anniversary of the horrified deaths of her
thousands of innocent civilians," says commentary writer Syed Atiq
ul Hassan. "However, sometime one has to swallow the bitter truth
and face the realities of the time when analyzing and documenting the
facts.
"In the last two years, has the U.S. found more opponents or sympathizers,
more friends or enemies, more stability or insecurity? . . . This is
what needs to be evaluated by the people of the United States,"
Atiq writes.
The editors of the Manila Inquirer
in the Philippines see only "Insecurity," as their editorial
is headlined, on the second anniversary of Sept. 11.
"The military conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq has not only failed
to root out the cause of terrorist attacks but also failed to install
democracy in these two countries. The costs of war and occupation have
prompted Bush to ask Congress for $87 billion in emergency spending
for military operations and rebuilding," the editorial says. "[President
Bush's Sunday] speech foreshadows an open-ended military presence in
Iraq that is turning into a seemingly bottomless hole devouring U.S.
economic resources."
In Australia, one of the main allies
in the war on Iraq, a leading national daily newspaper, the Sydney
Morning Herald turned to political activist and Massachusetts Institute
of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, a fierce critic of
U.S. foreign policy, for a look back.
"On September 11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and
sympathy for the victims," Chomsky writes. "But it is important
to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction:
'Welcome to the club.' For the first time in history, a Western power
was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere."
In Malaysia's leading daily, the
New Straits Times, law professor Shad Faruqi makes the same point more
harshly.
Other tragedies of Sept. 11 have gone unmourned, Faruqi says, citing
two examples. On Sept. 11, 1922, the British government promised European
Zionists it would support the establishment of a Jewish state in the
land known as Palestine. On Sept. 11, 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, backed
by the CIA, overthrew a democratically elected government in Chile,
and launched a military regime that killed 3,000 of its opponents in
the next 17 years.
"Somehow when Asians or Arabs commit terrorism, that is a crime
against humanity," he says. "When Americans, Europeans and
Israelis bomb, burn and brutalize the colored people, that is a war
against terrorism or (as in Iraq) a war of liberation. Such hypocrisy
and racism must be condemned."
The coincidental anniversaries of the Sept. 11 attacks and the 1973
coup in Chile was widely noted in Latin America. Miguel Angel Granados
Chapa notes in the Mexico City
daily Reforma (in Spanish) that "nobody in his right mind could
feel joy at the North American misfortune of two years ago, nor evoke
some form of justice for offenses that Washington has committed in different
times and places. But the coincidence of two calamaties lead us to remember
the North American influence in the military coup that 30 years ago
interrupted Chilean democracy, where the dictatorship caused as many
deaths in its first days as when the Twin Towers of New York fell."
The Saudi Gazette, the English-language
edition of one of Saudi Arabia's biggest circulation newspapers, notes
that the United States has suffered no new terrorist attacks in two
years while Saudi Arabia has.
"This has brought the United States and Saudi Arabia on the same
side in this war against terrorism and, therefore, they need to cooperate
with each other and also with all other nations of the world against
the common enemy," the Gazette editorial says.
"Nonetheless, the victims of terrorism, particularly the United
States, should note that international terrorism has increased in spite
of the war on terrorism," the editorial notes. "While the
war has not ended yet and new fronts against it can be opened as and
when the situation demands, the United States must rethink its policy
against terrorism."
In Indonesia, which suffered the
worst al Qaeda terror attack since Sept. 11, the Jakarta Post editors
stress their sympathy for America and their hope that Americans will
be "more reflective" on the second anniversary of the attacks.
The United States "must work hand in hand with other nations around
the globe to combat this global scourge. But how can the U.S. persuade
other nations to join its antiterrorism drive when they can so easily
put a finger on U.S. arbitrary actions? It seems that, for the present
at least, the Bush administration has its hands so full with fighting
its own battles against its enemies that it has no time to reflect on
the fact that other nations also have a right to exist on this planet,"
the Post says.
In the Times of India, columnist
Jug Suraiya fears that the commemoration of 9/11 "will increasingly
become a calendar event, a ritualistic exercise in mass memory. Ritualistic
because all such conjurations are selective, and are as much about forgetting
as about remembering."
The second anniversary, he says, "will divert attention from a
number of related questions that remain unanswered. For instance, what
happened to the top priority given to the hunting down of Osama bin
Laden as the man behind 9/11, though he himself denied it? Since he
wasn't found there, what was the justification for invading Afghanistan
and then abandoning it in a state of virtual civil war? Where are the
WMD which justified the attack on Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein?
Or were they only weapons of mass distraction?
"Memory as an individual narrative is what makes us uniquely human,"
Suraiya writes. "But when memory is institutionalized by a larger
entity, like a nation or a community or an ideology, it becomes the
most powerful weapon in the arsenal of propaganda."
© 2003 Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive
A Few Words From Our President, George W.
Bush
(satire or truth?)
Ok, it is time for me to fess up. I am a rich man who likes to try to
enhance the power of the ruling class of this country by exploiting
the masses.
I am attempting to increase the exploitation through many different
means, such a war, increases on regressive taxes, decreases on progressive
taxes, cutting social programs that benefit the common American, the
starving of funds for our government so that social programs need to
be cut, and by pretending to support democracy when I know damn well
I didn't even get the popular vote and wouldn't have even won the presidency
if not for my brother Jeb, (governor of Florida, the state that couldn't
get the vote right) and the Supreme Court, which has quite a conservative
and Republican bias, just like myself.
As for planning and being behind the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, as
many of you know, my admistration and I are far to intellectually impaired
to even come close to planning or successfully executing such an ingenious
and delicate operation. As can be seen, almost everything my administration
does is a failure. Look at the situation in Iraq...or forget Iraq and
take a look at the situation right here in America. I can't even speak
correctly! I had an intelligent man rewrite and proof this so I didn't
come off as complete idiot.
No, I am not responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9-11-2001, but
like any other greedy, opportunistic, selfish, short-sighted, corrupt
far right-wing Republican, even I was able to see the opportunity to
turn the tragedy of that day to support for my ridiculous policies.
Fear is one of the most powerful tools in manipulating the human mind.
By driving the fear of terrorism fueled by 9-11-2001 attacks with idea
like buying duct tape and issuing orange alerts (thanks, Homeland Security!),
I was able to do many things.
My main agenda was to destroy liberal and progressive advances of
the past here at home, while extending the American economic empire
abroad, namely in a place that has a lot of worth and very little loyalty
to my regime. (And it is a regime!!!) By connecting my (when I say "my"
or use any other first-person pronoun, do realize I am referring more
to the members of my regime than myself...after all, they are the brains
behind it, not me) desire for a new economic hold on the middle-east
along with the terrorist attacks, I was able to oversimplify the situation
and imply that arab-based Al-Qaeda was one in the same with arab Saddam
Hussein and the arab government of Iraq. This is clearly false, but
all that's important is that most American's fell for it long enough
for me to get my war on.
Once the war on terrorism was started, and later the war on Iraq, the
American people were more than distracted enough from my social and
economic aspirations. I am slowly, but surely working to reverse the
progressive nature of the 20th century with many different plans, like
my tax cuts for the rich, my dismantling of social programs like Head
Start, and my bad economic policies that starve other social programs
the government offers so that they are ill-equipped to run and then
later I can cite their lack of performance as an excuse to get rid of
them. I do all of this while supporting other conservative candidates
for government. In fact, I spend more time raising money for my party
than I do raising money for my country. By both dismantling the liberal
and progressive triumphs of the past here at home and increasing the
economic power of the American economic empire abroad, I am setting
up the perfect conservative climate for the ruling "elite"
to flourish in.
On a final note, though, don't put all of the blame on us. Even with
my right-wing buddies going as far as to fix elections by using mysterious
electronic ballot machines whose workings are unknown to all but the
companies who make them, the majority of the American people are still
at fault. In our society most people would rather watch "The Simpsons"
than the news. And for the rare few that do watch the news, most are
too lazy to get a variety of sources and/or think for themselves; these
people find it easier just to watch mass-media news broadcasts unaware
of the large corporations that are behind it--large corporations of
which my conservative ends benefits, unlike the people, meaning they
are most likely not going to give you news if it means publicizing a
policy of mine that hurts the average American but benfits them. I mean,
really, more than half of people don't even vote!!! I am not complaining
though, as long as America WANTS to be ignorant, it will be easy for
me and people like myself to bend the country to do what we want, even
until it breaks. I would never win against a free-thinking society,
but I don't have to fight a free-thinking society because that is not
what American is for the most part. It is enough for people to have
the illusion of being free-thinking and then sit down with a beer and
leave it to someone else.
The upcoming election will be a true test for America. If I lose, then
there may still be hope for those who don't believe in the screw-or-be-screwed
capitalist ethic of most conservatives. If I win, however, it will just
be another sign of a stagnating America; an America of degradation and
decay. A society to big to handle itself, a society on the downward
slope of empire with it best days behind it, and like all other empires,
will slowly, but most certainly fall. The choice is yours...
(DISCLAIMER - Ok, so I am not George W. Bush,
but I truly believe this is what he would say if he were both intelligent
and truthful, of which he is neither. Also note that almost all (a disclaimer
in itself) of what was stated was derived from reputable sources, so
if you don't like it, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! VOTE! It's your right,
and our only hope.)
Present at the Dissolution
Editorial from The
Nation.
Washington has shifted into scandal gear. The Administration offers
one explanation after another for the President's discredited claim
in the State of the Union address that British intelligence had "learned"
Iraq was seeking to buy lightly refined uranium from Niger. Each explanation
contradicts the last. None so far is believable. Talk of resignations
is in the air. Perhaps it will be George Tenet, who supposedly "threw
himself on his sword," as people keep saying, when he publicly
took responsibility for the President's mistake. (It turns out that
the sword must have been made of rubber, since, two weeks after throwing
himself on it, Tenet is still alive and well and in charge of the CIA--a
CIA that, furthermore, has partially repudiated Tenet's gesture by disclosing
that it had in fact warned the White House that the President's claim
was shaky.) Next it was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's
deputy, Stephen Hadley, who was throwing himself on his sword (rubber
or otherwise)--by revealing that he had not passed along the CIA's warning
to his boss Rice. Then there was talk that Rice might have to throw
herself on her sword, in order to protect the President. Now the President
has said he takes "personal responsibility for everything I say,
of course," but without confirming that the uranium claim was mistaken
or disclosing how it got into his speech.
The scandal--which might be called wargate (you only have to remove
two letters from "Watergate"), since the cost of the mistake
was a war--rightly preoccupies the capital. Yet the problem is not only
the fact that Tenet didn't tell Hadley or that Hadley didn't tell Rice
or that Rice didn't tell the President, or any other failure or manipulation
of intelligence or even flat-out lie (though all these occurred and
are important). For the roots of the debacle lie in the policy--it is
sometimes called the "Bush doctrine"--in whose name the Administration
propelled the country into war. That policy unfolded in a series of
bold speeches and documents in the months after September 11. The first
step was to designate the American response to the September attack
a "war on terror." By naming "war" (as distinct
from police action) as his means, the President put the world on notice
that the full, stupendous power of the American military machine would
be brought to bear; by naming "terror" (as distinct from the
group responsible for the attack, the Al Qaeda network) as the enemy,
he signaled that the operations would be global in scope. Next, in his
first statement to the joint session of Congress, the President announced
that not only "terror" but any regimes that sponsored it would
be placed on the list of enemies. Vice President Cheney soon put their
number at more than sixty. The first target was the government of Afghanistan,
which was duly overthrown.
In the State of the Union speech of 2002, Bush expanded the range of
his new doctrine still further. Most important, he incorporated into
it the gravest issue that any President of our era has had to face:
the danger from nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction.
Bush named an "axis of evil" consisting of three countries
that allegedly were seeking such weapons: Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Defining nuclear danger as proliferation--both to new states and to
terrorist groups--he asserted that the means to stop it was war. "The
United States of America," he said, employing the classic language
of military ultimatums, "will not permit the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
With these words, the cause of safety in the nuclear age was subsumed
by the war on terror.
Four months later, in a major speech at West Point on June 2, 2002,
Bush elaborated the means by which his ambitious new policy would be
pursued. The policy of "deterrence" and "containment"
had prevailed throughout the cold war. But now, he said, "deterrence--the
promise of massive retaliation against nations--means nothing against
shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend."
And "containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with
weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or
secretly provide them to terrorist allies." In this speech, too,
the President for the first time made an extraordinary claim: The United
States would reserve to itself a global monopoly on effective military
power, restricting other nations to nonmilitary activities. In his words,
"America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge,
thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless,
and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." Throughout
history, the choice between war and peace had been open to all nations.
Now the United States was claiming war as its exclusive domain and confining
other nations to peace.
The elements of the new doctrine were assembled, summed up, elaborated
and proclaimed to the world in September 2002, in a White House document
called "The National Security Strategy of the United States of
America." It stated that America's global military superiority
would be able not only to "decisively defeat any adversary"
but "dissuade future military competition." The pre-emptive
policy was stated even more boldly. The United States reserved the right
to attack "even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place
of the enemy's attack." The proper term for such a policy, as many
political scientists have pointed out, is not in fact pre-emptive war
(forestalling an attack that is planned and imminent) but preventive
war (destroying military forces that might one day be used against you).
At the document's core was still the resolve to stop proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction--whether to states or to terrorists--by
military force.
This is the policy whose unraveling across the board we are now witnessing.
Condoleezza Rice likened the post-September 11 moment to the end of
the Second World War and the beginning of the cold war. President Truman's
Secretary of State Dean Acheson titled his memoir of the period Present
at the Creation. The Bush doctrine was self-consciously patterned upon
it. Now, less than two years later, we are present at the dissolution.
The Bush policy has failed in Iraq. The Iraq war gave life to every
one of the main tenets of the Bush doctrine: It was an exercise in the
raw, overwhelmingly unilateral use of American military power; its chief
justification was stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction
(the Congressional resolution passed last October authorized forcing
compliance with UN resolutions, which dealt almost exclusively with
the disarmament issue); and it was preventive par excellence. Now the
weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found. To the arguments
that preventive war is illegal (a clear violation of the UN Charter)
and strategically reckless (if taken as a model by other states, it
is a formula for international anarchy), we must add that it is unusually
prone to catastrophic error. The President's spokesman has commented,
"the President is not a fact-checker." But he had better become
one if he wishes to pursue a policy of pre-emptive war, whose justifications
depend entirely on the accuracy of facts.
Intelligence failures--a serious problem in any war--fatally undercut
a pre-emptive war policy. The recent arguments by Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Administration that the war
was worth it even if the intelligence was "murky" (i.e., wrong)
is unlikely to persuade the families, American and Iraqi, of those who
died in the war. (As the factual basis of the war justification collapses,
the words of the National Security Strategy of the United States make
interesting reading: "To support pre-emptive options, we will:
build better, more integrated intelligence capabilities to provide timely,
accurate information on threats, wherever they may emerge.") Meanwhile,
the war itself spins out of control. The plan for global military domination,
it has turned out, had no political underpinnings. The Administration
knew it had a regime to destroy but apparently forgot that it would
then be in possession of a country to govern. In what is the most colossal
intelligence failure of them all, the Bush Administration scarcely seems
to know what a country is, or what is required to keep one--its electricity,
its schools, its local governments, its hospitals, its museums--running.
The policy has failed in North Korea. While attacking a country that
had no known, current program for building weapons of mass destruction,
the Administration proved helpless to deal with a country that, by its
own account, has moved swiftly and brazenly to acquire them. Former
Secretary of Defense William Perry has said that he cannot even detect
that the Administration has a policy toward North Korea. In truth, there
was a policy--it was the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive attack announced
in statement after statement by the President--but the problem was that
it simply had no feasible application to a country that, like North
Korea, had a significant conventional force and, allegedly, several
nuclear weapons. The United States might drop the policy of deterrence
in favor of pre-emption/prevention; but in the event it was itself deterred,
leaving it with the absence of policy noted by Perry. It was left in
the position--diametrically at odds with its own repeated warnings--of
saying that the appearance of a nuclear arsenal in North Korea was "not
a crisis." Perry now counsels a belated turn to negotiation, and
his proposal is well worth trying, but the likelihood of success is
uncertain. North Korea has witnessed regime change in Iraq and shows
every sign of believing that a growing nuclear arsenal is its best means
of heading off the same fate for itself.
The policy has failed in Iran, also apparently on its way to building
nuclear weapons. Like North Korea, Iran has not canceled or shelved
but stepped up its nuclear program in response to the war in Iraq. Does
the Bush doctrine offer a solution? Unable to govern Iraq, can it add
Iran to the list of countries it seeks to rule? American military forces
are already stretched to the breaking point by the occupations of Afghanistan
and Iraq, and other deployments, and soldiers are simply not available
to invade Iran, even if the Administration should wish to undertake
such a lunatic project. The high-tech forces so useful for annihilating
conventional armies have proved useless for running the countries thus
acquired. You can knock down government ministries with precision-guided
munitions; you can't pick up garbage with them.
The policy has failed in the world as a whole. It has encouraged the
proliferation it was meant to stop, leaving the United States and the
world without an effective nonproliferation strategy. It has dishonored
the democratic system it was meant to promote. The political disaster
in Iraq is writ large in the decline of US reputation and power among
the nations of the world, almost all of whom opposed the war and are
now perfectly ready to watch on the sidelines as the United States sinks
in the Iraq bog. It has estranged America's traditional friends, including
its NATO allies. It has created a divide between the United States and
Europe. It has demeaned and damaged the UN. It has placed a roadblock
in the way of the international cooperation necessary to solve the most
important economic and social problems of the twenty-first century:
saving the global environment and working to fashion a more just and
prosperous global economy.
Wargate must be investigated, and those responsible must be brought
to account, but none of this will matter if the policy stays the same.
Building an alternative vision will be the work of the political opposition
to this Administration--and, we hope, a new administration in 2004--but
already the general outlines of one are obvious: The United States needs
to choose cooperation over coercion; multilateralism over unilateralism;
respect for international opinion over defiance; defense over offense;
containment and deterrence over prevention; diplomacy over force; peace
over war. Neither the resignation of Tenet nor of Hadley nor of Rice
nor of all of them together will check the mounting damage. Not even
the replacement of the President will in itself be enough. That, too,
important as it is, will be significant only to the extent that it is
one more means for changing the fundamental direction of the foreign
policy of the United States.
Copyright © 2003 The Nation
Essay by television journalist
Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers is the host of NOW
With Bill Moyers, a weekly television show on PBS where these comments
were broadcast on May 23, 2003.
From your letters I know some of you are curious as to why journalists
like me keep opening the Pandora's box of democracy; why we come round
and round to what ails America -- the bribing of Congress, the desecration
of the environment, corporate tax havens, secrecy, fraud on Wall Street,
the arrogance of ideology, the pretensions of power. Do we delight in
the dark side of human experience? you ask. Do we never see good in
the world? Or was Nietzsche right: that the Christian resolution to
find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad?
I can only speak for myself, of course. And I confess to thinking of
journalism as the social equivalent to a medical diagnosis. My doctor
owes me candor; I pay him for it. Candor could save my life.
I like to think journalists are paid for candor, too; society needs
to know what could kill us, whether it's too many lies or too much pollution.
Napoleon left instructions that he was not to be awakened if the news
from the front were good; with good news, he told his secretary, there
is no hurry. But if the news were bad, he said, "Rouse me instantly,
for then there is not a moment to be lost." Think of journalism
as a kind of early warning system -- iceberg spotting in the choppy
waters of democracy.
But there's another reason for what we do. I'm reminded of it every
year at this time, when my thoughts about the honor and respect we pay
to our nation's soldiers on Memorial Day are colored by its proximity
to D-Day.
I was just 10 years old when the allies landed on Normandy on June 6,
1944. I couldn't then imagine what it must have been like on those beaches
when our world was up for grabs and men spilled their blood and guts
to save it. I never knew what it was like until 15 years ago when I
accompanied some veterans from Texas who had fought at Normandy and
survived, and were now returning to retrace their steps. Jose Lopez
was one of the veterans that joined me on that journey.
Lopez said of his experiences as a soldier, "I was really very,
very afraid. That I want to scream. I want to cry and we see other people
was laying wounded and screaming and everything and it's nothing you
could do. We could see them groaning in the water and we keep walking."
Jose Lopez went on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation's
highest honor for gallantry in action. But searching for the place he
landed that day, he didn't want to talk about the Medal of Honor. He
just wanted to be alone with his memories.
Every Memorial Day I think about what these men did and what we owe
them. They didn't go through hell so Kenny Boy Lay could betray his
investors and workers at Enron, or for a political system built on legal
bribery. It wasn't for corporate tax havens in Bermuda, or an economic
system driven by the law of the jungle, or so a handful of media buccaneers
could turn the public airwaves into private sewers.
Sure, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, freedom makes it possible for people
to be crooks, but so does communism, and fascism, and monarchy. Democracy
is about doing better. It's about fairness, justice and human rights,
and yes, it's about equality, too; look it up.
I was never called on to do what soldiers do; I'll never know if I might
have had their courage. But a journalist can help keep the record straight,
on their behalf. They thought democracy was worth fighting for, even
dying for. The least we can do is to help make democracy worthy of them.
United States Sen. Robert Byrd,
(D) West Virginia
Senate Floor Remarks -- May 21, 2003
"Truth has a way of asserting itself
despite all attempts to obscure it. Distortion only serves to derail
it for a time. No matter to what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate
facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeezing out through
the cracks, eventually.
Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this senator that the
American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion
of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing international law,
under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events
of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus
from Osama bin Laden and al Queda who masterminded the September 11th
attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of
Iraq featured the president and members of his cabinet invoking every
frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried
caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ-laden death
in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement
concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic
was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering
from a combination of post-traumatic stress and justifiable anger after
the attacks of 9/11. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo
for the anger.
Since the war's end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed to
refute the previous dire claims of the Bush administration has been
brushed aside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the
White House deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction
have yet turned up, but we are told that they will in time. Perhaps
they yet will. But, our costly and destructive bunker busting attack
on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main, precisely the opposite of
what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. ...
Meanwhile bin Laden is still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has come
up missing. ...
What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq
was no immediate threat to the U.S. Ravaged by years of sanctions, Iraq
did not even lift an airplane against us. Iraq's threatening death-dealing
fleet of unmanned drones about which we heard so much morphed into one
prototype made of plywood and string. Their missiles proved to be outdated
and of limited range. Their army was quickly overwhelmed by our technology
and our well-trained troops.
But the Bush team's extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for
a preemptive invasion ... has raised serious questions about prevarication
and the reckless use of power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk?
Were countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when war was not really
necessary? Was the American public deliberately misled? Was the world?
What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are "liberators."
The facts don't seem to support the label we have so euphemistically
attached to ourselves. True, we have unseated a brutal, despicable despot,
but "liberation" implies the follow-up of freedom, self-determination
and a better life for the common people. In fact, if the situation in
Iraq is the result of "liberation," we may have set the cause
of freedom back 200 years.
Senator Robert Byrd of W.Va.Despite our high-blown claims of a better
life for the Iraqi people, water is scarce, and often foul; electricity
is a sometime thing; food is in short supply; hospitals are stacked
with the wounded and maimed; historic treasures of the region and of
the Iraqi people have been looted; and nuclear material may have been
disseminated to heaven knows where, while U.S. troops, on orders, looked
on and guarded the oil supply.
Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and
refurbish its oil industry are awarded to administration cronies, without
benefit of competitive bidding, and the U.S. steadfastly resists offers
of U.N. assistance to participate. Is there any wonder that the real
motives of the U.S. government are the subject of worldwide speculation
and mistrust?
And in what may be the most damaging development, the U.S. appears to
be pushing off Iraq's clamor for self-government. Jay Garner has been
summarily replaced, and it is becoming all too clear that the smiling
face of the U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an occupier.
The image of the boot on the throat has replaced the beckoning hand
of freedom. Chaos and rioting only exacerbate that image, as U.S. soldiers
try to sustain order in a land ravaged by poverty and disease. "Regime
change" in Iraq has so far meant anarchy, curbed only by an occupying
military force and a U.S. administrative presence that is evasive about
if and when it intends to depart.
Democracy and Freedom cannot be force-fed at the point of an occupier's
gun. To think otherwise is folly. One has to stop and ponder: How could
we have been so impossibly naive? How could we expect to easily plant
a clone of U.S. culture, values and government in a country so riven
with religious, territorial and tribal rivalries, so suspicious of U.S.
motives, and so at odds with the galloping materialism which drives
the Western-style economies? ...
The path of diplomacy and reason have gone out the window to be replaced
by force, unilateralism and punishment for transgressions. I read most
recently with amazement our harsh castigation of Turkey, our longtime
friend and strategic ally. It is astonishing that our government is
berating the new Turkish government for conducting its affairs in accordance
with its own constitution and its democratic institutions.
Indeed, we may have sparked a new international arms race as countries
move ahead to develop WMD as a last-ditch attempt to ward off a possible
pre-emptive strike from a newly belligerent U.S., which claims the right
to hit where it wants. In fact, there is little to constrain this president.
Congress, in what will go down in history as its most unfortunate act,
handed away its power to declare war for the foreseeable future and
empowered this president to wage war at will.
As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are reluctant to
ask questions which are begging to be asked. How long will we occupy
Iraq? We have already heard disputes on the numbers of troops which
will be needed to retain order. What is the truth? How costly will the
occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight answer. How
will we afford this long-term massive commitment, fight terrorism at
home, address a serious crisis in domestic health care, afford behemoth
military spending and give away billions in tax cuts amidst a deficit
which has climbed to over $340 billion for this year alone? We cower
in the shadows while false statements proliferate. We accept soft answers
and shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular
or may be politically costly.
But, I contend that, through it all, the people know. The American people
unfortunately are used to political shading, spin and the usual chicanery
they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a
point. But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink
for a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged with
anger. When it comes to shedding American blood -- when it comes to
wreaking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women and children, callous
dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie --
not oil, not revenge, not re-election, not somebody's grand pipe dream
of a democratic domino theory.
And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often
of late by the "powers that be" will only keep the loyal opposition
quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the
truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit,
will fall."
-- Sen. Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia
has been a member of the Senate since 1958.
Email
Senator Robert C. Byrd
Above: Bush prepares
to symbolically cut veterans' benefits
on the deck of the U.S.S. Harry S Truman.
Bush Visits U.S.S.Truman For Dramatic Veterans'-Benefits-Cutting
Ceremony
satire from The
Onion.
NORFOLK, VA—With more than 5,400 jubilant Marines and sailors cheering
him on, President Bush landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Harry S Truman
in a Navy jet Monday to preside over a historic veterans'-benefits-cutting
ceremony.
"Your brave and selfless service to your country will not soon
be forgotten," Bush told the recently returned Operation Iraqi
Freedom soldiers. "At least, not for another five or ten years."
After congratulating the soldiers on their victory over Saddam Hussein,
Bush announced that the new budget passed by the Senate includes a $14.6
billion reduction in veterans' benefits. He then held aloft a pair of
oversized scissors and snipped a ribbon bearing the words "Veteran's
Benefits."
"No one knows the meaning of the word 'sacrifice' quite like our
men and women in uniform," Bush said. "Whether sacrificing
their lives or their health coverage, these brave Americans are willing
to do whatever it takes to help this nation, and for this I salute them."
As the ship lay at anchor in the Atlantic Ocean, Bush, holding a helmet
emblazoned with "Prez-1" along the side, expressed his gratitude
to the troops for the hardships they endured in the Persian Gulf, and
for the hardships they would be enduring at home in the future.
"When I look at the members of the United States military, I see
the best of our country, and I am honored to be your Commander-In-Chief,"
Bush said. "I am equally honored that you are stoically accepting
Congress' elimination of a large percentage of the benefits you were
promised upon enlisting so that I can finance a massive tax cut."
The speech was brought to a temporary halt as the troops' enthusiastic
cheers drowned out the public-address system. Bush then raised his hands
to silence the crowd, his face turning somber.
"You have shown the world the skill and might of the American armed
forces," Bush said. "You have exhibited a willingness to do
what your country has asked of you. In return, I would like to personally
show my gratitude by guaranteeing that your pension will not completely
dry up until you turn 40."
As a ray of sunlight broke through the clouds, Bush explained that the
cuts were necessary to ensure that the servicemen who received aid were
those who really needed it and not the parasites looking to take advantage
of a bloated bureaucracy and veterans' welfare state.
"This is a battle to root out waste in the dispensation of veterans'
funds," Bush said. "And, as you know all too well, casualties
are inevitable in a battle. If some of you are cut off from compensation
payments for injuries, take comfort in the knowledge that your sacrifice
was not in vain, for you have helped liberate billions of tax dollars
for our country's taxpayers."
Upon the conclusion of the president's speech, the troops once again
rose to thunderous applause. After posing for photographs with various
officers and enlisted men on board, the president returned to his jet
and departed.
Reactions to the speech were overwhelmingly positive.
"We all stand behind our Commander-In-Chief," said Petty Officer
3rd Class Henry Williams, 23, of Norfolk, VA. "When he started
this war, President Bush called upon Americans to support its troops.
Now, he's calling upon his troops to accept six-month waits for hospital
visits and pauper's funerals. In these times of economic crisis and
uncertainty, it is our duty to stand behind our president, whether or
not he is standing behind us."
© Copyright 2003, Onion, Inc., All rights reserved
Washington shelved report of 44-trillion-dollar deficit
Thu May 29, 8:53 AM ET
LONDON (AFP) - In the midst of negotiating a steep tax cuts package, the US government shelved a report that showed the United States faces future federal budget deficits of more than 44.2 trillion dollars.
President George W. Bush's administration chose to keep the findings -- commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill -- out of the 2004 annual budget report, published in February, London's Financial Times reported. The newspaper desribed the study as "the most comprehensive assessment of how the US government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the 'baby boom' generation's future healthcare and retirement costs."
The Financial Times hinted that the decision not to publish the report may have been because the White House was campaigning for a massive tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits.
The study, according to the same source, said that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or both are unavoidable if the US is to meet benefit promises to future generations.
"It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66 percent across-the-board income tax increase," the Financial Times said.
"The study was being circulated as an independent working paper among Washington think-tanks as Bush on Wednesday signed into law a 10-year, 350-billion-dollar tax-cut package he welcomed as a victory for hard-working Americans and the economy," the newspaper said.
Kent Smetters, then-Treasury deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, and Jagdessh Gokhale, then a consultant to the Treasury, were in charge of the analysis, the newspaper said.
"When we were conducting the study, my impression was that it was slated to appear (in the budget). At some point, the momentum builds and you think everything is a go, and then the decision came down that we weren't part of the prospective budget," Gokhale was quoted a saying in the front-page article.
O'Neill, who was fired last December, refused to comment, according to the same source. The Bush administration has come under severe criticism for the tax cuts package, which come on top of a 10-year 1.65 trillion tax cut program enacted in 2001, at a time when the US economy is sputtering and unemployment is steadily rising.
The National Security Strategy of the United
State of America
Are you curious about the policies which have
motivated and shaped the War on Iraq?
Read the actual document as authored by the White House.
Click
here to download the pdf (360K).
Click
here for a free download of Acrobat Reader.
Iraq Rebuilding Contracts Awarded
Halliburton, Stevedoring Services of America
get government contracts for early relief work.
March 25, 2003
By Mark Gongloff, CNN/Money
Staff WriterNEW YORK (CNN/Money)
The first contracts for rebuilding post-war Iraq have been awarded,
and Vice President Dick Cheney's old employer, Halliburton Co., is one
of the early winners.
The Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) unit of Halliburton (HAL: up $0.54
to $20.66, Research, Estimates), of which Cheney was CEO from 1995 to
2000, said late Monday that it was awarded a contract by the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires and make emergency repairs to
Iraq's oil infrastructure.
President Bush Tuesday asked Congress for $489.3 million to cover the
cost of repairing damage to Iraq's oil facilities, much or all of which
could go to Halliburton or its subcontractors under the terms of its
contract with the Army.
Cheney divested himself of all interest in Halliburton, the largest
U.S. oilfield services company, after the 2000 election.
Halliburton wouldn't speculate about the total monetary value or duration
of its contract, under which it will put into action some of the firefighting
and repair plans it outlined for the Army in a study it conducted in
November.
"KBR's ... contract is limited to task orders under the contract
for only those services which are necessary to support the mission in
the near term," Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said.
The Army Corps of Engineers told CNN Tuesday that Halliburton would
be paid on a "cost plus" basis, meaning it would be reimbursed
for the costs of its work and would get a certain percentage of those
costs as a fee.
Since it's still unknown how much damage has been or will be done to
Iraqi oil fields in the war, it's difficult to estimate the contract's
eventual dollar value.
But its biggest value could be that it puts Halliburton in a prime position
to handle the complete refurbishment of Iraq's long-neglected oil infrastructure,
which will be a plum job.
Getting Iraq's oil fields to pre-1991 production levels will take at
least 18 months and cost about $5 billion initially, with $3 billion
more in annual operating expenses, according to a recent study by the
James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, named
for the first President Bush's secretary of state during the first Gulf
War.
"Certainly Halliburton would have the lead [in the competition
for that job], even absent this contract, given the size and scope of
their current operations," said Pierre Conner, an analyst with
Hibernia Southcoast Capital. "But there's no question they'll start
with some footprint there. It clearly puts them in the position where
they will know more about the situation and have a bit of an operation
there."
Though none of the potential administrators of such a contract -- including
the Defense Department, the State Department's U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) and the United Nations -- have claimed responsibility
for handing out the job, Monday's award and Bush's request for funding
seem to indicate the U.S. government will be in charge.
Halliburton said it has subcontracted the firefighting portion of the
Army contract to Houston-based companies Boots & Coots International
Well Control Inc. (WEL: up $0.06 to $1.16, Research, Estimates) and
Wild Well Control Inc., a private company.
Hall of Halliburton said all oil fires should be put out within 240
days. Very few oil wells have been set ablaze by Iraqis so far, in contrast
to the first Gulf War in 1991, when Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait
set fire to more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells. Halliburton's KBR unit
was involved in putting out the 1991 fires.
Separately, USAID late Monday awarded a $4.8 million contract to Stevedoring
Services of America (SSA), a private company based in Seattle, to manage
the Umm Qasr ports in southern Iraq.
Umm Qasr's ports, where U.S. and British troops have struggled for full
control, are seen as critical to efforts to bring humanitarian relief
to Iraqis. SSA will handle several tasks, including assessing the need
for dredging and repairs to the ports, and unloading and warehousing
cargo.
USAID plans to issue seven other contracts, including one for $600 million
for general construction work in post-war Iraq. Halliburton is among
several companies reported to have put in bids for that contract.
Five Postwar Suggestions for George W. Bush
By Ted Rall, AlterNet
March 25, 2003
The invasion of Iraq has deeply divided
Americans. It has alienated our allies. It is already providing volatile
new ammunition for Islamist terrorist groups searching for impressionable
young men willing to blow themselves up just so they can take a few
of us along with them. It's a grim situation, but it isn't too late
for the Bush Administration to minimize the damage created by its reckless
and illegal war, now that we're committed to it.
A year and a half after invading Afghanistan, the United States is about to seize control of another volatile, strategically vital patch of Muslim real estate riven by ethnic and tribal fault lines. As before, in its war against the Taliban, administration officials are issuing grandiose assurances about noble intentions.
"We will deliver the food and medicine you need," Bush promised Iraqis. "We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free...The day of your liberation is near."
Only a few hard-right Republicans really believe in Bush's newfound interest in liberating the oppressed peoples of the world. Antiwar Americans, most international leaders and the overwhelming majority of the world's population still hold that the war is motivated solely by lust for Iraq's vast oil reserves. One U.N. Security Council diplomat explains his colleagues' reasons for voting no: "No one wants to alienate the United States but you can't ignore polls showing 80 percent opposition to the war," he said.
Opinions of America are even worse among Arabs, who note that the only countries that Bush has invaded – Afghanistan and Iraq – and is thinking of attacking – Iran and Syria – are Muslim. Arabs conclude that Bush – a self-described "born again" Christian fundamentalist – is waging a 21st century crusade against Islam. Only six percent of the Egyptian public holds a favorable view of the U.S. This in a country where scholars at the Islamic Research Academy declared that "If the enemy steps on Muslims' land, jihad becomes a duty of every male and female."
Bush's clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, sprinkled liberally with Old Testament imagery, hardly reduces tensions. Nonetheless, both America's image abroad and Bush's popularity here could improve dramatically if the former governor of Texas were to take the following steps to make the war look more like liberation and less like exploitation:
1. Promise to Lay Off the Oil.
Aggressive elements in the administration suggest that a new post-Saddam
government of Iraq – a toothless American puppet, similar to Afghanistan's
Karzai – should rip up its oil contracts with France's TotalFinaElf
and Russia's Lukoil in order to get even for the UN vote. Houston-based
Halliburton Co., where Dick Cheney served as CEO, is reported to have
already secured a $4 billion deal to put out well fires and rehabilitate
sanctions-ravaged refineries. And Bush is already scheming to raid $40
billion in the now-defunct UN oil-for-food program to finance postwar
reconstruction.
"How do we protect the oil facilities and bring in companies and material to sustain and improve those facilities without being criticized for taking over oil or giving the appearance of somehow taking the oil?" asks Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy adviser at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
Simple. Bush should pledge to honor all existing contracts, even – especially – with companies from countries that didn't support the war. More importantly for a leader whose top officials are nearly all former execs of big oil, Bush ought to prohibit sweetheart deals of any kind. Competitive bidding, not a cozy relationship with the White House, ought to determine which outfits get new contracts. And the people of Iraq, not the oil companies, ought to receive most of the proceeds in the form of direct payments.
2. Guarantee Iraq's Territorial Integrity.
On March 21, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul warned that Turkish
forces plan to invade the Kurdish zone of northern Iraq to eradicate
"terrorist activity." If unchecked, a Turkish incursion could
lead to a new war with the Kurds, and the beginning of the end for a
unified Iraqi state. Bush must issue two declarations, one guaranteeing
full autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan and the other an intent to respect
and defend Iraq's present-day borders.
Arabs will rightly blame the U.S. if one of their richest nations disintegrates into civil war. Any invader, whether it's Iran or Turkey, must be driven out by American forces. And we can't allow warlords and tribal chieftains to create fiefdoms within Iraq, as has occurred in Afghanistan.
3. Let the Iraqis Choose Their Own Government.
Bush claims that he wants to establish democracy in Iraq. Now he has
to make good on that vow. That means creating the conditions that would
allow free elections – peace and economic stability, reconstruction,
a free press, open electioneering, recognition of political parties
from across the political spectrum, including Saddam's Ba'ath Party
– to occur. Bush shouldn't be tempted to repeat the Florida 2000-style
backstage antics that manipulated the results of Afghanistan's loya
jirga – after decades of strong central rule, Iraq needs a popularly
elected president, not a puppet.
4. Rebuild Iraq.
Few Americans understand how badly we botched our occupation of Afghanistan.
Hardly any know that U.S.-occupied Afghanistan has been reduced to pre-Taliban-style
warlordism, that rape gangs rule the nights, that the stonings of adulterers
continue, and that not one house has been rebuilt with international
assistance – not even in Kabul, the one city ruled by the central
government. But the rest of the world knows – and that's why they'll
be watching us in Iraq. We have a second chance to get things right
– but it's going to take billions of dollars and several hundred
thousand troops at least a decade to get Iraq back on its feet. But
that's the least we can do after subjecting the country to 12 years
of brutal economic sanctions.
5. Get Out.
If we're really going to be taken seriously as liberators and proponents
of democracy, we'll allow the popularly elected leaders of Iraq to lead
their country into the post-Saddam era, whether or not we care for their
politics. And we won't tell them what to do or how to do it.
Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan."
1.31.03
Bogus Reasons For War On Iraq
By Michael T. Klare, AlterNet
January 30, 2003
In his State of the Union Address and other speeches, President Bush
has attempted to articulate the reasons for going to war with Iraq and
ousting Saddam Hussein. Stripped of rhetoric, these can be boiled down
to three main objectives: (1) to eliminate Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD); (2) to diminish the threat of international terrorism;
and (3) to promote democracy in Iraq and surrounding areas. To determine
if these powerful motives are actually behind the rush to war, each
must be examined in turn.
1) Eliminating WMD The reason most often given by President Bush for going to war with Iraq is to reduce the risk of a WMD attack on the United States. Such an attack would be devastating, and vigorous action is appropriate to prevent it.
If the threat of WMD attack is, in fact, Bush's primary concern, then he would surely pay the greatest attention to the greatest threat of WMD usage against the United States, and deploy available U.S. resources – troops, dollars and diplomacy – accordingly. But this is not what the president is doing.
North Korea and Pakistan pose greater WMD threats to the United States than Iraq for several reasons. Each possesses a much bigger WMD arsenal. Pakistan has several dozen nuclear warheads along with missiles and planes capable of delivering them hundreds of miles away; it is also suspected of having chemical weapons. North Korea is thought to possess sufficient plutonium to produce one to two nuclear devices along with the capacity to manufacture several more; it also has a large chemical weapons stockpile and a formidable array of ballistic missiles.
Iraq, by contrast, possesses no nuclear weapons today and is thought to be several years away from producing any, even under the best of circumstances. A policy aimed at protecting the United States from WMD attacks would identify Pakistan and North Korea as the leading perils, and put Iraq in a rather distant third place.
2) Combating Terrorism The administration has argued at great length that a U.S. invasion and "regime change" in Iraq would mark the greatest success in the war against terrorism so far. Why this is so has never been made entirely clear. It is said that Saddam's hostility toward the United States somehow sustains and invigorates the terrorist threat to America. Saddam's elimination would thus greatly weaken international terrorism and its capacity to attack the United States.
There simply is no evidence that this is the case. If anything, the opposite is true. From what we know of al Qaeda and other such organizations, the objective of Islamic extremists is to overthrow any government in the Islamic world that does not adhere to a fundamentalist version of Islam. The Baathist regime in Iraq does not qualify; thus, under al Qaeda doctrine, it must be swept away, along with the equally deficient governments in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It follows that a U.S. effort to oust Saddam Hussein and replace his regime with another secular government – this one kept in place by American military power – will not diminish the wrath of Islamic extremists, but rather fuel it.
3) The Promotion of Democracy The ouster of Saddam Hussein, the administration claims, will allow the Iraqi people to establish a truly democratic government and serve as a beacon and inspiration for the spread of democracy throughout the Islamic world.
But there is little reason to believe that the administration is motivated by a desire to spread democracy in its rush to war with Iraq.
First of all, many of the top leaders of the current administration, particularly Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, happily embraced Hussein's dictatorship in the 1980s when Iraq was the enemy of our enemy (Iran), and thus considered our de facto friend. Under the so-called "tilt" toward Iraq, the Reagan-Bush administration decided to assist Iraq in its war against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88.
Under Reagan, Iraq was removed from the list of countries that support terrorism, thus permitting the provision of billions of dollars' worth of agricultural credits and other forms of assistance to Hussein. The bearer of this good news was none other than Rumsfeld, who traveled to Baghdad and met with Hussein in December 1983 as a special representative of President Reagan.
The Department of Defense, then headed by Dick Cheney, provided Iraq with secret satellite data on Iranian military positions. This information was provided to Saddam even though U.S. leaders were informed by a senior State Department official on Nov. 1, 1983 that the Iraqis were using chemical weapons against the Iranians "almost daily," and could use U.S. satellite data to pinpoint chemical weapons attacks on Iranian positions.
Not once did Rumsfeld and Cheney speak out against Iraqi use of these weapons or suggest that the United States discontinue its support of the Hussein dictatorship during this period. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that our current leadership has a principled objection to dictatorial rule in Iraq.
Further, the United States has developed close ties with the post-Soviet dictatorships in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – all ruled by Stalinist dictators who once served the Soviet empire. And there certainly is nothing even remotely democratic about Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, two of America's other close allies in the region.
Other motives must be at work. Control of Iraq could give the United
States de facto control over the Persian Gulf area and two-thirds of
the world's oil – an unrivaled prize in the historic human struggle
for power and wealth. Perhaps these ulterior motives do justify war
on Iraq, even if the three stated reasons do not. If that is the case,
the President should make this claim to the American public, and let
us determine whether we want such a war.
Michael Klare (mklare@hampshire.edu) is a professor
of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Mass., and the author of "Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global
Conflict" (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2001).
1.9.03
The United States of America has gone mad.
By John LeCarre
From timesonline.co.uk:
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this
is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the
Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the
Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden
could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the
freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically
eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate
interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing
out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East
Coast press.
The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it
was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would
still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be
elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich;
its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft
of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have
to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard
for UN resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies
are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told.
The US defence budget has been raised by another $ 60 billion to around
$ 360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the
pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of
Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how
long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American
taxpayer's pocket? At what cost - because most of those 88 per cent
are thoroughly decent and humane people - in Iraqi lives?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from
bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring
tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that
one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack
on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being
misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and
fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his
fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.
Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with
the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would
love to see Saddam's downfall -just not on Bush's terms and not by his
methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy. The
religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps
the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock
on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed
America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed
Israel to be the nexus of
America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that
idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-
American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.
God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are
equal in His sight, if not in one another's, the Bush family numbers
one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor
of Florida and the ex Governor of Texas. Care for a few pointers? George
W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration,
an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company.
Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company.
Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company,
which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling
associations affects the integrity of God's work.
In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the ever-democratic
Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them, somebody tried
to kill him. The CIA believes that "somebody" was Saddam.
Hence Bush Jr's cry: "That man tried to kill my Daddy." But
it's still not personal, this war. It's still necessary. It's still
God's work. It's still about bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed
Iraqi people. To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute
Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends,
family and God, is there to tell us which is which.
What Bush won't tell us is the truth about why we're going to war.
What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil -but oil, money and people's
lives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield
in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a
piece of the cake. And who doesn't, won't. If Saddam didn't have the
oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart's content. Other leaders
do it every day -think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think
Syria, think Egypt.
Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, if he's still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes' notice.
What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America's need to demonstrate its military power to all of us -to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.
The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair's part in all this
is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He
can't. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice.
Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can't
get out. It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked
himself against the ropes, neither of Britain's opposition leaders can
lay a glove on him. But that's Britain's tragedy, as it is America's:
as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate
simply shrugs and looks the other way. Blair's best chance of personal
survival must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably
emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired.
But what happens when the world's greatest cowboy rides back into town
without a tyrant's head to wave at the boys? Blair's worst chance is
that, with or without the UN, he will drag us into a war that, if the
will to negotiate energetically had ever been there, could have been
avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated in Britain
than it has in America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will have set
back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to come.
He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great domestic
unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the party
of the ethical foreign policy.
There is a middle way, but it's a tough one: Bush dives in without UN
approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special relationship.
I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head
prefect's sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties
about terror are shared by all
sane men. What he can't explain is how he reconciles a global assault
on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq.
We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our
special relationship, to
grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding
in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.
"But will we win, Daddy?"
"Of course, child. It will all be over while you're still in bed."
"Why?"
"Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will get terribly impatient
and may decide not to vote for him."
"But will people be killed, Daddy?"
"Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."
"Can I watch it on television?"
"Only if Mr Bush says you can."
"And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do
anything horrid any more?"
"Hush child, and go to sleep."
Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket
with a sticker on his car saying:
"Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he'd finished
shopping.
1.9.03
The Bush Junta Knows How To Line Their Own Pockets, But Not Much Else.
by ragu
Once again, Mr. Bush and the GOP miss the boat on
economic relief with their misguided plan for across the board tax cuts.
What the American economy needs is true fiscal responsiblity in government
spending, not supeficial tax cuts to appease voters.
I ask Mr. Bush and his cronies, how does adding billions of dollars
to the federal debt year after year benefit our economy? Does he not
understand that continual tax cuts in the face of increased government
spending only increases the financial tax burden on ourselves and future
generations? Then again, Mr. Bushes children will surely be well provided
for in the future, so what does he care? Evidently, he doesn't.
President Clinton had his misgivings, but at least
that Rhodes Scholar understood a strong economy starts with a balanced
federal budget and not transparent tax cuts designed to help the rich
and win votes from the poor.
The GOP loves to laud itself as being "anti-Big Government",
yet they never hesitate to spend with reckless abandon while ignoring
the actual government balance sheet. To me, this seems like the worst
kind of Big Government. I'd rather my tax dollars actually help American
citizens in need rather than fund an unprovoked and misguided War on
Iraq, or squabbled on an unproven National Missle Defense System that
won't do anything to prevent a terrorist from detonating a suitcase-nuke
in Central Park.
The Bush Junta can start acting with more ecomonic responsibly by learning
from mistakes made in their own backyard. Haliburton, Harken Oil, Enron,
CRX, etc., all benefited from huge corporate tax breaks totalling billions
while their exec's pocketed millions more, in some cases, in return
for running those companies into the ground. If Mr. Bush wants to reform
our tax code, start with making the large corporations pay their due
share of taxes, and then learn to make our government live on a budget,
like the rest of Americans do on a daily basis.
12.19.02
Keeping Track of John Poindexter
By Paul Boutin
From Wired:
The head of the government's Total Information Awareness project, which
aims to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel,
medical, school and other records of everyone in the United
States, has himself become a target of personal data profiling. Online
pranksters, taking their lead from a San Francisco journalist, are publishing
John Poindexter's home phone number, photos of his house and other personal
information to protest the TIA program.
Matt Smith, a columnist for SF Weekly, printed the material -- which
hesays is all publicly available -- in a recent column: "Optimistically,
I dialed John and Linda Poindexter's number
-- (301) 424-6613 -- at their home at 10
Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md., hoping the good admiral
and excused criminal might be able to offer some insight," Smith
wrote.
"Why, for example, is their $269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered
with artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn't
a Reagan conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years?
Is the Donald Douglas Poindexter listed in Maryland sex-offender records
any relation to the good admiral? What do Tom Maxwell, at 8 Barrington
Fare, and James Galvin, at 12 Barrington Fare, think of their spooky
neighbor?"
Smith said he wrote the column to demonstrate the sense of violation
he felt over his personal records being profiled by secretive government
agencies.
"I needed to call Poindexter anyway, and it seemed like a worthy concept that if he's going to be compiling data that most certainly will leak around to other departments and get used, one way to get readers to think about it was to turn that around," Smith said. What Smith didn't realize was that Poindexter's phone number and other information would end up on more than 100 Web pages a week later as others took up the cause.
Phone-phreaking hackers supplied details on the Verizon switch serving
the admiral's home. The popular Cryptome privacy-issues website posted
satellite photos of the house. Poindexter could not be reached for comment
for this story, and calls to his home phone now reach a recording: "The
party you are calling is not available at this time."
Since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began awarding contracts
for the Total Information Awareness project in August, the effort has
been criticized by both civil rights advocates and
data-mining experts. The dispute over TIA seems to fall not along straight
political party lines, but between advocates and opponents of the government's
right to monitor its own citizens. Former President Clinton expressed
support for the project in a recent public appearance, while conservative
New York Times columnist William Safire recently wrote a pointed editorial
criticizing the idea.
One Bush voter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the pranks
on Poindexter: "If they're making him as uncomfortable as we are,
good."
Bush Can't See the Forest for the Trees, uhhh, I mean Oil..
by ragu
After
watching Bush's speech on Monday night which supposedly makes the case
for starting another full scale war on Iraq, I must say I am unimpressed.
Although Bush trotted out the same vague references and claims we've heard
for weeks, there was still no conclusive, definitive evidence provided
for justifying an invasion of a sovereign nation not currently involved
in aggression against another.
Just as disturbing is the fact that the Bush War Corporation seems to
feel that convincing the U.N. Security Council of the validity of a war
plan he has yet to define should be enough persuade the U.S. Congress
to approve his intentions as well. What Bush, Cheney, and the rest of
the drum beaters have yet to acknowledge is the first group they must
convince of this plan is the educated populace of the United States of
America. And on this front, they are failing miserably.
According to the polls i've seen, anywhere from 40% to 70% of Americans
continue to favor UN negotiations over US military intervention when dealing
with the problems in Iraq, I have trouble finding anyone in person who
fervently agrees with Bush that military action is our only true course
of action. Why? Because most folks with a head on their shoulders, regardless
of politcal affiliation, see the holes in the "swiss cheese rhetoric"
laid out by the White House with regard to this situation:
1. Bush has offered
no actual proof Saddam is planning to use any of his weapons in an pre-emptive/offensive
manner against another nation. Nor have they convinced anyone Saddam is
willing to risk his shaky tenure in Iraq by supplying such weapons to
Al-Qaeda.
2. Bush can not provide any direct ties between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, and
is unable to link 9/11 to any actions of the Iraqi government.
3. Bush has not defined a plan for "regime change", only vague
terms for "dictator removal". Why? Because Bush realizes actually
installing a puppet government in Iraq will be a helluva lot more difficult
and messy than he wants to let on. Do we really want our forces to occupy
Iraq for a decade to protect the new puppet regime? He knows Americans
won't support his actions ahead of time if they consider this, therefore
he avoids the subject.
4. Iraq has none of the ideological infrastructure to support a democratic
form of government, not many Muslim countries do. In addition, the physical
and economic infrastructure of the country is in ruins, due to 10 years
of US led and UN supported sanctions and air strikes. Not only would a
war cost billions, the post-war Iraq would cost the US taxpayers untold
billions more. Bush has enough trouble guiding our economy as it is.
5. Bush knows a large scale, U.S. led war in the Middle East is EXACTLY
what Bin Laden hoped to accomplish by attacking the US in the first place.
Yet Bush is so naive and ego driven, he refuses to admit he is playing
right into the hands of an already enraged Islamic terrorist movement
with such tactics. An Iraqi invasion will likely lead to larger Islamic/American
confrontations. It's like pouring gasoline on the fire.
If the average American will acknowledge these simple truths, the Bush
war initiative might be stopped before it causes unnecessary military
casualties and unpredictable economic destruction to the United States.
The sad truth is, our Senators and Congresspersons should heed this wake
up call and stop this White House inspired debacle before it happens.
I urge you to contact your government representatives at once to make
your opinions on Iraq known.
9.1.02
Dubya and the Good Ol Boys Just Don't Get It...But That's No Surprise.
by ragu
I
am truly amazed at the naive audacity of President Bush, V.P. Cheney,
and the rest of the White House Spin Machine
as they continue to pontificate about the necessity of invading Iraq.
Their own ignorance aside, what's even more astounding is that this group
of misguided political thugs believe if they keep spouting their "Evil
Saddam" rhetoric, the populace of America will eventually
buy into it and give them a green light to start a large scale war which
will inevitably draw in other countries on both sides. Judging by their
own simplictic and shortsighted view of the situation, this is a conflict
the Bush Corporation is clearly not intellectually
equipped to manage.
Sure it is a given that Saddam Hussein is a megalomaniac who does his
own country more harm than good. But he is no Hitler, nor does he have
the power or influence to become one. Hussein is, in effect, a prisoner
in his own land, a relatively benign neighborhood ex-bully. His regime
has no real diplomatic influence in the region, and his army is by all
accounts decimated and only a fraction of its strength before the Gulf
War. By most expert accounts (GOP pundits don't
qualify as experts), there is no real evidence that he possesses
functional nuclear weapons, nor is it believed that Iraq has the necessary
infrastructure to foster a nuclear weapons program in the immediate future.
But this isn't the message we keep hearing from the White House. They
would have us believe Iraq is the greatest threat to Western civilization
since the Third Reich and they are churning out nukes faster than we can
count 'em.
Sadly, it's the economic sanctions imposed by the United States that have
largely been responsible for keeping Hussein on the throne this long.
Saddam is not loved or trusted by his own people, as witnessed by the
multiple coup attempts against him in the last decade. The only thing
really keeping Saddam in power from within is his position as Iraqi cheerleader
raging against the "American Devils".
The continued sanctions condoned by the U.N. just fortify his position
as champion of the Iraqi people against an unjust and uncaring Western
world. Without the ability to rally his country in martyrdom against a
common oppressor, Saddam would have already lost what's left of the little
public support he still has in the Iraqi populace. The propoganda war
is the only kind Saddam wants, because it keeps the status quo and therefore
keeps him in power.
If Hussein indeed has a nuke, it no doubt was purchased surreptitiously
from a post Cold War Russian state. But even someone as foolhardy and
misguided as Hussein realizes that attacking America with "a weapon
of mass destruction" is an automatic death sentence for himself and
his country. The only reason he would have for using such a weapon is
as a last resort, when he is cornered, and his country is again under
direct military attack from the United States. At that point, he has nothing
left to lose, and he will nuke us if he can.
Bush and his cronies need to realize this
and stop this invasion nonsense before he gets in over his head, and Washington
D.C. gets a mushroom cloud for breakfast.
4.4.02
Jihad'da knock this shit off if ya' know what's good for ya...
by ragu
With all of this religiously sanctioned fighting going on in the world these days, i ask, "Just how much killing makes a "holy war" truly divine?" Simply put, if your god is telling you to kill someone in his name, it's time to find a different god to worship, because that one's not good for you.
We have the Hindus and Muslims killing each in India and Kashmir, Jews and Palistinians in Israel, Christians and Muslims on the warpath in Indonesia, Afghanistan and the Phillipines, various tribal fueds in Africa, etc.. All this Jihad-my-god-is-better-than-your-god shit is getting out of hand. Just what exactly is the point of annihilating another's religious culture and icons to satisfy the urge to claim a "heritage", or a chunk of Ethnic Real Estate? Do they expect the blood soaked soil to grow better crops? Is it just too difficult for people to justify the existence of their cultures without a crusade and the top slot in a global religious pecking order? Holy crap, can we just stop the nonsense and be adults here for second everybody?
The bigger paradox to reconcile in my mind is that supposedly "enlightened" governments and religious movements continue to obsessively pontificate about such concepts as "divine rights" to land. First of all, nobody on this rock we call earth really owns any of this land anyway, and we never have. We are, every last one of us, just a squatter at a point in time. A chunk of land is no more physically attached to you than you to it, regardless of what holy men or holy books tell you. Across the world humans merely pay homage for temporary usage rights to land, and those rights are a contrivance of man, not God, so let's just accept this and leave preferred dieties out of it. Or look at it this way, if God wanted us to be permantently associated with a "holy land" he/she would have given us roots instead of legs.
Secondly, isn't it pretty obvious by now that all of these gods, in who's name we are killing each other, are quite likely the same entity? I mean, is it really likely God would allow millions of his children to be deprived of His graces merely because they are victims of their particular language, location, borders or government doctorines? Isn't that the most cruel thing a benevolent God could possibly do to His creation? It sure seems to make more sense that He/She would make Their presence known to different cultures in a manner each could fully embrace and understand, thereby truly allowing all humanity at least a shot at knowing what Divine Love really is.
Holy
and War are two words that have no business
modifying each other. At least that's the way i see it.
The
Existential Burrito
(a
random thought by ragu)
When
the chips are up and the horizon is foggy,
it's times like these that we have to stop and ask ourselves,
"What IS the difference between existentialism and a good veggie
burrito?"
Is it the black beans?
Is it the tantilizing combination of onions and peppers?
Or is it the warm, soft, flour tortilla?
Perhaps it's the hypothesis that as humanity,
we simply "exist"
because without us there would be no consciousness?
Me? Personally, I have always felt it is the tortilla.
Because tortillas prosper
togetherness...
and without togetherness, you would just have a handfull
of hot, greasy vegetables and melted cheese.
• • •
 |
 |