There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas. ~ Dostoevsky
As I write this I am so depressed that I can barely work up a rant on the Republican right - something I can normally do in my sleep. I am horrified that an already terrible situation has gotten so much worse. What was the Bush Administration's shameful debacle in Iraq has become a multi-national conflagration, and threatens to blossom into World War III.
How did it ever come to this?
When people are hanging on to hope by the most tenuous grasp, the last thing they need is for the world to implode in an orgy of violence as we've seen over the past week. As if the disastrous debacle in Iraq wasn't bad enough, now we're `exporting democracy' to the rest of the region. I don't doubt for a minute that Bush is behind this new fighting. Israel is not likely to have made such a decision without tacit approval from the U.S.
DISCLAIMER: I am not interested in hearing justifications for this war from either side. My sympathies are with all suffering peoples, and my position on war is I'm against it. PERIOD.
The great neocon fantasy of war and military domination is coming home to roost. Needless bloody violence is raging in more countries than I can count. Much to my chagrin the Project for a New American Century is proving itself to be the gift that keeps on giving. This is what we get for letting the ghost of Nixon creep back into American politics. Why have we not learned to keep madmen and Republicans from the levers of power? And why must the whole world pay for our stupidity?
The only way to win World War III is to prevent it. ~ Dwight Eisenhower
I do realize that Eisenhower was a Republican, but he has a few good quotes. The one above and what he said in his warning about the Military Industrial Complex as he left office after two terms as President, for example. Judging by some of his quotations, he may well have been the last decent Republican - assuming there ever could have been such a thing in the first place.
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Why didn't we heed his warning? We have allowed the `military-industrial complex' to gobble up our government and impose its cruel will on the American people and the world.
The situation we face today is surreal to me. I feel like the world has been turned on its head. Every time I decide that the Republican madness has peaked, I am proven wrong. There is seemingly no end to how insane it can get, or how low they will go. In 1980 I was stunned that anyone would consider Ronald Reagan a fit candidate for the Presidency. Imagine my shock when he won! I knew we were in for a rough ride but resisted the notion that it was the beginning of the end. I figured, what the hell, we survived Nixon (barely), we'll survive this clown too. I knew the crowd behind this grinning idiot was dangerous but I had no idea just how dangerous they would prove to be.
It eventually became clear to anyone paying attention that there were evil men and a boatload of bad intent behind the Reagan Republicans. Like the last Republicans to attain the Whitehouse before them (Nixon's gang), they ran the government like a criminal enterprise.
In the Iran initiative, President Reagan chose to proceed in the utmost secrecy, disregarding the Administration's public policy prohibiting arms sales to nations supporting terrorism. He also chose to forgo congressional notification under the National Security Act and the Arms Export Control Act.
Having bypassed accountability to Congress, the President failed either to establish an effective system of accountability within the Administration or to monitor the series of activities he authorized.
Working in a climate of extreme secrecy and operating without accountability, National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the National Security Council staff and others associated with the initiative invited criminal acts including profiteering on the Iranian arms sales, the diversion of some of those proceeds to aid the contras, destroying documents, and lying to Congress to cover up their criminal activities. from Chapter 27 of the Iran/Contra Report written by Lawrence E. Walsh
The initial election of Reagan was a disaster for the American people and for large chunks of the bloody third world. Then to compound the error, after four horrible years of trickle down economics, class warfare, secret wars of foreign intrigue, and outright treason the American electorate re-elected the fool. He and his administration set this nation on a long downhill slide that isn't over yet. They were then and remain now guilty of bloody atrocities throughout Central and South America, of trading missiles to a sworn enemy of the United States, and of initiating the real "Long War," the Republican war on poor and middleclass Americans.
At the outset of his first term, Reagan's revolution appeared to have unstoppable momentum. His administration passed an historic tax cut based on dramatic cuts in marginal tax rates and began a massive defense buildup. To help compensate for the tax cut, his first budget called for slashing $41.4 billion from 83 federal programs, only the first round in a planned series of cuts. And Reagan himself made known his desire to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, and to scale back what his first budget director David Stockman called the "closet socialism" of Social Security and Medicaid. Source
The Republicans, who are so well known for their talent for twisting the truth into unrecognizable shapes, have been busy little beavers making up their lies about what a great man Reagan was, and how he single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union and Communism saving the `free world.'. It's all typical spin and bullshit from the crowd that never met a truth it didn't hate.
It would be impossible in this space to catalogue all the damage Reagan wrought in eight years. The standard line is that he won the cold war, but elsewhere in this issue Jonathan Schell corrects that notion. It is also worth noting that this man who yearned so much for freedom and democracy in Soviet-bloc nations showed limited concern for democracy and human rights in other parts of the globe. After Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa, Reagan vetoed the measure.
His Administration cuddled up with the fascistic and anti-Semitic junta of Argentina and backed militaries in El Salvador and Guatemala that massacred civilians. It moved to normalize relations with Augusto Pinochet, the tyrant of Chile. Reagan sent George Bush the First to the Philippines, where the Vice President toasted dictator Ferdinand Marcos for fostering "democracy."
Pursuing a quasi-secret war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration violated international law and circumvented Congress to support contra rebels engaged in human rights abuses and, according to the CIA's own Inspector General, worked with suspected drug traffickers.
Reagan covertly sent arms to the mullahs of Iran and courted Saddam Hussein, even after his use of chemical weapons. He appointed officials who claimed nuclear war was winnable, thus raising the chances that miscalculations by the Soviet Union or the United States would plunge the world into chaos. Source
The next disaster for America was when Reagan's veep, George HW Bush was elected President in 1988. That famous criminal, Richard Nixon, had earlier appointed this devious bastard chairman of the Republican National Committee, and he had been head of the Republican Party throughout the Watergate scandal. He had also headed the CIA under Ford.
Early on in the 1988 campaign, something snapped in Bush. He disengaged from the broader picture and focused solely on getting elected. So said a bunch of things he didn't really believe in, and started making promises he knew he would live to regret.
The Bush/Quayle team proceeded to run one of the ugliest campaigns in recent history. Bush could not help but call Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis a L-I-B-E-R-A-L at every possible opportunity. He even derided the Democrat for his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, alleging him to be a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." Source
When GWHB
suckered Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait by having the American Ambassador, April Glaspie say it was none of our concern if he did, Bush sallied in and royally kicked his ass. His popularity rating soared to 91%. It was thought that there was no way he could lose his coming re-election bid - but he did.
Bush had a handful of worries going into the campaign. The economy was tanking. Pesky Iran-Contra revelations kept cropping up. But the one thing that kept him up at night was the ghost of a four-year-old campaign promise:
"The Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And I'll say to them: 'Read my lips -- No. New. Taxes.'"
Source
As a parting shot Pappa Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger and all the other Iran-Contra criminals - with the exception of Ollie North. Ollie was convicted of three felonies that were later overturned on the grounds that his congressional testimony deprived him of the right to a fair trial. So much for justice.
In 1992 America finally caught a break and elected a Democratic President, Bill Clinton. After 12 ruinous years of Republican mismanagement, the economy was a disaster. It was growing at a meager 1% annually, and the deficit was at an historic high.
Over his eight years in office, Clinton balanced the budget and turned an historic deficit into an historic surplus. All in all Clinton presided over 8 years of economic prosperity and created nearly 22 million new jobs.
Which brings us to 2000 and quite possibly the beginning of the end of all we hold dear. When the American people elected Al Gore as our President, Papa Bush was displeased. He sent an army of lawyers and intimidation artists headed up by James Baker, senior counsel for the Carlyle Group and former Reagan Chief of Staff, to Florida to fight and subvert the will of the people. And they did just that - ultimately with the assistance of the Supreme Court of the United States. Amazingly it worked, and even more amazingly we let them get away with it.
For the first three-quarters of his first year as President, Bush was ineffective and embarrassing, as we all knew he would be. Then the September 11 attacks occurred and the PNAC neocons shifted their black-hearted machine into high gear. Now that they had a brilliant excuse and strong support from most of the population, they couldn't destroy the Constitution or the hopes and dreams of the American people fast enough.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial.
Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers. Source
Yes, the Republican career soldiers in the Pentagon despise and distrust Bush's neocon cabal. What's not to despise and distrust, eh? These chickenhawks with their insane ideas have run roughshod over anyone who dared get in their way.
They fired the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, after Shinseki told congress that it would take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq. Wolfowitz said Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark."
Shortly therafter Thomas White, Secretary of the Army left his post in anger after disagreeing with Rumsfeld who promptly fired him. The chickenhawks were in charge by God, and all the experience, wisdom, and good advice in the world could not save us from them.
Then they fired General Jay Garner as Iraq's first occupation administrator after one month on the job. Garner says he was fired because he wanted free elections and rejected an imposed program of privatization.
"My preference was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can, and do it with some form of elections ... I just thought it was necessary to rapidly get the Iraqis in charge of their destiny." Source
That `imposed program of privatization' was the Bush Administration plan to turn Iraq into a money bazaar for ethically-challenged Republican-connected contractors. So now, less than halfway through W's second stolen term in office, we are mired down in Iraq under rapidly deteriorating conditions as a full-blown civil war (that we started) rages across the country. We are squandering the wealth of our nation and destroying the lives and hopes of millions of people - for no good reason at all, and we have a bunch of pathetic, cowardly, rapacious chickenhawks to thank for it.
There is no noble purpose involved in Iraq and there never has been. This is a war for oil, empire, and greed. Bush and his buds have engorged themselves on the blood money of war. That this was the motivation for the terrible destruction and horrendous violence that we have seen and are still seeing disgusts me. It is a visceral blow to the gut to consider that men would commit such heinous crimes against humanity for personal profit. And these assholes are already filthy rich. Could there be a greater abomination? I didn't think so until I learned about Abu Ghraib.
The only people who have benefited from this nightmare are Bush's cronies and the war profiteers, cutthroats, and thieves who own him. What to everyone else is horror, sacrifice, and grief is the sweet smell of success to these ghoulish merchants of death.
These unprincipled greedheads are making a killing in Iraq, both literally and figuratively. The enormous amount of money involved is staggering, and is counted in the very high billions. This is all taxpayer money that we the people are being bilked out of. There are no checks and balances to keep the greedy bastards honest, and every effort to do so has been defeated by the rubberstamp Republican congress.
US: Defense firms feast on Bush's 'War on Terror'
According to reports, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Honeywell and United Technologies posted all-time best-ever profits in the first half of this year and they still have a huge list of orders.
August 29th, 2005
Analysts say that a significant part of the Americans' national life is determined by the financial interests of the "mighty 10."
The "mighty 10" are not the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force or Special Forces; they're huge arms firms that stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars from Bush's ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the "10" -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Litton, General Electric, United Technologies, TRW and Textron -- six are among the world's top 10 arms-producing companies. Source
These degenerate vultures are feasting on the flesh of the dead. I cannot imagine men so blinded by greed, so eaten up with avarice that they are oblivious to the carnage, numb to the agony, and indifferent to the suffering of innocents and children.
Yes, it's all about the Benjamins baby! It's not about anything less than monstrous greed; men consumed with a lust for money so overpowering that no outrage or abomination is too high a price to pay. These men have no shame, guilt, or conscience - they are sociopaths, thieves, and warmongers; men without pity or mercy; bottomless pits of inhuman avarice and bloodlust.
MERCHANTS OF MISERY
Today, a handful of well-connected U.S. corporations - many with scandal-ridden business records - are making billions in profits off the suffering of war, and pushing,
with the aid of the U.S. military, a destructive plan of privatization.
Many of these big corporations exert undue influence in U.S. politics, making big contributions to pro-war politicians who reward them with huge military contracts.
Powerful multinational businesses are also leading a corporate invasion of Iraq with aims to loot the oil, water, and other resources that belong to the people. Source
There is not even the appearance of accountability.
From 60 Minutes
Billions Wasted In Iraq?
U.S. Official Says Oversight Was "Nonexistent"
There were no banks or wire transfers to pay them, no bean counters to keep track of the money. Just vaults and footlockers stuffed with billions of dollars in cash.
"Fresh, new, crisp, unspent, just-printed $100 bills. It was the Wild West," recalls Frank Willis, who was the No. 2 man at the Coalition Provisional Authority's Ministry of Transportation.
The money was a mixture of Iraqi oil revenues, war booty and U.S. government funds earmarked for the coalition authority. Whenever cash was needed, someone went down to the vault with a wheelbarrow or gunny sacks.
For such as these millions die - murdered for nothing more than monetary profit. From deep in the pit of my soul I feel a profound revulsion for such men. Dylan didn't like them either. He called them masters of war.
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
from Masters of War by Bob Dylan
These people hold the lives of common men to be of little or no value - and equate foreigners to cannon fodder. They care not how many children are bombed, killed, or orphaned by their products. `We don't start the wars,' they claim - but they lie. If it weren't for the Machiavellian machinations of the `masters of war,' there would be no wars. People choose peace when they are allowed.
War is a despicable business. And it is just that - a business. We have been duped and manipulated by scam artists who would profit from the blood of our children and purloin the wealth of our nation. And the scurrilous pack of lies they tell to cover their tracks is beneath contempt. George Bush the senior before he was elected President said, "I can tell you this: If I'm ever in a position to call the shots, I'm not going to rush to send somebody else's kids into a war." He, like his son, is a lying, warmongering scumbag.
This morning I woke up to more bad news: killings, bombings, death, and destruction. Will we manage to stop the killing and the violence? Or will we be sucked into the abyss?
What are we, the American people, going to do about this sorry state of affairs? Two days ago there were over a million people in the streets of Mexico City to protest the stolen election there. Do the Mexicans care more about democracy than we do? Their courage is at once an inspiration and an admonishment. We must be prepared to follow their lead.
This senseless violence must end. We must take back our government and never again let it fall into the hands of Republican war profiteers. They need to be run out of office and kept out of office for all time. And we must demand justice for ourselves and for the world.
Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?
By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted July 10, 2006.
A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the 'supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.' Source
Yes, we must demand justice and bring our war criminals to trial for their crimes against humanity. Until we do we will owe a solemn and unpaid debt to the rest of the world, and our hands will be steeped in the blood of innocents and children.
The fiendish knuckle-dragging Republicans and their war profiteering corporate masters have brought us to this dark and evil place in history. We must ensure that they are never again allowed to wield power in this country. We must attack them, defeat them, and relegate them to the ash heap of history.
We must transform our defense industry and put all of that money, talent, and energy to peaceful purposes such as great public works, the development of clean alternative energy, social justice, environmental responsibility, and the greater welfare of our people.
We owe it to our children and grandchildren to deliver up to them a world at peace.
Amen.