Bush Or Kerry?

[DuctapeFatwa]

A myth equal to the fable of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie grow as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the "anyone but Bush" movement becomes a liberal cause celebre. While the rise to power of the Bush gang, the neoconservatives, belatedly preoccupied the American media, the message of their equivalents in the Democratic Party has been of little interest. Yet the similarities are compelling. Shortly before Bush's "election" in 2000, the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative pressure group, published an ideological blueprint for "maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests". Every one of its recommendations for aggression and conquest was adopted by the administration.

One year later, the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council, published a 19-page manifesto for the "New Democrats", who include all the principal Democratic Party candidates, and especially John Kerry. This called for "the bold exercise of American power" at the heart of "a new Democratic strategy, grounded in the party's tradition of muscular internationalism". Such a strategy would "keep Americans safer than the Republicans' go-it-alone policy, which has alienated our natural allies and overstretched our resources. We aim to rebuild the moral foundation of US global leadership ..."

Bush has been a beneficiary of this. His neoconservatives derive not from traditional Republican Party roots, but from the hawk's wings of the Democratic Party - such as the trade union establishment, the AFL-CIO (known as the "AFL-CIA"), which received millions of dollars to subvert unions and political parties throughout the world, and the weapons industry, built and nurtured by the Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's leading fanatic, began his Washington political life working for Jackson. In 1972 an aberration, George McGovern, faced Richard Nixon as the Democrats' anti-war candidate. Virtually abandoned by the party and its powerful backers, McGovern was crushed.

People who are aware of such danger, yet support its proponents in a form they find agreeable, think they can have it both ways. They can't. Michael Moore, the film-maker, should know this better than anyone; yet he backed the Nato bomber Wesley Clark as Democratic candidate. The effect of this is to reinforce the danger to all of us, because it says it is OK to bomb and kill, then to speak of peace. Like the Bush regime, the New Democrats fear truly opposing voices and popular movements: that is, genuine democracy, at home and abroad. The colonial theft of Iraq is a case in point. "If you move too fast," says Noah Feldman, a former legal adviser to the US regime in Baghdad, "the wrong people could get elected." Tony Blair has said as much in his inimitable way: "We can't end up having an inquiry into whether the war was right or wrong. That is something that we have got to decide. We are the politicians."

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=33&ItemID=5083