April 7, 2007
"The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted." --Lichtenberg
I don't think there is anything more unsettling when considering the Bush presidency than reflecting on the fact that so many Americans voted for him, twice. Even the 30% or so who still say they support him these days leave more than a few of us wondering who among us in our community or in our workplace could be so ignorant, or more corrupted. There hasn't been a more dangerous administration in modern history -- not just because of their ruthless grabs for power; not just because of the laws they break and ignore, claiming false authority; not just because of their willingness to sacrifice an endless number of our nation's defenders for their autocratic militarism; but because of the way Americans have virtually shrugged off the abuses and allowed Bush to continue unabated.
It was fear which compelled many Americans to rally behind the man who mindlessly presided over the most pernicious attack on our nation since Pearl Harbor. Bush was in the driver's seat when our nation was hit on 9-11, but we kept him at the helm anyway out of many Americans' blind conviction that nothing our government could produce in response to the attacks would be more pernicious than the actions of the perpetrators they entrusted him to pursue.
We were an America whose seemingly unassailable defenses had been breached; but we trusted anyway that, whatever letdown of our guard had occurred, there was someone, somewhere in our bureaucracy who would guide our response and administer justice to re-secure our unsettled nation.
That initial response from the administration was short-lived, ineffective, and counter-productive. As they let the original suspects escape into the mountains of Afghanistan, the Bush regime substituted regime-change in the Afghan nation for basic law enforcement. Instead of using the international goodwill they had achieved to effect cooperation from nations in the region to pursue the suspects, they sucked the life out of the coalition by insisting on installing their puppet Karzai as ruler of Afghanistan. After five years of working with the U.S. and NATO to destroy the Taliban -who had once given aid to the terror suspects - Karzai, this week, attempted to reconcile with the group.
"Afghan Taliban are always welcome, they belong to this country. . . . They are the sons of this soil," Karzai told reporters. "As they repent, as they regret, as they want to come back to their own country, they are welcome."
The Afghan government was overthrown and a U.S. compliant one installed, but the U.S. is no more secure now from the influence of the original terror suspects than was assumed at the outset of our military deployment there. Not only haven't the Taliban and their supporters been eliminated or neutralized, but the original terror suspects have spent the past five years since the 9-11 attacks taunting the U.S. as the mere fact of their freedom from prosecution has influenced and motivated countless wannabe combatants to challenge the U.S., our interests, and our allies wherever the opportunity presents itself.
The most damaging opportunity to harm our nation was offered out to all comers when Bush 'decided' to divert the bulk of our nation's resources, away from the hunt for bin-Laden and associates in Afghanistan, to invade and occupy Iraq as Bush called for combatants to 'bring it on' and attack our troops there.
Bush's war with Iraq was the invention of a banished ruling class - enriched by the selling of the influence of their positions in government - who had nursed their broken ambitions in exile, and had instinctively constructed their sympathetic webs of wealth to obstruct the remedies of the reformers and hatch the next generation of world capitalists who would inherit the patronage of the next conservative presidency.
The invasion of Iraq was a clumsy attempt by Bush to usurp the power from a vanquished nation of innocents; a suffering class of people who were already devastated by the bombing of the first war, and by the economic sanctions imposed by the U.N. at the insistence of the U.S., which served to enrich Saddam Hussein and steadily impoverish and starve everyone else.
This administration pulled the nation into war to compensate for, and to draw attention from, their failure to apprehend the ringleader of the attack on the World Trade Center. Bush made the appeal to the nation in a manner which exploited our deepest fears as he warned the nation about the potential for a future Iraqi assault on our country, or on our allies, of a magnitude that would far exceed the devastation of the horrendous suicide attack in New York.
"The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East," Bush told us before he invaded. "It has a deep hatred of America and our friends and it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaida," he said in his address to the nation.
It was either out of ignorance or a deliberate lie that Bush failed to note that the only 'al-Qaeda' in Iraq before the invasion was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who enjoyed protection from Saddam's stated objections to his presence among the Kurdish fundamentalists, Ansar al-Islam, in northern Iraq by the American-enforced, no-fly zone; a U.S. safe haven for Iraqi Kurds.
It was not out of concern for the slim thread to al-Qaeda in Iraq that al-Zarqawi represented to the U.S. which compelled them to invade. The would-be terrorist provided the administration with the element of fear they had sparked from the flames of 9-11. They knew that such a diversion to invade Iraq couldn't be sold without linking their scheme to the lingering insecurity over their failure to catch the perpetrators. Diverting to Iraq not only provided a way to assuage the publics' anxiety over the inability to catch the suspects, it also allowed the Bush regime to claim to be fighting 'terror' against a presumably conquerable country; "a slam-dunk." But, along with all of th other justifications used by Bush and his minions for invading Iraq, the al-Qaeda linkage to Saddam was a deliberate lie.
Another amazing phenomenon in the life of this administration has been their open closeness with the most depraved, reckless, demagogues among their conservative supporters. It's of no surprise from this America-hating administration to find them publishing the vice-president's
interview with American-hating Rush Limbaugh on the White House web page. And it is of no surprise that Cheney took the opportunity to continue the attempt to wrap their nation-building disaster in Iraq around their self-justifying lies about a danger to the U.S. from combatants there who've taken on the moniker of al-Qaeda.
Speaking of al-Zarqawi, Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh that the terrorist "took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June . . . this is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq," he said
"There's no way you can segment out and say, well, we'll fight the war on terror in Pakistan, or in Afghanistan, but we can separate Iraq, that's not really in any way, shape, or form, related," Cheney said, "That's just dead wrong. Bin Laden, himself, has said, this is a central battle in the war on terror."
What Cheney was trying to do in his radio appearance with Limbaugh was to link the fear of the attacks of 9-11 his administration had allowed, with their invented prospect that someone identifying themselves with al-Qaeda in Iraq would "follow our soldiers home" and attack us. To buy into all of that we'd have to accept, as the administration's own National Security Estimate concluded, that Bush's occupation that he's intent on continuing indefinitely has actually 'fueled' and increased the numbers of individuals and groups in Iraq and elsewhere who would do our nation harm.
Sen. Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today released the newly declassified
report of the Department of Defense Inspector General on its “Review of the Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy,” which directly contradicts Cheney's reassertion that Saddam and al-Qaeda were linked. The IG's report concluded that Douglas Feith’s office ‘developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship,’ which included ‘conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community’, after the initial request for an invasion-justifying link from his boss Paul Wolfowitz.
In fact, the main orchestrator of the lies which led the U.S. to institute a policy of regime change against Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, was a twenty-year friend Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Feith used Chalabi's web of misinformation about Iraqi WMD's to develop a rationale for war against Saddam; including the ‘intelligence' that Saddam was conspiring with bin Laden. Feith is known for a 1996 paper he co-authored and presented to President Clinton advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The letter was also signed by Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others.
In the letter they argued that, "In the present climate in Washington, some may misunderstand and misinterpret strong American action against Iraq as having ulterior political motives. We believe, on the contrary, that strong American action against Saddam is in the national interest, that it must be supported, and that it must succeed."
Co-author Feith was also one of about five members of the Bush administration who formed a separate ‘special plans office' in October 2001, whose purpose was to collect information from the CIA and the intelligence community to develop their own strategy for the war on terrorism. The group highlighted "interrelationships among terrorist organizations and state sponsors." They claimed "strategic alliances" between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, and a “mature, symbiotic” relationship, despite the argument that such an alliance would have to withstand deep ideological and religious differences.
Moreover, Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq has be the ultimate realization of the original al-Qaeda's dream. Bush and his republican apologists can twist the facts every which way they want, but their diversion from the hunt for bin-Laden and his accomplices in Afghanistan to invade and occupy Iraq has to have been the single, most blundering appeasement of terrorist violence by our government ever; certainly the largest since Reagan and Bush were caught in Iran trading arms for hostages.
Consider the argument that Bush and his republicans are making after five years of letting bin-Laden run free; after five years of shifting justifications for diverting to Iraq, and flip-flops regarding the importance of capturing or killing the rebel leader and his band of thugs. They are now reduced to arguing that the best place to wage their 'war on terror' is in Iraq. As Bush put it, Iraq is the "center" of his terror war. Why? "Because bin-Laden says so."
"We know what the terrorists intend to do because they've told us -- and we need to take their words seriously." Bush said last September.
Bush and his minions are more than content to listen to the terrorists, and they want us to listen too. "Don't believe me," Bush told Americans in his Rose Garden news conference last October. "Listen to the enemy, or listen to Mr. Zawahri, the number two of al Qaeda, both of whom made it clear that Iraq is central in their plans."
"I take the words of the enemy very seriously," Bush said, "and so should the American people."
The consequence of allowing Bush and Cheney to continue to prosecute their counter-productive militarism would be that bin-Laden and his accomplices would be able to continue to run loose in Afghanistan/Pakistan while the administration continues to direct the bulk of our defenses the other direction, to Iraq.
That's Bush and Cheney's promise to the American people. "For as long as Bush is president," as he has said, " they will continue to sacrifice lives and limbs in Iraq (where 16 of his intelligence agencies say our occupation is creating terrorists, not eliminating them) and continue to short-shrift the search for the leaders of the original al-Qaeda who are influencing other combatants with the example of their historic attack on the U.S. and their escape from justice.
"Remember what al Qaeda is betting on here," Cheney told Limbaugh. "What they're betting is that they can break our will, that they can, in fact, force the American people to retreat, that we'll finally get tired of the battle and go home, and then they win. The only way they can win is if we quit. And to adopt a policy that says we're going to withdraw from Iraq would do precisely that, and in effect, hands victory to the terrorists, it validates the whole al Qaeda strategy," Cheney said.
Whatever 'al-Qaeda' is betting on, we can be certain that one of those bets covers their safety from prosecution as they enjoy the 'safe-haven' Bush has allowed them in Afghanistan by directing the bulk of our nation's defenses to fight and die defending his Iraq junta. Over 3500 have been killed in Iraq alone since the initial invasion. This is what Bush and Cheney insist they are determined to continue, despite the overwhelming opposition around the nation, and, against the will of Congress in legislation passed and legislation pending demanding an end to the occupation and the withdrawal of our soldiers.
Bush and Cheney are dangerous for America. Americans can't afford any more of their reckless indifference to the plights of our soldiers, or to the inevitable and continuing consequences of their assaults against Iraqis. As they continue to allow the original 9-11 suspects to run free, they are themselves free to continue their fearmongering against Americans using the terrorists' specter to brush off criticisms of their unconstitutional manipulations and disregard of the constitution and the rule of law.
Bush and Cheney are busy escalating the danger to our nation using their original lies. They couldn't wait to bury our nation in Iraq, and they won't preside willingly over the digging out. Who are these folks still out there listening and believing them?
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