http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/azor-m17.shtml<snip>
The White House has repeatedly employed false analogies to the 1930s to justify its policies, with ludicrous comparisons of Iraq, a weak and impoverished country, to Nazi Germany. There is a parallel to Hitler, but it involves Bush and not Saddam Hussein. Once again, as in the 1930s, the world has been staggered by brazen acts of bullying and aggression perpetrated by a major world power. That is why massive protest demonstrations against the US war drive have taken place in virtually every world capital.
...
The location of the meeting—on an American airbase on the Portuguese island of Terceira, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—was an expression both of the isolation of the Bush administration and its complete contempt for public opinion. The summit could not have been held in the capitals of any of the three countries without a full-scale military mobilization. It had to be held on an island, inaccessible to the people of the countries involved, to avoid mass protests like the one million people who marched through the Spanish capital, Madrid, the day before.
...
This was not a summit to “go the last mile” in seeking a diplomatic solution, as the White House claimed—failing to explain, in that event, why the chief US diplomat, Secretary of State Colin Powell, stayed behind in Washington. Rather, it was an effort to make absolutely certain that no diplomatic obstacles would succeed in diverting the Bush administration from its long-desired goal of war.
...
And, as always with the Bush administration, personal financial gain happily dovetails with plans for military conquest. Only days before the summit, the British newspaper the Guardian revealed that Vice President Richard Cheney is continuing to receive payments, estimated at between $500,000 and $600,000 annually, from Halliburton, the big oilfield services company he headed before the 2000 election campaign. Halliburton is one of three huge US companies being given privileged status in bidding for contracts to rehabilitate Iraq’s oilfields under a postwar American administration. It is a measure of the cowardice and corruption of the American media that not a single major US newspaper has reported the Guardian’s findings. Nor was Cheney questioned about his personal finances during hour-long interviews Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation.
Bush repeatedly declared that the main purpose of military action against Iraq was to defend the world from the supposed threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The administration’s lies on this subject have been repeatedly exposed, most recently in an article which appeared in the Washington Post on the day of the summit. The newspaper’s national security reporter Walter Pincus—a former CIA informant and well-connected at the agency—cited CIA sources as acknowledging, as though it was obvious, that the US government has no evidence that Iraq possesses any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
</snip>
much more....
and here is the link to the Walter Pincus article in yesterday's WA Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30601-2003Mar15.html
s_m
Image"In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant
Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences
for years."
--Senator Robert Byrd, on the Senate floor, February 12, 2003
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