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Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Volume 6, No. 2
(Editor's Note: "Between 1945 and 1996 we spent $4 trillion on nuclear madness. In 1996 we spent $25 billion on nuclear programs. Over $3 billion of these funds were allocated to so-called "science-based stockpile stewardship" which enabled our mad Dr. Strangeloves to continue to design new nuclear weapons. Indeed, this deadly "stewardship" program will have a cost of $40 billion to 2006.
The long sought Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was finally signed by President Clinton at the UN on September 24th, 1996, was a Pyrrhic victory for activists who heard nation after nation condemn the nuclear powers for having gutted the meaning of the treaty by their elaborate computer-simulated virtual-reality testing programs which has enabled weaponeers to design new nukes for space and earth penetrators—"to get Saddam in his bunker." And these computers are not laptops. The new teraflop computer is as big as a house; the National Ignition Facility at Livermore will be the size of a football field!
Meanwhile we have over 4,000 contaminated sites in the US alone. Here are some examples: in Idaho there are rusting tin cans filled with plutonium from nuclear submarine waste sitting in raw open earth pits on top of an aquifer in an earthquake zone! The Navy ships its spent fuel clear across the country by rail, from New York to Idaho, creating this macabre storage "solution." And they continue to build new submarine reactors, creating even more nuclear waste. In Amarillo they store plutonium in pits from dismantled bombs on top of the world's largest freshwater aquifer—the Oglala—which supplies drinking water to 16 states. In Portsmouth, Ohio, on the Ohio-Kentucky border, the US enrichment plant pours its toxic filth into rivers and streams poisoning the poor people of Appalachia. Downwinders in Utah with higher incidences of breast cancer and leukemia continue to suffer from nuclear testing in Nevada.
Uranium miners in Arizona and workers at the leaking Hanford tanks in Washington live shorter lives than average with higher cancer rates than the general population. Indeed every site where nuclear activity occurs, both military and civilian, has a saga of woes from the effects of lethal radioactivity. Further, most sites, worldwide, are located on the lands of indigenous people or in poverty-stricken rural communities. It is an immoral tale of environmental racism." Alice Slater)
6 Articles
2. Hawking Warns: We Must Recognise the Catastrophic Dangers of Climate Change
3. UK Govt. Sources Confirm War with Iran is On
4. CT Scans: A Radioactive Risk
5. Soldiers and Imperial Presidents
6. Speaking Out Now Against The Iraq Disaster Is Too Little Too Late
1. DRAGON-SLAYERS (In Three Parts. This is Part 3)
BY
COREY ROBIN
While Arendt had worried about Zionism’s darker tendencies and imperial dalliances from the beginning, her awareness of the Arab question came slowly. By 1944, however, she had come to see it as the ‘most important’ challenge. Without ‘Arab-Jewish co-operation,’ she wrote in 1948, ‘the whole Jewish venture in Palestine is doomed.’ Zionism left the Palestinians with no options other than emigration or ‘transfer’, which could be accomplished only using Fascist methods, or second-class status in the land of their birth. This last option, she remarked in 1943, assumed ‘that tomorrow’s majority will concede minority rights to today’s majority, which indeed would be something brand new in the history of nation-states’. In the mid-1940s, she warned that the Arabs would soon ‘turn against the Jews as the Slovaks turned against the Czechs in Czechoslovakia, and the Croats against the Serbs in Yugoslavia’. ‘In the long run,’ she added, ‘there is hardly any course imaginable that would be more dangerous.’
Many people believe that great crimes come from terrible ideas: Marxism, racism and Islamic fundamentalism gave us the Gulag, Auschwitz and 9/11. It was the singular achievement of Eichmann in Jerusalem, however, to remind us that the worst atrocities often arise from the simplest of vices. And few vices, in Arendt’s mind, were more vicious than careerism. ‘The East is a career,’ Disraeli wrote. And so was the Holocaust, according to Arendt. ‘What for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.’ Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.
Eichmann was a careerist of the first order. He had ‘no motives at all’, Arendt insisted, ‘except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement’. He joined the Nazis because he saw in them an opportunity to ‘start from scratch and still make a career’, and ‘what he fervently believed in up to the end was success.’ Late in the war, as Nazi leaders brooded in Berlin over their impending fate and that of Germany, Eichmann was fretting over superiors’ refusing to invite him to lunch. Years later, he had no memory of the Wannsee Conference, but clearly remembered bowling with senior officials in Slovakia.
This aspect of Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann is often overlooked in favour of her account of the bureaucrat, the thoughtless follower of rules who could cite the letter of Kant’s categorical imperative without apprehending its spirit. The bureaucrat is a passive instrument, the careerist an architect of his own advance. The first loses himself in paper, the second hoists himself up a ladder. The first was how Eichmann saw himself; the second is how Arendt insisted he be seen.
Most modern theorists, from Montesquieu to the American Framers to Hayek, have considered ambition and careerism to be checks against, rather than conduits of, oppression and tyranny. Arendt’s account of totalitarianism, too, makes it difficult to see how a careerist could survive or prosper among Nazis and Stalinists. Totalitarianism, she argued, appeals to people who no longer care about their lives, much less their careers, and destroys individuals who do. It preys on the dissolution of class structures and established hierarchies – or dissolves those that remain – and replaces them with a shapeless mass movement and a bureaucracy that resembles an onion more than a pyramid.
The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.
2. HAWKING WARNS: WE MUST RECOGNISE THE CATASTROPHIC DANGERS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
BY
STEVE CONNOR
Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said.
Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it.
He was speaking at the Royal Society in London yesterday at a conference organised by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which has decided to move the minute hand of its "Doomsday Clock" forward to five minutes to midnight to reflect the increased dangers faced by the world.
Scientists devised the clock in 1947 as a way of expressing to the public the risk of nuclear conflagration following the use of the atomic weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.
"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again, to inform the public and to advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces," Professor Hawking said. "As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth.
"As citizens of the world, we have a duty to share that knowledge. We have a duty, as well, to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change.
"We are here today to outline the results of the Bulletin's recent deliberations and to warn the public about the deteriorating state of world and planetary affairs by moving the hand of the clock," Professor Hawking said.
"Lord Rees of Ludlow, president of the Royal Society, said humankind's collective impacts on the biosphere, climate and oceans were unprecedented. These environmentally-driven threats 'threats without enemies' should loom as large in the political perspective as did the East-West political divide during the Cold War era.
Technology in the 21st century could offer immense opportunities to everyone but it would also present new threats that were more diverse and more intractable than those posed by nuclear weapons, Lord Rees said.
"To confront these threats successfully and to avoid foreclosing humanity's long-term potential scientists need to channel their efforts wisely and engage with the political process nationally and internationally.
"We shall need, in all fields of science, individuals with the wisdom and commitment of the atomic scientists who founded the Bulletin," he said.
The board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the threat of nuclear apocalypse was now almost matched by the environmental threats posed by climate change.
"We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices," the board said in a statement issued yesterday.
"North Korea's recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions, a renewed US emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.
"As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilisation. We have concluded the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm."
3. UK GOVT SOURCES CONFIRM WAR WITH IRAN IS ON
BY
NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED
In the last few days, I learned from a credible and informed source that a former senior Labour government Minister, who continues to be well-connected to British military and security officials, confirms that Britain and the United States.
"... will go to war with Iran before the end of the year."
07/24/06 "Information Clearing House" -- - As we now know from similar reporting prior to the invasion of Iraq, it's quite possible that the war planning may indeed change repeatedly, and the war may again be postponed. In any case, it's worth noting that the information from a former Labour Minister corroborates expert analyses suggesting that Israel, with US and British support, is deliberately escalating the cycle of retaliation to legitimize the imminent targeting of Iran before year's end. Let us remind ourselves, for instance, of US Vice President Cheney's assertions recorded on MSNBC over a year ago. He described Iran as being "right at the top of the list" of "rogue states". He continued: "One of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked... Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."
But the emphasis on Israel's pre-eminent role in a prospective assault on Iran is not accurate. Israel would rather play the role of a regional proxy force in a US-led campaign. "Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East..." reports Seymour Hersh. He quotes a former high-level US intelligence official as follows:
"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah-we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."
Are these just the fanatical pipedreams of the neoconservative faction currently occupying (literally) the White House?
Unfortunately, no. The Iraq War was one such fanatical pipedream in the late 1990s, one that Bush administration officials were eagerly ruminating over when they were actively and directly involved in the Project for a New American Century. But that particular pipedream is now a terrible, gruelling reality for the Iraqi people. Despite the glaring failures of US efforts in that country, there appears to be a serious inability to recognize the futility of attempting the same in Iran.
The Monterey Institute for International Studies already showed nearly two years ago in a detailed analysis that the likely consequences of a strike on Iran by the US, Israel, or both, would be a regional conflagration that could quickly turn nuclear, and spiral out of control. US and Israeli planners are no doubt aware of what could happen. Such a catastrophe would have irreversible ramifications for the global political economy.
Energy security would be in tatters, precipitating the activation of long-standing contingency plans to invade and occupy all the major resource-rich areas of the Middle East and elsewhere (see my book published by Clairview, Behind the War on Terror for references and discussion). Such action could itself trigger responses from other major powers with fundamental interests in maintaining their own access to regional energy supplies, such as Russia and particularly China, which has huge interests in Iran. Simultaneously, the dollar-economy would be seriously undermined, most likely facing imminent collapse in the context of such crises.
Which raises pertinent questions about why Britain, the US and Israel are contemplating such a scenario as a viable way of securing their interests.
A glimpse of an answer lies in the fact that the post-9/11 military geostrategy of the "War on Terror" does not spring from a position of power, but rather from entirely the opposite. The global system has been crumbling under the weight of its own unsustainability for many years now, and we are fast approaching the convergence of multiple crises that are already interacting fatally as I write. The peak of world oil production, of which the Bush administration is well aware, either has already just happened, or is very close to happening. It is a pivotal event that signals the end of the Oil Age, for all intents and purposes, with escalating demand placing increasing pressure on dwindling supplies. Half the world's oil reserves are, more or less, depleted, which means that it will be technologically, geophysically, increasingly difficult to extract conventional oil. I had a chat last week with some scientists from the Omega Institute in Brighton, directed by my colleague and friend Graham Ennis, who told me eloquently and powerfully what I already knew, that while a number of climate "tipping-points" may or may not have yet been passed, we have about 10-15 years before the "tipping-point" is breached certainly and irreversibly. Breaching that point means plunging head-first into full-scale "climate catastrophe". Amidst this looming Armageddon of Nature, the dollar-denominated economy itself has been teetering on the edge of spiraling collapse for the last seven years or more. This is not idle speculation. A financial analyst as senior as Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan's immediate predecessor as chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently confessed "that he thought there was a 75% chance of a currency crisis in the United States within five years."
There appears to have been a cold calculation made at senior levels within the Anglo-American policymaking establishment: that the system is dying, but the last remaining viable means of sustaining it remains a fundamentally military solution designed to reconfigure and rehabilitate the system to continue to meet the requirements of the interlocking circuits of military-corporate power and profit.
The highly respected US whistleblower, former RAND strategic analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who was Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam conflict and became famous after leaking the Pentagon Papers, has already warned of his fears that in the event of "another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack on Iran, I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country, detention camps for middle-easterners and their quote 'sympathizers', critics of the President's policy and essentially the wiping-out of the Bill of Rights."
So is that what all the "emergency preparedness" legislation, here in the UK as well as in the USA and in Europe, is all about? The US plans are bad enough, as Ellsberg notes, but the plans UK scene is hardly better, prompting The Guardian to describe the Civil Contingencies Bill (passed as an Act in 2004) as "the greatest threat to civil liberty that any parliament is ever likely to consider."
As global crises converge over the next few years, we the people are faced with an unprecedented opportunity to use the growing awareness of the inherent inhumanity and comprehensive destructiveness of the global imperial system to establish new, viable, sustainable and humane ways of living.
4. CT SCANS: A RADIOACTIVE RISK
BY
TERRY J. ALLEN
How computed tomography (CT) scans are exposing you to 500 times more radiation than a conventional chest x-ray.
My dentist and I have been bickering for decades. Steve advocates diagnostic x-rays; I argue that ionizing radiation, an established cancer risk, is not worth the benefit of catching a cavity early. Every couple of years, he threatens to dump me as a patient, and I agree to a few x-rays after factoring in the benefits of his skill and his generous hand with the nitrous oxide.
Our negotiations rest on conjoined principles of Western medicine: risk-benefit analysis and informed consent.
But when it comes to the far greater risk of a "procedure performed more than 150,000 times a day in the United States most consent forms are silent," notes Georgetown University's Adrian Fugh-Berman, in a report for the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute.
Computed tomography (CT) scans take multiple x-ray images from different angles and link them into cross-sections of body tissues and organs. Researchers at Yale found that only a minority of U.S. academic medical centers inform patients about alternatives to diagnostic CT, including sonograms and MRIs, or about the radiation.
One abdominal CT, says the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), exposes a patient to 500 times more radiation than a conventional chest x-ray. Exposure from a single full-body CT scan is within the same range as doses that increased the cancer risk of Japan's A-bomb survivors. Full-body scans can cause a one in 1,250 increased chance of dying from cancer, Radiology reports. That risk more than doubles for the 2-3 million children scanned, and leaps again for the third of those kids given at least three scans, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
Of course, many CT scans are well worth the risk. They can be superb diagnostic tools that result in more effective treatments and, possibly, cures.
But early diagnosis does not always mean longer survival. "If I pick up a tumor that is one centimeter today and you live five years, or I pick it up four years later and you live one year, it's the same thing," Dr. Elliott Fishman, a professor of radiology and oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, told the New York Times.
The risk-benefit equation skews further at facilities touting CT scan screening for apparently healthy people.
"Are you at risk?," ask the big red letters of a Web pop-up ad. "Find out for only $99" for a heart scan at Pulse Medical Imaging, "located in the White Plains [NY] business district."
Or "Come to Florida, for a scan and a tan," flashes a Web ad for HealthTest Scan Center, where a pelvic, abdomen and chest scan will set you back $895, with a heart scan thrown in.
When Tania answered the phone at the Boca Raton, Fla., office, I said I wanted information but thought I was healthy. She chuckled, "Everyone thinks that, but it's just to make sure. Prevention is better than a cure." What can a scan prevent? "Death," she replied. And if my doctor refuses to prescribe it? "See our doctor [either Dr. Marc Kaprow or Rohtem Amir]. He'll give you the OK."
I asked Tania about radiation danger. "It's minimal with this machine," she reassured. How often should I get one? "Talk to the doctor, but some people have them four to five times in a six-month period." Why? "Some people are hypochondriacs," she confided.
Downplaying or ignoring the radiation risks extends to major studies and journals. Researchers at Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center assessed annual CT scans for smokers and former smokers without symptoms and concluded CTs save lives by detecting lung cancer early. The study, published in the October New England Journal of Medicine, never mentions radiation risk. The Center would not release its consent form David Behrman, head of the Institutional Review Board could not confirm how, or if, it described the radiation risks. But "I can't imagine subjects were not informed," he said.
A New York Times article and editorial pointed out design flaws in the study, including the lack of a control group, and noted that CT scans carried risks such as false positives, unnecessary biopsies and "needless surgery to remove tumors that might never have become a problem." It, too, omitted radiation concerns.
The number of CT scans in the United States is at 60 million a year and rising. The journal of American Society of Radiologic Technologists estimates that "20 percent of radiologic imaging exams are not clinically useful [and] lapses in safety protocols also are common, unnecessarily increasing radiation exposures."
Overuse of CT scans "points out a larger problem," says Fugh-Berman. Relying on information from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, "physicians are more informed about the benefits of therapy than the risks of drugs and procedures; risks related to diagnostics are off the radar screen." And once hospitals and medical practices invest in expensive equipment such as CT scanners, the more they use them the more they make. "They are a very high profit item," says Fugh-Berman.
And profitability is one benefit that commercial medicine always factors in.
5. SOLDIERS AND IMPERIAL PRESIDENTS
BY
CHARLES SULLIVAN
The vast majority of those who serve in the United States military probably do so with the best of intentions and with honor. The belief that they are defending their country from foreign attackers and doing their patriotic duty as citizens is persistently reinforced. Military service is one of America’s sacred cows; it is something that is rarely questioned and is surrounded by an invisible aura of nobility. No one, especially those who serve, wants to think of their time in the military as anything less than honorable and worthy of glorification.
But the trouble with sacred cows is that they tend to preclude critical examination and often escape the scrutiny of rational thinking and moral judgments. The premise of honorary military service thus goes virtually unchallenged, and often becomes the essence of dogma. But it seems to me that anyone contemplating a military career, especially since it may require killing other human beings and broad scale environmental destruction, should do so with open eyes and clear senses. They need to know who they are serving and whose interests they are protecting.
There is no escaping the fact that the U.S. is an imperialist nation conceived in genocide and racism that has continued through the ages, and worsened with the rise of modern technology and weaponry. With the advent of smart bombs came stupid and immoral leaders. Our litany of crimes against earth and humanity are concealed under layers of moral language, but the actual deeds belie the intent behind what is being done in our name. Ignorance, however, does not absolve anyone from culpability.
Anyone considering military service should deliberate upon the promises proffered by recruiters with extreme skepticism. Recruiters are trained to exalt war as the highest expression of patriotism and love of country; when, in fact, it is often the most debasing expression of our humanity that makes a shallow mockery of real service to god and country. The war resister and the conscientious objector may be the true patriot.
I will make no effort to conceal my contempt for military recruiters who prey upon unsuspecting and inexperienced youth, especially the poor and economically disadvantaged. No parent should expose their children to these predators. Recruiters are the moral equivalent of ambulance chasers, and they should be accorded no more respect than them, or the corporate con men who sell us goods that are detrimental to our health. These people are not concerned about the welfare of our children or the country; they are the representatives of imperialism, empire, and Plutocracy; and they are in search of cannon fodder.
Marketing militarism and war to society at large is no different than selling potato chips laced with trans-fats or carcinogenic chemicals, without regard to public health and its attendant social costs. It is all about managing public perception and providing widening profit margins to the corporations that are running the government. To hell with the public welfare and moral pronouncements, the plantation owner demands blood sacrifices as a show of loyalty and gratitude.
Thus it is not surprising that military sacrament is couched in the language of service to country, patriotism, and other noble causes that are as divorced from reality as the President is removed from sanity. The hypocrisy of righteous language contrasted to the actual deed is readily apparent to anyone who knows history. It is propaganda in the purest and most lethal form.
No doubt, the millions of men and women working in the armed forces today do so in the belief that they are heroically serving their country, as well as the cause of freedom and democracy. But in fact, they are serving the ruling clique, the Illuminati, and a few thousand wealthy investors, which represent less than 0.02% of the population. There must be no confusion that the financial interests of Halliburton, Bechtel, and the Bush dynasty are not the interests of America’s citizens, especially those in the armed forces.
There is nothing noble or moral about invading defenseless sovereign nations and killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent human beings. There is no morally justifiable way of making occupation and the outright theft of natural capital, such as oil, respectable or gallant. Genocide and theft are crimes against humanity, regardless how the corporate advertisers and public relations firms couch them; and the military is complicit in the commission of those crimes, whether they are ignorant of their role in them or not.
Consider, for example, the role the military has traditionally played in carrying out the plans of one imperial president after another. We have troops permanently stationed in 135 nations protecting America’s corporate interests from democracy. Stifling democracy is quite different from nurturing it. Either most of our presidents are pathological liars or they do not know the difference between nurturing and destroying. America’s record of imperialism speaks for itself; and it is something that, when critically examined, is not easily mistaken for anything other than what it is.
Similarly, the bogus war on terror is a contradiction in terms, as historian Howard Zinn has so aptly pointed out. War is terrorism. Terrorism begets terrorism, and nothing but terrorism. War does not, and cannot ever lead to peace.
Aided by the CIA and death squads trained at the School of the America’s at Fort Benning, Georgia, the U.S. has crushed one fledgling democracy after another and replaced them with brutally oppressive right wing dictatorships friendly to American corporations and financial investors. Let us recall that Saddam Hussein was our man in Iraq until he converted from the dollar to the euro. From Iran to Chile there are hundreds, if not thousands, of cases that could be cited. For a more detailed analysis of these incursions, I refer readers to William Blum’s provocative book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War Two.
Let us assume that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is a fairly typical example of imperial policies that have been in vogue for well over a century. Like previous military actions, the invasion of Iraq was based upon a litany of lies set forth by the president and his cabinet, and carried forth in the corporate media. Iraq did not pose a threat to America or to the interests of the American people, and both the President and the commercial media knew it. Their intent was to deceive and to garner support for unconscionable acts of aggression and terror that are not in the people’s interest.
Thus our armed forces are in Iraq under false pretenses that have nothing to do with spreading democracy or liberating oppressed people from tyranny. They are there for reasons that are as nefarious as they are treasonous. More than anyone, the men and women in the armed forces need to know why they are in Iraq and what is expected of them by the commander in chief.
The Plutocratic interests in Iraq may be summarized as the use of technologically advanced military forces and high tech weaponry that provide incalculable wealth to a privileged few. In this context, soldiers are nothing more than a means to an end; a Machiavellian way of socializing costs and privatizing profits—the ultimate in corporate welfare. Well over $50 billion in profits have been hauled out of Iraq by 150 U.S. corporations, including the privatization of lucrative Iraqi oil. The profits and the death toll continue to rise simultaneously.
To date, some 700,000 Iraqi people have died in the war and occupation, and the violence is rapidly escalating. Most of the dead are civilians, many of them women and children. Over 3,000 American soldiers have died on the basis of lies and thousands more are permanently maimed and traumatized—all to enhance the bottom line of America’s wealthiest and most privileged elite.
It is not well publicized in the western mainstream media that fourteen permanent military bases are under construction in Iraq. The occupation is growing deep tap roots that are drawing the life, and the oil, out of the region, and consuming it in a firestorm of self-perpetuating violence.
President Bush and his kind, always eager to exploit a photo opportunity, frequently pay homage to the troops stationed around the world and in return garner their respect and admiration, neither of which is deserved. Placing soldiers in peril when there is no threat to America or to national security is an expression of utter contempt for them; it is a treasonous offense worthy of the most severe punishment short of execution.
Aside from photo ops, Bush and his wealthy brethren do not associate with enlisted men, whose petty lives transpire far below the lofty socio-economic status the elite were born into. Enlisted men and women are permitted to wipe the cow dung from the president’s cowboy boots, but they are not allowed to wear them or travel in the same social circles as their owner.
The parasites that are running the country produce nothing, and have no more loyalty to the American people or to the Constitution than Frito-Lay or Halliburton. Their only allegiance is to accruing ever more wealth and power to themselves by all possible means, including war. You see, America is also an occupied country.
Neither the Iraqi nor American people’s interest is served by the military industrial complex. War is never in the interest of those who are fooled into fighting them. War benefits those who instigate them and reap their financial reward from the safety of posh offices and marbled halls. War is the century’s old tradition of peasants doing the bidding of kings and queens. That is whose interest is being served by our soldiers.
The truth is that soldiering is a particularly virulent manifestation of America’s unending class war; the continued exploitation of the working class by the ruling elite—the rich preying upon the poor. Now the President and his accomplices in Congress intend to send even more soldiers to Iraq, further escalating the violence, and acting contrary to public sentiment. The lives of these men and women mean nothing to the emperor and his minions. They are only so much excrement to be wiped from their boots; the sacrificial lambs of empire crawling beneath their ignoble gaze.
Despite my severe criticism, it is not my intention to disparage either soldiers or military service. However, these men and women are being duped and exploited, and someone has to tell them what they are killing and dying for. It will remain for each individual to weigh the evidence and decide whether it is right or wrong, courageous or foolish.
6. SPEAKING OUT NOW AGAINST THE IRAQ DISASTER IS TOO LITTLE TOO LATE
BY
CYNTHIA TUCKER
With President Bush's decision to send more U.S. troops to Iraq, it becomes clear that Gen. Eric K. Shinseki was right all along.
In February 2003, weeks before the invasion began, General Shinseki, then the U.S. Army chief of staff, testified at a Senate hearing that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to pacify Iraq after the early rounds of combat. For his candor, he was attacked, defamed and denounced by Bush administration officials, retiring with his reputation in tatters.
Only in the movies, it turns out, do the good guys - the courageous, self-sacrificing types - get the glory. In the real world, they get hammered.
That helps explain why General Shinseki was such a lonely voice back then. If last spring's "generals' revolt" was any indication, there were plenty of military men who saw trouble in Donald H. Rumsfeld's pared-down war plans. But they cowered before the condescending secretary, afraid to question his assumptions even in private meetings.
Retired Maj. Gen. John Baptiste, who once commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said last fall that Mr. Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next person who mentioned postwar plans. So they shut their mouths to keep their jobs. There were many officials - military officers, intelligence experts, strategic thinkers - who doubted the rationale for the war in Iraq or the planning for it. But few were willing to risk their careers by speaking up.
Intelligence professionals knew there were no close links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Military strategists knew that postwar operations demanded contingency planning and expertise that the Bush administration resisted. But most kept their doubts to themselves.
That includes then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who sold the war to a wary public in a speech before the United Nations in February 2003. He has since voiced regrets about that speech, but it's too late.
The same goes for all those Democratic senators who seem to want do-overs on their war votes. The record cannot be retracted or erased; the invasion cannot be recalled.
And therein lies our profound difficulty. There is no chance for "victory" or "success" in Iraq at this late date, and little chance for even averting disaster. What is done cannot be undone. There is no "way forward."
The U.S. invasion of Iraq fractured a fragile society, set off a cycle of retribution that may go on for years and emboldened Iran. We cannot fix the mess we've made. The best we can hope for is that the rest of the Middle East is not sucked into the maelstrom.
The moment for political courage came and went. Those who could not summon it then, those who failed to speak out when their nation most needed them, find that there is nothing they can do to make up for that failing.
In retrospect, it's not clear that President Bush could have been pushed back from his disastrous insistence on toppling Mr. Hussein, even if he had met firmer opposition. Given his continued resistance to reality, it's unlikely.
Still, wouldn't Sen. John Kerry, a combat veteran, have better served his nation if he had given a rousing speech on the floor of the Senate denouncing the invasion and then voted against it? The Massachusetts Democrat would have been called a coward and worse. But he could have plainly made the case that needed to be made: Invasion was not in the national interest.
And wouldn't Mr. Powell have done more good if he had resigned rather than give that speech to the United Nations? He was perhaps the most trusted member of the Bush administration at the time; his resignation would have spoken volumes about the folly of invasion.
But maybe that sort of thing makes grand movies because it is so very rare.
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