From the beginning of the Bush reign, as Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for Int’l Peace says, Bush’s one tactic conforms to "the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism" through fear, fear of the enemy, fear of the dark-skinned Other, fear of other religions, fear of the wolf at the door (as in a Republican ad). Bush’s slogan should be "We have nothing but fear itself."
Noam Chomsky refers to two categories of intellectuals: the "technocratic and policy-oriented" who are "responsible, sober, and constructive", and the "value-oriented intellectuals", who "pose a threat to democracy as they ‘devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking of established institutions." He is quoting from a 1975 study by the Trilateral Commission—remember them? They work with the World Bank, Skull And Bones, and the Illuminati to rule the world?—who were discussing the "crisis in democracy" caused by the 60’s. Chomsky goes on to explain the study as saying "the disruptive special interest are women, the young, the elderly, workers, farmers, minorities, majorities—in short, the population." This the the philosophy behind the old bastards that have ringed Bush since day one. A little from the Federalists, a little from Skull & Bones, and you have the most powerful cult in the history of the world. They make Scientology look like a tree-hugging hippie commune.
Thomas E. Ricks in "Fiasco" says Bush and Cheney’s continual, endless pounding into the heads of Americans that Iraq was a response to 9/11 led soldiers, once we invaded, to treat all Iraqis as terrorists, leading to humiliations, incarcerations, and then eventually to Abu Ghraib, and Kaditha, and Fallujah...Love Iraq, hate the Iraqis...
"Asia Times" wrote of the 3rd Armored Cavalry in western Iraq, where reporters rarely went. Nir Rosen reported that they went house to house, breaking into houses not on the target list with a sledgehammer, ransacking the houses, putting duct tape on prisoner’s eyes, going hours without water, roughing up innocent passersby, rousting an Iraqi policeman in a car marked "Police" at gunpoint, then leaving the town after fucking it up, blasting AC/DC throughout the neighborhood, because, as the commander said, "It’s good for morale after such a long mission." I’d go on a rooftop and shoot those fuckers myself. "Hey—I’m trying to get some sleep here!" These poor kids have been brainwashed by the military from the recruiters on that it’s just one big video game, and you can have screaming death metal coming out of your vehicle, like Robert Duvall’s "Ride OF The Valkyrie" in "Apocalypse Now": "Scares the hell out of the gooks."
The torture techniques aren’t just in the prisons. Love Iraq, hate the Iraqis...
Howard LaFranchi, Christian Science Monitor, October, 2002: "(The world is) more concerned about the unbridled use of American power than...about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein...(and) as intent on limiting the giant’s power as...in taking away the despot’s weapons." Of course Bush is scarier—he can’t control a country like Saddam could, and he actually HAS weapons.
There followed the largest world protest in history, after which the New York Times reported that "there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the US and world public opinion..." Then they said, "(This is part of a) "far larger and longer war against terrorism that (Rove) sees clearly, perchance fortuitiously, stretching well towards Election Day, 2004." You gotta give it to Rove—destroy one of the oldest civilizations on Earth so Americans would be afraid not to re-elect the "Commander-In-Chief" in "a time of war". Of course, Bush still lost, but you won’t hear that anywhere in the "If It Bleeds, It Leads" media, except when Mark Crispin Miller was on "Democracy Now". They still talk about Al Gore being a "loser" on the day he won a Nobel Peace Prize. You can swear on TV now, you can show nudity, but you cannot talk about A) 9/11 conspiracy theories, or B) The stolen elections. They’re the "fuck" of TV news.
Excerpted From "Iraqapalooza: A Short History Of An Endless War: Part One"
Let’s look at a few of Bush’s lies about Iraq:
"We will fight with the full force of the U.S. military."
-- Except it’s never been at full force, there’s never been enough body armor or vehicle armor or bullets or water...All that money to Halliburton, and our troops didn’t have enough water for years. Maybe the next time they invade a country, they should pick one with a fucking lake.
"We will protect and take care of our troops."
-- They cut funding for traumatic brain injuries (See my columns on "Bush Scandals".Bush said that a small raise for the troops was "unnecessary". One in five military families are on food stamps. Bush stopped a payment of an extra forty dollars a month for the families of dead soldiers. At the same time, visiting the hurricane disaster in Kansas, Bush said he "lifts people’s spirits and touches their souls". Yeah, with an icy chill of impending doom.
"We will not seek a permission slip to fight."
--Our military is embedded in Iraqi troops.
"We should be able to decrease our troops levels by what the Generals say, not the politicians in Washington."
-- First, George, you ARE a politician in Washington. You can’t claim to be an outsider when you’re the friggin’ PRESIDENT, legally or not. Secondly, generals have been telling him he’s doing it wrong since before the war, during the war, during the counter-insurgency, and he fired them all and did the "surge" all by himself.
"...Our friends in Iraq..."
-- We don’t have any friends in Iraq, especially because eight million Iraqis lack basic human needs, like water and power, after $20 billion was "spent" on reconstruction. Yeah, the reconstruction of Halliburton executives’ summer homes in Barbados.
"We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here".
--What, because we're in Iraq they can't buy a plane ticket anymore? Bush recently said again that we fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them here, then three seconds later he said they’re going to attack us here again anyway. He said to a reporter, "They will kill your children". The reporter doesn’t have any children.
"If we leave Iraq, we will be attacked here."
--Did Bush actually admit that the warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary renditions, torture, and the Department Of Homeland Security are all complete failures? Nahhh...
"We’re turning the corner."
--They’ve turned the corner so many times they’re back in the same fucking spot.
"If we leave Iraq, there will be chaos."
--Hey, the Iraqi people are PRAYING for chaos. Chaos would be a nice break for them.
From "Bush Scandals: Lying The Country Into War"
The CIA says they warned Bush about everything before Iraq. Usually Presidents don't ignore the CIA - they at least use them to assassinate foreign leaders or take over Central American countries. But Bush didn't need them - he had his posse of Nixon-era fossils. Poor CIA. There used to be a guy on almost every bus in San Francisco, ranting at the top of his voice to the poor scared passengers about how the CIA had planted a bug in his head to record his thoughts. Now you never see those guys say that. They know the CIA is too incompetent to pull that off.
Eason Jordan, the CNN News Chief, went to the Pentagon to ask which retired generals he should use as "experts" on the war -- before it started. One of their blonde airheads said "We remind you that over 5,000 people died on 9/11." CNN: "Crap Not News".
Phil Donahue, the only anti-war voice on "mainstream" TV, was fired by MSNBC three weeks before the war started, even though his ratings were the highest on the network. And they said it was all about the ratings. It is, unless the government tells you to do something. He had to go, even though he was a beloved and respected man in broadcast journalism, from the days in the 80's, when daytime talk shows were informative. Now it's Jerry Springer and "My Transvestite Husband Had A Crack Baby With My Mother".
NBC fired Peter Arnett right after the war started, for giving an interview to a foreign TV channel saying that the Iraq war wasn't wonderful and right and perfect. Where's his apology? "NBC: News By Corporations". At least MSNBC has Kos on. They got rid of Rita Cosby, but they still have Tucker Carlson, because they're trying to copy Faux News half the time. And they have Keith, a national hero. Unfortunately, they follow Keith with endless "To Catch A Predator"s, a show which actually killed a guy. "MSNBC: Mendacity Supplied Nightly By Crackpots".
Naomi Klein in "Shock Doctrine":During the 1991 Gulf war, 13 Iraqi museums were attacked by looters, so there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old regime and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to respond in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the prisons several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by leading archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to protect museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26 Pentagon memo to coalition command listed "in order of importance, 16 sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad". Second on the list was the museum. Rumsfeld ignored it.
Klein: "His colleague John Agresto also saw a silver lining as he watched the looting of Baghdad on TV. Yet Agresto was so convinced of the superiority of American systems that he seemed unable to entertain the possibility that Iraqis might want to salvage and protect their own culture and that they might feel its destruction as a wrenching loss.
"It's hard to believe -- but then again, that was pretty much Washington's game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all OK with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of weeks."
Rumsfeld ridiculed the often-used footage of looters taking vases out of the Baghdad Museum Of Antiquity, saying, "How many vases can they have?"
How many vases can they have? It’s Mesopotamia, it’s 2,500 year old, that’s a lot of friggin’ vases, Sparky.These are Arabs—they invented numbers. Even the Nazis had enough brains to at least steal the art of Europe and smuggle it out, not let it get ripped off so it could be sold in a market for a dollar. Soldiers are shooting people for no reason, but they all stood there for days and did nothing while people carted away everything in the city right in front of them. Some of them might have been Blackwater, who let the same thing happen in New Orleans. They’re shooting Black people for "looting", and letting white people empty stores for "getting survival needs".
In Ian Buruma’s New York Review Of Books review of "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism", released on 9/1107, (of course), a screed by Norman Podheretz, the father of neo-conservatism and the man most responsible for talking Bush into invading Iraq, says "Vietnam syndrome" is "neo-isolationism" and "pacifist sentiment" that exist in the "media", and if it wasn’t for those leftie peaceniks, we would have won. Bush apparently has been quoting him recently.
Anyone who calls the media "liberal" or "left-wing" does NOT read newspapers or watch TV, period. I do. I monitor the media every day, for many hours. It’s been sucking Bush’s dick since the day he declared he was running for President. It crucified Al Gore and John Kerry for the most trivial, meaningless crap it could manage to find. CNN and MSNBC and CBS fired many people who were critical of Bush or the war (See above).
In the review, Buruma calls Podheretz "zany", believer in "a dangerous form of hysteria", "suffering from severe ideological blindness", "unhinged", and "fanatic".But Buruma says he must be taken seriously as the de facto leader of the neo-cons, writer of their "bibles", and son of John D. Podheretz, another right-wing screwball. Here are some of Podheretz’s "positions":
He thinks a constant state of war brings clarity, and divides the world into us and the evil ones. He describes the arguments of anti-war and pro-war people as "no less bloody than (Iraq)...nothing less than a kind of civil war." I haven’t seen anyone in Congress blown up lately, have you? Although Trent Lott said they would be last August—the day an illegal wiretapping bill was up for a vote. As a veteran student of the Kennedy assassination, I believe in the old line "There are no coincidences".
Bush critics in university positions are "guerrillas with tenure", not professors who teach young people. The first people to be shot by dictators are professors and intellectuals. The Khmer Rouge actually killed people for wearing glasses. I’ll tell you when I’m kidding.
He compares the GWOT as like fighting Hitler. Here we go with the Hitler again. Bin Laden is not like Hitler. Nobody’s like Hitler. Enough with the Hitler references already. Get Bush to stop watching the History Channel before he bad-metaphors himself to death.
"World War III" was the Cold War. It was called the Cold War because it wasn’t a war. There never should have been a 50-year Cold War against the Soviets, which bankrupted our economy making nukes and starved countless Russians so their leaders could make nukes. All these nukes still exist and many are floating around the world unaccounted for. It’s not worthy of being called World War III, unless you just love war, like Podheretz does.
He says the Baath party is Islamofascist. Wrong! IT was founded by a socialist and a Christian and was Islamist, and neither was Saddam. He lumps different groups that are nothing alike as "Islamofascists", a term this guy might have invented, because he was, like many neo-cons, a liberal Jewish intellectual until he became the King Of The Pod Pepole, and everything has to be like 1938.
He supports Bush "draining the swamps" in the Middle East, even though some of the swamps are in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and we just sold them billions in arms and gave them billions in military aid. Drain the swamps? They can’t even fix New Orleans, and that’s in America.
Podheretz believes democracy will always defeat Islamism, but doesn’t mention Hamas winning a recent election, democratically.
He says "British intelligence HAD assured the CIA that Saddam had tried to buy ...uranium from...Niger". Wow. This is in a book published in 2007!
Podheretz signed a letter to Bush in September, 2001 along with William Kristol and Richard Perle and the editors of the once-liberal New Republic that said "But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to (9/11), any strategy...must include...remov(ing) Saddam..." Of course, we know the Bushites were planning that from the day they took office, and that’s because of people like Norman The Conqueror.
Bush is "a great President", and the failure in Iraq isn’t Bush’s fault, but the fault of Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag (who’s dead), Norman Mailer, and those "campus guerrillas" and the "hard Left", who were barely heard in the mainstream press and were constantly shouted down, so how could they affect what Bush did or what happened in Iraq? Bush has also stolen THIS line of bullshit—it’s not his fault. It’s the media, it’s the reporters, it’s the demonstrators, it’s Kerry, just like the FUBAR in Vietnam was all Jane Fonda’s fault. (Wow, she must have been the most powerful woman in the world at that time!)
Podheretz goes on, as the crazy will do, to "seriously propose, as Buruma says, that US TV was "drowning us in material presenting Islam in glowing terms...the media (NYT, the punching bag as usual) had a "stance of neutrality (between) America and its Islamofascist enemies...", except the Fox network, which he likes. Buruma says that the idea that the media produced "an anti-war and...anti-American stancve as an alternative to the pro-American Fox" strikes him as "unhinged". Podheretz, like Cheney, has his TV remote welded to Faux News, but thinks he knows all about everything in the mainstream media, which of course was rabidly, frothing-at-the mouth, pro-war from day one until, what, a year ago? Even to this day, CNN uses the "FIGHT FOR IRAQ" graphic, instead of the "FIGHT AGAINST IRAQ, IRAQIS, AND ANYTHING THAT MOVES" graphic.
Buruma concludes that neo-leftists (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) believe this wacko, and that they are "foolish" because they do it in the name of liberalism and that "betrays the very principles they claim to be defending".
Oh, and by the way, Podheretz is Rudy Guiliani’s foreign policy advisor. I’ll tell you when I’m kidding. Rudy and all the other Republican candidates just said in the last debate that they would go to war in Iran, and wouldn’t ask Congress. Rudy said it might happen too fast, and he wouldn’t have the "luxury" of going to Congress. Wow. They just stood there and told us all they think the President has the sole power to declare war. Chris Matthews asked Romney if he would go to Congress, and he said he’d "talk to his attorneys". Somebody Xeroxed the Rove Playbook. We better all fight hard against Rudy, because if he thinks Podpersonoretz should be his advisor, he’ll be worse than Bush and Cheney combined, and that’s not funny, but it’s happening. My last Iraq history diary will be "Iraq: Springboard To Iran". Let’s get moving, activists, and I don’t mean a rally and a candlelight vigil.
Al Gore, the man who was the real President, and Nobel Peace Prize winner,would not have taken us to Iraq, and would have made sure Afghanistan was successful, instead of the complete failure it is, because he was in Vietnam. Kerry was a decorated hero of Vietnam, or, in the words of the "Swift Boaters", a liar who was never on the boat, never in Vietnam, and apparently shoved shrapnel up his own ass to get a medal. But as we know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowit, Perle—none of them had ever seen combat of any kind, even as an observer. They probably never even watched the History Channel. That makes it much easier to send 1,000s to their deaths, and to administrate the worst-run war since...well, ever, as far as I know. Fucking chickenhawks. Bush was a drunk cokehead AWOL deserter, Cheney got five deferments because he said he "had better things to do." Rove probably got out on a Section 88. Bush’s father was a hero of WWII and they made a doc about him on CNN called "Flyboy". If they made a doc about Bush’s years during Vietnam, it would be called "Full Dinner Jacket".
Next: "Rumsfeld".
(I would like to gratefully acknowledge my sources: "Countdown With Keith Olbermann", "State Of Denial" by Bob Woodward, "Static" by Amy Goodman and David Goodman, The New York Review Of Books, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", "Fiasco" by Thomas E. Ricks, and the books of Noam Chomsky. I thank them and highly recommend them all.)
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