- The Bush family has been characterized in various ways
including the Bush dynasty, crime family or syndicate. George Bush is
just the latest in a line of unsavory characters but clearly the bad or
worst seed and, in the eyes of most honest observers, the least worthy
of an unworthy lot. He was supposed to be the latest in the Bush family
line chosen to lay another golden egg for the dynasty but turned out instead
to be an ugly duckling who's just been an embarrassment and much worse
because of the course he chose and his rigid ideological obstinacy to change
even in the face of failure.
-
- The Bush family considers itself among the special chosen
ones if based only on its royal heritage. The family is connected by blood
to every European monarch on and off the throne including every member
of the British House of Windsor. That relationship is more than familial
and extends to the president's father having close business dealings with
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip who themselves are connected to the
notorious Carlyle Group that also employs GHW Bush as a "senior consultant"
and master-rainmaker/fixer-arranger at a very high price for his services.
-
- George W. Bush, of course, is in the bloodline and is
a distant cousin of the Queen and Prince Charles. This American "royal"
family traces its heritage back to 15th century Britain at the time of
Henry VIII or earlier, but its royal connection is not unique to Washington
politicos as both Al Gore and John Kerry also have familial ties to the
British crown, and ironically Gore is a distant cousin of his former presidential
rival from having been a direct descendant of Charlemagne when he was emperor
of the Holy Roman Empire. Truth is indeed stranger or at least more ironic
than fiction.
-
- The modern-era Bush family dynasty goes back four generations
and was connected to the military-industrial complex of its day during
and after WW I much like the most recent two Bush generations are to the
present one. It began with George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott acting
as duel founding fathers of what turned out to be a criminal enterprise
run under the family name much like it is under a local Godfather except
for much bigger stakes and with the government of the United States acting
as protector, benefactor and enforcer.
-
- Walker was a St. Louis financier who later went to work
for Averell Harriman as president of WA Harriman & Company, a banking
business that invested in railroads, shipping, aviation and commodities
like oil. Samuel Prescott Bush, the current president's other great grandfather,
was a major Ohio industrialist and ran the Buckeye Steel Castings Co. that
produced armaments. He later went to Washington to run the small arms,
ammunition and ordnance section of the War Industries Board and became
a close advisor to Herbert Hoover.
-
- The president's grandfather Prescott Bush, Sam's son,
had a varied career as a US Senator, Wall Street investment banker with
Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH and same Harriman) and as a director of various
companies involved in war production including Dresser Industries where
his son, the president's father, later worked for a time. A hundred years
ago, the Bush family was also connected to John D. Rockefeller and Standard
Oil and later with a number of Wall Street firms as well as with the US
intelligence community since WWI.
-
- Above all, this is a family that formed strong ties to
the institutions of power that began in industry and Wall Street and was
parlayed to become a powerful political dynasty that included a US senator,
two governors, a congressman, vice-president, CIA director and two presidents
(the current president's father, of course, having been a congressman,
CIA director and vice-president before being elected president in 1988).
-
- Prescott, the president's grandfather, had a particularly
unsavory connection as recently declassified documents show. He was a
director of New York based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that was a holding
company for the Nazis and represented the German steel industrialist Fritz
Thyssen who was intimately involved with the Nazi regime. He was also
a director and shareholder of various other companies involved with Thyssen.
UBC bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, oil, steel, coal and
US treasury bonds to Germany that helped build and support the Nazi war
machine. Prescott was also with Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) when the
firm did business with the Nazis during the 1930s that continued during
the early years of WW II until the company's assets were seized in 1942
under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
-
- What BBH did and paid a price for, many other US corporations
did as well, prospered from and were never held to account for their lawlessness.
Charles Higham documented much of it in his 1983 book called Trading with
the Enemy in which he showed evidence of how major companies in America
like the Rockefellers' Chase Bank and Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors
and other corporate giants had no political or ideological problem doing
business routinely with Nazi Germany during the war. It was just business
with another good customer, no matter what the customer's business was.
-
- Particularly heinous was the role of IBM Headquarters
System Engineering, Design Automation and Management (not covered in the
Highman book) when it was run by Thomas Watson. The company used IBM tabulation
equipment to set up a system for the Nazis to locate all the Jews of Europe
and then sort, file and categorize them for extermination in the death
camps using the company's equipment and whose camp personnel IBM employees
trained. All the while this went on, IBM managed to fend off US War Department
probes into its illicit activities so it could continue to profit handsomely
from the Nazi genocide the company knew was taking place and was facilitating
- all for the big "blood money" profits involved. Current shareholders
of the company's stock might wish to take note of this and reconsider their
investment choice.
-
- BBH had no problem cashing in either, and by the late
1930s claimed to be the world's largest investment banking firm in business
like all others to make money, and like most others, as willing to do it
with regimes like the Nazis as with any other customer. George Herbert
Walker and Averell Harriman, who later became a prominent politician and
diplomat serving under four US presidents, have been characterized by some
as two evil geniuses who saw no difference in dealing with the Bolsheviks
in Russia as with Hitler and the Nazis. For them, business was business
just the way it is today and in the 1980s when GHW Bush as vice-president
and president was willing and eager to be part of the scheme to arm Saddam
Hussein who then became public enemy number one to be demonized for using
the weapons supplied him by US and other western corporations when he was
an ally.
-
- Before his son succeeded him in the Oval Office (8 years
removed), GHW Bush was involved in a long laundry list of criminal activities
he never could have gotten away with under a system of law and order with
those violating it held to account. He never was. As CIA chief in 1976
under Gerald Ford, the elder Bush was in charge of covering up the Agency's
involvement in coup d'etats and assassinations of foreign leaders including
its connection to an earlier September 11 - the one in 1973 ousting and
murdering democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile that
established the 17 year fascist dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet
who, despite his despotism, became a close US ally.
-
- The president's father was also deeply involved in the
secret, illegal negotiations with Iran in the 1980s, when he was vice-president,
that led to the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal that broke in 1986.
With the help of friends in the Congress, including Dick Cheney who served
then in the House and the corporate media that always looks the other way,
he was able to escape investigation and scrutiny. They helped him get away
with a strategy of lies and aggressive cover-ups to stay untarnished.
It freed him to pursue and secure the Republican presidential nomination
in 1988 and the highest office in the land he always wanted to hold, maybe
because he felt his royal blood entitled him to it.
-
- In 1992, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh
(who took his job seriously unlike his successors) uncovered evidence linking
the president to the illegal operation and lying to the public about it,
but "trickier-than-Nixon" Bush pardoned six indicted Iran-Contra
figures shortly before he left office to bury the evidence against himself
and slither away unscathed again. He's now seen as an esteemed elder statesman,
his past buried, forgotten and above rebuke. No matter the truth is quite
another matter that went down "the memory hole" and is no longer
part of the "official" historical record. That judgmental error
paved the way for a member of the next Bush generation to ascend to the
nation's highest office, a move not turning out as planned.
-
- A Dynastic Success Story Now on Shaky Footing
-
- A Bush family tradition of lying with impunity, operating
freely outside the law and getting away with it was no obstacle for the
next family member in line, George W. Bush, to be chosen by his party to
enter the presidential race in 2000. He got the nomination after serving
six years as Texas governor distinguished only by a record of indifference
to the public and a total dedication to the business interests in the state.
It meant giant corporations were salivating at the thought of having a
man like this in the White House serving them in that capacity the same
way he did it for the business community in Texas. Thanks to a fraud-laden
election, he got the job the old-fashioned way - his influential friends
and family stole it for him as arranged by family consigliere and master-fixer
Jim Baker securing the necessary 25 Florida electoral votes helped along
by the complicity of five friendly Supreme Court justices who had to be
in on the scheme.
-
- The corporate interests got their main man in Washington,
and for a short time seemed to be in "good hands" with him.
But lying and getting away with it only works when the schemes lied about
go according to plan. Bumps aside, the rise of the Bush dynasty to prominence
and power, went well through the ascendency and tenure of George Herbert
Walker Bush, the president's father, which included the election and reelection
George W. Bush's younger brother Jeb as governor of Florida after an initial
failed bid for the office in 1994 and George W's time as Texas governor.
-
- Nothing lasts forever though, and as best laid as the
plans were, they went awry with the misguided selection of the younger
George to carry the family banner as the rightful successor to assume the
position of supreme leader of the free world and lord and master of the
universe. He wasn't the family's first choice and only got bumped up to
that spot in line after brother Jeb's initial gubernatorial defeat - one
the family must now look back on as a major turning point in the family's
political fortunes that going forward may be irreversible.
-
- It should have been an omen of things to come when if
it hadn't been for the intervention of Jim Baker and those five arrogant
High Court justices, in an election Al Gore clearly won, George Bush would
have had to have found another line of work. The justices chose to rewrite
the law giving themselves the power to annul the vote of the electorate
to install their preferred candidate in the office they gifted to him the
same way he's gotten everything else in his privileged life he never deserved
and never had to work for. It's the way it's always been for a man of
questionable ability and dubious character going back to his days as a
youth when at best his behavior could only be charitably described as mischievous
and without significant achievement. This is a man who rose to the top
the way former Texas governor Ann Richards described it - as "someone
born on third base (thinking) he hit a triple."
-
- Six disastrous years later, this man now must not only
choose a new career path in two more years, he must also employ a good
legal defense team at the ready for the inevitable law suits sure to be
filed against him once he leaves office in January, 2009 - a time that
can't come soon enough for most and that many wanting him impeached and
ousted aren't willing to wait for and may press their demands he go a lot
sooner and face the music for his high crimes of war, against humanity
and against the people of the United States.
-
- As the current holder of the nation's highest office,
George Bush is not unique. As Noam Chomsky rightfully observes: "If
the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-(WW II) American president
would have to be hanged (like the worst of the Nazi war criminals found
guilty)." Other than the Vietnam era (that family influence let him
bypass in a comfortable Texas National Guard slot he rarely showed up for),
and arguably the Korean war one as well, the only difference about George
Bush as president is the immensity of his crimes and his hard line arrogance
and indifference about them and toward the people he's harmed at home and
abroad. He's undeterred and committed to press on with what he sees as
a messianic mission, or even royal prerogative, and that makes him stand
out as a special rogue who's already surpassed all others before him holding
the nation's highest office.
-
- Plans to Save the Bush Administration and Its Disastrous
Misadventure in Iraq
-
- With a lot of help from the Congress and complicit corporate
media that continues to shield him, George Bush not only took the nation
to war against two countries that never threatened us based on lies, deceit
and cover-up, he's determined to push on to a victory that can't be won
and is listening to sinister advice from the wrong people telling him to
do it. Proposals of what happens going forward are showing up in a number
of reports (related to the work of the Iraq Study Group - ISG) including
one on November 16 in the London Guardian and a later one on November 30
discussed below. They follow a meeting George Bush, the vice-president
and key administration officials had with the ISG, or Baker Commission,
that was formed in March to draft a new course in Iraq because the current
one isn't working, and it's led many high level business and political
figures to believe it's leading the country to an inevitable disastrous
train wreck unless redirected. It's also trying to rescue the family's
reputation and presidency of the current incumbent, but it will be hard-pressed
to do either.
-
- The Guardian reported that the president told his senior
advisors (or more likely Dick Cheney and other hard liners told him) the
US military (with any help it can get) must make "a last big push"
to win the war in Iraq and instead of beginning a drawdown in force strength,
he may send an additional 20,000 more soldiers into this cauldron even
against the advice of his Central Command (CENTCOM) commander-in-chief
on the ground General John Abizaid who testified before Congress the same
day the president was ignoring his advice that now may be changing after
hearing what his boss had to say.
-
- Whatever is said publicly or is released in the ISG report,
all that matters is what, in fact, will happen going forward and that may
be a clear example of a clinical definition of insanity - continuing to
do the same things (more or less) that have failed, expecting a different
result. It may also be more evidence that was first reported in Capitol
Hill Blue on September 5 that Bush has gone over the edge and that Republican
and Bush family insiders, including the president's father, are worried
George Bush may be heading for a "full-fledged mental breakdown"
judging by his bizarre or irrational behavior.
-
- Jeffrey Steinberg writing in Executive Intelligence Review
said GHW Bush fears his son is obsessed with his messianic mission and
is "unreachable" even by some of his closest advisors like Secretary
Rice. That view was also stated by prominent psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank,
who wrote Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. He said:
"With every passing week, President Bush marches deeper and deeper
into a world of his own making. Central to Bush's world is an iron will
which demands that external reality be changed to conform to his personal
view of how things are." Dr. Frank added that George Bush needs psychiatric
help.
-
- The US military and the public along with all Iraqis
better hope it comes soon before he inflames the entire Middle East and
a lot more with it. That's what the Baker Commission and president's father
are determined to avoid even though the plan they draft, or what we're
told about it, will likely have no better solution in the end than the
one Bush and his hard liners are now pursuing.
-
- According to the Guardian report, the ISG is circulating
its recommendations in a four-point "victory strategy" developed
with help from Pentagon officials advising them. It's also getting lots
of advice from a number of influential conservative think tanks whose members
are part of "working groups" dealing with issues of the military
and security, the economy and reconstruction, the political structure,
and fine-tuning geostrategy that includes no change in the country's imperial
agenda meaning the US military is in Iraq to stay whatever the final ISG
report says.
-
- Point One - calls for an initial increase in force size
that may be the 20,000 George Bush is calling for to "secure Baghdad"
where along with most all of al-Anbar province is where most of the country's
violence is.
-
- Point Two - stresses the importance of regional cooperation
that will have to include Iran and Syria along with Iraq's other immediate
neighbors. It could involve convening an international conference requesting
diplomatic, political and financial help - the latter mostly from the Saudis
and Kuwaitis.
-
- Jim Baker knows without Iranian and Syrian cooperation,
any hope for conflict resolution in Iraq is impossible, and even with it
it's doubtful at best. Unspoken in the report and commentary is the one
player with all the trump cards that's left out of the high-level consultations
- the Iraqi resistance and great majority of Iraqi people who'll settle
for nothing less than what the Baker Commission will never propose and
George Bush and the neocons will never agree to - a full and unconditional
withdrawal, no strings attached with reparations for the damage done that's
almost incalculable. That reality is what all the high-level thinkers
and planners are up against. Jim Baker surely knows this whatever his final
proposal is. In another article on the ISG, this writer characterized
Baker's efforts as a job for Superman and then some, and any hope for success
is even more than the redoubtable Jim Baker and his high-level insider
team are likely to achieve. Making it even harder will be the influence
of the powerful Israeli Lobby that wants the US to press on at least with
an attack against Iran and surely not engage the Iranians or Syrians in
constructive dialogue about Iraq or anything else.
-
- Point Three - focuses on an effort toward reconciliation
among the sectarian ethnic and religious groups to win over consensus among
them. The report cited the belief that doing this is crucial to convincing
neighboring countries that Iraq can again become a fully functioning state,
but conflicting reports about this idea are now surfacing days ahead of
the ISG report's release.
-
- If these ideas end up being adopted, they'll violate
everything the Bush administration did since March, 2003 when the strategy
was, and still is, to destroy all the institutions of a modern secular
society in the country along with its historical treasures to transform
this once modern and prosperous nation into an impotent desert kingdom
populated by easily controlled serfs. It will take more than just a major
effort, if one is even intended, to put that "Humpty Dumpty"
back together again.
-
- Oddly, or maybe in just a momentary case of bad judgment,
the Guardian writer said neocon ideas about "imposing" western-style
democracy will have to be set aside. It's hard to imagine the writer doesn't
understand that's the one thing US imperial strategy never tolerates and
was never part of the plan for "the new Iraq." A nation of serfs
is not one of democracy, and predatory capitalism and democracy go no better
together than fire and water.
-
- The report goes on to say that partitioning Iraq into
a tripartite loose federation won't be recommended as it would only lead
to a large-scale humanitarian crisis. It's hard to imagine anything worse
than the US-created one now on the ground that's out-of-control by any
measure.
-
- Point Four - calls for increased resources to be allocated
for additional troop deployments and to train and equip an expanded Iraqi
army and police. It will also call for efforts to stem corruption that
reportedly has involved the theft of billions, most of which has been pilfered
by US contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel Corporation (closely tied
to the White House) that either did shoddy work they were assigned (other
than for US installations) or little or none at all but still pocketed
many billions of US taxpayer dollars with nary a wink or nod of disapproval
from the Bush administration that effectively gave them and others a license
to steal.
-
- This point also will call for improving local government
and curtailing the power of religious courts and mentions that Bush may
be mesmerized by the "Svengali" or "Rasputin" advice
of fellow war-criminal Henry Kissinger who believes winning in Iraq is
just a matter of "political will" - just the way it worked for
Henry in Vietnam. Bush echoed that advice ironically while visiting the
capital of the country's last "Waterloo." When arriving in Vietnam
for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, he was asked about
comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam and said: "We'll succeed unless we
quit. We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the
task in Iraq is going to take a while."
-
- It's taking quite a long while as the US has now been
at war in Iraq against a guerrilla resistance longer than it took the country
to defeat the Nazis and Japanese in WW II, and those countries had a lot
more going for them than car and roadside bombs to fight us. That reality
and Bush's remarks show how in denial this man is just like the country's
leadership was in the 1960s and 70s believing (in their public statements
at least) staying the course would achieve the victory beyond their reach.
-
- But hold on - Bush's "Svengali" seems to be
advising him one way and commenting another in a BBC November 19 interview
where away from the US media spotlight he said he now believes military
victory in Iraq is no longer possible, the administration's policy failed
and is headed for "disastrous consequences (to haunt the world) for
many years....we have to redefine the course ("stay" is now "redefine")....I
don't think the alternative is between military victory....or total withdrawal,"
and there should be a regional conference of the permanent members of the
UN Security Council and Iraq's regional neighbors including Iran to work
out a way forward - meaning the Bush administration got us into this mess
so will Iraq's regional neighbors and other world powers please help get
us out of it. Now which way is it Henry - will the real Henry Kissinger
please stand up and show us who the real one is.
-
- He may or may not be helped by a November 30 report in
the New York Times, Washington Post, online in Capitol Hill Blue and elsewhere.
It cites a well-placed source saying the ISG decided to recommend a major
withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in a process of transitioning from a
combat to a support role over the next year or so but with no specific
timetable recommended. It all depends "on a series of conditions
and qualifications" governing the drawdown in language suggesting
as much smoke and mirrors backside-covering fudging as any real substantive
change of policy.
-
- That's apparently the message from national security
advisor Stephen Hadley in a November memo to George Bush saying (the ISG
report) "is neither 'cut and run' nor 'stay the course.' " It's
also what an unnamed senior Pentagon military officer involved in crafting
Iraq policy likely meant when he said: "The question is whether it
doesn't look like a timeline to Bush, and does to (Iraq prime minister)
al-Maliki." It's another example of what the New York Times calls
"a classic Washington compromise" - meaning "now you see
a change of policy, and now you don't."
-
- In harsher terms, it's what Newsweek magazine writer
Michael Hirsh calls "A Bust in Bakerville" in his November 29
article subtitled "Iraq can no longer be won or lost. Why the study
group won't solve anything." But Hirsh spoils his article toward
its end by suggesting Iraq is "manageable" and what's needed,
instead of consensus, is a "no-nonsense negotiator who can grapple
with the reality of the American failure....and seek the most honorable
way out (like a) Richard Holbrooke or Henry Kissinger....(or) the best
hope for....an adult solution (from Defense Secretary-designate) Robert
Gates."
-
- It all seems surreal at this point, but what it comes
down to is an attempt to pacify the US public and critics of the war.
It's to buy more time for a failed Bush presidency looking more all the
time like a house of cards nearing collapse, hoping to save it along with
the family's name and reputation. By couching recommendations in terms
of possibilities to be decided later depending on conditions in the country,
the ISG report apparently will be "much ado about nothing" signaling
no real change at all and a faint hope at best to rescue George Bush from
the fate he deserves.
-
- There's no hiding from the fact that conditions in Iraq
are deplorable and out-of-the-control of the US military looking pathetic
against an opponent it can't even see and impossible to subdue. It's not
likely to fare much better going forward than it has up to now in the face
of a determined resistance and mass Iraqi opposition to an occupation they
want to end and will keep fighting against it until it does whether the
US military stays in the streets or is hunkered down in its self-contained
permanent super-bases.
-
- Still, with a brave face, the report apparently will
recommend that US forces redeploy to its key bases inside the country and
elsewhere in the region and turn over more responsibility to Iraqi security
forces for frontline operations when and if they can handle them. So far
they can't and aren't likely to do much better ahead as many recruited
into them are from the very resistance forces the US military is fighting
and most others joined up for a paycheck with no ideological commitment
to the occupying power offered in return for it - not the best set of circumstances
for building an effective satrap security force.
-
- The report will also call for convening a regional conference
of Iraq's neighbors that will have to include Iran and Syria which the
Israeli Lobby is fighting to prevent and so far the Bush administration
has preconditions for unacceptable at least to the Iranians.
-
- Further, the report mentions recommendations being considered
by the Pentagon Joint Chiefs who seem to be leaning toward a brief increase
in force size followed by a partial drawdown and a shift, like the ISG
plan, from a combat role to one involving training, advising and backup.
The Pentagon option is called "go long" and apparently calls
for a large US military presence in Iraq for five to ten years which sounds
very much like cover saying there will be no exit strategy just the way
it turned out in South Korea still occupied by about 30,000 US forces a
half century after the war there ended, and there are no hostilities or
threats unless the US provokes one. The Times and Post said the ISG report
(said to be about 100 pages) will be released on December 6, at least whatever
portion of it the public gets to see.
-
- One other supposedly "classified memorandum"
on the war showed up on pages of the New York Times on December 3. It's
from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent to the White House on
November 6, two days before he was sacked from the job he showed he couldn't
handle long ago. On the one hand, it's a rather surprising admission of
personal failure and need for a change of course, but on the other it may
more of a thinly-veiled, late-in-the-game attempt to burnish an image too
tarnished for any public relations makeover at this stage. But you can't
blame the guy for trying, and he'll probably get some media-directed help
ahead for what little good it may do.
-
- In language trying to convey an image of elder statesman
but dripping with mea culpas, Rumsfeld acknowledges "In my view it
is time for a major adjustment....Clearly, what US forces are currently
doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough." Of course,
they're doing what he ordered them to do, and he, more than anyone else,
bears the most responsibility for all that's happened in Iraq since the
war began - but you won't hear that in the media-directed attempted makeover.
-
- The former secretary then lays out the policy changes
he recommends in a set of attractive "Above the Line Illustrative
Options" and less attractive "Below the Line" ones. Some
of it sounds much like what the ISG will propose and the "new"
direction the Pentagon seems to be leaning to in its planning. But Rumsfeld
can't resist suggesting a lot of the blame goes to the Iraqi puppet government
that must "pull up (its) socks" and change its "bad behavior."
This kind of talk is now coming out of the White House and echoed in the
corporate media - a shameless attempt to shift blame for what US forces
have done and bear full responsibility for to an installed Iraqi government
with no authority and no power to do anything more in the country than
clear away the daily carnage on the streets caused by the US presence there.
Mr. Rumsfeld and his administration allies planned, directed and lied
their way into this mess, and now he and they are trying to lie their way
out of it by shifting the blame to the Iraqis that had nothing to do with
it with a lot of help from their corporate media allies. It's a classic
example of Washington-spin dutifully picked up and echoed in the mainstream
hoping to make the victim look like the responsible party.
-
- Cheerleading 101 - It's What the Dominant Corporate-Controlled
Media Does Best, and They're At It Again
-
- When in trouble, as the Bush administration clearly is,
it can count on its corporate media allies to step up and help out just
as they did it during the Johnson-Nixon years when they backed their "stay
the course" and "Vietnamization" agendas. They're always
out in front delivering the "proper message" and leading the
cheerleading as they are now for what's highlighted above and the new Bush
rhetoric of "success" however Henry Kissinger and others define
it. It's highlighted in a November 16 article by media critic and columnist
Norman Solomon titled The New Media Offensive to Prolong the Iraq War posted
on Counterpunch. In it, he says the pro-war cheerleading is being featured
on the front page of the New York Times (as it always is) by columnist
Michael Gordon just like it was in the run-up to March, 2003 by the now-disgraced
Judith Miller in her daily hawkish screeds practically pleading for hostilities
and echoing the propaganda handed her by the White House and Pentagon.
-
- This is the same Michael Gordon today who was the lead
reporter on the Times front page in the lead-up to the Iraq war who wrote
the false and discredited story (he never apologized for) about the threat
of Saddam's aluminum tubes. Michael's back now and again doing what's
expected of him as a paid propagandist for "the newspaper of record"
that never met an act of US aggression it didn't support even when it turned
out to be a hopeless debacle as is true now.
-
- The Gordon piece on November 15 is certain to be followed
by more. It's another in a long line of thinly-veiled NYT empire-supportive
kinds of "journalism" leading the media pack with its cheerleading
even when war crimes are committed or the public interest is being ignored
or harmed. The Times, as always, knows what it's role is, and no journalist
need apply for work there without being willing to be part of the same
dirty business that includes supporting all imperial wars the nation pursues.
So it is now. And Solomon goes on to say many other journalists are joining
the chorus against the pullout option in Iraq the same way they did during
the Vietnam era. They go even further warning Democrats that, despite
strong public opinion to the contrary, not to go that far "if they
know what's good for them," and, right or wrong, it's the president's
call in all cases whether to go to war or continue one, and the Congress
should stay out of it - even if they have lie to the public to do it the
way the New York Times does.
-
- These journalists need a lesson in constitutional law
as that view is fraudulent on it face and contradicts what the founders
stood for and put in the Constitution for those who care to read it. It's
a further reckless endangerment of a democratic republic scarcely able
to draw breathe anymore. It's the result of corrupted government officials
and complicit corporate media journalists ignoring what Thomas Jefferson
helped codify, teach us, believed in passionately and said: "The most
effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are
to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people....Light
and liberty go together.....Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny
and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn
of day."
-
- Jefferson added no nation can ever be free if it's kept
ignorant, and no part of the corporate-controlled media is more guilty
of that sin than the "paper of record" that's the closest thing
in the country to an official ministry of information and propaganda that's
leading the way for all the others. It functions to serve the interests
of wealth and power violating the Jeffersonian spirit and the constitutional
law of the land he helped draft in 1787.
-
- It allows George Bush to sell his war agenda knowing
it'll be supported in the echo chambers of major front page dailies and
headlined on TV newscasts. It may be his last gasp, but he's at it again
calling for a "last push" strategy for victory in Iraq in a futile
attempt to refurbish his image and give Republicans time to regroup from
their drubbing in the mid-term elections and prepare for the 2008 presidential
campaign. It's hard to imagine how continuing what hasn't worked up to
now and won't will accomplish anything more than raise the level of public
anger wanting change and not getting it.
-
- The Real State of Things in Iraq the Corporate Media
Won't Report
-
- To learn what's really happening in Iraq just read unembedded
independent journalist Patrick Cockburn's November 28 column in the London
Independent (and all his others there) called Slaughter House Iraq. In
it he says "Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are
everywhere. In Baghdad, the police often pick up more than 100 tortured
and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on
each other." He goes on to explain the country is in an "ominous
stage of disintegration" and may be approaching what the Americans
call "the Saigon moment" when it's plain as day "the government
is expiring."
-
- Covering the region, freelance journalist and author
Nir Rosen is just as ominous in his latest article in the Boston Review
on November 27, 2006 called Anatomy of a Civil War - Iraq's descent into
chaos. Rosen says: "Shia religious parties such as the Iran-supported
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) controlled the
country, and Shia militias had become the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army,
running their own secret prisons, arresting, torturing, and executing Sunnis
in what was clearly a civil war. And the Americans were merely one more
militia among the many, watching, occasionally intervening, and in the
end only making things worse."
-
- Almost everyone in Washington and Whitehall know all
this except Bush and Blair and their most loyal acolytes who've lost all
touch with reality and are in a state of denial that the longer the occupation
continues the worse things will get. The human toll, according to Cockburn,
is 1000 Iraqis killed each week and 1000 US forces killed or wounded every
month, and these may be low estimates of even greater numbers unknown or
carefully concealed preventing people at home from knowing how desperate
things really are, what the human cost is, that the war in Iraq is lost,
and the longer US forces stay in the country the worse things will get.
-
- And consider what publisher and editor Bob Chapman writes
in his November 29 edition of his long-running, well-respected online publication
The International Forecaster. He says "the insurgency in Iraq is
now self-sustaining financially, raising millions of dollars a year from
oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic
charities and other crimes the occupation has been unable to prevent."
He believes they raise $70 - $200 million a year from these activities
and concludes with the dramatic observation that the resistance groups
can hold off the most powerful military in the world with that amount of
money compared to $100 billion or more spent by the Pentagon with all their
super-weapons trying and failing to defeat them. It can't and won't no
matter how many more billions are spend or for how long.
-
- That's the dilemma mandarins like Jim Baker and the heavyweights
on his Commission have to deal with. The spillage of six disastrous years
under the younger Bush is so immense, and the fallout from it so beyond
repair, that two years from now or sooner the rule and influence of a family
dynasty will end and whatever succeeds it will inherit less power than
any US administration since WW II as the American empire heads into an
irreversible decline that didn't begin under George Bush but was measurably
accelerated under his discredited leadership that turned out to be none
at all.
-
- The Price of Imperial Overreach
-
- After a mediocre start to his presidency, fate, or more
likely a sinister master-plan, handed George Bush and his allies their
chance to be untethered from any restraint and be able to go for the big
prize they wanted all along but needed public support to do it. It was
the gift of the 9/11 tragedy his administration ruthlessly exploited as
a launching platform to pursue an imperial agenda of permanent war against
enemies invented for the enterprise including former CIA asset against
the Soviets in Afghanistan Osama bin Laden in the lead role.
-
- With the help and complicity of round-the-clock daily
corporate media fed invented terror threat warnings, color-coded on television
for added impact, it scared the public enough and made the Congress willing
enough to go along with the scheme the administration had in mind all along
and had envisioned from the work of the right wing Project for the New
American Century think tank (PNAC) document called Rebuilding America's
Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Conceived
by future key Bush administration officials, it was a grand imperial plan
for US global dominance to extend well into the future to be enforced with
unchallengeable military power - a blueprint for the current "war
on terror" now rebranded as a "long war" against "Islamic
fascism" with goals spelled out in the May, 2000 Department of Defense
(DOD) Joint Vision 2020 calling for "full spectrum (world) dominance"
that was code language meaning total control over all land, sea, air, outer
space and information with enough overwhelming power to defeat any potential
challenger or adversary with no restraint on the use of any weapons, including
nuclear ones.
-
- This "Vision" was one of several imperial documents
looking ahead that included the Nuclear Policy Review of 2001, the FY 2004
Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan, the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial
Defense Review and the National Security Strategy of 2002, updated in 2006.
Together they laid out a "grand imperial strategy" that included
the notion of "preventive war" updated to a "long war"
against "Islamofascists" that was set in motion by the trigger
of the 9/11 tragedy to target those parts of the world of greatest strategic
value like the oil-rich Greater Middle East including Central Asia and
its Caspian Basin riches.
-
- These plans were embellished on October 6, 2006 when
George Bush quietly signed the National Space Policy superceding a September,
1996 version of the same directive. The plan lays out US space policy
goals that include implementing an "innovative human and robotic exploration
program" to extend the presence of humans in space. It calls on NASA
to "execute a sustained and affordable human and robotic program of
space exploration and develop, acquire, and use civil space systems to
advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system,
and universe." It supports the use of nuclear power systems and implies
without so stating that includes nuclear weapons that will be deployed
there to use when and if necessary. That's very much the message from
the language that this policy is designed "to ensure space capabilities....to
further US national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives
(that include defending) our interests there....(and having The Director
of National Intelligence) provide a robust foreign space intelligence collection
and analysis capability....to support national and homeland security."
-
- With all the pieces of its grand imperial scheme in place,
the best-laid plans, nonetheless, don't always go as designed especially
when they encompass more than can be digested and the forces against them
are determined enough to resist and do it effectively. What began with
world support for a global "war on terror" began to unravel in
the wake of the Bush administration's notion of endless wars and its unilateral
intent to invade and occupy Iraq in spite of growing opposition to it that
was ridiculed, spurned and arrogantly defied. Even the world's only superpower
should have known no nation, no matter how powerful, can challenge the
rest of the world and get away with it without enough support, especially
when the two adventures it undertook in Iraq and Afghanistan unravelled
so fast and the economic and political costs incurred from them are so
enormous and increasing they've made visible fissures in the hegemon's
superstructure making it vulnerable.
-
- The cost of Bush administration go-it-alone adventurism
accelerated a decline of US imperial power that began, according to some
astute observers, with its futile losing gambit in Vietnam. It's now
repeating it and then some in the Greater Middle East and as a result lost
its stature as a failed model of a once democratic state flaunting the
rule of law and ignoring the values it claims to stand for while doing
just the opposite in reckless pursuit of its own interests. It's now seen
for what it is - an out-of-control rogue state threatening all others wanting
no part of it and a growing number of them willing to challenge its supremacy
in the process.
-
- This behavior fits the definition of what Noam Chomsky
calls a "failed state" in his 2006 book titled Failed States
while explaining the notion of what this means, in fact, is imprecise at
best. It may be a nation unable to protect its citizens from violence
or destruction but could also be one that flaunts the rule of international
law and acts as an aggressor. The US uses this term for nations seen as
potential threats to our security we feel justified intervening against
in self-defense. Chomsky says if we evaluate our own agenda by that definition
"we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of
'failed states' right at home."
-
- Blame much of it on how noted historian and author Gabriel
Kolko characterizes the Bush administration - "the worst set of incompetents
ever to hold power in Washington. It 'shocked and awed'....itself."
Winston Churchill called himself an optimist and once remarked that "the
United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every
other alternative." Not a chance as long as George Bush is president
and neocons are in charge. That's a hurdle even Churchill's optimism couldn't
have cleared.
-
- It shows how a once proud country lost its legitimacy
and with it the power to face down a growing number of nations willing
to confront its authority and get away with it, even small players that
once wouldn't have dared. In the hemisphere, Cuba has been joined by Venezuela,
Bolivia, Nicaragua on November 7 with the reelection of Sandinista FSLN
leader and former US nemesis Daniel Ortega, and now in Ecuador on November
26 with the impressive election of populist candidate Rafeal Correa in
the run-off presidential election against the Washington-backed billionaire
oligarch.
-
- Elsewhere in Asia, China and North Korea have defied
US authority as has Russia in Eurasia and Iran and Syria in the Middle
East. Resistance groups everywhere have now learned the lessons from Iraq,
Afghanistan and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups have asymmetrical guerrilla-tactic
power that when used effectively can hold their own against the most powerful
nation on earth beating it at its own game by outlasting it or rendering
its super-weapons useless against an opponent that can't be seen until
its bombs go off and bullets start flying and often not even then. They've
also inspired the courageous people of Mexico and their epicenter of resistance
in Oaxaca taking to the streets in their courageous fight against electoral
fraud and an end to decades of abuse and injustice and doing it with little
more than their bodies and a redoubtable spirit that won't quit.
-
- Add to this the growing unease and discontent of an aroused
and angered public at home. It sent a powerful message of disgust and
contempt for six failed years of imperial madness and corrupted right wing
neocon Republican rule by drubbing its candidates in the mid-term elections.
It wants change in Washington even though there's little chance to get
it when the new leadership takes control of the Congress in January. Beyond
the usual post-election continuation of campaign-style rhetoric, already
it's clear the Democrat party mission is to move the ship of state forward
with its agenda largely intact but with them in charge including in the
White House if they can prevail in the 2008 election. It's the way things
always work in the nation's Capitol where those holding power owe their
allegiance to the interests of wealth and power that put them there, and,
in the end, the people be damned and "let 'em eat cake" but the
language is more subtle.
-
- It won't work for the new congressional leadership any
more than it did for the president who brought down the house of Bush ending
the family dynasty's reign while turning the nation's imperial dreams into
its death throes by his arrogance and ineptness. He'll now live in infamy
as the man who accelerated the American empire's decline. His imperial
madness buried it in the caves and rubble of Afghanistan and the burning
sands of the Middle East financing it with an unrepayable mountain of Federal
Reserve-created debt in an age of aberrant capitalism gone wild and transformed
into a fiscal weapon of mass-destruction that may end up throttling the
US and world economies. It's what out-of-control greed and delusions of
grandeur always lead to - self-aggrandizing excess that eventually undermines
the "irrationally exuberant" dreams of fools and despots that
go well beyond the limits of reason or any hope for success.
-
- If George Bush lasts another two years, it'll be thanks
to the kindness of his dwindling number of hard core friends and strangers
who still think they can pick something from the bones of his tenure before
payment for his imperial overreach comes due. When it does, it'll be high,
painful and inevitable just like it always is the way it was for that French
queen of "let em eat cake" fame who along with her husband, King
Louis XVI, lost their heads for their misdeeds. "King" George
may keep his, but the family dynasty has been undone and defrocked by the
sins of the unworthy scion ill-chosen to carry its reign forward to pass
on to the next in line after him. It wasn't to be as the dominance of
another powerful family passes into history, never to be trusted again
with the seat of power in a nation accelerating in decline in the new century
that was planned to be an American one but already is not six years into
it.
-
- Whereto from here with a disgraced head of state and
unindicted war criminal already an artifact or relic of an era past, his
power ebbing and marking time going through the motions despite the same
bravado, smirk and all, that resonates less with each public appearance.
It's intended to keep his weakened presidency from collapsing that may
just take one more good shove to do it. Despite desperate efforts to save
it, in the end who but the family will care if it does and who will ever
again believe a serial liar once exposed and disgraced making him unwelcome
in the halls of power that once embraced him. Success, as they say, has
many parents and friends, but failure is an unwanted orphan, and it's showing
up as some of the hard core faithful voice their displeasure openly and
walk away.
-
- It now remains for his final exit that can't come soon
enough for most who want him out now and may act to force it if the Congress
won't act as a majority of the public demands. Whatever happens from here,
the king is dead (even with his head in place), and with it the power and
influence of a family dynasty brought down by the poisoned chalice of its
ill-chosen successor, unworthy and unable to wear the crown and pass it
to the next in line. Henceforth, all will know what should have been clear
all along. Behind every "Bush," there's a crime, and some of
them are too great to hide, make up for or overcome. So it is with the
lesson of George Bush, a very bad seed and a president only a mother can
love. And even that's in doubt in a family that doesn't take defeat very
well. Give them time, they'll acclimate.
-
- Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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