- The Bush-Cheney regime is America's first neoconservative
regime. In a few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights,
the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America's
moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim countries
and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been prepared,
and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic country,
Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.
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- This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution,
international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement,
but of a handful of ideologues principally Vice President Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle,
Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney
General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy.
They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard,
National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and by "scholars" in assorted think tanks such
as the American Enterprise Institute.
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- The entirety of their success in miring the United States
in what could become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based on
the power of propaganda and the big lie.
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- Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden,
but after an American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame for
9/11 was shifted to Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons
of mass destruction that would be used against America. The regime sent
Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney
regime had conclusive proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
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- Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people,
the regime invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with totally
false expectations. The regime's occupation of Iraq has failed in a military
sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their failure into a strategic
advantage. At the beginning of this year President Bush began blaming Iran
for America's embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents
in Iraq.
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- Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge
that experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni. They
inflict casualties on our troops, but spend most of their energy killing
Iraqi Shi'ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is Shi'ite. Bush's
accusation requires us to believe that Iran is arming the enemies of its
allies.
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- On the basis of this absurd accusation a pure invention
Bush has ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack
forces off Iran's coast, and he has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases
and other US bases in countries contingent to Iran. In testimony before
Congress on February 1 of this year, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to orchestrate a "head-on
conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large."
He said a plausible scenario was "a terrorist act blamed on Iran,
culminating in a 'defensive' US military action against Iran." He
said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already articulating
a "mythical historical narrative" for widening their war against
Islam.
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- Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars,
the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?
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- There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears
among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist
revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler's revolution, neoconservatives
believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony
on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle
East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are
both in the Middle East. The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for
an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently
cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai,
who had been on UNOCAL's payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative
Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL's payroll, was installed
as US ambassador to Afghanistan.
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- Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador
to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control over the exploitation
of Iraq's oil resources.
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- The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important.
In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that
all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. "Israel's
enemies" consist of the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets
or allies. For decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians
such that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent
country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for
aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel's theft of Palestine.
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- The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn
to attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with
neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse was
required. Neoconservatives had called for "a new Pearl Harbor,"
and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the
public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in
charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts
emerged.
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- The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the
corporate media, from Christian evangelicals, particularly from the "Rapture
Evangelicals," from flag-waving superpatriots, and from the military-
industrial complex whose profits have prospered. But the fact remains that
the dozen men named in the second paragraph above were able to overthrow
the US Constitution and launch military aggression under the guise of a
preventive/preemptive "war against terrorism."
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- When the American people caught on that the "war
on terror" was a cloak for wars of aggression, they put Democrats
in control of Congress in order to apply a brake to the regime's warmongering.
However, the Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the neoconservative
drive to wider war and, perhaps, world conflagration. We are witnessing
the triumph of a dozen evil men over American democracy and a free press.
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- March 1, 2007
- Copyright © 2007 Creators Syndicate
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