- PALM BEACH -- The
year 2003 dramatically and dolefully illustrated Lord Acton's famous dictum
that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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- An almighty United States, unrestrained by any rival,
international body, or world opinion, bestrode the globe, a belligerent
colossus determined to monopolize global oil reserves and use its vast
military power to crush lesser nations or malefactors that disturbed the
Pax Americana.
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- For America's hard right - a curious farrago of Armageddon-seeking
southern Protestants; neo-conservative supporters of Israel's right-wing
Likud party; and the military-industrial-petroleum complex - the Bush administration's
aggressive foreign policy of world domination, and utter contempt for international
laws and old allies, marks a new era of national greatness. President George
Bush, who vowed his foreign policy would be "humble" and "compassionate,"
has turned out to be the most radical president in modern U.S. history.
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- But for those Americans whose primary loyalty was to
their country, rather than to religious cultism, foreign nations, or financial
profit, the rapid emergence of the U. S. as an imperial power waging two
hugely expensive colonial wars in Asia was a disaster, both for America's
democratic system and for the rest of the world.
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- Bush's vow to bring "democracy" to the Mideast
rang as hollow as pious assurances by 19th century European colonialists
they were gobbling up Africa and Asia to bring the blessings of Christianity
and civilization to benighted savages. Pillaging resources, not enlightenment,
were - and remain - the true colonial motivation.
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- Bush's claims to hold the mandate of heaven to wage global
warfare against the nebulous forces of "terrorism" sounded as
dangerous and nonsensical as old Chairman Leonid Brezhnev's drunken claims
it was the Soviet Union's "sacred internationalist duty" to launch
military adventures anywhere on Earth where socialism was threatened.
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- Columnist Georgie Anne Gayer put it perfectly when she
recently wrote that whereas America used to lead the world as champion
of democracy, personal freedom and human rights, today, under Bush, it
instead seeks to dominate the world through raw military and monetary power.
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- Carte blanche
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- In 2003, we saw an abject, cowardly Congress violate
its duty as the republic's premier political organ by disgracefully handing
the barely elected president carte blanche to wage an unprovoked war against
Iraq that was justified by a torrent of ludicrous lies worthy of Dr. Goebbels.
Lies and propaganda that were packaged in the best tradition of Soviet
agitprop as news, then force-fed by a servile media to an ill-informed
public shockingly deficient in any sense of history, geography, or foreign
affairs.
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- The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and sundry military
adventures around the globe, were made possible by a steady drumbeat of
warnings from the White House and its neo-con trumpets that the U.S. was
in dire national peril from "terrorists" and "rogue states."
Paranoia again swept America during the holiday season as planes were grounded
and orange alerts flashed at a populace that responded to these synthetic
alarms with well-trained Pavlovian reflexes.
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- Though the mighty United States, with only 5% of world
population, accounts for nearly 50% of total global military spending,
the continuing Orwellian message from Washington was of fear and vulnerability.
Vague threats of terrorist attack and menacing Muslims were used to curtail
American civil liberties, and expand the government's powers of repression
and intrusion. The public barely noticed this sinister, proto-totalitarian
campaign.
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- The so-called "war on terrorism" was a hoax
used to mask and justify the long-planned expansion of U.S. military power
around the globe. What were in reality a series of police actions waged
against tiny anti-American groups was no more a war than the farcical "war
on drugs." But invoking war trumped criticism and dissent - and justified
a real war of aggression against oil-rich Iraq.
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- The very term "terrorism" is a nonsense designed
for propaganda effect; a damning label applied by the administration to
groups or states strongly opposing U.S. policy.
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- A "war on terrorism" makes no more sense than
waging war on evil.
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- Those who opposed Washington's surging imperial and totalitarian
impulses were branded "leftists" and "anti-Americans."
The French thinker Regis Debray, writing about past colonial powers, answers
thus: "The free man is not anti-American, but anti-imperial. America
(now) revisits the time of colonizers drunk on their superiority, convinced
of their liberating mission, and counting on reimbursing themselves directly."
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- Criticizing U.S. foreign policy run-amok and George Bush
does not equal anti-Americanism. It is the citizen's birthright, and the
friend's duty.
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- This writer has witnessed nine colonial wars and saw
how they corrupted the armies, and then the nations, that waged them, brutalizing
conquered and conqueror alike. Iraq is the latest.
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- Mankind's three worst scourges are religious fanaticism,
nationalism and imperialism. Each of these three evils has been whipped
up by the Bush administration to justify domination abroad, repression
of dissidence at home and, of course, re-election.
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- Those who truly love and respect the United States, like
this writer, a conservative and U.S. Army veteran, see the very qualities
that made America a beacon to the world - its very soul - now under heavy
assault by a cabal of religious fanatics, foreign-leaning ideological extremists,
and self-enriching Enron-Republicans. That is a danger considerably greater
than al-Qaida.
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- Copyright © 2003, CANOE, a division of Netgraphe
Inc. All rights reserved.
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- http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_jan4.html
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