http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040503/index.php
(Standard disclaimers)
Lots Of Mistakes
by Charley Reese
For Monday, May 3, 2004
President George W. Bush has said he hasn't made any mistakes. I can think of lots of mistakes he's made.
He failed to prevent the attacks on Sept. 11. Say what you will, those attacks occurred on his watch and are his responsibility. The Aug. 6 memo the CIA prepared for him would have told an alert man to at least get the Federal Aviation Administration to beef up security at the airports. He did nothing. On Aug. 7, when he talked to the press, he didn't mention al-Qaida. He talked only about Saddam Hussein. He came into office obsessed with the idea of removing Saddam Hussein, and this obsession blinded him to the real dangers that faced the country.
He took the country to war on false pretenses. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no nuclear program. There were no ties to al-Qaida. Saddam Hussein was not a threat to anybody but his own people.
Bush has been the most secretive and deceptive president in modern history. Even before the war in Afghanistan was over, he ordered the secretary of defense to prepare a war plan against Iraq and to keep it secret. They used money designated for one war to prepare for another, a violation of the Constitution.
He alienated our most important allies ? France, Germany and Russia ? and had to put together a comic coalition of the bribed and the browbeaten. Yeah, Honduras is a big help in a war ? almost as much as El Salvador. Consequently, American taxpayers are bearing 95 percent of the cost and more than 90 percent of the casualties. And there is no exit strategy.
He disregarded plentiful warnings from experts that invading Iraq would weaken the war against al-Qaida and actually help the terrorists. He disregarded warnings that the occupation would be difficult and costly. Every single warning has been proven to be true, and every single assumption Bush made has been wrong.
He fired a retired general who had experience in Iraq and replaced him with a Washington policy wonk, L. Paul Bremer, who has made blunder after blunder. Bremer fired the civil servants and had no one to run the government. He fired the police and army and had no one to provide security. Now, a year later, he's trying to hire Saddam's people while eating crow.
Bush disregarded the advice of the Army chief of staff and went into Iraq with too few soldiers to do a proper occupation. The orgy of looting while our soldiers and Marines stood by and watched is probably the single biggest blunder of the occupation. Not only did the looting prevent the restoration of services in a timely fashion, it sent a clear message to the Iraqi people that we didn't give a toot about their welfare. The only building we protected was the oil ministry.
The two greatest failures of intelligence since Pearl Harbor occurred on his watch ? the Sept. 11 attacks and the mythical weapons of mass destruction. Yet Bush has not fired one person. He fought against the 9/11 Commission and then stonewalled it. Like somebody on dope, he keeps insisting his intelligence was "good." I've never seen a president as disconnected from reality as George W. Bush.
His blind support of Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has made America the most hated nation on Earth in the Middle East.
There is something seriously wrong with a man who denies any economic problems, any budget problems, any problems in intelligence and any problems in Iraq and insists he has made no mistakes. One has to wonder if he isn't living in his own private world.
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040505/index.php
(Standard disclaimers)
War Propaganda
by Charley Reese
For Wednesday, May 5, 2004
If you step back a moment and think about it, you will realize that you are constantly being propagandized to approve of war ? not just the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but war generically.
We should resist. War is killing, maiming and disfiguring human beings. It is so disgusting and horrible in reality that even the most "realistic" Hollywood movie sanitizes it. The news media sanitize it. The government sanitizes war because it doesn't want you to see the coffins. Most of all, it doesn't want you to see the bodies before they are put in the coffins. The Bush administration's real beef with the Arab television station Al-Jazeera is really nothing more than the fact that Al-Jazeera shows the bodies.
No, the Bush administration doesn't want you to see the bodies ? not the bodies of our men and women, and not the bodies of Iraqi men, women and children. The administration wants you to see the war as an electronic game with bright lights in the distance and good sound effects, or close-ups of our brave warriors firing their guns at an invisible enemy. It doesn't want you to see the torn flesh, blood, intestines, feces, urine. If you did, you might not support the war, and billions of dollars depend on your support.
The government line is that if you don't approve of the war, you are disloyal. If you don't agree to give the Pentagon whatever it says it wants, you are disloyal. If you don't agree to surrender your civil liberties to the Patriot Act, you are disloyal. If you disagree with the Bush administration, you are disloyal. If you disagree with the chicken-hawk demagogues on radio and television, blathering about the war from the safety of their studios, you are disloyal.
This entire glorification of war ? as if the whole and only purpose of the government and the country were to fight wars ? smells of fascism. The news media glorify the war and militarism; we get the same dose on television, in the movies and in video games. If the American people aren't careful, they will wake up one day to find out they've become a nation of mindless heel-clickers.
America should not be about war. War is justified only in self-defense. We've been involved in many wars, but the last war fought in self-defense was World War II. That was also the last war that was constitutional, with a formal declaration of war by Congress. Not one single poor soul of the more than 100,000 Americans who have died in the Cold War and the hot wars since 1945 has died in defense of America.
The sad thing is that when the last soldier leaves Afghanistan and Iraq ? if that day ever comes ? we won't be any better off. Afghanistan will still be Afghanistan. Iraq will still be Iraq. There will be more graves, there will be more Americans without arms and legs, but nothing will have changed. Politicians will be searching diligently for more "bad guys" for the next generation to fight. First it was the fascists, then the communists, now the terrorists. Who's next? God only knows.
We should not equate peace with weakness. We ought to be like the Swiss. Their policy is armed neutrality. They have a sound defensive force and can be in the field in 48 hours, but they will fight only if they are invaded. They do not send their sons to foreign countries to die for political or economic reasons.
We should emulate the Swiss. No American should ever kill or die except in defense of this country. And no corporation should be allowed to make a profit off the blood of American soldiers, as is now happening in Iraq and has happened in every war.
An old Marine general had it right when he said, "War is a racket." Let us all learn to hate it as it deserves to be hated.
Originally Posted by Rick Hirst
