Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Bush's War on the Republic

By Robert Parry
January 24, 2007

From the beginning of the “war on terror,” George W. Bush has lied to the American people about the goals, motivation and even the identity of the enemy – a propaganda exercise that continued through his 2007 State of the Union Address and that is sounding the death knell for the Republic.

Since 2001, rather than focusing on the al-Qaeda Sunni fundamentalist terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, Bush has expanded the conflict exponentially – tossing in unrelated enemies such as Iraq’s secular dictator Saddam Hussein, Shiite-led Iran, Syria and Islamic militants opposed to Israel, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Read on.
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2 comments:

Forwhatitsworth said...

Nice writing, but I am actually shocked that with the voluminous research since 9/11, why does he still assume that Bush is lying about everything EXCEPT who committed the 9/11 attacks.

Mike Ruppert,
David Ray Griffin, Webster Tarpley, Paul Thompson and many others show complicity of the US Government, and notably Dick Cheney in attacks.

911 is another in a long history of war provocations by the government itself.

A good starting point is Tarpley's Synthetic Terror:Made in the USA, which received the highest rating from Amazon's top reviewer.

Likewise, Crossing the Rubicon by Mike Ruppert, and the three books by Prof. David Ray Griffin all document this.

So Parry would be helping a lot by showing that the very basis for all these ensuing wars can be traced back to the fact that 911 was an inside job.

Thu Jan 25, 02:20:00 AM 2007
Unknown said...

Robert Parry's picture of what is going on with Bush and the nation is devastating and probably accurate, but his *model* of why this is happening seems limited. He seems to assume that Bush's goal is a perpetual military conflict and a militarized autocratic state. This begs the question of *why*.

My model of Bush and Company is of players, in tight with the oil, coal and military-industrial barons, who are engaged in the Big Game for domination of the world. They are very aware that world oil production is starting to peak, and their strategy is to control the remaining oil reserves. They regard nationalist leaders of oil states as obstacles to be removed and replaced, and they feel an urgency about doing this before rivals such as Russia, China and even the European Union can get claim to these resources and deny them to “us”. If any of these oil states were to become a nuclear power, it would make controlling them much more complicated.

An interesting piece of support for this model comes from a column by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, Jan. 13. She reports that Bush in college was an avid, extremely aggressive player of Risk, Parker Brothers’ “game of world domination”. He was also notorious for changing the rules of the game whenever he found himself losing. I laughed out loud when I read this; it fits so perfectly the picture I’d built of him.

Suppose for the moment that we accept this model of the President and crew and how they operate. What does it predict that they will do?

Clearly they would actually attack Iran, and they would go for control and regime change, not just denuclearization. All the signs indeed point to this. US-supported special forces and guerillas are apparently already operating inside Iran. Indications are that the attack will be massive, and not limited to nuclear facilities. (If Iran were to get wrecked in the process, as has happened in Iraq, no matter. A weak and divided Iran would suit their purposes just fine.)

To take Iran (and hold onto Iraq) they would have to raise a new and much larger army. Since it is unlikely that they could find many hundreds of thousands of new recruits for the all-volunteer military, they would have to be planning on a military draft. (At this point we are out beyond anything for which I have evidence, but this is where the logic of the model is leading, so let’s see where it goes.) They would know that if they were to approach Congress with a request for authorization of a war on Iran, a huge increase in the military budget and a draft they’d get laughed out of the house; so what are they to do?

The obvious next move would be to create or provoke a national emergency. To get a draft and the troops they’d need would take a major incident. This could reliably be done with the help of a severe provocation, a fabrication, a self-inflicted wound or a terrorist attack managed by a double agent. One possibility: Israel keeps threatening to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Iran’s leaders have publicly stated that they will retaliate against the US if this happens, which would certainly start a war but which would not necessarily provoke the kind of outrage needed, since it doesn’t place Iran strongly in the wrong. That would require something more heinous, something perhaps on the scale of the World Trade Center attack.

After the incident would come the process of “manufacturing outrage”. Nothing would be left to chance. In the face of national shock and anger, amplified by this process, Congress predictably would stampede to give Bush whatever he wants. Our heroes, our leaders in the hard years ahead, would include the few lawmakers who would dare to vote their consciences and hold out for hearings into what actually happened and why.

Any model represents a gross simplification of a complex reality, and Bush could by now have developed other competing motives, or the model could be wrong. This scenario makes sense of an otherwise senseless performance by our President, but maybe he really is just out of touch, delusional and making a last forlorn toss of the dice. Maybe Bush Junior has grown up on the job and is becoming a statesman. Maybe Iran will blink, and Bush will jump at the chance to cut a deal. We can hope so. In the meantime we need to keep on pressing for a withdrawal from Iraq and an agenda to meet the people’s needs at home. But if the worst happens (and probably no one - except possibly an insider whistleblower - can stop it if Bush is determined) we must be prepared to keep our bearings in the storm, resist getting swept up in the hysteria around us, keep telling the truth as we see it, keep in touch with each other, and not lose our belief in and hope for the possibility of a democratic, just, peaceful and sustainable world.

Chris Horton

Thu Jan 25, 11:37:00 AM 2007

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