The Rag Blog

06/01/08 “Washington Post” — — As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged — perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion — by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an “imminent threat” to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks — another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson’s observation: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world — more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies — especially the war in Iraq — have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: “I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans.” Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, “it wasn’t until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country’s laws — that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law — and repeatedly violates the law — thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors.”

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won’t be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I’d like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

01/05/08 “Counterpunch” — — Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh recently said that Barack Obama is our “only hope” to “lead a reconciliation between the Muslim countries and the US.” Why? Because Obama’s father was a Muslim.

I simply don’t follow Hersh’s logic here. Seems to me the actions of a president are more important than some familial affiliation with a particular religion-not to mention that candidate Obama has aligned himself with Israel.

These are some of Obama’s comments during a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC):

“Our job is to rebuild the road to real peace and lasting security throughout the region, “Our job is to do more than lay out another road map.”

“That effort begins with a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel: Our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy. “That will always be my starting point.”

And calling for sustained military support to Israel, Obama said: “We must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance and continuing work on the Arrow and related missile defense programs.”

For Barack Obama to say that “our job is to lay out another road map” for peace while we are providing military support to Israel as the country launches attacks on Palestinians is hypocrisy. There is more than a conflict of interest for the US to go to the table, act as peace brokers, and make demands. But, then, that is what we do as self-appointed police officers to the world. We decry the violence in Kenya. Condi Rice has just made a statement that it must stop. But the violence perpetrated on the Iraqi and Afghan populations by her boss’s policies continues without end. Our violence is good violence. Anyone else’s is barbaric.

It matters little to me that Barack Obama says he was against invading Iraq. After all, he votes to continue funding it. If this presidential candidate wanted to mend relations with Muslims, he could start by voting against additional war funding.

And he could say no to AIPAC – but this would be political suicide.

In a December 31, 2007, editorial, the New York Times faulted the current president and vice president of the United States for kidnapping innocent people, denying justice to prisoners, torturing, murdering, circumventing U.S. and international law, spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and basing their actions on “imperial fantasies.”

Um, thanks for finally noticing. What would you suggest we do about it?

“We can only hope,” concludes the New York Times, quite disempoweringly, “that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle, and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.”

But here’s the problem (other than the pretended certainty that Bush won the 2004 election):

The United States of America, as established by its Constitution, simply does not have a presidency with awesome powers. And the powers that Bush and Cheney have newly bestowed on the presidency, unchallenged by Congress or the media, are not powers that any human being can be expected to use with decency.

The Constitution gives the president extremely limited powers. He (or she) is to execute the laws created by Congress. He serves as commander in chief of the military. He can pardon crimes (but not impeachments). If he consults with and gets the support of the Senate, the president can negotiate treaties and appoint officials, ambassadors, and judges.

That’s about it. There is no constitutional presidential power to write or alter or violate laws, to act in secret, to abridge the judicial system, to violate the Bill of Rights, to violate existing treaties, to build an empire, or to launch a war. Those powers do not belong in the hands of a new president with “integrity, principle, and decency,” because they do not belong to the U.S. presidency at all. If the New York Times thinks that a new president with those powers will give us back a country that looks like the United States, then the New York Times is peering into a cracked mirror.

Oh, and the Vice President under the Constitution has no particular powers at all, other than serving as the president of the Senate, where he only gets to vote if there’s a tie.

In contrast, the legislative branch of our government, historically and even today in the version students are still taught in schools, has truly awesome powers. The Congress has the power to enact laws, all laws. Congress also has the sole power to raise and spend money. It has the power to declare war and to fund and oversee the military. It has the power to regulate international and interstate trade. Congress handles immigration, bankruptcies, the printing and valuing of money, the post offices, copyrights. Congress has the power to “constitute tribunals inferior to the supreme court,” and “to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations.” But the first power the Constitution grants the House of Representatives is the power of impeachment. The first power it grants the Senate is the power to try all impeachments.

In school we learn about the “Separation of Powers” and about something called “Checks and Balances.” Our three branches of government are supposed to be separately elected, none of them created by any other. And the power to run the nation is supposed to be divided. Congress has certain powers. The courts have other powers. The president has others. Congress, as the most powerful branch, is further divided into two houses with somewhat separate powers. It’s important to understand that Congress is more powerful than the other branches, which is one reason the phrases “balance of power” and “checks and balances” can be misleading. There is not supposed to be anything evenly balanced about it.

Our system of “presidential” government derives from the English system when it had a king running the country, as opposed to the modern English system in which the prime minister is dependent on the parliament. A presidential system, in which the winner takes all in presidential elections, tends to develop two parties, and tends to develop party- , rather than governmental-branch- , loyalties in members of the legislature. This leads in turn to the phenomenon exemplified by Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D., New York) asserting that impeachment is no longer a part of our Constitution because we now have political parties.

But, of course, we had political parties when Richard Nixon was driven out of town and have had them throughout our nation’s history. Any system is dependent on the people within it and the activism of the people outside of it.

Tom Paine mocked the idea of “checks and balances” as absurd, not because he had a plan for a better government without such a system, but because he didn’t think parliamentary checks on a hereditary monarch justified colonial rule over people lacking any representation in either branch. Ultimately, the decisive factor in what sort of government people get is going to be the actions of the people outside the government. The checks and balances we now pretend to have in the United States are as absurd as were those enjoyed by King George. But serious checks and balances provide a canary in the capital coal mine. When they are violated, people should recognize and act on the danger.

Under the U.S. system, the executive branch is understood to have the following checks on legislative power, and it still has them, plus some:

1. The veto. Bush does still have this power, but it is overshadowed by his newly created signing-statement power. No longer must he choose between signing a bill and vetoing it. Now, he can choose to sign it and rewrite it.

2. Commanding the military. Bush does still have this power, but he has added to it the power to declare war in violation of various laws, to act in secrecy in matters of war, to lie to Congress about war, to engage in a variety of war crimes, to misappropriate funds for wars that were not approved for them, and to take the National Guard away from states in order to use it in the commission of his crimes.

3. The vice president’s vote in the Senate. He does still have this power.

4. Recess appointments. Bush makes use of this power.

5. Calling Congress into session in emergencies and determining adjournments when the two houses cannot agree. This is less relevant now that the bums hardly ever go home.

And the President is understood to have these checks on the judicial branch, which he indeed still has:

1. Appointing judges. Bush still has this power.

2. Pardoning convicts. Bush still has this power. He has even commuted the sentence of a White House staffer convicted in a case Bush himself is involved in (an act that James Madison and George Mason deemed an impeachable offense). Bush also orders former staffers to obstruct justice, refuses subpoenas, and declines to testify under oath or without Cheney at his side.

The executive branch also has a check on itself. The vice president and cabinet can vote that the president is unable to discharge his duties. Sadly, failure to discharge duties has become the standard for membership in the cabinet.

The judicial branch has an important check on Congress and the president in that it can rule laws to be unconstitutional, but this has been eliminated by Bush and Cheney. The chief justice of the supreme court also serves as president of the Senate during a presidential impeachment. But that power depends on the House of Representatives first impeaching.

The legislative branch is supposed to have an array of checks on the president and vice president, including various minor powers of oversight. But the all-important check is impeachment. With that removed by Nancy Pelosi, subpoenas cannot be enforced. Freedom of Information Act requests cannot be enforced. Contempt citations cannot be enforced. In fact, laws of all types cannot be enforced.

Congress has the power to pick the President and Vice President if there is no majority of electoral votes. This is a major exception to the idea of separate powers, but it is unlikely ever to come up, and means less now that elections are routinely stolen.

Congress can override a presidential veto, but that power too is rendered irrelevant by new presidential powers. The Senate gets to approve appointments, but that power is clearly not sufficient to rein in the march of the Bush power grab. The Senate gets to approve treaties, a power that is also insufficient to check Bush’s abuses, even without its elimination by Fast Track. Congress gets to approve the replacement of the vice president, but that power depends on getting rid of the current one.

Congress gets to declare war, but has handed that power to the president. Congress gets to allocate funds, but Bush has misappropriated funds without repercussion or even remark and has openly claimed the right to do so in signing statements. A huge percentage of government funding (of the military and secret spying) is largely unaccountable. The president is required to deliver a “State of the Union” speech, but he’s clearly not required to speak the truth.

That’s about it. The only major tool in the box of legislative checks on the executive branch (or the judicial branch) is impeachment. That’s not the fault of impeachment advocates. That’s the way the Constitution designed it.

After Bush and Cheney lost to Gore and Lieberman but were installed by the supreme court, Congress could have refused to certify the election or could have immediately impeached. Or it could have waited for the first string of impeachable offenses. With Congress failing in this for four years, it was left to the public to check the power of Bush and Cheney. The evidence from Ohio is overwhelming that we did so. Yet they remained in office. It was then up to Congress, and is still up to Congress, to impeach, and it would be even if we had credible honest elections. The point of impeachment is not to do what elections do. It is not to swap one tyrant for another every four years. The purpose of impeachment is to rein in an outlaw president or vice president immediately and to establish limits on the abuses that will be permitted future members of the executive branch. The executive branch bears little resemblance, remember, to the “unitary executive” branch.

It’s true that, as Nadler claims, we do not have the same world we once did. There are indeed major problems with our system of government that have nothing to do with impeachment. We lack a credible election system. We lack democratic communications systems. We’ve legalized massive bribery. We’ve imposed grossly undemocratic primary elections. We’ve locked out any but two entrenched parties. We’ve created an eternal election season.

Some of these structural deficiencies will be easier to repair than others. But among the easiest are the most significant. We don’t just have political parties. We also have astroturf activist groups that voluntarily take their instructions from the leadership of those parties. And we have raised millions of anti-citizens, human beings who live in the United States of America but self-censor themselves, declining to speak up for their own interests when those conflict with the interests of an entrenched party elite. The same phenomenon is at work within Congress, where the people’s representatives have accepted, as has the New York Times, the shifting of all power to the White House. Their interest is in whether the next king will be a Democrat or a Republican. Our interest should be in making sure it is not a king at all. We can only do that by making 2008 the year of impeachment.

“… Philanthropic spending adds mainly to the nation’s stock of hospitals, libraries, museums, parks, university buildings, theaters and concert halls. Public infrastructure — highways, bridges, rail systems, water works, public schools, port facilities, sewers, airports, energy grids, tunnels, dams and levees — depends mostly on tax dollars. It is hugely expensive and the money available, while still substantial, has shrunk as a share of the national economy…

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that government should be spending $320 billion a year over the next five years — double the current outlay — just to bring up to par what already exists.

The shift from public money to private wealth in shaping the nation’s cities is evident in national data. Government outlays on physical infrastructure have declined to 2.7 percent of the gross domestic product, from 3.6 percent in the 1960s. Philanthropic giving, in contrast, has jumped to nearly 2.5 percent of G.D.P., from 1.5 percent in 1995 and 2 percent in the ’60s.

Most of this money goes into endowments and foundations, or comes in the form of individual gifts, and then is increased through leverage. Of the $3 billion that Yale has spent so far on its vast building program, for example, slightly less than two-thirds came from gifts and from the endowment, which now totals $22.5 billion. The rest was borrowed, Mr. Levin said.

Yale now spends more than $400 million annually on its renaissance, nearly six times its outlays for construction and renovation in the mid-1990s. New Haven, by contrast, budgeted $137 million in the current fiscal year for all its capital projects, including those subsidized by state and federal governments. That is less than twice the amount budgeted in the mid-’90s.

Government investment nationwide has lagged for several reasons, say business leaders, academics and public officials. Tax cuts have helped to hold down overall government spending. So has the view, widespread in recent decades, that public investment is often inept and wasteful. And politics intrudes, with the widely criticized earmark process in Congress cited lately as a prime example of misdirected spending.

“Governments are accountable to the democratic process, which has many, many virtues; I would not trade it for anything else,” Mr. Levin said. “But it is not particularly good at focusing resources and driving things efficiently.”

Perhaps most important, big businesses no longer put as much clout and attention behind public infrastructure investments. In an earlier era, corporations, many with deep roots in local communities, lobbied government for the railroads, highways and many other facilities they needed to operate successfully. And they served as a crucial fountain of local tax revenue.

But companies are more mobile today. And many of the urban manufacturers most dependent on public infrastructure have moved or gone out of business…

Some government-business alliances still carry weight. In the Seattle area, for example, Microsoft has pushed its headquarters city, Redmond, to spend millions to upgrade roads for its expanding campus, along with the millions that the software giant has spent.

Now Microsoft wants the state to replace a 40-year-old, two-lane bridge on a highway that connects Seattle and Redmond. “We joined the city in arguing for the new bridge,” said Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman, “and that was instrumental in bringing the issue to the forefront.”…

As Yale invests, pursuing its goals, Mayor DeStefano falls increasingly into step, blurring the line between public and philanthropic infrastructure spending. Yale has acquired land to build two more residential colleges, and the mayor contributed by closing off and giving portions of two streets to the university.

Historians will view Bush as the President who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), made public on December 4, concluded Iran had closed its nuclear weapons program four years earlier. Bush could have attributed this “fact” to his aggressive rhetoric (threats). Instead, he whined at his press conference that day: “Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The NIE says that Iran had a hidden — a covert nuclear weapons program. That’s what it said. What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”

He seemed more compelled by his own words than by intelligence findings. Recall that in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush — or speech writers–had placed Iran inside the elite Axis of Evil club.

OK. And now he could claim his threats worked. He got Iraq, North Korea, and Iran to stop nuclear weapons program (albeit Iraq didn’t have one). Bush could claim he even got Libya to quit the incipient nuclear club.

I can imagine him sporting his ubiquitous shit-eating grin and taking credit for international accomplishments. “Thanks to my inserting a perilous tone to my public discourse — one that has weighed on public consciousness like a toxic cloud–we won.”

Bush could have referred to post 9/11 days when the nation trembled in shock, and he swore “to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.” He then characterized North Korea as “a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.” Iran aggressively pursues “these weapons and exports terror.” The lead villain at that time, lest we forget: “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror”

These states “and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” Bush swore “the United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

So, why didn’t Bush return to this theme and say “I didn’t permit it?”

Perhaps facts did play a strange role. Since thinking people understand that Iran did not threaten the United States or Western Europe, they will also recall how Bush’s “accomplished” mission in Iraq showed a less than accomplished President. Indeed, the hysteric in the White House invaded Iraq over non existent WMD.

Did Bush fear that boasting of another “mission accomplished would cause him more trouble? The NIE information on Iran combined with North Korea agreeing to dismantle its nuke program in exchange for fuel aid and normalization talks with the U.S. and Japan had dispelled Bush’s Harry Potter-like world of evil axes.

Nevertheless, Bush bleated about “dangerous” Iran. Keith Olberman of MSNBC called him a” pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief.” Why didn’t Karl Rove rescue him from such blasphemies? (Was he too busy writing “how to beat Hillary columns for Newsweek?)

Bush knew since early August that Iran had no operating nuclear weapons programs; so why, asked Olberman, did he on October 17 taunt Iranian President Ahmadinejad? “I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

The answer: Bush apparently feels comfortable with inflammatory discourse; not with achievement oratory. Remember his July 24, 2004 fighting words: “Bring ’em on” he taunted the Iraqi insurgents on July 2, 2004, who had begun to attack US occupying forces. Maybe he recalls those words and the fiasco following his “Mission Accomplished” speech in May 2003 as Iraqi insurgent began killing and wounding US troops — and his ratings plummeted. For Bush, fear has worked well; especially scary are references to nuclear threats.

Compare President Franklin Roosevelt calming discourse to Bush’s alarmism. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said FDR in his 1933 Inaugural Address, when the Great Depression truly depressed millions of people, economically and mentally. Bush, in contrast, seems to feel comfortable as America’s year-round Halloween monster. “We have plenty to fear. Terrorism will never go away. The terrorists are everywhere, always plotting against us. Trust me to fight them as long as you people remain scared”

With that outlook, Bush probably didn’t consider sharing his knowledge with the public, that Iran had no operating nuclear weapons program. He did, however, slightly alter his tone, but never told the truth. The Washington Post’s chronology of Bush’s Iranian fright lines shows the nuance in his speech after the CIA informed him in August that Iran had shut its nuke program.

Look at the differences. On March 31 Bush stated definitively that “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon” On August 6 he invented an Iranian provocation: “this is a government [Iran] that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon…” By August 9, however, as Olberman notes, fine distinctions began to appear in his alerts. Iranians “expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program…”

On October 4, Bush became semi biblical: “you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon…”

Two weeks later, on October 17, Bush issued yet another veiled threat, without accusing Iran of actually trying to make a nuke. “Until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon.”

On December 4, after the NIE report became public, Bush had to reluctantly acknowledge the key fact he had absorbed in August. But he nevertheless kept firing away. Indeed, with White House encouragement, his neo con acolytes like Frank Gaffney (Center for Security Policy) and Norman Podhoretz (Commentary editor and Rudy Giuliani adviser) compare Iran and Nazi Germany–on talk shows. As if!

After seven years in office, Bush has placed fear before victory. He saw how throwing panic at the public–terrorists everywhere — could serve his power. By seizing on the 9/11 tragedy and manipulating it as a symbol to keep the public terrified, he garnered unequaled presidential power and provoked world wide animosity–while Congress and the public were busy being scared. The rest of the nation didn’t do so well.

Under his and the malevolent Cheney’s guidance, the CIA used torture — while denying it — extraordinary rendition (kidnapping) and other invasions of the Bill of Rights and Magna Carta (no right to privacy or habeas corpus). Periodically, Homeland Security reveals how it foiled yet another terrorist plot. The latest of these alleged plots evaporated. Seven barely literate Miami men who know nothing of explosives or weapons were charged in June 2006 with conspiring to blow up the Chicago’s Sears Tower. One defendant was acquitted; the judge declared a mistrial for the six others.

Bush’s detractors accuse him of having the IQ of a moron and the morality of Henry Kissinger, but Bush has accomplished several missions: he has destroyed Iraq, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and put the people of this country into deep stress. The so-called intelligence community (oxymoron?), beyond angry that their intelligence was distorted in order to give Bush a pretext to invade Iraq, no doubt predicted Bush would recoil at receiving the no nukes in Iran finding, that he would discount it and use the braggadocio that has flavored his sour administration to diminish its impact.

Ironically, the intelligence experts have yet to actually show evidence that Iran sought a nuclear weapons program. The NIE claimed Iran once had a hidden weapons program. Bush averred. “What’s to say they couldn’t start another nuclear weapons program?”

The lap dog press has yet to even pose the question about the “fact” of Iran’s supposedly hidden project. IAEA head Mohamed El Baradai has never claimed he found evidence that the Teheran government actually had begun such production. The powerful in government and media “deduced” the logic that Iran was going beyond nuclear energy reactors since Iraq was seeking a weapons program and Israel, the most dangerous enemy in the region, had accumulated some 200 nukes.

Hey, Libya and North Korea could also restart their programs–an old fashioned axis of evil revival? Brazil, Argentina and South Africa could refurbish their old nuclear dreams!

Evil billionaires like Rupert Murdoch or T. Bone Pickens could start private nuclear weapons operations–a real life James Bond movie! How frustrating for Bush, wanting to fight–vicariously–and getting a diplomatic victory that he refuses to acknowledge.

Being a Christian is the best. It’s not really OK to be a Jew unless you live in Israel, the Promised Land. Mormons should learn how to be more Christian. Everyone else should convert or die.

The U.S. does well when huge corporations are allowed to do whatever they want. The more we can make rich people richer, the better it will be for everybody:

Rich people hire everyone else to work for them, making our economy robust.

Rich people got rich because of the free market system and their own individual efforts, for which they should be rewarded. Those people who aren’t rich have only themselves to blame.

People in high office — like the president and the vice-president — have difficult, complicated jobs. If they forget to do stuff, or if they cut corners here and there, or if they tell a white lie now and then, that’s OK, because the important thing is for them to protect us not only from bad things but also from thinking about bad things, unless they feel we need to. The only thing a president shouldn’t do is to have sex with someone who’s not his wife — because that’s a betrayal of the American people’s trust.

Scientists’ opinions are neither better nor worse than anyone else’s.

Just because someone doesn’t use big words or make sense a lot of the time doesn’t mean that that someone isn’t smart and kind and doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

If people disagree with you, the only reasonable explanation for their behavior is that they’re traitors. Sometimes they know this and sometimes they don’t.

If you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter who listens to your phone calls or looks at your bank statements or follows you around the block in a van that says “ClearTone Cell Phones” or talks to your neighbors about who’s been visiting you on Tuesday evenings under the guise of “playing poker.” Only criminals would object to any of those things.

If you live in an area that’s prone to a natural disaster like a fire or a flood or an earthquake or a hurricane, you shouldn’t expect the federal government to take care of you when your neighborhood gets destroyed. Next time you’ll think more carefully about where you’re going to settle down.

Some people in the world are envious of everything we have — computers and cable TV and cool-looking clothes and the Super Bowl and especially our freedoms. They’ll do anything to destroy us, because if they can’t have those things, they believe that no one should. These people are probably dark-skinned. That doesn’t mean we should be suspicious of everyone who’s dark-skinned. Still.

The immigration problem is the most critical issue facing Americans today, except maybe for those terrorists who are envious of us — unless they’re both illegal immigrants and terrorists, which is more common than most people think.

The fall of communism is the best evidence that providing everyone in this country with free health care is doomed and in any case gives drug addicts and slugabeds free handouts and no motivation to succeed on their own merits.

Democrats block progress at every turn, either by spending beyond our means, taxing beyond our means, preventing the administration from doing what’s right, or just kind of being obnoxious. They should go away and let Republicans fulfill their mandate.

God speaks to the president, which is really fortunate, because otherwise people might have stronger arguments against what he does.

Excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31

01/04/08 “ICH” — — DAVID BARSAMIAN: One of the heroes of the current right-wing revival… is Adam Smith. You’ve done some pretty impressive research on Smith that has excavated… a lot of information that’s not coming out. You’ve often quoted him describing the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for other people.”

NOAM CHOMSKY: I didn’t do any research at all on Smith. I just read him. There’s no research. Just read it. He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. That’s the argument for them, because he thought that equality of condition (not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India.

He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. He pointed out that its totally senseless to talk about a nation and what we would nowadays call “national interests.” He simply observed in passing, because it’s so obvious, that in England, which is what he’s discussing — and it was the most democratic society of the day — the principal architects of policy are the “merchants and manufacturers,” and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, “most peculiarly attended to,” no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn’t have the data to prove it at the time, but he was probably right.

This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you don’t have to go to Marx to find it. It’s very explicit in Adam Smith. It’s so obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he didn’t make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that’s correct. If you read through his work, he’s intelligent. He’s a person who was from the Enlightenment. His driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He’s part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.

The version of him that’s given today is just ridiculous. But I didn’t have to any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If you’re literate, you’ll find it out. I did do a little research in the way it’s treated, and that’s interesting. For example, the University of Chicago, the great bastion of free market economics, etc., etc., published a bicentennial edition of the hero, a scholarly edition with all the footnotes and the introduction by a Nobel Prize winner, George Stigler, a huge index, a real scholarly edition. That’s the one I used. It’s the best edition. The scholarly framework was very interesting, including Stigler’s introduction. It’s likely he never opened The Wealth of Nations. Just about everything he said about the book was completely false. I went through a bunch of examples in writing about it, in Year 501 and elsewhere.

But even more interesting in some ways was the index. Adam Smith is very well known for his advocacy of division of labor. Take a look at “division of labor” in the index and there are lots and lots of things listed. But there’s one missing, namely his denunciation of division of labor, the one I just cited. That’s somehow missing from the index. It goes on like this. I wouldn’t call this research because it’s ten minutes’ work, but if you look at the scholarship, then it’s interesting.

I want to be clear about this. There is good Smith scholarship. If you look at the serious Smith scholarship, nothing I’m saying is any surprise to anyone. How could it be? You open the book and you read it and it’s staring you right in the face. On the other hand if you look at the myth of Adam Smith, which is the only one we get, the discrepancy between that and the reality is enormous.

This is true of classical liberalism in general. The founders of classical liberalism, people like Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is one of the great exponents of classical liberalism, and who inspired John Stuart Mill — they were what we would call libertarian socialists, at least that ïs the way I read them. For example, Humboldt, like Smith, says, Consider a craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if he does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire what he does but we despise what he is. On the other hand, if he does it out of his own free, creative expression of himself, under free will, not under external coercion of wage labor, then we also admire what he is because he’s a human being. He said any decent socioeconomic system will be based on the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and create — since that’s the fundamental nature of humans — in free association with others, but certainly not under the kinds of external constraints that came to be called capitalism.

It’s the same when you read Jefferson. He lived a half century later, so he saw state capitalism developing, and he despised it, of course. He said it’s going to lead to a form of absolutism worse than the one we defended ourselves against. In fact, if you run through this whole period you see a very clear, sharp critique of what we would later call capitalism and certainly of the twentieth century version of it, which is designed to destroy individual, even entrepreneurial capitalism.

There’s a side current here which is rarely looked at but which is also quite fascinating. That’s the working class literature of the nineteenth century. They didn’t read Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, but they’re saying the same things. Read journals put out by the people called the “factory girls of Lowell,” young women in the factories, mechanics, and other working people who were running their own newspapers. It’s the same kind of critique. There was a real battle fought by working people in England and the U.S. to defend themselves against what they called the degradation and oppression and violence of the industrial capitalist system, which was not only dehumanizing them but was even radically reducing their intellectual level. So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called “factory girls,” young girls working in the Lowell [Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious contemporary literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to turn them into tools who would be manipulated, degraded, kicked around, and so on. And they fought against it bitterly for a long period. That’s the history of the rise of capitalism.

The other part of the story is the development of corporations, which is an interesting story in itself. Adam Smith didn’t say much about them, but he did criticize the early stages of them. Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings, and he was very strongly opposed to them. But the development of corporations really took place in the early twentieth century and very late in the nineteenth century. Originally, corporations existed as a public service. People would get together to build a bridge and they would be incorporated for that purpose by the state. They built the bridge and that’s it. They were supposed to have a public interest function. Well into the 1870s, states were removing corporate charters. They were granted by the state. They didn’t have any other authority. They were fictions. They were removing corporate charters because they weren’t serving a public function. But then you get into the period of the trusts and various efforts to consolidate power that were beginning to be made in the late nineteenth century. It’s interesting to look at the literature. The courts didn’t really accept it. There were some hints about it. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that courts and lawyers designed a new socioeconomic system. It was never done by legislation. It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could exercise over individual states. New Jersey was the first state to offer corporations any right they wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons. Then the other states had to do the same thing just to defend themselves or be wiped out. It’s kind of a small-scale globalization. Then the courts and the corporate lawyers came along and created a whole new body of doctrine which gave corporations authority and power that they never had before. If you look at the background of it, it’s the same background that led to fascism and Bolshevism. A lot of it was supported by people called progressives, for these reasons: They said, individual rights are gone. We are in a period of corporatization of power, consolidation of power, centralization. That’s supposed to be good if you’re a progressive, like a Marxist-Leninist. Out of that same background came three major things: fascism, Bolshevism, and corporate tyranny. They all grew out of the same more or less Hegelian roots. It’s fairly recent. We think of corporations as immutable, but they were designed. It was a conscious design which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests. It was certainly not popular will. It’s basically court decisions and lawyers’ decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was. These are major parts of modern twentieth century history. The classical liberals would be horrified. They didn’t even imagine this. But the smaller things that they saw, they were already horrified about. This would have totally scandalized Adam Smith or Jefferson or anyone like that….

BARSAMIAN: ….You’re very patient with people, particularly people who ask the most inane kinds of questions. Is this something you’ve cultivated?

CHOMSKY: First of all, I’m usually fuming inside, so what you see on the outside isn’t necessarily what’s inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating. I shouldn’t. I should expect it. But I do find it irritating. But on the other hand, what you’re describing as inane questions usually strike me as perfectly honest questions. People have no reason to believe anything other than what they’re saying. If you think about where the questioner is coming from, what the person has been exposed to, that’s a very rational and intelligent question. It may sound inane from some other point of view, but it’s not at all inane from within the framework in which it’s being raised. It’s usually quite reasonable. So there’s nothing to be irritated about.

You may be sorry about the conditions in which the questions arise. The thing to do is to try to help them get out of their intellectual confinement, which is not just accidental, as I mentioned. There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view are completely reasonable….

BARSAMIAN: At the Mellon lecture that you gave in Chicago… you focused primarily on the ideas of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell [regarding education]…

CHOMSKY: … These were highly libertarian ideas. Dewey himself comes straight from the American mainstream. People who read what he actually said would now consider him some far-out anti-American lunatic or something. He was expressing mainstream thinking before the ideological system had so grotesquely distorted the tradition. By now, it’s unrecognizable. For example, not only did he agree with the whole Enlightenment tradition that, as he put it, “the goal of production is to produce free people,” — “free men,” he said, but that’s many years ago. That’s the goal of production, not to produce commodities. He was a major theorist of democracy. There were many different, conflicting strands of democratic theory, but the one I’m talking about held that democracy requires dissolution of private power. He said as long as there is private control over the economic system, talk about democracy is a joke. Repeating basically Adam Smith, Dewey said, Politics is the shadow that big business casts over society. He said attenuating the shadow doesn’t do much. Reforms are still going to leave it tyrannical. Basically, a classical liberal view. His main point was that you can’t even talk about democracy until you have democratic control of industry, commerce, banking, everything. That means control by the people who work in the institutions, and the communities.

These are standard libertarian socialist and anarchist ideas which go straight back to the Enlightenment, an outgrowth of the views of the kind that we were talking about before from classical liberalism. Dewey represented these in the modern period, as did Bertrand Russell, from another tradition, but again with roots in the Enlightenment. These were two of the major, if not the two major thinkers, of the twentieth century, whose ideas are about as well known as the real Adam Smith. Which is a sign of how efficient the educational system has been, and the propaganda system, in simply destroying even our awareness of our own immediate intellectual background.

BARSAMIAN: In that same Mellon lecture, you paraphrased Russell on education. You said that he promoted the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water, but rather assisting a flower to grow in its own way…

CHOMSKY: That’s an eighteenth century idea. I don’t know if Russell knew about it or reinvented it, but you read that as standard in early Enlightenment literature. That’s the image that was used… Humboldt, the founder of classical liberalism, his view was that education is a matter of laying out a string along which the child will develop, but in its own way. You may do some guiding. That’s what serious education would be from kindergarten up through graduate school. You do get it in advanced science, because there’s no other way to do it.

But most of the educational system is quite different. Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate them, what we call “education,” they’re going to take control — “they” being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

On the other hand, there are exceptions, and Dewey and Russell are among those exceptions. But they are completely marginalized and unknown, although everybody sings praises to them, as they do to Adam Smith. What they actually said would be considered intolerable in the autocratic climate of dominant opinion. The totalitarian element of it is quite striking. The very fact that the concept “anti-American” can exist — forget the way it’s used — exhibits a totalitarian streak that’s pretty dramatic. That concept, anti-Americanism — the only real counterpart to it in the modern world is anti-Sovietism. In the Soviet Union, the worst crime was to be anti-Soviet. That’s the hallmark of a totalitarian society, to have concepts like anti-Sovietism or anti-Americanism. Here it’s considered quite natural. Books on anti-Americanism, by people who are basically Stalinist clones, are highly respected. That’s true of Anglo-American societies, which are strikingly the more democratic societies. I think there’s a correlation there…As freedom grows, the need to coerce and control opinion also grows if you want to prevent the great beast from doing something with its freedom….

01/04/08 “ICH” — – Perhaps a clear and simple law is needed that states: “Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech. Speech includes ‘the broad and constant streams of information’ freely exchanged on the Internet.” Does the Internet need to be singled out? Or is this self-evident in the First Amendment to the Constitution? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Clearly, Jane Harman (D-CA) who sponsored H.Res.1955 does not respect the Constitution. Nor does her partner, Dave Reichert (R-WA), who authored the original bill, H.Res.1695. Both bills seriously violate the most precious amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are preparing to follow suit with a Senate companion bill, S.1959. Did any of the 404 members of the House of Representatives who voted for the passage of this bill understand that they violated our Constitutional rights, once again? The “immanent threat” charade seems to nullify their capacity for critical thinking and erase their memory of the Constitution, as well as their oath to defend it. How many Senators will succumb to terrorist fear tactics and betray the American people?

Among the Powers granted to the Federal Government by the People of the United States which one authorizes Congress to investigate the so-called “belief systems” of private citizens? Which Power granted by the People endows Congress with authority to investigate the motivations and clairvoyantly predict the intentions of private citizens? Which Power granted by the People authorizes Government surveillance and censorship of the Internet? Which Power granted by the People authorizes the Government to data mine the personal records of US citizens, subjectively filter the personal beliefs of Americans and categorize them for acceptability or to infiltrate local communities and eradicate ‘unacceptable’ beliefs? Which Power authorizes the Federal Government to gather intelligence on American citizens for use by Federal, State and local law enforcement? What is the Constitutional authority for Frau Harman’s storm troopers to terrorize the public through “vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to State and Federal agencies”?

Is this Congress aware of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution? “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Is this Congress unclear about its Constitutional boundaries? Which rights are reserved to the People? The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the People.” The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.” In other words, the People retain all rights not specifically granted to the Government. The rights to think freely, to exchange information, to choose values and beliefs and to freely associate with others are reserved to the People.

If current employees of the Federal Government are not happy with the laws that govern this country and would prefer to live under totalitarian regimes they are free to exit and live elsewhere. They are not free to pervert our laws to conform with their own personal belief systems and ideologically based values. In fact, they have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution as a prerequisite for holding public office.

This bill establishes a National Commission and Center of so-called “Excellence” to censor and crush social concerns which are subjectively perceived to be “threats” by RAND spokesmen, who supplied the content for this bill. RAND coined the folksy epithets “homegrown terrorism,” “violent radicalization” and “ideologically based violence” to invalidate expressions of social conscience that conflict with corporate interests. RAND does not propose restraints on corporate abuse or explore US policy corrections that acknowledge the validity of these concerns. Rather, it characterizes individuals who care deeply about international human rights, national sovereignty and ecological protection as “homegrown terrorists” who have been “violently radicalized” by “extremist belief systems.” This bill quotes RAND ideology verbatim.

The People of the United States did not elect RAND Corporation or its emissaries on Capitol Hill to rewrite the laws of our nation “to advance political and social change” that serves the special interests of selected individuals. Our Constitution was carefully crafted to protect citizens from precisely this type of despotism. Regardless of emotional pretexts which appeal to fear, it is not the Constitutional prerogative of Congress to investigate, evaluate, censor or suppress the personal beliefs of United States citizens.

The Internet, which is a public channel of communication, is being systematically strangled by surveillance devices that police the flow of information; filtering web servers, search engines, web sites, email content and keystrokes. Specifically, the information-sharing networks of citizens whose concerns are inconsistent with global corporate objectives are being censored, blacklisted and suffocated. In direct violation of our Constitution, channels of communication which are protected by the First Amendment are under surveillance by the National Security Agency. The Open Net Initiative reports, “With respect to online surveillance, the United States may be among the most aggressive states in the world in terms of listening to online conversations.”

This bill is a direct assault on Internet privacy and freedom of speech. Packaged as a pretext for “preventing terrorism”, the authors of this bill claim that, “The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.” Even if this gibberish were true, it would not legitimize Government censorship. There is no Constitutional authority for Government supervision of information freely chosen by American citizens. This assault on the First Amendment is a transparent attempt to police the Internet by slandering the personal values of citizens and denouncing their activities, a practice well underway in Britain where Internet Service Providers are required to install software with secret “offender” lists that block out blacklisted websites.

China’s 60,000 strong Internet police force uses western surveillance technology to repress its citizens. There are currently 64 Chinese citizens in prison for signing online petitions. The Open Net Initiative reports that “Australia maintains some of the most restrictive Internet policies of any Western nation. Britain has been criticized for leading a ‘Web takedown’ culture where Internet Service Providers immediately remove content that is allegedly defamatory for fear of facing law suits.” Comcast, the second largest US Internet Service Provider is forging TCP RST packets with faked return addresses that disrupt file sharing among its customers, using equipment sold by the Canadian company, Sandvine. These are the exemplary democratic models of “lessons learned by foreign nations” that this bill declares the United States “can benefit from”; citing Canada, Australia and the UK.

The Baltimore Sun reported In November that George Bush requested $154 million in preliminary funding to “prevent cyberspace attacks”, which current and former government officials say is expected to become a seven-year, multibillion-dollar program to “track threats” in cyberspace on both government and private networks. A lawless administration which is notorious for covert surveillance and conjuring up fictitious threats of immanent danger can hardly be trusted to identify genuine threats or use this revenue in the public interest. Nor would an incoming administration be able to alleviate these unconstitutional invasions of our privacy. These Government crimes would be permanently institutionalized through the National Security Agency CAEIAE program, the Center of so-called “Excellence” designated by this bill. There is nothing excellent about unlawful surveillance and social repression by storm troopers.

What Harman describes as “vertical information sharing from the Intelligence Community to the local level and from local sources to State and Federal agencies” is equivalent to The Third Reich’s Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda which terrorized German citizens from Party Headquarters through a chain of command that reached all the way down into local communities. With modern telecommunications technology this terror campaign of “intelligence sharing” will persecute citizens in the privacy of their homes, monitoring their online conversations and reporting dissidents to the Gestapo. Lawmakers who voted for this malicious operation have forgotten that pogroms always begin by targeting a contrived enemy and expand exponentially to terrorize the whole society. We have laws for a reason.

Inventing a special “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer” embedded in this unlawful operation to create rules for handling the Constitutional rights of US citizens should raise a red flag for lawmakers. Those procedures have been on the books for two hundred and thirty years. All civil servants in every branch of Government are required to uphold the Constitution and follow the rules established by the Bill of Rights. Assigning one individual to tailor those rules to an illegal Cointelpro operation is an indication of deep antisocial contempt for the Constitutional rights of all citizens protected by our system of law.

Masquerading as an “academic” assembly, the political appointees to this Commission will have “relevant expertise” in Information Technology, Juvenile Justice, Corrections, Counterterrorism, Intelligence and Local Law Enforcement. All members of the group will be endowed with sweeping investigative powers and unlimited access to classified files in all branches of government ~ A McCarthy Inquisition with a mandate to hold hearings, administer oaths, take testimony and propose “initiatives to intercede” in the so-called “radicalization process,” a RAND euphemism for crushing social dissent. This mandate to subjectively define and eradicate “unacceptable” social values and beliefs is a gross violation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The operation neatly sidesteps peer review systems and strict academic privacy safeguards for data collection that would be imposed on genuine academic scholars and conveniently bypasses the process of competitive bids for taxpayer-funded recommendations deemed “necessary” by this coterie of political insiders. If this assemblage of political appointees had wholesome objectives it would not have been released from congressional oversight and public transparency secured by The Federal Advisory Committee Act. The bill requires only that the Commission produce a public “version” of its findings before disbanding, permitting secret versions to permanently remain at the Center of so-called “Excellence” as a catalyst for Government abuse by Federal, State and local law enforcement agents trained to believe that their targets deserve persecution.

The Waco Texas massacre is a perfect example of citizens being assaulted without provocation by Government agents who ‘believed’ they were targeting “radicals”. The men, women and children who were poisoned and set on fire by Federal agents had not committed any crime, nor were their religious beliefs posing any threat to the community. Yet these Government agents tormented their victims for 51 days, violently destroying their homes and gassing 76 American citizens including 21 children. This bill would authorize exactly this type of ideological profiling perpetrated by self-righteous bigots under Color of Authority whose personal values direct them to commit acts of ‘ideologically based violence.’

RAND spokesman, Brian Jenkins whose personal ideology is fully incorporated into this bill said to Jane Harman’s Committee: “Unless a way of intervening in the radicalization process can be found, we are condemned to stepping on cockroaches one at a time.” This statement perfectly expresses the deep contempt for Constitutional law that pervades this legislation. Is there any doubt that exterminating people would come easily to someone who views his victims as cockroaches? This particular characterization of human beings is the precise terminology that was used by Nazis to justify exterminating Jews.

If members of Congress were the intended victims of this malicious legislation they would instantly comprehend why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Make no exceptions to the rule of law. Violating the Constitutional rights of any group or individual jeopardizes the security of our whole society.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all Beings are created equal, that they are endowed by Creation with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these Rights governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ~ that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Government long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind is more disposed to suffer than to right itself by abolishing the forms to which it is accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” ~ The Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Four Marines to Face Lesser Charges After Two-Year Inquiry Into Iraqi Killings

01/04/08 “Washington Post” — — After a two-year investigation into the killings of up to 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, the Marine Corps has decided that none of the Marines involved in the incident will be charged with murder. Instead, two enlisted Marines and two Marine officers will face trial in coming months for the killings and for failing to investigate them.

The most serious charges have been leveled against Marine Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, who is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of voluntary manslaughter in California next week, the last step before the case officially moves to trial.

Initially called a massacre by Iraqi residents of Haditha and later characterized as coldblooded murder by a U.S. congressman, the case has turned not on an alleged rampage but on a far more complex analysis of how U.S. troops fight an insurgency in the midst of a population they seek to protect.

The Marine Corps at first charged eight Marines and officers with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime. The charges have since been narrowed to four men in the unit, after three were cleared and a fourth was granted immunity to testify.

Wuterich is charged with nine counts of voluntary manslaughter, with the charges alleging that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing “in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.” Charging documents released this week say he killed at least nine people without properly obtaining positive identification that they were the enemy in the midst of an attack. 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson has been charged with obstructing the investigation.

Wuterich and Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum are the only two shooters that day to face criminal scrutiny; Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, the battalion commander, faces charges that he was derelict in his duty for failing to ask for an investigation.

The charges arise from the Nov. 19, 2005, shootings of as many as 24 innocent civilians who were nearby when a roadside bomb killed a member of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. Wuterich and others in his unit killed a group of men who were in a white car near the blast and then stormed into two nearby houses, killing unarmed men, women and children after the Marines believed they were taking fire from the homes.

Public attention to the Haditha case increased in the spring of 2006 when Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) said after briefings from military officials that the Marines had killed civilians “in cold blood.” The killings are among the most infamous of the Iraq war; 69 U.S. troops have been charged in connection with killing Iraqi civilians, and 22 of them have been convicted of murder, negligent homicide or voluntary manslaughter.

Military law experts said the manslaughter charges reflect the military’s reluctance to pursue murder charges because they are hard to win in court — especially as military juries tend to give combat troops the benefit of the doubt. Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.

“I think it’s still going to be hard to get convictions in these types of cases when you’re in a battlefield environment,” said David P. Sheldon, a military law expert in Washington.

Mark Zaid, one of Wuterich’s defense attorneys, said the charges show there was no “massacre” and that the case highlights how difficult it is for U.S. troops to make tough battlefield decisions. He said Wuterich and the other Marines were following their rules of engagement when they shot and killed their targets in Haditha, with unfortunate — but not illegal — consequences.

“Every Marine, period, is trained with the intent to kill,” Zaid said. “What everyone will realize at the end of the day is that the characterization of the events was nothing like reality, that the training the troops on the ground received was primarily responsible for what happened, and that the fog of war sometimes ends up with terrible results.”

Brian Rooney, an attorney for Chessani, said yesterday that Chessani’s trial, scheduled for April, is merely a way for the Marines to show they prosecuted an officer even after they administratively punished at least three senior officers who never ordered an investigation. Military probes blamed Chessani and several others for failing to take civilian deaths seriously.

“It’s clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward,” Rooney said.

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said that while the charges against the Marines are still “very serious,” they are not “the bang that people expected at the front end.” Each charge of voluntary manslaughter carries a potential maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

On Thursday December 27th 2007, shortly after polling stations were closed, Kenya was hailed as having fulfilled an African dream – to have a free and fair closely contested democratic election. But less than 48 hours later it was clear that the dream of democracy could become a nightmare of ethnic violence. Most of the casualties so far have been the poor and the marginalized – and if things continue as they are, a bitter civil war fought along ethnic lines is certain. To say that what is at stake is the very future of Kenya is not an overstatement.

To answer the question of how the promise became a nightmare one must begin with very nature of democracy and how it has been functioning in Africa.

The first element to consider is that in the absence of strong democratic institutions (the three pillars of legislature, executive and judiciary), democracies in Africa are relying more and more on the goodwill of politicians: in this case, a nation is only as democratic as its politicians.

Added to this, African democracy is in real terms an expression of ethnic tensions. Instead of rolling back tribalism (I use the derisive term deliberately), African democracy serves it. One could say that all democracies have an element of this: in the West it generally goes under the euphemism of voter demographics. When Hilary Clinton is courting the white, black or Latino vote, she is in fact practicing what might, in other circumstances, be called tribal politics.

In the Kenyan presidential election, ethnic politics were a key factor in the close election results: the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, received very few votes in the Luo areas, while his Luo opponent, Raila Odinga, received only a very small percentage of the Kikuyu vote. In this bitterly contested election where ethnicity was the deciding factor, victory from either side was bound to spill into violence.

As a direct result of the above, questions of what true justice means and about the growing divide between haves and have-nots become lost to ethnicity. Raila is a flamboyant millionaire while Kibaki is as elite as you can get in Kenya. Lost in the fires of ethnicity is the simple fact that Kibaki and Raila have much more in common with each other than with their supporters. In this sense those engaged in the violence are, to put it bluntly, proxies in a war between two elite leaders.

Another element to consider is the extent to which the landscape of African politics has changed. We need to stop blanket condemnations of African leadership, and acknowledge that it varies and some leaders are better or worse than others. Kibaki, while not a Mandela is not a Moi or a Mobutu, or a Bokassa or an Idi Amin. By the same token the nature of opposition has changed. Since independence and the struggles against neo-colonial governments, opposition has been automatically understood as the legitimate voice of the people. But opposition no longer means the good guys. In many instances the opposition and the sitting government are practically the same as is indeed the case in Kenya. So while Raila is accusing Kibaki of vote-rigging, it could just as easily be Raila trying to rig and short-circuit the democratic process to favor himself. In other words we have no reason to take either of their claims to be true at face-value. In this impasse of two leaders intent on seizing power, respect for the democratic process couldn’t be more important.

Raila in my opinion seems to be attempting to foment a Ukrainian-style Orange revolution hence the call for a million-man march in the capital and the threats to form a parallel government. In a country demarcated along ethnic lines, this will only lead to more ethnic violence. Luos will arm against the Kikuyus who will in turn form Kikuyu defense teams. The result will be not a fast transition of power, but rather escalating ethnic violence. Only an insistence on true democratic processes will see Kenya through this crisis. And we need to bind both Kibaki, who is equally responsible for the violence, and Raila to these processes.

Toward a solution, Kenyans should realize that something beautiful did happen during this election. Most of the big men of Kenyan politics were voted out of Parliament and hence out of office. Even the sons of former dictator Moi did not win seats in Parliament. There seemed to be a belief that voting was a way of talking back the Kenyan political elite, and that democracy could be made to work for the majority poor. This is the flame that we must not let die.

To nurture this flame, a recount of the votes in a transparent manner is necessary. This, no matter what one thinks of Raila or Kibaki, or whether one thinks the elections were fair or not, should be the meeting ground of all those concerned about the future, immediate and long term, of Kenya.

If the votes can be recounted in full transparency, this election will not then become the death of Kenyan democracy but rather a test along the way to a democracy with real content – the content of security, equality and justice for Kenya’s majority poor.

There have been good reasons not to support John Edwards for president. For years, his foreign-policy outlook has been a hodgepodge of insights and dangerous conventional wisdom; his health-care prescriptions have not taken the leap to single payer; and all told, from a progressive standpoint, his positions have been inferior to those of Dennis Kucinich.

But Edwards was the most improved presidential candidate of 2007. He sharpened his attacks on corporate power and honed his calls for economic justice. He laid down a clear position against nuclear power. He explicitly challenged the power of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical giants.

And he improved his position on Iraq to the point that, in an interview with the New York Times a couple of days ago, he said: “The continued occupation of Iraq undermines everything America has to do to reestablish ourselves as a country that should be followed, that should be a leader.” Later in the interview, Edwards added: “I would plan to have all combat troops out of Iraq at the end of nine to ten months, certainly within the first year.”

Now, apparently, Edwards is one of three people with a chance to become the Democratic presidential nominee this year. If so, he would be the most progressive Democrat to top the national ticket in more than half a century.

The main causes of John Edwards’ biggest problems with the media establishment have been tied in with his firm stands for economic justice instead of corporate power.

Weeks ago, when the Gannett-chain-owned Des Moines Register opted to endorse Hillary Clinton this time around, the newspaper’s editorial threw down the corporate gauntlet: “Edwards was our pick for the 2004 nomination. But this is a different race, with different candidates. We too seldom saw the positive, optimistic campaign we found appealing in 2004. His harsh anti-corporate rhetoric would make it difficult to work with the business community to forge change.”

Many in big media have soured on Edwards and his “harsh anti-corporate rhetoric.” As a result, we’re now in the midst of a classic conflict between corporate media sensibilities and grassroots left-leaning populism.

On Wednesday, Edwards launched a TV ad in New Hampshire with him saying at a rally: “Corporate greed has infiltrated everything that’s happening in this democracy. It’s time for us to say, ‘We’re not going to let our children’s future be stolen by these people.’ I have never taken a dime from a Washington lobbyist or a special interest PAC and I’m proud of that.”

But, when it comes to policy positions, he’s still no Dennis Kucinich. And that’s why, as 2007 neared its end, I planned to vote for Kucinich when punching my primary ballot.

Reasons for a Kucinich vote remain. The caucuses and primaries are a time to make a clear statement about what we believe in — and to signal a choice for the best available candidate. Ironically, history may show that the person who did the most to undermine such reasoning for a Dennis Kucinich vote at the start of 2008 was… Dennis Kucinich.

In a written statement released on Jan. 1, he said: “I hope Iowans will caucus for me as their first choice this Thursday, because of my singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade. This is an opportunity for people to stand up for themselves. But in those caucuses locations where my support doesn’t reach the necessary [15 percent] threshold, I strongly encourage all of my supporters to make Barack Obama their second choice. Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.”

This statement doesn’t seem to respect the intelligence of those of us who have planned to vote for Dennis Kucinich.

It’s hard to think of a single major issue — including “the war,” “health care” and “trade” — for which Obama has a more progressive position than Edwards. But there are many issues, including those three, for which Edwards has a decidedly more progressive position than Obama.

But the most disturbing part of Dennis’ statement was this: “Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.” This doesn’t seem like a reasoned argument for Obama. It seems like an exercise in smoke-blowing.

I write these words unhappily. I was a strong advocate for Kucinich during the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Two weeks ago, I spoke at an event for his campaign in Northern California. I believe there is no one in Congress today with a more brilliant analysis of key problems facing humankind or a more solid progressive political program for how to overcome them.

As of the first of this year, Dennis has urged Iowa caucusers to do exactly what he spent the last year telling us not to do — skip over a candidate with more progressive politics in order to support a candidate with less progressive politics.

The best argument for voting for Dennis Kucinich in caucuses and primaries has been what he aptly describes as his “singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade.” But his support for Obama over Edwards indicates that he’s willing to allow some opaque and illogical priorities to trump maximizing the momentum of our common progressive agendas.

Presidential candidates have to be considered in the context of the current historical crossroads. No matter how much we admire or revere an individual, there’s too much at stake to pursue faith-based politics at the expense of reality-based politics. There’s no reason to support Obama over Edwards on Kucinich’s say-so. And now, I can’t think of reasons good enough to support Kucinich rather than Edwards in the weeks ahead.

THE WHITE House, leading Democrats, and the media are all trumpeting the recent decrease in violent attacks in Iraq as a sign that Bush’s surge has worked. This Chicago Tribune report is typical of the new line: “Baghdad has undergone a remarkable transformation. No longer do the streets empty at dusk. Liquor stores and cinemas have reopened for business. Some shops stay open until late in the evening. Children play in parks, young women stay out after dark, restaurants are filled with families and old men sit at sidewalk cafes playing backgammon and smoking shisha pipes.”

Democrats like presidential frontrunner Hilary Clinton have conceded and even celebrated the success of the surge.

In order to present the surge as a success, the media have focused almost exclusively on the decline in Iraqi and U.S. casualties over the past few months. The fact that these numbers are comparable to 2005 figures—a period when no one was touting any great successes in Iraq—is perhaps the best indicator of how shallow the feel-good talk is. The fact remains that in Iraq 1.2 million people have died, 5 million have been driven from their homes, the central state is practically non-functioning, and the economy is in complete shambles.

2007: The deadliest year

Bush’s surge sent in 30,000 troops over the last year to bring the U.S. troop presence up to about 160,000, concentrated in Baghdad and Anbar province. The administration planned to defeat al-Qaeda, contain the civil war between the militias, and give space for political reconciliation between the Kurdish, Arab Sunni, and Arab Shia elites.

The surge initially caused a massive spike in violence, and in spite of the recent declines—which are likely to be only temporary—the overall picture is one of increased casualties. Lauren Frayer, a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem, reports that 2007 has been “the deadliest year for U.S. troops despite the recent downturn, according to an Associated Press count. At least 852 American military personnel have died in Iraq so far this year—the highest annual toll since the war began in March 2003.”

A Pew Research Center poll of American reporters who have worked in Iraq found that “nearly 90 percent of U.S. journalists say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit.”

Iraqis see conditions getting worse, not better. An ABC/BBC poll found that in 2005, two-thirds of Iraqis said life was getting better, but by August 2007, that figure had declined to one-third of the population. Instead of supporting the surge and occupation, 47 percent want immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, and an overwhelming majority wants withdrawal within a year. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. soldiers.

Real causes of recent drop in violence

Only in the last few months have attacks on U.S. troops, the Iraqi Army, and civilians dropped. But, as Juan Cole concludes, “the ‘good news’ of a lull in violence is relative at best. In fact, Iraq’s overall death rate makes it among the worst civil conflicts in the world.”

Bush’s troop surge, moreover, is not even the cause of this recent decline. Rather, the drop seems to be the result of a shift in U.S. tactics combined with unforeseen changes on the ground in Iraq. The American forces have increasingly used air strikes instead of ground troops, thereby minimizing U.S. casualties. Pepe Escobar reports that the U.S. launched “four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007—the year of Bush’s ‘surge’—than in the whole of 2006.”

Similarly, instead of exposing U.S. troops to battle in Anbar, Bush opted to buy off tribal leaders of the resistance and arm their militias to fight al-Qaeda. Hala Jaber reports in the Sunday Times, “U.S.-backed Sunni militias have spread eastward from Anbar across Baghdad. They already number 77,000, known collectively as ‘concerned local citizens.’ This is more than the Shiite Mahdi Army and nearly half the number in the Iraqi army.”

The U.S. troops also did not have to weigh into battle against Sadr’s forces. Instead of risking open warfare with a buttressed U.S. troop presence, Sadr declared a cease-fire.

The recent decline in Iraqi civilian deaths followed a frenzy of sectarian killing earlier in 2007 that ethnically cleansed Baghdad and its neighborhoods. As a result, it has gone from a city that was 65 percent Sunni to 75 percent Shia. Charles Crain writes in Time magazine, “many neighborhoods have completed their brutal sectarian segregation, leaving fewer easy targets for intimidation and murder.” Juan Cole notes that the relative reduction in violence is artificial and probably cannot endure.

Blast walls enclose once posh Baghdad districts like Adhamiya, but although they keep out death squads they also keep out the customers that shopkeepers depend on. When a Baghdad pet market was bombed recently, it was revealed that the U.S. military had banned vehicles in its vicinity for some time, but allowed cars to drive there again just a few days before the bombing. Vehicle bans are effective, but not practical in the medium or long term. When they end, what will prevent the bombs from returning?

Refugees returning to peace and security?

Perhaps the biggest scam of the surge propaganda is the claim that refugees are returning to Iraq because of the improved peace and security. The Iraqi government now claims 46,300 refugees returned in October at the rate of 1,600 a day.

However, as Damien Cave writes in the New York Times, “Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.”

The tiny minority of the 5 million driven from their homes is not returning willingly. Instead, the countries that have received most of the Iraqis—Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—have all in various ways made it so difficult to enter or stay in their countries that most of the refugees are being forced back into Iraq as a result of persecution and poverty.

The New York Times reports that a UN survey of Iraqi refugees in Syria found “46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.”

Political failure of the surge

The surge’s political goal of reconciliation between the Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish elites has also failed. The U.S. hoped to force them to agree on a central government, repeal the ban on Baath Party members’ participation in politics, hold regional elections, and pass the infamous oil law to open Iraq’s key industry to U.S. corporations.

All of these initiatives have stalled. The various Iraqi elites are completely at odds with one another on most of these issues and have mutually incompatible plans for a future Iraq. The Kurds want a separate nation. The Shia want to either control the central state on their terms or establish a majority Shia region. The Sunnis want a return to a central government so they are not cut out of oil revenues that are concentrated in the Kurdish and Shia regions.

The only point that the Arab elites agree on is opposition to the U.S. occupation and its aims. As Pepe Escobar writes, “As far as the key Sunni and Shiite factions are concerned they all agree on the basics. Iraq won’t be occupied. Iraq won’t have permanent U.S. military bases. Iraq won’t give up its oil wealth. And Iraq won’t be a toothless pro-Israel puppet regime.” The Kurds, by contrast, are still willing allies of the U.S. occupation.

Time bomb of resistance and civil war

U.S. policies enacted during the surge have set in motion dynamics that will spur greater resistance. U.S. troops now back Sunni tribal leaders and militias that recently had been fighting the U.S. in Anbar province; these newly armed and trained forces see themselves as temporary allies with the U.S. against al-Qaeda, but there is nothing that says they won’t resume at a future date active armed opposition to the occupation. The U.S. also supports the Shia parties that oppose the occupation. And the Sadrists are merely biding their time until the U.S. withdraws the 30,000 surge troops to assert their more effectively organized forces.

As one army officer stated, “the tactic of paying your enemy not to fight is not a new one, but it has limitations. If the plan is to leave Iraq, it’s a good solution. If the plan is to stay in perpetuity, and that seems to be the case with the Bush administration, history says it’s dangerous. Eventually, the underlying hatred for the foreign presence overwhelms greed.”

The surge has also set the stage for an even more destructive civil war. Because the U.S. has increasingly allied itself with Sunni forces and used them to pressure Shia parties to pass pro-Sunni legislation, such as ending the ban on ex-Baathists serving in government, they have further deepened the schisms between the Arab sects that could produce greater sectarian violence. Even worse, the U.S. has armed the Sunni resistance in Anbar to the teeth, making it more capable of taking on the Shia militias and Shia-dominated government that they despise. Moreover, if the surrounding countries expel greater numbers of Iraqis, the returning refugees will only further spark sectarian tensions. Most cannot return to their homes because families of other sects now occupy them. The sectarian forces will likely use their demands as a rallying point for a renewed civil war.

The civil war is also spreading to the previously stable Kurdish region. The Kurdish parties are trying to retake control of Kirkuk, one of the key centers of oil production, in order to establish the economic foundations of their autonomous region. This has brought them into conflict with not only the Iraqi Arabs but also U.S. ally Turkey which fears that the strengthened Kurdish region will inspire their own Kurdish population’s nationalist aspirations.

Surge triumphalism is merely the latest justification for the American occupation of Iraq. With bipartisan agreement, the U.S. has proceeded with the construction of five mega-bases, one hundred smaller ones, and its massive Baghdad embassy. From these redoubts they plan to rule Iraq as a neocolony and use it as a permanent base from which to police the region.