The Rag Blog

If you are awake, aware, and more than outraged, I’ve got to ask. Has this been a week from Hades or what? Certainly Hugo Chavez – and the rest of the world would agree. Oh, perhaps Tony in the UK would be an exception, as he’s the fellow who seems to find little fault with the US (and some say even holds the American Devil’s uh, pitchfork). Rumor even has it that since taking office, the American Devil-Monster has spread his putrid stench wherever Air Force One happens to land.

Both parties, after all, endorse and nearly-unanimously fund bill after bill of pre-emptive, unjustified illegal American wars in defiance of international law concerning war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Both parties are fully signed up for threats against nations like Iran who express a desire to enrich uranium for power – just like the US and 30 other nations do.

Both parties are hell-bent on dismantling our Constitution, policing and watching our every move, listening in on our phone calls, and pulling our remaining rights, liberties, and freedoms out from under us.

Both parties accept rigged elections with vote counting done in secret and machines programmed to play funny games – with no way to legitimately verify results.

Both parties get off on destroying the environment and effectively nuking the planet with our military’s guns, tanks, and bombs in the Middle Eastern part of the world.

Both parties accept US military false flag operations such as 9/11 as necessary in furthering the goals and aims of US imperialism.

If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution — the “justice” of exchanging one damage for another.

Apologists for war will insist that war answers the problem of national self-defense. But the doubter, in reply, will ask to what extent the cost even of a successful war of national defense — in life, money, material, foods, health, and (inevitably) freedom — may amount to a national defeat. National defense through war always involves some degree of national defeat. This paradox has been with us from the very beginning of our republic. Militarization in defense of freedom reduces the freedom of the defenders. There is a fundamental inconsistency between war and freedom.

In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

That many have considered the increasing unacceptability of modern warfare is shown by the language of the propaganda surrounding it. Modern wars have characteristically been fought to end war; they have been fought in the name of peace. Our most terrible weapons have been made, ostensibly, to preserve and assure the peace of the world. “All we want is peace,” we say as we increase relentlessly our capacity to make war.

Close behind U.S. tanks and troops, America’s big builders invaded Iraq three years ago. Now the reconstruction funds are drying up and they’re pulling out, leaving completed projects and unfulfilled plans in the hands of an Iraqi government unprepared to manage either.

The Oct. 1 start of the U.S. government’s 2007 fiscal year signaled an end to U.S. aid for new reconstruction in Iraq.

“We’re really focusing now on helping Iraqis do this themselves in the future,” said Daniel Speckhard, reconstruction chief at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

From one key Iraqi’s perspective, much of the reconstruction funds were misspent.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Oct. 14) – Upset by the war in Iraq, Julia Wilson vented her frustrations with President Bush last spring on her Web page on MySpace.com.

She posted a picture of the president, scrawled “Kill Bush” across the top and drew a dagger stabbing his outstretched hand. She later replaced her page on the social-networking site after learning in her eighth-grade history class that such threats are a federal offense.

It was too late.

Federal authorities had found the page and placed Wilson on their checklist. They finally reached her this week in her molecular biology class.

In a month in which the US Congress voted to legalize torture, discard the US Constitution by abolishing habeas corpus and increase the military budget to prolong the daily slaughter of hundreds of Iraqis and Afghanis, the big controversy among the mass media and elected officials is the sexual overtures of a Republican Congressman to adolescent boys employed by Congress.

Millions of fundamentalist Christians, who blindly supported the Republican Congress’ deadly ‘War on Terror’ are in revolt against their Party because of its tolerance toward a single pervert – overlooking the torture at Abu Ghraib, Israel’s massive bombing of Lebanon and the Bush Administration’s criminal abandonment of the hundreds of thousands of poor (mostly black) citizens in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Why do US Congress members and the mass media go into a political feeding frenzy over personal sexual transgressions like Congressman Foley’s nasty e-mail flirtations with teenage boys or former President Clinton’s office adventures in extramarital sex with a White House intern and not over issues of great consequence for peace or war, democracy or authoritarianism, torture or human rights?

Superficial commentators trot out our Anglo-American ‘Puritan heritage’: a pseudo-explanation, which overlooks the US democratic-constitutional heritage, our recent history of opposing the Vietnam War, and our signing of the United Nation Charter on Human Rights. Since there are numerous historical pasts, there is no single ‘heritage’ that dominates others, especially when the so-called ‘Puritan’ past is overlain with a highly sexualized mass culture over the last 50 years.

We should leave aside dubious psycho-cultural explanations because they fail to explain political behavior. Specifically, even if ‘Puritan morality’ were such a dominant aspect of US political life, it cannot explain why one should focus only on sexual misdeeds of individual politicians and not the immorality of the widespread, systematic use of sexual torture practiced by US interrogators in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo prison camp and specifically approved by the Bush Administration.

“The legacy of Nuremberg and the solemn undertaking that Justice Jackson gave for the United States at the opening session, are under assault by the Bush Administration, which has embraced a radical world view that rests on a cult of power and a disdain for law.” Scott Horton, When Lawyers Are War Criminals

Before Congress recessed, it passed, amid much criticism, the Military Commissions Act (MCA). The Act has consequences for citizens and non-citizens alike. Among it’s worst features, it authorizes the President to detain, without charges, anyone whom he deems an unlawful enemy combatant. This includes U.S. citizens. It eliminates habeas corpus review for aliens. It also makes providing “material support” to terrorists punishable by military commission. And, once again, the military commissions procedures allow for coerced testimony, the use of “sanitized classified information” (where the source is not disclosed), and trial for offenses not historically subject to trial by military commissions. (Terrorism is not historically a military offense; it’s a crime.) Finally, by amending the War Crimes Act, it allows the president to authorize interrogation techniques that may nonetheless violate the Geneva Conventions and provides future and retroactive immunity for those who engage in or authorize those acts.

Given the troubling new broad powers Congress has given the President, what will happen now?

Yesterday’s report in the Washington Post that over 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the US-led invasion is just the latest bit of bad news to hit the Bush administration. In fact, the buzzards have been circling the White House for some time now and they won’t be leaving anytime soon.

The “peer-reviewed” report from the John Hopkins School of Public Health followed all the standard procedures for producing a thoroughly credible survey. After interviewing nearly 2,000 Iraqi residents, checking death certificates and records at the morgue, they compiled their data and made their calculations. “The same survey methods were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions.”

The Bush administration has never challenged the organization’s findings before. In fact, they used the group’s reckoning on Sudan to accuse the Sudanese government of “genocide”. If that’s true, then Iraq must be “triple-genocide”; an entirely new nomenclature for the premeditated obliteration of the world’s oldest civilization.

Still, in the face of mounting pressure and widespread public unease, Bush has ordered a carrier group to the Gulf; steaming ahead for an apocalyptic confrontation with Iran. When the time is right, he’ll blow the whistle and the bombs will start pelting down like a Texas hailstorm.

It’s a death-wish.

Bush is chugging inexorably towards Tehran and we’re all being swept along in his wake. It’s like one last wild ride on the Titanic before we hit the ice in the open seas and slip slowly beneath the waves.