DETROIT -- How about a little focus and perspective about what's happening to our nation in the steady grip of international imperialism and domestic Stalinism? Sure, there should be howls over people at the State Department illegally peering at the passport files of presidential hopefuls Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The file-prying was an egregious violation of privacy.
Even McCain was a tad miffed, saying, "I expect a through review and a change in procedures as necessary to ensure the privacy of passport files." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promises an internal investigation and called the candidates to apologize.
Suspecting treachery is a reasonable and measured response to everything that happens under the Bush regime. In 1992, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, the passport files of his rival, Bill Clinton, were scoured for evidence of the rightwing wacko myth that Clinton once denounced his American citizenship.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich jumped into the fray, saying the government's responsibility to keep passport records confidential is an "absolute obligation." Frothing on the Fox News Channel, Newt argued, "I suspect these people have broken the law. I don't think it's enough just to fire them, and frankly, if the first breakthrough was back in January, how can they say that the security worked?"
Gingrich then demanded a Justice Department investigation, "because we have to sustain a very high standard of protecting the privacy rights of Americans."
High standards? How about any standards at all.
The passport-prying is nothing compared to the secret government program to wiretap the phone conversations and Internet activities of literally hundreds of millions of Americans. That's what the Bush-Cheney-inspired National Security Agency program did and probably still does.
Where's the outcry about that? It's the most far-reaching monitoring of the private lives of Americans in the nation's history. The illegal warrantless wiretapping Bush initiated tramples on the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and disconnects any judicial review of the government spying. It's right out of the textbook used by Stalin's secret police and the Stasi in East Germany, even more so now with advances in technology.
"Protecting privacy rights" is only words for faux conservatives who regularly urinate on the Bill of Rights, all in the name of making us safe and secure. Now they are hell-bent to grant immunity for all the giant telecommunications companies that broke the law and conspired with Bush's Stasi, spying on countless innocent people.
Why should these crooked corporations get "Get Out of Jail Free" cards? Not that any of the telecom executives would ever do prison time anyway, but they do want their obscene salaries and bonuses protected from any dip in earnings lawsuits might force.
Privacy rights mean nothing to the Busheviks; corporate profits mean everything. That's the perspective that's needed as we follow the passport-file snooping on three presidential candidates, a minor transgression compared to assaulting the rights of all the American people.
Weighing in one week after the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq presents the advantage and perspective of having heard what the architects of war said about the mess they built, the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history.
President George W. Bush made a thoroughly horrible speech at the Pentagon. By the way, when was the last time he made any speech where regular people, not just invited guests used as visual props, were allowed to hear the words of our fearless leader? The quick answer is that "commander guy" is deathly afraid of boos.
Never once in his remarks did Bush even mention why he ordered the invasion. It was the "solid" evidence and certain fear that Saddam Hussein was hoarding weapons of mass destruction. We heard the refrains incessantly: "Iraq is a threat," "Saddam must give up his weapons," and "We can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud."
But not even a passing mention of the stated reason for attacking Iraq -- a pre-emptive war that has killed over 100,000 Iraqis (a low count), displaced 5 million people, killed 4,000 Americans, and wounded and disabled tens of thousands more soldiers. All this at a cost that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz now says will hit $3 trillion for U.S. taxpayers.
Bush said his invasion of Iraq "was a remarkable display of military effectiveness," without mentioning that planning and managing post-Saddam Iraq was also a military project and fiasco for the ages. How quickly we forget the glib former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the most arrogant and incompetent military leader since the Brits who planned the invasion of Gallipoli in World War I.
Bush did mention that a little over a year ago "the fight in Iraq was faltering," but thank God, he and his neoconservative global strategists, like the cavalry to the rescue, decided it was high time for a troop escalation -- i.e., the surge.
Never one for modesty, Bush declared, "The surge has done more than turn the situation around -- it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror" Then Bush mentioned a long-forbidden name: "In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his murderous network. And the significance of the development cannot be overstated."
Bush -- who fashions himself as Lawrence of Iraq -- vastly overstated and misrepresented the "Arab uprising" and what it can lead to in the long run. Arming and bribing former Sunni insurgents in Anbar province and turning them against al-Qaeda in Iraq -- as opposed to bin Laden's al-Qaeda, an important distinction Bush conveniently ignores -- has the potential of making future Sunni-Shiia conflicts even more bloody.
Without political accommodations -- and there are none on the horizon -- the force escalation is a failure. Unless, of course, your strategy is aimed at permanent U.S. bases and military presence in Iraq.
While most in the mainstream media chirp about "the success of the surge" like trained seals, Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has a more fact-based and sober assessment. Cole's Informed Comment Web site is one of the best around for reliable news and insightful analysis on developments in the Middle East.
I read it every day and I have interviewed Juan many times at his Ann Arbor, Mich., home. While so many not- ready-for-prime time "experts" -- mostly former political appointees at government agencies -- trip over the subtleties and nuances in the region, Cole is a committed scholar who knows the history, cultures, religions and languages essential in understanding the Middle East.
He discussed the surge strategy and other issues in a piece in Salon titled "Five Years of Lies: How President Bush and his advisors have spent each year of the war peddling mendacious tales about a mission accomplished."
Cole describes how U.S. military leaders began "paying Sunni Arab Iraqi guerrillas and others in provinces such as al-Anbar to side with the United States and turn on the foreign jihadis, most of them from Saudi Arabia and North Africa. U.S. troops also began a new counterinsurgency strategy, focused on taking control of Sunni neighborhoods, clearing them of armed guerrillas, and then staying in them on patrol to ensure that the guerrillas did not re-establish themselves."
That shapes up to a lasting police presence for U.S. soldiers, far different from Bush's description of the moves that "inspired Iraqis to take up the fight" and what he claims are "more than 90,000 local citizens who are protecting their communities from the terrorists and insurgents and the extremists."
Another surge "success" is the sectarian cleansing used to attempt to pacify Baghdad. Cole adds:
"The strategy of disarming the Sunni Arabs of Baghdad -- who in 2003 constituted nearly half of the capital's inhabitants -- had enormous consequences. Shiite militias took advantage of the Sunnis' helplessness to invade their neighborhoods at night, kill some as an object lesson, and chase the Sunnis out. Hundreds of thousands of Baghdad residents were ethnically cleansed in the course of 2007, during the surge, and some two-thirds of the more than 1.2 million Iraqi refugees who ended up in Syria were Sunni Arabs. Baghdad, a symbol of past Arab glory and of the Iraqi nation, became at least 75 percent Shiite, perhaps more."
The Republican's sword bearer, Sen. John McCain, was in Baghdad last week for a telling and chilling visit. Iraq, Iran, Sunni, Shiite -- what's the difference? That was McCain's either bumbled or calculated message. Like Bush, he envisions endless war in Iraq, a "hundred years," and he's showing greater inclination to wage war on Iran.
McCain said, "It's common knowledge" that Iran was harboring and training al-Qaeda terrorists -- an absurdity for anyone who took Middle East 101. So then his fellow traveler Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Likud-Conn., whispered a correction into his ear. McCain modified it to Iran was training "Islamic extremists across the border."
Instead of a "senior moment," McCain's sloppy muddling of the facts -- claiming Sunni al-Qaeda types were doing spring training in Shiite Iran -- may point to a more sinister thought process.
After the initial correction, McCain's national security spokesman Randy Scheunemann told the New York Sun, "There is ample documentation that Iraq has provided many different forms of support of Sunni extremists, including al-Qaeda as well as Shi'ia extremists. It would require a willing suspension of disbelief to deny Iran supports al-Qaeda."
Scheunemann's statement was neocon crap, Cheneyesque -- in tone, bellicose; in substance, no evidence. That should not be surprising since Comrade Scheunemann once served his neocon cell as spokesman for the Committee to Liberate Iraq, a group of warmongers pushing for the invasion of Iraq long before the 9/11 attacks and their invention that Saddam possessed phantom WMDs.
On Palm Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI called for an immediate end to the war in Iraq, saying, "Enough with the slaughters, enough with the violence, enough with hatred in Iraq."
Bush, who claims God chose him for this task, says, "The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary, it is just."
McCain agrees with him.
Cole sees the reality: "Bush's heir apparent in the Iraq propaganda department has been signaling that 'complete victory' in Iraq will be his talking point of choice for Year Six. If the mainstream media and the American public don't wake up to the truth about how the war has gone, they'll find themselves buying into an even longer and deeper tragedy."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 25 2008 |