The Empire 134

'Bush to America: War!
by Jack Random
www.dissidentvoice.org

Faced with a collapse of popular and political support, the president’s response in an address to the nation was astonishing: Not only will the war effort go on unabated; it will be escalated and expanded.

The first question that arises is: Why was it necessary to dawn the mask of deliberations, dancing silently through two months of weighty consultations, for this?

This did not represent a change in strategy. It did not represent a change in thinking. Rather, it was open defiance: Damn the election; load the munitions! It was a barely discernible rephrasing of the same old tired lines:

“We must not fail” but we have failed.

The war is “noble and necessary” when in fact it was a war of choice founded on repeated lies and deceptions.

We are engaged in “the ideological struggle of our time” when in fact we have prosecuted the oldest imperial strategy in history: a war for greed and dominion.

We are “advancing liberty” by ripping a nation apart at the seams.

“We have to fight them over there so we will not have to fight them here” when in fact we have created more enemies by our actions than we can possibly count.

On and on, the president stands firm, lock-jawed and determined. He will not back down. He is a war president: Once a war president, always a war president.

He will send another 21,500 American warriors into door-to-door, urban battle in the midst of an exploding civil war.

He will push Iraqis to take up arms against Iraqis and position our forces in the crossfire.

He has dispatched a carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf with vague orders to engage Iran on the high seas.

Like the commander who cuts off the head of an emissary and returns it in a box, he has discarded even the hint of real diplomacy and hurled another volley of threats to Iraq’s neighboring nations.

Having replaced every commander and advisor who dared, however belatedly, to speak truth to diminishing power, the president has barricaded himself in a tower of stone. He cannot hear our protests. From his high perch, he can barely distinguish us as human beings.

What is the truth he cannot bear? Spurred on by a radical fringe of power hungry, oil greedy, unconditional Israeli loyalists, he defied the history of the world by attempting to become the first western power to successfully conquer, occupy and establish permanent dominion in the heart of the Middle East.

The most dangerous mythology to have evolved over four years of a catastrophic war is the one that holds: We could have prevailed if only we had committed sufficient troops from the beginning. History instructs otherwise. We could only have prolonged the catastrophe in a rising tide of Iraqi and American blood. To believe that the indigenous powers of the region or indeed the world would stand idly by while we seized the planet’s most illusive treasure is naïve in the extreme.

The second most dangerous myth to have evolved from this river of shame is the one espoused by Democratic spokesperson Dick Durbin (Senator, Ill.): That we have given the Iraqis enough. What have we delivered to the Iraqi people if not a broken nation, a legacy of death and a future as dark as a torture chamber in the basement of Guantanamo Bay?

No one wants an end to the war more than I do but not at a cost of blaming the victims. The Iraqi people did not invite us to invade and destroy their country. That invitation was culled from a corrupt circle of power hungry exiles -- bloodsucking leeches of the neocon dream.

We cannot be absolved from responsibility for committing the cardinal crime of international law (aggressive war) either by prolonging the suffering or by proclaiming our nobility as if by birthright. To promulgate either deception would be to announce to the world that we have learned nothing from our egregious crimes and that we are fully capable of repeating the offense.

The fallacies of the president’s plan for success are too clear for any honest analyst to ignore. Throwing our soldiers into the crossfire, imbedding them with alien forces, engaging the Mahdi army, baiting Iran and threatening Syria can only result in an exponential increase of violence, resistance and civil divide.'

Lees verder: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan07/Random11.htm