Bush’s Unceasing War in Iraq…

Ironically and accurately viewed as:

“ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS DOWN ON THE FARM”*

By: Leonard Carrier.  DW’s In-House Historian and Philospher

Everything that’s going on in Iraq, and at home, makes it look like a phony war–no defined enemy and no call for personal sacrifice except on the part of the military. That makes it look more like a “war game” than a real war. The reason I wouldn’t classify it as a war game, however, is that people are getting killed by the thousands (us) and by hundreds of thousands (them).

To me that makes it seem more like a laboratory experiment. We’ve got the rats (Iraqis) at our mercy, and we’re using the cats (our military) to experiment on them. Sometimes the rats fight back and kill some cats. In the background are the animal trainers (like Paul Bremer) who devise a new environment for the rats to live in (flat income tax, privatization of oil revenues) to see how many rats can survive in those new surroundings.

We also have the animal doctors who measure how much depleted uranium it takes to kill the rat-babies. We let the rats form a government–but only under our political trainers. We then devise punishments for the rat-government when they don’t meet certain demands, like controlling violence on the part of certain rat-rebels whose rat-families have been killed by our cats.

If this sounds like speciesism, that’s because it is. We use terms like “raghead” and “greaseball” to describe the rats, and we devise tortures for them for our entertainment, just to let them see how much we detest them (Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib). All the while, we tell the rats that what we’re doing is for their own good, that it’s part of “democratization,” and then we take a poll to see whether we’re convincing any of them. Of the rats we do manage to convince, we tell them that it’s too bad the other rats are now their enemies for collaborating with us, and that they’d better watch their backs. Then we can check to see how effective they are in staying alive.

Orwell had it right. In 1984 his premise was that constant war abroad allowed Big Brother to run roughshod over everyone’s rights at home (except for those running the rat race). Then in Animal Farm he showed how easy it was for the pigs to take over the farm and persecute the other animals. Iraq is our animal farm, and the pigs who control the cats are having a field day.

*This article is a reprint of Dr. Carrier’s recent contribution to our corresponding Blog –http://watchingpolitics.com/?p=3481,  with his and their kind permission.

American Fascism* Neo-Con Judeo-Christian Zionist Herrenvolk….. A FREE BOOK FOR DW READERS! An annotated  and documented summary of how
	Christian
and Jewish Zionists
	In a Neo-Con Fascist Combination
Guided America into World War III (Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Mythological War on Terrorism)

A revised and up-dated reprise of “B.E.A.SOLUTION”, a comprehensive paper on the Judeo-Christian origins of war written and submitted by DW Foreign Policy Editor, Robert R. (Dusty) Schoch to the  B.E.A.* June 19, 2004.

*The B.E.A. (“Barristers et al”) is a N.C.-based foreign policy think tank. We are a voluntary and charitably-constituted and oriented assembly of a-political attorneys, physicians, teachers, writers, military personnel and lay members who collaborate to develop and disseminate (for the most part on the internet) peace-oriented foreign policy alternatives.  I serve as the group’s “scribe”  and work as liaison where the B.E.A. elects to communicate with other think tanks and policy institutes.

PREFATORY NOTE:  This is a comprehensive paper (more like a book—viz. 38 pages and 18,000 words) and covers the war in Afghanistan and Iraq from start to … (I was about to say finish, but as long as there’s oil and Halliburton in Iraq, there will never be a finish).  It has to do with causation.  What elements and events (beginning with the formation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the consequences thereof occurring on September 11, 2001) led America to become an aggressor nation led by a bunch of fascist/Zionist  neo-con Christian Rightists and Jews?

I have re-edited this paper because it was first written as a sort of “prediction” of failure for Bush’s “War on Terror” and his “Bush Doctrine” warning the world that America would attack any nation harboring what Bush deemed “terrorists”.

Since it was written, our worst and scariest fears have come to “fruition.”  Americans have not brought anything but terror into Iraq and Afghanistan and that terror will persist until America abandons its fascist policies and withdraws from the Middle East.

DW Readers are urged to purchase and read the new book by Chris Hedges, entitled “American Fascists – The Christian Right and the War on America” ,  which book pretty much confirms everything contained in the “B.E.A.Solution” paper (a book in itself)  which follows.  The link to Hedges’ book is here:

DW readers are also urged to download and store this (present)  article (book) as it was written (before Hedges’ I might mention) to provide for the B.E.A. (and now DW members and readers) a comprehensive  accounting of how a “critically-massed” combine of Zionist Jews and Fundamentalist Christians essentially inspired and machinated the wars declared by Bush on Afghanistan and Iraq, and (still) pursues the plan to extend this new “reordering of the Middle East” into Iran, Syria and …beyond.

Note that this offering supplies you with an invaluable “TIME LINE FOR WAR”, (beginning about page 22) which provides for your present information and future reference an outline of all the major facts and events that combine to show that the thesis of the present essay is sound…and chillingly true.  And now, the edited article, originally published in 2004, when the majority of America was still mostly deceived enough to be bullish on the war against Terrorism being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq….  But, as you read, BEWARE – the Christian Right, despite what has happened in Iraq, still wants the war in the Middle East to continue…because…you guessed it. . .

“IT IS GOD’S WILL….”

I’ve entitled this offering “B.E.A.Solution” because if you (now “you” includes not only B.E.A. members, but DW readers…wherever you are) don’t make yourself part of the solution (as in how you cast your next presidential—and other– ballots) you are part of the problem.  To put the “solutions” in context, I will here print my last letter to you, which was in essence a promise to supply you with the reference materials necessary for you to validate for yourselves  my argument that Bush’s now proven failed “war on terrorism” was the result of the collision of a “critical mass” of Neo-Conservative craziness and craft composed of essentially two castastrophic constituents:  (1) The Christian/Zionist/Left-Behind Rightist  Armageddon Neo-Cons which are Bush’s constituent base, and (2) the Jewish Zionist Cabal who took over our Pentagon and still run our military show.

I realize we are all distracted with problems involved in our “Mexican Standoff” in Iraq…where we’re dead if we stay and damned if we depart…But this problem will become a template for our future demise if we don’t attend to the problem that caused that dilemma, because that problem still exists….The Neo-Con Christian/Zionist Herrenvolk plan to take over the Middle East (to consummate the folie-a-deux  dreams of the Christian/Jewish Zionist Consortium [a la Genesis 15:17] has hit natural snags in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is clearly still in place, and if Bush is elected, this deluded bunch of Neo-Con crazies is going to continue our present willy-nilly devil-may-care plunge into international Armageddon because they think it’s predestined to happen…It’s written in the Bible!!!…Combining the childish (but cataclysmically lethal)  mythologies of Genesis 15:17, Revelations  and Matthew 24, the disastrous “critical mass” that presently threatens the perpetuity of peace on planet earth is catastrophically laid out. Genesis 15:17 provides “God’s” grant/promise to the Jews…and their progeny–including of course the Zionist Christians–all the land between

the Nile and the Euphrates…and hence, most of the world’s oil supply).

CRAZY JOHN’S (writer of Bible’s “Revelations” Book)

MODERN COUNTERPART –

Tim LaHaye

Christian Fascist Pied Piper and author

Of Christian-youth propaganda series “Left Behind” books,

Conning young people into not only believing that the wars

In Afghanistan and Iraq are part of God’s plan, but ENJOYING

The  Biblically-Alleged “Rapture” that will call them to heaven and leave

The rest (ALL OF US WHO ARE NOT

BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIANS) BEHIND.

MAKE NO MISTAKE…

This “Left Behind Bunch” lumps terrorists and

All non-born again Christians in the same group-

Those who will be “gone” (dead if you will, in the forever sense of the word) when this war of Armageddon they started to fulfill God’s Prophesies is over.

If you don’t believe it, check out the website where the Left Behind authors are interviewed at:

http://www.leftbehind.com/channelhelpinfo.asp?pageid=187&channelID=93

The entire Book of Revelations supplies a  madman’s  (John’s) delusional forecasts- and frenetic formula for  the destruction of mankind—a destruction cunningly and conveniently mollified by the Christian Gospel of Matthew, who in Chapter 24  predicts the sparing of those “lifted up” from the conflagration in the “rapture”….the current version of which sinister Jewish/Christian/Zionist plan is being marketed in the best-selling “Left Behind” books.  Better read ‘em before this wild bunch of Biblically-Babbling crazies, led by Bush (who blithely features himself as the legendary Captain of the Crusading forces in the Armageddon End Game) manage to ordain their neo-consolidated plans for PAX-American world domination (through divine destruction and selective salvation).  As I said before, Neo-Con Christian Zionist Herrenvolk…is now upon us. And just as when the Nazi Herrenvolk was starting its juggernaut roll across Germany and Europe, most American citizens are so astonished  and unable to believe its leadership could be truly waging a preemptive  genocidal war that most of us are just burying our heads in civil sand wondering–asMichael Moore laments in F 911—“Is/was it all a dream?” The genocide which was first conceived and executed by ancient Jews in Genesis and Exodus  (the repercussions of which their progeny have complained of for the past 2000 years) is now inherent in the  Christian and Jewish Zionist union which has combined to wage war against all peoples who oppose their neo-con Genesis-revival plan to machinate the fulfillment of shared Biblical prophesy, both in terms of real estate acquisition and eventual dominance (by the return of Jesus Christ as foretold by Matthew et al ). Oil and real estate acquisition have made strange bedfellows, but if you dare…take a look at the Jewish “manifesto” in PNAC.com,and the collateral Christian Manifesto in zioninprophesy.com…and if it doesn’t scare the living Z-Jesus out of you, I say to you, you are clearly illiterate.   And we are lost.

If you will bear with me, visit and ponder this material, taking your brain and independent thought along with you in the journey, you will have hell scared into you. But you will also become enlightened. If enough people understand what happened between the events of (1) the Wurmser’s presentation (“A Clean Break” — the plan for Jewish/Christian conquest of the Middle East to Netanyahu in 1997, and (2) the window of opportunity provided by 9/11 and our Twin Tower’s toppling for this insane plan, turned down by two presidents to find a sponsor in our little cretin cowboy of an American President, GW Bush, there is still cause for hope.

If you will bear with me, and visit this material, I will also promise you that your curiosity about the “Bush” swagger will be quenched. I mean…and I know you have all wondered about it…How can he continue to look so damned CONFIDENT and act so inconceivably  cocky and unembarrassed when he has been proved to be a liar in every respect (cause for war) , and a failure in every respect (maneuvers in war)?  Time Magazine (Sept. 6) covered him the man “With No Excuses”.   With proof that he lied about WMD’s; with proof and admissions that there were no Iraq/Al Qaeda connections; with his declared  “mission accomplished” now established by the consensus as a perpetual mission impossible…What keeps the smile on this imbecile’s face?  The answer to that is the most frightening reality since Adam and Eve flirted under the Tree of Knowledge. But you’re going to have to dig this one out from the material provided herewith. I’ll give you a hint, though, for incentive. The hint is this: His apparent insouciance is totally authentic– He truly doesn’t care. His mission IS being accomplished…because he’s deluded into believing his mission is His (God’s) mission.  You can unravel the mystery of his not caring if you read Matthew 24…especially Matthew 24:24. Pick up the “Good Book” of xenophobia, genocide and world conquest and read it for yourself.  Long before Mohammed lifted his sword and said “I’m the new prophet of God , just as Jesus was, and follow me or fall before my sword” , the same God instructed a long succession of Jews and Christians that He was granting them the promised land of “milk and honey”  ( neo-con trans: Suez canal and oil) and if any ….(other-type) people stand in the way…you have 007 blanket authority to take them out…every man, woman, child, ass, goat, dog and chicken.  Yes my B.E.A. friends, it is quite significant in our current circumstances to realize and admit and be concerned with the fact that the notion, concept and institution of ethnic cleansing and genocide have their roots in the Judeo-Christian manual of arms, entitled , “The Bible”.   As Salinger’s protagonist lamented in “Catcher in the Rye”….  “Ol’ Jesus would have puked!”.   Now, onward Christian soldiers…Let’s get back to this issue of War in Afghanistan and Iraq, and study how it all happened.  Forget for a moment that we have huge problems in getting out of Iraq and focus on how we can prevent this from happening in Iran, Syria, Korea…and eventually everywhere in the world where people resist our country’s newly-declared right to wage preemptive war against “any country that gives aid to terrorists”.

Who declared this “Bush Doctrine” in the first place, for starters?  I can tell you IT WAS NOT GEORGE BUSH.       It was UTTERED (actually read before a teleprompter) by George Bush,  but it was written by a guy named Frum; dictated by a guy named Perle; motivated by a guy named Wolfowitz, orchestrated by a guy named Kristol, mediated by a guy named Cheeney, and inspired by an arch-neo-com academic named  Leo Strauss.  Unless you read and carefully study this recent history, it’s going to repeat itself in your lifetime. In fact, it’s quite apt to determine your lifetime, as it has over 1000 relatively innocent American soldiers–not to mention tens of thousands of innocent , if ignorant, Islamics, formerly denizens of presently American-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.

I know you all have heard “murmurings” in the whispering “left-wing” media of those names just given…David Frum (Bush speech writer Douglas Feith (Feith and Zell Associates) , David and Meyrav Wurmser, Richard Perle (A.E.I.- American Enterprise Institute, “study group leader”), Paul Wolfowitz (Dep. Sec. of Defense) , William Kristol Editor, Weekly Standard) Leo Stauss (professor of political science University of Chicago, teacher of Wolfowitz, paradigm for Perle) but I am confident  you hadn’t heard anything about them prior to 9/11, 2001.

Before I get to “solutions”, I will print here the B.E.A. Preview I sent you April 13… I suggest you scan through it to put the solutions in context….The current offering will resume with bold print … “BACK TO SOLUTIONS….”

April 13, 2004

B.E.A. PREVIEW:                 NEO-CON-ZIONIST HERRENVOLK

Dear B.E.A. friends,

As a PREFACE AND GENERAL CAVEAT,   I want to first suggest that we all  – Stop paying attention to what’s happening now, long enough to at least figure out how we got to the place we are now. If we don’t do that, we’ll be blinded by the trees in a forest where we don’t belong. The trees are a problem—yes—but the problem remains….how to get the hell out of the woods.  We don’t need to get overly distracted about the Rice debriefing or the daily body count in Iraq…or even about bodies being hung from bridges. As riveting/horrible as these events and images are,  they are obstacles to our properly viewing a much more predominant and vital fact…We are in the forest of war again…maybe not the Jungles of Viet Nam, but perhaps a forest globally more ominous.  And don’t forget the lesson of “Wagging the Dog”– The best way Bush could devise to keep us from focusing on the mistake of invading Iraq would be to have us focus on a totally-unrelated subject (such as who was asleep at the switch on 9/11/01.) This may not be “wagging the dog” in the Hollywood movie mode, but it’s nonetheless an effective strategic distraction. We’ve got over 150,000 troops in Iraq in a PAX-American war we can’t win, and we can’t get out.  And the longer we stay in, the closer we come to fostering World War III, fulfilling  bin Laden’s wildest dreams of an Islamic/Christian conflagration,  and ordaining Saddam’s prophesy of the “Mother of all Wars”.  As the stories unfold, showing that  Iraq and Afghanistan were pathetically ill-conceived wars (with no effect on terrorism and no exit strategies even analyzed) and perhaps even criminally-contrived by intentional disinformation by Pentagon intelligence sources, we need to realize that the best way to distract Americans from looking deeper into the origins of  war is  to escalate  war.  We’ll never be able to see clearly enough to find our way out of the forest while our leaders are planting  trees faster than we can cut them down.  So let’s get back to focusing on the reason we are in the Iraqi forest before the war machinists convert it to an Arabian Heart of Darkness.

This is the beginning of the forecast series of offerings, the gist of which is to furnish you with the resources you will need (at least, if you don’t have them already) to understand why we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq; what those wars bode, and what, if anything we can do to reverse the processes that started them. I suggest you save this and the ensuing B.E.A. mailings, as they will be interrelated and cumulative, and the plan is to give you a comprehensive, documented treatment of the topic issues. As a side-bar, whatever develops from this series of offerings and exchanges will (with the permission of all contributors) be submitted for dissemination/publication in as broad a public/political and media forum as is attainable.

I’ll now remind you of what was said when this topic was first mentioned:  When the series of offerings is done, those who wish to remain on the B.E.A. mailing list will be asked to contribute something (quantum and quality of response being up to the individual).  Those who do not respond will be taken off the B.E.A. mailing list.  The reason is as previously stated—Anyone who sits back today  in silence and condones what his leaders are doing is as responsible as the leaders,  and what our leaders are doing now (my opinion) is intolerable, counter-productive, and according to previously-adopted international law, criminal. The participation asked of you ultimately may be no more than to signify your approval or disapproval of a collective policy proposal, statement or set thereof.

In preparing this most important B.E.A. offering, I came to realize that it can’t be done in a single message or e-mail.  I would wind up simply sending you a series of related ideas and websites to search to explore them…too much to digest in a month of reading. So, I decided that in order to conquer the task, it had to be divided, and so it is.  I will be sending you, in roughly bi-monthly serial increments, the whole subject, covered one general topic at a time. There will be overlapping.

As said before, I explicitly ask that you do not take my opinion as your own. I am expressing my point of view only so that you can better form—and articulate– your own by way of response.  To better structure the presentation of resource materials and the consideration and—hopefully—the debating thereon, I will in this first offering give you an index of topics to come, and a theoretical matrix in which to consider the several topic areas.  I’ll give you here first the “theoretical matrix” and then the outline and order of serial sections to come.

I.

THE MATRIX:    “NEO-CON ZIONIST HERRENVOLK”

Why are we involved with  bloody wars in Iraq—and still in Afghanistan—that have changed  America’s perceived national character from “protector/defender” to “fascist aggressor” nation and caused  most of the world to fear and despise us?   It’s as if World War III is already underway, and if things continue in the direction they seem to be, WW III could actually happen and we could actually lose.  How did all this begin?  Who was really responsible? Can—should—we do anything now about it?

ANSWER  (only  opinion…and stated simply to structure the subjects which will follow with resource materials that will  be entirely devoid of my opinion, input or authorship) :

            History shows there are never wars with a single cause.  Slavery was not “the cause” of the Civil War in America.  At the same time it (slavery) was a “necessary condition”.  Logically (Aristotelian logic) things (or “antecedents”) have “necessary” or “sufficient” relations to their results (or “consequents”).  Example: Logically, we know that all normal dogs have 4 legs.  So, it’s “necessary” for an animal to have 4 legs in order for it to be a normal dog. Accordingly, we can “soundly and validly” argue that: “(1) All dogs have 4 legs; (2) Blackie is a normal dog; (3) Therefore, Blackie has 4 legs.”  On the other hand, in order for an animal to be a normal dog, it’s not “sufficient” for it to have 4 legs, and thus you can’t say that “This animal has 4 legs and therefore, it’s a normal dog.”  That’s a fallacy (Aristotle called it “assuming the consequent” of the  syllogism or “modus ponens” argument  if I recall correctly.) All this is just common street-sense with an erudite slant…but to answer the question of “why war?” we need to understand it—completely and profoundly.

History students know that there was more to the Civil War than a North/South dispute on slavery. But the astute historian would also insist that, without the slavery dispute, there would likely have been no war.  So the slavery issue was not a “sufficient” cause for our Civil War in theory…because there were other “necessary conditions” that played a decisive role in the road to that horrible war (and all wars are horrible, and all wars are mistakes; and all wars are preventable.)  The 9/11/2001 attack on the Twin Towers was not “the cause” of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it was certainly a “necessary condition”.   The way G.W. Bush reacted to this terrorist act seemed to imply that at least he considered the terrorist attack a “sufficient” provocation for war against terrorism. But we need to study and understand what ALL THE NECESSARY CONDITIONS (CAUSES) WERE, BECAUSE THERE WERE SEVERAL MAJOR ONES…and unless we understand  what those converging—and integral–elements were, there’s no way we can halt them, and if we can’t stop them now, we may be facing (and possibly losing) WW III—Enough 9/11-grade terrorism committed by  increasingly-zealous Islamic Jihadists could clearly and certainly  topple the already teetering geo-political structure and stature of the United States and its already-wavering allies.  The Bush wars are clearly fueling rather than foiling fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.

CRITICAL MASS

To provide the “MATRIX” for seeking and studying these CAUSES—these interrelated—and integral– “necessary” conditions for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, I’m going to refer you to the most dangerous WMD on earth – the Atomic Bomb. Literally, “critical mass” was that approximately 6-inch ball of refined uranium in the Hiroshima bomb; it takes at least this quantity of nuke material to fuel a thermonuclear event.  In this metaphor, WW III will be the DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST  RETALLIATION we would like to prevent by DEFUSING (or “de-triggering”)  the war bomb so to think and speak.   Our WW II (real) Manhattan-projected bomb required both a  “CRITICAL MASS” of Uranium and a “TRIGGER” (a load of dynamite to “implode” it and set up the chain reaction by crunching together the “critical” uranium core until its sub-atomic elements went to battle with each other in a sort of war of all against all in a theater they named “ground zero”). [Isn’t it ironic Americans chose that name for the phantom footprints of the Twin Towers left by the Islamic bombers? ]

In this metaphor about WW III,  I’m suggesting we view the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as atom bombs that “went off”—preemptively of course.   What were the elements that comprised the “critical mass”…all the “necessary conditions” that together amounted to a “sufficient” cause for war(s)?   And, finally, what was the “TRIGGER”…I.E.  the “TNT” that crunched the critical mass into the explosion of war in the Middle East…that’s presently killing American soldiers and civilian workers and posing a cataclysmic  threat  to world peace and American…survival?

MY CANDIDATES FOR “CRITICAL MASS ELEMENTS” and “TRIGGER” CONSTITUTE THE SUBJECTS TO BE TREATED IN COMING B.E.A. SERIAL OFFERINGS AS FOLLOWS: 

1. The TRIGGER:

The “Trigger” was the attack of 9/11 and it will not receive separate treatment.

(2) THE  “CRITICAL MASS”:

(The list of “necessary conditions”, or causes

that, acting together became the “sufficient condition”

for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq….

Those issues/elements without which there would have

been no wars, and those issues/elements which if

addressed and remedied in the future may avert the

escalation to and consummation of WW III….)

B) The Zionists, (Jewish and Christian) and their plans (respectively) for theocratic Middle-Eastern, and world dominance, which plans were in place before 1000 B.C., but up-dated and implemented in present times on a minute-to-minute basis.

C) Essentially inert  cast-iron Bomb casing catastrophically cast  in  a Constitutional foundry of un-checked and un-balanced executive war power ( Oval Office of President G.W. Bush, C.I.C., U.S. Armed Forces).

QUERRY:  Why are the nefarious OIL corporations,  Military/Industrialists and Cheney’s own Halliburton Corp being left out in this outlining of “critical mass”?  Because I didn’t want to insult you all by belaboring the obvious.  And in the end, these

war mongers and Daddy-Warbucks profiteers are the perennial

partners of all wars, and will hence be mentioned only in passing. No literate soul with a beating heart and a waking thought is today deceived by Dick Cheney’s agenda.  Hell knows he’s still on the Halliburton payroll.  But, Halliburton and the munitions-makers aren’t really running the show; they’re just selling the popcorn (occasionally even delivering it). We need to focus

on those more  opaque and heavy elements presently filling the Oval office with their increasingly-critical mass so we can either get rid of them, or dispense with the trigger, or better…both. 

Well, that’s about enough for preview.  I’m in the process of getting the necessary permissions to e-mail you each a copy of the seminal—and perhaps the most significant and comprehensive synthesis/expose’ on the “junta” of “Neo-Conservatives”  who, according to many sources (which I will share),  took over the Pentagon and led Bush to lead us to  war in Afghanistan and Iraq.  For those of you who want to start now, it’s the July, 2003 issue of “Vanity Fair”, and therein, Sam Tanehaus’ absolutely amazing interview of Paul Wolfowitz and others, along with his synthesis of elements constituting the “critical mass” and “trigger” we will be addressing.

     The Tanenhaus article will be accompanied by an unabridged transcript of the interview which took place between the two men, so you will not be constrained to take the media’s (or any pundit’s) opinion of whether Tanenhaus’ “take” on Wolfowitz was inaccurate or unfair.  Look in the horse’s mouth- always, when you have the opportunity.

(I now have permission from Vanity Fair to share individual e-copies of this article with any B.E.A./DW member who writes me and requests it. Here’s the address:   (Rschoch@triad.rr.com).

The “whole story” is pretty much outlined in the Vanity Fair article…but without cumulative corroborative support, it’s almost unbelievable. But, trust me, after you finish reading the materials to come, you’ll re-read the Tanenhaus article over and over again, and ask…. “How’d he know that, that early in the game?” The more you read, however, the more you’ll be asking, “Why didn’t we all see it coming back in 1997 when the Neo-Cons announced to the world in the media and on the World Wide Web their plan for “New World” dominion?  

If you don’t have a “working knowledge” about (1) the PNAC (Project for New American Century) , (2) the A.E.I. (American Enterprise Institute) and (3) the Weekly Standard (Magazine),   you desperatelyneed to read and study what’s to come. These groups (private, Neo-Con-funded “institutes”) are all inner-connected and to one extent or another working together.  They are located in the same building (The American Enterprise Institute Bldg. in D.C.).  When the terrorist planes were still airborne after the first Tower was struck, this is—LITERALLY—the place White House insiders went to hide.  Together these privately-funded institutes have members constituting the “cabal” which  international observers (along with recent bell-ringing  defectors from our own military , C.I.A. and now Bush’s own appointees) maintain effectively took over Bush’s foreign policy machine and the Pentagon, making Bush, Rice and Powell simply pawns in their New-World dominance game plan.  All the documentation necessary (and sufficient) to inform you on this will follow in issues to come.

In the meantime, if you aren’t totally satisfied with your own understanding of what is meant by “Neo-con’s” and you want to read perhaps the scariest document you will ever read (including all of  Stephen King’s and the Book of Revelations) , by way of preview and homework,  hit on the PNAC “manifesto” athttp://www.newamericancentury.org/

Be sure and hit the “Statement of Principles” link at the top of their website  to view their

very frightening (a la “Mien Kampf”)  manifesto.

…and take a gander at who signed it….and then try and figure out why I entitled this series of B.E.A. offerings…. “Neo-Con-Zionist Herrenvolk”.   A hint:  Take each officer and director’s (and founder’s) name and GOOGLE it alternately juxtaposed with 2 sets of key words : (1) “Zionist Jew”  and (2)  “Zionist Christian”….and see what you get. If that exploration pricks your interest, get ahead in the investigation and do the same GOOGLING with A.E.I. fellows, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David Frum and  Bill Kristol- all insider operatives in the junta the majority of the world’s political analysts think pulled off a pacific coup in the Pentagon and drove Bush—and us—through the first stages of their plan of world “re-ordering” with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, by lying to us, because their “prince of darkness” mentor (to be later identified) instructed them , in Machiavellian fashion, that “to lead and control your subjects, you must strategically lie to them and keep them in a state of war.”  If you find all this incredible, what’s going to follow is very apt to blow your socks off.

The “z  word”…

I fully realize that in suggesting that “Zionism” is involved in the motivations of the groups I have mentioned, I will be accused of being “anti-Semitic”.   That, you will eventually see, is an integral part of the Neo-con-game plan.  It is akin to the logic and propaganda of hyper-hawkish Republicans who maintain that if one is opposed to the Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one is opposed to America.  It is equally untrue to say that opposition to Neo-Con-Zionist plans to take over the Middle East constitutes opposition to either the Jews or Christians—even those who believe in Genesis 15:17. “Zionists” of the currently-expansionist neo-con variety are a distinct minority among both Jews and Christians. And don’t forget- just as  “black slavery” wasn’t the only (“sufficient”) cause for our Civil War,  “Zionism” (the ancient Biblical and persisting remedy for Jewish slavery and oppression) will not be (by me) presented as “the” cause for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will, however, be presented as an integral (and “necessary”) element, among others,  precipitating war.

With that, I’ll sign off pending your receipt of the initial offering on the subject of the Neo-Cons at the core of our currently—and cataclysmically–“critical mass”. 

Peace,

Dusty

War is the only Enemy.

BACK TO  SOLUTIONS….

Tanenhaus’ article gives meaningful bio and character sketches of all the major players in the neo-con takeover of the White House and Pentagon. Bush comes out looking exactly what he is….innocent because of ignorance. He had no idea of what had hit him (much less our Twin Towers) on 9/11 three years ago today.  It wasn’t merely 18 ICBM’s (intercontinental ballistic Muslims); it was a bunch of Machiavellian disciples  of Leo Struass.  Chicago’s professor Struass (who died in ’73) helped pull Wolfowitz from physics over to politics. Wolfie’s parents were  Jewish immigrants from Poland; When he met and studied under Leo Strauss (a German/Jewish  philosopher émigre’) the die for Pax American colonialism was most likely cast, eventuating in the informed political world’s denomination of Wolfowitz as “Wolfowitz of Arabia”.  Although pundits and academics will differ on it, it is the consensus that Strauss inspired Wolfowitz to switch from science (ballistic warfare technology…precursor to “smart bombing”) as a means of fulfilling  Zionist ambitions in the Middle East, to Platonic/Machiavellian politics including the axioms of  leadership by WAR AND LIES.  Specifically (do the research for yourself) Strauss taught Wolfowitz (as did Perle’s mentor who was himself a Straussian protégé’) that post-Amerian-Soviet détente politics would create a window of opportunity for a Pax American coup of the Middle East and eventually the civilized world— an opportunity that should be seized upon because it was basically too dangerous for the U.S. not to eventually rule a world of multi-lateral nuclear powers.  Correlative to this Pax American potentiality were the axioms that modern and enlightened leadership of America in this quest would be obliged to (1) keep America in a state of war in order to keep its people in a state of fear in order to keep them in a state of being vulnerable (credulous) of  (2) the big lies that would have to be told to the American people to make them think that waging a war of conquest in the Middle East was really a war to establish peace in a terroristic and needful-of-deliverance country.  This is the gist and essence of Straussian political philosophy which was derived from a brilliantly-synthesized amalgam of neo-Platonic/Pseudo-Aristotelian, para-Machiavellian brand of neo-con fascism.

But, according to Tanenhaus, and other informed sources, Perle and Wolfowitz  were but the executors of the neo-con will to fulfill Zionist prophesy with a  pretext of Pax-Americana paternalism. The draftsmen of the Zionist plot were clearly David and Merav Wurmser.  In a 1997 paper, entitled “A Clean Break”, this Jewish Zionist husband and wife team tried to persuade Isreal’s Prime Minister, Netanyaho to expand systematically Israel’s territorial interests to fulfill in effect Biblical myths of a grant from God of “promised land” property stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, via Syria, Iraq and other minor obstacles….but always Iraq first.  Sound familiar?  This is the only part of the plan Bush hasn’t commenced to execute, as he (against all Zionist wishes and odds) insisted on going after Afghanistan (because of bin Laden) first.

At THIS POINT, I suggest you GOOGLE  Wurmser and “A Clean Break” and  peruse the seeds of Armegeddon. The inception of the  serious neo-con Zionist plan for Middle Eastern take-over that our country has unwittingly begun to execute under the covert control of this Neo-Con Cabal of Christian and Jewish Zionists was articulated here.

“Smacks of Conspiracy Theory” I can predict you’re thinking about now.  Definitely.  The most successful conspiracies are the ones carried out IN THE OPEN.  In his conversations with Sam Tanenhaus, Wolfowitz  seethes at the suggestion that he, Kristol, Perle and other A.E.I. cabalers COVERTLY took over Bush’s Pentagon and began to “manufacture” intelligence as a pretext to declare war on Iraq.  The Irony in this denial is that is a clear admission.  Wolfowitz DOES NOT DENY THE CONSPIRACY….He simply maintains it was an OPEN AND OBVIOUS CONSPIRACY…. I’ll quote from p 118 of the Vanity Fair article:  “People think there’s a conspiracy”, says an amused Kristol, who like all Beltway pros can dismiss an idea even as he reinforces it. “It’s not as if Paul (Wolfowitz) and Richard (Perle) and I get together every month and decide what the next move is going to be.  But, yes, he admits, “Bush moved a little after 9/11. Certainly he says things now he wasn’t saying two years ago.” but “if it’s a cabal, it’s the most visible cabal ever.” After all, “we write articles.”  For his part, Wolfowitz is less amused, bristling at any suggestion of secrecy. “It’s completely out in the open who holds these views in this administration. It couldn’t be more transparent.”

Tanenhaus’ report of what happened on 9/11 three (exactly) years ago still blows my mind…It out-freaks anything Michael Moore documented in his movie, F-911:  I’ll give you some excerpts which will show you what was actually going on while Bush was talking to school children that dreadful day….What did you suppose was going on in the White House when the first plane struck, and then the second?  How did we get from a president who , upon hearing the news that New York was under attack by terrorists, and who just sat there reading fairy stories to school kids and enjoying his photo op, to the POWERFUL-LOOKING AND SOUNDING leader who made that brave and decisive speech before our Congress…that (momentarily) comforted us all?  Well, here’s how media magic takes place.  Marshall McLuen was right…There did come a day when the Medium became the message. The medium, plus a little Frum here and a little Perle there….. read for yourself….

WHILE BUSH WAS FROZEN SOLID IN THAT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CLASSROOM…..what where the Neo-Con movers and shakers doing?…….

“Meanwhile, on Sept. 11, across the Potomac, fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, soon to emerge as the Bush administration’s favorite think tank, were receiving similarly aggressive counsel from Wolfowitz’s longtime friend and ally Richard Perle, who was on the phone from France. Perle, himself an A.E.I. fellow, was also the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a high-powered 30-member group (Henry Kissinger and Newt Gingrich also belong) that periodically gives advice to the secretary of defense. Like Wolfowitz, Perle is never at a loss for a bit-picture reading. One who consulted him that day was presidential speechwriter David Frum, who along with the other administration staffers had taken shelter at A.E.I.’s offices after the White House was evacuated. Frum spent an hour on the phone with Perle. “I remember very clearly what he said”, Frum recalls.  “Whatever else the president says, he must make clear that he’s holding responsible not just terrorists but whoever harbors those terrorists.” (Vanity Fair, July 2003, p 117). (emphasis added)

This was the precise moment the critical mass imploded and the potentially-holocaustic Armageddon scenario was set in motion.   The Neo-Cons, including Bush and the fundamentalist Christians who elected him, who are ready and rarin’ to face the advent of international wars…because , according to Scripture (Matt. 24) they are ORDAINED TO HAPPEN,  are now in the same book and on the same page with the ZIONIST JEWS and the Wurmser Doctrine (usurp the whole of the Promised Land beginning with Iraq) so the Christians can have their Rapture and the Jews their just grant of the Promised land….not that oil-baren grant from the League of Nations in ‘48, but the real McCoy-Beverly-Hillbilly-bubbling-Crude Promised land of Genesis 15:17.

From that moment forward the dominos have just kept falling.  In this sense, Bush was just another dumb domino…essentially innocent at first, because essentially he—like us—was then mainly unaware of the MOTIVES of those forceful individuals within his 9/11-panicked midst. These were just the same trusty guys who’d worked for his daddy.  NO…IT WASN’T A ‘SECRET’ CONSPIRACY… Their motives and standards were, as Kristol and Wolfowitz persist to insist…all in writing, and the writing was “on the table”, and the table was, unbeknownst to Bush (who does not read) a little intramural beltline rag edited by William Kristol called the “Weekly Standard”, perhaps the most potent  Zionist policy vehicle  since the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant.

Absolutely- on the PNAC website, in the A.E.I. think tank documents and proposals, and regularly on the cover of the Weekly Standard – IN WRITING”–were the plans of these neo-con Christian and Jewish Zionists, long lying in wait for the opportunistic moment to wage END-TIME WAR,  ARMEGEDDON-TYPE WORLD WAR against the COMBINED ENEMIES OF CHRISTIANITY AND JUDISM….WHICH IS WHAT THIS WAR in the Middle East  TRULY IS ( and—truly–WWIII is NEO-NATALLY UNDERWAY AS I WRITE)… A now-united war of conveniently-allied Christians and Jews against all non-Christians and all non-Jews (especially, and most visibly, all of Islam, who, quite alarmingly and conveniently to all three fundamentalist Theocrazies, detest Christians and Jews with the same passion they are feared and loathed by the latter.)…. All willing to risk it all, including us all, our children and the peace of all in the world, over Arabian oil and sand, and the ever-present initial Pax-American foot-print in the sand…the State of Israel, that combat-booted foot in the door of Islam which more than any other thing is accountable for the first suicidal sortie of Arabia over America on 9/11/01.

OK, I know you’re weary with reading about now, so why not store this and finish it later.  It’s really just the introduction…the gist of it. The true evidentiary grit you will have to dig out for yourself…either on the internet or in your libraries. Please start with …somehow…getting a copy of the Tanenhaus article.  All the  names of all the major players are given, along with great portraits and bio sketches that put the players in the big-picture contexts of their lives.   You’ll see, for example, that only on the surface are Perle, Wolfowitz, Kristol and the rest acting in “official” capacity in their respective government offices and institutional “think tanks” (e.g., the A.E.I., where the White House physically retreated on 9/11)….Think about it.  Think about that phone call between Bush’s speech writer Frum on the 11^th floor of the A.E.I. office and Perle from his perch in ….France!  Think about the fact that the only important thing Bush said to Congress thereafter is that monumental morsel that Perle funneled to Frum in that magic moment of national and presidential panic…That tiny quantum of fissionable rhetoric that became the Bush Doctrine of the Preemptively-American-declared World War III.    When Hitler invaded Poland, it looked like a war that might be containable. We woke up from that dream on December 7, 1942.  When Wolfowitz and Perle got to Bush through Frum and declared war on every nation harboring terrorists, he declared potential war on the entire Islamic world…not just the named “Axis of Evil”.  Now the world is gearing up to defend itself against American aggression.

Does the world have cause to worry?  (About more Preemptive American Aggression)?

The answer, is, alarmingly, absolutely.   As  McLuan warned, the media has become the message, and the senses of all nations have been expanded to include not just C-Span and Al Jezerra…but the absolutely uncensorable internet ….resorting to which anyone in the world can now tap into the end-game plans of the neo-con Christians and Jewish Zionists who have launched their collective herrenvolk war against Islam and the rest of the non- Judeo-Christian world on the very top of the global table…on the world wide web.

Out of my paranoid mind am I?  OK…As Wolfowitz and Kristol challenged…read for yourself WHAT THEY WRITE…WHICH IS ALL ON THE INTERNET FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD TO READ….

But, where to begin?  First I suggest you hit:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

and read (please sit down first, and have some form of tranquillizer handy) their manifesto , entitled “Statement of Principles”.  Their “home” page iswww.newamericancentury   simply.  Look who signed up as founding parties. Google every member as to religious, ethnic and  political loyalty. You will find they are Israeli Jews (Zionists) and Neo-Conservative Christian Zionists FIRST  and American Government and Institutional “think tank” delegates and members a DISTANT SECOND.   Their “statement of principals” is , as Wolfowitz would argue, “on top of the table”….but I will submit to you, their PRIME MOTIVES ARE BURIED IN THE BIBLE, AND IN THE NAZI HOLOCAUST, AND IN THE DOCTRINES OF THE ‘NEW HEBREWS’ OF THE MILITANT ORDER WHO FOUNDED THE STATE OF ISREAL.  As for the Christian element, their Zionist motives are totally “off the diplomatic table” but totally articulated on ubiquitous Christian websites such as …. PLEASE CHECK THIS ONE OUT…

http://www.virginiawater.co.uk/christchurch/articles/hallindsey.htm

This website gives an encyclopedic treatment of the life works of Hal Lindsey, generally reputed to be  The Father of Apocalyptic Christian Zionism (the non-Anti-Semitic form)… Here’s an excerpt:

This chapter will explore the significance of Hal Lindsey within Christian Zionism, his dispensational hermeneutic, unconventional view of prophecy and eschatology, his distinctive apocalyptic Zionism and his stand against anti-Semitism.

Lindsey acknowledges that ‘The future is big business,’⁵ and has proved the axiom true. He is a prolific writer, the author of at least twenty books spanning 27 years, most of which deal explicitly or implicitly with a dispensational interpretation of the future, biblical prophecy and Christian Zionism.⁶ He hosts his own radio⁷ and television programs, leads regular pro-Israeli Holy Land tours, and by subscription makes available a monthly Christian Intelligence Journal called Countdown as well as the International Intelligence Briefing⁸. Lindsey, along with fellow Zionist, Grant Jeffries, hosts a weekly news program, International Intelligence Briefing on the fundamentalist Trinity Broadcasting Network television station.⁹

Lindsey’s most famous book, The Late Great Planet Earth has been described by the New York Times as the ‘#1 Non-fiction Bestseller of the Decade.’ It has gone through more than 108 printings with sales, by 1993, of more than 18 million copies in English, with estimates varying between 18-20 million further copies in 54 foreign languages.¹⁰

Check that out…over 40 million copies of this insanely incendiary trash sold…in 54 foreign languages.  This guy swears that God (yes, THE God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus) has personally visited him and dictated the details of the end-game (Armageddon)….so as to make complete sense out of Crazy John’s inscrutable visions and babblings in Revelations which God revealed to John on the island of Patmos.  SIDEBAR QUERRY:  Why did God give LSD-ish patently insane pictures of “future history” to John and crystal clear and cogent revelations to Lindsey?  (Could it possibly be to sell 40 million books to as many dangerous-ly deluded Neo-con Christian Zionists?)

Pardon the rhetorical aside and irony….But there’s simply got to be some comic relief in  all this craziness. The point I’m making is that you can get, through Google (although the website given is the best definitive treatment of the Fundamentalist Christian philosophy in perilous play here) literally thousands of references to establish beyond a doubt that Bush and probably the better part of his Christian constituency are not just vying for laws to enforce their anti-abortion and anti-gay leanings…they are quietly…implicitly…endorsing world war (by backing Bush)  as a natural and God-Engineered plan for their own salvation through being among those lifted up by the Rapture of the second coming of Christ as forecast by Matthew in Chap. 24, and tied in with Judeo-Christian endorsed beliefs in a Zionist fulfillment through an Armageddon end-game (World War III) with the Axes of Evil. Bush has been quoted as quipping in response to questions like “What do you think history will write about President George W. Bush?” the very ambiguous reply :  “It doesn’t matter; We’re not going to be here.”   I don’t have a cite for this, but I heard him say it on a news clip.  If anyone wants to challenge me on this, put  a $1,000 along side mine in escrow and I’ll provide the documentary proof that he said words to that effect.  Yes.  I admit it. I’m trying to scare you…all the way to the polls.

BACK TO THE NEO-CON CABAL…AND WHAT THEY DID AND DIDN’T DO IN THE PENTAGON….

When I sent you the preview, the only Pentagon insider who had become a bell-ringer was Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiakowski…. If you want to review her debriefing showing that she observed that everyone telling the truth about Iraq NOT HAVING WMD’S was being fired in the Pentagon, etc., just GOOGLE her name and “The Lie Factory” (and author Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest….Jan/Feb 2004 issue)…http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

Since Kwiakowski, we’ve been blessed by the confessions and revelations of many more Bush Administration insiders….the most important and creditable among which were of course the very reliable books of Bob Woodward (“Plan of Attack”) and Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies”.

The revelations in these two books alone make it absurd to doubt that, at least at some point after 9/11, Bush came to know that the Zionist Cabal in the Pentagon pulling his strings through Cheney were creating a cause for war based on lies motivated by Zionist ambition. Both authors confirm my suspicion that Powel held out until the very last in his opposition to war in Iraq until his job was put on the line and he sold out.

I’VE GOT TO SHARE YOU AN ASSIDE… I forgot the title to Tom Ridge’s book and to find it hit GOOGLE with the key words: “Bush bashing books”…

Take a minute and guess how many website offerings there are this second in time referring to books available bashing the policies of our Incumbent Chief…….. the number is eighty thousand, five hundred…and mounting. It took Google a nearly a half-second to load them…and for Google, that’s a long time.

Of course, as soon as one of the bell-ringers tells the truth, the Republican media spin masters set about to kill the messengers and manage to do so in the eyes of the blind. 

Just for fun, let’s go back to the Tanehaus article  (Vanity Fair July 2003) and I’ll summarize…Tanenhaus was accused of misrepresenting what he termed an “admission” on Wolfowitz’ part that the administration agreed that the single issue justifying war would be “weapons of mass destruction”.   As the blog-busters on the web put the issue:

“The article by Sam Tanenhaus quoted Wolfowitz as saying, ‘For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.’ … According to a tape recording made by the Pentagon, the actual quote is, ‘The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason.’”

I was curious about the truth of the Tanenhaus interview with Wolfowitz and located a transcript of the entire interview on the U.S. gov website.  Here is is:

United States Department of Defense.
News Transcript
On the web:
Media contact: +1 (703) 697-5131
Public contact: http://www.dod.mil/faq/comment.html or +1 (703) 428-0711

If you really want to read some intelligent muckraking, you’ll enjoy reading this interview… Tanenhaus makes a monkey out of Wolfowitz and gets him to admit his Straussian-elitist and  Zionist bias in spite of himself. He also admits in effect that the administration did in fact settle on the issue of weapons of mass destruction as the only cause for war in Iraq they could sell to the American public. He makes little effort to conceal this fact. Why would you think?  I think I know.  I think Wolfie is being transparently (intentionally so) boastful of his Staussian maneuverings that succeeded in neo-conning a Christian president into waging war in Iraq in order to consummate the Wurmser/Wolfowitz/PNAC  ZIONIST  program for Middle Eastern domination.  I truly enjoyed and marveled at the way Tanenhaus maneuvered the monstrous ego of this “Wolfowitz of Arabia” to spill his Zionist beans to the rest of the world. It was reminiscent of Sharon’s statement made in 2001 in the wake of Bush’s post-9/11 declaration that the U.S. would be backing  a revived effort to establish Palestinian Statehood… and Sharon (quite honestly I believe) said (words to effect):  “That will never happen….we (Israel) own America.”    Ariel, I only wish I could dispute it.

HISTORY (WITH TIMELINE) OF THE WAR IN IRAQ:

For those of you who want corroboration and details of the events leading to war in Iraq, I’m printing here a “time line” which pretty much outlines it all. You may want to keep it for reference.  I recommend you scan the entries for the first year at least…covering the crucial time I contend the U.S. was intentionally and systematically mislead by the administration under the orchestration of the neo-cons featured in the timeline. The great thing about the “Timeline” I’m printing here is that it is derived from information contained in the best (most reliable) authorities and sources available on the issues…some of which have already been mentioned…e.g. the Woodward and the Clarke books. As a preface to the “Timeline” (History), I’ll print here the article by John Mahoney  concerning its source materials:

Current Issue

Title: Timeline for War 
Author: John F. Mahoney 
September – October   2004 
Volume 37 , Issue 4 

Unless otherwise noted, the sources for this timeline come from the following: “A Pretext for War,” (Doubleday) by James Bamford; “Plan of Attack,” (Simon & Schuster) by Bob Woodward; “Rise of the Vulcans,” (Viking) by James Mann; “Against All Enemies,” (Free Press, Simon & Schuster) by Richard Clarke; “The 9/11 Commission Report,” by The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks against the United States; and “The Path to War,” an article that appeared in the May 2004 issue of Vanity Fair.

A Reader’s Guide on pages 8 & 9 offers background information on persons who enter prominently in the timeline; it is based on two articles: “The Men From JINSA and CSP” by Jason Vest in the Sept. 2, 2002 issue of The Nation, and “Serving Two Flags: Neocons, Israel and the Bush Administration” by Stephen Green in the May 2004 issue of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

While the timeline was being constructed, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released its 511-page report on why we went to war against Iraq. The report concludes that the major reasons the Bush administration gave to justify the war were baseless. Most of the blame is placed on the CIA, but, as Senator Jay Rockefeller noted, the report does not explain the environment of intense pressure in which intelligence officials were asked to render judgments on Iraq, when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public. This part of the committee’s investigation is expected later this year, most likely after the November presidential elections.

Our timeline aims to fill the gap left in the Senate Committee’s report. Recognizing that the information was wrong is one thing; acknowledging how and why it was wrong is quite another—and too important to leave for post-November 2 reading.

A.M.E.U.’s list of books and videos is on pages 14-16. Of particular relevance to this timeline issue are James Bamford’s book, “A Pretext for War,” and the video “Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land,” produced by the Media Education Foundation. Bamford is the former Washington investigative producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. His book reads like a detective mystery. And, like all good detectives, Bamford follows the facts. He concludes that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends, and that its Middle East policy, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to unconditionally supporting Israel, is driven by long-held beliefs and goals of an elite group of conservatives inside and outside government.

As for how this can happen and why we Americans fail to see the centrality of the Palestinian cause, “Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land” answers those questions better than any documentary I’ve seen.—John F. Mahoney, Executive Director, September 2004.

Articles
Timeline for War, by John F. Mahoney

Timeline for War
by: John F. Mahoney
September – October  2004
The Link - Volume 37, Issue 4

Timeline for War

The Timeline was written by AMEU executive director John Mahoney, with considerable input and editing from AMEU board members and staff.

March, 1992: The Pentagon. Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary of defense for policy for President Bush, drafts an update of America’s overall military strategy called the “Defense Planning Guidance.” In it he argues that the U.S. might be faced with taking preemptive military action to prevent the use or development of WMD. The official ultimately responsible for the document is Bush’s defense secretary Dick Cheney. The draft is actually written by Wolfowitz’s protégé and top assistant Lewis Libby.

Sept. 1, 1992: New York. Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, arrives at JFK Airport. Born of a Palestinian mother, his goal is to punish the United States for its support of Israel, knowing that the U.S. government every year sends military and financial aid worth billions of dollars to Israel. Ramzi says that he and his uncle, an engineer who had studied higher mathematics and jet propulsion in the U.S., have been planning to bring down the towers of the World Trade Center, the ultimate symbol of America’s worldwide financial muscle.

Feb. 26, 1993: New York. Ramzi Yousef, with others, sets off explosives at the World Trade Center. Later in the day he flies out of JFK for Karachi, disappointed that both towers were still standing and determined to bring them down at another time.

Feb. 27, 1993: New York. A group calling itself the “Liberation Army” sends a letter to The New York Times saying the World Trade Center bombing was in retaliation for American support for Israel, and warning that if America did not change its Middle East policy, more terrorist missions would be carried out, some by suicide bombers.

April 15, 1993: Kuwait. Kuwaiti police say they have prevented an assassination attempt on former President George H. W. Bush, his wife, two sons, and daughter-in-law Laura. Most in the CIA promptly point the finger at Saddam Hussein; others, including investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, doubt the Iraqi president had any involvement in the plot.

Jan. 7, 1995: Manila. Ramzi Yousef and a colleague, Abdul Hakim Murad, accidentally set off an explosion in their apartment. Murad is captured and, under torture, tells the Philippine police of a plan to board an American commercial aircraft, hijack it, control the cockpit, and dive the plane into the CIA headquarters. The Chief of Intelligence Command for the Philippine National Police tells the Associated Press that its office shared the information immediately with FBI agents in Manila, along with the message they found on Yousef’s laptop explaining why they were doing it: “If the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel … then we will continue to carry out operations inside and outside the United States.”

April 18, 1996: Lebanon. Israel attacks a U.N. refugee camp at Qana, killing women and children. Israel says it was a mistake. The U.N. and Amnesty International say it was intentional. Shortly afterwards, Osama bin Laden moves to the mountains of Afghanistan, where he uses the Qana massacre to recruit fighters in a war against the U.S. and Israel.

July 9, 1996: Washington, DC. Douglas Feith, the Washington, DC partner of an Israeli firm soliciting American business for Israel’s right-wing settler movement, joins with other pro-settlement supporters Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Wurmser’s wife, Meryav, to develop a foreign-policy position paper for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” it calls for Israel to overthrow Saddam Hussein and put a pro-Israel regime in his place. Netanyahu rejects it.

July 25, 1996: Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia. A truck bomb rams a high-rise complex housing U.S. airmen. Nineteen are killed. The bombing is blamed on Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors, although the U.S. commission investigating the 9/11 attacks will later conclude that Osama bin Laden may have had an involvement—but not Saddam Hussein.

Aug. 23, 1996: Afghanistan. Bin Laden, with his new mastermind for worldwide operations, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, issues a call to action: “My Muslim Brothers of the world…Your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia] are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy — your enemy and their enemy — the Americans and the Israelis…The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory…They [Americans] are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this [their] government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places.”

Jan. 26, 1998: Washington, DC. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Armitage, and 14 others send letter to President Clinton urging regime change in Iraq and a more aggressive Middle East policy. The letter is sponsored by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), founded by William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.

July 31, 1998: New York. David Wurmser meets with Israel’s permanent representative to the U.N., Dore Gold, in an effort to get Israel to put pressure on the American Congress to approve a $10 million grant to Ahmed Chalabi ‘s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group based in London with a guerilla army based in northern Iraq, whose purpose is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Aug. 7, 1998: Tanzania and Kenya. Suspected Al Qaeda cells bomb U.S. embassies in both countries, killing 258, including 12 Americans.

Aug. 20, 1998: Afghanistan and Sudan. President Clinton orders missile attack against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan said to produce nerve gas and to be linked to bin Laden. Bin Laden survives and doubts are raised about the pharmaceutical plant, which Sudanese say produced infant formula. Shortly after, bin Laden tells ABC News that, if the liberation of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the Ka’aba in Saudi Arabia is a crime, he indeed is a criminal.

Feb.-March, 1999: Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden summons Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to tell him that his proposal to use aircraft as terror weapons against the U.S. has the full support of Al Qaeda.

Sept. 28, 2000: Jerusalem. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, flanked by 1,000 armed police, visits site of the Al Aqsa Mosque. Bin Laden reacts by asking that the planned attacks against the U.S. be moved up.

Oct. 12, 2000: Yemen. The USS Cole is attacked; 17 sailors are killed and 39 wounded. Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind, praises the suicide attackers, then reads a poem he wrote in honor of Palestinian children killed in their struggle against Israel’s occupation of their land.

Jan. 1, 2001: Washington, DC. David Wurmser recommends to President-elect Bush that America and Israel join forces to “strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza,” and he suggests that “crises can be opportunities” to implement this plan.

Jan. 30, 2001: The White House. President Bush holds his first high-level National Security Council meeting. Two topics are on the agenda: Israel and Iraq. He says he plans to “tilt it [U.S. policy] back toward Israel” and—in what turns out to be the prime focus of the meeting—he says he wants to remove Saddam Hussein. Condoleezza Rice explains: “Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region.”

Feb. 5, 2001: The White House. Rice chairs a principals’ committee meeting to review Iraq policy. All agree that the sanctions were only hurting the Iraqi people, not Saddam. Powell proposes stricter U.N. sanctions on Saddam’s military programs.

April, 2001: The White House. Cabinet deputies meet to review terrorism policy. Richard Clarke warns that the network of terrorist organizations called Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, presents an immediate and serious threat to the U.S., and that the U.S. had to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator drone. Wolfowitz replies that Iraq is just as much a terrorist threat. Clarke says he is unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the U.S. Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin backs up Clarke. Wolfowitz tells Clarke he gives bin Laden too much credit and that he had to have a state sponsor. Clarke replies that bin Laden has made plain his terrorist aims and, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe these people will actually do what they say. Wolfowitz responds that he resents comparing the Holocaust to “this little terrorist in Afghanistan.” Clarke replies: “I wasn’t comparing the Holocaust to anything. I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it.”

June 21, 2001: Afghanistan. Bin Laden aide Ayman al-Zawahiri announces over the Middle East Broadcasting Company that, “The coming weeks will hold important surprises that will target American and Israeli interests in the world.”

Aug. 6, 2001: Crawford, Texas. President Bush receives a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” It warns that the FBI has intelligence indicating that terrorists might be preparing for an airline hijacking in the U.S. and might be targeting a building in lower Manhattan. No action is taken.

Sept. 4, 2001: The White House. Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke meets with the President to walk him through a proposed National Security Presidential Directive, whose goal is to eliminate bin Laden and Al Qaeda leaders. Clarke had asked for the meeting, calling it “urgent,” back in January, but only now is allowed to see him. He tells Bush that the use of minimum-wage rent-a-cops to screen passengers and carry-on at airports has got to stop. The President agrees.

Sept. 11, 2001: New York, Washington, DC, Pennsylvania. Nineteen Middle Eastern hijackers, 15 from Saudi Arabia, commandeer four commercial airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Towers in Manhattan, one into the Pentagon in Washington, and one in a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 are killed. Rumsfeld directs Pentagon lawyer to talk to Wolfowitz about Iraq’s connection to the attacks.

Sept. 12, 2001: Germany. Seven members of Rumsfeld’s brain trust meet at an airport in Frankfurt and board an Air Force refueling plane sent to ferry them back to Washington. Group includes Douglas Feith, now undersecretary of defense for policy. On the flight back they sketch out a plan for the defense secretary according to which the U.S. would first topple the Taliban government of Afghanistan, then go after other terror states, including Iraq. Feith appoints David Wurmser to put together a secret intelligence unit in his Pentagon office that will bypass the normal channels and report directly to him; called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, its purpose is to find loose ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in order to counter the CIA, whose analysts had found no credible links between the two. Later in the day, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke attends White House meetings of the inner circle of Bush’s war cabinet and is stunned to learn that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Rumsfeld specifically asks if the attacks did not present an “opportunity” to launch war against Iraq.

Sept. 15, 2001: Camp David. Bush gathers closest advisers. Much discussion is on Afghanistan, but Wolfowitz advocates attacking Iraq, maybe even before Afghanistan. He says there’s a 10 to 50 percent chance Iraq was involved in 9/11. Bush sends note to Wolfowitz saying he doesn’t want to hear more on Iraq that day. Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz, and Rice vote against hitting Iraq first; Rumsfeld abstains. Powell, who is appalled at the idea of hitting Iraq, finds Rumsfeld abstention interesting. Richard Perle, who is also present, says Wolfowitz planted the seed.

Sept. 16, 2001: Washington, DC. Richard Perle and other neoconservatives send letter to Bush urging him to focus immediately on a war with Iraq, whether or not a connection with 9/11 can be shown.

Sept. 17, 2001: The White House. Bush signs a Top Secret order that lays out his plan for going to war in Afghanistan and directs the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.

Sept. 19, 2001: The Pentagon. Perle convenes a two-day meeting of the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises the Pentagon. He introduces two guest speakers: Prof. Bernard Lewis of Princeton, a longtime friend of Cheney and Wolfowitz, who says U.S. must respond to 9/11 with a show of strength, and must support such democratic reformers in the Middle East as Ahmad Chalabi. The second speaker, in fact, is Ahmad Chalabi, who tells the group that Iraq does possess WMD, although, as yet, there is no evidence linking Iraq to 9/11.

Oct. 7, 2001: Afghanistan. U.S. and U.K. planes bomb Taliban bases; the war against Al Qaeda begins.

Nov. 13, 2001: Afghanistan. The capital, Kabul, falls. Most of the Taliban leaders flee.

Nov. 21, 2001: The White House. At the end of a National Security Council meeting, President Bush secretly directs Rumsfeld to prepare for war on Iraq.

Nov. 27, 2001: Florida. Rumsfeld flies to see General Franks at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa and tells him to update the Top Secret Operation Plan on attacking and invading Iraq.

Dec. 4, 2001: The Pentagon. Franks presents a slightly revised plan on invading Iraq. Estimated force level is reduced from 500,000 to 400,000. Rumsfeld thinks fewer forces will be needed in light of the Afghanistan success. Franks agrees.

Dec. 12, 2002: The Pentagon. Franks returns with updated plan. Rumsfeld tells him he has to look at a plan that he could do “as early as April or May.”

Dec. 20, 2001: New York. The New York Times reporter Judith Miller has front-page interview with Iraqi defector Adnan Ishan Saeed al-Haidere, who says he has recently been working in Baghdad in secret facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Miller secures the interview through Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, which has close contacts with Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith. Miller will later say that it is Chalabi who provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to The New York Times.

Dec. 28, 2002: The White House. Franks tells Bush that, with support from other Muslim countries, Iraq could be invaded with an initial 105,000 U.S. forces, but 230,000 eventually would be needed.

Jan. 2002: The White House. Bush’s top speechwriter, Michael Gerson, gives instructions to David Frum, a Canadian, to write a speech making the best case for war in Iraq.

Jan. 29, 2002: Washington, DC. Bush gives State of the Union address; he calls North Korea, Iran, and Iraq an axis of evil and pledges not to wait while dangers gather.

Feb. 1, 2002: The Pentagon. Franks tells Rumsfeld a unilateral U.S.-only invasion of Iraq could be readied in 45 days with an initial force of 105,000; ultimately, 300,000 would be needed to stabilize Iraq after it fell.

Feb. 7, 2002: White House Situation Room. Rumsfeld introduces notion of shock and awe, i.e., building up such a carrier force and bombing onslaught that it might, by itself, trigger regime change.

Feb. 12, 2002: Washington, DC. Powell tells the Senate Budget Committee there are no plans to go to war with Iran or North Korea, but U.S. is looking into ways of bringing about regime change in Iraq.

Feb. 16, 2002: White House. The National Security Council ratifies Policy Directive on Iraq, committing the U.S. to examining ways of bringing about a CIA-backed coup and providing military support for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

Feb. 20, 2002: Iraq. CIA survey team secretly enters northern Iraq to prepare for deployment of CIA paramilitary teams.

Feb. 28, 2002: Pentagon. Franks brings Rumsfeld a list of nearly 4,000 possible bombing targets in Iraq. Rumsfeld tells him to prioritize the list.

March 6, 2002: The White House. In preparation of his upcoming visit to the Middle East, Cheney is briefed by Franks, who tells him what the U.S. will need in its invasion of Iraq from other Arab and Muslim countries. When he does go to the Middle East, the vice president is surprised to learn that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is seen by Arab leaders as a greater threat to the region than Saddam Hussein.

March 9, 2002: Washington, DC. CIA tells the White House reports that Niger was supplying Iraq with uranium were investigated by Ambassador Joseph Wilson and were found not to be credible.

March 14, 2002: The White House. The Joint Chiefs of Staff report that an invasion of Iraq “would place severe strains on personnel and cause deep shortages of certain critical weapons.”

April 20, 2002: Camp David. Bush tell Franks he wants the invasion of Iraq done “right and quickly.”

April 24, 2002: Doha, Qatar. Franks tells his major commanders to do whatever it takes to prepare for an invasion, no matter the costs.

May 11, 2002: Camp David. Franks presents a five-front war plan to Bush.

June 19, 2002: The White House. Franks tells Bush he could do the invasion within 30 days with a little over 100,000 ground assault troops.

Late Aug. 2002: The Pentagon. Office of Special Plans is set up at the Pentagon to plan for the war and its aftermath. Picked to head the OSP is longtime protégé of Richard Perle, Abram Shulsky. As part of its mission, the OSP forges close ties to a parallel intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel, whose job is to provide key Bush administration people with cooked intelligence on Saddam’s Iraq. One Pentagon official, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, later relates how she had escorted six or seven Israeli generals to Feith’s OSP office. The generals surged ahead of her, waved aside the required sign-in book, and entered the OSP office; seeing Feith’s office door closed, the generals demanded to know from his secretary who Feith was talking to.

Sept. 7, 2002: The White House. Bush tells reporters that an International Atomic Energy Agency report estimates that the Iraqis are six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. The new report, however, turns out to be an old IAEA document from 1996 that described a weapons program that the inspectors had long ago destroyed.

Sept. 12, 2002: New York. Bush addresses U.N. General Assembly, saying the U.S. will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions to go to war with Iraq.

Sept. 16, 2002: New York. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan says he has received a letter from Iraqi authorities allowing inspectors access “without conditions.” Bush administration is livid because it did not say “unfettered access,” meaning “anytime, anyplace.”

Sept. 19, 2002: Washington, DC. Rumsfeld, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, says current U.N. inspection team is weak. At the White House, Bush says if U.N. Security Council won’t deal with Iraq, “the U.S. and some of our friends will.” Bush also meets with 11 House members, telling them the biggest threat is that Saddam, with his WMD, “can blow up Israel and that would trigger an international incident.”

Oct. 1, 2002: Langley, Virginia. CIA prepares secret National Intelligence Estimate on the case for war with Iraq. NIE claims Saddam has chemical and biological weapons, including mobile labs, and that it is building nuclear weapons. Bush wants condensed version for the public in the form of a White Paper. The White Paper, however, distorts the facts to make the strongest possible case for war. (See the Vanity Fair article for specific examples of distortions.)

Nov. 8, 2002: New York. U.N. Security Council passes Resolution 1441, which gives Iraq a “final opportunity” to come clean on its WMD, adding that the council would meet again, following the inspectors’ report, to “consider the situation.” The French, who oppose war with Iraq, say off the record that they understand the resolution is enough to give America and Britain legal cover for going it alone, if they felt Iraq hadn’t complied to their satisfaction.

Dec. 7, 2002: Baghdad. Iraqi government delivers a 12,000-page document in Arabic to UNMOVIC. It is intended to account for the state of its weapons programs. The U.S. takes possession of it, has it translated, submits it to the Security Council with large portions deleted, then dismisses it as a “material breach” of Resolution 1441.

Jan. 13, 2003: The White House. The French call for a meeting that is held in Rice’s office. Attending are Chirac’s top adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, and French Ambassador to the U.S., Jean-David Levitte. Both explain their country’s reasons for opposing the war, then Levitte says that if the U.S. was determined to go to war, it should not seek a second U.N. resolution, that 1441 arguably gave the White House enough cover, and that France would keep quiet if the U.S. went ahead. White House dismisses the offer because it has promised Tony Blair it would seek a second resolution. The French are angry. On the same day, Bush tells Powell in the Oval office, “I’m really going to do this.” Powell asks if he understands the Pottery Barn principle: if he breaks Iraq, he’ll own it. Bush says he understands.

Jan. 20, 2003: New York. French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin announces that France will not support military intervention in Iraq. The White House is irate.

Jan. 21, 2003: The White House. Franks delivers final war plan to Bush. He estimates fewer than 1,000 U.S. killed. No public pictures of returning coffins and no body count of Iraqis killed will be permitted, as both practices created bad PR during the Vietnam war.

Jan. 25, 2003: White House. Lewis Libby makes presentation on Saddam’s WMD and ties him to bin Laden. Much of the material comes from Feith’s Office of Special Plans. Richard Armitage, the second in authority at the State Department, sees it as drawing the worst conclusions from fragmentary threads; Wolfowitz finds it convincing. Bush aides Karen Hughes and Karl Rove think Powell should make the U.N. presentation. Powell agrees to do it.

Jan. 27, 2003: New York. Hans Blix delivers his first inspections report to U.N. He acknowledges that no WMD have been found but notes that Iraq has failed to account for undetermined quantities of the nerve agent VX and anthrax, and for 6,500 chemical bombs.

Jan. 28, 2003: Washington, DC. Bush gives State of the Union address in which he claims: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Jan. 29, 2003: The State Department. Powell gives his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, a 48-page dossier that the White House wants Powell to use in his U.N. speech making the case for war with Iraq. The dossier is prepared in Cheney’s office by a team led by Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and his deputy assistant for national security affairs, John Hannah.

Jan. 30, 2003: Langley, Virginia. Wilkerson, with several staff members and CIA analysts, sets up shop at CIA headquarters to prepare Powell’s speech. Meanwhile the White House supplies 45 more pages on Iraq’s links to terrorism and human rights violations.

Jan. 31, 2003: Langley, Virginia. Wilkerson throws out the White House dossier, suspecting much of it originated with the Iraqi National Congress and its chief, Ahmad Chalabi, whose information in the past often proved suspect or fabricated. Powell is convinced that much of the material had been funneled to Cheney by the separate OSP unit set up by Rumsfeld. “We were so appalled at what had arrived from the White house,” says one staff member.

Feb. 5, 2003: New York. At 2 a.m., on the day of his U.N. speech, Powell receives a call from the CIA’s George Tenet, who says he wants another look at the speech. Tenet is afraid Powell has cut too much about Saddam’s supposed links to terrorism, especially the 9/11 attack. For days the White House and Cheney have pressed Powell to include a widely discredited Czech intelligence report that Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. Powell had thrown out the Prague material as suspect and unverified. But Powell does keep much of what the White House wants, including mobile biological weapons labs, ties to Al Qaeda, and anthrax stockpiles. One of the sources for the mobile labs is an Iraqi major known to the CIA to be a liar. That morning, at the U.N., Powell insists that Tenet sit behind him as a signal that he is relying on the CIA to make the case for war.

Feb. 8, 2003: The White House. President Bush, in his weekly radio address, says: “Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990’s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document-forgery experts to work with Al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. And an Al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990’s for help in acquiring poisons and gases. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.”

Feb. 14, 2003: New York. Hans Blix goes before the U.N. Security Council. He contradicts Powell, saying the trucks Powell had described as being used for chemical decontamination could just as easily have been used for routine activity, and he contradicts Powell’s statement that the Iraqis knew in advance when the inspectors would be arriving. And he adds that Iraq is finally taking steps toward real cooperation with the inspectors, allowing them to enter Iraqi presidential palaces, among other previously prohibited sites. Disarmament through inspections is still possible, he concludes.

Feb. 15, 2003: Worldwide. Tens of millions participate in an unprecedented, antiwar demonstration. The biggest crowds are in the countries that support the war: Britain, Italy, and Spain.

Feb. 24, 2003: New York. Claiming Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded it in Resolution 1441, the U.S., Britain, and Spain propose the second resolution Tony Blair has been seeking.

Feb. 27, 2003: The White House. Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel visits Bush and tells him Iraq is a terrorist state that should be invaded as a matter of morality, otherwise Saddam will unleash a weapon of mass destruction on Israel. Bush later remarks, “If Elie Wiesel feels that way, I am not alone.”

March 1, 2003: Turkey. The Turkish government rejects U.S. request to move troops through its country.

March 3, 2003: The White House. Pope John Paul II’s envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi, visits Bush and tells him war with Iraq would be unjust and illegal because it would cause so many civilian casualties, create a wider gap between the Christian and Muslim world, and overall would not make things better. Bush replies it would absolutely make things better.

March 7, 2003: France. The French announce they will veto a second resolution to authorize the automatic use of force. The U.S. begins lobbying the six undecided members of the Security Council: Pakistan, Chile, Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea, and Angola, having first wiretapped their offices. Chile and Mexico say they will not support a second resolution.

March 10, 2003: France. French President Chirac goes on TV and announces, “My position is that, regardless of the circumstances, France will vote ‘no’.” U.S. and Britain blame France for the diplomatic breakdown, and use it as the reason for not seeking the second resolution.

March 14, 2003: The White House. As a concession to Blair, Bush announces agreement on a road map for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

March 16, 2003: The Azores. Bush, Blair and Spanish prime minister Aznar meet. Bush says they need to start the war soon because antiwar sentiment will only get worse if they delay. He says he is going to give Saddam a 48-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq.

March 17, 2003: The White House. Bush reneges on his commitment to seek U.N. approval, claiming 1441 provides ample authorization. In a TV announcement he gives Saddam the 48-hour ultimatum. Prior to the announcement he calls Australian prime minister Howard and Israeli prime minister Sharon to tell them of his decision. Meanwhile, Cheney tells congressional leaders of the decision, noting that Israel will not be part of the coalition, “but we are working closely with them on their reaction.”

March 18: 2003: London. Blair wins a Commons vote for war, barely carrying his own party.

March 19, 2003: The White House. Bush gives Franks order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. Around 4 p.m., CIA information is received that Saddam and his two sons are or will be in a bunker in Baghdad. Cheney advises Bush to strike at the target, effectively beginning the war. Bush agrees. At 7:30 p.m., Rice phones Israeli finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling him the war had begun; he says he knows. Rice then summons Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar to come to the White House. Around 8:30 p.m. she tells him that, within a half-hour, all hell will break loose. At 10:10 p.m., Bush informs the nation the war has started.

April 7, 2003: Washington. Rumsfeld appoints Gen. Jay Garner to direct Pentagon’s new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq. Garner, a JINSA advisor, says the first person he will invite to work with him is former Israeli defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer.

May 2, 2003: The USS Lincoln. President Bush tells nation, “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

May 6, 2003: Washington. L. Paul Bremer III is appointed administrator of Iraq, replacing Jay Garner.

June 5, 2003: Washington, DC. The Washington Post reports that VP Cheney and his aide Lewis Libby paid multiple visits to the CIA in the months leading up to the Iraq war. Later, former CIA Counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro will tell a congressional hearing that prior to the war, the White House exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to come up with evidence linking Iraq to bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

June 8, 2003: Washington, DC. David Kay, former chief weapons inspector for the U.N., is asked to take over the search for WMD in Iraq.

July 6, 2003: New York. Former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson IV writes column in The New York Timessaying he was sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger by the CIA and that, well before the president’s State of the Union Address, he reported his finding that no uranium had been shipped to Iraq.

August 27, 2003: Washington. Newly available documents reveal that Halliburton, the company VP Cheney formerly headed, wins contracts for more than $1.7 billion out of Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to receive hundreds of millions more under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Bechtel Group, George Shultz’s company, wins contracts for one billion dollars.

Sept. 17, 2003: The White House. President Bush tells a reporter, “No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11.”

Oct. 2, 2003: Washington, DC. Kay delivers interim report to Congress saying, “We have not yet found stocks of weapons.”

Dec. 13, 2003: Iraq. Saddam Hussein is captured.

Jan. 23, 2004: David Kay resigns.

Jan. 28, 2004: Washington. Regarding the existence of WMD in Iraq, Kay tells Senate Armed Services Committee, “We were almost all wrong.” His testimony forces White House to name a presidential commission to investigate the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Feb. 5, 2004: Washington, DC. Tenet admits in a speech at Georgetown University that as far back as May 2002 the Defense Information Agency had issued a “fabrication notification” to steer clear of the Iraqi major who had attested to the mobile biological labs mentioned in Powell’s U.N. speech. Somehow the CIA never saw it.

Feb. 24, 2004: Washington, DC. CIA director Tenet tells the Senate Select Committee that, despite our invasion of Afghanistan and occupation of Iraq, the worldwide threat from bin Laden and Al Qaeda has grown, not diminished.

March 11, 2004: Madrid. Train bombs kill 200 people. Search leads to a widening web of organizations that may have few ties to Al Qaeda but share its goals.

March 14, 2004: Madrid. Conservative prime minister José Aznar is defeated by Socialist challenger José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, who ran on a pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq unless they were placed under U.N. sanction. The new prime minister calls the Iraq war an error, saying: “It divided more than it united, there were no reasons for it, time has shown that the arguments for it lacked credibility, and the occupation has been poorly managed.”

April 18, 2004: Madrid. Spain withdraws all its troops from the Coalition of the Willing.

April 19, 2004: Nicaragua. President Maduro says Nicaragua will withdraw its forces from Iraq.

April 28, 2004: CBS’s Sixty Minutes II shows U.S. troops mistreating Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

April 29, 2004: Santo Domingo. The Dominican Republic withdraws its troops from Iraq, citing security concerns. Wolfowitz tells a congressional hearing that Iraq is still a combat zone, “and until it becomes peacekeeping, a lot of countries are probably going to stay on the sidelines.”

May 20, 2004: Baghdad. Iraqi police and U.S. military raid home of Iraqi National Council finance minister Ahmad Chalabi as part of an investigation into suspected fraud. CIA also charges him with informing Iran that the U.S. had cracked its secret codes and was eavesdropping on its intelligence messages. The Pentagon stops monthly payments of $340,000 to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

May 26, 2004: New York. The New York Times acknowledges that its reporters, among them Judith Miller, used questionable sources in affirming the existence of WMD in Iraq, and that Ahmad Chalabi, the INC leader, was feeding bad information to journalists and the White House, information the White House eagerly received.

May 29, 2004: Baghdad. Iyad Alawi, a longtime CIA operative, is chosen interim prime minister of Iraq.

June 4, 2004: Langley, Va. CIA Director George Tenet resigns.

June 16, 2004: Washington, DC. The 9/11 Commission investigating the September 11 attacks reports that there did not appear to be a collaborative relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

June 22, 2004: Washington. Wolfowitz tells a House Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon had underestimated Iraq’s postwar insurgency and that the U.S. may have to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq for years to come.

July 5, 2004: Former U.S. Army General Janis Karpinski, who had been in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison when Iraqi detainees were abused and humiliated, tells BBC radio that she knew of at least one Israeli involved in the prisoner interrogation.

July 9, 2004: Washington. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concludes in its report that the most pivotal assessments used to justify the war against Iraq were unfounded and unreasonable. Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the committee, concludes: “We in Congress would not have authorized that war — we would NOT have authorized that war—with 75 votes if we knew what we know now.” The second part of the report on whether the White House and Pentagon tried to influence intelligence agencies is postponed until after the November election.

July 12, 2004: The Philippines. President Arroyo announces that her country will withdraw from the Coalition of the Willing in order to save the life of a Filipino hostage held by Iraqi insurgents.

Aug. 1, 2004: Number of U.S. killed in the Iraq war reaches 910. The media is barred from showing their returning coffins. Number of Iraqi civilians killed is not available from official U.S. sources; independent sources estimate the number to be between 11,305 and 13,315. (For updates on Iraqis killed and wounded, see: www.iraqbodycount.org.)

Addendum….I’m sorry to remind you all that the figure above just this week passed the 1000 mark…and counting.

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CONCLUDING  NOTE …

Thanks and cudos for those of you who waged through all of this.  I know it was arduous as I put it together and composed some of it myself.  In an effort to addend this offering with a more positive note, I’m going to print one more thing hereon and attach a few more, and describe them all right now:  The last thing to follow on this e-mail is an essay in response to Vanity Fair’s August call for the best answer to the following question:  “How would you presently EXPLAIN THE AMERICAN CHARACTER to the rest of the world?”   I think Vanity Fair wanted to hear ideas on why America’s character has apparently changed to the rest of the world. I thought of Bush; I thought of the media’s handling of America’s road to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I wondered what I could say that would not sound simply hopeless and cynical. I wrote the essay I think in order to find out what in fact I think.  The essay is entitled: “McLuhan’s Monster-  The Media as Frankenstein Fabricator of America’s Fictionally Monstrous Character”…

No, I really don’t care if I place high in Vanity Fair’s contest.  If you read it, I hope you enjoy the short moment of relief—and hope–I managed to feel at the end.

McLuhan’s Monster:

The Media as  Frankenstein Fabricator of

America’s (Fictionally) Monstrous Character

 Because no one listened to Marshall McLuhan’s warnings about the way the media were changing the character of America, his worst prophesies have been ordained.  The media have “become the message” as McLuhan frenetically forecast in the early 60’s.

But McLuhan was really ruing the unlocking of the barn door when the cattle had already gone…The alleged transmogrification of television was but a geometric expansion of what the film industry had already done to and for American “character”.   A strong case could be made for the proposition that some predominantly Jewish immigrants invented the American “character” –and perhaps saved America and the free world in the process. These progenitive, essentially European, film artists immigrated America’s West Coast between the two wars, and for combined motives of self-preservation and prodding America away from its isolationism to become big-brother defender of the free world, created the image of America that united  diverse populations of previously warring Irish, German, French, Italian, Spanish and African peoples into the image of…well,  John Wayne. John Wayne’s character, as  Maureen O’Hara, would subsequently proclaim to Congress, became America’s character – either commanding platoons of eager “Sea bees” or heroically assaulting the sands of  Iwo Jima.

Up until the tandem threats of the Kiser and Hitler, America appeared to the rest of the world just as it was… a refuge for immigrant fugitives and rebels who followed European pilgrims to America for reasons as diverse as their genetic roots.   Even before the first 4th of July, America had no “national character” other than the proud mongrel essence that eventually gave  metropolitan melting pots like N.Y. City labels like “hell’s kitchen.”  And because it was a haven for rebels and  “rugged individualism”,  America’s diversity spawned further diversity and rugged individualism.   It took a depression and two world wars for America to acquire a “face” recognizable to the rest of the world, and the face was not established by traditional books or news print. The face of America assumed its unique character on the silver screens of Hollywood.

Without the images of John Wayne, Rosie the Riveter and similarly waspish Hollywood effigies of the American G.I. and fly-boy “Hero”, it is unlikely America would have learned to beat its mongrel heart with the strength and endurance it took to leap from the ashes of Pearl Harbor and storm the Beaches of Normandy on the way to Berlin’s final bunker.  Certainly, to win the wars against the enemies of freedom, in America “all gave some, and some gave all”, but that clever and cohesive core of kosher movie makers artistically—and effectively– gave America  and the world the first clear (if essentially-contrived) image of America’s “face”.     Post his image today on the corner of any 50 culturally-distinct metropolises in the world, and in as many tongues they will salute “John Wayne”.  The same cameras subsequently codified and exported America’s peacetime image in the equally waspish forms of Mickey Mantle and Marilyn Monroe.

But then came the mid-century emergence of Television, and Hollywood’s position as America’s image-artist was challenged.  Actually, with the passing of the art/media torch from Hollywood to …ubiquitous Television, a cataclysmic conversion of American’s character occurred. The artistically-inspired face of America passed from the hands of fond and symbiotic Hollywood moguls to a menagerie of Mr.-Hyde-mad–monster TV producers (inanimate, corporate “networks”).  Before TV, the worst rebels Hollywood artists created for our-and the world’s—imitation and adulation were the relatively benign (if still waspish) bike-braving Brando, and switchblade-swashbuckling James Dean. Following the sadly short Halcyon days of Ozzie and Harriot, our Loving Lucy and Mayberry’s mythically “simple” society, the artists who once controlled the evolution of America’s image were replaced…as was America’s morality itself, by dollar-driven corporations intent on fashioning whatever image of America their Neilson Ratings dictated.   No longer were artists sitting around creating beautiful images of how things in America COULD  be, if only we continued to love, and strive…Rather, writers and producers were being told to write what would sell sponsors’ product.  Madison Avenue “margin men” came up with the catastrophic concept of “demography”…. “Don’t give them all a single image of truth and beauty they can rally round…Give them what sells.”  At this point, America ceased evolving as an integrating culture and began disintegrating into demographically-dictated sub-cultures.  Whitie could watch the Andy Griffith Show, and later the more realistic All in the Family, and the dollar-demographers would spin off  Jeffersons for the blacks and Chico for the Hispanics.   This part of the media paradigm shift from silver to cathode-ray screens was arguably salutary in that diversity had been the culturally primordial stuff from which the initial character of “America” had been mined by the minds and souls of those pioneer Hollywood movie makers who were truly the romancers of American’s mythically monolithic demeanor.   Watching Carrol O’Connor struggle with the funny fruits of his own bigotry was …good for white and blacks, and watching the Jefferson’s discover that previously “white-type” power can corrupt…currently black Americans, was a sharpening experience at both ends of the diversity stick.

So, what part of McLuhan’s sinister prophesy has been ordained in monstrous fashion by the American media, and how has this served to transmogrify America’s image of itself and the world’s image of America?  The answer to this question would afford an answer to Michael Moore’s plaintive opening query in Farenheit 911… “Has it all (from the election  heist in Florida to the War in Iraq)  been a dream? The answer is the same because the cause is the same. It was all a dream. There were no WMD’s and no bin Laden/Saddam connections. The lies were told and the media printed them, and the media’s message changed the face and character of America.

The power of the media to dictate the form and content of art has been pivotal in the evolution of America’s now Frankensteinian   image. The cataclysm that has made this the reality is composit—a composit of the evolution of American citizen-driven democracy into an oligarchical corporate despotism, and the evolution of the media’s prime medium from silver screen to electron machine.  The music industry provides an illustration in microcosm:  The illustration is relevant, because the “sound image” of America has been almost as integral as its visual counterparts in providing the world its image of American character.  Before syndicated corporations bought up the air waves, there were literally thousands of family-owned (human) broadcasting stations where an artist could be heard…and “discovered” by his naturally-selecting audience of empathetic ears.  Now there are literally a handful of music monopolies and our radios now blast only what these musak moguls decide the public will hear.  Our children are for the most part today in our ….cars.  In the cars, are the radios.  Six mega-companies dictate what comes over the air, and what comes is what sells.  It’s no longer a matter of artistic discrimination, because the masses are given only six options, where, in the days of their parents, there were thousands. If Bob Dylan or Paul Simon were teenagers today, their music would perish in a New York or L.A. coffee house.  Diversity is for the most part …dead…and if Darwin was even  close to being right, and McLuhan  only 5% on the money, diversity, a vital element in any system of successful evolution….is now missing from the equation by which our American character continues to evolve.

In the place of diversity today, the media gives us various forms of “non-art”.  On the visual side, the “reality show” epitomizes the Frankenstein-monster evolution of America’s media-spun character.  The corporations currently dictating television programming have discovered that it is “dollar efficient” to wholly eliminate art from television, as, appealing to the baser audience instincts,  sexual infidelity, humiliation and mayhem  pay greater dividends.  Thanks to the “dollar efficiency” of the Jerry Springer paradigm, the rest of the world is now forming its image of America by watching its perversity in the form of wholly artless “reality TV”.  In place of  former art and diversity, the American media has put America’s perversity on parade…because it sells.  During the crucial years the Al Qaeda was  making its early sorties into the basement of the Twin Towers, the media busily enabled a lame Republican party to effectively demean and ultimately displace an American president-along with his party- by publishing video and audio tapes of his extramarital dalliance.

When Al Qaeda finally succeeded in toppling the twin towers, a media-conscious president was more concerned with completing his TV Video op in a grade school reading class than contending with the mortal enemies of Americans under attack.  Bush’s inspired speech before Congress, and the entire “War On  Terrorism” were, in practical terms, products of a media-driven society.  Bush didn’t write his speech, or even formulate the globally-encompassing policies pronounced therein… Rather, he read–as any other media “talking head–from a teleprompter screen….a speech written by a media-savy speech writer ( David Frum), dictated in terms by a corporate-driven adviser named Richard Pearl.   In turn, what force drove Richard Pearl, to drive David Frum to drive the teleprompter tech to put all those words of war before our Congress, and before us through, again,  our TV screens? …

The answer to this final question  provides us both a conclusion and a cruelly ironic modicum of hope as we wind up our search for America’s image , and how it’s managed to devolve from John Wayne to a Machiavellian (or Straussian) Frankenstein monster in a short half century… The media.  When Bush began to market his war in Iraq as a war on Al Qaeda-connected terrorism and WMD’s, the media published this fiction without due circumspection or question, because the story sold.

But, although the TV medium has enabled the transmogrification of the America’s image from heroic to  monstrous…more benign (greener)  branches of the media tree may well have started reversing the process and restoring America’s image to one we can live, and even grow with.    For example Vanity Fair, in July of 2003, published Sam Tannehaus’ avante-guarde revelations  concerning the Cabal which successfully managed the silent coup in our Pentagon which led us to wage our Neo-con Zionist-inspired wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the pretext of declaring a war of reprisal against terrorists.

As said before,  lies were told and the media printed them, and the media’s message dynamically changed the face and character of America. But the change in America’s perceived character was based upon lies, and therein lies our room for hope.  The change in America’s true character has been as fictional as the lies and misinformation on which the perceived change was founded.  When and as the media discover and collectively reveal the truth, America’s true character and face can—and will—emerge.

Vanity Fair’s bellwether article courageously published the evidentiary core of Michael Moore’s mainstream movie production, which (film) despite neo-conservative attempts to stifle its broadcasting, has succeeded in giving America a facelift, beginning with a twenty-minute standing ovation in France, and sallying forth with box-office attendance by  Americans sufficient to bode a  renaissance of truth and diversity in America, and the restoration of her former character and  destiny to join and perhaps eventually again lead the international brotherhood of states and souls in search of freedom, global harmony and peace.  (END)

Attached to this e-mail you will find some short, very relevant articles on Bush’s Christian/Zionist involvements, and some other topics of interest, including a piece entitled “Boykin’s War”…http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/6557/

From MMN (Media Monitors Network)  Author Nasim Zehra- An instructor at Harvard;  April 29, 2004 -  Note the references the writer makes to evangelical delusions of a neo-con-Christian 3-star General….This guy is loonier than the John who wrote Revelations, and a hell of a lot more dangerous because he (as opposed to the John who penned his psychotic ramblings innocuously from cave on Patmos) is operating from a cave in D.C. where there is a suitcase containing a button you can push and literally make  Crazy John’s dreams of Armageddon.  Google this subject long enough to find those photos of Satan that Bush’s General has proving the Devil was in Mogadishu that day….This is so scary I know you think I’m joking. But I’m not joking….and neither was Bush’s Christian Soldier marching onward into war…..You can Google this and similar articles with the key words:   ‘BUSH EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN WAR”…This type article is just the tip of the Titanic iceberg of this

threat of a joint neo-con Christian/Jewish/Zionist Herrenvolk.

Check out a website I’ll print here about how Bush may be fitting himself in as a player in John’s (author of Revelations) Armageddon story….

Bush- Iron Man or JC? Revelations

Take your pick…My belief is that GWB thinks he’s either the “iron man” warrior in crazy John’s  hallucinogenic Revelations or Jesus Christ in his Raptured second coming….. Read the excerpt from John’s ravings and choose for yourself:    (see this question in context of article on Iraq in neo-con Christian website   www.raptureready.com …..

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days” (Revelation 12: 1-6).

Revelation, chapter 12, tells about a “woman,” which refers to Israel, the Jewish people out of whom the Deliverer, Jesus Christ, will come. The great red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns, whose tail draws one-third of the stars, refers to Satan. The stars are the angels who rebelled and followed Lucifer, who was cast out of Heaven.

I (Dusty) say, if anybody doubts that G.W. Bush didn’t have this distorted deluded image of himself in the context of John’s deluded Revelations in mind when he declared war against the “axis of evil”,  he’s got his head buried in the sand…….. read Revelations…

Finally, if you can read all of this, absorb it, and still think you can vote Republican (for any Republican for any office), then, before you do, I beg you to do two things more: (1)  Go see Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 (which I know you haven’t seen because if you’re still planning to vote for our little Christian Fascist party) and (2) Hedges’ new book, “American Fascists”…

Best regards to all.

War is the only Enemy.

Peace,  Dusty    9/1/2004

Revised Feb. 21, 2007

Like We Said, This War is about Chemical Weapons…

	Realism about Iraq- The Doughnut versus The Hole Part One

By: DW In-House Historian and Philosopher, Len Carrier, with an addendum by DW Foreign Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch.

            George Packer’s “Talk of the Town” piece in the November 27 New Yorker decries the lack of realism shown by both Republicans and Democrats concerning what to do about Iraq.  He scoffs at those of us who want to begin removing our military forces now by saying that if we leave we will be unable to compel the Iraqi government to do anything to stop the escalation of violence.  He also points out the obvious by saying that the fading neoconservative hope of eventual “victory” in Iraq is just a pipe dream.  So what is Packer’s only hope of not losing in Iraq?  He says we ought to get all the various warring factions together around the table to work out some means of sharing power and decreasing the level of violence.  If that doesn’t work, nothing will.

How is this supposed to inject a note of realism into the picture?  He would have more success in forcing the Bloods and the Crips to sit down and talk things over.  It just isn’t going to happen.  There is no way, as an occupying force, we are going to get anyone to do anything in Iraq.  Iraq is a shambles.  Its government, hiding in the Green Zone and propped up by our military forces, would fall instantly if we withdrew that support.  Packer apparently thinks this is a bad thing.  He thinks that the ensuing violence will spill over into other countries in the Middle East, and he thinks we must try to prevent it.  This is a pleasant thought, but so was King Canute’s thought that he should try to prevent the tide from rising.

Packer’s mistake lies in thinking that it is up to us to “do something” to make Iraq, and the entire Middle East, a better place—not only for Iraqis but also for ourselves.  But the hard truth is that any more meddling on our part is only likely to make matters worse for all parties concerned.  Would there be an escalation of violence if we left? In the short run, probably.  But how can it be any better to stand watch over the killing of a thousand people each month for two more years (the length of Bush’s tenure), than to have even as many as ten thousand killed in the aftermath of our leaving? 

What the do-gooders forget is that these Arab tribes who are now warring against one another used to live together in relative peace.  They knew their territories and the limits of their powers.  It is we who lit the fires of sectarian war, and we only pour gasoline on the flames by trying to manage the blaze we created.  Perhaps it is time to squelch our paternalistic instincts and leave people alone to work out their own destinies.  Oh, yes, as a token of our sincere regret for killing so many of their citizens, we can bequeath all those billion-dollar military bases we constructed to protect our claim on Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. Maybe they can make better use of them than we did.

Leonard Carrier

DUSTY’S ADDENDUM

Leonard, as always I have nothing to dispute about your astute observations, except one thing- You’re ruing the hole and missing altogether the doughnut.  This artesian brouhaha  about what’s going to happen while we’re there in Iraq and how awful things are apt to get when we’re gone…it’s all Canute’s naïve struggles about the inevitably returning tide.  The point (of REALITY) is the Neo-Cons knew all along that there was no exit from Iraq…at least no non-chaotic exit.  Bush’s own father turned down the same Wolfowitz/Perle/Wurmser “A Clean Break”- inspired call for ousting Saddam after Kuwait as a mission rendered impossible by lessons taught the French and English on earlier occasions, and the Russians more recently in Afghanistan. No Western nation will ever successfully occupy and/or forcefully democratize an Islamic nation.

The doughnut all along was and remains the oil. The doughnut was that the Bush-led Neo-cons have totally won the war because it was never a war against terrorism in the first place; it was a war to control 20 percent of Middle Eastern oil reserves and in this-the  true reality about American meddling in Iraq—it’s truly a matter of “mission accomplished”.  Bush was telling the truth that day he landed on the carrier in his cute little pretend aviator’s jacket.

I urge you and the rest of the DW readership to re-read Chris Floyd’s piece I published on November 7 (hit the “articles” link on this site), entitled “Why Bush Smiles”.  Here’s a “reality-relevant” excerpt:

“Yes, victory. You wonder why Bush and his minions maintain the seemingly irrational belief that “things are going well” in Iraq, that “we’re making progress,” etc.? That’s because things are going well in the war they are fighting: the war for money and power. What happens to the human beings caught up in this war ­ Iraqi civilians, or American citizens at ever-greater risk from the terrorism spawned by the war ­ is, again, no concern of the Bush gang. In fact, the worse things are from that standpoint, the better it is for the Bushists. The war profits (and stolen swag) they and their corporate cronies have accrued from the Iraq War (and the “War on Terror” as well) have given them unimaginable wealth with which to continue their overall dominance of American society ­ no matter who wins the elections in 2006 or 2008, or for decades beyond. As I’ve stated often before, no matter what happens, Bush and his cronies have already won the war .

They’ve won even if Iraq collapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they’ve won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights ­ because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they’ve won even if they lose their majority next month or the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will still fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic “centrist” ­ who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state  ­ until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And you know and I know that’s not going to happen.”

Click here and read the whole article —again and again – until the hole disappears and you see the doughnut - http://democratswrite.com/the_democratic_opinion/page231.htm

 So, as I said, Leonard—I have no fault to take with your analysis of the flaws inherent in all the armchair quarterbacking in the on-going  Iraq games, the political pragmatisms, posturings, polemics  and pretensions;  I simply want to remind you that all scenarios (exit and staying put)  are going to be disastrous with the exception that Bush’s victory is in either case complete and absolute.  The oil is pouring; we’re in control; we’ll continue to exert that control to protect the flow of oil and dollars so long as the oil is there and our corporate lobbyists can con their  Congressional puppets into funding the military costs of assuring the oil’s security and flow.

There is absolutely nothing we can do to alter the fact that Halliburton, and the oily Houses of Bush and Saud have won this war. But let’s not add degrading insult to our nationally-disabling and demeaning injury by letting the sleazy neo-con oil magicians trick us into watching their diversions (tails wagging dogs) instead of paying attention to the legerdemain going on in reality—The oil flows on.  The oil fields were the first assets seized and placed under protective guard after our armed forces landed–you remember, while vandals were emptying the Holy Land (theirs and ours) of irreplaceable historic art and iconic religious treasures in the smoke screen provided by American “shock and awe”.

 And the oil fields will remain protected by–Bush has already promised it–American armed forces…indefinitely. 

This, my friends,  is the doughnut reality in the case of Iraq. All the rest is–quite wholly— the hole.

So, let’s pull our eye away from the hole and put it back on the doughnut. When we do it’ll be plain as a glazed Krispy Cream  that getting out of Iraq ASAP is the only rational option. The mayhem isn’t going to get any worse, and America’s presence in Iraq is clearly the reason it’s as bad as it is. This oily nightmare has now lasted longer than WWII.  Between a 500,000 and a million Iraqis have died because of Bush’s insane declaration of war against a figment of neoconartistry…a tactic (as opposed to a national enemy). So let’s get on with the redemption of America and get out of there now, bring our troops home and impeach the bastard war criminal who sent them there to die…for that god forsaken oily doughnut.