Grasping at Straws
The United States is the world's primary holder of weapons of mass destruction, and as such, it constitutes the world's greatest danger, something people all around the world are finally waking up to thanks to the Iraq war and the planned war on Iran. Ever so slowly international resistance is building to the world's "sole remaining evil empire."
America's favorite curmugeon Andy Rooney often writes amusing pieces tailored for humor, and perhaps because of that he is sometimes allowed to say things that other commentators would lose their jobs for. In one column for 60 Minutes called "Ike Was Right About the War Machine" he takes up the topic of the obscene amounts of money the U.S. spends on "defense" (war and weapons of mass destruction). First he gives us a simple statistic:
"No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.
"We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons - enough to destroy all of mankind.
"We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. "
The he refers to President Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military-industrial" complex:
"We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. …'
"Well, Ike was right. That's just what's happened. "
We can now understand that "military-industrial complex" was really a euphemism for fascism, the combination of a dictatorial system and the power of corporations, the exact combination being put in place by the Bush administration. This system serves the corporations, not the people. In fact, it IS the corporations. For the corporations WAR is necessity justifying any act, however horrific. One such act was 9/11.
Norman Livergood puts it very succinctly in an article called "The World Resistance Movement:"
"Thinking people around the world acknowledge that the American political-economic system has been taken over by a demonic cabal and debased into a Fascist Police State .
"Fortunately, a growing body of people worldwide recognize this junta's crimes against humanity and are carrying out non-violent operations of dissent that constitute a peaceful world resistance movement to stop this tyranny."
"The evidence of America having devolved into a fascist police state stares us in the face--only the brain-dead refuse to acknowledge it or deny it."
The pathetic original premise of this thread was a desperate attempt to try find tiny speck of something to justify the fascist takeover of America. It is, as Livergood states above, "brain-dead." It is hardly worth responding to because whoever, at this late date, has no eyes to see is unlikey to ever have such eyes. Below a certain level of intelligence speech and debate are useless. That 9/11 was an inside job complete with controlled demolitions, probably masterminded by Israel, is self-evident to anyone who has studied the issue. The fascist cabal which overthrew the U.S. government in 2000 needed their war to keep the money flowing to their pockets, so they attacked the United States and blamed it someone else with arguments that would be laughed out of a real court of law.
Ted Lang says it simply and with passion:
"It was designed to anger US all and to demand retaliation against anyone G. Bush deemed culpable.
"I charge the Bush administration with full responsibility in this planned, international criminal act of war by a government against its own people to justify the crime of launching a false war of invasion against an innocent people. "
If we had, any longer, a real free press, the current situation could never have come about. The crime would have been solved by now, easily, and the real perpetrator put in prison. Lang goes on to make our current danger explicit:
"The Jewish corporate, establishment mainstream media is the only thing keeping the Bush criminals operational. Should the general population of the United States finally be convinced that the unthinkable actually happened, Bush and his criminals would be toast. The Congress is in fear because they know Bush could order a nuclear strike against America and blame it on them for being 'soft' on terrorism thereby causing the event. Congress must, therefore, be completely circumvented as an initiator for remedy. "
A cabal capable of attacking America once is capable of attacking it twice, and next time it may be with real weapons of mass destruction, nuclear bombs, and not just specially outfitted passenger jets.
There have also been extremely pathetic attempts to put a rosy light on the situation in Iraq by those who are incapable of seeing the truth no matter how much information, facts and evidence you put in front of them. They will grab at any straw in attempt to keep their increasingly untenable world view together, God only knows why. Is it an inability to think? Fear of changing outworn and useless concepts? Some misplaced loyalty to a myth? It is as difficult for an intelligent person to understand a fool as it is for a fool to understand what the intelligent man is saying.
A recent article at CounterPunch by William Blum helps wipe away some of the myths. It is called "Why Bush's Iraq is Worse Than Saddam's" and is but a partial compendium of the destruction of a nation by the Bush fascist cabal.
"I was moved to compile a list of the many kinds of misfortune which have fallen upon the heads of the Iraqi people as a result of the American liberation of their homeland. It's depressing reading, and you may not want to read it all, but I think it's important to have it summarized in one place. "
Blum then goes on to create a long list of undeniable things proving the devastion caused to Iraq, devastion which really started on 9/11 when Israel and the Bush administration attacked America in order to justify an attack on Iraq, a nation which had absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center.
Blum's list is, necessarily, very long, and I can just give a few sample items here. To browse the whole disheartening list, go to the following link at CounterPunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum06222006.html
Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84% of the higher education establishments have been "destroyed, damaged and robbed".
Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public's health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are rampaging through the country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely damaged by the war and looting.
Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed babies. During the few weeks of war in spring 2003, A10 "tankbuster" planes, which use munitions containing depleted uranium, fired 300,000 rounds
A nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more prevails.
Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious issue.
A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government feature a wide variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psychological, emotional; painful, degrading, humiliating; leading to mental breakdown, death, suicide; a human-rights disaster area.
The cost of living has skyrocketed. Income levels have plummeted.
Continual bombing assaults on neighborhoods has left an uncountable number of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges, roads, and everything else that goes into the making of modern civilized life.
The supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal, and reliable electricity have all generally been below pre-invasion levels, producing constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching 115 degrees. To add to the misery, people wait all day in the heat to purchase gasoline, due in part to oil production, the country's chief source of revenue, being less than half its previous level.
Civil war, death squads, kidnaping, car bombs, rape, each and every day ... Iraq has become the most dangerous place on earth. American soldiers and private security companies regularly kill people and leave the bodies lying in the street; US-trained Iraqi military and police forces kill even more, as does the insurgency. An entire new generation is growing up on violence and sectarian ethics; this will poison the Iraqi psyche for many years to come.
And it goes on. Only a brain-dead knee-jerk partisan could possibly grasp at straws at this point to try to put a positive spin on the wholesale destruction of this nation by the United States. It is not advantageous to argue with such people. There IS such a thing as blindness, and there is also such a thing as willful blindness. Best to just drop and move on in search for more intelligent people.
Norman Livergood has written a good deal about the current fascist overthrow of the United States. In his latest article he speak hopefully of a world wide resistence movement against what he calls the "demonic cabal" and the "Fascist Police State."
See: http://www.hermes-press.com/world_resistance.htm
The "bill of indictment" against the demonic cabal is so long that it's a challenge to remember all the charges and record the daily atrocities. Fortunately, the crimes against humanity this junta is perpetrating are recognized by a growing body of people worldwide who constitute a world resistance movement to stop this tyranny.
He quotes from a Jim Kirwan article :
"Resistance is not futile, not if we stand our ground and question everything that happened. Resistance is not futile if you chose to stand and fight instead of just voting with your feet. At first glance that might seem easier, (running away from totalitarian fascism), but this is evil incarnate: it is here in the USA, in this country - what used to be your country. Will you allow a bunch of shallow thugs to kick you out of your own country, because to fight them would be too difficult, too inconvenient - has it come to that?"
Silly little late attempts to come up with some tiny crumb of justification for the illegal war Iraq are ridiculous at this point. They are distractions from the real and heavy issues that face us. The fascist takeover of a world power is a disaster for the whole world and threatens to send the entire planet into chaos, more evil wars, widespread human suffering and loss of freedom. If there were a free press it could be stopped, but there is not. Fascism is a system in which large powerful corporations are intimately involved and our full media have conglomerated into a small handful of such corporations. Orwell understood that this is all that is necessary to control the minds of vast masses of people and it is now unfolding before our eyes.
People still looking for minor justifications of the evil actions of Bush fascist cabal are desperately attempting to shore up a fast crumbling outdated and delusional world view. Such delusions are a form of mental illness, one that is now epidemic among diehard partisans of the old order.
