No monopoly on patriotism
No one spat on Vietnam GIs and no one can justify Bush's war
by John F. Sugg
- Kristin Sabena
- Demonstrators in Atlanta last week
Police know the slang: "throwaway gun." A bad cop will keep an untraceable gun stashed in the cruiser in case an arrest goes bad, and the suspected perp who lies dead in the street did not have a weapon. The officer will take the gun and drop it next to the suspected but now deceased bad guy.
And that's what is going to go down in Baghdad.
The Bush junta cannot afford not to find some chemical or gas weapons. I don't think Saddam Hussein had cleansed himself of the weapons. That was his crime, of course, and not the crime of Iraqi civilians dying in our firestorm bombing. But on the chance, however slim, that Saddam was clean, our spooks will make sure evidence is found. Throwaway chemicals and bugs, so to speak.
And, like almost every other step as we tramp across Bush's Rubicon, it's likely the fraud will be discovered and thoroughly documented, probably by the foreign press, but largely ignored by the American media. After all, the Bushies know that lies work - if you don't have to worry about the press calling you on the facts.
The intellectual disconnect and professional depravity is nowhere better illustrated than in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (my list of major, well-documented but embarrassing-to-the-Bushies war stories not reported on its pages now is at item 32). On Saturday, the AJC bannered the front page with "BAGHDAD BURNS" and on Sunday elevated War Boss Donald Rumsfeld's transparent spin to an editorial page headline claiming "U.S. shows restraint." Please tell us, how is the "shock and awe" incineration of large tracts of a city with 5 million people, almost half of them children and the vast majority innocent of any wrongdoing that would warrant a ghastly death by fire, an act of "restraint"?
...O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief...
High Priest and Presidential Appointer Antonin Scalia last year rallied "people of faith" (i.e. Bush) to oppose the "tendency of democracy" (the "tendency"!?) and to support the "divine authority behind government." With God's authority, then, the Bushies' farrago of lies, deceptions, half-truths and slanders (against any number of foreign nations and domestic dissenters), is not only forgivable but achieves a status of holiness.
Just look at the success of propaganda. The Christian Science Monitor reported that before the media war trumpets sounded, only about 3 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had anything to do with Osama bin Laden's 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now, thanks to uncritically and repeatedly broadcasting the never-even-remotely-proven accusation, some 40 to 45 percent of our citizens swallow the tale.
It should gall Americans that they have been so snookered by charlatans, who have long hidden their real agenda of a long series of conflicts. But the tactic of putting blinders on the public is an old one. Hitler dressed S.S. soldiers in Polish uniforms, sent them into Poland and had them fire on a German radio station. Then declaring that "the Polish state has refused the peaceful settlement," Hitler launched his version of "shock and awe," the blitzkrieg.
... help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it...
How many times will we be told of the "growing coalition" (including, thank God, major powers such as Micronesia), and not be told of the bribery and intimidation used to marshal compliance?
How many times will we not be told that among our "allies" (none of whom, other than Britain and Australia, actually back words with soldiers), it is only the governments that support our war? Polls show that virtually every country in the world, other than in Israel, the vast majority oppose this war. How many times will the press harp on the alleged perfidy of France and Germany, and fail to recognize that Bush has destroyed the Western Alliance, has alienated allies by the score, and has rendered America hated, despised and disbelieved by most of the world?
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