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writing for godot

We Pharisees

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Written by Basil E. Dalack   
Monday, 04 July 2016 00:17
WE PHARISEES



Reality to Americans today is whatever the Bush administration and its corporate media sycophants say it is. Otherwise, we would not have reelected Bush in 2004; we would not be allowing the administration to continually erode the rights our Constitution was designed to guarantee; and we would not be condoning a congress that has abdicated its responsibility to guard against executive despotism. Because of that reality, the Bush Republicans and their Democrat fellow travelers will still control Congress after the 2006 bi-election, and Bush will continue to run amok.

This is so because of the administration’s virtuosity at reverberating a primal emotional chord: fear.

The events of September 11, 2001, did not change the world forever. What did change the world forever is the Bush administration’s preemption of those events as a pretext for transforming our constitutional republic into an autocracy. According to Bush, those events were part of a war that countless millions of Moslem terrorists, led by Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda, were waging against us. Those extremists constituted an unremitting threat to the safety of our country, and we needed to fight an interminable war to protect against that threat. “They” (whoever we designated as a threat) were out to get us, and we could never relax our vigilance or stop fighting “them” wherever we decided “they” were located. The bogeyman is always out there, and we are always at risk. Moreover, although we are at war, only we have warriors; the other side has only “unlawful combatants”, who are not subject to international law, but are subject only to whatever rules we choose to make.

We are the good guys, and they are the bad. The end of security justifies whatever means we choose to make us believe that we are assuring that security. And so whatever we do in the name of security, rain bombs on the defenseless a la the Condor Legion over Guernica, imprison people indefinitely without giving any reason, hold secret trials a la the Star Chamber, and torture prisoners a la the Inquisition, is okay.

Which is what got us to where we are today.

Aided and abetted by his corporate media groupies, Bush created the American reality that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq threatened our security because someday Iraq might have atomic weapons and someday Iraq might be able to fire those theoretical weapons at the United States. We could not wait for someday to happen; we needed to strike now to prevent someday’s becoming today.

On October 3, 2002, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, tried to stop the war before it started. He proposed to avoid war by holding a duel at a neutral site, with Kofi Annan as referee, Saddam Hussein against George Bush, and a vice president against a vice president, “and in this way we are saving the American people and the Iraqi people….”

Bush, the self-styled western gunslinger, declined the opportunity for a showdown at the OK Corral. But on March 17, 2003, Bush delivered the following ultimatum to Iraq: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.” Abdication was necessary because:

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised….



[The Iraqi regime] has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.



The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat. But we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set the course toward safety. Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed.





Rather than meet Saddam Hussein mano a mano, Bush, at 0230 Greenwich Mean Time, March 20, 2003, had our navy and air force launch a “decapitation attack” on a site where Saddam Hussein was supposedly located. Four cruisers and two submarines positioned in the Persian Gulf launched 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and several F-117A stealth bombers (shades of Mussolini and Ethiopia) dropped guided bombs in the attempted hit. Invasion followed the failed assassination.

At 10:16 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, March 19, 2003, Bush announced that he had ordered the beginning of “military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” He said that:

Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly – yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet the threat now, with our Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.



Those words, and those of March 17, 2003, recall Adolf Hitler’s Proclamation to the German Army on September 1, 1939:

The Polish State has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has appealed to arms. Germans in Poland are persecuted with bloody terror and driven from their houses. A series of violations of the frontier, intolerable to a great Power, prove that Poland is no longer willing to respect the frontier of the Reich. In order to put an end to this lunacy, I have no other choice than to meet force with force from now on….



Just as Poland forced Germany to invade it in self defense, so, too, did Iraq force Bush to invade in self defense. And we swallowed this; this became the American reality.

Our acceptance of George Bush’s reality has not allowed us to see the world’s reality, that the war against Iraq is a war of aggression that violates American statutes which are also part of international law: the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions For The Pacific Settlement Of International Disputes; the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Renunciation Of War Pact (which was the legal underpinning of the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials); and the United Nations Charter. Even so eminent a neocon as Richard Perle recognized, on November 20, 2003, that “international law… required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone.” (Although he hedged this by saying that leaving Saddam Hussein alone would have been “morally reprehensible”; talk about doublethink and doublespeak.)

It is also doublespeak to say that our troops in Iraq are fighting to defend us; that we must support our troops by keeping them in Iraq; and that to bring them home immediately would be to “cut and run.”

Our nation entrusts Bush and the commanding generals with the lives of our soldiers. The trust is to risk those lives only to defend the nation. Because Iraq never constituted a threat to the United States there is not now and never has been any need to defend the United States against Iraq. Because Bush and the generals knew this, they betrayed our troops and breached the trust of our nation when they ordered our troops to invade Iraq. Bush and the generals transformed American warriors into biological organisms striving to stay alive in an alien and hostile environment. The only real way to support our troops is to preserve their lives by bringing them home now. That would not be cutting and running. Soldiers assigned to defend their country against an invader “cut and run” if they leave the battlefield; but invaders who leave the battlefield are not cutting and running; they are merely ceasing to be invaders.

And the Bush reality we embrace also applies domestically: trial lawyers and environmentalists are out to destroy American business, therefore gun makers and sellers must be immunized from tort liability, and levels of mercury and co2 emission must not be regulated. We may choke and poison our children, but profits must be protected. And the way to stimulate the economy is to cut taxes for the super-rich.

Have we always been so benighted? The answer is Yes; we have always been in thrall to the reality established by our leaders. Even Vietnam did not cause a moral awakening, because we never made any attempt at making amends for the millions of people we killed to protect the world from Communism.

We have never been able truly to join with Katharine Lee Bates and pray: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw” because we do not acknowledge that America has any flaw. The prevailing American spirit embodies the prayer of Luke’s Pharisee: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers….” hypocrates
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