Understanding the U.S. War State

by John McMurtry

“It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
Herman Goering

Genocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as “progress” and “spreading civilisation”.

The tradition of misleading the American people by false pretexts for aggressive wars is an old one in U.S. history, but since the fascist interregnum war criminal invasions of other countries have not been accepted by public opinion. The U.S. under the control of the corporate war party now seeks to reverse this trend.

By dint of the permitted 9-11 plane attacks on the World Trade Centre, an open presidential blank-cheque has been granted by Congress for attacking third- world countries so as to occupy their countries and control their resources. The now known blueprint of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others written in September of 2001 as the “Project for the New American Century” is clear on the plan to “shape the international security order in line with American principles and interests”. Armed domination of the Gulf region “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein”.

The U.S. state military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in under two years are expressions of this new supra-market policy. Before we pass over the pattern of facts at work as merely “realpolitik”, we should note that this armed-state project resembles fascism: not only in war criminal attacks on other countries in violation of international law, but in repudiating market relations to seize others’ valuable goods by armed force.

Facing Facts
As demagogic glorification of genocidal invasion once again escapes naming by a flood of falsehoods and projections onto the latest U.S. Enemy, we need to remind ourselves of facts that no mass medium once discussed from October of 2002 to March of 2003. As we lay bare the ruling deceptions here, we should keep in mind their unifying principle which is not seen. U.S. state justifications always project onto the designated Enemy what the U.S. security state is doing itself.

If it loudly condemns another weaker state’s “weapons of mass destruction”, “chemical and biological weapons”, “violation of international laws”, or “attempts to impose its will on the world by terror”, then we can deduce that this is exactly what the U.S. is planning more of, but is diverting attention from by accusing others. Test this underlying principle with every international accusation the U.S. makes next, and you will find that it is invariable confirmed.

Government web page reveals Nuclear Blueprints

You're Kidding Me, Right?
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t Perspective

The New York Times headline for Friday reads, "US Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer." Bad enough all by itself, true, but this headline does not entirely convey the insane and astonishing and absurd and awful realities behind this story.

"Last March," begins the article, "the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to 'leverage the Internet' to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein."

Translation: On the three-year anniversary of the catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq, Congressional Republicans, terrified that their comprehensive failures would come back to haunt them in the November midterms, cajoled the White House into publishing incredibly sensitive information in a rhetorically empty attempt to cover their backsides.

The Times article continues, "The site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs."

Translation: We have spent the last five years being terrorized by our own government - "We do not want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud" - and yet these nitwits somehow conclude that publishing detailed directions for the building of nuclear bombs is perfectly fine.

You have to wonder if North Korea's sudden leaps forward in their own nuclear program came because they got a chance to read the user's manual for the nuclear club. Note well, by the way, that the data published is from before the first Gulf War, which means it has nothing to do with Iraq's WMD program in 2003, said program having been utterly decimated by sanctions and targeted bombing runs.

No Conservative Party

by Charley Reese October 28, 2006
The Republican Party is not now, never was and never will be a conservative party. It is what it has always been – a representative of the rich and of big business.
It might have become a conservative party in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was nominated as the presidential candidate. The Rockefeller wing of the party, to which the Bush family has always been a part, conducted the most vicious character assassination campaign against Goldwater in modern political history. The liberal Rockefellerites preferred a crook from Texas to a conservative.

The Rockefeller wing never lost control of the party again, co-opting Nixon, Ford and even Ronald Reagan, who was forced to take George Bush as his vice president. The Bush people, within two years, ran off nearly all of the original Reagan supporters.

There was a famous quote by James Baker, the first Bush's hatchet man. He was quoted as saying: "Who else are the conservatives going to vote for?"

Well, Mr. Baker discovered that the conservatives had three choices in 1992. They could stay at home, they could vote for Ross Perot, or they could vote for Bill Clinton. I hope he thought of that while he watched Clinton's inauguration.

The hard truth is that if you are a genuine political conservative, you don't have a party. The Democrats are practically socialists; the Republicans are closer to corporate fascists. Neither one offers conservatives anything but rhetoric.

But let's define our terms, because it is my belief that not many Americans today are really conservative. Political conservatism has nothing to do with such social issues as abortion or gay marriage. Those are moral and philosophical issues that properly belong to the state legislatures.

A true conservative recognizes that the Constitution is a binding contract that should be interpreted literally and in the context of the time at which it was written and ratified. A Constitution that means anything a judge says it means means nothing. Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party were the first to violate it in a blatant manner. One of Lincoln's cronies referred to it as "a worthless piece of parchment."

A true conservative is fiscally responsible. Laying debt and interest payments on posterity is neither conservative nor liberal. It is just obscenely irresponsible.

A true conservative believes in noninterference in the affairs of other countries. Regime change is a policy favored by fascists or communists, but it has nothing to do with American conservatism. Americans have the right to govern only one country – their own. Americans have an obligation to defend only one country – their own.

A true conservative believes in a free economy and that beyond protecting the public from force and fraud, the government should not interfere in private affairs.

There are a lot of other things that define a genuine conservative, but suffice it to say that the Republican Party, with its imperialistic foreign policy, its disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, its fiscal irresponsibility and its erosion of personal liberty, is not by any stretch of the imagination a conservative party.

It wouldn't be a bad idea for people to sit down with a pencil and paper and list what they actually believe. Clarifying their own political philosophy might make them less susceptible to the demagoguery and political propaganda that characterize our present age.

When the Founding Fathers laid the burden of self-government on us, they didn't do any favors for the ignorant and lazy-minded. Tom Jefferson observed that those who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.