Published on Saturday, March 15, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Accountability for the Iraq War
by David Krieger
We have been engaged in an illegal war in Iraq for five years - and there is no accountability.

It is beyond doubt that our leaders lied us into this war - and there is no accountability.

More than four thousand American and coalition soldiers are dead - and there is no accountability.

Tens of thousands of American and coalition soldiers are seriously wounded - and there is no accountability.

Our surviving soldiers are coming home traumatized from the war without proper medical and psychiatric care - and there is no accountability.

More than a million Iraqis, mostly civilians, have been killed in this war and countless others wounded - and there is no accountability.

More than four million Iraqis are displaced as internal or external refugees of this war - and there is no accountability.

By using so-called “depleted uranium” weapons, we are poisoning the earth, air and water of Iraq, causing serious health problems to Iraqis and coalition soldiers - and there is no accountability.

America has become a nation that tortures - and there is no accountability.

America has become a nation that spies on its citizens - and there is no accountability.

America has become a nation that hides the body bags of its soldiers killed in action - and there is no accountability.

We are spending $12 billion a month on this war - and there is no accountability.

Reputable economists calculate that this war will cost American citizens more than $3 trillion - and there is no accountability.

This war is burdening unborn generations of Americans and Iraqis - and there is no accountability.

This war has brought respect for America to its lowest ebb throughout the world - and there is no accountability.

The war in Iraq has stretched our military forces to the breaking point, making us far less able to cope with real threats to our security - and there is no accountability.

The war in Iraq has been a training ground for terrorists, making us far less safe - and there is no accountability.

Accountability means holding to account those who are responsible for a war that is illegal under international law - in this case, it means holding to account those who have been irresponsible and criminal in their behavior. It means holding to account George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and others. It means not just their disgrace, but trials to bring them to justice.

This is not a partisan issue - it is an issue of responsibility and accountability and, at a deeper level, an issue of restoring our decency, our dignity and our democracy.

Americans must hold those responsible for this war to account.

David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Fascism Anyone?

Laurence W. Britt

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The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2.

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Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.

 

I have included this Interview by Buzzflash.com of Naomi Wolf because of my deep concern for the direction America is going.  Naomi's research and understanding is a great resource to keep America a great nation of and by the people.  Her book is The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot (Paperback)
By Naomi Wolf

Naomi Wolf: I know an actual, real young patriot named Chris Le. He is a 28-year-old activist. As I describe in the Introduction to the book, two things were happening at once in my life. A mentor of mine, who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, kept saying to me: You've got to read the histories, you've got to read the histories, you've got to read the histories. There are echoes. I kept thinking, that's crazy, but she was so adamant that she basically sat me down and made me read the histories of her parents' experience, basically. I then went on and read about six other classic cases of societies closing down democracies or democratic uprisings being crushed. Then I understood why she was so insistent that I study and write about this.
At about the same time, I went to the wedding of this young patriot, Chris Le, who is typical of the best of his generation in that he's idealistic, he's committed, he wants a better America. He's extremely worried about the themes I write about in the book.
But like most young people, he wasn't given a tutorial in what democracy is in a very clear way. He was certainly not given a tutorial in mid-twentieth century history of the closing down of democracies. When I was at their wedding, and I realized these horrible scary storm clouds were brewing, and these signs were so clear, that there were threats from the past that we need to remind people of in the future in a very clear, accessible way, I decided the best thing that I could do for him and his wife and other people who may not be scholars was to write this kind of primer in a super-clear accessible way that reminds us all about how democracies are crushed. It basically shows that there's a blueprint for doing it, and the blueprint was developed early in the last century, but the tyrants all over the world replicate it.
The Founders totally believed and foresaw that an American despot or tyrant could oppress the American people, and that the greatest threat was not a foreign power. The book is meant as a very immediate reminder and guide to what freedom is, and how our system was set up to protect us in a very personal way. We've become so accustomed to our democracy that we really don't understand how easy it is to close down a democracy, once certain checks and balances are dismantled, and certain pieces are set in motion.
BuzzFlash: You have outlined ten steps to dismantling a democracy, which the Founders of our country also recognized as threats. How did you come to pick those ten?
Naomi Wolf: Basically they leapt out as a pattern in the reading I was doing. I read about these different times of crisis, specifically the Twenties in Italy, the Thirties in Germany, the Fifties in East Germany, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1973 in the coup in Chile, and the late Eighties/early Nineties which saw the crushing in China of the pro-democracy movement.
What jumps up when you read those histories is that essentially, the practice of crushing an open society was essentially invented by Mussolini. It was then developed and elaborated on by the other great tyrants of the twentieth century, and then they studied each other. Hitler studied Stalin. Both of them studied Mussolini. Subsequently, the other dictators all over the world go back and look at what works.
The School for the Americas, basically teach it -- this blueprint was passed on to any number of would-be Latin American dictators and military leaders. Tyrants all over the world take the same ten steps. And it really is like a blueprint.
I start the book saying, in Thailand this coup took a week. This is what they did -- boom, boom, boom. It's like they had a shopping list, and, really, they did, because, by now, people who want to crush a democracy know what to do. The people who live in a democracy don't know what these ten steps are. Otherwise, we would absolutely be thronging the streets right now. We might realize that we're in a state of crisis rather than just shopping online and watching "America's Top Model."
But how did those ten steps arrive on my list? Various writers on fascism try to identify what the key steps are. Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, and Robert O. Paxton have all written about the elements of the totalitarian or fascist mind. All the writers look at different things, and they don't all correspond to my list, although Eco's list had some of the same elements. It just seemed very clear to me from my reading that you see these ten things again and again and again, such that you know what's going to happen. It's so predictable; it's so well-established.
Here's one. Categorically, in every closing society, someone who wants to crush democracy will establish a military tribunal system which parallels or is outside of the established judiciary. Once you create a prison system outside of the rule of law -- I call it a secret prison system, unaccountable, not transparent, where people get disappeared, where people get tortured -- can you name a society that did that that did not eventually have fascist rule?
As I was writing the book, someone sent me documentation of the expansion of the definition of terrorists to apply to activists. It was so clear that the definition of terrorist in every fascist shift expands to include more and more, to reach closer to the heart of civil society. You start to see the expansion of the term traitor, treason, espionage. Look at the censure by the Senate of an ad -- the notion that criticism is unpatriotic and bordering on treason. Stalin and Goebbels both developed that tactic. You start to see the broader and broader use of accusations of treason and espionage, like the calls we heard after the SWIFT banking story broke to try citizens under the 1917 Espionage Act -- an Act which, most Americans do not realize, was used at the end of the teens in this country to round up and arrest thousands of people like you and me; some were beaten in prison. Eugene Debs got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for a speech about the First Amendment. The White House led a drumbeat of voices calling for the trial of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller for "treason" when he published the SWIFT banking stories. The penalty for treason in this country can be execution.
Sure enough, if you go back to history, you find that Nikolai Bukharin, the publisher of Izvestia, was tried in the third Moscow show trial and was in fact executed for treason. So these things are like part of a game plan, part of a blueprint. And there are so many parallels I found, which I point out in the book, that it is very hard to avoid the hypothesis that someone brilliant in this administration studied history and is replaying elements, language, and tactics from violently closing societies that worked in the past.
I really saw the same tendencies happening again and again in the reading I did about how open societies dismantled parliamentary democracies and constitutions, and how they were crushing pro-democracy uprisings.
BuzzFlash: Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil," and the reality is that sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we simply can't see what is happening to us. One analogy to what is happening to our Constitution being dismantled and the encroachment upon our civil liberties is the idea of a frog being boiled in water. The frog doesn't realize, until it's too late, that the temperature just keeps rising.
To the average person, is it just too much to comprehend, too much to think about, it's not what we're concentrating on, so in the end we're the frogs being boiled? We're busy entertaining ourselves, or working, or being with our families, or going out and having a drink. It's only people like yourself, or people who really follow this, who are aware that we're being boiled.
Naomi Wolf: This is the desperately urgent question, and you're right to ask it. Let me address it on three levels.
First, I deliberately wrote the book in the most accessible possible way, really based on Tom Paine's prose style. The pamphleteers of the Revolution were really deliberately trying to write in a way that ordinary people -- farmers, small shopkeepers, people without an elaborate higher education, people who are not aristocrats -- could understand. It was urgent that the ordinary colonist or the ordinary American got it -- the kind of threat that was posed by George III -- what it meant to have blanket warrants, what liberty meant, what the arguments for liberty were. You know, before Common Sense, most people in the Colonies were not persuaded that they needed a revolution. The American experiment at the time pushed human beings further out into a completely untested model of government. So his very transparent, accessible prose style let people realize for themselves, or think through for themselves, that they deserved liberty and that they needed to act on behalf of liberty.
You and I are in the same position -- and everyone on the Internet. We have to switch our model of leadership and return it to the Revolutionary American model of citizen leaders. The Congress is not going to save us. The mainstream media is not going to save us. The pundits are not going to save us. The U.N. is not going to save us. The European Union is not going to save us. There is not a force on earth that can save us, except for our own talking to each other, clearly and urgently, to explain and convey the nature of this threat, and then for us to take radical action NOW. So that's why I wrote it this way.
Our strategy has to be that thousands, and we hope soon millions, of other citizens who are persuaded by the argument will speak to each other and then mobilize in a hurry to confront these abuses. It depends on citizens acting as journalists, citizens acting as advocates, citizens acting as leaders and revolutionaries to mobilize one another. So that's A.
B is, you're absolutely right about the incremental nature of this kind of shift. That's why I spend so much time looking at the early years of earlier such shifts. Americans tend to think that the closing down of a modern parliamentary society happens in some giant, dramatic explosion. But it doesn't. In a democracy as sophisticated or resilient as ours had been, it's going to be closed down incrementally.
If you go back to Berlin in 1931, it wouldn't have looked so unrecognizable to us. There was a Parliament that was meeting there. There was a constitution. There were abortion rights organizations, human rights lawyers and activists. There were gay rights organizations. There was modern art. People were doing what we're doing. People were going to the movies. They kept living -- and that's why I draw on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. People were doing what we're doing. They were shopping. They were leading their lives, even as the catastrophe was tightening and tightening around them.
There are scenes in the books I cite that are exactly the same as the scene that played out in the University of Florida last week when the kid was tasered for asking a question and everyone sat still as he was dragged out. That scene was described by Count Kessler, by Victor Klemperer, in memoirs of Germany form 1931-1933. And people then were saying what we are saying: surely this can't get worse; people will come to their senses.
Historians such as Richard Evans point out that, at that point, if the people of Germany had arisen and confronted the abusers of parliamentary process and of the Constitution, the horrors could have been averted. By the way, I am not looking at Germany to make an analogy of any kind about outcomes. I am Jewish and do not take that issue lightly. What I am doing, and I think we honor the victims of the Holocaust by doing so, is looking at how there are threads that recur in the early years of a fascist shift, and lessons we have to learn in time. What we really have to realize is that in a modern democracy, the shift to a closed society doesn't happen overnight.
And it doesn't happen even in a clear line on a graph that's left to right diagonally. It happens in what Malcolm Gladwell would call tipping points. You can chart it, and there may be pressure, pressure, multiple assaults, and, then, a key event that would be like a vertical line on that chart. And then you're looking at another reality.
The really important thing to understand, which is why I walk the reader so carefully through the way democracies really curve down, is democracies can reach a point of no return. And it's sudden when that happens. And it's disorienting. There's a point at which democracy can no longer heal democracy. People have got to understand that. People need to realize that the day we made it legal, essentially, for the state to torture people, that was one of those vertical lines on the chart. We're now in a place where it is legal, the White House has claimed, to knock on your door or my door, and say: You are an enemy combatant. Come with us. Then there is what Jose Padilla went through, in three years of solitary confinement -- making it difficult to see a lawyer, making it difficult to see his family.
I'm not saying he's a good guy. But I'm saying the White House is taking the position that the President -- and any future president -- can say: You, Naomi, you, peruser of BuzzFlash -- you're an enemy combatant. And the President gets to decide what that means. The President gets to decide to hold you. The first time that someone is called an enemy combatant that you and I identify with -- that's going to be another one of these vertical lines, after which you are not going to be having this conversation, because I'm not that brave. The tasering of this student was another vertical line, because, believe me, if they are tasering voting groups in Florida in a disputed 2008 election, dissent will close down pretty quickly. People are just not that brave when they start to get physically hurt.
And that's how society is closed down. Suddenly, there's news of someone getting arrested. Or someone being taken. Someone getting a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for publishing something in the Wall Street Journal.
And the next day, there are still newspapers. There's still online shopping. There are still so many aspects of normal society. But what there isn't is freedom, because people are scared. And that's why we need to wake up now, because, believe it or not, the President has the power to do that. The President -- any president, President Thompson, President Giuliani, President Obama -- any president now has the power to make it easier to declare martial law and to declare a state of emergency. The president gets to decide what that is. That is not what the Founders envisioned.
People who are fighting overseas for democracy understand better than we do that we are witnessing the clasic danger signs. They know how dangerous it is to have a leader relegate for himself or herself the power to do that -- to seize people and to militarize civil society. Or to declare a state of public emergency or to make it easier to define a threat to public order. Those are classic signposts that other democracy activists around the world recognize as flashing warning lights.
The third point is simply that you're absolutely right about our psychology. We've been so blessed and so spoiled, in a way, by over 200 years of strong democracy, even taking into account the serious moments like the McCarthy era, that we expect the pendulum will always swing back, because the checks and balances have always been in place. I've explained in the book why this is different now -- why the pendulum isn't as free as it used to be, why we can't rely on it, a point Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda made first.
The trouble is that we're so used to a democratic mindset and we're so reliant on freedom, that we, A, don't recognize the dangers, and B, we don't realize what it takes to resist them. When I talk about these threats, people tend to answer before they've thought it through, or before they've read the book, with the correctives of democracy. Well, the ACLU will sue them. Or we'll just vote the guys out. "Vote the bums out." After you've read the book, you'll realize that you cannot rely on democracy to heal democracy, as you could if our democracy was strong, and checks and balances were in place.
So it is a radical shift in consciousness that we need right now, and we don't have time. We need to understand right now that this is a crisis. It's not business as usual. We can't leave it to other people, to Congress, to activists, or until the next election, because we are much further along than people realize.
BuzzFlash: Your book does a tremendous job of putting together the ten different threats running in parallel and intertwined courses. The power of the ten together leads to a tipping point, as you've called it, which, at some point becomes the point of no return. That type of concurrence is described in the book They Thought They Were Free by an American Jew who, after World War II, went back to Nazi Germany to find out how it happened. The Germans thought they were free until they weren't any longer.
In the mainstream news, and certainly in a lot of the political discourse, the Republicans in general, and Bush, are portrayed as the patriots, the champions of freedom, the ones who are the "strict constructionists" in terms of the Constitution, and so forth. You and I would argue that, in reality, what is happening under the current administration is a radical assault on our Constitution, on our freedoms, on the vision of Founding Fathers. The radicals are the people in the government who are trying to change the very foundation of the country. But they wrap themselves in the wrapping paper -- disguise themselves as the champions of the Constitution.
How do you break through to the American public? The mainstream press doesn't seem to be able to even begin to penetrate the dissonance and the contradiction in the narrative as the administration presents it.
Naomi Wolf: I try to avoid theorizing in the book, and instead just let the reader decide for him or herself what inferences may be drawn about this White House. But it's very hard to avoid a hypothesis that the White House has studied twentieth century history in some detail. When despots are trying to close down an open society, and Orwell pointed this out, they call something the opposite of what it is. Goebbels, for one, was a master of saying something the opposite of what it was. If you read Mein Kampf, and look at Hitler's speeches, he is continually invoking democracy and freedom, democracy and freedom, the rule of law. I'm upholding the rule of law; he actually said he was simplifying democracy. Indeed, it was the prior administration that had opened the door to him, and they weren't even national socialists, but they weakened the constitution so badly that it left the field wide open for him to do what he wanted to do.
I have a section in the book about how lies in a fascist shift serve a different purpose than they do in a democracy. In a democracy, people lie to deceive. In a fascist shift, lies serve to disorient. Lies in the service of a fascist shift make it hard for citizens to trust their own judgment about what's real and what's not. Once citizens don't know what's real and what's not real, they are profoundly disempowered. The Bush administration seems to have learned that lesson, and they regularly name things the opposite. And there's a long historical precedent for making people feel that there is no such thing as truth.
There's another tipping point in closing down a democracy when the leaders no longer are accountable for disclosing the truth. Why is the mainstream media not more rigorous?
I think has to do with, first, corporate ownership. There are just some issues you really can't pursue. Recently someone pitched a renewal of a famous program that taught children about democracy, and checks and balances, to a major network. They basically said we don't want to do anything to rock the boat. Even librarians are affected. I've been offering to give librarians copies of the Constitution to distribute, and they say, we can't do that because that'll be too controversial. I'm not kidding. The Constitution's become too controversial.
So the networks have some profound vested interests, which I track in the book, that would be served by a dismantling of the Constitution in this country, and by an ongoing war on terror that never ends. These are powerful industries, and millions of dollars are at stake. And they have lobbyists. They contribute to political campaigns, and it's not negligible.
The second reason, I think, is, it's hard for the mainstream media, even when they're privately owned, to say certain things for psychological reasons. There's a mindset that it's taboo to say in America that an American president might try to bring down democracy. There are a lot of taboos. You're not allowed to look at the history of Germany. That's a social taboo. You're not allowed to suggest in a mainstream context that an American president might have radically oppressive motives, just like dictators all over the world. It's like this collective wish to believe our leaders are always benign, our system will always endure, even if we don't do anything to protect it. We are always safe. We are always the exception. There's a kind of regressive, almost infantile fantasizing that Daddy could never actually be abusive-- it is this magical thinking -- and there's a lot of it.
BuzzFlash: One thing we've talked about a lot on BuzzFlash, is that the Bush administration, and in particular, Cheney, lie with such abandon and brazenness. But you're absolutely right that a key feature of seizing power is to put so much lying out there you kind of just give up trying to figure out what the truth is. But also, the brazenness is a factor. Americans are largely still a common-sense sort of culture. Just put your cards down on the table. Cheney is still saying that Saddam was connected to 9/11 in some way. The lies are so big that they defy common sense. So you're thinking, no one would lie that openly and brazenly. That just doesn't make any sense.
Naomi Wolf: Yes.
BuzzFlash: You may even start to think there's something there, because no one would be so audacious, having been disproven on so many occasions, as to continue to say the same thing. So you question your own sense of truth. And you don't want to accuse your leaders, in a democracy. You would almost be reflecting upon yourself if you're accusing your leaders of intentionally and chronically and daily misleading you. It's almost like accepting that democracy is so flawed that we have to do something about it. And who wants to take that on?
Naomi Wolf: You're right that all these threads are well-documented. In the book you see how they fit together. That's exactly what I try to do.
My readers say that basically the book acts as kind of a key, so that now, when they see the aspects of each of these threads, whether it's a new development in detainee abuse, or whether it's a new development of surveillance, the FISA story, or you hear that assets of critics of the war are going to be seized, it makes a different kind of sense to them than it did before. That's good, even if it is very scary at first, because people really do need to listen differently and watch differently now.
We have a mindset, which is that democracy is the resilient rule. Historically it is fragile exception. Democracies take nurturing. They're easy to pull down. The Founders understood that. It's a very dangerous time.
In Italy, in the early 1920s, people just couldn't believe it. And in Germany, from 1931-1933, they just couldn't believe it. You read the memoirs, and people were saying, surely, no one's going to go for this. Surely, this can't last. Surely, no one will put up with these thugs marching in the streets like this. Surely, we will all come to our senses.

The trouble is, this mindset is very, very dangerous when it's a different game being played. There is this scene in which Mussolini is marching on Rome, and the members of Parliament are still trying to negotiate with him -- offering him various cabinet positions. They think it's still a democracy, and he just waits for them to get it.
As I say at the end of the book, I feel like there's very little time left for us to act. I'm very worried about the upcoming elections, and here's why. One of the things very few people followed up on is that there's a strong indication that when they fired the US attorneys, they were considering purging all of the US Attorneys -- all of them, all at once. That's essentially what Goebbels did in 1933 with the civil service. The White House has fought any disclosure of the e-mails about the US Attorneys purge, or would-be purge. It's a classic move in a takeover to purge the civil service, and especially the lawyers and the judges, and replace them with your own cronies -- that's a standard, recognized tactic.
BuzzFlash: TPM Café and Josh Marshall were in the lead on "Prosecutor-gate," as it's called.
Naomi Wolf: Right. So had the U.S. attorneys all been purged, basically, the game would be over right now. The U.S. attorneys have the power to harass opposition groups, to bring charges against people who are organizing voters. At the end of the book, I ask readers to look at the record of what the administration's been willing to do vis-a-vis abuse after abuse after abuse, the systematic dismantling of our democracy and our checks and balances, and ask if it is reasonable to assume we will have fair, transparent elections. Given all these violations of these sacred tenets of democracy, do you really think that George Bush is going to say, fourteen months from now, that the great pageant of democracy -- a fair election -- must proceed without intervention or corruption? That the people have spoken, the people's will be done? Is that really common sense?
BuzzFlash: We at BuzzFlash have editorialized and pointed out that it's naïve, at this late date in their eight-year administration, to still allow them to take advantage of every possibility to seize more power. Why would they want that if they assume there's a possibility that a Democrat will come in on January 20, 2009? They're seizing the power for a Democrat? That doesn't make any sense.
Naomi Wolf: I'm really glad that you're raising that and editorializing on it. So many decisions of this administration are strategic and not tactical. That's why I worry about people like Mitt Romney saying that he wants to expand Guantanamo and sort of eternalize Guantanamo to make it a permanent part of the landscape, or Giuliani -- who seems clearly to have been anointed to carry this process forward -- to say he wants to strip prisoners of even more rights. The building of Guantanamo does not look like a short-term decision. It seems that many of the absolutely systematic changes that this administration is intent on, are strategic rather than tactical decisions. They seem like long-term rather than short-term decisions.
BuzzFlash: They don't make sense to fight terror. But they do make sense if they're for the purpose of seizing power.
Naomi Wolf: That's exactly right. This is another important thing to put across in terms of getting people out of this bubble of innocence, and into fighting anger, and sort of revolutionary ardor. I really believe this issue is a conservative issue, and it's a liberal issue. It transcends party politics. You know, there are as many patriots on the right as on the left. Many are appalled at what's been done in the name of conservatism. Why would they be aggregating power?
BuzzFlash: Right. At this late date.
Naomi Wolf: There's a kind of hypnosis that invoking the war on terror, invoking 9/11 in the mass media, creates. That's why Congress has been so cowed. Off the record, they say to us that they can't be more aggressive because they're afraid of being seen as soft on terror. They can't be more aggressive about liberty, and protecting liberty, and preventing these power grabs, because they don't want to be seen as soft on terror. That's why it's so important for people to understand that, historically, it is an absolute constant for a would-be tyrant to invoke a terrorist threat -- often, a real terrorist threat.
The national socialists continually invoked Bolshevik terrorism and violence. And there was Bolshevik terrorism and Bolshevik violence. There were communist terrorists. By the same token, Pinochet eased his way in by telling Chilean citizens about insurgents who were going to engage in this spectacular act of terrorism, a mass assassination, and he showed citizens the purported weapons caches on television. He used fake documents to hype a real threat, which again is quite common in history -- like the fake documents the White House relied on to lie to us about the yellowcake threat.
It's absolutely standard for would-be dictators to invoke a terrorist threat, and it can be a real terrorist threat. What they'll do is they'll hype it, or manipulate the information. Or heighten the fear level. The reason is it enables them to subdue people.
I feel like it's actually liberating for readers to read about how this has been used in other countries. First, it lets them snap out of that kind of frightened feeling of, oh, my God, the terrorists have struck from al Qaeda. The terrorist threat from al Qaeda changes everything. We must give up our liberties in order to be safe. It's just not true. There are historical precedents for it not being true.
I also note that Spain and England, which are countries that suffered very serious terrorist attacks, by the same terrorists that threaten us, responded very differently. They responded with transparent trials. Their trials of the accused terrorists are on the Internet. They responded by upholding their values of democracy and openness and freedom. And in England, Gordon Brown says terrorism is a crime, not a cause. Israel has nothing like the red, yellow, orange alert that we do, and they fight terrorists every day.
BuzzFlash: Some conservatives have gotten away with a tremendous framing success in using the word conservative. But as you pointed out, if you're really a conservative about the Constitution, you support civil liberties. You support the checks and balances in our government. You support an independent judiciary. That's a true conservative position.
What we have from the Bush administration is a radical position that's an assault on the conservative position. And for the Bush administration, and Cheney and his aides like Addington, to be called conservative, is an insult to conservatism. That's number one.
Number two, in relation to your point that they initially floated the idea about firing all the U.S. prosecutors, there was a precedent in the German Nazi judicial system. Basically, in addition to the parallel military system, the Third Reich instituted a civil judicial system. If someone was charged with a violation against the state, and they were a German citizen, they went through this judicial system. It was all rigged in the sense that you only served on the judicial courts, just as the Bush administration was trying to do, if you had been vetted, and you were a follower of the right, and you would basically go along with the recommendations of the prosecutors installed by the state. But they gave the appearance to the citizens that would say: Well, this person has been executed because the court found them guilty.
Naomi Wolf: Exactly.
BuzzFlash: So it wasn't just that the military coopted the judicial system. They had a parallel judicial system. But they did have a civil judicial system too which the Third Reich was able to say, well, justice has been accomplished. This person has been tried and they had been determined to have violated laws of the state and that execution is warranted. So it wasn't just that the army took and executed the German citizens. They went through a rigged judicial system, just as the Bush administration was trying to do with the U.S. prosecutors, and which they try to do by appointing judges who are not qualified to be judges. Their only qualification is loyalty to the party.
Naomi Wolf: Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner, who represented Guantanamo detainees before the Supreme Court, is really eloquent about the legal analogies between what happened in Germany and what's happening now. And Harper's recently made some of the same points. What you're talking about is a process that the National Socialists perfected, called coordination. That's why looking at Germany is so necessary now -- because they coordinated every aspect of civil society. And when you've got people who understand that their tenure depends on following the party line, you do get a rigged system.
What's happening with the military -- JAG -- lawyers is also important. These are lawyers, so their job is to uphold the rule of law and do good jobs representing their clients. And again and again, these brave, decent, honorable men and women, probably many of them Republicans, have suffered career setbacks or worse simply trying to do their jobs as lawyers, and not sell out their clients, and not hand over their clients to a rigged system.

And you're right to point out people really don't understand what fascism looks like. They think it looks kind of like goose-stepping military and barbed wire everywhere. It doesn't look like that. I give examples of closed societies in the book, and after a society is closed, there will often still be a judiciary. There will be journalism. There will be radio. There will even be television. There will be universities and students. Many aspects of the institutions of civil society continue. What happens, though, is everybody knows how far you can go before you lose your job, or how far you can go before getting arrested. And it's actually very important for some dictators to maintain a facade of the rule of law, to maintain a facade of elections, and to maintain a facade of a working civil society system, because it gives the regime legitimacy. You saw that in Italy and in Germany. You see it throughout Latin America.
Our system is so fragile. If we woke up to learn that all of the U.S. attorneys had indeed been fired and replaced with lawyers loyal to the machine, it would still be America. We'd still have a lot of the stuff that we have now. It would look familiar. But it would be a different reality. The election campaign would be like election campaigns in weak or struggling democracies where a lot of it is sham. A lot of it is wishful thinking. People who go ahead and register voters or fight for candidates who are not in the party line, who are not 'coordinated,' face investigations, face harassment, face warrants for arrest on various minor violations. Would that be America in more than name? Or would that be the end of America?
We'd still have the Internet. We'd still have a judiciary. But it wouldn't be freedom. And it is really important for your community, for all of us, to understand that it's going to take a citizen uprising right now -- I mean a civil uprising -- to hold accountable people who would dismantle our democracy in this way, and to use democracy to heal democracy while we still can, because we still can.
That's why we started the American Freedom Campaign to parallel the American Freedom Agenda. Millions of Americans can compel Congress to pass the legislative agenda that would rewrite these horrific laws, and would restore checks and balances, and, I think, compel Congress to confront the people who have committed crimes against the Constitution. We're still in the state where democracy can heal democracy. That's why we have to act.
BuzzFlash: In a recent editorial we commented on some of the strategic efforts by the Bush administration. Firing the U.S. prosecutors was an effort to control the prosecution system, and one of the chief objectives in controlling it was to be able to indict Democrats, and so help decimate the Democratic Party as an effective opposition party. Let's remember that most of those attorneys who were put in after the purge are still in place. So, it's not like this has been rectified.
A key thing in controlling the government and moving it toward a one-party, despotic state, was to indict Democrats. That was one of the major issues in evaluating who was going to be replaced. If you had indicted Democrats, many of those people kept their jobs. If you didn't indict Democrats and you had been asked to, those were some of the people lost.
The second idea was to use the U.S. attorneys to, in essence, concoct prosecutions accusing the organizations that supported Democrats, or were affiliated with Democrats, or the Democratic Party itself, of "voter fraud."
Naomi Wolf: Exactly.
BuzzFlash: And they make those anti-Democratic cases high profile before elections, to influence the elections. Then, since most of the cases have no justification, they drop them after the elections. And, again, this is not stopping. As you indicated, this is why it's so much of a threat.
Another priority for them is to have, at the state level, laws passed in as many states as possible where Republicans are governors and control the legislature, and to suppress the vote by requiring more identification, more ability to challenge voters when they show up, more claims that they don't live at that address and so forth. In essence, they use state laws to suppress the Democratic vote by picking criteria that will suppress the demographics that would go for Democrats.
Another part of the strategy is the spying issue. The reason that bypassing FISA is so important is that a despotic power wants the ability to be able to spy at will. This is an issue we have pointed out, which went virtually completely unnoticed by the traditional press. When Alberto Gonzales was testifying about the FISA issue when it first came out -- and this we just happened to catch this by watching his testimony on the C-SPAN tape -- but he was asked if the illegal spying powers that had not been authorized by FISA, had ever been used for political purposes. And he said he couldn't answer that question.
Naomi Wolf: Yes.
BuzzFlash: That was astonishing, and the mainstream press didn't pick that up at all. The ability to spy at will on American citizens, without any oversight, is just too great a temptation, even if you had a benign view of the Bush administration.
Naomi Wolf: The surveillance of ordinary citizens is an absolute cornerstone of a closed society. It's an absolute cornerstone to control the population.
BuzzFlash: The third issue is one-party control of the judiciary. Well, if you control the referees, you control the game. You're constantly giving calls that the favor the team you're supporting. So they have judges who are either Federalist Society members with pedigree, or people who don't have pedigrees who are lousy judges, perhaps racist, misogynist, who knows? They've certainly got a lot of them, like David Sentelle and many of these people that they've put in who are just wretched lawyers. You have partisan people on the courts who are not chosen for their ability to adjudicate cases, but are chosen to make the right referee's calls on crucial cases that have to do with the balances of power within the United States between Congress and the Executive Branch.
Naomi Wolf: Right. May I add one thing? It's that Americans, even in this worst-case scenario of all these threads continuing to tighten -- "Oh, my God, they've coordinated the U.S. attorneys, they're using the Watch List to keep critics of the administration from flying, they are tasering professors now for asking questions in a lecture hall, or people registering voters, or they have sent NSA letters to the heads of environmental groups, antiwar groups," -- Americans still imagine that, well, we'll organize. We'll march.
BuzzFlash: Yes.
Naomi Wolf: Americans imagine that there is still recourse. Ordinarily, there is recourse, with checks and balances in place. What we need Americans to think about is how the ability to physically threaten Americans on a most personal level will change that.
None of us knows in our bones what it's like to live in a police state. My warning is that, when you get a state using violence against the individual in the act of suppression of democracy, you change your whole reality. Most Americans have a sense of physical invincibility. If we sign a petition somewhere, if we register as a Democrat, someone might know about it, but we still can't believe that anyone would ever hurt us in our democracy.
But people should be aware of how aggressively this administration has sought to assert the right that it has to call any American an enemy combatant and to mistreat them on a physical level. They've been very clear. Think of the abuses against Jose Padilla. And Dick Cheney has said he's outside the system, right?
But what happens after you are arrested, or I am arrested, or someone we identified with is called an 'enemy combatant', or after the first journalist or an editor is charged under the Espionage Act, or after more people like Brandon Mayfield experience break-ins in your home? And their computer's taken. Their kids come home to find that their house has been broken into by the state. As that begins to become not a bizarre exception but part of the landscape, I promise you, based on the historical record, the kind of recourses we assume we have as free people protected by the Constitution will vanish, because people just aren't willing to take physicals risks -- understandably.

I, personally, as a mother, am willing to risk arrest in a strong democracy, because I assume that my innocence will protect me, or the First Amendment will protect me, that the courts are fair, that I'll get good representation and I will not get hurt in prison. But would I be willing to risk three years in a Navy brig? In solitary confinement? No.

And history shows that it doesn't take many such cases to close down an open society. Author Greg Palast was investigated by Homeland Security, and it's kind of a joke. But when fifty critics of the administration are investigated, it is a tipping point. And history shows things get quiet after that very very fast.
Everyone has to draw the line somewhere -- and this is also a lesson we need to learn from Germany. How can so many good people have done nothing? Because once you introduce state terror against the individual, you completely change the landscape of what we're willing to risk, understandably. And I just want to kind of conclude by saying we need to reverse these laws, because all of the actions that we can still take in a democracy to restore democracy, we will be scared to take after that next tipping point. Let's conclude on a happier note though.
BuzzFlash: Maybe not, because the reality is what needs to penetrate people. What you have indicated, and what we are constantly pointing out on BuzzFlash, is there's an urgency here. If the Bush administration had started backing off this effort to seize power, perhaps one could have felt they realize they aren't going to achieve their goal. But instead of backing off, they are actually redoubling their efforts. That seems to indicate they have confidence in maintaining one-party control. And it seems to indicate that they must have reasons to maintain that confidence, and we aren't aware of what that basis is. But it is there, and therefore we need to forge forward.
You have a call to action at the end of your book. And you mentioned a couple times you are associated with the American Freedom Campaign. There's a great deal of frustration. Your book is very cogent, and we highly recommend people read it, even if they are regular BuzzFlash readers and exposed to a lot of this information. You give a tremendous historical context, and I think people need to see it, and in one document, in order to understand the gravity of the threat to this great democracy we have. But the concluding question, which you address in your book, is what can American patriots who support our constitutional guarantees do at this critical juncture?
Naomi Wolf: Really, this is where we choose. History will look back and say, either we saved the country or we didn't. Either we stopped it at a point where we could restore democracy, or we didn't, and someone else will be writing the histories.
This is what you need to do. First, educate yourself. It is so important, as you say, to get the historical perspective.
The second thing is we urgently need to drive Congress. Congress can still confront these abusers and dismantle their power. The same could have been true in Germany or Italy, early on, had people driven their representatives to act. So I would say, all of your community and their friends need to immediately sign up with the American Freedom Agenda on the right, or the American Freedom Campaign on the left. We represent a number of cardinal organizations. Total membership now is almost five million in the AFC. We're growing all the time.
BuzzFlash: Just for clarification purposes, the American Freedom Agenda, on the right, I assume is a civil libertarian group working for the Constitution? It's not the traditional concept of the Bush right, but it's the libertarian right.
BuzzFlash: Yes.
Naomi Wolf: We're organizing, hopefully, millions and millions of Americans to compel, demand, force Congress to restore balance. We've got a ten-point legislative agenda, which if we forced Congress to pass it, would do a lot to get us breathing room. It includes restoring habeas corpus, and protecting journalists from prosecution. That would do a lot to give us some time. If we don't restore these laws we have almost no time, according to the blueprint. And we know there is a strong impeachment movement.
Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment is not on the table. I am not taking a position on impeachment, and the American Freedom Campaign hasn't taken a position, but what I am saying is that in a true democracy movement, which is what I'm calling for, it is the people that decide. And that is a debate that hasn't happened yet -- not a rigorous, principled, Constitutional debate, which was what the Founders envisioned in the event of a dramatic crisis such as this one.
What did the Founders intend to have happen when there was a leader that systematically dismantled their checks and balances, and systematically dismantled our system of government? That debate hasn't happened in a principled, educated, patriotic way, and that debate has to happen. What do you do when there are assaults like this? I don't think it's Nancy Pelosi who decides preemptively. I think in a democracy, it's the people who decide.
And the abuses are escalating every day. The Senate just censured MoveOn for speech -- and argues that criticizing anyone in the armed forces is a sign of treason. This is exactly what the National Socialists did. They created these third rail subjects and created strictures that expanded all the time, criminalizing or punishing speech as unpatriotic and eventually criminalizing opposition itself. This is a horrific development, no matter what you thought of the wording of the ad, and Congressional democrats who do not stand up to it -- indeed Republicans as well -- should know they are playing into a very dark development historically.
Most urgently, we need to drive Congress to confront these abuses and restore the rule of law now, long before the election. And we need to take seriously what the founders intended; they did not mean for a professional class to enact democracy for us or to defend it for us or to rise up when a despot threatened to destroy it. They intended for us, on the left and the right, to be the revolutionaries in defense of liberty.
BuzzFlash: This has been wonderful. You did a great job in the book.
Naomi Wolf: Thank you.

I placed this entire article here because I think it is something everyone should have access to.  The War in Iraq is a huge mistake that we have allowed to continue.  I hope this stirs you up

 Joseph

 
Published on Friday, June 15, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
What Every American Should Know About Iraq
by David Michael Green
Some people think that anyone who disagrees with the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is either a bleeding-heart liberal appeaser, a George W. Bush hater, a blame America firster, an underminer of the troops, a traitor, or a geopolitical naif.

To those who see opponents of the war as fitting into one, several, or all of these categories, I say read this page. I will make no arguments herein, nor even commentary. I will twist no data nor spin any tales. I will even include some of the comments and arguments made by the administration and its supporters.

Instead of arguing against the war, I will try to offer a fairly complete account of the relevant facts one might wish to consider when evaluating America’s policy in Iraq. Especially for those who continually claim that they, more than others, have the best interests of the troops at heart - but actually for all citizens in a democracy - it is incumbent upon us to educate ourselves about this most important of national policies.

Those troops are being maimed and are dying on our behalf every day. The very least we can do is spend a brief amount of our time learning about this question so that we can decide whether their continued sacrifices are justified.

So, in that spirit - and as the Founders themselves said - “let Facts be submitted to a candid world”.

• Mesopotamia has long been a playground for great powers. The British invaded the area in 1917, causing a widespread revolt of the Iraqi people. Britain later ruled under a League of Nations mandate that produced the artificial creation of the country Iraq (and Kuwait), and continued to control oil production in the region. Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour said at the time, “I do not care under what system we keep this oil, but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available”.

• Saddam Hussein started his career as a political thug, on the payroll of the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s, torturing and murdering Iraqi leftists whose names were provided by American intelligence, and participating in an armed coup against the Iraqi government.

• In 1972, the United States conspired with Iran and Israel to support a revolt of the Kurdish people within Iraq against their government.

• In 1980, the United States provided encouragement, weapons, intelligence, satellite data and funding for Saddam’s Iraq to invade Iran, launching an eight year war - the longest and probably the bloodiest of the post-WWII era.

• During this war, Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to improve relations with Saddam. The United States then restored full diplomatic relations with Iraq, despite the administration’s clear awareness that Saddam was using chemical weapons at the time.

• The Reagan administration also knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds rising up again against Baghdad (this was the incident George W. Bush would later repeatedly invoke, saying of Saddam, “He gassed his own people”), but nevertheless authorized expanded sales to Iraq of highly sophisticated equipment that could be used to manufacture weapons, only two months after the Halabja incident.

• George H. W. Bush equated Saddam to Hitler. But, in the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War, after the elder Bush had encouraged Kurds and Shiites to rise up against the regime, he abandoned them, leaving them to be slaughtered by Saddam’s military, in many cases right before the eyes of US forces who were ordered not to intervene.

• The senior Bush had a chance after that war to occupy Iraq and topple Saddam. He chose not to because, in his own words and those of his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, “Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq … would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. …furthermore, we had been self‑consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post‑cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome.”

• The younger Bush, George W., never asked his father for advice on Iraq. Instead, he said: “You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” Bush has also stated, “I’m driven with a mission from God. …God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq…’ And I did.”

• George W. Bush gave twenty interviews in 1999 to Mickey Herskowitz, a friend of the Bush family contracted at the time to ghostwrite his autobiography. Bush was thinking about invading Iraq at that time, saying “‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander‑in‑chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.” Herskowitz said that Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were shaped by Dick Cheney’s ideas, based on the power and glory Margaret Thatcher earned from her Falklands War: “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.” Herskowitz also reports this interesting note from his interviews with Bush: “He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. That was one of the keys to being a leader.”

• During the presidential campaign of 2000, candidate Bush said very little about Iraq, and certainly never suggested the need for urgent action. Somehow, though, in just two years time - during which, if anything, Iraq actually got weaker, not stronger - Saddam and his country became a perilous and imminent threat that had to be addressed immediately.

• Former members of his own cabinet have revealed that Bush planned to invade Iraq from the very beginning of his administration, well before 9/11. All discussions were about the how of doing it, never about the why, the justification, the costs or the wisdom.

• Bush claims he is fighting a war on terror in response to 9/11. But in the first eight months of his administration, his own top terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, could not get a meeting of cabinet-level security officials to discuss terrorism. They finally met, one week before 9/11, and then the meeting was ‘hijacked’ into discussing Iraq instead. In 2004, Clarke said “Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re‑election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11.” Clarke is a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, and also served in the administrations of Bush’s father, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

• Right after 9/11, according to Clarke, “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’ He came back at me and said, ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection’. And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again’.”

• Iraq was not in league with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, whom the administration blamed for the 9/11 attacks. As Richard Clarke put it, “There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever”. Indeed, the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is a Muslim fundamentalist organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the secular regimes ruling Islamic countries, precisely what Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was. Indeed, even the highly religious Saudi Arabia (from which 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers came, none of them being Iraqis) is under violent pressure from al Qaeda for not being theocratic enough.

• Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even George Bush has now admitted this. However, over the last six years, and still to this day, Bush constantly conflates the two in almost every speech he gives, to the point where in 2003 sixty-nine percent of Americans came to believe that Saddam had been behind the 9/11 attacks. There can be little doubt that the administration used 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, though they had nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

• According to the internal top secret documents later leaked as the Downing Street Memos, we know that the administration itself realized that “the case was thin” for war against Iraq, because “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

• Nevertheless, the administration made an internal decision that the war would be marketed around the supposed WMD threat, despite knowing it was false. The allusions to mushroom clouds, centrifuge tubes and all the rest were gross exaggerations and outright lies, and were known to be at the time by the people making them. As the Downing Street Memos reveal, a decision for war had already been made, and the public case for it was fabricated afterwards: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.

• The president claimed in a state of the union speech that Saddam had gone to Africa to get uranium, seriously alarming the American public. Before the speech, the CIA had told the White House to remove that comment because it was transparently false, based as it was on a crude forged letter. Ultimately, the ‘mistake’ of including this lie was blamed on Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who was later punished for this grave ‘error’ by being promoted to National Security Advisor. His former boss, Condoleeza Rice, was punished by being promoted to Secretary of State.

• When Joseph Wilson came home from a trip to Niger and told the truth about the forged letter, the administration revealed the identity of his wife, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, thus potentially jeopardizing the lives of all her contacts overseas. Eight witnesses recalled nine conversations with Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in which Libby blew Plame’s cover - an act of treason - in order to punish a political ‘enemy’ for telling the truth. Libby claimed not to remember these nine conversations. Both the jury and the judge in the case thought Libby was unquestionably lying and convicted him of obstructing justice, with jurors commenting that they felt sorry for him because he was obviously taking a fall for Cheney.

• The case regarding Saddam’s chemical weapons capability was similarly trumped up. It was based on the rantings of a single source, code-named “Curveball”, whose handlers in the German intelligence service had repeatedly warned the administration that he was a drunk and a liar.

• The administration continually relied upon Iraqi exiles, many of whom had not set foot in the country for decades, as sources for information about Iraq and as mouthpieces to justify the invasion. But it is unclear who was using whom. Ahmad Chalabi, the most prominent of these, intended to use the US military as a vehicle to become leader of Iraq. Despite being wanted for massive bank fraud in Jordan, Chalabi convinced neoconservatives that he was the “George Washington of Iraq”. His Iraqi National Congress was the primary source for Bush administration claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda, neither of which was true. Chalabi gloated about how his influence led the Bush administration to war, and the Pentagon immediately flew him into Iraq following the invasion. The army of followers that he had promised would rally around him never materialized, and his party won zero parliamentary seats in the December 2005 elections. Ultimately, the United States accused him of providing intelligence secrets to the Iranian government and raided his offices.

• Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council sealed the deal for most Americans regarding the case for war. It later became apparent that almost everything Powell said that day was false, and he has described this episode as the low point in his career.

• The Downing Street Memos reveal that the purpose of authorizing UN weapons inspectors to go to Iraq was never actually to assess the threat and destroy any weapons found. Instead, the purpose was to “wrongfoot” Saddam by getting him to reject the inspectors, thus giving the American and British governments a pretext for war. Tony Blair said “It would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. If the political context were right, people would support regime change.”

• To this day Bush claims that Saddam kicked out the inspectors. That had been true five years previously, but not before the war. Hans Blix, the head of the 2002-03 weapons inspection team reported that they were getting good cooperation from the Iraqis, despite the fact that - as revealed by one of the former team members - the US had inserted American spies into prior international weapons inspection teams in Iraq.

• At the time of the invasion in 2003, the weapons inspectors were nearly done with their work, and only asked for a month or two more to finish. The Bush administration claimed that the threat of Saddam and his WMD was too grave and too urgent to wait. Bush’s claim that Saddam kicked out the inspectors is not only false, but masks the actual truth, which is that the administration told the inspectors to leave because of the looming attack, before they could finish their work and by so doing remove the rationale for that attack.

• As war loomed, Iraq made broad overtures to the United States to prevent an invasion, offering to allow full, on-the-ground, American weapons inspections, anti-terrorism cooperation, oil concessions, and even backing for the US position in an Israeli/Palestinian peace plan. The only thing Saddam balked at was regime change, but even then he offered to hold elections within two years’ time. The Americans were also informed by the Iraqis at the time that there were no existing WMD. The Iraqi representatives “could not understand why the Americans were focused on Iraq rather than on countries, like Iran, that have long supported terrorists”. The Bush administration rejected their offer, despite that it met every demand that Bush was publicly making.

• Saddam had never attacked the United States, nor even threatened to do so.

• In March of 2003, when the invasion was launched, Iraq was a gravely weakened military and economic power which could not seriously threaten its neighbors, let alone the United States. International sanctions had seriously damaged its economy and killed vast numbers of its citizens, including about 500,000 children. It had no serious weapons capability. It had lost control over two-thirds of its own airspace to American and British flyers.

• In November of 2002, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1441, requiring that Iraq declare its WMD, disarm, and allow inspections to verify that this has occurred. One week later Iraq announced that it would accept the resolution, and the weapons inspectors were simultaneously deployed.

• Iraq submitted a report to the UN, as required, indicating that it possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration immediately and definitively asserted that Saddam was lying. In fact, since Iraq had no WMD, and since Bush claimed that Saddam was unquestionably lying in saying so, it was Bush who lied, not Saddam.

• Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of the supposed Iraqi WMD, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat”. But the United States government had never informed the UN weapons inspectors - a team that Bush had demanded be sent - of where to find those weapons.

• Two subsequent reports from teams sent to Iraq by the Bush administration itself revealed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though some people continue to this day to say there were some found there. Moreover, these teams scientifically confirmed that such weapons are neither missing nor hidden nor deported, but never existed after the mandated weapons destruction which followed the Gulf War.

• At one point Bush claimed that two small trailers found in the desert were mobile “biological laboratories” and thus declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction”, seemingly vindicating his decision to go to war. But even before he spoke, it was known by the Pentagon that these trailers had nothing to do with WMD production, and that fact was reported to Washington two days before the president’s statement. Bush and other administration officials continued to make the claim for nearly a year, despite an unequivocal report filed from the field stating that the trailers were not, and could not be, weapons labs. Scientists and engineers on the investigating team referred to the trailers as “”the biggest sand toilets in the world”.

• Added all together, what emerges from the above-listed facts is that all the carnage and destruction that has ensued was based on the case that Iraq was so imminent a threat - despite in fact being a very weak military power - that America could not wait four to six more weeks for the weapons inspectors to finish their work and reveal that it was no threat whatsoever.

• All the world, including the Bush administration, clearly understood that Security Council Resolution 1441 did not authorize an invasion of Iraq. Thus, in March 2003, the US drafted a second resolution which would explicitly do so. It needed nine out of fifteen votes, with no permanent member vetoes, to pass. In a press conference, Bush was asked whether he would call for a vote regardless of anticipated outcome. He responded, “No matter what the whip count is, we’re calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It’s time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.” But after extensive American pressure, lobbying and even spying on Security Council members, only four countries were prepared to vote in favor of the resolution, with three of the five permanent members opposing. The president quietly withdrew the resolution he had promised “no matter what”.

• To this day Bush says in his speeches that Saddam did not comply with the UN, that Saddam kicked the inspectors out of Iraq, and that Bush had Security Council authorization to invade. None of those statements are true.

• In 2004, after saying that the Iraqi threat of WMD was urgent, Bush was asked by a reporter whether he had concerns about North Korea’s nuclear weapons development program, which - unlike Iraq’s - was quite real. In response, the president just opened his palms and shrugged. North Korea has since actually tested a nuclear warhead. Yet there is little expressed concern, the president almost never mentions it, there is no invasion being planned and no war drums being beaten.

• For that matter, there never was when the Soviet Union had more than 20,000 nuclear warheads mounted on ballistic missiles targeted on the US and set to a hair trigger. Bush never explained why nuclear deterrence worked against the Soviets with all their weapons for forty years, but couldn’t have had the same effect against Iraq today.

• Bush also never explained why Iraq had to be invaded, even though more than thirty countries had greater WMD capability at the time.

• When the WMD and al Qaeda link rationales for the war were exploded, the administration began arguing that its central purpose in invading Iraq was to bring democracy to the country and to the Middle East. At the same time, however, it has done next to nothing about Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been murdered in a clear case of ongoing genocide. Since the first requisite for being able to vote is to be alive, it is unclear how invading Iraq in the name of democracy could be so urgent, yet saving lives in Darfur of little concern and no action.

• The administration was told in advance by American intelligence agencies that there was a very high danger that Iraq could explode into ethnic chaos following an invasion. It chose to attack anyhow.

• According to former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, Bush was startled to learn - in January 2003 - that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Responding to the three Iraqi exiles whom he had invited as guests to the Super Bowl, Bush looked at them and said, “You mean…they’re not, you know, there, there’s this difference. What is it about?” As Bush often likes to brag, he governs based on gut feelings, not on intelligence or analysis. Those who know him state that he doesn’t read books, and he himself admitted he doesn’t read newspapers.

• Before the war, General Eric Shinseki testified to Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to govern this country of 25 million people during a post-war occupation. But since the administration was insisting that the war could be handled with far fewer troops and at far less expense, General Shinseki and at least one other general who made the same argument were publicly humiliated and had their long and prestigious military careers terminated for political reasons. Four years later, Bush is now ‘surging’ in Iraq by adding troops to the 140,000 or so that were already there, in addition to the 80,000 or so highly expensive mercenaries the taxpayers are funding. With the total now nearing 250,000 soldiers occupying the country, it is still transparently not enough to keep the peace.

• To say that there was never a plan for the post-war occupation of Iraq is technically incorrect. There was an extensive plan which the State Department had put together, working with experts and Iraqi exiles. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld didn’t want the State Department to have the credit and control for the occupation, so he and Bush threw State’s document in the garbage. Then there was no plan.

• Most of the Americans sent to staff the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had no technical or professional training or experience in the work to which they were assigned. Rather, they were chosen because they were Republican Party loyalists.

• One of the most significant blunders the United States committed during the occupation was to dismiss the entire Iraqi Army, sending them home unemployed and armed, along with anyone associated with the Ba’ath Party, despite the fact that everyone who wanted to work at a professional level anywhere in Iraqi society had been forced under Saddam to join the Party. The first Chief Executive of the CPA, General Jay Garner, refused to purge all Ba’athists from Iraqi governing institutions, and instead sought to maximize Iraqi control of the post-war government as much as possible. He was quickly fired.

• As a result of this war, over 3,500 Americans are dead, and perhaps 20,000 or so are gravely wounded. Americans have not been allowed to see the caskets returning to Dover Air Force Base.

• The best, most scientific, and least politicized estimate of Iraqi dead suggests that probably close to one million have now perished in the country’s post-war chaos, out of a population of 25 million.

• Nearly four million Iraqis have been forced to leave their homes as refugees from the violence, flooding Jordan and Syria, especially. The United States allowed all of 202 refugees - many thousands of whom have been targeted for death for having cooperated with the US occupation - to settle in America in 2006. America’s major ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, is building a wall to keep them out.

• The United States has spent half a trillion dollars on the war, so far. Estimates suggest that the number could rise to two trillion dollars before the war is over and the continuing costs of medical care and economic displacement are fully accounted for.

• America’s army has been described by Colin Powell as “broken”. Almost all our land forces are deployed in Iraq - a war of choice - leaving none for use in a real foreign crisis.

• Similarly, our National Guard and Reserve troops have been used in ways that were never intended to fight this war - along with about 80,000 highly expensive mercenaries - so that the president could avoid an unpopular draft. This means that Guard and Reserve troops and their equipment are unavailable for use in national emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina.

• As a result of the war, America is far more hated today throughout much of the world, especially the Mid-East, and is seen as a imperialist power. The Iraq invasion thus played directly into the hands of Islamic radicals like Osama bin Laden.

• America’s own intelligence agencies concede that Iraq has become a giant factory for the minting of new terrorists, where almost none existed prior to the invasion.

• Terrorist incidents worldwide have gone up seven-fold since, and largely because of, the invasion of Iraq.

• Iran, a country whose government truly does despise the United States, has been an enormous beneficiary of the war. Prior to 2003, Iran was a natural check on Iraq among Middle East powers, and vice versa. Now Iran is enormously influential in Iraq and throughout the region, its growth in power alarming its neighbors.

• A very real possibility exists that the civil war now raging within Iraq will become a regional war, perhaps drawing in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Israel and others.

• Gas prices have doubled since the war began. The potential also exists for a global depression should further conflict limit the flow of oil to industrialized countries, just as these economies were damaged by OPEC doing the same thing in the 1970s.

• To this day, American troops in Iraq do not have sufficient body or vehicle armor, leading to hundreds of unnecessary deaths. Communities across America have literally held bake sales to raise funds for purchasing armor for their own kids. When confronted by a soldier about this, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time”.

• Companies like Halliburton, meanwhile, in which the Vice President still maintains financial interests, have received multi-billion dollar contracts for work in Iraq, without having to competitively bid for them, and with the internal influence of Cheney’s office in winning the assignments. Numerous scandals have emerged from these contracts, including billing for work never completed. Eight billion dollars in cash, entrusted to the Coalition Provisional Authority, has gone missing in one incident alone.

• Before the war, when they were marketing it to the public and Congress, administration officials hinted that it would be quick, easy and cheap. After the invasion, George Bush declared, under a “Mission accomplished” banner, that fighting had ceased before the war had really even begun. It has now lasted longer than America’s involvement in World War Two, and the administration has begun to talk about Iraq using the Korean model of a fifty-year occupation.

• The invasion of Iraq was supposedly part of an American ‘war on terrorism’. But, today, the United States is protecting Luis Posada from extradition to Venezuela or Cuba, despite that Posada has bragged about blowing up an airliner and killing seventy-three people on board, as well as a string of other bombings of Cuban hotels and nightclubs. The government claims that Posada cannot be extradited to Venezuela because he might be tortured, even though Venezuela has no such reputation - but after Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the Attorney General’s renouncing of the Geneva Conventions, the United States now does.

• None of the principals who decided to go to war in Iraq had ever seen combat themselves. George W. Bush used his father’s influence to avoid service in Vietnam. John Ashcroft got seven draft deferments. Dick Cheney got five deferments, and later said “I had better things to do in the Sixties than fight in Vietnam”. Neither Paul Wolfowitz nor Richard Perle nor Condoleeza Rice ever served, and Donald Rumsfeld never fought in a war. The only senior member of the administration who had was Colin Powell. Powell advised Bush to be cautious about invading Iraq, and was thus sidelined from discussions leading up to the war. George Bush’s Secretary of State was not informed of the decision to invade Iraq until after Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, had been told by the president.

While many can imagine political leaders making mistakes, most Americans find it inconceivable that an American president could actually put personal or political interests ahead of the national interest or the welfare of the troops, especially on so grave an issue as war and peace.

But such individuals would do well to remember that there is a long history of this sort of behavior, and that it is an unfortunate part of human nature. The Europeans used to have an expression for this, which was all too well earned from their own experiences. They noted that “War is the sport of kings”.

This is precisely why America’s Founders so feared the concentration of political power that they created a system devoted to spreading that power out, through checks and balances, through federalism, and through guaranteed civil liberties. Often those institutional obstacles have been successful at preventing presidents from acting like kings, but sometimes not. During the George W. Bush presidency, Congress has been a side-show, and many of America’s Bill of Rights-provided civil liberties have been shredded.

Some Americans may believe that, while Europeans have been unfortunate enough to have suffered under warring governments, that could never happen here. The truth, alas, is that it already has, many times. We know today that the stories we were told by our government to justify US involvement in the Mexican war, the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War, for instance, were complete and knowing fabrications, as the secret internal history of the latter war - the Pentagon Papers - definitively proved in that case.

Today, Americans will have to decide for themselves whether George Bush’s invasion of Iraq to protect the United States from the threat of terrorism was legitimate, or yet another example of a president sporting like a king, at the expense of the American people, the troops, the Iraqis, and the world.

Personally, I think the evidence above does exactly what I had intended it would do in assembling it for this article. On the question of the motivation and justification for George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, it speaks for itself.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

I have been stirred up lots lately because I have become too attached to my attempts to influence my congressman about how I think he should vote about the continued funding of the Iraq War. This to me is an important issue for the future of our democracy. Attachment is a tricky because it means my ego gets invested in having its own way. Of course I want things to go the way I want them to and sometimes they do. When I am attached to the outcome I really want the situation to go my way and if it doesn’t, I get upset. I have felt upset lately because I feel like my elected representative is not representing me viewpoint or the majority of people in my community or the country.

I forget sometimes that there are way too many other influences in D.C. and that those elected often owe a lot to special interests. I remember talking to a friend who said he worked very closely with a US Senator and that 90% of the Senator’s time in his office was spent asking people for money. How could they have time to finding out what the many people who elected them want?

Well I have emailed my Congressman 3 times and called once in the last two weeks. There is an expectation here and I know it is full of attachment and some part of me thinks that is ok. It is ok if I don’t mind that attachment often causes me to suffer.

I want him to know what I think. I want him to show courage and stop the war in Iraq. This needless war has been a total disaster unless you are invested in the military industrial complex. Those who benefit from war have to figure out how to be ok with their money being part of a killing machine. There is judgment here from me towards those who are ok making money off war. I want to be free of the “me right, you wrong” thinking but I have further growth here to do that.

So the whole war in Iraq is a teacher for me. I want it to end but my attachment to results is not the best. I have a lot of judgment toward what I feel is a total failure of leadership in DC. I am upset this war was even started based on lies and then it continues to be funded because no one has the courage to stop the president on this course of destruction. The ego goes I want this to be my way but it won’t be. However can’t there be some level of consciousness or higher wisdom in Washington? I am frankly bewildered by such arrogance and a total disregard for human life. Maybe I need to look at my own arrogance that thinks I know better in some way?

I am rambling away here. What do you think about war, attachment, ego, arrogance and all that stuff? What is the higher way of looking, dealing with all this? My hope is at sometime we will evolve past the need to kill each other to be in control. That is my hope.