Zar

Although the "officials" in this piece are not attributed, the information herein does mesh well with the slowly changing impression I'm getting as I continue to hearing what Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld are saying about Iraq's alleged WMDs. They are creeping their statements every so gradually and morphing them into a new casus belli that was not the orignal perception they gave. At least they rarely put it this way. The justification, as of now, seems to be settling on "nothing matters except that Iraq has some smart people in it and they don't like us, so we can just kill them whenever we like." By that logic, really no one in the world should stay up at night worrying about ethics. Every one of them should launch a pre-emptive attack on the U.S. right now, and they can claim it was with America's blessing.

You have to hand it to these guys at the White House. They are masters at lying while leaving little bread crumbs for their devotees and sychophants to keep the faith by warping their minds right along with them... Their manipulations and machinations are quite frightening.

From: US: 'Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction'

Pomp

I'm not familiar with the Sunday Herald. How reputable a source are they?

Zar

I honestly am not certain. I've seen a number of articles from them and I haven't been put off yet. But like I said, the article linked to is not attributed, so feel free to ingore it if you want.

Anyway, given the fact that no banned weapons have been found, that Rumsfeld and others are saying not only that "maybe Syria has them" and "it won't be us stumbling on a find but getting someone to talk", and that no one they have "gotten to talk" says anything they want to hear, I think we're at the stage of grabbing into the thin air to come up with a reason and they are few and thin indeed. I'll bet that the administration is going to turn to the idea of regime change again to say that, WMDs or no, the regime could not be "trusted" or was "bad" and that "bad" is enough to attack them in case someday they get any funny ideas about making banned weapons again. That will be the line. That is the only one left, isn't it?

RED DAVE

The shifting rationales cannot be exposed too many times:

The Fig Leaf

RED DAVE

Ruy Lopez

Since about February this year, I tend to click off the TV screen to another channel everytime I see Rumsfeld, Bush, Powell and Cheney. Also I have forgotten which channel Fox is in and watch CNN only for the weather forecast.

It's their control of TV medium and near thorough intimidation of worthless democrats that made feasible the establishment's media and public policy. You are living in a de facto martial rule as far as media is concerned. You can complain but won't be heard or would be ridiculed to no end. There is very little difference from the 14 years of martial law I lived through. However people don't get picked up yet nor get a knock on the door at night for being vocal.

Americans think or are made to believe that in dictatorships, everyone is terrified and wary of the police every minute of the day; say in the former Iraq or Cuba. This is utterly false! What is the difference between a flimflammed or bamboozled American and the Cuban public. The Cubans are better off in one respect. They know the rules; their northern neighbors don't.

You might not believe it but I worked for a long time for a dictatorship at elevated technocratic positions both in the oil company and energy ministry. The Energy Minister and concurrent Chairman/President of the Nat'l oil company, a favored crony of the dictator, knew that 80% of his officers and rank and file were against the dictator. The secret police knew of those sentiments too because they were widespread in government ministries and the financial community. But that did not stop us from living and working in peace. It was truly an oderint tum metuant case. The Latin is loosely translated "let them hate as long as they fear".

We also had torture chambers as in Iraq. The difference was our dictator was US sponsored.

Zar, maybe I should provide a translation for "casus belli". I saw somebody misuse it here earlier. Literally, the cause or reason of war.

Zar

Ruy Lopez,

Thanks for the input.

Also, see for example the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for a definition of casus belli.


The funny thing is, upon looking at this definition, the "excuse" in the OP doesn't even qualify. They are claiming that the "character" of the leadership of Iraq is enough reason to attack the country and recast it as they see fit, not any action or event.

This is then perhaps better termed a belli contra persona if I may coin a phrase.

RED DAVE

One more shot in the ass for the Administration:

Intelligence Professionals on War Rationalization

RED DAVE

Farren

Ruy, thanks for your excellent posts. I always find myself reflexively reading carefully when your nick comes up. Your thoughts are intelligent and informed.

Your feelings about living in an state where the government abuses its authority echo my own. I grew up under aparthied. Since I'm white I didn't suffer the physical deprivations imposed by the system, but the mental anguish was enormous.

I recall, as a teenager, passing three huge white men beating up a black man. The sense of rage and helplessness was enormous. There was no way in which I could help, and if I phoned the police they would in all likelihood arrest the black man, if they bothered to respond at all. This is one incident of thousands that haunts me.

In order to qualify what I want to say I'd have to provide a little background about Apartheid.

Apartheid, to all intents and purposes was a system of modern slavery. It wasn't even particularly subtle about it. The 75-80% black majority were allocated 15% of the country's land, fragmented puzzle pieces resembling Israeli proposals for Palestine. These tiny (usually barren and unworkable) allotments were called "homelands" and given "independent" status so that the government could allocate each black "tribe" to its own "nation" and deprive them of their citizenship. This in turn was their justification for stripping black people of their South African citizenship.

But the economics of the nation were built on cheap black labour. The "homeland" model ensured that the black "nations" within South Africa's borders were utterly unable to sustain any working economies. Naturally this forced homeland "citizens" (in reality the majority of South African citizens) to seek work in "white" South Africa, and accept the status of a immigrant worker in their own country, relegated to tightly controlled urban ghettos called "townships". These were often under a permanent state of martial law.

The Apartheid governments grip on media was very tight indeed. While we enjoyed a nominally free press, numerous laws and restrictions made reporting on the failures and horrors of the system extremely difficult. A white reporter in a black township risked running foul of a host of laws. A black reporter working for a white newspaper was a "foreign national" and ran the risk of being deported at any time.

When the desperate regime began to crumble after 40 years, even the pretenses of freedom (for whites) sustained for so long began to crumble. In the early 1980's the regime spend hundreds of millions of Rands of taxpayer money secretly funding a pro-government "independent" newspaper and at home and recruiting several foreign "journalists" and news sources to the same end. Because of the vestiges of due process still in place, this was exposed and brought down one Nationilist government, only to be replaced by another one by ignorant and fearful white voters.

Then all pretense disappeared. PW Botha, a former general, and his securicrats started hard selling the idea of "total onslaught", using state media and every other means to create the impression of "Total Onslaught". We were told that we were surrounded by a sea of hostile black heathen nations, intent on turning South Africa into a Stalinist state, murdering our men and raping our women.

State of emergency after state of emergency was declared. All reporting on banned topics and people were censored. The few liberal newspapers responded by printing blank columns and photo slots where copy and images would otherwise have appeared, to illustrate to the public what they were missing. The state responded by passing laws making this, in turn, an act of "incitement".

What astonished me in school and in my early youth was that despite all of this, the evidence of all this inhumanity and stupidity was all around us. Elderly black women got up at four in the morning in distant townships and caught three connecting minibus "taxis" to arrive at our homes at 7am and take care of our children. Police openly beat black men on the streets for the most trivial of reasons.

But if you engaged the majority of fellow students on the issue at school, the normal reaction was not first to defend Apartheid, but to deny that any of the arbitrary arrests, beatings, detentions, torture, inhuman conditions and fourth class education existed. This was the most astonishing thing of all, that so many of my fellow white countrymen allowed themselves to be convinced that we were giving blacks "a decent education", "decent houses", "equitable wages" and so on, and they were such barbarous heathen Stalinists that they knew only how to destroy, and suffered through their own fault.

Another salient aspect of this is that, in the siege mentality of many whites under apartheid, it became easier to believe that the rest of the world was wrong in its judgement of South Africa. Those countries with whom we claimed "common cultural value" like Western Europe and the United States, were seen as victims of jewish/black/Stalinist propaganda, and South Africa as a bastion of those values they all secretly cherished.

Having lived through this, my political radar, like your own, is finely tuned to the rationale, distortions and manipulations of evil men who wish to twist the minds of an electorate by slealth.

From the outside looking in, it is glaringly obvious that this is happening right now in the United States. A one to one comparison isn't entirely valid but all of the hallmarks exist, if in lesser degree.

The siege mentality has been successfully created and nurtured. This is evident from the neocon apologists on these boards who by kneejerk reflex equate anything anti-Bush administration/Republican congress as anti-American. It is also evidenced by the fact that countries that oppose the US in matters political are now seen as "enemies" out to destroy the "great nation", villified and targeted for economic reprisals.

The control of the media is there. It has not been accomplished by legislation but by the same process that nurtured McCarthyism in the press years ago. Because, as Chesney points out, the US has the most corporate, profit driven press in the world, it no longer responds to the ideals of a "free press" when popular sentiment (created by device of siege mentality) becomes so extreme that opposing views would cripple profits.

Spin is virtually a hard science in the US and its easy to see how the tremendous body of knowledge of marketing used to sell everything from Coca Cola to Jennifer Lopez can be turned on a populace conditioned to respond to sell unpalateable policies to a complacent market, in defiance of morality and reason.

What gives me hope is the number of US citizens who haven't bought the bullshit. A (large) minority they may be now, but I believe in years to come, they will at least have the satisfaction of knowing they were right when the next generation makes angst-filled movies about "America's second McCarthy era" and examines the hysteria that drives a great nation to the lonely corner of isolationism, xenophobia and self delusion.

paul30

The truth is, George W. Bush likes and uses terrorism extensively.

Every day he says a prayer of thanks for 9/11--since it gave him an excuse to do what he had wanted to do: crack down at home and attack people abroad.

These were always his plan; and they also help cloud his utter failure in domestic policies: the sucky economy, the looting of the US by Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing, the torpidity of education--which Bush likes because he certainly doesn't want people to think, the absorption of the media into the government, the absorption of the government into big business.

Add it up, and it spells fascism.

Ruy Lopez

Thanks for making me feel good, Farren---brother in experience and mindset.

The US public may not have to live under this delusion much longer than we did in our respective countries. It usually takes enormous pain and sacrifice to break the kind of grip the US is under. The question is what?

One possibility. An anti-empire anti-preemption Democratic candidate who shows surprising strength at surveys gets assasinated in suspicious circumstances. Or he clearly gets cheated in the 2004 elections. Another possibility is a severe recession or an economic depression that brings down most of the rich too.

In our case two major events brought down Ferdinand Marcos; assassination of the top opposition figure who already had a death sentence and was under government custody; second, widespread cheating in a snap election called months after the assassination. If you wish to read about it, this is the best account I know. It's easy reading.

http://www.stuartxchange.org/BeforeEdsa.html

I am banking on that 30-40% large minority in the US, that Farren cited, that cannot be duped. Even after 9/11, I remember that around 25% of America refused to be cowed by this patriotism jingoism. They have to be organized and ready to move when the occasion arises. The neocons will only yield to force; they should find a way to do this without bloodshed. The Philippines and South Africa did and without vengeance and bloody recriminations afterwards. We allowed the leading personalities of the regime to escape to Hawaii (including my Chairman boss who flew to Singapore in the company Lear Jet) and none of their subalterns were tried for crimes against humanity.

As for me, I turned revolutionary 4 days before the revolution broke out on Feb. 21 1986 at 6 pm. Relentlessly prompted by a top business leader and two vice president friends, I drafted a manifesto which majority of head office employees signed. We had committed sedition or treason because we withdrew support from the dictator who was our highest superior. Rebel radio aired the manifesto on Feb. 20 and 21 almost every hour. I wrote at the end "The king is not England and England is not the king'. Guess who originated that.

Good luck USA.