Note the devilish number at the end.
Annual Report Due on the War For Political, Corporate Profit
by Pierre Tristam
"Your war, our dead." The slogan was fired at Jose Maria Aznar on Sunday as he cast his last ballot as Spain's prime minister. Justly or not, Spaniards' response to the Madrid bombings that killed 200 people last week was to blame Aznar for his blind support of America's open-ended war on terror and to throw him out of office. Aznar was only a collateral target. As the United States marks the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq this Friday, nothing sums up the year's futility and the greater folly the invasion stood for than that slogan, which should hang from the neck of every member of the Bush administration.
It has been a war of inexplicable exemptions, exceptions and special favors, a war of lies and fabrications, a war for the basest, most criminal motives: Political and corporate profit. An annual report is due.
On those two scores (politics and profit), the war has been successful. President Bush's accidental presidency was aimless in its first nine months, glazing past anything that didn't spell "tax cuts" and wondering how to elevate Iraq from a fourth-world backwater to an imminent threat. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, solved part of the problem. Deception did the rest. "This," Bush told his Cabinet immediately after declaring his vague new war on terror, "is the purpose of this administration." The war has been his justification, his sustenance, his only chance. Without the make-work business of homeland security and the biggest growth in government since the New Deal, Bush couldn't have created the few jobs that have kept the economy from looking like Sicily's, although his administration has adopted many of Sicily's customs: The security-industrial complex at home and the empire's good works in the name of nation-building abroad have turned patronage into national economic policy. Bullying substitutes for international relations. And assassinations are encouraged.
The story about weapons of mass destruction was made up, but Saddam Hussein's capture alone, the administration says, is success enough because a 30-year reign of terror that claimed 300,000 Iraqi lives finally ended. By that measure the "coalition of the willing" should be busy invading the Congo, where more than 3 million people -- that's 3 million -- have died in the world's biggest war in the last five years alone. Unlike Iraq, most of the killing in the Congo has taken place on Bush's watch. But most Americans don't know of the Congo's existence. "There is a human condition that we must worry about," Bush told an interviewer not long before the Iraq invasion, a noble thought if it hadn't been so expediently selective. In Haiti and Israel-Palestine, the two other biggest flash points on this administration's watch, the response has been equally disengaged. Walls have ensued -- literally in the West Bank, figuratively regarding the Caribbean. The carnage carries on. Bush's slogan regarding both: "Your war, your problem."
The administration's duplicity is pathological. Bush's "moral clarity" had divided the world between those who support terrorists and those who fight them. Yet Pakistan, an American ally, remains terrorism's biggest hide-and-seek playground and a bazaar of nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia, an American ally, remains terrorism's International Monetary Fund. The administration didn't hesitate to imprison thousands of Arabs in the months following Sept. 11, deport thousands more and force thousands of Arab immigrants to register in the most racist security sweep since the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Yet within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration whisked several members of Osama bin Laden's Saudi family out of the country -- one of many favors in a gallery of mendacity the administration refuses to explain to the 9/11 Commission.
A homeland security department was created, yet the two agencies needing revamping most -- the CIA and the FBI -- were exempted. Their fatal failures leading up to Sept. 11 and over Iraq's WMDs remain unaccounted for, their plans for securing the nation from further attacks unaccountable, their end runs around the Bill of Rights not only undisputed but encouraged by an administration that wears its self-declared exemptions from civil liberties and the rules of war as a badge of honor. The lawless treatment of prisoners in the Justice Department's prisons at home and the Pentagon's prison at Guantanamo Bay, the torture and inexplicable deaths of prisoners held by the military in Afghanistan, the Pentagon's administration of justice that is accountable to no one but itself in Iraq: Those are the legacies of enduring freedom, and still no assurance that Madrid's grief won't be America's yet again soon.
For this glorious war on terror, 666 American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan so far. No room for celebration on Friday's one-year mark of Iraq's invasion. Bush's only greeting card should be Aznar's hand-me-down: Your war, our dead.
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