This is a very long piece of commentary, but I thought it was worth reading- I give you the first little bit:
REALPOLITIK OF BUSH'S REVOLUTION
Part 1: The Philippines revisited
By Henry C K Liu
On November 6, addressing the National Endowment for Democracy, a neo-conservative organization founded during the Reagan era, US President George W Bush sought to justify the predictably endless and unsustainably high cost in lives and money of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush set out the argument for America's war against Iraq no longer in terms of defense against a threat to US security, but as part of a proactive "global democratic revolution". Even if no weapons of mass destruction can be found in Iraq despite an exhaustive search, the blood and money Bush is expending in that troubled land is now justified by the noble-sounding aim of promoting Arab democracy.
The president was speaking in Washington on a theme that freedom is "worth dying for" at the same time that a memorial service was being held in Iraq for the 15 US soldiers killed in a Chinook helicopter shot down by guerrilla fighters four days earlier. The first half of this month saw 44 US occupation soldiers killed by hostile fire from unidentified sources in Iraq. As of last Friday, some 9,200 US soldiers had been wounded since the war started in April, with the bulk injured by guerrilla forces or evacuated for non-combat medical reasons associated with occupation after the war formally ended.
While ignoring press inquiries on why he has thus far avoided attending any funerals for soldiers killed in action, Bush predicted that successfully implanting a democratic government in Iraq would energize a democratic revolution that would sweep away alleged tyrannies from Cuba to North Korea. Specifically, Bush proclaimed a new "forward strategy" for advancing freedom in the Middle East, declaring that six decades of excusing and accommodating dictatorships there on the part of the United States "did nothing to make us safe, because stability cannot be purchased at liberty's expense".
Bush acknowledged that the United States has historically failed to support overseas the values that it claims to uphold at home. Yet the "war on terrorism" now threatens those same values even at home, as former vice president Al Gore pointed out in Constitution Hall in Washington on November 9, three days after Bush's speech.
Gore said: "In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden. In both cases, the administration has attacked the wrong target. In both cases, they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country. In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American democracy. In both cases, they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening, not strengthening, America. In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the courts, the press and the people.
"Indeed, this administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people - while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion. But instead this administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism."
Gore went on to cite specific cases of abuse of the rights of US citizens: "In an even more brazen move, more than two years after they rounded up over 1,200 individuals of Arab descent, they still refuse to release the names of the individuals they detained, even though virtually every one of those arrested has been 'cleared' by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] of any connection to terrorism and there is absolutely no national security justification for keeping the names secret. Yet at the same time, White House officials themselves leaked the name of a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] operative serving the country, in clear violation of the law, in an effort to get at her husband, who had angered them by disclosing that the president had relied on forged evidence in his State of the Union address as part of his effort to convince the country that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of building nuclear weapons. And even as they claim the right to see the private bank records of every American, they are adopting a new policy on the Freedom of Information Act that actively encourages federal agencies to fully consider all potential reasons for non-disclosure regardless of whether the disclosure would be harmful. In other words, the federal government will now actively resist complying with any request for information." Gore pointed out that since the Bush administration has warned that the war on terrorism will last a lifetime, it follows that the suspension of civil liberties in the United States will be permanent.
Bush acknowledged that putting realpolitik ahead of freedom in the past has backfired. Yet it is doubtful that a preference for realpolitik is the sole cause of the current anti-US rage in the region and indeed worldwide. The detente policy of the late president Richard Nixon, a modern master of realpolitik, elevated the international image of the United States as a leader for world peace, mostly a result of his historic opening to China, a communist state. The problem was not realpolitik, but realpolitik in support of bogus democratic claims.
The main part of the blame for the recent rise of post-Cold War global antagonism toward the US has to go to neo-liberalism, which, through unregulated markets, has made a few select elites around the world rich, but left the masses in dire poverty and hopeless desperation, thus providing a fertile breeding ground for terrorism not just against the United States, but against many of its allies. Economic democracy has not been part of the values of the US democratic system in the past decade, if ever, as the disparity of wealth and income not only widened but was condoned by policy and ideology both at home and abroad. It is true that political terrorists tend to come from the well-educated middle class, not quite indigent members of society. But that is because of the poor lack the education, the wherewithal and, above all, the political consciousness to understand the geopolitical causes of their plight. It falls upon the educated among the exploited to develop the political consciousness, the intellectual awareness and the personal courage to make the supreme sacrifice in the struggle for national liberation. American terrorists against British tyranny before the War of Independence were no exception.
Bush is not the first president to promise to put democracy at the forefront of US policy. He cited Woodrow Wilson, who put forth his idealistic Fourteen Points proposal to a skeptical, war-torn Europe, but failed to save the world from another World War within a couple of decades. He also cited Franklin D Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, annunciated in a January 6, 1941, message to Congress proposing lend-lease legislation to support war allies. The Four Freedoms (of speech, of worship, from want and from fear), FDR proclaimed, should prevail everywhere in the world, but they were largely sidetracked by the postwar US fixation on anti-communism, particularly freedom from want.
Freedom of association has not always been an American heritage. The Alien and Registration Act of 1940 proposed by congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, generally referred to as the Smith Act, was signed into law by FDR on June 28, 1940, 16 months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was the first statute since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to make the mere advocacy of ideas a federal crime. So much for freedom of speech and freedom from fear in the Land of the Free.
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