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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (513301)	12/19/2003 10:05:52 PM
From: Rick McDougall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Zionism's Useful Idiots by Kurt Nimmo www.dissidentvoice.org November 22, 2003 That's you and me, taxpaying US citizens. We're useful idiots for the Zionists in Washington and Tel Aviv. Useful because our hard-earned paychecks can be harvested to pay for war and mass murder in the Middle East, idiots because we don't do anything about it. So outraged were the Sons of Liberty over British taxation without representation, they pitched a whole lot of Darjeeling tea into the Boston Harbor. Now? We're couch potatoes, useful idiots more interested in Bachelor Bob than the possibility of an apocalyptic war that will consume the lives of our children and our wealth. So usefully idiotic are we that treacherous neocons no longer bother to offer threadbare lies to cover their murderous tracks. On Thursday, November 20, the former lead conspirator of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and long-time accused Israeli spy, Richard Perle, proudly admitted Bush's invasion of Iraq was illegal. "I think international law stood in the way of doing the right thing," he brazenly told a London audience. In other words, laws reached by international consensus, agreed upon by the vast majority of civilized people on the planet for centuries, are little more than doormats for Zionist gangsters such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, to name but the most obvious, and their bosses, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Like their philosophical and spiritual swami, Ariel Sharon, these criminals not only thumb their noses at their foes, but also target them for assassination if they get in the way. It's as if Perle and his ruthless gang have suddenly decided to dump the philosophy of the neocon cognoscenti of Machiavellian lying and deception, Leo Strauss. Instead of telling lies and building half-ass fabrications in preparation for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the name of a clan of Likudites in Israel and corporate mobsters close to the Bushites in America, the neocons now seem more than happy to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. It's easier, less hassle, and besides Joe Taxpayer doesn't really seem to care one way or the other if he's lied to, told the truth straight up, or kept in the dark entirely. He's essentially imperturbable, or maybe semi-comatose. So long as the ultimate cost, in lives and hard cash, remains an abstraction in the short term, well, nobody on Main Street's going to complain too much. Maybe a few anti-war types here and there will hoot and holler, but they can easily be sloughed off -- or ignored entirely -- by the Bush Ministry of Disinformation (i.e., Fox, ABC, CNN, CBS, etc.) as hate America firsters or a meaningless focus group. Death on such a magnitude cannot remain an abstraction forever, especially now with coffins (the Pentagon calls them "transfer tubes") and wounded coming home in ever-increasing numbers. For now, however, the wounded piling up at Walter Reed and Fort Stewart, and the dead arriving daily at Dover, will not make prime or any other time. "I don't understand why these guys are so hidden, why there are no pictures of them," Cher lamented recently. Well, Cher, that's a no-brainer. The Bush neocons understand something very essential - people, that is average, every day people - will do almost anything to avoid war, mostly because they are the ones to pay the highest price for it. Roosevelt understood this -- and that's why he steered the Japanese into invading Pearl Harbor. Something outrageous has to push the people into war, be it the prospect of rapacious Japanese murdering defenseless GIs or Saddam conniving with Osama to murder Americans with weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that the Japanese had no intention of killing Americans until Roosevelt embargoed their oil. Never mind that Osama hates Saddam and, besides, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was, and is, murderous deception. "Of course the people don't want war," mused a recalcitrant Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials. "But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." If the average American were suddenly exposed to an endless parade of coffins and the gruesome stories of those seriously wounded in Iraq, the dreaded Vietnam Syndrome would come screaming back - in other words, people would demand an end to war, like they did during the Vietnam war -- and the neocon jihad against the Arab Third World in the name of Zionism and neoliberal corporate theft would be throttled in short order. Obviously, the Perles and the Wolfowitzes and the Cheneys and Rumsfelds and their ideological bedfellows outside of the White House and Pentagon are not going to let this happen. They're going to do whatever it takes to keep the "war on terrorism" moving forward, even if it means another attack on the American heartland. Even if it means another slaughtered 3,000 office workers, or a dirty bomb going off during Christmas rush in the parking lot of the Mall of America. These people are sincerely immoral, even sociopaths. Their legacy is Operation Northwoods, the firebombing of Hamburg, Tokyo, Dresden, Kobe, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's the deliberate murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, the spreading of depleted uranium across the globe, the methodical serial murder of nearly 3,000,000 Vietnamese. Of course, the average American -- the sheepish Untermensch, the useful idiot for Zionism, the guy who unconsciously donates part of his paycheck to Israel every year -- he's immersed in an entertainment fog, the modern equivalent of Roman bread and circuses, so he's essentially clueless to what's going on. Since he rarely ventures beyond Fox, the Bush Ministry of Disinformation, for his "news," he knows nothing about Zionist control of not only the White House, but also Congress and the very media he's passively consuming. He's a blinkered cash cow. Maybe, as well, his kid's a bullet stopper for a Zionist settler who thinks Americans should die so he can steal land from Palestinian Arabs, so no powerful rival will emerge in the Arab world to challenge Israeli crimes against Arabs. "An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public pressure," explains Edward Said. This "small cabal," writes Edward Herman, consists of "the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which advances Israeli interests by pushing for U.S. aid and protection to Israel, and, currently, by pressing for a war against Iraq, which again will serve Israeli interests. This lobby has not only helped control media debate and made congress into 'Israeli occupied territory', it has seen to it that numerous officials with 'dual loyalties' occupy strategic decision-making positions in the Bush administration." You can't get much more "strategic" than Dick Cheney, vice president, the guy right below Bush (or some would say Bush is below Cheney). Here's a former advisor for JINSA, short for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, running the executive branch of the government. Directly below him are staunch Israeli-firsters, friends of the war criminal and mass murderer Ariel Sharon and the criminal, Arab (and British and American) killing machine, also known as the Likud Party, a gangster organization based on "revisionist" Zionism, in other words the philosophy of Vladimir (Zeev) Zabotinsky, a fascist Arab hater who harbored warm and fuzzy feelings for Benito Mussolini. The Israel-firsters in the Bush administration, according to Ann Pettifer, "pursue political power not in order to make the US a better place, to right wrongs or to fight inequality here, but to promote Israel's pre-eminence in the Middle East, to confine Palestinians to a couple of Bantustans or, better still, engineer their expulsion to Jordan... Wolfowitz and fellow Jewish neo-cons Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have emerged as the Pentagon's Paladins, their aim being to subdue the Islamic world through decisive, pre-emptive use of American military superiority." In other words, chew up US treasure and kill American kids who thought they joined the military to defend their country - or, like the hapless Jessica Lynch, joined up because they couldn't get a job or an education anywhere else. The streets of Iraq have become in short order murderous hellholes designed by malevolent former Ba'athists -- who were brought to power by the CIA in the 60s -- to kill US soldiers. Bush, of course, and the Likudite Zionists who run his illegally appointed administration don't give a rat's ass about the lives of a few thousand American soldiers or, for that matter, 28 million odd Iraqis. Israel, and the racist colonialist mentality of the Zionists, is all that matters. It's currently what the foreign policy of the United States is all about. All of us, especially the Arabs, are expected to pay homage to the Zionists. Those of us who live in the United States and pay our (war) taxes, we ante up every week or two weeks, certain our money will go to build Israel's apartheid wall, pay for new settlements on Arab land, or grease the gears of bulldozers that smash down ancient olive trees. We pay dearly for Israeli ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, by default or mere stupidity and ignorance, the American people remain useful idiots for Zionism. They may not realize George Bush's so-called "war on terrorism" is actually, as the neocons deem it, the opening salvos of World War IV (according to neocon and former CIA director James Woolsey). It's a war Bush has declared will last a long time, possibly for the rest of our lives, generations, but few Americans seem to glimpse the obvious implications - more mass murder, increasing hardship, loss of constitutional liberties, maybe even nuclear Armageddon. Stupid Americans. As Wilhelm Reich knew, the "little man" will invariably embrace not only his enslavement, but also revel in his own denigration. He not only supports dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin (and now Bush), but admires them as well. "You give impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you," Reich wrote. "Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded." Now's the time to stop the fraud. But I don't know if the useful idiots of Zionism are up to it. Kurt Nimmo is a photographer, multimedia artist and writer living in New Mexico. To see his photo work and read more of his essays, visit his excellent “Another Day in the Empire” weblog: drmenlo.com Other Articles by Kurt Nimmo * No Apologies for Wolfowitz the Microbe * Sailor-Mongering Civil Disobedience: The Justice Dept.’s War Against Greenpeace * Criticizing Zionism: Naked Anti-Semitism? * Shock Therapy and the Israel Scenario * Cuba and the "Necessary Viciousness" of the Bushites * Imperial Sociopaths * Bush's Speech: Internationalizing the Whirlwind * The Imam Ali Mosque Bombing: Round Up the Usual Suspects * Iraq's WMD: The Lie that Will Never Die * UN Bombing: Terrorism or National Liberation? * Saddam Hussein: Taking Out the CIA's Trash * The Bug Exterminator Goes to Jerusalem * Bread, Circuses, Uday and Qusay HOME FREE hit counter and Internet traffic statistics from freestats.com

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (513301)	12/19/2003 10:38:37 PM
From: Rick McDougall	Respond to of 769667

WEIRD MEN BEHIND BUSH Christian Fundie , Wolfowitz , and Eternal War Today , It was announce that three more precious U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq. We're lied to!!!! no WMDs , No Scuds , OR Drones capable of Spraying deadly toxins , No Al-Qaeda connection . Weird men behind Gerge W. Bush's war By Michal Lind New Statement --London < Snipped because of space > As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies - such as the selection rather than election of George W Bush, and 11 September - the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the US population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment. The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers. Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy". They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians. The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con "in-and-outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo- cons are ideologues, not opportunists. The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud- supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co- signed a Jinsa letter that began: "We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority." The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a "pro- Israel activist". While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government. Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada. Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "Gotcha!" style of right- wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement. The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied. How did the neo-con defence intellectuals - a small group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic - manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first - a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf war and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process - and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination. Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby. The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a north- eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture. The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie", as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorisation from Congress and the UN. It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", something the leading neo-cons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the US to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with US attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neo-cons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the US. The neo-cons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the US, a far greater problem. So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the US into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the US and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaeda attacks, any US president would likely have gone to war to topple Bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the US has done since then would have been different had America's 18th- century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion. For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of Reverend Ian Paisley, extreme Eurosceptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types - all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- Michael Lind, the Whitehead Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, is the author of Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.