Iraq Redux
“When a stupid man is doing something he
is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.” ~
George Bernard Shaw
By Dom Stasi
03/25/06 "ICH" -- -- As we observe this somber anniversary,
the third of senseless slaughter in our name and in the name of
our once and future glorious nation, yet another atrocity – a
new one - must be endured by thinking, reasoning Americans. We
must, it seems, now also endure the nauseatingly predictable
platitudes of the very same hypocrites – by that I mean the
talking heads of TV and the equally useful idiots of the press -
who’ve spent the years since 9/11 growing rich or famous or just
saving their jobs as propagandists by exploiting the gullible
and bloodthirsty among us with their sensational if irrelevant
reportage and bankrupt philosophies of fear and loathing.
We must
watch as those who still purport to be journalists and experts,
yet are nothing more than accessories to grand theft and murder,
climb from the mire of their absolute professional failings and
personal cowardice to once again regale us with their dueling
quotes disguised as news, their neuroses disguised as toughness,
their White House press releases disguised as analysis, their
incorrect opinions disguised incredibly as wisdom. Lately
however, the fantasy of balanced perception they so proudly
hail, can be seen slowly shifting its underlying bias toward a
grudging acknowledgement that they might have missed something
lo these past three dismally retrogressive years in America.
That the something they’ve failed to notice has been roughly as
apparent as would be an enormous, stinking, bellowing,
rampaging, rabid bull elephant in a phone booth you happened to
be using, is of little consequence. They’ve failed to notice
precisely what they are paid to notice. That’s news.
I’m
speaking of course of the media’s long overdue recognition that
this federal administration, this gaggle of knaves upon whom the
ladies and gentlemen of the information mass media have spent
the last five years doting, is a bunch of crooks, traitors, and
just plain knuckleheads. As the circulation and ratings of news
media dwindle, its practitioners seem suddenly less willing to
blindly kiss up and ask softball questions at White House press
briefings in an effort to get – albeit incorrect – information
from a vindictive and stonewalling White House communications
office. They seem no longer completely blinded – not completely
blinded - by the Bush administration’s staged, if non-existent
heroics. In fact, we are starting to actually hear and read
about this administration’s serial incompetence, and we’re
getting it from the press and the pundits of all people!
Could it be that the mainstream media have actually noticed in
our “leaders” an absence of both ethics and abilities that the
“alternative” press and so called “fake news” had somehow
recognized and have been reporting on contiguously since the
1999 campaign?
Here’s
a question. When, may I ask, will we start to hear and read of
the corporate media’s own mistakes and incompetence? After
all, much of the blood is on their hands. Failing to notice the
precise thing one is paid to notice is in itself news, isn’t
it?
Instead
of fessing up, the talking heads of electronic and the
stenographers of print journalism are visibly struggling to
cover those deadly mistakes now, not reporting them.
In the
manner of every exposed hypocrite before them since time began,
they are squirming in the light and heat of accountability. The
disciples of “stay the course” are suddenly squirming like so
many maggots to hide their post 9/11, unbroken record of
wrongness, and wrongness, and more wrongness yet, and doing it
the only way they know how, behind a facade of righteous
indignation and feigned outrage. They do so in the fervent hope
that their public, their readers and viewers and listeners,
those who’ve hung on their every word and gesture while
themselves cowering too deeply in fear to find the truth on
their own, will be willingly fooled again. They are hoping,
perhaps correctly, that when it comes to punditry, angry
commentary is enough. Sprinkle it with a smattering of arcane
words their fans don’t recognize and it’ll sound downright
brilliant. If fact, if the commentary is delivered by a bulimic
Barbie doll, or a guy wearing googley eyeglasses and a bowtie
some might think it worthy of a Pulitzer!
To
validate this, one need only stop for a moment and consider the
childlike, credulous, and hopelessly biased fan base the
conservative pundits have built. Compare that to the declining
circulation of newspapers among informed and critical readers
and the ever-more tabloid editorial formats that will drive many
of us farther away still but hopefully gain a foothold among the
uncritical, the true believers. Consider that and you’ll
understand why the pundits think that they can fool their
faithful base yet again and get away with it. Do that, and
you’ll see why perhaps this time, after all this time, the
pundits might actually be right about something. Simply put,
those who remain faithful to these so called journalists who’ve
gotten it wrong from the start, will believe anything. It need
only come from a pulpit of authority. That pulpit might be a
genuine pulpit such as that behind which the president stands
when he lies to us. Or it might be a newspaper masthead, a
radio tower, or a TV satellite in space, or a damned soapbox.
It matters but little. It’s an authority icon, and they – the
faithful - are childlike. They’ll believe what their told on
faith, wholly unaware that when examined in context, faith and
knowledge can coexist only in inverse proportion. Sooner or
later, when claim after claim goes unproven and unfounded, all
but the most completely credulous humans lose their faith in
authority. Critical thinkers eventually demand evidence.
Since 9/11 the authority peddlers have shown us much of the
former and none of the latter.
So, as
we the people reflect upon a sad anniversary, a week spent in
mass demonstrations, or in quiet and somber contemplation of
that which our countrymen have wrought with their fear and
ignorance, we must neither forget nor forgive the travesty of
truth spewn forth by the vulgar, manipulative swine of the
right-wing and mainstream media, the killers of the innocents
whose words are their weapons - these creatures whose putrid
mouths and poison pens now feign a righteous outrage as if this
debacle of blood and death and heartbreak and robbery, this
avoidable human tragedy, unfolded sans their complicity. They
will endeavor to persuade themselves and their followers, if not
us, that it would have happened with or without their
encouragement.
Lest we
do forget, and as we watch them slowly squirm and change their
childish stories, hoping their murderous lies of the recent past
will fall into the great American memory hole, as they probably
will if the rest of us remain silent, please allow me to remind
us all how very obvious was the criminal manipulation of our
innocent, frightened, gullible, or just simple-minded American
brethren who believed the lies of the corporate press and right
wing media and the White House communications office.
To that
end I offer the following: I began the article that appears
below back in January of the strange - though apparently
predictable - year, 2003. Completed and published in its print
version weeks before the invasion of Iraq began, I was moved to
write it while witnessing what seemed a growing and irrational
level of support for an unjustified, but ever-more-probable
“war” against a people who - despite their despicable leader -
had done us no appreciable harm. Since that time, not a speck
of evidence has been found that might indicate that they had
they ever intended to. The war against Iraq is an action that
was - and remains – a crime against humanity, all of humanity
not just the innocents whose lives, families, and bodies it’s
ruined so far. It is a crime of maiming and murder, of robbery
and deception on the grandest of scales. As Americans of
self-proclaimed free will we have borne witness or been party to
a horrific atrocity accomplished by an easily manipulated
president for his personal ends and the personal ideologies of
those who control him. His actions were supported and enabled
by an as-easily manipulated populace for their own personal
ends. And all of it was instigated upon our countrymen’s now
world-famous ignorance, bigotry, and fear. Three years ago, they
the people - (I refer to Americans of popular mind) - frustrated
by our government's inability to bring the perpetrators of
September Eleventh to justice, seemed intent upon killing
somebody. In fact, the somebody need not be demonstrably
complicit in our violation, merely different, Arab-seeming,
Muslim-like, virtually defenseless.
At that time the majority of Americans – by far the majority -
were motivated to mass murder, if for no other reason, than to
show the world the perils of attacking the United States while
satisfying their childlike strike urges. Our self-appointed
"leaders" and those who control them knew that many Americans
were ready to lash out in their frustration at something
tangible, however irrelevant to the acquisition of cold
vengeance and real justice that something might be. It allowed
our graceless unelected president to unleash both his and our
countrymen's scared-rat fury on a convenient, obvious,
tangential-at-best - and potentially very profitable - villain:
Saddam Hussein.
Hussein is a murderous despotic scumbag to be sure, but a
scumbag who has never - not ever! - been a terrorist. Yet in the
end, all that factual stuff paled to insignificance. It paled
because the former Iraqi president is a character whose
self-fabricated image was every bit as palpable, but not one bit
more tangible, than the one our own president has fashioned for
himself. Hussein is a thug who's fashioned himself a dictator.
Bush is a privileged Ivy League, frat-boy boozer, and
rear-echelon shirker who's fashioned himself a populist bumpkin
and warrior prince. In short, they were both easy targets for
exploitation.
The
ultimate capture (by PUK clansmen, not by American or coalition
troops) of Hussein was something our peevish president long
relished for personal reasons. Because then, as now, Bush was
intent on the settlement of some weird version of what is
essentially a hillbilly family feud gone terribly, terribly
wrong. Every failed man wants his victory. Bush is no
exception. To settle his personal score, Bush committed what
history will declare a war crime, but it was (and is) a war
crime that appealed to his irrational, fantasy cowpoke self, and
was thus justifiable. Yet each passing day, month, year further
verifies that Hussein's capture and the destruction of the
world’s first nation-state was an end instigated by our
president's own white collared, red-necked White House thugs,
and a victory they could virtually guarantee their credulous
simpleton of a boss. They are, after all, cut from similar cloth
as was their prey. So, in Ox Bow Incident fashion, we allowed
our own scumbags, safe in their Washington easy chairs, to
invest our expendable military youth, squander our hard-earned
monetary treasure, and go out and catch the absolutely wrong
villain.
Three
years on and Hussein is neutered. No matter. We still kill the
other Iraqis upon whose oil and homeland our armies tread
uninvited, unwelcome, unreasoned, unwavering.
Three
years on and nothing’s changed but the story of why we’re
there. Stay the course there, change the story here.
Three
years on, and at home we face more danger from terrorists than
ever. Abroad, Osama is now a folk hero on the order of a
turbaned Davy Crockett. And when the monetary cost of our
leaders’ treasonous folly is tallied, our children’s future has
been traded for blood and nothing more. Nothing.
We’ve
squandered our national security. Economic stability is
security. Money is security. Not guns, not armies, money!
It’s the reason the paranoids at the top of this dung heap are
gathering as much of it as they can. This, while those in the
middle have seen theirs thrown away along with their children’s
prospects for a better life. Anyone doubting that need only
realize that America and Americans are today more indebted to
foreigners than at any point in our personal or our nation’s
history. Ever.
Everyone who’s rational knows these things. Yet even today,
there seems little time amid the bloodlust and neurotic
chest-beating that characterizes this idiotic atrocity to
remember that the actual - if still alleged - perpetrator of the
crimes of 9-11 runs free dragging a dialysis machine behind
him! So, to, do the countless bin Laden imitators our moronic
actions have spawned. A no-longer tiny alQaida and its newfound
legions plot our demise while laughing at our national fear and
stupidity. Home of the brave? What a sick and a sickening
joke that is.
But at last there are stirrings beneath the popular surface.
At long last.
As this congressional election year unfolds, and we continue to
suffer the perpetual spectacle of our rudderless republic amok
in the world; as we further endure the waffle and babble of most
of our elected representatives in their collective careerist
attempts to distance themselves from their savage decision to
slaughter over 100,000 civilians; as we watch them defend their
willingness to do so; as we watch the newspapers close their
foreign bureaus; and worst of all as we endure the pundits’
ratings-preserving bullshit, I ask you once more to consider the
following short essay. It was first published at the start of
2003 and before the start of what was at that time still quietly
called Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) by its plotters. In the
interim, the acronyms have changed, but nothing has changed as
relates to Iraq's complicity. This war was never justified.
Thinking, objective Americans knew that then. Today, a growing
number of formerly trusting, nationalistic, credulous, or
perhaps just slow to comprehend Americans are coming to know it
too.
For
today, only slaves to their personal biases cling to the myth of
might is right, Go W, These Colors Don’t Run, Power Of Pride,
and God Bless America.
Which
god might that be? Which America would he deign to bless?
So,
come back with me now to the dawn of 2003. Read once more – or
perhaps for the first time - what was written before the
headlong plunge into a war for oil and personal revenge against
a nation we’d spent the previous 12 years disarming. Read what
we knew and our government pretended they did not.
Under
its original title Dear Fellow Americans, the old article
below called upon my experience in military reconnaissance
coupled with plain common sense, to draw conclusions that are
more relevant today than they were even then, three long and
horrific and costly years ago.
The
flood of letters at the time of its print publication revealed
that many Americans shared these conclusions then. Yourself
perhaps among them. Many, many, many others did not. Yourself
perhaps among them. For accepting such conclusions at
that time would have required that one also accept that the
president was at the very least, the very least, a liar.
A healthy personal bias might have prevented that three years
ago, perhaps even two years ago.
But
evidence and conscience demand that it be accepted now. Yet
accepting truth now means accepting that the president is a
premeditative mass murderer as well – the felony has been
compounded in the intervening years. These things cannot be.
Yet it seems unequivocally that they are. So, add guilt to the
fear and the bias and the egotism that still prevents 34% of our
countrymen from coming to their collective senses and mustering
the courage to face reality.
As
Americans we've lost much in this still-new century - not least
our place at the table of humanity. In the year ahead our
founders' have bequeathed us a way to take our country back. We
need only overcome our fears and biases and return to an ever
more distasteful rationality. There is only one truth. To not
accept it is understandable for a time. To reject the truth
forever is psychotic.
We were
lied to by those who’ve pledged us their honesty and trust!
There’s
no shame in that for those who believed the lies. There is only
shame – much shame – in continuing to reject what is now the all
too obvious truth. To willingly acquiesce to that and yet to
fondly consider oneself sane, is to reward the murdering liars
out of ego and self interest and fear and greed and, yes,
stupidity.
So I
ask you to read this old piece immediately below. It will
remind many of you of just how you felt back then, how your
countrymen felt as well. Get mad as hell, again. Get mad with
the talking heads, get mad with the politicians, get mad with
the yellow “journalists” whose lies you’ve rejected, and stay
that way until November. Then throw your radio through the
television screen, put the newspaper under your cat where it
belongs, and march to the polls with the single-minded will to
toss these bums out of our – OUR! – government and start the
process that will impeach and/or indict the rest.
March
to the polls in such overwhelming numbers that even the crooked
voting machines cannot deny your will. It can be done!
In the
name of our children’s and our country’s future, it must be
done.
******************************
The following was first published
in February, 2003. It is offered here for your
recollection and reference.
Dear
Fellow Americans
By Dom
Stasi
February 2003: George W. Bush does not appear to
be a complicated man. In fact, with the exception of his
apparently instant grasp of the complex legal abstractions
attendant to Antonin Scalia's appointing him president of the
United States, Mr. Bush seems the very paragon of intellectual
simplicity itself. "I see things in black and white," he so
readily declares. "I'm not about nuancing," he adds, daily
swelling America's lexicon if not its coffers. How comforting a
worldview his must be.
Well, however comforting it might be to Mr. Bush and his ilk,
the rest of us should be troubled as hell by such statements
emanating from a president of the United States. In fact, I
would submit that his "good versus evil/you're either with us or
against us" homilies have a profoundly discomforting, even
juvenile, quality to them. Yet we've watched silently these past
two years of civil retrogression as he's drawn conclusions
supremely unworthy of any world leader, much less one who must
reconcile diplomacy to awesome power, less yet again America's
president.
We the people seem not the least bit troubled by this apparently
simple man's simple words. Neither are we much concerned that
the simple man seems so readily accepting of complex advice,
advice fomented in minds perhaps not as simple as his own, minds
whose motivations most Americans - to their credit - neither
know nor understand.
Mr. Bush is also a man of obvious faith. Witness the zeal with
which he promotes his constitutionally dubious "faith-based
initiative" even as we prepare for mortal war.
Of course, faith can be a wonderful and healing force. It can
also be blind, if not tempered with reason. For faith is a state
of mind that cannot coexist with knowledge in context. To quote
the American genius, Carl Sagan, "I'd rather know than believe."
When confronted with this particular black and white simplicity,
Mr. Bush will too quickly opt for the latter. It's easier to
believe than it is to know - more convenient, less critically
complex. Witness his indifference toward that critical basis of
knowledge called evidence. Witness how readily he eschews it
when it interferes with his decision-making. Such credulity is
both troubling and, in the complex global framework of today,
patently un-American. Rarely in the practice of American
governance has that credulity been more blatantly manifest than
it has been these past weeks in Bush's approach to the matter of
Iraq. The promotion of his agenda, through the compelling yet
wholly circumstantial evidence provided the United Nations by
the charismatic Colin Powell, was pure theater. For however
compelling the secretary of state's presentation might have been
on the visceral level, it was wholly inconclusive on a
critically objective basis. Its examples of "evidence" were
wholly refutable in their ambiguity, its dramatics better suited
to inspiring Hollywood actors to action than lethal armies. Such
evidence as that, which Secretary Powell presented, would be
dismissed as circumstantial by any honest judge in any American
court of law. Neither would such ambiguities hold up against a
reasonable jury in whose hands lay the fate of but a single,
however suspect, human being in an American trial. But alas,
this is international power ball, not an American trial, and
however inconclusive the out-of-context sound bytes and
meaningless snapshots presented by Colin Powell might appear to
a trained and objective analyst (such as myself), they are
apparently definitive enough for Mr. Bush and a majority of
Americans to willingly, if not eagerly, sacrifice the lives of
an as-yet incalculable number of innocents to arbitrary and
merciless execution. I submit that had the same standard of
evidence been applied to Mr. Bush's insider trading allegations,
or to his alleged dereliction of military duty during the
Vietnam War, his government service might by now find itself
limited to the manufacture of license plates.
But more to the point: Does Saddam have nuclear weapons?
He almost certainly does not.
Does he have chemical and biological weapons? Probably. But
these are hardly weapons of mass destruction by modern
standards.
I pose this latter assertion not as conjecture, but as a matter
of history supported by physical evidence. But the audit trail
to that evidence - based upon American government records -
might surprise you.
Quoting the president's father, who, near the end of his term,
said, "As you may remember from history, there was a lot of
support for Iraq at that time [1980s] as a balance against a
much more aggressive Iran, under Khomeini."
A lot of support? How about $5 billion in intelligence, weapons
and training?
Recorded history, not conjecture.
Quoting again, this time the man considered America's foremost
war historian, Gabriel Kolko: "The United States was Iraq's
functional ally and encouraged it to build and utilize a huge
army with modern armor, aviation, artillery and chemical and
biological weapons." Saddam's first recorded use of mustard gas,
cyanide and nerve agents against humans began at that time. This
begs the question: Was our $5 billion gift of weapons and
training a coincidence or the proximate cause of Iraq's use and
subsequent knowledge of germs and gas?
Why was this historically recorded transaction never mentioned
or referenced among the "evidence" the Bush administration
seemed so desperate to produce? Let's be simpler still. Whose
spent nerve gas canisters did the weapons inspectors find in the
sands of Iraq following the Gulf War and again so recently? Are
they ours? Russia's? Or the product of "evil" Iraqi science?
These too represent direct evidence, physical evidence. We are
told only of their presence, never of their provenance. Well, it
takes no leap of imagination to conclude that the act of giving
Saddam the wherewithal to use germs and poison gas is less
inflammatory than when we gave him these capabilities. If not
the material itself, we certainly offered Saddam access or, at
the very least, tacit approval and huge sums of money to gain
access to these products of World War I era technology that have
now - in the nuclear age - become known as "weapons of mass
destruction." But that we did so during the Iran-Contra years,
the conservative movement's Camelot years … the Ronald Reagan
years, well, that makes public consideration of this stuff a
Bush administration taboo. Now, I ask you, what sort of an
American president, however reluctantly, chooses to suppress
direct evidence while allowing his cabinet to compromise
national security by revealing confidential sources in a
misguided dog and pony show whose probative value will be argued
by historians forever. Could the answer be a president who would
compromise his citizens' safety before risking the wrath of his
faithful right-wing base, a wrath he'd surely incur by
blaspheming its beatified former president, Ronald Reagan?
Conjecture? My apologies.
President Bush (the current one), while expecting the United
Nations to rationally consider its course, recently offered a
characteristically simple mandate: "Show some backbone," he
admonished the ostensibly spineless world body. Act upon Iraq or
be considered irrelevant was the Hobson's choice he offered up,
adding that the United States will "act" with or without the
UN's assent. By this simple dictate, the president himself
rendered the world body irrelevant, nullifying in advance the
implications of whatever consensus might derive from
disciplined, civilized discourse - discourse born of empirical
inspection. Instead, we and the world at large are subjected to
Mr. Bush's peevish ultimatums. We witness scene upon scene akin
to an American prosecutor advising a global jury, "I'm gonna
hang the suspect, no matter what you people decide."
Last week he turned that same reductio-ad-absurdum logic upon
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. When European NATO
member states did the very thing treaty organizations are formed
to do - enforce the treaty and keep the peace - Mr. Bush
declared them irrelevant.
Yesterday, he completed the circle. This president who ascended
his high office one-half million votes short of a popular
mandate, referred to the millions of anti-war demonstrators
whose voices were raised in global unity this weekend, and by
inference another 100 million less active but like-minded
Americans, as - you guessed it - irrelevant.
But perhaps the most troubling insight into our president's
simplicity is simplicity itself. Despite that George W. Bush
somehow commands the most terrible and destructive power ever
poised upon our fragile planet by mortal man, he has not yet so
much as learned its name (the power, that is - I must presume he
knows the planet's name). I, for one, cannot persuade myself
that George Bush's ignorance of the atom, which begins with the
assumption of a "nuke-u-lus" at its center, does not extend to
the implications of its misuse. Perhaps that, too, is
irrelevant.
Make no
mistake, this writer considers Saddam Hussein a festering
pustule on the anus of humanity. I care not one wit for his well
being or how horribly he might meet his end.
However, I neither earned nor did I contribute a lifetime of tax
dollars expecting that, in the end, so much as a penny of my
taxes would be used along with yours to incinerate children. But
acquiescing to George W. Bush's horrific demands in the absence
of genuine, direct, supporting evidence of our enemy du jour's
capabilities or intent will mean just that. As one Iraqi
diplomat said, upon considering the likely indiscriminate
slaughter of his people, "America has smart bombs, but not smart
leaders."
Lest we as a nation become as simple as our American president's
diatribes, we the people must understand that through such
inhumane and undisciplined use of its irresistible power, the
United States - not simply the United Nations or the treaties we
sign in good faith, but the United States itself, its people and
the grand human experiment to which we ascribe and to whose
principles our forbears committed their lives -- will be
rendered truly, not allegedly, irrelevant.
That would be the truest manifestation of spinelessness
imaginable.
-END-
-The
Author -
Dom Stasi is a technology executive in the television and motion
picture industry in Hollywood. Mr. Stasi also flew aerial
reconnaissance during the Cold War and, after an honorable
discharge, worked as a flight test engineer whose specialty was
the flight test and certification of advanced military aerial
reconnaissance systems.
-Footnotes & References-
1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/international/middleeast/26KAY.html?hp
2. Counterpunch, January 19, 2004: Alexander Cockburn
3.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/17/1543215&mode=thread&tid=47
Copyright: Dom Stasi
