Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Children
Kurt Nimmo

According to some estimates, Bush's Iraq attack will cost each and every
American $320. Now, for the Waltons and Gates and Buffetts, this isn't a
whole lot of scratch, but for most of us it's a decent chunk of change. For
instance, I need a new computer for writing these articles and $320 would be
a nice start. Instead, that money will go toward killing innocent children,
pregnant women, grandmas, grandpas, and a whole lot of other people in Iraq.
The money is siphoned off before my employer cuts me a check. Most of it
goes right to Donald Rumsfeld.

Now I don't have a problem with taxes, not like a whole lot of libertarian
types who think giving one red cent to the government is theft. I realize we
need bridges, highways, park rangers, schools, etc. I'd like to see more go
toward helping people out -- especially in these tough economic times -- but
that's another ball of wax. Most of our taxes go to the military and the
likes of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, etc., who pocket the money and
deliver (usually over budget and late) questionable weapons systems. Apache
helicopters, Abrams tanks, Stealth bombers, etc., all of this stuff is great
if you intend to fight big wars in far away places like Afghanistan and Iraq
(or Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea).

Once upon a time, the military was supposed to protect America from attack.
Now the military is used to attack other countries. Not because they
threaten you or me. Because it's profitable. And because a certain dinky
nation has figured out how to make the US military a proxy for its own
selfish interests.

In fact, the government mostly invents "threats" so it can justify all this
spending. Do you remember Reagan warning that the Nicaraguans would invade
Texas if we didn't support the contras? The Cold War was mostly a scam. We
had the so-called missile gap, the bomber gap, and most of it was hype. As
Kennedy noted, these "gaps" were mostly mythical, they were created by the
Pentagon and the Eisenhower administration, which "distorted the facts and
created a myth of the gap that didn't exist." Eisenhower eventually warned
us about the "military-industrial complex" and its "unwarranted influence"
on the "very structure of our society." He said this after he let the
Pentagon have its way.

Bush has 32 former arms industry executives, consultants, and major
stockholders in his administration (according to Michelle Ciarrocca, of the
Arms Trade Resource Center). Lockheed Martin VP Bruce Jackson was the
finance chair of the Bush for President campaign. He was heard to brag at a
conference that he would be in a position to "write the Republican platform"
on defense if Bush was nominated. Dick Cheney spent years running
Halliburton, which ranked 18th on the Pentagon's top contractors list in FY
1999. Cheney's wife, Lynne, served on Lockheed Martin's board. Secretary of
the Air Force James Roche is a former Northrop Grumman vice president. Lewis
Libby and Paul Wolfowitz also worked for Northrop Grumman as consultants.
Richard Armitage was a Boeing consultant and Karl Rove a Boeing shareholder
(Armitage was also a consultant for Raytheon). And, of course, daddy Bush
sits on the board of directors of the Carlyle Group (as does James Baker,
the former secretary of state), an investment consortium contracting for
United Defense. "None of these links is illegal," writes investigative
reporter Andrew Gumbel for The Independent UK, "but that does not mean there
is no conflict of interest."

No kidding.

Really, it doesn't matter anymore. These guys don't even bother to hide what
they're doing, maybe because so few people seem to care and, besides, who's
going to argue now that we're faced with global terrorism and Saddam's
arsenal of bio and chem weapons? Both these "threats" are grossly overstated
but, hey, don't expect the corporate media -- who also own and profit
handsomely from death merchant stock -- to report this on the evening news.
As Boeing Vice Chairman Harry Stonecipher told the Wall Street Journal, "the
purse is now open" so the sky is the limit. Don Rumsfeld and his boys over
at the Pentagon never saw a weapons system they didn't love. Never mind that
the so-called national missile defense system -- that scientists say will
not work -- will not stop a single terrorist.

Actually, Bush and his neocon chickenhawks aren't focused on preventing
terrorism or even rounding up the terrorists -- beyond a few lowly errand
boys -- they keep telling us are out there gunning for us. These guys are
far more interested in large wars, the kind that deplete expensive JDAMs and
cruise missiles and DU munitions in large numbers. Not wars against puny and
ragtag bands of terrorists, but rather big state players such as Iran,
Syria, Libya, North Korea, and maybe down the road China. Now that's some
serious war making, enough to keep Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon,
Northup Grumman, et al, busy for decades -- since Bush's "war on terrorism"
is promised to last for the rest of our lives, maybe for more than a hundred
years if Iranophobe and chickenhawk Michael Ledeen has his way.

Say au revoir to the "peace dividend" forever.

Americans, it seems, just don't give a whit. Sure, hundreds of thousands of
them turned out recently to voice their opposition to Bush's Iraq attack,
but that's small potatoes considering there are nearly 300 million people in
the United States. It's not even one percent of the population, so our
unelected leader can safely ignore them.

"You know, size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide
policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy
based upon the security -- in this case, the security of the people," Bush
said with customary articulacy.

I bet millions buy into this "security of the people," even as Bush makes us
less secure by threatening other nations with everything from cluster bombs
to nukes -- that is if they refuse to grovel at his feet like good "vassals"
(as Zbigniew Brzezinski calls most people in the third world).

If 20 or 30 million Americans went in the street and told Bush what they
think of his plan to mass murder tens if not hundreds of thousands of
people, well, chances are Bush may pay attention, especially if the
protesters were a bit rambunctious. Even Nixon fretted over demonstrations,
although he never let on. Of course, Bush may pay attention in a negative
way, as in making sure the Son of the Patriot Act is rushed through Congress
and the FBI does to the current antiwar movement what it did to its ancestor
30 years ago.

No, I have no confidence in the American people. They will not put this
madness to bed. $320? Big deal. Most Americans are resigned to paying
through the nose for everything from corporate welfare to propping up Israel
and paying for the slaughter of Palestinians.

Israel is about the only excuse Bush has to attack Iraq. Naturally, he won't
say this, he will talk about terrorists instead. But the real deal is Israel
needs a war declared on Islam. Such a war will directly benefit Israel.

A war on Islam will be good for business, too.

Americans like Israelis, or at least Christian Americans like them. Some
folks are calling Bush a "Christian Zionist," which is to say he believes
all kinds of farcical biblical stuff about the Jews and God and the Land of
Israel as it relates to the so-called Rapture and the End Days. Out of 98
million Christian evangelicals in America, something like 40 million buy
into this fairy tale as popularized by Hal Lindsey, the father of Christian
Zionism. "The center of the entire prophetic forecast is the State of
Israel," writes Lindsey.

So, naturally, with a Christian Zionist in the White House Israeli Zionists
will get their way. It works out well for the death merchants and oil
transnationals, too.

These Christian Zionists have teamed up with powerful Jewish lobbyists to
push the Israel First agenda in Washington. "AIPAC (the American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee) has a lot of influence on foreign policy," says
J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish newspaper The Forward. "They work hard
to ensure that America endorses pretty much Israel's view of the world and
the Middle East."

But AIPAC isn't the only pro-Israel pressure group in Washington -- there
are well over 100 Israel First PACs operating in Congress, by far the most
active of all PACs. AIPAC was instrumental in helping Dubya's daddy get the
first war against the Iraqi people rolling in 1991, as the Wall Street
Journal reported at the time. Naturally, AIPAC and other pro-Israel PACS are
behind the current effort. They're pretty much writing the script along with
the Likudites in Israel.

If not for the fleecing of average tax-paying Americans, Israel wouldn't be
the serial murderer it is today. Not only does Sharon tell the US how much
it will fork over to the tiny country in aid, but he also gives the US
military its marching orders. As Hebrew radio Kol Yisrael reported in
October, 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yelled at foreign
Minister Shimon Peres during a cabinet meeting, "Don't worry about American
pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the
Americans know it."

That control is exercised by the "Wolfowitz cabal," led by Paul Wolfowitz
(No. 2 man at the Defense Department and key Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld confidant)
and the 18-member Defense Policy Board. Fellow travelers include Richard
Perle (chairman of the Defense Policy Board), Douglas J. Feith (Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy), Elliott Abrams (director of the National
Security Council's office for democracy), Josh Bolten (Deputy Chief of
Staff), and Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff to the Vice President). All of these
guys are Israel-centric Jews. They're the shock troops of the Israel First
federation.

As Lawrence F. Kaplan, Washington Post columnist, put it recently "the
problem here is the implication that some of the Bush team have been doing
Israel's bidding and, by extension, harbor dual loyalties." So obvious is
this dual loyalty that when Josh Bolten went to Israel recently Sharon told
him Israel wants Iran taken out. Bolten said "he had no doubt America would
attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats
from Syria, Iran and North Korea," reported Ha'aretz.

"Iraq is the most dangerous threat," Sharon told a Knesset committee
recently. Not only is Israel within striking distance of Saddam's clunky
Scuds (which he may or may not have), but Saddam also pays a lot of lip
service to Palestinian resistance to Israel's illegal occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza. If Bush's Iraq attack benefits anybody directly, it's the
Israelis.

Think about that when you do your taxes this year.

I bet you'd love to keep that $320 you'll be donating to a war that mostly
serves the interests of Israel, maybe give it to your kid's school, or have
the local municipality use it to fix that pothole at the end of your street.
Fat chance. So long as Americans sit on their duffs and let Bush and his
"dual loyalty" Zionist minions run this country, things will only get worse.
Christian Zionists will not only destroy America in their selfish zeal to
embrace Armageddon and the Rapture -- essentially a merit club of eternal
life for good Christians -- but they will also force hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis to pay with their lives.

I can't think of anything more self-indulgent and criminal.

In the end, the only people who will benefit from all of this are the
Zionists in Israel. Bush is ignoring our economic problems as he obsesses
over the removal of Saddam Hussein. He's raiding your social security and
jacking up the debt in order to do what Sharon and the Likudites demand.

The Christian Zionist hallucination is about to reach cataclysmic
proportions.

Is it worth losing your job so the Israelis can feel safe and impose their
political will on the Arab world? Eventually, Bush may demand your 20 year
old son fight wars of conquest (in Iran, Syria, Libya) so the Zionists can
have their precious holy land -- which their bible tells them runs from the
River of Egypt to the River Euphrates. Oh, and so oil transnationals and
death merchants can make a whole lot more money, too. It's no mistake so
many Bushites are up to their necks in these businesses.

It's about time a whole lot more people say enough is enough.
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Kurt Nimmo's Another Day in the Empire
http://nimmo.blogspot.com/