Americans Have Lost Their Country
By
Paul Craig Roberts
03/01/07 "ICH" -- -- The Bush-Cheney regime is America’s first
neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime has
destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the
Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America’s moral
reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim
countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans
have been prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack
on a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and
Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.
This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution,
international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a
vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues--principally Vice
President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas
Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay
Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General
Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled
policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the
Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN,
and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by “scholars” in
assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.
The entirety of their success in miring the United States in
what could become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based
on the power of propaganda and the big lie.
Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden, but
after an American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame
for 9/11 was shifted to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was said to
have weapons of mass destruction that would be used against
America. The regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell
the lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive
proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people, the
regime invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with
totally false expectations. The regime’s occupation of Iraq has
failed in a military sense, but the neoconservatives are turning
their failure into a strategic advantage. At the beginning of
this year President Bush began blaming Iran for America’s
embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents
in Iraq.
Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge that
experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni.
They inflict casualties on our troops, but spend most of their
energy killing Iraqi Shi’ites, who are closely allied with Iran,
which is Shi’ite. Bush’s accusation requires us to believe that
Iran is arming the enemies of its allies.
On the basis of this absurd accusation--a pure invention--Bush
has ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack
forces off Iran’s coast, and he has moved US attack planes to
Turkish bases and other US bases in countries contingent to
Iran.
In testimony before Congress on February 1 of this year, former
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he
expected the regime to orchestrate a “head-on conflict with Iran
and with much of the world of Islam at large.” He said a
plausible scenario was “a terrorist act blamed on Iran,
culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran.”
He said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already
articulating a “mythical historical narrative” for widening
their war against Islam.
Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons
for which are patently false. What is going on?
There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears
among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of
the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of
Hitler’s revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a
monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest
of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East
because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied,
are both in the MIddle East.
The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas
pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not
sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was
used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been on UNOCAL’s payroll,
as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad,
who also had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, was installed as US
ambassador to Afghanistan.
Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq.
American oil companies have been given control over the
exploitation of Iraq’s oil resources.
The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996
Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that
all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East be overthrown.
“Israel’s enemies” consist of the Muslim countries not in the
hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has been
stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that today there
is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent
country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and
Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s
theft of Palestine.
The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to
attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East
and with neoconservatives in office to implement the plans.
However, an excuse was required. Neoconservatives had called for
“a new Pearl Harbor,” and 9/11 provided the propaganda event
needed in order to stampede the public and Congress into war.
Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the 9/11
Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts
emerged.
The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the corporate
media, from Christian evangelicals, particularly from the
“Rapture Evangelicals,” from flag-waving superpatriots, and from
the military- industrial complex whose profits have prospered.
But the fact remains that the dozen men named in the second
paragraph above were able to overthrow the US Constitution and
launch military aggression under the guise of a
preventive/preemptive “war against terrorism.”
When the American people caught on that the “war on terror” was
a cloak for wars of aggression, they put Democrats in control of
Congress in order to apply a brake to the regime’s warmongering.
However, the Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the
neoconservative drive to wider war and, perhaps, world
conflagration.
We are witnessing the triumph of a dozen evil men over American
democracy and a free press.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall
Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.Click here
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