America Disgraced! George Bush's Legacy 

By Ted Lang 

05/01/04 "ICH" -- There are a variety of possibilities as to why the Bush administration’s first and foremost order of business was the invasion of Iraq. Any of several motives, ranging from President George Bush’s need to avenge Saddam’ s attempt on his father’s life, or to facilitate lucrative contracts for wealthy political insiders through unbid awards to Bechtel and Halliburton for reconstruction and oil drilling and pipeline construction, or to generate increased profits for the military industrial complex for the Carlyle Group, or for establishing an Eastern Front for Israel and eliminating an enemy that has attacked it, or just preventing China and Russia from gaining foothold access to the world’s second largest oil supply, can all be offered to justify our illegal invasion. It can be all these, or just some, or perhaps only one of them. None justified our attack on Iraq. 

The public relations pap of “weapons of mass destruction,” or a required “regime change,” or trying to “bring democracy to the people of Iraq,” are all prepubescent pabulum for public consumption of a dumbed-down American populace. And if the American people are indeed so hopelessly gullible, then it is clear that the Bush administration failed to consider the Internet “enlightenment.” It is obvious that a “business-as-usual” relationship with the corporate media was what the Bush administration felt was all that was needed to transform a lackluster intellect with no real record of achievement or accomplishment into a glorious wartime thinker. 

War, whether or not justified, should always be avoided, and undertaken only in the direst of circumstances, and then only in self-defense. Our Constitution provided for this horrific possibility, a possibility that could indeed become reality if there were such enemies of our republic that longed for our wealth, our natural resources, or our vast land regions. The terrorist acts perpetrated against US on September 11, 2001, can never be interpreted as either an act of war or an invasion. Terrorist groups do not equate to an attacking nation. Terrorism is almost always an act of frustration against an unbeatable power, designed to instill fear in either its government or its populace in order to promote disruption and to bring about an intellectual effort aimed at the reconsideration or revision of policies that provoked the attack. The terrorists have told US they acted in retaliation for our militaristic conspiracies against them in the Middle East and due to our alliance with hated Israel. When will the 9-11 commission acknowledge this? 

The Bush administration has been hammered by a growing number of former operatives and executives who have made it clear that the administration’s number one objective from the get-go was the invasion of Iraq. President Bush deliberately lied to the American people and its Congress, and whether or not this was based on mistake, accident, or “bad intelligence,” none of these make any bit of difference. Neither is it of any significance that Saddam was a tyrant and a torturer of his people. Crimes against humanity were more pronounced in Rwanda than in Iraq, yet the United States took no action there to halt the stoppable carnage, and neither did the UN. 

By campaigning for war powers from Congress and the American people, President George W. Bush violated the United States Constitution, after placing hand on bible and giving a public oath acknowledging and accepting his responsibility for its preservation and protection. He has not done this – he’s done just the opposite! 

As Bush’s ulterior motives are increasingly being exposed and understood, even more disturbing facts are now coming to light. It started with our military’s censorship of the Iraqi press, specifically the closing of an Iraqi newspaper. This led to the unified uprising of all Iraqi factions in Falluja. And that city is still a major consideration for our occupation forces. The only way to get the town under control is to surround it, and then virtually level it by air strikes and artillery barrages. This action, of course, kills thousands of non-combatant, innocent civilians. The invading forces of Nazi Germany first introduced such tactics. 

Simply attacking and destroying a city from afar in order to get at “insurgents,” is an accepted tactic in current modern warfare, again reaffirming the need for moral restraint and legitimate justification for any war for any reason. And as Iraqi civilian casualties mount, more and more American service personnel are being killed as well. 

The Bush administration’s second major public relations blunder was to aggressively attack the “friendly” media by ordering the photographs of flag-draped coffins containing the remains of Americans killed in action to be suppressed and not made available for public viewing. Along with the rapid transformation of the 9-11 commission from being a fact-finding group to where it has now become a growing parade of events exposing yet more public information manipulations such as the Sibel Edmonds cover-up, the Bush administration has lost for America all its former moral direction and international leadership. And this loss of leadership will now require even more military force than before as opportunities for peaceful diplomacy wane. 

Add to this the current disgrace of both the British and the American military just exposed for their brutality in having tortured defenseless prisoners of war in violation of the Geneva Convention. We have now come full circle as regards those tactics that have alienated the entire world against US. The very torture prisons used by Saddam, the ones the Rush Limbaughs and the Sean Hannitys have offered justified the war and the removal of brutal Saddam, are the very same ones being used by the American military to torture the very same Iraqis. Nothing could make greater mockery of the Bush administration’s justification for war. Nothing could bring greater disgrace upon America. 

Ted Lang is a political analyst and a freelance writer. <tlang1@optonline.net>

5/01/04 © THEODORE E. LANG 5/01/04 All rights reserved