Clinton got away with bombing the crap out of Iraq “no fly” zones,
and economic sanctions that hit innocents especially hard, with not a peep out of the American people–maybe largely because of the handling of it all by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies–but, anyway, the precedent is there. Antiseptic killing by distant bomber pilots, and other forms of assault, can safely be ignored and kept out of “the news,” if ground troops are not involved.
I hadn’t thought of our bombing capability. I was wondering what the Cartel’s plan was. It’s getting clearer. Get the oil, via ironclad contracts with unjust terms (that the savvy Sunnis would never agree to) from the Kurds and the Shias. Bomb any village or neighborhood that the Kurds and the Shias want bombed. Let the Kurds and Shias gang up on the more educated and westernized Sunnis (who have already been cut out of the oil deal), and wipe them out. And the Kurds and the Shias will be safe (from us) as long as they don’t nationalize their oil. Iraq was so impoverished by the UN sanctions that, for a while, ordinary Kurds and Shias may be content with slight improvements. If Iraq follows the model of other western-created Arab states, whatever wealth the Cartel permits them to have will soon be concentrated in a few hands and new dictators will arise–just the sort of government that the Bush Cartel prefers to deal with.
Bush’s religious beliefs are of no concern. He is not in charge. He is being handled by people who know how to feed him delusions of grandeur, and utilize his simple, primitive thought processes, to control him–and how to prop him up, and drug him or whatever they do, to enable him to speak his lines. He is a bully and a war criminal, but only dimly aware of the details of his own and his junta’s crimes–they can’t trust him with the details–and his religious beliefs are completely irrelevant to what is happening. Massive thievery is what is happening–and also, the complete subversion of the U.S. Constitution, and the destruction of our democracy.
Bush is an empty suit, a prop. That’s the scary part–that our government is being run by a cabal of rightwing, fascist, corporate war profiteers that have NO beliefs in anything and no loyalty to us or desire for the common good. They are thieves and looters. And, in Bush, they found someone whom they could install and use of their puppet. His alcoholism and religion–and stunted personality, and limited intelligence–made him an easy tool.
The Neo-cons and PNAC-ers are also largely window-dressing. The real powers in this cabal don’t have any interest in governing, or creating or running an Empire. That takes some skill and some thought for the long term, and indeed, some loyalty. Everything they do speaks of chaos and looting. They are not into creating anything, not even a fascist state. Our government, for them, is just a sham–a way for rich men to get richer. It gives them an aura of legitimacy which they would discard in a minute if it suited them. They have absolutely no belief in its principles.
This may be small comfort, but they are not Nazis. They are looters. The Nazis turned a ruined country into a great industrial machine, capable of achieving their evil dreams of racial purity and a Nordic empire. The Bush cabal is doing just the opposite–it is ruining a once sound country, and squeezing it of every last dime, and haven’t convinced anybody of anything. (58% of the American people opposed the Iraq war before the invasion. Feb. ’03. And continue to oppose it, even moreso today. 63% of the American people oppose torture “under any circumstances.” May ’04. Look at the issue polls and other opinion polls! Most people hate Bush and all of his policies, and, if Diebold and ES&S hadn’t intervened, he and his cabal would have been ousted in 2004.)
Our difficulty is that we have misdiagnosed the problem. We thought we could get rid of the inept Mr. Bush. Not so. They fiddled the vote with their new electronic voting systems, with its ‘TRADE SECRET,’ PROPRIETARY programming code, owned by Bushite corporations. Most of us didn’t have a clue that it was not this one man and his bluster and his stupidity that was the problem, but rather a cabal so powerful that it could gain control of the election system, and dictate our leaders forevermore–and insult us with this dimwit, and degrade our idea of democracy, and depress and disempower us.
So it’s not good to dwell on Bush, as a personality. We need to widen the lens, to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby, Bolton, Rice, Rove and others, and to unseen persons (heads of Diebold, ES&S, Halliburton, Bechtel, etc.), to fathom how this cabal operates, and work on a strategy for defeating it, and for restoring our democracy and getting our country back.
And let’s hope that it will be a better country than we had before, and one that is less vulnerable to corporate takeover and fascist coups.
