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CounterPunch
November
15, 2002
Crimes
Plotted in Windowless Rooms
Into the Bush Imperium
by KURT NIMMO
Either the corporate polltakers are lying, or
there's something terribly wrong with the American people.
According to a recent survey conducted
by USA Today/CNN/Gallup, 54% of Americans think the Democrats
are too liberal; 57% think Democrats are weak-kneed on terrorism,
and a majority believe attacking Iraq is the right thing to do.
Remarkably, 50% of those polled think the Republicans have a
"clear plan for curing the country's ills," while only
30% think the Democrats do. But what curatives have the Republicans
offered? Bombing Iraq? Drilling oil in Alaska's pristine national
wildlife refuge? Making sure large corporations get federally
funded insurance to protect them from terrorism? Allowing Enron
criminals to skedaddle? Raiding Social Security to pay for an
abominable military budget?
Of course, the Democrats don't have a
plan for anything except holding on to the seats they already
have -- a plan that is failing, and rightfully so, since they
are not much different than the Republicans. The widely held
perception that Democrats are too liberal is a mirage. The most
liberal member of the Senate -- who was merely liberal, not progressive
-- was killed recently, or had an unfortunate and oh-so coincidental
accident, and his seat was taken by a Republican because the
Democrats ran an ideologically bankrupt old man who couldn't
win at Parcheesi, let alone an election.
Clinton and the Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC) killed any shred of liberalism in America. Clinton
and the DLC sold-out their mild liberalism -- by moving away
from support for the AFL-CIO, the National Organization for Women,
Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and other liberal groups --
in order to compete with Reaganism. When Clinton became president,
as John B. Judis has pointed out, he strenuously avoided "undertaking
reforms that would threaten the entrenched power of major business
interests," and moved the Democrats to the right. "Instead
of giving high priority to serving and building up a popular
constituency, Clinton quickly retreated to placating business
and the right," writes Edward S. Herman. "His major
policy moves, designed to curry favor with the bond market and
transnational corporations, weakened his ability to serve ordinary
citizens."
Like a good Republican, Clinton helped
arms exporters win tax breaks, guaranteed loans for arms-importing
countries, ended the ban on arms exports to Latin America, and
defeated bills that would have conditioned arms exports on human
rights. Clinton, as "the environmental president,"
ignored the recommendations of US Fish and Wildlife Service scientists
and teamed up with developers to kill the addition of species
to the Endangered Species Act. He was soft on pesticides from
agricultural runoff that have reduced parts of the Gulf of Mexico
into a "dead zone." Under Clinton's environmental "stewardship,"
Enron was allowed to dictate a "market-based" approach
to global warming. In order to help out loggers, the Clinton
administration spent billions of dollars of taxpayer money to
construct roads to get the loggers to trees on national lands.
Clinton not only screwed labor with NAFTA -- he happily sold
them down a river that spews into a polluted maquiladora. As
for out Bushing Bush, Clinton violated the 1973 War Powers Resolution
when he ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia, a sovereign nation.
He also violated the Constitution when he bombed Iraq.
This is liberalism?
So liberal are the Democrats in Congress
that they voted overwhelmingly to let Bush attack Iraq unilaterally.
In the Senate, a mere 22 Democrats opposed Dubya's war madness.
Demonstrating how liberalism no longer exists in mainstream American
politics, Daschle and Gephardt -- who voted against Bush Senior's
Iraq Attack I -- signed on to Junior's redux scheme to mass murder
a few hundred thousand more innocent Iraqis with nary a bleat
of protest. While the Great Spineless One, Tom Daschle, made
a few purling complaints at the outset -- not concerning murder
and war crimes, mind you, but rather about the unelected president
politicizing national security -- he soon signed on "because
this resolution is improved, because I believe that Saddam Hussein
represents a real threat, and because I believe it is important
for America to speak with one voice at this critical moment."
Obviously, the non-liberal liberals stand four square behind
Bush for new and "improved" mass murder. One of these
days maybe the whole lot of them can be indicted on charges of
crimes against humanity.
Either Americans -- or the ones surveyed
by Gallup, anyway -- are cold-hearted and vicious, or they are
so deluded, brainwashed, so trepanned by the government and the
corporate media that they are no longer capable of discerning
reality. Since I know plenty of good-hearted and kind Americans,
I'd have to say the latter is the case. But it's not simply propaganda
-- any half-intelligent person, if he wants to glean the truth,
can look beyond media lies and distortions -- but there also
seems to be an all-too prevalent and inexcusable form of intellectual
laziness embedded in the American spirit.
As the visiting Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville
observed in the 1800s, Americans have a sheepish and diffident
quality about them. "I know of no country in which there
is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion
as in America," he wrote. Tocqueville, who genuinely liked
Americans, was being kind. Wilhelm Reich, on the other hand,
was far less polite when he observed how Americans -- and Germans,
Italians, Russians, and others -- not only cooperate with dictators
such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, but actually embrace and
worship them. "You give impotent people with evil intentions
the power to represent you," wrote Reich in his mostly ignored
book, Listen, Little Man. "Only too late do you realize
that again and again you are being defrauded." Or maybe
the playwright Arthur Miller was more accurate when he said,
"The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing
so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has
to be internally denied."
Certainly Bush, in the name of the American
imperium, will punish the innocent. How can we go on denying
such enormous crimes and look at ourselves in the mirror?
Medact, an organization of British health
professionals, estimates that 500,000 people -- the vast majority
innocent civilians -- will die in Bush's Iraq Attack II. 260,00
will die directly in the conflict and another 200,000 or more
will perish in the aftermath from starvation and disease. In
a nightmarish scenario sketched out by Medact, nearly 4 million
people die when the US responds to chemical or biological attacks
with nuclear weapons. This scenario is hardly fantasy considering
the Bush Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). "Dr. Strangelove
is alive and well in the Bush Pentagon," vows John Isaacs
of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. First strikes
are in, deterrence is out -- and Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria,
according to leaked excerpts from the NPR "are among the
countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or
unexpected contingencies." In other words, it is now permissible
to nuke entire nations populated with millions of people on short
notice because Bush does not agree with their "longstanding
hostility toward the United States and its security partners."
"It has got to be something in the
water, or perhaps the more highly polluted air, that's clouding
the better judgment of Americans these days," writes Doreen
Miller. While CNN and Gallup distract us with the imaginary and
exaggerated differences between tweedledum and tweedledee, the
Bush hawk crusaders -- VP Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
and lesser known others -- are cranking out Quadrennial Defense
and Nuclear Posture Reviews, conspiring to murder and lay untold
waste to large swaths of the globe in the name of a deadly and
wholly arrogant hegemonism. It's always the people who ultimately
pay the price for crimes plotted in windowless rooms.
Finally, is the invasion of Iraq -- now
promised as a grotesque and macabre Christmas present -- our
revenge for the blowback of September 11? (Bush has labored for
months to make a connection, however tenuous and uncorroborated,
between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.) Will killing Iraqis by
the tens of thousands make us feel better about our loss, our
overstated victimhood? If so, we may wish to consider the words
of David Potorti, who lost a brother at WTC:
"War, to the increasing exclusion
of everything else, is the only thing that America collectively
cares about anymore. We don't manufacture much of anything; just
war. We don't concern ourselves with education; just war. We
don't attend to the 40 million Americans without health coverage;
just war. We don't focus on the 30 million American children
living in poverty; just war. We don't support the arts; just
war. Even though a multitude of human needs were in existence
prior to September 11, and have only increased since then, we
continue to direct our attention and our resources into what
we do best: war. Just war."
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Yesterday's Features
William Hughes
The Mad
World of A.M. Rosenthal
Robert Fisk
War Dance
with Saddam
Ron Lare
Getting 9/11-Baited
War and a Union Election
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
Why
Newsweek is Bad for Kids
Jerre Skog
When Big Biz Has Taken Over Everything
The Brave New Nightmare of GATS
Pierre Tristam
Deferral by Default
Lee Sustar
Dockworkers in the Dark
Anis Shivani
"The Doctors' Vote Is Now Up for Grabs"
The Fading Democratic Delusion
Alexander Cockburn
The Anti-War Movement and Its Critics
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- The Shafts of Death: Bush, Coal Mines, and Death
in the Tunnels;
- Speak Memory!: Carter and the Draft;
- Daniel Pipes' World: Smearing Pro-Arab Academics;
- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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November 10,
2002
Ali Abunimah
Sharon's
Appendix
M. Shahid
Alam
Political Geography
Zionist Theses and Anti-Theses
Michael Neumann
Demonstrating a Genteel Reticence
Rosemary &
Walter Brasch
Personal Possession:
War and Iraq, a Recollection
Ralph Nader
The Mid-term Elections
Mark J. Palmer
Bring Back the Grizzly
Robert Fisk
Bush's "Clean Shot"
Dave Marsh
And the Beat(ing) Goes On
Adam Engel
No Blood for Marijuana in Iraq
Josh Frank
Sleater-Kinney
Rocks
Our Protest Songs Are Here
Clifford Lyle Marshall
Give the Trinity Back to the Salmon
Zeynep Toufe
Turn These Children into Stone
Philip Farruggio
In Name Only
Charles Sullivan
Mountain Party Rising!
Bernard, Krieger, Alam
Poets'Basement
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