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October Surprises |
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by Tom Turnipseed
(No verified email address) |
21 Oct 2002
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How do you make the distraction of war go away by empowering the political figure who is manipulating the distraction to make war at his own option? Are the Democrats so naive as to believe that the Bush administration will not manufacture events to keep war and rumors of war dominating the news right on up until election day? |
The Democrats in Congress voted for President Bush's war resolution on Iraq in order to get the war distraction out of the news before the elections. In approving authority for America's new Caesar to wage war, the Democrats had hoped to get war talk out of the headlines. Then our failing economy could once again capture the headlines and become a winning issue for Democrats in November. With disgusting deference to George the 2nd's imperial intentions to invade Iraq, the Democratic leadership gave up on peace and principle and deceived themselves into believing that by voting for war, the distraction of war talk would somehow go away for the elections. They are beginning to experience some October surprises.
How do you make the distraction of war go away by empowering the political figure who is manipulating the distraction to make war at his own option? Are the Democrats so naive as to believe that the Bush administration will not manufacture events to keep war and rumors of war dominating the news right on up until election day? Beyond the obvious self-deception, there must be some twist in the Demo's political legerdemain that I am missing. Bush has a continuing "axis of evil" out there to scare us with.
Just as it appears to be faltering in its wheeling and dealing at the U.N. to drum up support for an immediate invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has suddenly revealed that North Korea has a secret nuclear weapons program that the administration claims to have learned about when a U.S. envoy visited North Korea, October 3-5. The headlines now warn of an ominous "nuclear crisis" with North Korea.
CIA director George Tenet is also in the front page of all the papers with a scary message that the threat of a new terror attack inside the U.S. is as grave and immediate as it was just before the September 11 attacks. The ability to fabricate fear and rumors of war runs in the Bush family.
The Democrats must remember that, to justify invading Iraq in 1991, George the 1st and his national security apparatus used deceptive propaganda and tactics to launch that war. The U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, gave Saddam Hussein a wink-and-a-nod to invade Kuwait, saying, "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait"; false stories of Iraqi soldiers disconnecting Kuwaiti babies from their incubators were concocted; and phony satellite photos of the Iraqi army massing for an invasion of Saudi Arabia were conjured up and shown on U.S. television.
After all these years why is a regime change in Iraq such an urgent and immediate necessity? Could it be that George the 2nd is using the war as a "mass distraction" from our economic plight?
The Halliburton, Harken and Enron corporate/governance corruption scandals are hovering over the White House and involve the President, Vice-President and other top Administration officials. There is a crisis in confidence that has our economy in a tailspin causing a loss of wealth and economic uncertainty not seen since the 1930s. George the 2nd has done a masterful job of diverting media discourse from the recurrent recession to "weapons of mass distraction" in our fearful aftermath of 9/11. Without proof of complicity and without significant rebuttal from the Democrats, President Bush has been allowed to focus the fears from 9/11 and now blame them on Saddam Hussein. As I wrote on December 22, 2001, "War is Working for Bush; Osama becomes Saddam" http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1222-02.htm
President Bush is a most proficient purveyor of fear, preying upon the fears of the American people who feel so very vulnerable since the 9/11 attacks. The corporate interests now making enormous profits from weapons of war and other military assets have a bull market for their killing tools created by such fear. The so-called defense industry has a super salesman for their lethal products in Bush.
The Bush administration is dominated by former corporate executives from the defense and energy industries, including the President and Vice-President, and war against oil-rich Iraq will make a lot of money for their corporate friends and patrons. The talk of war and making war is also a bonanza for a violence peddling corporate media as they hype war with nightly shows titled "America at War" and "Bracing for War".
Democratic leadership in the Senate concurred in rushing through the debate on the Iraq War Resolution. They put tremendous pressure on Senator Robert Byrd of W.Va. not to engage in extended debate that would focus the attention of the American people on the tremendous hypocrisy of U.S. relations with Iraq. Byrd told the Senate about conclusive evidence that the U.S. government approved the shipment of chemical and biological weapons components sent to Iraq from the U.S. in the 1980s to use in their war against Iran. Byrd wanted to talk extensively about the more than 90 Security Council Resolutions violated by countries other than Iraq, with 31 of them dealing with Israel.
War works for Bush, and the Democrats should not really be surprised this October, or on November the 5th.
Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and civil rights activist in Columbia, South Carolina. http://www.turnipseed.net |
See also:
http://www.commondreams.org/
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