Americans Have Lost Their Country
March 1st, 2007By Paul Craig Roberts
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. [Testimony in PDF]
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.
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http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070228_lost.htm
Like I have said before, if any country can turn around from a situtation like this, the usa can. It will however, cost nothing less than trillions of dollars in reparations and literally, the heads of the conspirators listed above.
Nothing less will set the balance right, and even that may not be enough.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:02 pm
We watched ‘Enron: The smartest guys in the room’ last night. Although there were ‘normal’ people affected, and genuinely shocked by how things could have got so bad, the problem was that none of these people ever make it even half way up the ladder. Enron seemed like a metaphor for the problems in the US, driven by pure, naked greed. I watched in disbelief, unable to understand how the traders, managers, CEO et al. talked in terms of being justified in their lives through the accumulation of wealth. It was all they had, all they cared about. It was almost inhuman. At one particularly fun time, they deliberately caused power blackouts in California to hike up the cost of power, revelling in the billions while unable to see any ethical problem with their behaviour.
So maybe this was an Enron-restricted phenomenon? No. Watch the film, and feel again the freak-show emotions you felt when you watched The Elephant Man. Feel the horror, the almost unbelievable disgust as the complicity of accountants, lawyers, PR staff, the entire US stock market, every major investment bank… all put aside any ethical dilemma in favour of the offer of yet more money. And all these people were the best of their type, the ones making most money.
It seems that the US societal (capitalist, free-market) structure has come to bias success towards these types of animal, the ones who will stomp on anyone to reach the top. The ones with no morals, despite the masks they wear.
I doubt very much it is really changeable. The ‘good’ people will never reach the top, will never have the influence to exert. It’s over. The US made it’s bed, and now it’s lying on a shit-stained mattress surrounded by flies, a pistol under the pillow, shotgun under the covers, a vicious snarl on it’s face, unable to see that the treasure under the bed is just a figment of it’s paranoid imagination.
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Sadly that figment of their imaginations buys them the best food, wine, cars, houses, education, vacations and freedom.
And thats not hard to imagine.
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Buys /some/ of them the best food, wine, cars, houses, education, vacations and freedom (sic! given the long history of blogdial posts on American ‘freedom’).
http://www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/statistics.asp
http://www.povertyinamerica.psu.edu/
Very few have treasure under the bed. America as a nation certainly does not, any more. Two dollars to the pound?! All America has is an overheated printing press and a very large debt.
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:23 pm
When I say freedom, I mean ‘means to escape’ like the guy who wanted to kiss the ground when he landed in New Zealand. Or stay. Or come and go as they please.
That figment of their imaginations drives them like mad men. It makes them cease to act like men. I heard the recordings of the energy traders joking about arbitraging and grandmothers ‘failing it’. Its horrible.
But.
I like to deal with it on its own terms, and try to understand how these people think and what makes them tick.
They imagine that they will gain all the things I listed if they do what they do. That is why they do it. This has nothing to do with the facts, or with reality, or with humanity and its suffering. This is about the illusion of cash, and what it can buy.
These people are in the majority. And even if they were not, the forces that drive them and which they serve are so powerful, only a handful of them are needed to control whole continents.
These are the facts.
Do you still have hope that the obese, burger eating monsters that are duplicating like the stuff you work with every day, are going to suddenly get a clue? Anything is possible.
Thats a fact too.
March 4th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
‘the forces that drive them and which they serve are so powerful’
indeed … it’s the basic survival instinct, warped to varying degrees, but the same one that many relish when sitting down to watch David Attenborough whisper into the microphone while yet another lion jumps onto yet another antelope’s back.
I happen to think that many of us are sickened not by the fact simply that humans indulge in such barbaric behaviour. I think that the deeper cause is our shock and bemusement at the fact that humans are still capable of behaviour that is not shocking in the ‘animal’ world, as if we are separate from it, as if we should somehow not still be prey to the same forces that exert themselves upon every other aspect of life. We all suffer this arrogance to varying degrees.
This is not to say that I think that just because we are prey to those forces, that acting in this way is ok. In case this needs pointing out.
March 4th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
In case this needs pointing out.
Sometimes you do have to put in a disclaimer, like whenever people talk about Israel they always say, “I am not an anti-semite”, or when they talk about the disproportionate number of foreigners responsible for crime in any particular country, “I am not against foreigners as such”.
In a perfect situtaion, you would never have to insert a disclaimer. They make me cringe frankly. You should be able to write whatever you like, and then have people judge wether what you aer saying is right or wrong, without having to make an extra judgement about wether or not you are a ‘bad guy’.
Bad guys can say true things and good guys can lie. Once you understand that intimately, you can read with proper focus.