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The War Criminal In The Living
Room
Paul Craig Roberts
V Dare
Friday Aug 31, 2007
The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted
as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran.
- US Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran.
- US Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in bases
in countries bordering or near to Iran.
- US B-2 stealth bombers have been refitted to carry 30,000
pound "bunker buster" bombs.
- The US government is financing terrorist and separatist groups
within Iran.
- US Special Forces teams are conducting terrorist operations
inside Iran.
- US war doctrine has been altered to permit first strike nuclear
attack on Iran and other non-nuclear countries.
Bush’s war threats against Iran have intensified during the course
of this year. The American people are being fed a repeat of the
lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq.
Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations
of Iran for threatening "the security of nations everywhere"
and of the Iraqi resistance for "a vision that rejects
tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent
men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power."
[President
Bush Addresses the 89th Annual National Convention of the American
Legion, August 28, 2007]. Those are precisely the
words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt
administration. The Pew Foundation’s world polls show that despite
all the American and Israeli propaganda against Iran, the US and
Israel are regarded as no less threats to world stability than
demonized Iran.
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Bush has discarded habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions,
justified torture and secret trials, damned critics as anti-American,
and is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for
over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high
on the list of mass murderers of all time. The vast majority of
"kills" by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan
are civilians.
Now Bush wants to murder more. We have to kill Iranians "over
there," Bush says, "before they come over here."
There is no possibility that Iranians or any Muslims who have
no air force, no navy, no modern military technology are going
to "come over here," and no indication that they
plan to do so. The Muslims are disunited and have been for centuries.
That is what makes them vulnerable to colonial rule. If Muslims
were united, the US would already have lost its army in Iraq.
Indeed, it would not have been able to put an army in Iraq.
Meanwhile the US media
focuses on whether Republican
Senator Larry Craig is a
homosexual or has offended gays by denying being one of them.
The run-up for the public’s attention is why a
South Carolina beauty queen cannot answer a
simple question about why
her generation is unable to find the United States on a map.
The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice
is taken of the fact.
Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush administration
has decided to bomb Iran
"back into the stone age." Punishing air and
missile attacks have been designed not merely to destroy Iran’s
nuclear energy projects, but also to destroy the public infrastructure,
the economy, and the ability of the government to function.
Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and
Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi
civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the
prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian
civilians. Last summer the Bush administration demonstrated to
the entire world its total disdain for Muslim life when Bush supported
Israel’s month-long air attack on Lebanese civilian infrastructure
and civilian residences. President Bush blocked the attempt by
the rest of the world to halt the gratuitous murder of Lebanese
civilians and infrastructure destruction. Clearly, turning the
Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy. For Bush,
civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony über alles.
The Bush administration has made its war plans for attacking
Iraq and positioned its forces without any prior approval from
Congress. The "unitary executive" obviously doesn’t
believe that an attack on Iran requires the approval of Congress.
By its absence and quietude, Congress seems to agree that it has
no role in the decision.
In the improbable event that Congress were to make any fuss about
Bush’s decision to attack yet another country, the State Department
has devised legalistic cover: simply declare Iran’s military to
be a "terrorist organization" and go to war under
the cover of the existing resolution.
The "Iran issue" has been created by the Bush
administration, not by Iran. Iran, like many other countries,
has a nuclear energy program to which it is entitled as a signatory
to the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty. Inspectors of the International
Atomic Energy Agency have found no evidence of a nuclear weapons
program in Iran.
The Bush administration has brushed away this fact, which should
be determining, just as the Bush administration brushed away the
fact that weapons inspectors reported, prior to Bush’s invasion
of Iraq, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Bush administration managed to disrupt the work of the pesky
IAEA weapons inspectors in Iran. Iran has been working successfully
with the IAEA and has achieved what a senior IAEA official recently
described as a milestone agreement. The Bush administration instantly
went to work to discredit the agreement and unleashed its new
lapdog, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to threaten "the
bombing of Iran." [Iran
risks attack over atomic push, French president says By
Elaine Sciolino, International Herald-Tribune, August 27,
2007]
The Bush administration’s position is legally untenable and is
really nothing but a contrived excuse to start another war. Bush
claims that Iran, alone among all the signatories of the Nuclear
Non- Proliferation Treaty, must be denied its right under the
pact to develop nuclear energy, because Iran, along among all
the other signatories, will be the only country able to deceive
the IAEA inspectors and develop nuclear weapons. Therefore, Iran
must be denied its rights under the agreement.
Bush’s position on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is as
legally untenable as his position on every other issue--the Geneva
Conventions, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, habeas
corpus, the constitutional separation of powers, and presidential
signing statements that he cavalierly attaches to new laws in
order to override the legislative power of Congress. Bush’s position
is that the meaning of laws and treaties varies with his needs
of the moment.
Bush has declared himself to be the "decider."
The "decider" decides whether Americans have
any rights under the Constitution and whether Iran has any rights
under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the "decider"
has decided that Iran has no such rights, the "decider"
decides whether to attack Iran.
No one else has any say about it. The people’s representatives
are just so much chaff in the wind.
Whatever form of government Bush is operating under, it is far
outside an accountable constitutional democratic government. Bush
has transitioned America to Caesarism, and even if Bush leaves
office in January 2009, the powers he has accumulated in the executive
will remain.
Unless Bush and Cheney are
impeached and convicted, there is no prospect of the US Congress
and federal judiciary ever again being co-equal branches of government.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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