This is a republication of an article I published on May 29, 2007.
Service to our country can come in many ways, whether it be military service, public office, or community endeavors.
However, I don’t find much in the way Memorial Day is any longer FOR honoring our courageous men and women who have served in the military. No, I find Memorial Day being USED by people for promoting their own agendas in a continuing spiral of degradation of the American way of life.
Admittedly some of what I’m about to espouse isn’t necessarily directly attributable to Memorial Day services and such, but more along the lines of just what can be foisted upon the American public by those whom would use you to gain power. And let me be straightforward about this. Those who would use your fears, heap unsubstantiated slurs or mislead you in order to gain your votes are not people who wish to do a thing FOR you.
Public service in terms of elected officials has become such a power play of gluttony that one wonders how more Americans STILL CANNOT see the forest for the trees.
The trees, in this case, are the oft stumbling presidential candidates and are largely from both sides. Rudy wants to scare you into voting for him, as does John McCain, whilst Mitt Romney is resorting to full scale lies and misstatements designed to do the same thing and hopefully garnering him the religious right’s backing.
During the latest debates, Rudy tried to continue the lies of a Saddam-Al Qaeda tie with 9/11. John McCain's message much presented the same thing, but since he’s been a "Stay the Course" guy with Bush that’s not surprising.
The most surprising of all the statements I found was Mitt Romney’s efforts to scare Americans by lumping in Hamas and Hezbollah, both groups of which are listed as terrorist groups by the United States and yet hold elected political offices in their respective communities. Ah, but what was Mitt trying to do when he added to the lump both the Shia and the Sunni? To quote, Mitt said "They want to bring down the West, particularly us. And THEY’VE COME TOGETHER AS SHIA AND SUNNI AND HEZBOLLAH AND HAMAS AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AND AL QAEDA WITH THAT INTENT."
Either Mitt Romney is just as dangerous of a man to America’s ability to remain a democracy as Bush has been, or he’s just plain stupid. Why? Because he was stupid enough to designate virtually the entire Muslim world as enemies of the United States. And he did this on an internationally broadcast debate.
If you didn’t know before 9/11, you damned well should know now that there are two religious sects to Islam. Those of the Sunni faith and those of the Shia faith. One supports the son of Mohammed as the continuation for the prophet’s teachings and the other supports the brother of Mohammed. It might seem like a minimal difference to you, but perhaps that’s just because you don’t know, don’t want to know, and damned sure don’t want to understand what that "minimal" difference is. And even this lack of knowledge on your part is forgivable and even understandable.
But I cannot say the same thing for people who profess themselves to be the best person for you to elect as president in November of 2008, particularly if they either use information which is not correct and do so on purpose, or they don’t know the correct information in the first place.
You know, I personally don’t care whether a brain surgeon is a bad one, or whether he really doesn’t have the proper credentials. Either way he is not going to do brain surgery on me.
And I am not going to sit back and let more presidential candidates erode the concepts of democracy to serve their own purposes without continually pointing out their misstatements and misconceptions.
So to get back to Mitt Romney’s attempt to make all Muslims our enemies, let me put it this way. Mitt Romney is obviously making a major attempt to play down his Mormonism by kowtowing to the evangelical religious right who played such a strong part in helping George W. Bush to redefine political boundaries whilst attempting to take over the federal government single-handedly.
Since we KNOW the fact that all Muslims are NOT OUR ENEMY, then we have a personal job to do. We have to figure out how to make those of a like mind to Romney’s asinine statement to use their own brains. This is particularly hard to do because they are evangelical Christians who believe that Muslims are indeed our enemy, and that by defeating the Muslim scourge Jesus Christ will return and the Rapture will bring all the faithful to God.
Count on it, this is what they believe, and Mitt Romney wants them on his side so that he can become President. The same can be said for Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, so you can expect increased rhetoric towards the concept of our "Global War on Terror" really being a war of civilizations, but without actually saying that it is.
In other words, they will continue to try to mislead you, to frighten you, to denigrate you if you disagree, to deride you if you disagree in front of them, all the while spouting lies they hope to explain away, or misleading statements they hope to make light of until they can say them again.
President Bush just did this at a Rose Garden press conference last week when asked direct questions about his credibility to discuss the war in Iraq with America, bringing up the fearful image of a couple of the reporter’s children being directly attacked because they asked the questions they did. Now one can parse out his answer as being aimed at all of American children, but it only takes a moment to notice he did not mention threats to anyone else’s children based on the questions they asked.
Personally, I think George W. Bush has been the greatest danger to America and her children, and any of those who would be president after him are trying to ride the "fear factor" coattails into the White House. So who’s more of a threat?
OK, let’s just discuss the question for a moment. One fact we do know is that Al Qaeda is a threat, and they have no compunction about killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans. Hell, they have no problem killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of Muslims, whether it be by using people as suicide bombers, or blowing up movie houses in Kashmir, as happened early in 2002. In Kenya, 12 Americans were hurt, I believe, but 209 Kenyans were killed or maimed.
If one doesn’t care whether their target is killed or not, then the level of their threat is indeed global and requires careful attention to penetration of the group and a decided effort at dismantling the reasons behind Al Qaeda’s successful efforts to continue to garner new recruits. For now we have a dangerous combination of factors, which is we know that the use of people in suicide attacks can and will take place, and we know that it really doesn’t matter to Al Qaeda’s uppermost echelon who dies.
So we have a question to answer about this last little fact, and that is "What is Al Qaeda trying to achieve?"
Now the current batch of Republican presidential candidates, except for Sen. Ron Paul, have the same stupid words coming out of their mouths, which is "They hate us for our Freedom." This is most decidedly the stupidest piece of analysis ever presented, because they are not attacking other countries having different levels of freedoms. So the answer given cannot be the correct answer.
Senator Ron Paul apparently HAS read the history involving America’s foreign policy and involvement in the Middle East over the past 50+ years. And the fact is when Osama bin Laden tells us his efforts to bring down America are directly tied to America’s foreign policy, it is Osama bin Laden who is not lying to America.
For all practical purposes it has been the American government lying to the American public time and time again over the years. The last President to NOT lie to the American public was Dwight D. Eisenhower, and that was when he gave his outgoing speech about the military-industrial complex.
Prior to the end of World War II America did not have a military-industrial complex because we didn’t have a standing army. In fact, when WWII ended, we still didn’t have a standing army because we brought them all home and reintegrated them into society.
OK, so we had a smaller number of standing army than during the war, but both Germany and Japan needed transition time to turn into world citizens again. Then suddenly we had a military-industrial complex that wished to exploit the economic advantages of having a country at war, large contingents of troops, and military bases throughout the free world. And this is when the true beginnings of the marriage of congress and the military-industrial complex came about through lobbying.
So how does all of this play with what is happening today?
Well, in 1953 the United States, through it’s newly created CIA, caused Iran’s democratically elected but left leaning President to be deposed in a coup, thus allowing the United States to prop up the Shah. Certainly this wasn’t the people of Iran’s will, so strong-arm tactics were necessary to maintain the Shah in power. What did we receive out of all of these efforts?
Two things, at the least. The first was an inroad into the petroleum producing Middle East with an American backed leader of Iran. The second was the development of a long memory in the Iranian public. The prior produced immediate advantages for America in terms of gaining needed low cost petroleum production whilst garnering a large portion of the revenues.
Since the Shah got a lot of money and companies from the United States and Britain got a lot of money, there really wasn’t too much money left for the population of Iran. And the Iranians didn’t, nor shouldn’t, forget America’s foreign policy.
In 1979 as the Shah was ousted and the popular ex-patriot Ayatollah Khomeni returned, students decided that they wanted to get into the American embassy and find whatever records they could to prove that the United States had interfered with legal and democratic elections to the detriment of the Iranian people.
Unfortunately 44 Americans didn’t leave the embassy as they were trying to destroy all the records, and they then became hostages. The rest is a history of distrust between not only the Iranian people and the government of America (not the American people, whom the Iranians like), but a history of such finagling by the Reagan Administration in all of it’s dealings with the Middle East, that as Reagan might be crowed as the one to end Communism, he must also be declared the real reason behind the terrorism of today.
And how not? America has chosen to be an "ally" of Israel when Israel itself has declined to sign any protectionist pact. To the military-industrial complex Israel is a large consumer, and conflicts involving people in the Middle East can easily and quickly be instigated, for certainly there are no shortages of protagonists in the Middle East.
More money, more money.
Just one year ago Israel chose to initiate another war against Hezbollah, which is a legally elected portion of the Lebanon government. And that’s not real surprising to me, but what is surprising is how quickly the American military-industrial complex was able to RE-SUPPLY Israel with armaments. It seems as if someone was awfully prescient to know that Israel would need a new supply of these weapons for the armaments to have so quickly beome available. Just how long does shipping of massive tonnage of weapons take by sea? Seems there was no ramp up time necessary for production, and virtually no time necessary at all for Israel to receive armaments neither normally in production nor held in inventory.
As has been noted in numerous news articles, one of Israel’s own terrorist actions is to demolish the homes of "suspected terrorists" in the Palestinian terroritories.
One of the greatest gripes by the Lebanese population about Israel’s efforts against Hezbollah were about the armaments being used. We’re not talking about normal run of the mill bombs, but highly accurate yet incredibly devastating bombs whose casing was built to break apart in large chunks of metal fragments big enough and packed with enough power to break the steel and concrete structure of a building and bring it to the ground. And bombs don’t care whether a terrorist is in the building, or an 11-year-old girl hiding from the fighting on the streets.
This is not a weapon one would use to fight a skirmish between some factions of Hezbollah and the Israelis army, but a effort to bring Lebanon to it’s knees by devastating Lebanon’s infrastructure as well as rout the population. In a movie joke Hezbollah would be "Stupid. Always bringing a knife to a gun fight."
In Iraq we have another long history dating from the Reagan Administration, which directly pitted Iraq against Iran whilst negotiating with "terrorists" in Iran to supply weapons in order to gain the hostages freedom. All of the time Reagan was President, the mindset he informed Americans about is that "We don’t negotiate with terrorists", and yet his election team was negotiating with the "terrorists" in Iran in order to ensure his own election. Then when it came down to supporting his favorite "rightist vs. leftist" Central American battle, again with a democratically elected government, Reagan’s people negotiated with Iran to supply weapons (once again) and took the funds and gave them to the Contras.
President Reagan’s appointed people robbed hundreds of millions of dollars from the American treasury by clandestine operations forwarding weapons to Israel who then forwarded these same weapons to Iran. Rather than that money be funneled back into the American treasury, it went to the Contras, with a large number of dollars being siphoned off by a gun running middleman like Manucher Ghorbanifar, who apparently still has inroads into the White House with George W. Bush.
Elliot Abrams, a Reagan appointee was indicted for lying in Congressional hearings for his Iran-Contra work (pleading guilty to a couple of lesser offenses), and who was pardoned by ex-President George H. W. Bush, is currently Deputy National Security Adviser for George W. Bush, as I recall. So if history plays a part in the way the Muslim world views us, then it must be how history shows us from the start to the finish, and the fundamentalist now know we don’t hold our own accountable for their actions.
Now here’s an example of playing both sides part of our foreign policy. While Reagan’s people were taking money from illicit weapons sales to Iran and giving it to the Contras (which Congress had ordered would get no more money from America), we were selling weapons to this new guy in Iraq named Saddam Hussein. And not just planes, bombs and missiles, but precursors to chemical and biological weapons.
As has been bandied about before, the reason we knew that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction is that we still have the receipts.
America has such a large footprint upon the world that our massive military might can be in any corner of the world anywhere from 15 minutes with nuclear missiles to 8 hours with troops on the ground and circling AWAC command and control systems. We can fly bombing missions from the United States to Afghanistan non-stop and have our flight crews home late the next day. We have bases in some 100 plus countries.
We’ve only left the Philippines and Panama after gaining a foothold. And both of those countries weren’t key players because our technology allows us to fly missions to South America within 8 to 12 hours, and Japan and South Korea, along with Guam and Midway allow us military might in the Asian theater within a couple of hours. We no longer need the Panama canal to fight a war and the Philippines could be bombed into submission in a matter of hours.
Diego Garcia allows us quick response to the other areas of the far east, and it appears that we are planning to have a large footprint in Iraq with the addition of four major bases. These bases could easily house tens of thousands of soldiers and airmen, along with armaments enough to decimate the world.
We currently have bases in countries previously inside of the Iron Curtain and Russia knows it. Uzbekistan, Germany, and numerous smaller Balkan states all have American installations or military bases. Numerous other countries are willfully hiding illegal detention centers.
America is poised for worldwide domination and apparently some people don’t like the idea.
Certainly the idea of the current administration and its neo-con friends doesn’t match up to the preamble to the United Nations. We are apparently here to make your day our day.
So who’s lying to whom? Osama bin Laden when he wants America’s nose out of other people’s state of affairs, or America’s government who has all the preparations ready to … well, you finish the sentence.
All I ask is that you remember all of this when you stand in the voting booth in November 2008 and contemplate just which candidate matches your idea of what America means. Not what the candidates tell you it means. What you grew up with, what you learned in school, and how it makes you feel to know that someone else wants to hurt you and you don’t know why because the government won’t tell you the truth.
All of the truth is out there. Your duty as a citizen is to determine just what that truth is.
Nice comment in the NYT article about the soldiers returning from Afghanistan.
This was a nice piece, too.
Posted by: Green Zone Cafe | May 31, 2011 at 11:12 AM