This law, as has become more and more clear over the last three months, was but the initial move by the Bush administration in what has become an extended and coordinated attack on the civil liberties of U.S. persons in the name of national security and—ironically—in the name of bringing democracy and civil liberties to Iraq.
Iran has long been a target of the Bush administration’s rhetorical ire. The president called it “the world’s primary state sponsor of terrorism,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice characterized it as “something to be loathed,” and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Teheran of designing roadside bombs to kill U.S. and British troops. But with the U.S. military under siege in Iraq, and polls running heavily against the White House’s Middle East version of Vietnam, it seemed just bluster and so much talk.
Last year, 5,736 Iraqis died and 845 U.S. soldiers died in the Iraq War, many at the hands of the estimated 2,000 foreign terrorist fighters based in the U.S.-occupied country. If this conflict is part of a larger war on terrorism as President George W. Bush claims, it’s clear the U.S. is losing the so-called “global war on terror.”
Reprinted from Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures
While the nation mourns the 2,000th U.S. combat death in Iraq, instead of looking for ways to plan an exit strategy, Congress is finalizing another payment of $50 billion to continue fighting the war.
A jury verdict in Memphis late last year caused little stir among the general public, but it may have caught the attention of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other high officials of the Bush administration. The jury found Colonel Nicolas Carranza, former Vice Minister of Defense of El Salvador and now a U.S. citizen living in Memphis, responsible for overseeing the torture and killing in that country 25 years ago. 1 Could similar charges be brought against high U.S. officials for the actions of their subordinates in Abu Ghraib, Falluja, and Guantanamo?
After nearly three years devoid of serious discussion in Washington about Iraq, the floodgates opened when Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. — a conservative Democrat who originally supported the war — called for withdrawing U.S. troops at the earliest “practicable date.”
As the official rationales for the U.S. invasion of Iraq—that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” which threatened the national security of the United States and that the Iraqi government had operational ties to al-Qaida—are now widely acknowledged to have been fabricated, and the back-up rationalization—of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq—is also losing credibility, increasing attention is being given as to why the U.S. government, with broad bipartisan support, made such a fateful decision.
In a 2002 Le Monde Diplomatique article titled “Constructing Catastrophe,” Israeli journalist Amon Kapeliouk challenged one of the central myths about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. To wit: that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat was offered a great deal at the Camp David talks in July 2000, but turned it down and launched Intifada II.