Vaseline and Matches and al-Qaeda, Oh My! Oh Wait, Nah.

Within half an hour, we were told of a woman who went berserk on a flight and was found to be carrying matches, vaseline, a screwdriver, and not one but TWO letters mentioning al-Qaeda — one in English and the other in Arabic. And then slowly these items disappeared and the story became one of a 60-year-old woman who became claustrophobic, causing the diversion of her London-DC flight to Boston. I can understand the confusion about whether or not a terrorist was on board this flight or if any of this was cause for concern.

But where the f*ck did all that other crap come from? Someone clearly made all this up. Vaseline? Letters about al-Qaeda!? Someone wants you to be scared.

Bush: Betrayed by Iraqi Ingrates

Today’s New York Times reveals that George W. Bush is deeply disappointed that the Iraqi people have “not shown greater support for the American mission.”

One person who attended a meeting of Bush’s “war cabinet” on Monday commented on Bush’s reaction: “I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget. The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”

I recall those halcyon days of early 2001, when neoconservative whiz kid David Brooks gurgled about how wonderful it would be to have a president who had a Masters of Business Administration – and from Harvard, no less.  Bush’s reaction to Iraq is vintage MBA: If only these people would get “on board”…

One professor who attended (and who is getting money from the U.S. State Department) said that Bush expressed the view that “the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private.”

Perhaps Bush believes that America’s problems in Iraq would be solved if there more Iraqi government officials were assassinated.

Bush was apparently especially upset that a recent rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad drew 10,000 people.  One person at the meeting commented that Bush “was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States.”

Maybe Bush was confounded that Iraqis are too stupid to recognize that America’s ally, Israel, was using U.S. bombs to kill Lebanese civilians solely in the cause of Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom.”

In unrelated news elsewhere in today’s NY Times, the civilian death toll in Iraq in July  set a record and experts fear that “the country is already embroiled in a civil war.”

[Comments & denunciations of this post are welcome at http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/08/16/bush-betrayed-by-iraqi-ingrates/ 

Bush Out-Drivels Himself

So Bush made the supreme sacrifice, returning from his vacation in Texas to Washington to inform Americans of his latest victories in the Middle East.

His comments at the State Department yesterday came close to breaking his previous personal best in both the delusions and drivel categories.

Bush began by declaring that Hezbollah was fully liable for every bomb that the IDF dropped, regardless of many farm workers were killed and how far the victims were from any military-related target: “America recognizes that civilians in Lebanon and Israel have suffered from the current violence. And we recognize that responsibility for this suffering lies with Hezbollah. It was an unprovoked attack by Hezbollah on Israel that started this conflict.”

According to Bush’s logic, if Israel had exterminated every living thing in Lebanon, it would still be faultless.

For Bush, the latest Mideast conflict is another example of how America is bringing freedom to the world. Bush declared: “America’s actions have never been guided by territorial ambition.”

This would be news to the Mexicans, some of whom have not forgotten 1846. Or to the Filipinos, or the Puerto Ricans, or the Cubans (who lived under America’s thumb prior to 1959, after which they lived under Castro’s fist). By Bush’s standards, Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon was spurred by a desire for spiffing up his botany collection.

But Bush’s declaration is as credible as when Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union wanted only peace. Yet, people in Washington – people at editorial pages – swallow this crap as if being the president of the United States automatically turned a man’s mouth into the Temple of Delphi.

Now, some people may look at the title of this blog and assume that I have been too harsh on America’s Commander-in-Chief. I rest my case with the following excerpt from Bush’s comments on the Israel-Hezbollah clash:

The world got to see what it means to confront terrorism. I mean, it’s a –it’s the challenge of the 21st century, the fight against terror.  A group of ideologues, by the way, who use terror to achieve an objective — this is the challenge.

And that’s why in my remarks I spoke about the need for those of us who understand the blessings of liberty to help liberty prevail in the Middle East. And the fundamental question is: Can it? And my answer is: Absolutely, it can. I believe that freedom is a universal value. And by that, I mean I believe people want to be free. One way to put it is, I believe mothers around the world want to raise their children in a peaceful world. That’s what I believe. And I believe that people want to be free to express themselves and free to worship the way they want to. And if you believe that, then you’ve got to have hope that ultimately freedom will prevail.

But it’s incredibly hard work, because there are terrorists who kill innocent people to stop the advance of liberty. And that’s the challenge of the 21st century.

[Comments / Denunciations welcome at my blog]

Paving the Way to War with Iran

Israel’s war on Lebanon is a warm-up for the U.S. war on Iran.

That is the message of Seymour Hersh’s latest superb article in the New Yorker. Hersh reveals that the Bush administration was “closely involved” in planning Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.  A former senior intelligence official informed Hersh that, beginning this Spring, “planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.”

Hersh notes:
The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

Israel is following its own agenda.  But a Pentagon consultant informed Hersh that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.”  Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers last month provided the pretext for a massive bombing campaign than had been planned long before.

The Bush team is chomping at the bit to use the “lessons” from Israel’s war for its own on Iran.  A former intelligence officer told Hersh: “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’” The Bush team apparently believes that they are entitled to create a few more catastrophes before Bush’s time runs out.

Hersh highlights the harebrained notion underlying the Israeli bombing campaign: “Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official.” 

This has backfired massively.   And yet the Bush administration appears to still believe that a U.S. bombing campaign in Iran would turn the Iranian people against the Iranian government.  

There is no evidence that Bush or Cheney have yet recognized any drawbacks, political or otherwise, from sending Americans off to die for damnfool ideas. [Comments / criticisms welcome – post at http://jimbovard.com/blog/

Wars Against Life and Liberty Based on Lies

We’ve tried it the War Party‘s way for about 5 years now, and, with the newest suicide bomb plot, at long last, the ridiculous lie that our enemies are a finite number of “Islamic fascists” who hate us for our freedom has finally finished running its pathetic course. Or has it just received a breath of new life?

The governments of the US and UK are responsible for the deaths of thousands of these “extremists” (and more than a hundred thousand innocent people) so far, and at the rate they’re going, they have about a billion left to go – not because Islam produces terrorists, but because people, no matter who they are, will always fight back against foreign invaders.

Before the U.S. government financed the Mujahedeen resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the religious schools in Pakistan, the dominant terrorist factions in the Middle East were secular communists like the PLO.

It has been the deliberate (and in some cases unintentional) policy of the US government (and the Israeli one) to encourage the rise of Islamic political power as a check on the secularists.

There is no bigger or more cynical lie rehearsed by this country’s politicians and TV “experts” today than that the Terroristsâ„¢ are motivated by religious fanaticism and hatred of liberty in our faraway land, unless, perhaps, it’s their assertion that the solution to the problem is more war, more foreign occupation, and more “regime change” throughout the Middle East.

The motivation for terrorist violence was foreign occupation then, and as Robert A. Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, recently explained to interested reporters on the other side of the world from here, it is foreign occupation now. This Wikipedia entry has a good outline of Pape’s study.

To call them “fascists” must simply be the projection of their own guilt onto others. After all, the fascists had states, armies and an economic program. As free-market economist Lew Rockwell points out, fascism,

“a 20th-century scourge, … combines the corporate state, the welfare state, the police state, the national security state, religion, glorification of the military, aggressive war, hatred of the other, state control of the culture, education, and the media, political centralization, the leader principle, and the rhetoric of fear and belligerent nationalism. Now, who does that sound like?”

America’s enemies in the Middle East, as even George W. Bush himself correctly noted once when his regular speechwriters were out sick, are “more like a loose network with many branches than an army.”

Are we to believe that this “loose network” maintains discipline among its members simply by ridiculing American culture and promising its recruits a bonus heaven?

Our “leaders” know good and well that this is a lie and that the solution to stateless terrorist groups like al-Qaeda is to treat the individuals like criminals: arrest them, try them and imprison them, while at the same time stopping the unjust policies that are motivating their actions.

(Yes, unjust. How would you like it if all the Arab countries propped up a Bush family kingdom in the U.S., controlled our markets, stationed thousands of troops at bases across the country, and paid billions to, say, the Dutch, so their government could commit acts of terrorism and wage aggressive war to steal the old “Oregon Country” from the U.S.A.?)

Waging war and killing innocents is counterproductive. It only helps to persuade people that the Wahhabist crazy down the block has been right all along – in the very same way that reasonable, educated adults in this country turned to a bunch of former followers of Soviet Red Army founder Leon Trotsky to tell them what to think after September 11th – and have yet to turn back.

Nearly every actual victory in the “war on terror” since September 11th has been accomplished not by the military, but by cops – mostly Pakistani ones.

Both Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, the former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still free and podcasting from the Hindu Kush today, while untold innocents have lost their lives in the wars fought in the name of avenging their deeds.

When the CIA begged Tommy Franks to let the Marines finish off bin Laden at the infamous battle of Tora Bora, he refused.

The cops walked right in to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s apartment in Karachi and arrested him. The same was true of al Qaeda’s resident computer genius who was turned into a valuable informant … until he was outed by the publicity-seeking Bush administration during the Democrat’s political convention in 2004.

Now we have this story about a plot to bomb multiple airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. The national government of this country has lied about terrorist plots so many times since 9/11, that the whole damn Department of Justice ought to be in prison. I know of no reason – so far – to expect this one is anything but more cries of wolf from the same liars.

Of course, Bush has already moved to exploit it as proof that we need more more war and that his political opponents aren’t tough enough.

If it turns out that this was a real plot, what is their motive? Freedom-hatred, virgins in heaven or US foreign policy?

Who found them out, cops or soldiers?

Should we invade Pakistan now? How about the UK?

Are we really better off giving up our freedom to the state which is creating our enemies for us, or would it make more sense for the people of the US and UK to take their security as their own responsibility?

This just in: The US government is now shipping an emergency order of cluster bombs to the government of Israel.

Imagine being thrown in Saddam’s imaginary human shredder, only with really, really hot blades. Now imagine a billion Muslims imagining that. Now you know why they hate us.

The truth is that terrorism is good for our government. They love it. It only helps them to justify expanding their own power while the population defers to them out of fear – and gets accustomed to doing so. Israel and the neocons get their Clean Break, cops get to run around with their camouflage and MP-5 machine guns, the oil companies get to keep the prices artificially high, and the bomb makers and those who rebuild what they bomb get to loot the treasury for hundreds of billions of dollars. This is why every attempt by Shi’ite Iran to cooperate with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda has been thwarted while we threaten war against them instead – exactly as Osama bin Laden wants.

As long as we live in a country where a third of the population can’t even remember what year the casus belli took place, it only seems likely to get worse.

Update: The Independent: “It has also emerged that there was a police informer working closely with the plotters.”

I am shocked.