I see that  a news conference was scheduled for Thursday night (March 6, 2003).   If Drudge had it right Wednesday, GW Bush decided Wednesday night that we are going to war.  Or not.  It's reported that British troops have been told that 3/17 is the day their part in the invasion begins.  It's also reported that there will be no additional UN resolution.   The rocket and bomb assault will last 3 days before serious ground action by ground troops begins.

Before that, there will be an intense campaign to justify the war. That propaganda campaign began in earnest with  speeches declaring that the war was the solution to the problems of the Mid East.   No sale here.  I agree with Matthew Rothschild, editor of "The Progressive"

Until Bush stands up to Sharon, the United States could overthrow the governments of Iraq and Iran and Syria, for that matter, and still not solve the truly "growing threat," which is the ongoing crisis between Israel and Palestine.

• PNAC is is a Master Plan, not a conspiracy.  (Koppel referred, inaccurately, to "claims" that it was a conspiracy.)   Conspiracies are developed and executed in secret.  In contrast, this master plan for US world domination was made public, published in a letter to President Clinton no less, by those who developed it.
• Whether the execution of the master plan required or resulted in any conspiracies among or on the part of those who developed it is another matter.  That the "New Pearl Harbor" defined by the originators of the plan as a way to precipitate implementation of their plan was provided by the 9-11 attacks may be purely accidental.   No connection  has been established to:
• The cancellation, after the Bush inauguration, of  an Osama bin Laden task force initiated by President Clinton.
• The cancellation of the processes for establishment of a Department of Homeland Security begun by President Clinton's plan for implementing the Report of the US Commission on National Security. &
• G.W. Bush's remark after "everything changed" on 9/11,  "Lucky me--I hit the trifecta!" &
• The fact that the complex and overreaching "USA (un)Patriot Act was ready for submission by by Ashcroft to the Congress only one month after 9-11
• etc.
• The PNAC master plan has guided Shrubbyist strategy at least since 9-11 and apparently well before.
• The War on Terror was never the central issue for the Shrubbyists, the implementation of the master plan through War on Iraq was.  The War on Iraq is not a diversion or distraction from the War on Terrorism for the Shrubbyists.  Rather, the War on Terror was always only a means to the end of implementing the PNAC master plan, and War on Iraq was the key step in that implementation.  Suppression of Civil Rights and Liberties and vast increases in police powers are rationalized by both.
• The drive for War in Iraq explains why by the Anthrax attack, which  so closely followed the 9-11 attack, was vigorously used to incite fear of biological and chemical weapons popularly believed to be in Iraq's hands.    That the Anthrax attacks originated from US government held stock of the virus has been demonstrated; that the FBI has not moved toward arrest or a credible investigation of the persons responsible is criminal.
• The effective "purpose" of the PNAC master plan is not the establishment of stable and democratic governments and societies in the Mid East, as it has been represented by its apologists in the White House, by Koppel on "Nightline", and by Bill Kristol, in his appearance on "Nightline".  Kristol, at least, genuinely seems to believe in that goal.  But I do not believe that the Shrubbyists running the war are or ever were committed to it.
• Those who would "save Iraq by destroying it" have  tragically misread the character of their supposed Islamic enemies and Shrubbyist allies. They will be betrayed by the latter.  Kristol, and others who say they support a benign US hegemony as a way to liberate the Arab and Muslim world from centuries of autocratic rule, medievalist ideology, and fundamentalist theology and so allow the establishment of free, pluralist, and democratic societies are living in an Alice in Wonderland world.   This same miasma of unreality permits him to contemplate the impending war with apparent calmness and lucidity -- combined with a blindness to the costs in human life and welfare so incomprehensible it persuades me he is delusional.
• The Shrubbyists are allied by ties of political philosophy and financial self interest with the very fundamentalists, autocrats and dictators that Bill Kristol claims the PNAC master plan would oppose.  Of the 40 or so NeoCon think tankers and propagandists who signed the master plan sent to President Clinton, many are undoubtedly sincere in their hopes that it would bring a better future for the people of the Islamic world, in free societies.  But of these 40, only 10 work in the Shrubbyist government.   These 10 are not, by ideology or temperament,  supporters of free, popular, or democratic governments.  These the people behind anti-democratic incursions against civil liberties and civil rights in the United States.  A large segment of the Shrubbyist political "base" objects to religious pluralism in the US!  These are the extremists who have guided our imperial policy, and destroyed the Alliance with their intemperate words and imperious deeds.  These are committed ideologues of the far right, friendly both to authoritarianism and fundamentalism.  Quoting Howard Zinn, in "The Progressive"  "In the cartoon "The Boondocks," which reaches twenty million readers every day, the cartoonist Aaron McGruder has his character, a black youngster named Huey Freedman, say the following:
 
"In this time of war against Osama bin Laden and the oppressive Taliban regime, we are thankful  that OUR leader isn't the spoiled son of a powerful politician from a wealthy oil family who is  supported by religious fundamentalists, operates through clandestine organizations, has no  respect for the democratic electoral process, bombs innocents, and uses war to deny people their civil liberties. Amen."
 http://www.progressive.org/march03/zinn0303.html
 
• The final act of this tragedy, if it is permitted to proceed, will follow a path determined by the known ideologies and predictable calculations of political and financial advantage by the Shrubbyists.  It will see the alignment of autocratic, anti-democratic, contra Enlightenment forces in the US, Israel, and the Muslim world, driven by the identities of their self interest.  Each of their political power bases are medievalist in ideology, fundamentalist (even Millenialist) in religious belief, and authoritarian in temperament.   Cheney, Feith, Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Bush, Rumsfeld, and company have much more in common with Sharon and his fundamentalist supporters in Israel, and with the Saudi's and their Wahabbist Islamic fundamentalist agents in Saudi Arabia, even with the RSS Hindu fundamentalists in India,  than with the self deluded authors of the PNAC war plan.
• Kristol, and others of the "benign hegemony" school of imperial ambition, will find themselves betrayed, searching, after the fact, for reasons their grand plan strayed so far from its "intended" course, and spending countless hours before television cameras in self justifying rationalization of why "though this is not the outcome we hoped for it turned out to be the best that could be achieved".
• And that is where, and why,  we have all but abandoned the nation foreshadowing all this, poor Afghanistan.  With one great difference:  President Hamid Karzai truly wants progress and democracy for his people.  The medievalist, fundamentalist Shrubbyists are terribly discomfited by that, and have undercut him at every opportunity.  They revel in his ensnarement between the Scylla of their reluctant support of or even sabotage of his government's efforts toward democracy and the Charybdis of an impatient, ill informed press and NGO lobby stridently criticizing Afghanistan's labored progress toward real freedom.
• My frank apprehension is that in Iraq and the Mid East the travesty will follow this script:
• The call by the majority Shia of Iraq for an Iraqi democracy based on the three principles of democracy, federalism and community rights, and fervently desired by Kurds and other minority groups, will prove too hot for the Shrubbyists (it already has), who will perpetuate a centralized and authoritarian regime run by their "pet" Sunni politicians.
• The Saudis and the Shrubbyists will come to an easy accommodation, based on their mutual desire for a profitable and stable oil economy and their characterological preference for authoritarian and fundamentalist control of their nations' social and political life.
• The Shrubbyists will not follow through on their ever so weakly asserted desire that illegal settlement of Palestinian territories by Israeli settlers cease and be reversed.  Instead, the continued irritation of ruthless violations of Palestinian civil and property rights on the West Bank by the Sharon government will perpetuate tensions, and acts of terrorism, providing an eternal excuse never to remove the settlements, as required by many UN resolutions.
• Sharon and his right wing extremist, fundamentalist base (Falwell/Robertson allies) will press to secure support for removal of the Palestinian population of the West Bank to Jordan and occupied Iraq, and if Bush is elected a second time will likely succeed in that crime.
• Democratic reform in the Arab world will be infinitely deferred as well.  The invasion and occupation of Arab and Muslim land by the US will create increasingly violent disaffection by the suppressed populations of our autocratic client states in the region.   The US will insist on the suppression of those popular movements, as terrorist, by their governments.   Real Democratic reforms will be too destabilizing to contemplate (as they have proven in Afghanistan, and as the Shrubbyist betrayals in Iraq are proving them to be there as well.)
• Some of the resulting resentment and violence will be directed against the US and Europe, or their "assets", and will justify further suppression of civil rights it has taken the last 400 years of Enlightenment based political progress in the West to achieve.  Of course Falwell and Robertson of the religious right, as well as Lush Rimbow, the felon talk radio goons and other savages will be delighted at  this reversal of "permissiveness" in our society.

Mossback: Springtime for Hitler?
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/printme.php3?eid=40046   Includes the lines:

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, observes that a culture steeped in Christian fundamentalism would find the central fascist story line very familiar. Of course, so would a culture steeped in New Age mythology, but last I looked, the Woo-Woo Coalition had less influence in Washington than the Christian Coalition and John Ashcroft was attorney general, not Shirley McLaine. Certainly, at the millennium, on the brink of an expanded war and the potential for chemical, nuclear, and bio-terror Armageddons, at a time when our international woes are centered in the Middle East, the ground zero for the coming Rapture (you can watch it live on a Web cam at www.olivetree.org), the air is thick with the hothouse atmosphere where fascism takes root, and the sound of goose steps carries.

“America: Our Land, Our Flag, Our Freedom!”  Notes on filming of a 4th of July, 2002 parade, with reference to this book and to "The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin", Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, U. of Chicago Press, 1984
http://www.snowshoefilms.com/fn15continued.html
All of the Snowshoe Films productions are worth looking at: http://www.snowshoefilms.com/index.html

Paul Andrews posted this in December 6, 2001!

Andre Gregory to Wally Shawn in  My Dinner With Andre: "And you know, Wally, for two or three years now Chiquita and I have  actually had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. We really feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Of course, the problem is where to go. Because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. In fact, it seems to me quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished."

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