Politics

Just tossing these in really quickly — I may come back and revisit them later on tonight.

Sitting around at work, doing something mindless, so my mind is wandering.

Theory 1: Bush must be pissed — the sniper is stealing all his press.

Theory 2: What if that’s the point?

Theory 2a: The sniper is a government operative (and probably future fall guy, once he’s caught), unleashed to distract the American public from the buildup to invading Iraq, making it easier for Bush to work out all the schemes and deals he needs to in order to set the invasion in motion.

This really should be required reading, in my estimation. John Perry Barlow, of the EFF, has posted a very compelling rant looking at where we’re going as a nation — and why he believes that our current attitude is, “THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IS DEAD. HAIL THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. OR ELSE.”

I believe that the American Republic died in the U.S. Senate last Thursday morning and was buried yesterday morning in the East Room of the White House.

Despite a deluge of calls, letters, and e-mails, which Capital Hill staffers admitted ran overwhelmingly against the ludicrously-named “Resolution Authorizing the President to Use Force, if Necessary, to End the Threat to World Peace from Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Congress extended to George II the authority to make unlimited and preemptive war against another nation that has neither attacked us nor shown the ability or inclination to do so.

(…)

[In 1848, William H.] Herndon had suggested that the United States would be prudent to attack Mexico before they attacked us, as they clearly appeared willing to do. [Abraham] Lincoln replied:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

(…)

I don’t think that our new Emperor is an evil man. But he has the kind of unquestioning belief in his own virtue that is the richest loam for growing evil. He is simply too weak to possess this kind of power without misusing it. And now we have removed all the Constitutional impediments that might have checked his hubris. We have thrown ourselves on the mercy of a conscience too clear to be reliable.

(…)

As much as I loathe organizations, we need to organize.

And we’d better start doing it now before the Empire decides it’s necessary to declare a National Emergency and make it lethally illegal to oppose it. It could get that bad.

Or it might get oddly worse than that. The Empire has discovered something important. The best way to deal with us is to ignore us altogether, as they did last Thursday. Our calls and letters had no effect whatever.

But those were the acts of citizens. In an Empire, there are no citizens, only subjects.

Empires in the past found it expedient to jail, torture, and execute recalcitrant subjects. This one has learned that you can get a lot further with less trouble simply by pretending that the opposition doesn’t exist.

These arrogant bastards are so persuaded of their sublime duties to God and Exxon that they no longer need concern themselves with public outrage or even, I shudder to say, elections.

Let us prove them wrong. We must make ourselves painfully visible to them.

(…)

…vote. I know many of you gave up on this a long time ago, for which dereliction of citizen’s duty you are getting exactly the government you deserve. But there’s still time. Many states permit registration right down to the wire.

I particularly hope you will vote heavily against everyone who supported this treasonous resolution, no matter how enlightened they appeared before. Right now, a weakling with good intentions is worse than an outright Facist.

They didn’t listen to your phone calls or letters. Let them now hear your silent voice speaking from the voting booth.

I’ve always enjoyed Woody Harrelson‘s acting, but I never knew that he was much of a writer. He’s in London right now performing in a play, and wrote an excellent editorial piece for The Guardian.

I remember playing basketball with an Iraqi in the late 80s while Iran and Iraq were at war. I didn’t know at the time that the US and Britain were supplying weapons to both sides. I asked why they were always at war with each other and he said something that stayed with me: “If it were up to the people, there would be peace. It’s the governments that create war.” And now my government is creating its second war in less than a year. No; war requires two combatants, so I should say “its second bombing campaign”.

The history taught in our schools is scandalous. We grew up believing that Columbus actually discovered America. We still celebrate Columbus Day. Columbus was after one thing only — gold. As the natives were showering him with gifts and kindness, he wrote in his diary, “They do not bear arms…They have no iron…With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Columbus is the perfect symbol of US foreign policy to this day.

…in wartime people lose their senses. There are flags and yellow ribbons and posters and every media outlet is beating the war drum and even sensible people can hear nothing else. In the US, God forbid you should suggest the war is unjust or that dropping cluster bombs from 30,000ft on a city is a cowardly act. When TV satirist Bill Maher made some dissenting remarks about the bombing of Afghanistan, Disney pulled the plug on him. In a country that lauds its freedom of speech, a word of dissent can cost you your job.

Via MeFi

I don’t have time to comment much right now, but I sure hope that Douglas Rushikoff is right.

It’s not ‘conspiracy theory,’ as some of my readers have accused me, to suggest that Bush may not actually want to spend the lives of Americans to invade Iraq. It is quite possible — no matter how evil or misguided you believe Bush to be — that he would rather not waste a few hundred or thousand American lives, or a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, on pipelines and additional security against nuclear/chemical/germ threat. Bush would rather do it the easy way than the hard way. He’d stand a better chance of being re-elected if he could cow Iraq into true submission without a full-scale war.

In order to do this, though, he needs to convince Saddam Hussein that he’s coming in, and that he’s coming in no matter what Chirac, Putin, or any other more “reasonable” statesman advises. He needs to appear like a chicken without a head — a driver without a wheel — careeing inexorably towards invasion. He needs Saddam to believe that America doesn’t have the mechanisms to flinch.

Things that Bush wants us to forget:

• Forget for a moment that we still can’t prove Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons.
• Forget that the latest Bush speech was just a re-hash of all the “ifs” and “mays” and “coulds” in Tony Blair’s flimsy 16 pages of allegations in his historically dishonest “dossier”.
• Forget that if Osama bin Laden ever acquired a nuclear weapon, he’d probably use it first on Saddam.
• Forget the 14 Palestinians, including the 12-year-old child, killed by Israel a few hours before Mr Bush spoke…
• …forget that when his aircraft killed nine Palestinian children in July, along with one militant, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon — a “man of peace” in Mr Bush’s words — described the slaughter as “a great success”.
• Forget that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It’s essential to forget this for three reasons.
• • Firstly, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians — which is one of the reasons we are now supposed to go to war with him.
• • Secondly, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the US embassy — in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad.
• • Thirdly, because the envoy was — wait for it — Donald Rumsfeld.
• We must forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds — when he “used gas against his own people” in the words of Messrs Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al — President Bush senior provided him with $500m in US government subsidies to buy American farm products.
• We must forget that in the following year, after Saddam’s genocide was complete, President Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1bn, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious “dual-use” material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons.
• Forget how the Americans promised Pakistan and Afghanistan a new era of hope after the defeat of the Soviet army in 1980 — and did nothing.
• Forget how President Bush senior urged the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam in 1991 and — when they obeyed — did nothing.
• Forget how America promised a new era of hope to Somalia in 1993 and then, after “Black Hawk Down”, abandoned the country.
• Forget how President Bush junior promised to “stand by” Afghanistan before he began his bombings last year — and has left it now an economic shambles of drug barons, warlords, anarchy and fear.
• We must forget, as we listen to the need to reinsert arms inspectors, that the CIA covertly used UN weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq.
• And of course, we must forget about oil…in all of Bush’s 30 minutes of anti-Iraq war talk yesterday — pleasantly leavened with just two minutes of how “I hope this will not require military action” — there wasn’t a single reference to the fact that Iraq may hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stand to gain billions of dollars in the event of a US invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war.

We must ignore all this before we go to war. We must forget.

— Robert Fisk: What the US President wants us to forget

If/when we catch the Maryland sniper, howabout we just airlift him into Iraq and set him loose on Saddam?

No, this isn’t entirely serious. Just a brain fart.

Talk about killing two birds with one stone, though. Remove Saddam from power (okay, via assassination, which the U.S. really isn’t supposed to condone, even though Ari Fleischer doesn’t seem to know that), and since the sniper isn’t likely to make it out of Iraq alive after offing Saddam, we save the trouble of all the trials, media frenzy, and eventual death sentence over here. Hmmm….

Again — this is not a serious suggestion. Just some random rambling.

I’m trying to avoid reposting entire articles from other sources here, but as Yahoo! News has a tendency not to keep articles live for more than a couple weeks at most, I’m making an exception in this case.

Often controversial cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall creates a brilliant essay, in which Iranian President Mohammad Khatami calls for U.N. intervention against the United States, decrying everything from the stockpiles of nuclear weapons to civil rights violations.

Excellently done.

Read more

So it seems that Bush will be making his case for war against Iraq tonight on television. Unfortunately, I’ll be at work, and won’t be able to listen in. Bummer.

Any bets on how much actual content is in the speech?