- Neoconservatives from the left, right and middle, including
George W. Bush, believe that they create their own reality, live in their
own world, and make their own history.
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- It's kind of funny how they don't want to talk about
it right now.
-
- Freshly ironed World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, when
asked about the Downing Street Memoranda, had this to say:
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- "There will be a time and place to talk about history,"
he added, "but I really don't believe it's now."
-
- Highly classified and eyes-only official government records,
written by the British counterpart to George Tenet at the time, record
the Bush decision in early 2002 to invade Iraq - long before the Congress
or the American public was alerted by the administration to any national
security risk involving Iraq.
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- The Downing Street memoranda also indicate that the George
W. Bush administration crafted and disseminated half-truths and falsehoods
to Congress and the media to support this predetermined policy.
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- I saw it, many others saw it, and we could not stop it.
Each and every day since the war in Iraq was illegally launched, long before
actual invasion in March 2003, people have died as a result. Cities and
entire nations have been destroyed as a result. Billions and billions of
U.S. borrowed money - added to the oppressive tab already owed by our children
and grandchildren - has been wasted as a result.
-
- These memoranda from Downing Street, circa 2002, also
indicate that the Bush administration was attempting - through increased
military attack beyond enforcement of the Northern and Southern No-Fly
Zones and through an obscenely oppressive international inspection regime
- to goad Saddam Hussein into some action that could then be used to justify
a military action by the United States.
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- Tragically for the neoconservatives, Saddam Hussein did
not take the bait. He sat passively as the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy
attempted to soften up the Iraqi battlefield. Saddam Hussein eagerly welcomed
the most intrusive inspection regime imaginable. The inspectors had full
access, and they - like David Kay's team after them - found no weapons
of mass destruction. No stockpiles, no existent capability, no programs.
-
- But Wolfowitz prefers not to discuss such history. He
remains, in his own mind, a hugely successful instrument in gaining the
war he had long fantasized and craved. What's not to like?
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- Where is Donald Rumsfeld on the Downing Street Memoranda?
Increasingly, Rummy seems to embody the utter dementia that permeates the
current administration. He seems to not to understand questions, not to
have seen the news, not to have heard of the policy, not to be aware of
the facts, not to conceive of the gravity of his personal situation in
historical terms.
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- Ah, but there is time for that later, they say.
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- Dick Cheney, beyond identifying and denunciating presumed
enemies of America behind every shrub at the Naval Observatory and beyond,
has had little to offer. While Cheney makes history - for himself, Halliburton,
Iraq, energy policy and American neoconservatism - discussion of that history
can wait. Let's not talk about it now.
-
- George W. Bush gave another speech this week, regarding
energy. It occurred to me again, as I watched and listened to his words,
that we have elevated only knaves and fools to Washington. Like Spanish
conquistadors witnessed for the first time, we believe them gods and kneel.
-
- Perhaps a better analogy is seen in The Gods Must Be
Crazy, where a Coke bottle dropped from an airplane leads to a new "culture"
of worship for an African tribe - a culture filled with hatred, envy, and
discontent.
-
- Young George spoke this week about future energy technologies,
ethanol from corn, and bio-diesel from soybeans. He said taxpayers should
be glad that he is spending "our money" to pay for programs to
teach people to conserve energy and to subsidize research into energy saving
practices, devices and vehicles.
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- Higher oil prices - made higher by wars and threats of
war and embargoes and government managed international trade and expansion
of unpopular U.S. military operations around oil pipelines and fields -
in another world, would amply fuel this type of alternative energy research.
-
- But no, the American government needs to extract more
tax receipts and can somehow spend it more smartly than the marketplace
of a billion choices could do. This fatal conceit is shocking. That it
spews forth from a so-called Republican in the White House is in itself
historic, or on second thought, perhaps not. Maybe the Whigs are back.
-
- But of course, let us study all that later.
-
- And who says the Congress has sat idly by? Why, there
is a bipartisan move to repeal the 22nd Amendment, to remove the restriction
that a President serve only two consecutive terms. The Senators fuss over
the idiotic Bolton nomination while they vote 100 to 0 for the REAL ID
and grant more of "our money" for the President's every whim.
They quibble over Bolton's mediocre incompetence while smoothly confirming
the far more deadly and corrupt Negroponte as super-intelligence czar,
and integrating domestic and foreign intelligence and law enforcement in
a constitutionally inscrutable way. J. Edgar Hoover would have been so
proud.
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- Imagine what history we could postpone talking about
if we repealed the 22nd Amendment! You'd think that the Democratic and
Republican sponsors of the 22nd Amendment Repeal bills in the House and
Senate could think of some other stupid laws to repeal, like say, the Patriot
Act, the Intelligence Reform, the REAL ID. Perhaps they could eliminate
funding for the illegal war they were seduced into supporting. But no,
they can only get it up for giving some future President the right to be
a permanent ball and chain in Washington, bequeathing to the rest of us
an American version of the aging and interchangeable Presidents and Prime
Ministers of France. Who knew?
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- History in the reality-based world, that is to say -
real history - is made by individuals, who simply put, act.
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- Like North Carolina Republican Representative Walter
Jones who, following his father's advice to "vote my conscience first,
my constituency second, and my party third," publicly repudiated the
President's past and continuing lies about Iraq and called for an exit.
-
- Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush don't want to talk
about the Downing Street evidence. Perhaps this is on the advice of counsel.
But if I may recall a Chaucerian phrase, "Time and tide wait for no
man."
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- When the Coke bottle worshipping Bushmen realized the
utter nastiness of life in thrall of a piece of trash, they sent out one
of their own to simply throw the garbage out. That strategy sounds really
good about now.
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- June 24, 2005
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- Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., is a retired USAF lieutenant
colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at
the Pentagon. She lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah
Valley, and among other things, writes a bi-weekly column on defense issues
with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com.
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