- In an excellent piece in Monday's New York Times, columnist
Bob Herbert tells how the Bush administration has been trying to turn
not just the Guantanamo detainee tribunals but the entire U.S. legal system
into the kind of judicial environment more appropriately depicted in a
Marx Bros. film.
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- At the same time, U.S. foreign policy is coming to resemble
not Marx-ism, but a Laurel and Hardy script.
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- Indeed, as Israel, with Bush's blessing, expands its
initial militaristic bullying of Gaza into a full-scale invasion of Lebanon,
with daily escalation of the violence threatening to ignite the whole Middle
East, a version of Oliver Hardy's famous line springs readily to mind:
"Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten us into."
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- It is clear by the ease and speed with which Israel's
military moved systematically into Gaza, destroying the basic infrastructure
of that hemmed-in captive community of a million impoverished human beings,
that this had nothing to do with "rescuing" a "kidnapped"
soldier, and everything with attempting to destroy the elected government
of the nascent Palestinian state. Israel initiated this act of aggression
after weeks of rocket and shelling attacks against the territory--including
one which killed eight members of a family on a beach outing--all of which
provocation took place without any criticism from the U.S.
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- It doesn't take much of a foreign affairs background
to predict that such an all-out assault on the Palestinian people would
elicit a response from the Palestinian people's closest ally, the Hezbollah
movement in Lebanon, and respond Hezbollah did.
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- Now there may be those in Israel's right-wing government
who wanted Hezbollah to attack, giving Israel a pretext to move back into
Lebanon and to unleash its American-provided and American taxpayer-financed
weaponry against the Palestinian and Lebanese backers of a Palestinian
state residing in Lebanon. There may even be those in Israel who for their
own insane reasons want an excuse to expand the current bloody war further
into Syria, which is a backer of Hezbollah. But where are America's interests
here?
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- Apparently the Stan Laurel impersonator in the White
House, with his biblical megalomania and his self-delusional neo-con advisors
seems to think all this is a good thing. The president has had not a word
of criticism to offer for Israel's blitzkrieg, and is content to take
a historic conflict of national, ethnic and tribal dimensions and cram
it into his simplistic "us-against-the-terrorists" dogma.
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- In the Bush worldview, bombing crowded urban areas by
air and howitzer is "legitimate national defense," while capturing
Israeli soldiers and firing small, unguided rockets back at Israeli territory
is "terrorism."
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- Of course, we can trace this ignorant and simplistic
thinking (if it can be called that) back to the invasion of Iraq, where
President Laurel/Bush and his gang imagined first of all that invading
that country would a) be a piece of cake and b) set off a wave of democratic
reform across the Middle East.
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- A fine mess that has proven to be!
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- Iraq is now, by almost any measure, a worse place to
live than it ever was under Saddam Hussein, and appears headed for at
best a religious theocracy, and at worst an interminable period as a failed
state of warring tribes and religious sects slaughtering for supremacy.
As for spreading democracy, the only place where democracy seems to have
really been attempted was Palestine, where the people, using the ballot,
threw out the corrupt and ineffective PLO, and replaced it with a government
led by Hamas. And what did President Laurel/Bush do in response for this
dramatic and honest expression of the people's will? He joined Israel
in condemning their decision, and set about, with Israel, in attempting
to undermine and overturn that elected government.
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- We are reaping the result of this unprincipled idiocy
today. Just watch the news (after filtering out the pro-Israeli slant on
the coverage, if you can).
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- There are many people on the left and the far right who
see all this as part of some master conspiracy of the zionists and neocons,
claiming that the idea is to bolster Israel as a military master of the
Middle East, while weakening the Arab regimes so that the U.S. can ultimately
step in and control them and their oil. I have a couple of problems with
this theory. First of all, the U.S. does control Iraq, and it can't even
get cheap oil out of that country the way it was able to do while Hussein
was in power. Meanwhile, the U.S. has effectively controlled Saudi Arabia
for years, and gets full access to that country's oil--and to neighboring
Kuwait's oil--without firing a shot. Why spend $1 trillion and create unpredictable
chaos abroad and at home to accomplish something that we already have?
The truth, anyway, is that while the U.S. is being bankrupted by war this
without end, the Chinese are signing long-term oil-supply deals with Iran
and other producing countries at favorable forward prices.
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- These are not smart people running American foreign policy.
They're the same kinds of bumbling idiots who brought us the War in Indochina.
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- A nice mess they're getting us into.
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