“We came, we saw, he died,” cackled Hillary Rodham Clinton. The gorgon who heads Caesar’s state department was gripped by a paroxysm of joy when a CBS News reporter informed her that Col. Muammar Gadhafi had been executed. “Veni, Vidi, Vici”: “I came, I saw, I conquered” is attributed to Julius Caesar in 47 B.C.

The hilarity unfolded on October 20, 2011. Backed by American drones and French fighter jets above, our Libyan buddies, “the rebels,” apprehended Gadhafi as he fled his hometown of Sirte en route to Misrata, both on the Mediterranean Sea. As they lynched their former leader on camera, the rebels emitted their version of Hillary’s blood-curdling riff: “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” Sophisticated enough to film their “justice,” these atavists had no qualms about tearing into a defenseless individual before summarily shooting him in the head.

The murder that caused Mrs. Clinton such merriment was not a random act of revenge by the army of the National Transitional Council (NTC). Gadhafi’s son, Moatassem Gadhafi, was dispatched simultaneously. (Ever the role models, the US and its “allies” killed another of Col Gadhafi’s sons and a couple of his grandchildren in May this year.) Also a laughing matter: the long-term aid and support the succubus Clinton had promised the NTC, during a just-concluded, surprise visit to Libya.

The war in Libya was Hilary’s special project. As in Greek mythology, it all began with three Gorgon sisters. Medusa’s posse included Samantha Power (special assistant to the president and member of his National Security Council), and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. The women devised the casus belli for this war, and cultivated the “angels and demons” Disney production, which starred an evil dictator who was killing his noble people, and three amazon warriors, who—high on estrogen-driven paternalism—rode to the rescue.

Human Rights Watch is tracking the blood sports in Libya as best it can (for the NTC is as transparent as the emperor in the White House). And there’s a lot to laugh about. “Fifty-three people, apparent Gadhafi supporters, had been executed at a hotel in Sirte between October 14 and October 19.” It appears that “their hands had been bound behind their backs when they were shot.” Russia Today confirms that another 60 corpses were discovered on the lawn of the Al-Mahari hospital. Some “had been killed execution-style, with a bullet to the head.” Many “had been bound hand and foot.”

“The willful killing of a person in custody,” Human Rights Watch warned, “is a serious violation of the laws of war and is a war crime that could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. The laws of war also oblige parties to a conflict to provide medical care to captured combatants.”

As the opening act at the Colosseum that is the democratic Libya, the Gadhafi bodies were displayed in a refrigerated meat container. For days, thousands filed by to gawk and to pose by the putrefying corpses. The Libyan leader was not accorded an Islamic burial as was his wish. Once again, the US has given its imprimatur to a French-Revolution like upheaval in an Islamic land.

The blood-drenched, illiberal and irreligious French Revolution bore no philosophical resemblance to the American Revolution. Indeed, your average American war hawk is more French revolutionary than American. No wonder, then, that in Iraq, Bush the barbarian brought about the destruction of an ancient Christian community dating back to the Apostles. Libya’s Christians were protected under Gadhafi. Will brother Obama’s victory prove to be a Pyrrhic one for them as well?

Fresh from finishing off a 16-year old Yemeni boy—the son of Anwar al-Awlaki had just been killed by a US missile strike in southern Yemen—an invigorated Barack Hussein Obama hastened to broadcast his jubilation over the Gadhafi killings: “You’ve won your revolution,” the president of the United States assured Libyans.

Let us not kid ourselves about the quality of justice Gadhafi would have received in a US-backed rebel courtroom. Under American auspices, a stoic Saddam Hussein, noose about his neck, was hung (and heckled by a hooded Shiite executioner). Even more repugnant than that hasty hanging were the US-sponsored legal proceedings that preceded it. (All the obligatory denunciations of Hussein apply here, naturally. Bad man. Bad man. Bad man.) That Tribunal, which was branded “made-in-America,” and masqueraded as a court of law, more closely resembled the French Revolutionary Assembly, meting justice by popular demand.

“The concept of a society is based on the quality of its mercy, of its sense of fair play, its sense of justice,” goes that memorable line from the film “Midnight Express” (which surely represented Hollywood at its heyday). The protagonist’s protest against his inhuman and inhumane Turkish jailers was a plea against a merciless authority, the kind the US and its surrogates (“NATO”) around the world have, increasingly, come to represent.

But the parting (or Parthian) shot from “Midnight Express” that best captures the crassness and cruelty of Hillary’s countenance is this: asking mercy from the merciless is “like asking a bear to sh-t in a toilet.”

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
October 28

The post Murder On Her Mind appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

… Iraq, where at least a million people have been displaced and are now impoverished, aid-dependent refugees in their own country ~ilana

When it comes to Iraq, the pols and the pundits fetishize details, hang hopes on minutia and forfeit a deeper understanding of the place and people. The devil is not in the details, but in the big picture. More troops or training for Iraqis, better baksheesh, Maliki or Moqtada—these will make no difference. For the government of Iraq doesn’t stand apart from the governed; it reflects them. Ditto the phantom known as the Iraqi Army.

The divisions that have riven the region for four millennia are mirrored in the current regime, and will continue to hobble every successive government that hunkers down in the Green Zone, where it’ll forever be forced to take cover, incapable of governing Baghdad, much less the rest of the country—a reality the philosopher-kings who sing from Bush’s hymn sheet are slowly accepting. But have neoconservatives slunk off the political stage? Not on your life; they’ve merely shifted tactics, and now blame, first, faulty logistics for failure in Iraq.

Rummy’s sacking was an extension of this superficial thinking. The meaningless musical chairs that ensued suggested that if one could only pinpoint and uproot the source of dysfunction in the administration, Iraq would be on the mend. Grappling with the deep moral and intellectual failings that facilitated the war was out of the question. Another more contemptible and cowardly strategy has been to blame the chaos on ordinary Iraqis, who never asked to be invaded and “improved.”

Every bit as light weight and inconsequential were the hearings on the war, which followed on the heels of the Rummy red herring. Senator John McCain insisted on, wait for it…more troops. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina parroted McCain—he often does. Gen. John P. Abizaid, top American military commander in the Middle East, wisely disagreed, although his “innovation” was to suggest that the Iraqi military be trained “more robustly.” Yes, that’s what this ragamuffin militia needs, more of what’s been worse than useless so far.

In such company, the Hildebeest dazzled. “I have heard over and over again, ‘the government must do this, the Iraqi Army must do that’,” warbot Clinton complained to Abizaid. “Can you offer us more than the hope that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Army will step up to the task?” As if she doesn’t know the answer.

At least Faux News has cut the treacle about Iraqi good-news stories. If anything, we are spared the full spectrum of the horror in Iraq, where at least a million people have been displaced and are now impoverished, aid-dependent refugees in their own country. Children, who once played safely in the streets, can’t leave home, although enterprising criminals regularly invite themselves into homes and kidnap family members for ransom.

(Mind you, so-called good-news stories are not good at all. What is so good about American soldiers building schools for Iraqi children with money mulcted from you and me? Nothing. Principled conservatives ought to oppose, not celebrate, such confiscation.)

If Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented, it is because they are busy … busy dying at rates many times higher than under Saddam. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” as the Lancet reported. Since Iraq became a Bush object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

Still, there is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis to get with the program. As though Iraq ever had it together; Hussein’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people. What a shame it’s too late to dust Saddam off, give him a sponge bath, and beg him to restore law and order to Iraq.

Secretly, that’s what anyone with a head and a heart would want. We could promise solemnly never to mess with him again—just so long as he kept his mitts off nukes, continued to check Iran (which he did splendidly), and minimized massacres. To be fair, Saddam’s last major massacre was in 1991, during which only 3,000 Shiites were murdered. That’s less than Iraq’s monthly quota under “democracy.”

No one is praising Saddam, yada, yada, yada. But even the Saddam-equals-Hitler crowd cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our faith-based intervention. Even the war’s enablers must finally admit that under our ministrations Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state.

Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order—or under a force made up of ideological terrorists, feuding warlords, and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

The author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” may be wrong about very many things, as Joseph Farah has cogently contended. But Rick Warren is right about this: Syria is a moderate Muslim country. So was Iraq before our mission of mercy. A secular strongman suppressing the seething Arab Street is as moderate as it gets across Dar al-Islam. Americans had better remember that.

© 2006 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
December 1

The post At Least Saddam Kept Order appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The U.S. attacked a prostrate, Third World nation, with no navy or air force, whose military prowess was a fifth of what was smashed in the Gulf War. The election of Jan. 30, 2005, and any number of photographs of happy, ink-stained voters cannot change this truth one iota ~ilana

People with no principles look to consequences to justify their actions – the Republican Party and its media megaphones now contend that Iraq’s first democratic election has provided a final and irrefutable justification for America’s invasion and conquest.

That Iraqi Shi’ites turned out en masse for Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and sharia law doesn’t alter the truth – we waged an illegal, unjust, and unnecessary war.

However, with Fox and Friends continuing to claim that WMD were probably moved to Syria, and al-Qaeda and the Ba’athists were an item, it falls to the “reality-based community” to periodically remind them of the facts. To paraphrase Corneille, a good memory is needed once lies become the norm.

As a comprehensive report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in January 2004 stated, “There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam’s government and al-Qaeda.” Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was viewed unfavorably by the Islamists, for precisely the reason we ought to have viewed it more favorably: under Saddam, Iraq was a secular country.

There is some evidence terrorist coordinator Abu Musab al-Zarqawi traveled to Iraq in May 2002, well after 9/11. He briefly ensconced himself in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq (among Bush’s allies and beyond the reach of Saddam’s power), near the Iranian border, before resuming his murderous peregrinations in the region.

On Jan. 27, 2003, Hans Blix, Chief United Nations weapons inspector, reported to the UN Security Council regarding the inspections process he resumed in November 2002.

He briefly recounted the procedures outlined by Resolution 687 and implemented in 1991 after the Gulf War, when the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) set about to disarm Iraq. The process continued for eight years, until 1998, at which point Saddam Hussein’s prohibited weapons programs had been dismantled.

At the time of Blix’s report, the Americans and British insisted that after 1998 Saddam Hussein had reconstituted the programs that had been dismantled during eight solid years of inspections. Blix’s task was to investigate this claim.

Blix was decidedly cautious and suspicious in his 2003 report. When the Iraqis claimed (truthfully) that all proscribed items had been destroyed between1991 and 1998, Blix refused to take their word for it. He launched comprehensive inspections – interviews, seminars, inquiries with suppliers and intelligence organizations. These were impeded by some Iraqi jitters (they suspected inspections were a … covert operation. What on earth would have given them that impression?). These fears were invariably soothed over after discussions and negotiations (barbaric, I know).

Contra the lies and the liars that tell them, Blix noted that “Iraq has, on the whole, cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect, and with one exception, it has been prompt.”

A stipulation of Resolution 1441 was that Iraq submit a comprehensive WMD declaration. A terrified Iraq promptly complied. Submitted in December 2002, the declaration contained some 12,000 pages and was promptly ridiculed by both the White House and Whitehall. Yet it has never been refuted.

Blix, too, remained skeptical, although he firmly believed his process would expeditiously ferret out the truth about Iraq’s putative WMD. Aided by military and technological assistance from Switzerland, New Zealand, Germany, and other members of the coalition of the unwilling, numerous experts under Blix’s command crisscrossed the country (something they can only dream of doing today after “liberation”), ready to disable any dangers that might be discovered.

From November 2002 to January 2003, Blix conducted approximately 300 inspections of more than 230 different sites in Iraq. Of these, more than 20had hitherto not been inspected. (He set up field offices in Mosul and Basra, places he could never hope to access today.)

Despite this empirical exercise, the fantasy-based community asserted that “All the Western intelligence services – the UN itself – stated with certainty that this thug had and was hiding WMD.”

Really?

The UN itself, in the person of Hans Blix, never stated that Iraq had WMD in 2002. He suspected the lion’s share of the weapons had been destroyed between 1991 and 1998, but sought to verify claims to the contrary. He wrote: “Intelligence authorities have claimed weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks; in particular, that there are mobile production units for biological weapons.”

Dutifully, Blix proceeded to investigate.

On March 7, 2003, the UN’s chief weapons inspector reported good cooperation from the Iraqis. “At this juncture, we are able to perform professional no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance,” he observed approvingly.

Using Cyprus as a base, and assisted by American U-2s, French Mirage surveillance, and other capabilities offered by the Russian Federation (Old Europe, you know), Blix had the run of Iraq. The meticulous Blix scuffled with the Iraqis over the legality of their al-Samoud 2 missiles, but here too, he secured the destruction of 34 of them. In an attempt to check for discrepancies regarding the numbers of biological and chemical weapons produced and destroyed in 1991, Blix had also begun to excavate disposal sites.

The fear-mongering claims made by “intelligence authorities” were scrutinized by Blix (and later by David Kay, and after that by Charles Duelfer), as he conducted surprise searches both underground and above. Like David Kay and Charles Duelfer after him, Blix found “no evidence of proscribed activities.”

Nevertheless, Blix wanted to be absolutely sure: “Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude induced by continued outside pressure, it will still take some time to verify sites and items, analyze documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions,” he cautioned.

How much time? “It will not take years, nor weeks, but months,” months he did not get because of George W. Bush’s rush to judgment.

On Feb. 14, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei, chief inspector of the International Nuclear Energy Agency, filled in the mushroom-cloud-sized blanks in the emerging WMD picture.

“We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear related activities in Iraq,” he stated categorically.

ElBaradei’s extensive and aggressive inspections throughout Iraq included sampling air, water, sediment, and vegetation, and interviewing key Iraqi personnel and officials (who had yet to be dispersed). From high explosive HMX, to the manufacture of magnets, to the purpose of the notorious high strength aluminum tubes (the ones Condoleezza Rice falsely declared were suited only to nuclear weapons programs), to probing the possible use of laser technology to enrich uranium, to investigating dual-use equipment – ElBaradei had a firm grip on what he described as Iraq’s crumbling military infrastructure.

He even checked out the story of the nukes from Niger, which Bush had continued to parrot well after this legend had been exposed as a crude forge
ry. Iraq’s claim that “it has made no attempt to import uranium since the 1980s” was corroborated. ElBaradei unceremoniously, but politely, pronounced that the Niger procurement was “inauthentic.”

ElBaradei, who conducted a total of 177 inspections at 125 locations, had reached almost every nook and cranny in pre-invasion Iraq. He too confirmed that, contrary to the line Bush and his claque adopted about Hussein’s recalcitrance, “Iraq has continued to provide immediate access to all locations.”

Exhaustive searches had concluded that Iraq was no threat to America. So the search for a casus belli mutated from “national security” to “humanitarianism.” Desperate to reverse John Quincy Adams’ wisdom (in 1821, the secretary of state emphasized that “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own”), one typical warmongering commentator argued that Saddam’s regime remained intolerable. The Bush administration had no choice but to consider Saddam “in the context of [his] past history of murderous aggression against his neighbors and against his own people, showing his total contempt for the rights and sovereignty of others.”

There you have it. We invaded Iraq in 2003 because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 (I thought we settled that score). Or because he launched a chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja (killing 5,000) … in 1988. Or because he invaded Iran in 1980 (with the U.S., led by Donald Rumsfeld, weighing in to help Saddam settle that score).

To sum up, the U.S. attacked a prostrate, Third World nation, with no navy or air force, whose military prowess was a fifth of what was smashed in the Gulf War. The election of Jan. 30, 2005, and any number of photographs of happy, ink-stained voters cannot change this truth one iota.

©By ILANA MERCER
February 9, 2005
Antiwar.com

*Screen pic image credit

The post Ink Stains And Blood Stains appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

After their jerry-built justifications – 1. WMD. 2. Saddam and Osama sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G – fell apart, the neoconservatives had a problem. Why, exactly, did we invade Iraq? It seems we invaded not so much for us as for them. The Iraqi people, that is. How very altruistic. Saddam was a killer, and we put paid to him, delivering liberation in his absence. But you can’t make an omelet – or impose democracy on Muslims – without “collateral damage,” and the human toll of America’s invasion has risen so fast it is no surprise many Iraqis want Saddam back, despite the torture chambers George W. Bush never forgets to remind us about.

The neocons are always fighting World War II (although we’re now up to WWIV by Norman Podhoretz’s count) and Saddam, like Slobodan, was accused of “genocide.” Milosevic’s genocide was long ago exposed as another neocon whopper, but this claim served admirably as a pretext for aggression. Saddam is accused of having killed 250,000 or 500,000 or even a million of his own people over 35 years. Evidence to back up these numbers is somewhat lacking, and the numbers are especially suspect if they include those Iraqis that died while engaged in insurrection against Saddam. (Over a million Americans died because Lincoln put down an insurrection in order to preserve the Union. If we hold Lincoln to the same standard the neocons hold Saddam to, then Lincoln must be universally acknowledged as one of history’s greatest war criminals.)

Be that as it may, let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention. In fact, it was rather orderly. Whatever one might say about the al-Tawhid and Jihad (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s outfit), the Islamic Army, the Khaled bin al-Waleed corps, the Green Brigade, the Islamic Response, Ansar al-Sunna and the Black Banners – they did not have the run of Iraq. Saddam Hussein did. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but he did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order.

As opposed to the chaos that now obtains. Both ideological terrorists and the “Ali Baba” element are running rampant because they can. Saddam Hussein’s monopoly over force might not have been to our liking, but it certainly prevented the rampant murder, robbery and assault that have made liberated Iraq a Hell on Earth – 18 months after “Mission Accomplished.”

If Iraqis have not piped up in protest – if they’ve failed to spread the “good news” about their country – it is because they are busy … busy dying at rates at least as high as those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd.

And I am not referring here merely to the unofficial counts of the numbers of Iraqis killed directly by the invasion and its aftermath.

The Iraq Body Count estimates that between 14,000 and 16,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed; the Brookings Institute says between 10,000 to 27,000. Other reliable sources estimate that as many as 37,000 Iraqis have been killed by coalition forces. (Ah, but their deaths, though unfortunate, were unintentional, the neocons respond. Only idiots, however, could deny that the civilian carnage was inevitable and should have been foreseen well in advance, as it continues to be in the assault on Fallujah.)

The numbers noted above are bad enough, but they don’t tell the full horror story.

To fully put us in the picture, much as Picasso’s Guernica put us in the picture as to what happened in one Spanish town in 1937, we now have a study conducted by scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and published by the Lancet.

In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness.” Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence, according to the report.

Since March 2003, Iraqis have suffered from an excess of deaths, if you will. As Dr. Les Roberts, author of the study, told BBC News, “About 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.”

According to the study, “The relative risk, the risk of deaths from any cause, [my emphasis] was two-and-a-half times higher for Iraqi civilians after the 2003 invasion than in the preceding 15 months. But “the risk of death by violence [my emphasis] for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion.”

To be clear, American forces have not replaced protracted agonizing death by disease with mercifully quick, violent death. If this were the case, no doubt, neoconservatives might be touting the merits of their new Iraqi Health Care Plan.

©By ILANA MERCER
November 17, 2004
Antiwar.com

The post LIBERATION HAS A BODY COUNT appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’ ~ senior Bush adviser, probably Karl Rove

Bush believes that by ‘spreading’ Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité (as defined by him) he is doing the work of God. May God help us ~ilana

French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon was not describing the Bush administration when he wrote, “[They] speak like Tocqueville but continue to think like Robespierre.” Had he been referring to the Bushies rather than to France’s elites, he might have said that they speak like Tocqueville but act like Robespierre.

Rosanvallon argues that France’s big cheeses have retained an attachment to their Jacobin heritage – expressed in a powerful, centralized, universalist state that aggrandizes abstractions and subordinates communities to a national general will. This is a description that fits Bushian America far better than it does the so-called “surrender monkeys.”

I’ll add a qualification. As classical liberal thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Frédéric Bastiat observed, elites can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced. The Jacobins relied on the people of Paris for support during the Reign of Terror. And, as John Kerry has learned, Bush can count on the support of the 42% of Americans who actually believe Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11. And this is why Kerry has been progressively cozying up to Bush on Iraq.

Of course Kerry is no paragon of principle. But, and I realize I’m being exceedingly charitable, I suspect he knows the invasion of Iraq was wrong and unwarranted rather than just premature and insensitive. Most Americans are still unwilling to entertain that truth, however. To his credit, Kerry discussing Iraq thrashes about like a fish out of water because it takes an effort to for him to lie about it.

George Bush, on the other hand, lives a lie effortlessly. He stays on message not because he is “steadfast and strong and determined,” a mantra steadfastly chanted throughout the presidential debates, but because he is incapable of telling right from wrong or fact from fiction on Iraq. The Lie is his reality.

Empirical truths are irrelevant to this White House. As a senior Bush adviser told author Ron Suskind, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

So come Nov. 2, the American people will be forced to choose between a man whose Iraq policy excludes reality (Bush) and a man who is prepared to hold the truth about Iraq hostage to political expediency (Kerry).

Kerry’s pragmatic cynicism accounts for the contradictions that plagued his position throughout his campaign and especially during the debates. “The president made a mistake in invading Iraq” was negated by “Saddam Hussein was a threat,” which was then gainsaid by a description of a “menacing” Iraq crippled by sanctions, crisscrossed by inspectors, patrolled (and bombed) by American and British no-fly-zone pilots.

Kerry first modified his message when the Democratic base turned on the antiwar candidate, Howard Dean. Determined to avoid Dean’s fate, Kerry determined to confine his comments on the invasion of Iraq to criticism of military tactics. (Both Bush and Kerry understand that most Americans prefer to probe military rather than moral failings.) By the time Bush declared, during the debates, that “We change tactics when we need to, but we never change our beliefs, the strategic beliefs that are necessary to protect this country in the world,” Kerry was on the same page.

Similarly, Kerry soon mastered a line about the president’s miscalculations having resulted not in an obscene squandering of lives, but merely in an “overextended military.” Therefore, according to Kerry, while “the president made a mistake in invading Iraq,” Americans were dying daily there for a “noble cause.” Go figure!

At most, Kerry is prepared to venture that “You don’t take America to war unless you have the plan to win the peace,” a proposition that accommodates waging just about any war so long as a winning strategy is in place.

His Pavlovian training also conditioned Kerry, the consummate political canine, to realize that it had been an immense miscalculation to promise to “reduce [terrorism] to a nuisance, comparing it to prostitution, [and] illegal gambling,” as Bush jeered. Once America commits body
and soul to a program of war – be it against drugs, poverty or cancer – The People prefer to remain suspended in a state of heightened emotional arousal. The prospects of an all-encompassing global war against terror, pitting “good” against “evil,” is closer to the voter’s excitable heart than Kerry’s more modest, less Armageddon-like measures.

Modest and measured is definitely not a part of the “strong and resolute and determined” profile Kerry is cultivating. Duly, Bush commanded his spineless rival to shut up about “the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.” And Kerry complied.

True to Bush’s bloody revolt against reality, he said at the debates that “Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming” and that “to think that another round of resolutions would have caused Saddam Hussein to disarm, disclose, is ludicrous.” But Saddam was “unarmed.” He had no weapons of mass destruction – none were found, and none were under construction. To complain that negotiations to disarm an already unarmed Iraq would have failed is utterly risible but to be expected from Bush, whose reasoning skills are rationed and whose moral compass is busted. Nevertheless, Kerry’s cowardly convergence demanded yet another concession. “The president needed the authority to use force in order to be able to get [Saddam] to do something,” he intoned.

Although Kerry has furtively edged ever closer to Bush on Iraq, he has thus far spared us his own version of Bush’s (voracious) pet project: “spread[ing] freedom and liberty around the world.”

Proposition one: Bush said he believed “that God wants everybody to be free.”

Proposition two: Bush affirmed his belief “in the transformational power of liberty.”

Proposition three: Bush vowed to “unleash the armies of compassion,” and “continue to spread freedom.”

Ergo: Bush believes that by “spreading” Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité (as defined by him) he is doing the work of God.

May God help us.

©By ILANA MERCER
October 20, 2004
Antiwar.com

* Image as screen pic credit

The post KERRY’S COWARDLY CONVERGENCE appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals,’ which James Madison warned war would bring ~ilana

The chattering classes are doing what they do best, and that is to shed darkness wherever they go. This column informed readers about the Niger lie in March 2003, after Muhammad ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, unceremoniously and politely called the allegation that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa “inauthentic.” It’ll take the mainstream media a few years to work out, but many in the administration (not least Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney) had been sitting on this intelligence since February 2002, when a diplomat called Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA and the State Department to ferret it out.

Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say?

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.

But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for “the degeneracy of manner and morals” which James Madison warned war would bring—the same “bring ’em on” grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

Hold the CIA responsible for giving in to the War Party’s pressure, if you will. But recognize that the CIA was only obeying the wishes of its masters. The CIA had attempted to resist. Witness the early statements by Vince Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief, who scoffed at the concoction of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. Having come under fire after September 11, the agency gave in to White House pressure to politicize and shape the lackluster information.

Unforgivable? Yes. But consider who the intelligence community takes its corrupt cues from. Perhaps New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka had a point when he wondered, “Who know [sic] what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza.” The National Security Adviser has since September 11 been rocking the intelligence community with her antipathy to the truth. As if her Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter forecasts were not bad enough, on September 8, 2002, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” “That’s just a lie,” an appalled David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security told the New Republic.

In her latest damage control interview with Blitzer, Rice continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was threatening his neighbors when the president pounced, and, as justification for the war, she still makes reference to Saddam’s effort to pursue a nuclear program in … 1991, and to the burying of old centrifuge parts prior to the first Gulf War. Rice, of course, continues to deny the Niger forgery.

Clearly, Whitehall and Washington will not willingly give up their dark secrets. With few exceptions, such as U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich; John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee; and Bob Graham of Florida, the utterly disposable and detestable Democrats have been only too pleased to aid and abet this (heritable) executive dictatorship.

And the media will continue to do what their collective intelligence permits: focus only on the one lie, thus making the lattice more impenetrable.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
July 16, 2003

The post BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

For journalistic jingoism, it was hard to find a better example than the coverage of the high-tech media extravaganza known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom ~ilana

The Faustian bargain hundreds of embedded journalists struck with the military involved capitulating to an elaborate set of limits and conditions. Embedded with the military turned out to be a euphemism for in bed with the military, which is how a truly shameful episode in American television journalism shaped up. For journalistic jingoism, it was hard to find a better example than the coverage of the high-tech media extravaganza known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” What made the supposed American champions of objectivity so much more obnoxious is that they paraded flagrant bias as gritty and honest reporting.

Embeds, for instance, were supervised by the military in the same way Saddam once assigned minders to accompany western journalists. Even so, American television networks went beyond the call of duty in giving unquestioning credence to the home team.

As farsighted as Washington has been in controlling and shaping the emerging information, not least through the embed program, the degree to which the networks transformed into shills for the administration must have exceeded its wildest expectations. (Come to think of it, the dearth of hard-edged questions from the press in general at the U.S. Central Command’s briefings would have done any dictator proud.)

The monolithic quality of the reporting/cheerleading coming from the networks was and still is proof of the slutty sell-out. Practically all network embeds focused exclusively on the pentagon’s version of who did what, when, and how. Logistics usurped real issues; spectacle replaced substance, as the viewer was subjected to a perspective as monochromatic as the green of the night vision optics.

In their coverage, the networks also evinced a thorough assimilation of the Pentagon’s power words. With the deployment of bluster like, “Breaking Baghdad,” “Decapitation,” and “Shock and Awe,” a morally repugnant zeal was the order of the day.

Journalistically, the word “embedded” has bad connotations. Still, reporters who slept with their sources were treated as paragons of truth, while those who refused such cohabitation, and didn’t join the embed program were labeled “unilaterals.” The more independent perspective was thus tagged as one-sided. The networks were complicit in this linguistic co-optation.

Some of the issues that ought to have been highlighted and weren’t:

There was a compelling tale in the obscene power discrepancy between the dilapidated Iraqi military and the American military might. Instead, when network reporters obliged viewers with proof of “huge caches of Iraqi weapons,” their cameras would invariably zero in on ancient AK47s and rusty tubs of bullets. Jarring disagreement between verbal description and image was par for the course in the coverage.

Surely the peculiar specter of the “coalition forces” feigning shock and indignation at Iraq’s lack of commitment to the Geneva Convention was worthy of media commentary? Isn’t the nation that has been aggressed against justified in deploying all methods to repel the invader? Would anyone, including our truth-seeking reporters, have flinched if, in 1990, Kuwaitis had gone all out against the invading Iraqis? If my home were broken into, and if I ruthlessly eliminated the burglar, even when he assured me he was there to ultimately improve my lot, would I be without logical warrant? Or as a 33-year-old Iraqi Shiite told the Los Angeles Times: “Do you allow someone to enter your home and force you out of it?” Iraq had been invaded, yet the Pocahontas Partners were complaining bitterly about the Iraqis’ disrespected for the Convention.

I’m still waiting to hear why it is that the U.S. decides which nations are sovereign and hence immune from invasion, and which are not and can be invaded, their leaders hunted down and killed. Incapable of posing the kind of questions that come with elemental intellectual curiosity, journalists thus remained poker-faced when Central Command issued a corny list of the most-wanted figures in Iraq in the form of a set of playing cards.

The stories that should have been told and weren’t?

I learned about 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas from the Canadian Broadcaster (CBC). Most of my information about Iraqi civilian casualties has come from the CBC. Abbas lost both his arms when an American missile smashed into his home, killing both his parents. Sixty percent of his body was covered with burns that turned septic. The hospital director at the Saddam General said there were hundreds like Ali, killed, orphaned or maimed. Their faces are not seen on American networks.

Reporting hearsay as truth and failing to verify stories has also been part of the networks’ war effort. A Geiger counter that went off in the inexpert hands of a marine was broadcast as possible evidence of weapons-grade plutonium. Every bottle of Cipro tablets became a likely precursor to an anthrax factory. Anchormen and women somberly seconded these “finds,” seldom bothering to issue retractions for misinforming the viewing public.

Periodic reality checks came from the CBC: “So far, soldiers have found gas masks, chemical suits and some white powder. None of it has turned out to be the biological or chemical weapons they are looking for.”

Knowing what we know about Saddam Hussein, it’s probably safe to say that if he had an arsenal, he would have used it. Since he didn’t use his lethal stash in the face of “decapitation,” it’s reasonable to conclude that, either he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or, if he had them, he was an extremely responsible tyrant. Both conclusions incriminate Bush.

In the unlikely event that it will fail to convincingly coordinate the planting of evidence of WMD in Iraq, the Pentagon, aided by the “parrot press,” has begun to prime the American audiences (no other population would swallow the bait) with a new twist. The Associated Press recently reported that, according to the Pentagon, the looters may have removed the evidence. Even better: The Syrians spirited the weapons away. Better still: Onward to Syria!

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
April 16, 2003

The post ON PIMPS AND PRESSTITUTES appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

… to watch Fox News anchorwomen doing the Countdown to Obliterating Iraq segments was like watching bitches on heat.” ~ ilana

Come to think of it, there was a discrepancy between Washington’s treatment of North Korea and its treatment of Iraq only if one was searching for a just principle behind the actions. Abandon principle and settle for an abiding pattern, and it becomes clear that what animated the administration’s assault on Baghdad was what also puts the spring in the step of every schoolyard bully: the smell of vulnerability.

There’s more. War is beneficial not only to Fox News’ ratings; it’s good for the presidency too. The dynamic behind war as a vehicle for political popularity is quite simple, even primitive. Anyone of the Fox News anchors makes a good case study, and the other network personnel soon caught up. The writing was on the wall well before hundreds of embeds officially slipped between the sheets with the military.

At the best of times, Fox anchorwomen are an aggressive amalgam of furiously gyrating facial muscles and staccato Pidgin English. But to watch these women doing the Countdown to Obliterating Iraq segments was like watching bitches on heat. One anchorwoman’s memorable Freudian slip was to express disappointment that there was as yet no “evidence that’ll give us an excuse [her words] to attack Iraq.”

Since the Bush war whirl began, the intellectual climate has changed so rapidly that such faux pas didn’t even register with viewers. The American people had taken this war, its propaganda, and its prosecutors to their hearts—perverted warpath patriotism was what was getting the folks hot. People who are in a constant state of heightened emotional arousal tend to want to remain that way; the emotions are self-reinforcing.

The president, Bush, and his advisers knew that to keep the people tuned-out, they had to keep them turned-on. Simpler than the Stay On Heat principle is the bully convention. It explains why the impressive display of aggression by the North Koreans was a winner that kept Bullyboy at bay.

It was not Iraq that raised the specter of a “Third World War,” after announcing its withdrawal from the world’s foremost nuclear arms-control treaty. And it wasn’t Saddam’s relatively subdued rhetoric that sent U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly scampering to consult with China, Singapore, Indonesia, and Japan. The Iraqi state-controlled press might not have been particularly complimentary about Americans.

But it paled compared to the North Korean press’ call to “turn the citadel of imperialists into a sea of fire.” Or its dictator’s promise to “smash U.S. nuclear maniacs” in a “holy war” if they didn’t back off. There was absolutely no mixed message in the signals that came from North Korea’s man in charge of liaisons with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

As the Associated Press reported, Mr. Son Mun San promised that his plutonium reprocessing plant stood in a state of “readiness.” That sounded like an unadulterated “make my day” message to me. Surprisingly, Pyongyang’s unambiguous bellicosity was interpreted in the U.S. as a “mixed message.” That the U.S. chose to dilute a pure threat with favorable interpretations should occasion no surprise. Show a bully a fist and he will usually retreat, preferring to put a face-saving spin on the affair rather than follow through on the threat.

Which brings me to the multicult cards. Mr. Bush enlisted New Mexico’s Governor and former Clintonite, Bill Richardson, to hold meetings with the North Korean Deputy UN Ambassador. Diversity Dick put the conflict down to cultural differences, claiming that North Koreans simply “don’t negotiate like we do. They don’t have our same mentality.” There’s an element of truth to this.

Whereas the North Koreans were genuinely hopping mad at the perceived threat from the U.S., not least being plunked on the axis of evil, Saddam and the Iraqi people were truly terrified. Saddam’s actions proved it. He had, after all, allowed UN inspectors to transform Iraq into a sophisticated crime scene. Asian self-control being what it is, when the usually inhibited Asians froth at the mouth, beware! Arab effusive demonstrativeness being what it is, when Saddam, the habitual blowhard, toned down his truculence, it should have been taken as a sign of resignation.

That is if sincere diplomacy was ever the administration’s objective, which, of course, it wasn’t.

Soon another American conceit reared its head. A million (doubtless hungry) North Koreans marched on that nation’s capital, many chanting promises of “revenge with blood” for any country that violated their sovereignty. Just as Americans imagined the Iraqi people were panting for an occupying force to liberate them from Saddam, they doubtless believe North Koreans, at their core, are hunkering for a delivery of U.S.-style democracy.

American sentimentality, childishness, and insularity simply don’t admit of a strong national pride in so wretched a people as the Iraqis or the North Koreans. However oppressed, people would sooner deal with their homey Hun than submit to a foreign force, even if it comes bearing minute-made democracy.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
January 15, 2003

The post TUNED-OUT, TURNED-ON, AND HOT FOR WAR appeared first on ILANA MERCER.