Watergate in historical perspective

[RBHam]

Why does today’s criminal White House face no similar challenge?
By Patrick Martin
3 June 2005
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/deep-j03.shtml

excerpt:
The Watergate crisis has enormous relevance to the current state of affairs in American political life. By any objective standard, the administration of George W. Bush is guilty of far more flagrant crimes than even those of Richard Nixon, yet it faces virtually no comparable opposition within official political and media circles.

Like Nixon’s, the Bush administration is engaged in a criminal war of aggression, launched under false pretenses (the 9/11 attacks, which had nothing to do with Iraq, playing the role of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” used by Lyndon Johnson to obtain congressional authorization for war). Like Nixon’s, but on a much greater scale, the Bush administration presides over a deteriorating US position in the world economy, which threatens, sooner rather than later, to trigger socioeconomic convulsions within the United States.

The great difference is that unlike Nixon, George W. Bush does not yet confront a mass social and political movement from below, in opposition to his reactionary policies. The American labor movement has collapsed, as globalization has undermined its perspective of pressuring corporate employers within a national labor market, and a bureaucracy comprised of gangsters and parasites has sabotaged all efforts by workers to defend their living standards and jobs.

The protest movements of the 1960s were ultimately absorbed into the Democratic Party, that graveyard of political opposition to American capitalism. The former antiwar protester, Bill Clinton, personifies the drastic swing to the right in American liberalism and the abandonment of even the slightest criticism of the capitalist market and imperialist war. John Kerry, who made his start in politics as an impassioned opponent of the Vietnam War, based his presidential campaign last year on his war record, not his antiwar record, and vowed to achieve victory for the American occupation of Iraq.

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Same ole, same ole,

[seemslikeadream]

2. The Other Bomb Drops

Jeremy Scahill Wed Jun 1, 6:29 PM ET

It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.

But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.

At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence showing that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war." The paper cites newly released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that "the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially begun.

more
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20050601/cm_thenation/20050613scahill




Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org on C-SPAN 7:45 - 8:30 a.m. EST Saturday June 4