The Christening of Battleship Bush - Democratic Underground

bigtree

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Sat Oct-07-06 10:11 AM
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The Christening of Battleship Bush

Edited on Sat Oct-07-06 11:05 AM by bigtree

October 7, 2006

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoast, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not the reliance against the resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle." -- Lincoln

The Bush kings christened an pernicious, imperious symbol of their militaristic legacies today. Northrup-Grumman has named their 11-hundred-foot, last in-the-series, Nimitz-class aircraft carrier after the former President George H.W. Bush, and will let their two most important benefactors oversee the launch of the latest floating platform of U.S. projected aggression and contrived world dominance. "She is unrelenting, she is unyielding, she is unstoppable," the younger Bush said.

Like the Chevron oil tanker which was named after their cunning corporate apologist Condi, whose shilling for the billionaires earned her an elevated role in the military industry menageries of both Bush regimes, this mammoth instrument of wanton death and destruction dealt from a safe distance will allow the legacies of their collective doctrines of manufactured war for hegemony over Mideast oil, projecting U.S. intentions of imperialistic expansionism all over the globe, well into the future.

It's an irony that both Bushes began their presidencies proclaiming themselves to be "education presidents", and devolved their presidencies into military autocracies. The younger Bush took on other more elaborate monikers like, the 'decider', the 'explainer', and so on, as he assumed the same contrived Executive powers his father used to direct Ollie North in Nicaragua with their secret, separate-government military operations in Iran/Contra, and expanded that dictatorial control every time Congress blanched from their responsibility to hold him accountable.

Bush I, who ultimately triumphed in making Kuwait safe for future monarchies, said of his own military adventure in Iraq, "We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a New World Order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations."

That was utter nonsense. The rule of law that was enforced in the ousting of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was nothing more than the product of a patronage that was forged in the U.N. with U.S. taxpayer-funded payments to Saudi Arabia's King Faud, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Hussein, and others. The risk to the world community, as stated by the president then, and by this president today; that an enriched Saddam would align with some radical Muslim theocracy, would be in sharp contrast to the campaigns against those very forces in which Iraq had waged war at our bequest and with our eager assistance.

Both of the Bush's were recruited by their military industry benefactors into using our nation's military to "protect the flow of Mideast oil to the U.S.," as the elder Bush put it before he began the first bombing of Baghdad. The Bush I administration issued a national security directive which listed among its objectives; ". . . the defense of U.S. vital interests in the region, if necessary through the use of military force; and defense against forces that would cause added damage to the U.S. and world economies." More importantly, the security directive declared that access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key, friendly states in the area were vital to U.S. national security. It was on that basis that President Herbert Walker Bush first waged war with Iraq.

The Bush I administration's stated objective in their Gulf war was to prevent Iraq from obtaining a seaport from which Iraqi shipments would supposedly depress an already sputtering world market. Saddam Hussein had not threatened the American people in his power grab for a greater share of the oil pie. Aside from the question of the danger that the expansion of Saddam's dictatorship may have posed to the region, the defense of Kuwait's territorial integrity was a foreign concept to H.W. Bush who had participated in and overseen the ordering of the mining of the Nicaraguan harbor, the invasion of Grenada, the overthrow of the president of Panama and the installation of a U.S. puppet government there, as well as the acquiescence of Britain's invasion of the Falklands in 1982.

The younger Bush has outdone his father in his own exploitation of our nation's military resources and defenses, and in his stalwart support of the trillion dollar military industry. The election of the younger Bush and Dick Cheney was a watershed for the military corporations. Both had been compliant stooges of military corporations; Bush in his home state, and Cheney, wherever he could exploit his tenure as defense secretary during the first Iraq assault and build on his past deal-making with the Mideast patrons of that aggression.

The present war with Iraq is the ambition of the corporate wing of the conservative establishment who views Iraq as a potential wedge against the domination of Mideast oil-producing nations which, in many respects, are openly hostile to American economic interests in the region. Having failed to turn the first war to their corporate advantage, the exiled power brokers brooded and plotted to revive a public campaign against Saddam Hussein which would unseat the dictator and allow the U.S. to install an authority there compliant to American business concerns.

During the 2000 campaign Bush and Cheney complained that developments of new military technologies had reached "all-time lows." But that would only be a concern to the industry, not to the average American. The U.S. arsenal is full of high-tech weapons that don't work or that they don't use. Their call for a 'new generation' of weapons was intended to facilitate the neocrook agendas of Bush administration hawks who would project U.S. influence around the globe like mercenary carpetbaggers through intimidation from the force of our weaponry, whenever given free reign. Northrup-Grumman, an offshoot from the other military industry giant, Lockheed, the bestower of the Nimitz-naming, has been allowed by Bush to infect civilian and military offices of his regime with their military-industrial warriors:

I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs was a Northrup-Grumman consultant. Dov Zakheim, Under Secretary for Comptroller of Defense was a paid advisory board member of Northrup-Grumman. Nelson F. Gibbs, Air Force; Assistant Secretary for Installations, Environment and Logistics is a former corporate comptroller for Northrop-Grumman. Sean O'Keefe, former NASA Administrator was on a paid advisory board of Northrop Grumman. James G. Roche, former Secretary of the Air Force, was a former president of Northrop-Grumman. Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of DOD, and former assistant to Dick Cheney, was a Northrop-Grumman consultant. Douglas J. Feith, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Director of Iraq Reconstruction was president and managing partner of former law firm, Feith & Zell, whose clients included Northrop-Grumman.

Bush is projecting a domineering image of the United States around the world which has provoked lesser equipped countries to desperate, unconventional defenses; or resigned them to a humiliating surrender to our rape of their lands, their resources and their communities. Bush intends for there to be more conquest - like in Iraq - as the United States exercises its military force around the world; our mandate, our justification, presumably inherent in the mere possession of our instruments of destruction.

Our folly is evident in the rejection of our ambitions by even the closest of our allies, as we reject all entreaties to moderate our manufactured mandate to conquer. Isolation is enveloping our nation like the warming of the atmosphere and the creeping melt of our planet's ancient glaciers. We are unleashing a new, unnecessary fear between the nations of the world as we dissolve decades of firm understandings about an America power which was to be guileless in its unassailable defenses. The falseness of our diplomacy is revealed in our scramble for ‘usable', tactical nuclear missiles, new weapons systems, and our new justifications for their use.

The Bush's routs of Saddam may have made them appear to be warrior kings. But in the context of their overwhelming domination of the inept Saddam and the hapless Iraqi army, and the younger Bush's ineptness in the 'hunt' for bin-Laden, they more resemble Don Quixote. In the classic tale of the ideal vs. the real, Quixote battles windmills that appear to be giants, and sheep that look to him like armies. He believes himself the victor, comes to his senses, only to be trapped by his delusion; forced to continue to play the conquering hero.

They are not heroes. They are the world's most dangerous villains in their collective unraveling of decades of understanding of America's role as a partner to the world; dictating their "ideology" to the world through their respective, repressive exercises of the force of our defenses, and through their mindless sacrifices of our soldiers lives and livelihoods for their personal greed and zeal. Our nation, and, our world doesn't need another carrier of death bearing the moniker of the Bush kings to sail the globe, spreading their message of suppression and fear. Certainly, for those who've suffered the airborne assaults and the "shock and awe" that have been launched from these imperial battleships, their celebration will wait until these erstwhile relics of war, the Bushes and their battleship, are resigned to their ultimate decommission and abandonment to rust.

by Ron Fullwood

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_full_061007_the_christening_of_b.htm

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bigtree