Chris Floyd: Lost in the Roar: War Alarms Drowned by Beltway Bloodlust

[babylonsister]

Lost in the Roar: War Alarms Drowned by Beltway Bloodlust
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 28 September 2007


"I got my hammer ringin', baby, but the nails ain't goin' down."
— Bob Dylan

Hammerblows of truth keep falling on the Bush Regime's propaganda campaign for war against Iran, which has been built up out of allegations so specious and shoddy that they make the manifold deceits of the Attack Iraq carnival look like gospel truth. But far from doing any damage to the engine of death now rolling toward Persia, the hammers are not even being heard above the roar.

Of course, it is actually inaccurate to refer to the "Bush Regime's propaganda campaign." As we have noted here before, the Democratic-led Congress has already overwhelmingly swallowed the Bush case for war – the Senate even accepted the Regime's mendacious casus belli unanimously. And this week, the Democrats went even further in adopting aggression against Iran as their own cause, when a majority of them joined with the obedient goose-steppers of the GOP in support of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which effectively if not officially authorized military action against Iran by declaring the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a "foreign terrorist organization" and tying it to attacks on American soldiers in Iraq. The measure accepted at face value the proven mendacities and manipulations of Bush war propaganda, offering a selection of carefully-filtered testimony from the sainted General Petraeus (whom the Senate has declared literally sacrosanct, with its recent passage of an amendment "strongly" condemning any one who exercises their right of free speech to question "the honor, integrity and patriotism" of "any member of the armed forces" and Petraeus in particular). The Democrats have made it clear where they stand on aggression against Iran: alongside – or even in advance of – the war criminals of the Bush Administration.

(For a devastating take on the latest confirmation of Bush's criminal intent to launch a war of aggression against Iraq – the newly released transcript of the talks between Bush and then-Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar just before the war – see Juan Cole's blistering piece: The War Crime of the Century. One central point of the transcript is Bush's admission that he had turned down Saddam's offer to go into exile – one of several offers Iraq put on the table to avoid war before the invasion, including an offer to hold free, internationally-supervised elections and allow heavily-armed foreign troops to conduct WMD inspections. But Bush wanted war; and the war came. Cole's conclusion is damningly true: "(Bush) had a real offer in the hand, of Saddam's flight. He rejected it. By rejecting it, he will have killed at least a million persons and became one of the more monstrous figures in recent world history.")

Now this is the man whom the Democrats are so slavishly eager to support on Iran. This is the man whose minions they so willingly believe about Iran, having already been lied to in precisely the same fashion about Iraq, by precisely the same kind of honorable, patriotic men of unquestionable integrity. (Colin Powell, anyone?) This is beyond cravenness, beyond cowardice, beyond incompetence, beyond even the most bitterly tragic farce. No, something else is at work here. As we have noted before – echoing the powerful arguments of Arthur Silber – the Democrats are doing this because they want to.

It's the same reason they supported the invasion of Iraq; the same reason they supported Bush's obscene tax cuts for the rich; the same reason they supported the outrageous whitewash of the 9/11 investigation; the same reason they championed the "Bankruptcy Bill" put the screws to working people and the poor; the same reason they supported "Defense of Marriage" bills that legitimize hate and penalize love; the same reason why they rolled over and played dead when not one but two presidential elections were stolen from them. It's because they too, like the Bush and his ilk, worship at the altar of money and power. They too believe that the wealthy and well-connected should order the earth for their pleasure, through war, loot, terror, fraud, rapine – by any means necessary. Their "honor" depends solely on how well they serve this cause, not on how well they uphold their Constitutional responsibilities or live up to the ideas they espouse. (See Silber again for more on this.)

more...

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2523/1/

[seemslikeadream]

1. The Depravity of Empire

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/09/depravity-of-empire.html

The Depravity of Empire
Because an empire must, by definition, rely on coercion and murder, any given day in the rule of empire is immoral and detestable for those who genuinely value liberty and peace. But certain days are worse than others. In terms of what it bodes for our future -- and for the future of the world -- yesterday was a particularly awful day in the United States Senate, now controlled and led by the imperial Democrats. If there are any people who still believed that the Democrats would represent a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy, they have no reason to believe it any longer. Even before yesterday's events, maintenance of such a belief required criminal ignorance and/or a willingness to peddle lies and propaganda on a huge scale. I say that for all the reasons discussed in my series, "Dominion Over the World" -- and I note that I have not even concluded that series, and that those essays do not cover anything close to all the reasons for my indictment. The logical and necessary implications of the Senate's actions mean we will see at least several more decades of war, large-scale death, chaos and destruction. It would appear that, with regard to its broad outlines, the 21st century will be the 20th century all over again: endless war, tens of millions of deaths, brutality that spreads across entire continents, and darkness that descends upon the world.

I will comment further on the Senate's actions in a moment, but I first want to consider a broader issue. One of the more viciously dishonest aspects of empire and colonialism is this: after interfering with and attempting to impose their will on numerous countries for decade after decade, colonial powers will occasionally withdraw, at least to some extent. The withdrawal is never complete, for the interference continues via economic and trade policy -- by the use, for example, of punitive sanctions which do nothing to dislodge disfavored regimes but cause untold hardship for the general populace, and which almost inevitably lead to further war, as we saw with Iraq and are now seeing again with Iran, and by various other methods. The endless years of occupation had prevented the victimized countries from developing in their own manner and on their own schedule -- but after they withdraw, and if the exploited nations do not immediately reshape themselves into what the colonial powers consider to be a "civilized" country, those powers condemn the same nations they had earlier destroyed.

Thus, we have the repellent Hillary Clinton saying it's the Iraqis' fault that they didn't avail themselves of the wonderful opportunity we provided to them. The same line is peddled by many other Democrats, and by Republicans as well. To describe this perspective as monstrously and brutally immoral and inhumane does not begin to capture its hideousness. The West has pursued this general pattern in Southeast Asia, in most of Africa and, of course, in the Middle East. As the earlier post discussed, an especially primitive and unforgivable racism is a necessary part of the dynamic involved, and this racism is an inextricable part of the American national myth.

I realize that most Americans' conception of history extends, at best, to the Vietnam war or, if we are contemplating once again the Eternal Virtue and Axiomatic Nobility of America the Great, World War II -- which, as Allesandra Stanley notes about Ken Burns' latest exercise in myth-building, was apparently all about us. (Since I don't have television, I'm not watching the Burns series, so I have no opinion about it myself. But narcissism of this kind is endemic to mainstream American culture; for a very different view of World War II and what we failed to learn from it, see "Let Us All Become Cowards.") Nonetheless, I will ask you to travel farther back in time, to the aftermath of World War I. Since the Senate has now endorsed restructuring the Middle East by means of brutal violence still another time -- which violence is, of course, to be directed by the United States -- we should try to appreciate how long the Western powers have been engaged in this deadly exercise. The following is from David Fromkin's book, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (also excerpted in my essay, "Narcissism and Paternalism as Foreign Policy"):

[seafan]

2. Arthur Silber's aim at these enabling Democrats is as brilliant as it is devastating.

These excerpts must be read by all. This is the cold, ugly Truth.


Arthur Silber
September 27, 2007

And yesterday, our barbarian mapmakers in the U.S. Senate, led by that notable barbarian, Joe Biden, lent their approval to redrawing the lines again:

(T)he Senate approved a resolution by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, calling for greater diplomatic efforts and, in particular, a focus on partitioning Iraq into federal regions, in hopes of reaching a political solution and more swiftly ending the war.

...

Mr. Biden's resolution called on the United States "to actively support a political settlement in Iraq based on the final provisions of the Constitution of Iraq that create a federal system of government and allow for the creation of federal regions consistent with the wishes of the Iraqi people and their elected leaders."

And it said that the U.S. should call on the international community to help and on Iraq's neighbors not to "intervene in or destabilize" Iraq.

The limitless arrogance of these vile politicians is breathtaking. In the context of the U.S. invasion and occupation, the meaningless nod to "the wishes of the Iraqi people and their elected leaders" is worse than insulting. And to demand that Iraq's neighbors not "intervene in or destabilize" Iraq -- after all that we have done and continue to do, and after the genocide that we have caused -- is sickening to an extent that makes accurate description all but impossible.


Because U.S. foreign policy is one bloody, murderous lie piled on top of countless bloody, murderous lies, we can hardly expect Biden or any other politician to be honest to any degree at all about what partition means in fact. For that, you should read Chris Floyd, here and here. This is the truth that no U.S. politician will ever utter:

"On the actual day of the relocation operation...." Try to imagine such a day, when millions of Iraqis are uprooted and forced to move to other areas, all under guard by "Iraqi and US-led coalition forces." Actually it's not that hard to imagine, for we have seen it before: in faded photographs and newsreel footage and films like "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah," and "Schindler's List." Less familiar in the popular imagination but perhaps even more apposite are the "relocations" of ethnic populations carried out by Josef Stalin, when whole peoples, such as the Chechens, were uprooted and transported by force to other regions. Or we could of course look closer to home, at the "Trail of Tears," the deadly removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to concentration camps in Oklahoma.

These kinds of scenes are precisely what the clean-limbed O'Hanlon and his partner envisage for Iraq, followed by a life ensnared by checkpoints and passes and internal border controls. It may sound harsh, brutal and inhuman, but not to worry: "For the most part these burdens would be bearable."

....This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them. And all of this done for no other reason but to enhance the coddled elite's power, privilege and pleasures.

You can now add the Democratic-led U.S. Senate to the murderers' row that includes Bush, the Republicans, O'Hanlon and the other killers.

One genocide is not enough for the U.S. Senate, for yesterday they also advanced our government closer to the next one:

The Senate approved a resolution today urging the Bush administration to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, and lawmakers briefly set aside partisan differences to approve a measure calling for stepped-up diplomacy to forge a political solution in Iraq.

Since last month, the White House has been weighing whether to deem the entire Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group or to take a narrower step focused only on the Quds Force, an elite unit of the corps. Either approach would signal a more confrontational posture by declaring a segment of the Iranian military to be a terrorist organization.

...

The Senate resolution, which is not binding, calls on the administration to designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group and to impose economic sanctions. Even if the White House were to take such a step, policy experts said it was unclear that it would be anything more than a symbolic gesture without the cooperation of other nations.

The measure proposed by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent of Connecticut who votes with Republicans on war issues, relied heavily on testimony earlier this month by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the top American political official in Baghdad.

It quoted General Petraeus as saying it is "increasingly apparent to both coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps Quds Force, seeks to turn the Shiite militia extremists into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."

.....

You have to hand it to the Washington Democrats and those commentators and bloggers who continue to shill for them. The Democrats count on the American public and their lobotomized lapdogs not to remember significant events from one week to the next -- and the Democrats' enablers willingly render themselves deaf, dumb and blind. The Democrats first put on a phony show of aggressively questioning Petraeus and doubting his propagandistic claims, and very shortly thereafter they rely on Petraeus's lies to set the stage for World War III.

I almost admire the Democrats' defenders in a certain way. The Democrats stab them deep in the gut and, while the knife is disemboweling them, the Democrats continue to lie in their agony-ridden faces -- and the victims still tell these bastards they will continue to support them. This collection of subhumans give sado-masochists a bad name. The commitment to cruelty, self-abasement and self-humiliation is all but perfect. It's no wonder they can regard one genocide after another with equanimity. It appears none of these people has a conscience any longer to be troubled in the smallest degree.

I will not go over the significance of the Revolutionary Guard amendment. I went over that ground in detail in "The Worsening Nightmare." Let it be noted that, if and when World War III destroys much of the world and the comfortable, ignorance-ridden lives of many Americans, neither the Democrats nor their defenders should look to any remotely civilized person for forgiveness. It will not be forthcoming.

So, still another time, I note that murder, chaos, devastation and human suffering on an ungraspable scale are what the U.S. governing class wants. Is it what you want? For many Americans, the answer is: Yes. Yes, it is.

God damn all such people to hell.

.....

US Senate votes to divide Iraq (Via Juan Cole)

September 27, 2007

The US Senate has approved a Bosnia-style plan to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines, as car bombs and other attacks killed at least 56 people in the strife-torn country in a day of mayhem.

The bloodiest attack was a double car bombing on a crowded Baghdad shopping street that killed at least 32. The bloodletting, in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, was the worst Baghdad attack since July.

Sunni insurgents have launched a systematic campaign to assassinate police chiefs, police officers, other Interior Ministry officials and tribal leaders throughout Iraq, staging at least 10 attacks in 48 hours, reports said yesterday.

In Washington, the US Government triggered a bruising new battle with Congress by demanding the mammoth sum of almost $US190 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2008 budget request from the Pentagon - $US42 million higher than an earlier estimate - was the Bush administration's largest plea for funding yet for the six-year-old war on terror.

.....

The measure would not force a change in President George W. Bush's war strategy, but provides a key test of an idea drawing rising interest in Washington despite opposition from the Bush administration.

The plan, offered as an amendment to a defence policy bill, would provide for decentralizing Iraq in a federal system as permitted by Iraq's constitution to stop the country from becoming a failed state.

It proposes to separate Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni entities, with a federal government in Baghdad in charge of border security and oil revenues.

.....

Advocates say the plan, championed by Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Joseph Biden, offers a route to a political solution in Iraq that could allow US troops to eventually go home without leaving chaos behind.

The measure won support from some prominent Republicans, providing a rare moment of bipartisanship in the intensely polarized debate over the Iraq war.

Critics, who have included the White House, have argued Biden's plan is a recipe for more chaos in Iraq.

.....

Juan Cole writes:

The US Senate voted for a soft partition of Iraq on Thursday. First they messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it. It makes no sense to me; the US Senate doesn't even have the authority to divide Iraq. Wouldn't that be for the Iraqi parliament?

There are just no words for what is happening.



(Bold type added)

[babylonsister]

3. Bookmarked, and thank you, seafan!

:hi: :thumbsup:

[Emit]

6. Silber is brutal.

And he kicks ass. I just posted one of his scathing pieces earlier:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1933499&mesg_id=1933499

Ouch!

A lot to chew on at his blog.

[KoKo]

8. The Silber comments are devastating indictment of what we are seeing....

stark, harsh and there's no way of seeing partition or bombing of Iran in any other light ...no matter how much lipstick some Dems want to put on these crimes against humanity. :-(

[seafan]

9. Mr. Silber's blog is very close to my state of mind these days.

We all have to keep pushing for the facts, tearing down the walls of secrecy around these ba$tard$ and getting the word out to as many of our fellow citizens as quickly as we can, because with these monsters leering at us from the White House, time is not on our side.


While certain members of Congress just simply want to wait it out until January, 2009, that will be a catastrophic error.


We will deal with those members of Congress who operate by cowardice and complicity in the next election. But right now, we are fighting for our literal survival against madmen at the controls.

[bbgrunt]

4. Chris Floyd says it perfectly.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. K & R

[lonestarnot]

7. Hawks on the wire.

Waiting to swoop.