Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Responding to the President’s Address on Sunday
Sunday night, President Bush completed a campaign to persuade public opinion to support his war policy with a brief address on national television. In it he asked the American people, including his critics, for understanding and patience as the Iraq war continues.
In the course of his persuasion campaign, Bush has repeated many of the discredited assertions that the public has already grown weary of hearing. He has continued to insist on “staying the course” in Iraq, a course that offers neither “victory” nor departure, but only additional US military fatalities, which he has virtually promised and begged us to tolerate. More, it is a course in which US government conduct will continue to antagonize the people of Iraq and the Middle East with destructive consequences there and here.
There, US presence has meant as many as one hundred thousand dead, (overwhelmingly non-combatants), destruction of a modern industrial society, summary detention and torture. Here, the commitment of national resources to war has robbed our society of so many possibilities, retarding our capacity to advance health policy, education policy and all manner of social well-being and wrecking our capacity to respond usefully to a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina.
Moreover, by crafting an endless “war on terror” replete with an ever-changing “enemy,” invasion, torture and spying on our own society’s dissenters, the Bush administration has gone far in fulfilling George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother prophecy, making a mockery of the ideals of freedom and democracy in the process. Not only is this conduct a mirror-image of the extreme authoritarianism it criticizes in Saddam Hussein, for example, but it returns us to police-state tactics and their inevitable abuses that we thought we’d left behind after the Nixon administration collapsed in disgrace 30 years ago.
We should not be surprised. After all, some of the chief figures responsible for cultivating the current national security mentality and policy, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, learned their craft in the same Nixon administration, (as did Bush’s father) and have now brought the same into the 21st century to discredit our country – again.
Despite his tough posturing and his appeal to the American people to bear with him, Bush’s administration has shown itself a far greater threat to our country than any foreign government or terrorist organization, destroying from within what outsiders can’t possibly attack - our society’s ideals and even its soul. Like the Nixon regime before it, the disastrous Bush regime needs to exit – stage right – and now!
Paul Magno, Co-ordinator
In the course of his persuasion campaign, Bush has repeated many of the discredited assertions that the public has already grown weary of hearing. He has continued to insist on “staying the course” in Iraq, a course that offers neither “victory” nor departure, but only additional US military fatalities, which he has virtually promised and begged us to tolerate. More, it is a course in which US government conduct will continue to antagonize the people of Iraq and the Middle East with destructive consequences there and here.
There, US presence has meant as many as one hundred thousand dead, (overwhelmingly non-combatants), destruction of a modern industrial society, summary detention and torture. Here, the commitment of national resources to war has robbed our society of so many possibilities, retarding our capacity to advance health policy, education policy and all manner of social well-being and wrecking our capacity to respond usefully to a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina.
Moreover, by crafting an endless “war on terror” replete with an ever-changing “enemy,” invasion, torture and spying on our own society’s dissenters, the Bush administration has gone far in fulfilling George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother prophecy, making a mockery of the ideals of freedom and democracy in the process. Not only is this conduct a mirror-image of the extreme authoritarianism it criticizes in Saddam Hussein, for example, but it returns us to police-state tactics and their inevitable abuses that we thought we’d left behind after the Nixon administration collapsed in disgrace 30 years ago.
We should not be surprised. After all, some of the chief figures responsible for cultivating the current national security mentality and policy, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, learned their craft in the same Nixon administration, (as did Bush’s father) and have now brought the same into the 21st century to discredit our country – again.
Despite his tough posturing and his appeal to the American people to bear with him, Bush’s administration has shown itself a far greater threat to our country than any foreign government or terrorist organization, destroying from within what outsiders can’t possibly attack - our society’s ideals and even its soul. Like the Nixon regime before it, the disastrous Bush regime needs to exit – stage right – and now!
Paul Magno, Co-ordinator
