Iraq, 9/11, Drugs, Cheney, and Watergate Two

[reprehensor]

A Post-Election Wrap-Up: Iraq, 9/11, Drugs, Cheney, and Watergate Two

by Peter Dale Scott

27 November 2004

snip

For the next few weeks many people's eyes will be focused on obtaining an accurate vote count in Ohio and other close states. But beyond the efforts to fix a broken electoral system there must also be a strategy to heal America's deep divisions as a society, if we are ever to see democracy work. To defeat the divisive electoral tactics of a Karl Rove, we must find issues which can bring right and left together to correct the excesses of a bureaucratic center. I shall argue that the quest for truth about 9/11 is such an issue. I believe further that it stands a better chance than vote recounts of shortening George Bush's occupancy of the White House.

snip

It is tempting to think that the most urgent priority is a tactical one: to protest the slaughter in Fallujah and other Iraqi hot points. But beyond the battle of Fallujah one has to think how to contest the neocons who are intent on extending what they call "World War IV" beyond the borders of Iraq. One of them, Frank Gaffney, has in the National Review Online (11/5/04) renewed their call for the US to proceed (after "the reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens . . . in Iraq") to "Regime change -- one way or another -- in Iran and North Korea."

Such irresponsible language is offered I believe in part as a provocation, not just to persuade the White House to plan new invasions but also to dissuade Iran and Syria from helping to bring peace to the Middle East. For as the Financial Times sensibly observed,

Both Syria and Iran fear the US is determined to bring down their own regimes when its hands are free from Iraq. So co-operation on Iraq may not be sustainable without a broader and friendlier dialogue between these two governments and Washington. <1>

Gaffney is speaking for a neocon fraction, hitherto unsuccessful, inside the Bush tent. As Newsweek reported last September,

administration hawks are pinning their hopes on regime change in Tehran -- by covert means, preferably, but by force of arms if necessary. . . . Informed sources say the memos echo the administration's abortive Iraq strategy: oust the existing regime, swiftly install a pro-U.S. government in its place (extracting the new regime's promise to renounce any nuclear ambitions) and get out. This daredevil scheme horrifies U.S. military leaders. . . . <2>

The current mood on the right is that they can now go far beyond the political boundaries previously imposed. My hope is precisely that the President's triumphalism, newly liberated from thoughts of re-election, will lead to his own downfall in less than four years. It is interesting that Karl Rove, even while sounding himself somewhat triumphant, recently saw fit to warn on TV that "Those that the gods destroy they first make prideful." <3> (I doubt that Greek wisdom will have much impact on Bush's God-driven certainties.)

snip

We now have four new books which between them strengthen the case that the Bush-Cheney Administration itself, taken as a whole, was at least partly responsible for the catastrophe of 9/11, not just by negligence but by design. I hope readers will buy and study them: Paul Thompson's The Terror Timeline, David Ray Griffin's The 9 /11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon, and Peter Lance's Cover Up. (I'm not impartial on 9/11, after having blurbed the first two books, and being mentioned in the third.)

Each book has its own different merits. Griffin's is the best introduction, Thompson's is the best research guide, Ruppert's is the strongest case against Cheney. Lance's Cover Up, while it says less about Bush and Cheney than the other books, is the best expose of how the 9/11 Commission became a seamless part of an ongoing cover-up, because of the involvement of some of its members and staff in prior pre-9/11 scandals, which a true investigation would have exposed. While his narrative is complex, it reaches to profound malfunctions in America's justice and intelligence establishments.

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[OneBlueSky]

1. "we must find issues which can bring right and left together . . .

to correct the excesses of a bureaucratic center" . . .

absolutely correct, and something that I've been saying (though not as eloquently) for some time now . . . specifically, that this whole right/left dichotomy is, in large part, an artificial construct to keep us occupied with peripheral issues that divide us so we won't have the time or the energy to focus on the core issues that can unite us . . . those on the left and those on the right (except for the real crazies) have MUCH more in common than not . . .

our common interests include things like jobs, peace, honesty in government, fiscal sanity in government, fair elections, fair taxation, environmental protection, corporate re-regulation and control, real domestic security, and the U.S. position in the world (among many others) . . . these are issues that all of us could come together around and confront the ruling elite with . . . instead they keep us arguing about abortion and gay marriage and such, setting the agenda and having their house organs (the MSM) reinforce it daily . . .

what most terrifies BushCo is that people will figure all this out and begin supporting populist (as is "good for the people") and progressive (as in "forward looking and reality based") solutions to these problems . . . which would leave them with a very small following indeed for their regressive, reactionary, and imperialist policies . . .

and probably a one-way ticket out of office and into the closest federal penitentiary . . .