Rank Ignorance Fails(Paul Craig Roberts barf alert)

In keeping with its established role as purveyor of disinformation, Fox "News" talking head Brit Hume misreported Fox's own poll. On the Jan. 26 "Special Report," Hume said that 51 percent of Americans "would now support" air strikes on Iran.

What the poll found is that if diplomacy fails, 51 percent would support air strikes.

Can we be optimistic and assume that the American public would not regard an orchestrated failure by the Bush administration as a true diplomatic failure? Alas, we cannot expect too much from a population in thrall to disinformation. The "evidence" that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons consists of mere assertion by members of the Bush administration and the neoconsevative media. Iran says it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have found no evidence of a weapons program (and they wouldn't lie, would they?).

Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Under the treaty, signatories have the right to develop nuclear energy. All they are required to do is to make reports to the IAEA and keep their facilities open to inspection. Iran complies with these requirements.

There is no Iranian "defiance." When news media report "defiance," they purvey disinformation. The "seals" on Iranian nuclear facilities were placed there voluntarily by the Iranians while they attempted to resolve the false charges brought by the Bush administration.

The "Iran crisis" is entirely the product of the Bush administration's determination to deprive Iran of its rights as a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty. It is one more demonstration of President Bush's belief that his policies are not constrained by fact, law and international treaties.

Despite the clear and unambiguous facts, the Fox-Opinion Dynamics poll reports that 60 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 36 percent of Democrats support using air strikes and ground troops against Iran in order to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

This poll indicates an appalling extent of ignorance and misinformation among the American public(he's talking about himself again). The Bush administration will take advantage of this ignorance to initiate another war in the Middle East.

A majority of Americans have now been deceived twice on the same issue. Just as there was no evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, there is no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

There is nothing but unproven assertions - assertions, moreover, that are contradicted by the evidence that does exist. Americans, it would appear, are so eager for wars that they welcome being fooled into them.

One wonders, also, where the 60 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 36 percent of Democrats think the United States will find the ground troops with which to invade Iran.

As the three-year-old "cakewalk war" in Iraq has made completely clear, the United States does not have enough ground troops to successfully occupy Iraq and to suppress a small insurgency drawn from a Sunni population of 5 million people.

We hear report after report from military authorities that the Iraq war is straining our armed forces to the breaking point. For example, a Pentagon study by Andrew Krepinevich (reported by The Associated Press on Jan. 24) concludes that the U.S. Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency.

Every military expert knows this to be true, although few dare to say it. If the U.S. military is at the breaking point from trying to deal with an insurgency drawn from 5 million people, how can Bush send ground troops into vastly larger Iran with a population of 70 million people?

Another recent poll, a Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, finds that 57 percent of the respondents "favor military intervention if Iran's government pursues a program that could enable it to build nuclear arms." Fifty-three percent of these same respondents believe it was not worth going to war against Iraq.

The poll thus reveals the American public as grist for the neoconservatives' war mill.

If a country can produce material for nuclear energy, it can, with additional facilities and knowledge, produce material for nuclear weapons. Thus, if Iran exercises its rights under the non-proliferation treaty, 57 percent of Americans support a U.S. military attack on Iran!

American politicians, whose strings are pulled by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee despite AIPAC's current engulfment in spying charges against the United States, are demanding that the United States attack Iran in order to protect Israel(Ahhhh, those pesky Joooos).

One excuse for these demands is the statement by the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Europeans should give Israel a piece of Europe and move the country there.

His statement that Israel should be wiped out is one intended for Muslim ears, not a declaration of an Iranian program of action. The Iranian president is simply elevating Iran's standing among Muslims by taking advantage of the anger that President Bush has created against the United States and Israel.

The notion that Iran might march into Israel is laughable(Yeah, that's what we're worried about). Iran has four routes into Israel: through Turkey and Syria, through Iraq and Syria, through Iraq and Jordan (or Lebanon), and through Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Three of these routes are foreclosed by U.S. troops on the ground, and the fourth by the Turkish Army.

Moreover, Israel has never signed the non-proliferation treaty, and, unlike Iran, Israel does have nuclear weapons. An Iranian invasion of Israel could be fatal for Iran.

Why, then, is the American population being whipped up by the Bush administration and Fox "News" into war hysteria against Iran?

Fox is aggressively agitating for war with Iran. On shows such as "Hannity and Colmes," guest after guest - Newt Gingrich, various retired generals, pundits and even Democratic politicians - agitate for attacking Iran.

For example, on Jan. 26 and 27, liberal Democrat Bob Beckel said on Fox that the United States has "a moral obligation to take out what we could of Iran's nuclear capabilities." Newt Gingrich said that the Iranian "dictatorship" is "too dangerous" to leave "in charge of one of the world's largest supplies of oil."

On Jan. 27, Democratic strategist Pat Cadell expressed mystification as to how strongly the polls surged, literally overnight, in support for attacking Iran.

One wonders if Americans ever think of the consequences of the rash actions they favor. The Bush administration has placed Iraq in the hands of the majority Shia, who are allied with Iran, which is allied with Hizbollah, the strongest military force in Lebanon, which is friendly to Hamas, the new Palestinian authority.

What response might a U.S. attack on Iran bring from the Shia population in Iraq? What terrorism might Iran unleash throughout the Middle East? What U.S. puppets might fall?

What consequences might follow if Iran not only shuts off Iranian oil, but knocks out facilities throughout the region and blocks oil flows from the Middle East?

Compared to attacking Iran, attacking Iraq was a small, if reckless, risk. Nevertheless, the unexpected consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq have prevented the Bush administration from achieving its goals.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida must be marveling at the rank stupidity of the American people. Maybe Fox "News" only pretends to be the "ministry of war propaganda" for the Bush administration and is in the employ of al-Qaida, instead.

War is not strengthening America's position in the Middle East, as gains by extremists in Palestinian, Iraqi, Pakistani and Egyptian elections attest. There is no prospect of the Bush administration imposing its will on the Middle East.

This is VERY LONG

But for those who care, Roberts does outline how he went from being a conservative to a conspiracy monger whose exotic theories would stand proud in DU

Also, at one point, Roberts makes an implicit -- hell, it's explicit -- observation that GWB = Hitler.

Roberts recounts how the German High Command tried to get rid of Hitler, but only Hitler's foolish adventures in Russia finally doomed the Nazi leader. (I guess the United States didn't have anything to do with the fall of Germany, so perhaps his hatred of this country pre-dates Bush's rise to power.)

Roberts suggests that our upcoming military adventures in Iran and Syria will similarly doom the 21st Century "jackboots" who now march through the halls of power in
the White House -- in his view.

This was posted on counterpunch.org, which is well to the left of democrat underground

Here we go:

*****
Who Will Save America?
My Epiphany

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

A number of readers have asked me when did I undergo my epiphany, abandon right-wing Reaganism and become an apostle of truth and justice.

I appreciate the friendly sentiment, but there is a great deal of misconception in the question.

When I saw that the neoconservative response to 9/11 was to turn a war against stateless terrorism into military attacks on Muslim states, I realized that the Bush administration was committing a strategic blunder with open-ended disastrous consequences for the US that, in the end, would destroy Bush, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement.

My warning was not prompted by an effort to save Bush's bacon. I have never been any party's political or ideological servant. I used my positions in the congressional staff and the Reagan administration to change the economic policy of the United States. In my efforts, I found more allies among influential Democrats, such as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long, Joint Economic Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen and my Georgia Tech fraternity brother Sam Nunn, than I did among traditional Republicans who were only concerned about the budget deficit.

My goals were to reverse the Keynesian policy mix that caused worsening "Phillips curve" trade-offs between employment and inflation and to cure the stagflation that destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency. No one has seen a "Phillips curve" trade-off or experienced stagflation since the supply-side policy was implemented. (These gains are now being eroded by the labor arbitrage that is replacing American workers with foreign ones. In January 2004 I teamed up with Democratic Senator Charles Schumer in the New York Times and at a Brookings Institution conference in a joint effort to call attention to the erosion of the US economy and Americans' job prospects by outsourcing.)

The supply-side policy used reductions in the marginal rate of taxation on additional income to create incentives to expand production so that consumer demand would result in increased real output instead of higher prices. No doubt, the rich benefitted, but ordinary people were no longer faced simultaneously with rising inflation and lost jobs. Employment expanded for the remainder of the century without having to pay for it with high and rising rates of inflation. Don't ever forget that Reagan was elected and re-elected by blue collar Democrats.

The left-wing's demonization of Ronald Reagan owes much to the Republican Establishment. The Republican Establishment regarded Reagan as a threat to its hegemony over the party. They saw Jack Kemp the same way. Kemp, a professional football star quarterback, represented an essentially Democratic district. Kemp was aggressive in challenging Republican orthodoxy. Both Reagan and Kemp spoke to ordinary people. As a high official in the Reagan administration, I was battered by the Republican Establishment, which wanted enough Reagan success so as not to jeopardize the party's "lock on the presidency" but enough failure so as to block the succession to another outsider. Anyone who reads my book, The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1984) will see what the real issues were.

If I had time to research my writings over the past 30 years, I could find examples of partisan articles in behalf of Republicans and against Democrats. However, political partisanship is not the corpus of my writings. I had a 16-year stint as Business Week's first outside columnist, despite hostility within the magazine and from the editor's New York social set, because the editor regarded me as the most trenchant critic of the George H.W. Bush administration in the business. The White House felt the same way and lobbied to have me removed from the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Earlier when I resigned from the Reagan administration to accept appointment to the new chair, CSIS was part of Georgetown University. The University's liberal president, Timothy Healy, objected to having anyone from the Reagan administration in a chair affiliated with Georgetown University. CSIS had to defuse the situation by appointing a distinguished panel of scholars from outside universities, including Harvard, to ratify my appointment.

I can truly say that at one time or the other both sides have tried to shut me down. I have experienced the same from "free thinking" libertarians, who are free thinking only inside their own box.

In Reagan's time we did not recognize that neoconservatives had a Jacobin frame of mind. Perhaps we were not paying close enough attention. We saw neoconservatives as former left-wingers who had realized that the Soviet Union might be a threat after all. We regarded them as allies against Henry Kissinger's inclination to reach an unfavorable accommodation with the Soviet Union. Kissinger thought, or was believed to think, that Americans had no stomach for a drawn-out contest and that he needed to strike a deal before the Soviets staked the future on a lack of American resolution.

Reagan was certainly no neoconservative. He went along with some of their schemes, but when neoconservatives went too far, he fired them. George W. Bush promotes them. The left-wing might object that the offending neocons in the Reagan administration were later pardoned, but there was sincere objection to criminalizing what was seen, rightly or wrongly, as stalwartness in standing up to communism.

Neoconservatives were disappointed with Reagan. Reagan's goal was to END the cold war, not to WIN it. He made common purpose with Gorbachev and ENDED the cold war. It is the new Jacobins, the neoconservatives, who have exploited this victory by taking military bases to Russian borders.

I have always objected to injustice. My writings about prosecutorial abuse have put me at odds with "law and order conservatives." I have written extensively about wrongful convictions, both of the rich and famous and the poor and unknown. My thirty-odd columns on the frame-up of 26 innocent people in the Wenatchee, Washington, child sex abuse witch hunt played a role in the eventual overturning of the wrongful convictions.

My book, with Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, details the erosion of the legal rights that make law a shield of the innocent instead of a weapon in the hands of government. Without the protection of law, rich and poor alike are at the mercy of government. In their hatred of "the rich," the left-wing overlooks that in the 20th century the rich were the class most persecuted by government. The class genocide of the 20th century is the greatest genocide in history.

Americans have forgotten what it takes to remain free. Instead, every ideology, every group is determined to use government to advance its agenda. As the government's power grows, the people are eclipsed.

We have reached a point where the Bush administration is determined to totally eclipse the people. Bewitched by neoconservatives and lustful for power, the Bush administration and the Republican Party are aligning themselves firmly against the American people. Their first victims, of course, were the true conservatives. Having eliminated internal opposition, the Bush administration is now using blackmail obtained through illegal spying on American citizens to silence the media and the opposition party.

Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.

The United States is undergoing a coup against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil liberties, and democracy itself. The "liberal press" has been co-opted. As everyone must know by now, the New York Times has totally failed its First Amendment obligations, allowing Judith Miller to make war propaganda for the Bush administration, suppressing for an entire year the news that the Bush administration was illegally spying on American citizens, and denying coverage to Al Gore's speech that challenged the criminal deeds of the Bush administration.

The TV networks mimic Fox News' faux patriotism. Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda.

The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.

Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are not our protectors. They undermine our protection by trashing the Constitution and the civil liberties it guarantees. Those with a tyrannical turn of mind have always used fear and hysteria to overcome obstacles to their power and to gain new means of silencing opposition.

Consider the no-fly list. This list has no purpose whatsoever but to harass and disrupt the livelihoods of Bush's critics. If a known terrorist were to show up at check-in, he would be arrested and taken into custody, not told that he could not fly. What sense does it make to tell someone who is not subject to arrest and who has cleared screening that he or she cannot fly? How is this person any more dangerous than any other passenger?

If Senator Ted Kennedy, a famous senator with two martyred brothers, can be put on a no-fly list, as he was for several weeks, anyone can be put on the list. The list has no accountability. People on the list cannot even find out why they are on the list. There is no recourse, no procedure for correcting mistakes.

I am certain that there are more Bush critics on the list than there are terrorists. According to reports, the list now comprises 80,000 names! This number must greatly dwarf the total number of terrorists in the world and certainly the number of known terrorists.

How long before members of the opposition party, should there be one, find that they cannot return to Washington for important votes, because they have been placed on the no-fly list? What oversight does Congress or a panel of federal judges exercise over the list to make sure there are valid reasons for placing people on the list?

If the government can have a no-fly list, it can have a no-drive list. The Iraqi resistance has demonstrated the destructive potential of car bombs. If we are to believe the government's story about the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh showed that a rental truck bomb could destroy a large office building. Indeed, what is to prevent the government from having a list of people who are not allowed to leave their homes? If the Bush administration can continue its policy of picking up people anywhere in the world and detaining them indefinitely without having to show any evidence for their detention, it can do whatever it wishes.

Many readers have told me, some gleefully, that I will be placed on the no-fly list along with all other outspoken critics of the growth in unaccountable executive power and war based on lies and deception. It is just a matter of time. Unchecked, unaccountable power grows more audacious by the day. As one reader recently wrote, "when the president of the United States can openly brag about being a felon, without fear of the consequences, the game is all but over."

Congress and the media have no fight in them, and neither, apparently, do the American people. Considering the feebleness of the opposition, perhaps the best strategy is for the opposition to shut up, not merely for our own safety but, more importantly, to remove any impediments to Bush administration self-destruction. The sooner the Bush administration realizes its goals of attacking Iran, Syria, and the Shia militias in Lebanon, the more likely the administration will collapse in the maelstrom before it achieves a viable police state. Hamas' victory in the recent Palestinian elections indicates that Muslim outrage over further US aggression in the Middle East has the potential to produce uprisings in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Not even Karl Rove and Fox "News" could spin Bush out of the catastrophe.

Perhaps we should go further and join the neocon chorus, urging on invasions of Iran and Syria and sending in the Marines to disarm Hizbullah in Lebanon. Not even plots of the German High Command could get rid of Hitler, but when Hitler marched German armies into Russia he destroyed himself. If Iraq hasn't beat the hubris out of what Gordon Prather aptly terms the "neo-crazies," US military adventures against Iran and Hizbullah will teach humility to the neo-crazies.

Many patriotic readers have written to me expressing their frustration that fact and common sense cannot gain a toehold in a debate guided by hysteria and disinformation. Other readers write that 9/11 shields Bush from accountability, They challenge me to explain why three World Trade Center buildings on one day collapsed into their own footprints at free fall speed, an event outside the laws of physics except under conditions of controlled demolition. They insist that there is no stopping war and a police state as long as the government's story on 9/11 remains unchallenged.

They could be right. There are not many editors eager for writers to explore the glaring defects of the 9/11 Commission Report. One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its explanations. We know the government lied about Iraqi WMD, but we believe the government told the truth about 9/11.

Debate is dead in America for two reasons: One is that the media concentration permitted in the 1990s has put news and opinion in the hands of a few corporate executives who do not dare risk their broadcasting licenses by getting on the wrong side of government, or their advertising revenues by becoming "controversial." The media follows a safe line and purveys only politically correct information. The other reason is that Americans today are no longer enthralled by debate. They just want to hear what they want to hear. The right-wing, left-wing, and libertarians alike preach to the faithful. Democracy cannot succeed when there is no debate.

Americans need to understand that many interests are using the "war on terror" to achieve their agendas. The Federalist Society is using the "war on terror" to achieve its agenda of concentrating power in the executive and packing the Supreme Court to this effect. The neocons are using the war to achieve their agenda of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Police agencies are using the war to remove constraints on their powers and to make themselves less accountable. Republicans are using the war to achieve one-party rule--theirs. The Bush administration is using the war to avoid accountability and evade constraints on executive powers. Arms industries, or what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex," are using the war to fatten profits. Terrorism experts are using the war to gain visibility. Security firms are using it to gain customers. Readers can add to this list at will. The lack of debate gives carte blanche to these agendas.

One certainty prevails. Bush is committing America to a path of violence and coercion, and he is getting away with it.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
*****

Also here are books listed by Wikipedia as having been written by Roberts:
# The Supply Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington (1984) ISBN 0674856201
# Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy (1990) ISBN 0932790801
# The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America (1997) ISBN 0195111761
# The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy (1997) ISBN 0895264234
# The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice (2000)

I know one can't judge a book by its cover, but most of these titles seem consistent with solid conservative views.

It appears Roberts' insanity could have coincided with George W. Bush's first presidential election victory in 2000, based on the date of that last book (whose title possibly could have been an early-warning sign of Robert's mental collapse)

*****

-George

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