Paul Craig Roberts: Evil in Our Government [barf]

In the past three years, the Bush regime has murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and an unknown number of Afghan ones.

U.S. Marines, members of our finest and proudest military force, are under criminal investigation for breaking into Iraqi homes and murdering entire families. In an unprecedented event, Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, has found it necessary to fly to Iraq to tell our best-trained troops to stop murdering civilians.

Hagee told the U.S. Marines: "We do not employ force just for the sake of employing force. We use lethal force only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful."

The war criminals in the Bush regime have dismissed the murders as "collateral damage," but they are in fact murders. Otherwise, there would be no criminal investigations and the Marine commandant would not be burdened with the embarrassment of having to fly to Iraq to lecture U.S. Marines on the lawful use of force.

The criminal Bush regime has now murdered more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. The Bush regime is also responsible for 20,000 U.S. casualties (dead, maimed for life and wounded).

Bush damns the "axis of evil." But who has the "axis of evil" attacked? Iran has attacked no one. North Korea has attacked no country for more than a half-century. Iraq attacked Kuwait a decade and a half ago, apparently after securing permission from the U.S. ambassador.

Isn't the real axis of evil Bush-Blair-Olmert? George Bush and Tony Blair have attacked two countries, slaughtering their citizens. Israel's Ehud Olmert is urging them on to attack a third country, Iran.

Where does the danger to the world reside? In Iran, a small religious country where the family is intact and the government is constrained by religious authority and ancient traditions, or in the United States, where propaganda rules and the powerful executive branch has removed itself from accountability by breaking the constitutional restraints on its power?

The U.S. government has spent the past half-century interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, overthrowing or assassinating their chosen leaders and imposing its puppets on foreign peoples.

Americans think that they are the salt of the earth. The hubris that comes from this self-righteous belief makes Americans blind to the evil of their leaders. How can American leaders be evil when Americans are so good and so wonderful?

How many Serbs were slaughtered by American bombs released from high above the clouds, and for what reason? Who even remembers the propagandistic lies that the Clinton administration told us about why we absolutely had to drop bombs on the Serbs?

Wasn't it evil for the United States to bomb Iraq for a decade and to embargo medicines for children? When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked if she thought an embargo that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified, she replied, "Yes."

The former terrible tyrant ruler of Iraq, Hussein, is on trial for killing 150 people. The U.S. government murdered 500,000 Iraqi children prior to Bush's invasion. When the U.S. government murders people, whether Serbs, Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, or Iraqi women and children, it is "collateral damage." But we put Hussein on trial for putting down rebellions.

Gentle reader, do you believe that the Bush regime will not shoot you down in the streets if you have a rebellion?

A Reputation in Tatters
by Paul Craig Roberts
by Paul Craig Roberts

George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the US. America can redeem itself only by holding Bush accountable.

As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush’s far more serious lies. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, devastated a country, destroyed America’s reputation, caused one billion Muslims to hate America, ruined our alliances with Europe, created a police state at home, and squandered $300 billion dollars and counting.

America’s reputation is so damaged that not even our puppets can stand the heat. Anti-American riots, which have left Afghan cities and towns in flames and hospitals overflowing with casualties, have forced Bush’s Afghan puppet, "president" Hamid Karzai, to assert his independence from his US overlords. In a belated act of sovereignty, Karzai asserted authority over heavy-handed US troops whose brutal and stupid ways sparked the devastating riots. Karzai demanded control of US military activities in Afghanistan and called for the return of the Afghan detainees who are being held at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Abundant evidence now exists in the public domain to convict George W. Bush of the crime of the century. The secret British government memo (dated July 23, 2002), leaked to the Sunday Times (May 1, 2005), reports that Bush wanted "to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. . . . But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. . . . The [UK] Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorization. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult."

This memo is the mother of all smoking guns.

Why isn’t Bush in the dock?

Has American democracy failed at home?

May 17, 2005

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Copyright © 2005 Creators Syndicate

How New Orleans Was Lost

by Paul Craig Roberts
Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush's Iraq war.

There were not enough helicopters to repair the breached levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guardsmen available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting.

The situation is the same in Mississippi.

The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fool's mission in Iraq.

The National Guard is in Iraq because fanatical neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to invade the Middle East and because incompetent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to listen to the generals, who told him there were not enough regular troops available to do the job.

After the invasion, the arrogant Rumsfeld found out that the generals were right. The National Guard was called up to fill in the gaping gaps.

Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes.

The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops. The rising water overwhelmed the massive pumping stations, and New Orleans disappeared under deep water.

What a terrible casualty of the Iraqi war – one of our oldest and most beautiful cities, a famous city, a historic city.

Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the U.S. government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katrina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corps of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.

Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corps of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.

Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Why can't the U.S. government focus on America's needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?

How can the Bush administration be so incompetent as to expose Americans at home to dire risks by exhausting American resources in foolish foreign adventures? What kind of "homeland security" is this?

All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America's reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden's recruitment.

What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters.

* * * * *

On the day Katrina devastated New Orleans, America lost its most optimistic pundit, Jude Wanniski, who died of a heart attack at age 69. Jude often misplaced his optimism, but he was never without it. Jude never gave up on anyone and would invest his persuasive talents on everyone who would listen and even on those who wouldn't. Jude was not an economist, but he understood long before most economists that fiscal policy changed incentives and affected aggregate supply in contrast to the Keynesian emphasis on aggregate demand. Jude rose to fame as the publicist for supply-side economics. As a journalist, he was a natural. Robert Bartley, the Wall Street Journal editorial page editor, once told me that Jude had the best nose for news of any journalist he had ever known. Those he favored with his missives will miss his insights.

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