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Americans Have Lost Their Country
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Twan
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Mar 05, 2007 00:08 PST
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Americans Have Lost Their Country
by Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts197.html
The Bush-Cheney regime is America’s first neoconservative regime. In a
few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the
separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of
America’s moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim
countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been
prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic
country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.
This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution,
international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast
movement, but of a handful of ideologues – principally Vice President
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton,
Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main
operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their
media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York
Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by "scholars"
in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.
The entirety of their success in miring the United States in what could
become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based on the power of
propaganda and the big lie.
Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden, but after an
American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame for 9/11 was
shifted to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass
destruction that would be used against America. The regime sent
Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the lie to the UN that the
Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive proof of Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction.
Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people, the regime
invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with totally false
expectations. The regime’s occupation of Iraq has failed in a military
sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their failure into a
strategic advantage. At the beginning of this year President Bush began
blaming Iran for America’s embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly
armed insurgents in Iraq.
Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge that experts
regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni. They inflict
casualties on our troops, but spend most of their energy killing Iraqi
Shi’ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is Shi’ite. Bush’s
accusation requires us to believe that Iran is arming the enemies of its
allies.
On the basis of this absurd accusation – a pure invention – Bush has
ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack forces off
Iran’s coast, and he has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases and
other US bases in countries contingent to Iran. In testimony before
Congress on February 1 of this year, former National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to orchestrate a
"head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at
large." He said a plausible scenario was "a terrorist act blamed on
Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran." He
said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already
articulating a "mythical historical narrative" for widening their war
against Islam.
Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for
which are patently false. What is going on?
There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the
Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist
revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler’s revolution,
neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the
right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative
conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which
neocons are closely allied, are both in the Middle East. The American
oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas pipeline through
Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US
invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been
on UNOCAL’s payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay
Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, was installed as US
ambassador to Afghanistan.
Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq. American
oil companies have been given control over the exploitation of Iraq’s
oil resources.
The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996 Richard
Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel’s
enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. "Israel’s enemies" consist of
the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets or allies. For
decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such
that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an
independent country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq,
and Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s
theft of Palestine.
The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to attack the
remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with
neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse
was required. Neoconservatives had called for "a new Pearl Harbor," and
9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the
public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in
charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable
facts emerged.
The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the corporate media,
from Christian evangelicals, particularly from the "Rapture
Evangelicals," from flag-waving superpatriots, and from the military-
industrial complex whose profits have prospered. But the fact remains
that the dozen men named in the second paragraph above were able to
overthrow the US Constitution and launch military aggression under the
guise of a preventive/preemptive "war against terrorism."
When the American people caught on that the "war on terror" was a cloak
for wars of aggression, they put Democrats in control of Congress in
order to apply a brake to the regime’s warmongering. However, the
Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the neoconservative drive
to wider war and, perhaps, world conflagration. We are witnessing the
triumph of a dozen evil men over American democracy and a free press.
March 1, 2007
Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and 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 author or coauthor of eight books, including The
Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous
academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political
Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown
University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford
University. He has contributed to numerous scholar journals and
testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S.
Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He
was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert
Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is
also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones – La Era
Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000).
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