TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING

THE IRAQ WAR AND THE JOHN F KENNEDY CONNECTION!

With those words Thomas Jefferson cautioned a newly independent United States of America against the perils of, well… ignorance. Jefferson knew that for any people to govern themselves successfully, they must first become and then remain wise enough to do so. That's a very grown up responsibility. It requires a willingness to acknowledge transgressions among those in whom we've placed sacred trust. It requires accepting that our leaders, whether chosen or presumed, might harbor and respond to political and ideological motivations of a kind we'd perhaps prefer to ignore or otherwise rationalize.

But failing or refusing to recognize official deceit is to abdicate ones intellectual liberty and swear blind obedience to authority. That is not very grown up behavior. Neither is it behavior worthy of those who would be free.

Yet such is the present. Rather than the enlightened germ of human equality he envisioned, Jefferson's land of the free would today appear to a him a nightmare utopia, a place whose destiny is being sealed by that same blissfully ignorant, blindly obedient segment of the populace his words so eloquently disdained.

The home of the brave he loved with such passion is at once a frightened and frightening behemoth crowding out a world made small by the behemoth's influence and reach. Democracy's birthplace has grown to belie the very thing it spawned.

But not even Jefferson's fecund imagination could have dreamed that, in the end, the high office his genius helped create would degenerate into the instrument of exploitation and peril against which he had warned over two centuries ago. Never would Jefferson's worst nightmares have foretold that his republic of the people, by the people and for the people would meet what might well be its end at the hands of a simple-minded, impossibly inadequate, arrogantly corrupt successor to the very office his own tenure so brilliantly served: that of the President of the United States.(1)

Yet so it is. The America of our founders was a nation of but two-million, but from their numbers came Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale, and Benjamin Franklin, to name but a few. Today, that nation is become a land divided against both itself and the world, and driven there by the divisive manifestation of its now 280 million people's dissonance, George W. Bush.
Today, to our national shame, we find ourselves enduring the confused leadership of a single wholly unremarkable American fool, who stands before a multitude of American fools, as they gaze dumbly - one upon the other - mutually unaware that the precipice onto which they've stumbled, has already cracked beneath their weight. Or worse: aware but in childlike denial of the impending collapse their respective actions and inactions - one toward the other - have assured. It is a collapse whose inevitability the rest of the world - a world of 1.3 billion outraged Muslims and ten-trillion eurodollars - awaits. (1,3)

That an entire peoples, a society that so fondly considers itself enlightened, would so closely and warmly identify with a president whose abject stupidity, professed irrationality, and legacy of failure-compounding-felonious-failure, stands as a bold and damning testimony of our nation's susceptibility to exploitation.(1)

America's instant mutation from a great and noble society-of-man, into a panic-stricken primeval predator has precedent in the modern world by the likes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and their own subsequent and dramatic collapses. Today, this once greatest of all nations, this land of the still free, but home of the no-longer-brave, is become more notably home of the advertising agency, the gas guzzler, the Pet Rock, astrology, mystic crystals, faith healers, personal auras, guardian angels, acupuncture, weapons of mass destruction, duct tape, gas masks, militias, armchair warriors, chickenhawks, Nostradamus cults, UFOs, Bible codes, breast enhancing cream, penis enhancing cream, snake handlers, missile defense delusions, exploding shoes, TV economists, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, dangling chads, spiritualism, and bottled water. America - dysfunctional, post-traumatic America - has withdrawn into the somnambulance of self-deception more completely than ever. And since September 11, 2001, more blindly irresponsibly and pointlessly than ever as well, leaving little hope or possibility that anything but grief and remorse will greet our ultimate, and inevitable awakening with the dawn's early light.

This country, the Bankrupt States of America, in two short years has endured a self-inflicted collapse of rationality equaled only by the concurrent supernovael collapse of her economy. While we were alternately shaking our fists and cowering in terror, the American economy has been allowed to freefall $600 billion from the most prosperous period in its spectacularly prosperous history to the status of a banana republic economy characterized by a national debt of $6 trillion and a cancerous deficit of $400 billion with neither a single thing to show for it, nor so much as the germ of a plan for recovery. This society of the ostensibly enlightened that casually gives its president another $87 billion it does not have (on top of the $600 billion), adding yet again to the $79 billion it's already squandered in Iraq alone so that he may further destroy a sovereign country and its institutions, only to presume its reconstruction through corporations his assistants, owners, and family control, is this time perhaps deservedly beyond saving.(3,4)

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we most not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

This declaration (above) was made by US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, America's senior representative at the 1945 Nuremberg war crimes trials: http://www.stormfront.org/revision/ff1warcrimes.html , and the tribunal's chief prosecutor.

America is rushing toward self-destruction. It is being driven there by that which its brilliant founders anticipated, forestalled, and called the Tyranny of the Majority. Every penny in taxes you and I have ever earned and contributed to this country over our entire lives, has been squandered before the alter of misguided ideology. Our dollars, the billions upon billions we've contributed as a peoples, are used daily to murder innocents in the name of profit. (5)

How, I ask you, how do we not see it? How very much have we never learned from our immigrant ancestors?

The shame of it, the stupidity of it, the avoidability of it, each contribute to making America's fall from the heights it had so recently achieved all the more painful. For after standing as a beacon of hope for four centuries, the brash human experiment that became the American nation entered this new century shining brighter than ever and illuminating a world of never-before possibilities for all its people.

America's successes were to a great degree seen as humanity's successes. We'd built a big rep for a mongrel society, hell, for any society. A fledgling nation became an unprecedented superpower, a secular, scientific societal model based on human equality for the world to emulate. And make no mistake, it was those successes, piled one upon another through our history, those successes and an open challenge to the world to partake of them, that ended the Cold War, not the unbridled and idiotic military spending of the Reagan years.

Look back to understand what we are (or were and can be again), at what we've done and what we've challenged the world to match. The Mayflower Compact. The Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers. The Constitution. The Bill Of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Marshal Plan. The Voting Rights Act. The Wage Hour Laws. The Civil Rights Act. Each of these declarations was a promise made to ourselves. Each was a world-altering, yet humane act of reformation. Each was a correct and considered response to self-inflicted injustice. Each followed the cognitive recognition of that injustice. Each acknowledged and denounced an affront to humankind before the world. Each was a triumph of the human spirit, and slowly - ever-so-slowly - came to be seen by all of rational humanity as such. Our actions demonstrated to the world that America was before all else, humanitarian.

When viewed on balance, of course it's not been all good. How could it have? Many of America's mistakes rank among humankind's most vile atrocities: Manifest Destiny, Native Genocide, The Trail of Tears, Slavery, Child Labor, Japanese Interment, Racial Segregation. Let's face it, America was - and is - just a young country. It had been abused by its parents, rebelled, broke away from home, grew to gigantic stature and strength and promise all before learning quite how to behave on its own. Americans have always been left to learn their humanity with little frame of reference save the abuses heaped upon them by the overlords they'd left behind. But unlike us, our forbears learned from their transgressions. Each segregated immigrant brought his or her unique experience to America. Many attempted to impose the same injustices they'd come here to escape. Some succeeded. But America alone has both admitted, and corrected the mistakes of its people and its government more willingly than any society before, and we've done so on the world stage. We did not hide our transgressions, or deny them, or even lament them very much. We learned of them, and we corrected them. America's failings were not European, or African, or Asian failings. Neither were they native failings. They were human failings. American triumphs, too, should be shared in credit by all of its people, whatever their shade of pale.

So here we stand at the start of a new age, a country founded and populated far, far more by the descendants of atrocity's victims than by those of its perpetrators. One more time, in what Jefferson called the course of human events our republic is remaking itself. One more time we await the cognitive recognition of an American mistake by the majority of her people. And it's been but a mere instant since that glorious age the world named 'The American Century.'

Here we stand, the work, dreams, and prospects born of our ancestors' sacrifices having been betrayed. Everything they'd learned, everything they'd fought against, everything they'd fought for, everything they left us at the cost of their lives or their time on this earth in the hope that better lives would be created for their children and ours, being squandered before our closed eyes. How did we fall so far in so short a time?

There are those who would say that we did not fall, but were pushed. Either way, we allowed it to happen. We've been neither vigilant, responsible, skeptical, courageous, or adult. We've allowed the treasures of liberty, security, and promise, the sacred trust bequeathed us by our immigrant ancestors to be stolen from us right-by-precious-right and from our children by the very tyrants our fathers tried to teach us to distrust. We learned but little.

I would submit, however, that it's not too late. Not yet. We are living another of America's mistakes. Nothing more, nothing less. Some of us have achieved cognitive recognition. Many more of us have not.

But it is clearly now our turn to sacrifice if we hope to leave our children a nation of value. The question then becomes, do we have the stuff of our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers, and theirs? Will our tranquilized, therapied, 'I'm okay, you're okay' generation be able to face and overcome what we've wrought in but two years? Will we have the courage to retake what we've allowed to be taken from us, from our parents, from their parents, and theirs? Do we have what it takes to correct this latest American mistake? Only our children will know the answer. It will be revealed to them with the dawn's early light.

To shamelessly paraphrase, Will our flag be still theirs? Or will our failure be their American legacy?

Because the simple truth is this. With the American Century's end, came the perhaps unexpected (perhaps not),(6) unnecessary, and hopefully temporary end of so many things American: the year 2000 saw the end of our functional democracy; 2001 the end of our perceived security; 2002 the end of our rationality; 2003 the end of our global fraternity; 2004 will see the end of our privacy; and unless we find that strength buried in our genes, 2005 will see the end of our intellectual liberty; 2006 the end of our prosperity; 2007…

The possibilities arrayed before us on the Millennial threshold were many. We had, as President Clinton said, "..an opportunity to lead the world." We grabbed, instead, an opportunity to run it.

Contrary to popular opinion, America's myriad possibilities were not co-opted by the horrors of nine-eleven, but were in fact multiplied by them, multiplied exponentially. Because, for the first time in its history, America found the entire world standing with her. Despite the vigilante-like inferences and Ox Bow Incident approach to vindication characteristic of our cowpoke-from-New England president, neither Iraq nor any nation was responsible for the horror. Neither was any nation spared its grief. To a greater degree than ever before humanity transcended politics on a global scale. Even in America herself, the people united behind their then-foundering president. For the first time in memory, a misguided act intending to isolate and punish a specific people, was instead seen as an act of unfathomable hatred committed by idiots against all people. No atrocity, wherever or whenever it might have occurred, had so galvanized the squabbling world the way nine-eleven galvanized all of rational humanity. Every people saw and felt their own kind crushed beneath the towers' terrible weight. Every shade of flesh was as easily ripped by the mangling iron. Every color save blood red faded in the mud of Ground Zero.

Yet somehow, from the ashes and tears, the America born of her founders' experiment in liberty and human dignity emerged valid, stronger than ever before, more unified and whole, and all at the moment of our greatest prosperity. For a very short time - but a time unique in all of time - the entire world felt one people's shock, awe, grief, anger...

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 4:28 am    Post subject: The Twilight's Last Gleaming The Twilight's Last Gleaming

The decimated towers themselves, whose own similarity their immigrant architect proclaimed "A living symbol of mankind's dedication to peace in the world" were turned instead to a symbol of a different kind.(7) They were mutated by an at-once frightened and exploitative political establishment into a symbol of hatred, invoked and invoked again to instigate renewed polarization and rage and anything but peace in the world.
If that rage happened to be turned against anyone unfortunate enough to culturally or physically or geographically identify with the murderers, so be it.

Jefferson's admonitions have been made manifest, mutated into a vulgar self-fulfilled prophecy by the abject stupidity of his impossible successor and those who would blindly follow him. And, blinded by that very rage, we allowed him to steal our children's' future. We allow it still. Were we not forewarned?

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be..."

Of course it's heresy to compare Thomas Jefferson with George W. Bush in any context, contrast included, but I doubt that any president since Jefferson has better represented the bleak future Jefferson's words portended. Because simply put, never has an American administration more thoroughly capitalized on its countrymen's ignorance than has this one. Never has a president had so powerful a tiller as today's mass media, or so fertile a field of public credulity in which to sow the seeds of exploitation. Neither has any gaggle of fanatical advisors ever had a landscape so completely cleared of the obstacles of preconception, so empty a tract into which they in turn can sow their personal ideologies as is the wholly commonplace mind of George W. Bush. Nowhere in this president's head is one likely to find the cluttered forest of ideas which characterize the great leaders.



No. To a man, America's great presidents have been men of their own ideas. The great ones have been men who turned to their advisors seeking refinement of those ideas, but not for the ideas themselves, not for direction, not this completely.

So while we indulge ourselves in speculation on how few Americans actually voted for George W. Bush or his snarling understudy, I submit that no Americans voted for Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Ken Lay, William Bennett, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Perle, Billy Graham, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, John Ashcroft, or Don Quixote Rumsfeld. Yet it is this gaggle of ideologues whose ideas are leading our country. Our president is but their ventriloquist's dummy. And while I doubt that George W. Bush has ever considered or even encountered Thomas Jefferson's words of warning - nor would he much comprehend them if someday he should - his cadre of handlers most certainly has, and they comprehend them just fine.

They regale us with references to the "Bush Doctrine" and its plan for a new American century. Who among you believes that this sneering martinet - a man incapable of speaking in sentences on those rare occasions when the words are his own - is smart enough to have intuited a doctrine?! How supremely insulting such a presumption is to the genius and principles of our nation's founders, if apparently not to most of its people.
If there is a doctrine to be found amid the rudderless lunacy of this presidency, it is a doctrine of deceit. (9)



Were we not forewarned?

"You can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all the time." — Abraham Lincoln.

Whether Honest Abe actually penned those words or not (there is conjecture), he would today agree that the observation stands incomplete. For today we have nationwide polls. They show to an accuracy of plus-or-minus 3% just who can and cannot be fooled at any given time.

And that knowledge is being expertly used and abused to mislead a credulous and childlike American majorty.10 For example, this very month, Bush launched a publicly funded public relations campaign. Meanwhile, papers around the world were reporting things such as the almost indescribably dismal failure of the Middle East "Road Map" for peace, the undenied reports of high treason from the White House in the Valerie Plame affair, the return of Afghanistan to the Taliban, its renewed stature as the world's leading producer of heroin, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (other than our own), proof that well over 3000 of our American service people have died in Iraq ALONE...


and a like (much LARGER [40,000?]) number are being maimed physically & psychologically everyday for Bu$h's outright lies...

Most recent update: June 5, 2006. All numbers are actual counts or lowest credible estimates. See: http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html for the latest updates

-- IN AFGHANISTAN --

8,587 AFGHAN TROOPS KILLED
and 25,761 SERIOUSLY INJURED July 2004

3,485 AFGHAN CIVILIANS KILLED
and 6,273 SERIOUSLY INJURED July 2004

292 U.S. TROOPS KILLED
and 876 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2006

143 OTHER COALITION TROOPS KILLED
and 429 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2006

__ ? U.S. and COALITION CIVILIANS KILLED
and __ ? SERIOUSLY INJURED

US and coalition deaths and injuries listed above include deaths and injuries reported in all of "Operation Enduring Freedom," which is the Pentagon's public-relations name for what's commonly called "the war on terror." About 75% of these deaths and injuries have occured within Afghanistan and its neighbor nations, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Other US and coalition deaths and injuries included in the above numbers may have occured in Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Yemen.

Special thanks to Mark Herold: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/ at the University of New Hampshire, for information on Afghan casualties.

-- IN IRAQ --

30,000 IRAQI TROOPS KILLED
and 90,000 SERIOUSLY INJURED Aug. 2003

205,564 IRAQI CIVILIANS KILLED
and 370,015 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2006

2,500 U.S. TROOPS KILLED
and 38,091 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2006

224 OTHER COALITION TROOPS KILLED
and 672 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2006

130 U.S. CIVILIANS KILLED
and 234 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2006

202 OTHER COALITION CIVILIANS KILLED
and 364 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2006

US and coalition deaths and injuries listed above include deaths and injuries reported in all of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," which is the Pentagon's public-relations name for the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq. US and coalition deaths and injuries included in the above numbers may have occurred in neighboring or nearby nations, in support of OIF.
Once again, SEE: http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html

... verification that Colin Powell lied before the U. N. General Assembly on Bush administration orders, verified reports that the Bush administration flew Osama bin Laden's relatives out of the US on September 11th, the failure to find either Osama bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein, the highest unemployment among American workers since his father was president, and a poll released by Time Magazine Europe showing that 86% of Europeans consider George W. Bush the most serious threat to world peace of any man alive. Despite that the rest of the world was being made aware of all this, despite further that Mr. Bush finds $166 billion ($79B + $87B) of our American tax money to spend on Iraq, yet still has paid not one penny of the remaining $13 billion he promised New York City at his emotional September 2001 Ground Zero lie fest, despite all this real news, the TV talking heads and newspapers in the US chose to lead with a report that Bush's public relations campaign had resulted in an 8% jump in his popularity (Re: Aug '03). That's right. This was the most domestically reported political story on the worst day of American casualties in the middle east in three months and the deepest federal deficit in American history, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.

Incredibly, this sweeping and instantaneous influence over American public opinion in the face of such extreme adversity and failure, cost the Bush reelection organization nothing, nada, not one red cent of their own money.

Disturbing? Certainly. Impressive? Undeniably. But does not such an incomprehensible level of public credulity, coupled with this radical administration's disregard for truth beg a far more troubling question for thinking Americans. Simply stated, if he gets an 8% jump in the polls for free, what sort of public popularity will be purchased with the $300 million Bush and his Rightist legions are putting behind his 2004 campaign?
I think against hope that the answer to that question is clear by now. For these polls reveal far, far more than that which is immediately apparent in their dry statistics. These polls reveal a permutation not considered even by the cynical likes of ol' Honest Abe when he wrote his now-famous words about which of the people can and can't be fooled. What these polls show - and why they are held in an almost religious reverence by the likes of Bush and his dubious political advisor Karl Rove - is that you can also fool most of the people most of the time. And today, beneath the rubble of Jefferson's democracy, that's apparently all it takes to disgrace and sack America.

For those willing to face it, there's an irony in all this. That irony, that supreme irony, is this: our first unelected president has invoked the Tyranny of the Majority (11) and done so to stunning and disastrous effect.

Will history reveal that therein lay the true and only Bush Doctrine?

- END -

Footnotes & References:
1. http://www.bigeye.com/uncurious_george.htm
2. http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/101803I.shtml
3.
4. http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=1010
5. http://www.weeklydig.com/dig/content/2621.aspx
6.
7. http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/World_Trade_Center.html
8. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/16/1559208
9. http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/101903I.shtml
10. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/17/1526207
11.Definition: A phenomenon characterized by a homogenity of public opinion, caused by the peculiar psychological dynamics of public democratic politics, and resulting in little tolerance for difference of opinion. Public opinion is seen as authentic rather than ascribed, and therefore has a great deal more moral force.

This article may be linked to without prior consent. It may be reproduced online as well as in print without changes
as long as credit is given to its author and source — www.bigeye.com/twilight.htm
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*Note: "Twilight's Last Gleaming" is also the name of an obscure film.

Also Known As: Nuclear Countdown (1977)
Runtime: 146 min

This movie is a highly exciting political thriller, written by Edward Huebsch - based on the novel 'Viper Three' by Walter Wager and it has some deeply disturbing things to say about the powers that be in America.

The action begins in 1981 (the near future for this 1977 release) and centers on former US Air Force general Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster), a Vietnam veteran who served five years as a POW. Upon his return, Dell became a vocal advocate of disclosing the truth behind US involvement in Southeast Asia in the hope that a post-Watergate America would forgive its government and have renewed faith in its leaders.

Regarded as a dangerous embarrassment by the higher-ups, Lancaster is framed on a manslaughter charge and sent to prison. Still determined, he recruits three inmates (Paul Winfield, Burt Young, and William Smith) to help him escape and take over a nearby SAC base that he helped design. Once in control of the base, Dell demands that the president, David Stevens (Charles Durning) reveal the truth about the Vietnam War to the American people by reading National Security Council document 9759 on national television. If these demands that top-secret Vietnam files are not made public, Dell promises to send the nine Titan missiles to their targets in the Soviet Union.

"Twilight’s Last Gleaming" is a stunning indictment of the arrogance of America's decision makers and the lengths to which they will go to maintain "business as usual." At the same time it also dramatizes the danger of our unthinking faith in technology. Tellingly, it comes as a deep shock to the military that their usually reliable machines and detailed procedures seem to have gone haywire on the day of the siege (of the missile silo he is in – Ed), leaving them powerless to stop Dell.

Though a bit slow at the outset and suffering from some occasional lapses of logic, Robert Aldrich's film--shot in Germany with no cooperation from the US military--is a fascinating, tension-filled effort. Lancaster contributes a fine performance as the righteous, populist general, and Durning is superb as the president who comes to share Lancaster's high hopes.

Further, Aldrich uses some remarkable split-screen techniques (pioneered [excellently, BUT quite expensively {at the time}] in Don Siegal's 1970 film adaptation of Arthur Hailey's Best-Selling Novel "Airport", which also happened to star Burt Lancaster as 'Mel Bakersfeld', the ‘Airport Manager’) which add to the film's tension and speed up the complicated expository passages. Despite some flaws, "Twilight’s Last Gleaming" is a gripping drama that will have you on the edge of your seat until the bitter end.

In addition to the primary cast members noted above, it also has a distinquished supporting cast that includes Richard Widmark as Gen. Martin MacKenzie, Charles McGraw as Gen. Crane, Ed Bishop as Maj. Fox, Roscoe Lee Browne as James Forrest, Joseph Cotten as Arthur Renfrew, as well as Melvyn Douglas, Leif Erickson, Richard Jaeckel, Vera Miles, and Gerald S. O'Loughlin among others.

This movie was released on VHS in the mid 80's, and obviously does not have a happy ending. The President is shot dead by members of some shadowy branch of American Special Forces before he is allowed to reveal one word of this document; and, if my memory serves me correctly…General Dell (Lancaster) suffers a similar fate.

I thought I’d mention this movie, as it fits into the general theme of this essay.
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I found this dated article (03/05/ 03) that I thought would fit into this thread...

At The Twilight's Last Gleaming
Is oil-driven war fever anyone's cherished vision of America?

BY HAL CROWTHER

When I'm disoriented by the pressure of immense events, my tendency is to defer to someone whose moral authority is beyond question. These people are in pitifully short supply. But certainly Nelson Mandela qualifies -- a man in his 80s with no more deals to make except his final peace with God, a man who spent the best years of his life as a political prisoner and emerged as the leader of a morally inevitable revolution that changed not only Africa but some basic assumptions of the human race.



If we can't admire Mandela, then whom? Jesse Helms didn't admire him, and it was a stern measure of the moral bankruptcy of Jesse's life. What does Nelson Mandela have to say to us, citizens of the United States of America, at this critical moment in our history?



"One power, with a president who has no foresight and cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust."

This old warrior is not mincing words. It's little comfort to read European newspapers and the World Press Review and realize that an overwhelming majority of the articulate world -- statesmen, clergymen, poets, journalists --endorses Mandela's misgivings with interest. It's not an irresponsible generalization to say that the community of nations, representing 90-plus percent of the earth's population, rejects our government's argument that Iraq must be invaded -- and fears George W. Bush far more than it fears Saddam Hussein.

If there is any such thing as "the court of world opinion," it has heard our argument and ruled against us. It goes without saying that many of these nations have no use for each other. They form no coalition and hold nothing in common except their desire to survive. Is it possible to declare their almost unanimous opposition irrelevant -- to disown Thomas Jefferson's belief in "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind"? Would anyone this side of Joseph Stalin presume to do so?

This is the loaded question Americans are asking themselves, and millions of them answered it by standing in the streets, in some of the worst February weather on record, to protest a war in which no shot had yet been fired. Yesterday there were several dozen protesters in front of the courthouse in the village of Hillsborough, where I live -- a mix of high school students and gray-haired citizens who have walked this path before, when Vietnam divided this country as it has not been divided since, until now.

Call me a sentimental patriot, but I noticed several faces of a shrewd, honest American type that Norman Rockwell would have relished.



Icons, to me -- faces that remind me of times in England, France, Germany and the Soviet Union when this country was criticized and I tried to explain to skeptical Europeans that there is still a great heart in America, an abiding generosity and openness of spirit, above all a sense of fair play, an indigenous distaste for bullies and liars.

One face reminded me of Philip Berrigan, who died last year in the midst of all this belligerence and terror. His life of pacifist sacrifice ended, like so many other lives, to the beat of war drums. Father Berrigan was a devout Christian and a great patriot; "for God and country" is the first war cry a child reader encounters. What does the child make of the fact that Berrigan's church abandoned him and his government imprisoned him repeatedly? And it's no child's conundrum to consider that Berrigan's life of principle and unswerving moral commitment was a path to solitary confinement, while George Bush's life of self-indulgence, expediency and careless opportunism was a path to the White House.



I looked at the faces in front of the courthouse and thought of my afternoon with Berrigan in his jail cell in Edenton. The president looked at millions of the same faces and declared them of no consequence, or of no more consequence than the disapproval of the anxious human race beyond our borders. And he added, unctuously, that he was fighting for our right to protest.

Protesters know it's imperative to march now, while The Great Gun, loaded and primed, still rests in its holster. Experience tells us that once American blood is shed, it makes no difference if the mission is shameful or preposterous -- the ranks of the war party will be swollen by tens of millions of armchair patriots incapable of the distinction between "supporting our troops" and supporting political hoodlums who purchase credibility with soldiers' blood.

The Return of the Frozen Cold Warriors

War fever is a disease like gambling, an infection that seems incomprehensible if you happen to be immune. Legions of citizens, and not all of them moronic, go into a brain-numbing trance when the eagle screams and the trumpet sounds. People who actually fought in a war are the least susceptible. Some of us inherit immunity; our parents teach us that it's no hero who marches whichever way the arrow may be pointing, no patriot who casts his lot with any gang of desperadoes who momentarily steer the ship of state. And "desperadoes" is not a strong word, in this winter of anguish, for the war trash whose smug and hideous certainty is inviting Armageddon and tearing this country apart.

The Vietnam debacle reflected the national neurosis of the day, the communist lurking behind every tree. It was a bipartisan folly, tarnishing two political parties which were in those days much closer in their aims and beliefs. It was a bitter learning experience for a country too sure of its power. Democrat or Republican, we suffered, we quarreled, we learned together. But what George Bush has assembled for his war on Iraq is a rogue's gallery of all the discredited adventurers and right-wing ideologues who have resolutely failed to learn.

Does Middle America in its endemic amnesia know who they are, the architects of the new foreign policy that appoints the United States judge, jury and executioner of nations? Does it recognize the names Perle, Abrams, Reich, Rumsfeld, Poindexter, et al, as the same names we heard during the Iran-Contra scandal, the names of men who skirted high treason and long prison sentences and seemed to have ended their careers in disgrace? Of all Iran-contra's major players, it seems that only the convicted bag man, Ollie North, has failed to find work in the new Bush administration -- and the last time I saw Ollie he was filling in for Geraldo Rivera on the administration's media subsidiary, Fox News.

This resurrection is not something I could have predicted. Like many others, I was reassured by people who knew George W. Bush way back when, who offered the class argument that at heart he was an Ivy League moderate, an affable political prostitute like his father, in no way a true believer in the spooky cult of extremists and fundamentalists the Republican Party is becoming. When you considered that his alleged election was something between a fluke and a coup, you expected some humility, some caution, some spirit of compromise.

What he gave us instead is the Revenge of the Rabid Right, the Return of the Frozen Cold Warriors, the Jihad of the Petroleum-Deprived. Using the 9-11 massacre as a license to roll, George Bush is like the triumphant colonel in a banana republic coup, perched on a tank, sniffing cordite, feverish to elevate all his friends and destroy all his enemies before the next wave of revolution replaces him. By reputation the blandest and least inspired of politicians, he has recruited an army of misbegotten zealots and launched what some wry historian will call the Tenth Crusade.

Though I believe that oil and Texas testosterone are the key ingredients in the march to Baghdad, it's the religious rhetoric that frightens me most, that seems most likely to set this planet on fire. In North Carolina, the Guilford County Republican Party linked its website to a Christian hate site that calls Islam "a false religion. . .nothing more than a barbaric occult (sic) invented by savages for savages." Among more influential Christian idiots, evangelist Franklin Graham -- whose move to Charlotte has been welcomed and praised by that city's leaders -- called Islam "evil and wicked," and five people were killed in a riot in Bombay after Jerry Falwell called Muhammad "a terrorist." A book endorsed by leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention vilifies Muhammad as "a demon-possessed pedophile."

The crude language of holy war, in the mouths of men who can fill churches and stadiums, may be our most disgusting, dangerous, retrograde religious disturbance since the Salem witch trials. A fundamentalist leader recently greeted the president as "our brother in Christ." Imagine how that would torment the Founders, those Enlightenment sages who believed that an unbreachable firewall between church and state was one of the cornerstones of democracy.

An equally alarming regiment of the president's war party is made up of bellicose pro-Israel extremists, prominent now in the State and Defense departments and in journalism's op-ed arena. Many seem far more committed to the best interests of Israel, as they see them, than to the best interests of the United States. Appalled when the screeching bloodhawk Charles Krauthammer challenged him, "Are you in the trenches with us or not?," British scholar Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the The New York Review of Books, used the word "Likudists" to characterize the columnist and his ferocious cohorts. Ash knew that someone would call him anti-Semitic anyway, but "Likudist" delicately separates the Krauthammers and Wolfowitzes from sane American Jews who oppose the war and Israeli Jews who oppose Ariel Sharon.

No one absorbing all this rhetoric with sober detachment can honestly maintain that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States -- or a greater threat than any hostile (or friendly) state with one determined citizen who can hijack a jetliner or build a bomb. It makes only slightly less sense to bomb Britain, where Al-Quaeda cells are acknowledged, than to bomb Iraq where none have been found. There is no logical connection between Saddam and 9-11. The emergence of a nuclear and defiant North Korea turns the Iraqi imperative into a stumbling farce. This war is, as many have observed, a flagrant case of bait and switch, where American rage at an invisible enemy has been diverted to an enemy who cannot hide. My own opinion is that the only Saddam who would try to destroy Israel -- a suicidal act assuring his own death and the devastation of Iraq -- is a desperate, cornered Saddam of last resorts, the Saddam George Bush seems driven to create.

Irresponsible Pack of Yahoos

Considering the national paranoia, and the obsessive way this war has been sold to Americans, it encourages me that polls find only 54 percent who support it, and only 34 percent if the United Nations fails to approve. Should Bush launch this thing -- and who can stop him if he insists? -- he's on the path that has seduced every arrogant warlord since Attila, a path where America will find no true friends, no real allies and no admirers, only sycophants scheming for handouts and concessions. Islamic terrorists, secretly applauded by nearly half the world, will come at us relentlessly. If your daughter loses her legs next year in the Munich airport, it will be Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, not Saddam Hussein, that you have to thank.

We will have squandered 50 years of moral capital in the blink of an eye. What becomes of the United States, so notoriously self-righteous, when it muddles on without respect, without credibility, with no diplomatic assets except fear and firepower? Iraq is the lethal precedent that leads to a lonely future, a long bleak siege for the Fortress of Democracy. So much has been lost already.

We are deeply divided, along fault lines that are not always clear to me. Where I see a petulant Uncle Sam sinking up to his tailcoat in the raw sewage of hypocrisy -- bellowing, clutching his little flag in one hand and his little cross in the other -- my neighbor may see the righteous wrath of a great nation wounded. Where I see the most cynical of domestic politics driving a suicidal foreign policy, editors who ought to know better claim to see strong leaders and American idealism in action. It makes me sick at heart to see essentially decent newspapers, like Charlotte's Observer or Raleigh's News and Observer, slowly caving in to war fever, running ever more columns, cartoons and editorials that cast Saddam as the Antichrist.

More than 80,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of our limited "surgical" strikes during the Gulf War. This time the Pentagon plans to hit Baghdad with 800 cruise missiles in the first 48 hours. If you saw Dresden after the firebombing, Hiroshima after the fireball, perhaps you can imagine the effect. Otherwise you cannot. I believe that anyone who supports such an attack -- on a country that has not attacked the United States (or anyone, recently) -- is in some sense clinically insane. Anyone who orders the attack is close enough to an Antichrist to suit my limited secular specifications.

If we are not now at the mercy of the least rational, least humane, least responsible pack of yahoos who ever seized control of the American war machine, then I have learned exactly nothing in 35 years as a professional observer. A friend of mine, a veteran centrist congressman, admits to the most "personal antipathy" he has ever felt toward an occupant of the White House.

Where are we wrong here, what have we missed? Even if you look away from the war, this administration is like a black hole for all progressive programs, ideals and aspirations. Environmentalists are already using Mandela's word, "holocaust," to describe the administration's reckless assault on America's wilderness and natural resources. Civil libertarians are moved to equal hyperbole, and to tears, by a fundamentalist attorney general who is indifferent to due process and overrules federal prosecutors to promote capital punishment. Economists predict financial catastrophe in a $50-$100 billion war flanked by deep tax cuts for the rich and a new indifference to deficits, violating the most sacred Republican tradition. International treaties are shredded, social services are slashed, the arts are defunded -- and all the public hears is "Saddam, Saddam, Saddam."

Is this anyone's cherished vision of America? Did those explosions in New York bring an end to 200 years of flawed but contagious idealism? I have to assume that most Republicans aren't grim predators, or monomaniacs with one fixed political idea like protecting handguns, executing abortionists or defeating Charles Darwin. I ask them, not innocently but not rhetorically either -- I'd sincerely love to know -- is this what you had in mind when you voted for this man? Would you do it again?

Rejected for various sins by the Left, Right and center, I've never been a member of any political party. I never defend the Democrats. The only reason to vote for Democrats is the Republicans -- and lately, that's the best reason in the world. When I saw a sign outside Titusville, Florida, that read "Thank the Lord for George and Jeb Bush," followed by another that read "Jeb in 2008," I couldn't help calculating whether I was too old to emigrate, whether Norway or Portugal might be somewhere in my future.

The impulse was new to me. It hurts when your country shames you, hurts even more when your government disgusts you. Yet we are, thank God, divided, and I hold out hope for the 54 percent who support the president and his crazy war. Maybe they're a soft majority, packed with bewildered, embarrassed citizens who cling to their party right or wrong. Remember that being a Republican is not the same as being a Korean or a Lapp. You can grow out of it. You can change, without surgery even.

I remember another war, and the year 1972, when my brother (just home from the 101st Airborne in Vietnam), my father (the county Republican chairman) and I all cast our votes against the war, for George McGovern. It was the first time in 100 years, since the first ones arrived from the old country, that any Crowther had voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. We were never sorry, and we never looked back.
*****
Hillsborough essayist Hal Crowther is a contributing writer to CL, a winner of the H.L. Mencken journalism award for columnists, and a regular contributor to Oxford American magazine. His most recent book is "Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South."

Re: http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/newsstand/2003-03-05/news_cover.html

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TW NOTE: THIS IS A March 1, 2007 UPDATE PIECE TO THIS THREAD
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Americans Have Lost Their Country

by Paul Craig Roberts

The url for this article is: 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.

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 (Send him email @: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com) 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).



Copyright © 2007 Creators Syndicate
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The Twilight's Last Gleaming

The Washington Monument from the Boulevard at Potomac Park in the autumn of 1912.