Will Neocon Fanaticism Destroy America?

The People with the Blood-Soaked Hands

Will Neocon Fanaticism Destroy America?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
September 20, 2005
The "cakewalk war" is now two and one-half years old. US casualties (dead and wounded) number 20,000. As 20,000 is the number of Iraqi insurgents according to US military commanders, each insurgent is responsible for one US casualty.

US troops in Iraq number about 150,000. Obviously, US troops have not inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi insurgents. US troops have perhaps inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi civilian population, primarily women and children who are the "collateral damage" of the "righteous" and "virtuous" US invasion that is spreading civilian deaths all over Mesopotamia in the name of democracy

What could the US have possibly done to give America a worse name than to invade Iraq and murder its citizens?

According to the September 1 Manufacturing & Technology News, the Government Accounting Office has reported that over the course of the cakewalk war, the US military's use of small caliber ammunition has risen to 1.8 billion rounds. Think about that number. If there are 20,000 insurgents, it means US troops have fired 90,000 rounds at each insurgent.

Very few have been hit. We don't know how many. To avoid the analogy with Vietnam, until last week the US military studiously avoided body counts. If 2,000 insurgents have been killed, each death required 900,000 rounds of ammunition.

The combination of US government owned ammo plants and those of US commercial producers together cannot make bullets as fast as US troops are firing them. The Bush administration has had to turn to foreign producers such as Israel Military Industries. Think about that. Hollowed out US industry cannot produce enough ammunition to defeat a 20,000 man insurgency.

US military analysts are beginning to wonder if the US has been defeated by the insurgency. Increasingly, Bush administration spokesmen sound like "Baghdad Bob." On September 19 the Washington Post reported that US military spinmeister Major General Rich Lynch declared "great success" against the insurgency that had just inflicted the worst casualties of the war, including a three-day mortar attack on the "safe" Green Zone.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, says: "We can't secure the airport road, can't stop the incoming (mortar rounds) into the Green Zone, can't stop the killings and kidnappings." The insurgency controls most of Baghdad and the Suni provinces.

With its judgement lost to frustration, the US military has 40,000 Iraqis in detention--twice the number of estimated insurgents. Who are these detainees? According to the Washington Post, "Many of the men detained in Tall Afar last week were rounded up on the advice of local teenagers who had stepped forward as informants, at times for what American soldiers said they suspected amounted to no more than settling local scores."

Obviously, the US, not knowing who or where the insurgents are, is just striking blindly, creating a larger insurgency.

The Iraq government, despite being backed by the US military, is unable to control movements across the Iraqi - Syrian border. So the Bush administration has passed the buck to Syria. Puny Syria is declared guilty of not doing what the US military cannot do.

Adam Ereli, the demented US State Department spokesperson, denounced the Syrian government for "permitting" insurgents to cross the border. The US government cannot prevent a steady stream of one million Mexicans from illegally crossing its border each year, but Syria is supposed to be able to stop a couple hundred foreign fighters from sneaking across its border.

Ereli misrepresents Syria's inability to be "an unwillingness" which indicates that Syria is consorting with terrorists, not only in Iraq, but also in Lebanon and Palestine. Does this sound like Syria being set up for invasion?

According to news reports, at Ted Forstmann's annual meeting of movers and shakers last weekend, US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, predicted that US troops will soon enter into Syria. Simultaneously, the Bush administration is desperately trying to orchestrate a case that it can use to attack Iran.

Stalemated in Iraq, the White House moron intends to attack two more countries.

At the Human Rights Conference on September 9, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, described Americans as "people with blood-soaked hands."

"Who are the terrorists," asked Mahathir, the Iraqis or the Americans?

The entire world is asking this question.

Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.co

Comment: 900,000 rounds per dead "insurgent"... The two primary possibilities that come to mind here are that either US forces have killed a lot more than 2,000 "insurgents", or they have in fact killed only 2,000 Iraqis, and their aim is so bad that it simply defies belief.
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Our Future

In the mirror of the water

New Orleans as a portrait of ourselves and our future
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
9-7-05

The dog opened his mouth to get the other bone, and as he did, the bone he already had fell into the water.
- Aesop

All our seeming wakings are but the debris of evening waters.
- Edward Dahlberg

Still water is like glass.
- Chuang Tzu

Welcome to Bantustan, Louisiana, where the first stage of creating a large, armed, New World Order fortress, complete with gated communities and an Israeli wall against the sea and the riffraff, has begun. It is the inevitable course of human history, playing like a bad rerun of humanity's medieval nightmares.

In the meantime, the chief sephardic rabbi in Jerusalem declared that the hurricane that obliterated New Orleans was God's punishment because President Bush supported the eviction of Israeli settlers from Gaza.

Take a taste, a gargantuan, thirst-quenching slug of that delicious elixir brewed by humanity's most successful citizens, that Cajun cabernet of pesticide-fouled Mississippi River water curdling in the backwater blender of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, spiced by fragrances from all across the periodic table of toxic elements and spiced with a disease-bearing melange of decomposing dead animals.

Savor the bouquet. See how it tinkles on your tongue and wafts into your hairy nostrils. Close your eyes and you can envision the perfect portrait of human civilization.

They say we are 89 percent water. The quality of the water within us is directly correlative to the ingredients of the potion in the cauldron of New Orleans.

Note the bloated black man, floating face down in the brew. Boats rush past, to and fro, hoping to pry decomposing remains from dank attics, and occasionally, with luck, find some terrified child shivering in the stinking darkness, while National Guardsmen play cards at a nearby truckstop.

If there is a legitimate vision of hell in this life, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is it (although this act has also been seen recently in Fallujah, Kigali, Port-au-Prince and many other locations as well).

Where your last breath, to last you for all eternity, is the fetid stench of humanity's caustic creations, what kind of hope could there be for anyone? Why did four people last week die suddenly simply by breathing the air? Must be a new government test.

The two major conspiracy angles on the New Orleans disaster are (1) the hurricane was directed toward the city by artificial means, and (2) the rescue efforts were deliberately inept to increase the death toll among indigent African-Americans.

Culling the herd. That would be the neocon phrase, slurred out as humor by people like Barbara Bush.

But when you observe who keeps getting it in the face, without even perusing the obvious evidence all across history, you realize there is and has always been a continuing war on blacks, on the dark-skinned peoples of the world, and New Orleans is - whether deliberately contrived or not - a genuine manifestation of this nasty and pointless insanity.

Because so many ordinary people have tried to help New Orleans storm victims and been thwarted by bureaucratic officialdom, one can only draw the conclusion that the government has severely limited its rescue efforts because there is no place in corporate society for these people, and they need to be eliminated.

I thought it was very cool that so many of those like DU activist Dennis Kyne and others who went to Texas to support antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan smoothly moved their operation to New Orleans to help out.

This small remaining segment of morally decent Americans knows - much more authentically that the government could ever pretend to know - that when people are dying you don't argue about causes or rules. Perhaps that is the true test of being human.

9/11 taught us that our government will sacrifice 3,000 of its own best and brightest without blinking an eye. New Orleans is the message that the number eligible in this category, especially if they're black, is much, much higher.

And it is a confession that a real population control program is moving into high gear.

Good numbers in Indonesia, good numbers in New Orleans. Could a West Coast quake be far behind? Heck, they have already caused several of those in Iran.

And it's way past time for the government, after many decades of trying, to develop a really effective biological agent - the new flu as an expression of love in the New World Order world - and you begin to get some sense of how twisted we have become as a species.

Which leads to an examination of how twisted we have always been. Kind of like ... on the bridge at twilight, a man with a flashlight falls off a bridge, and what you can remember was the rhythmic flailing of his arms as he fell. I dunno. Maybe I'm thinking about 9/11 again...

Now the new images are of floating, inert, face down in poison after rummaging through spoiled and flooded supermarkets looking for clean water. I found it heartwrenching that a top choice of New Orleans looters was disposable diapers.

How far? How far distant is the realization in the minds of everyone that we have created a monster, and that monster is what we do to ourselves and the planet.

Did you ever notice how the Andaman Island indigenents were not harmed by the tsunami, or how animals are never killed in these storms? I don't mean to point out faults in those who were caught in the floodtide, but as regards our fitness to survive as a society.

In our sparkling delusions, our high-minded ideals and low-flying scams, we have abandoned the planet. Soon the planet, which has gone out of its way to help us for millions of years, will abandon us.

Where will your dreams be then? Floating on the bayou, baby, with all the other dead birds.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on a part of the Gulf Coast of Florida that for some reason Hurricane Katrina inexplicably swerved around on its way to New Orleans. He is the author of "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001." http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Comment: The following are some interesting quotes which cast the last one in a different light:

"The U.S. and other world powers should sign a treaty to outlaw the tampering with weather as an instrument of war. It may seem far fetched to think of using weather as a weapon -- but I'm convinced that the U.S. did, in fact, use rainmaking techniques as a weapon of war in Southeast Asia."
- "United States and Other World Powers Should Outlaw Tampering With Weather for Use as War Weapon", Editorial by Senator Claiborne Pell, D-Rhode Island, The Providence Journal Bulletin, 1975.

"To preserve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by permanently prohibiting the basing of weapons in space by the United States, and to require the President to take action to adopt and implement a world treaty banning space-based weapons. The term 'exotic weapons systems' includes weapons designed to damage space or natural ecosystems (such as the ionosphere and upper atmosphere) or climate, weather, and tectonic systems with the purpose of inducing damage or destruction upon a target population or region on earth or in space. Such terms include exotic weapons systems such as--chemical, biological, environmental, climate, or tectonic weapons."
- 'Space Preservation Act of 2001', H. R. 2977 107th Congress, 1st Session, October 2, 2001

"Some countries...are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important."
- Secretary of Defense William Cohen speaking at an April 1997 terrorism conference at the University of Georgia, revealing the existence of weather weapons

"Weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary... In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels."
- Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report

"Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised... Techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm."
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser, Between Two Ages, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1992)

"It's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine.''
- President George Bush, commenting on the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, from a Coast Guard Hanger in Mobile, Alabama, 9-2-05

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Hindsight

No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"
By Sidney Blumenthal
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken.

After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City.

But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence."

When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."
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