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The War on Terrorism:
Where We Seem to Stand
Robb Murray
July 2, 2004
I thought I would respond to the letter about the war on terrorism. I am
going to comment with my understanding of the facts in back of the present
"war". Like most people, I get my facts second- and third-hand
sometimes, so I am giving these a 60% overall probability of being true.
1 The letter starts by naming various Islamic bombings of US
interests. These are worth noting.
2 I believe, however, that there have been US attacks,
sponsored or carried out by the CIA, that are not widely discussed in the US media, but which the Arab press such as Al Jazeera
has been quick to report. These have fueled Arab hatred. These
include the bombing of a Turkish mosque and the bombing under Clinton of a drug manufacturing center in Sudan, whose removal caused many subsequently sick
Sudanese to suffer and, sometimes, die. Noam Chomsky talks about these in
his small book, 9/11.
3 I believe that we in the mass public are led around by a
small piece of the full picture, and that elites run the country, and often may
do so at our expense for their private gain.
4 A problem we have in Iraq as a public is that we are getting the comeuppance
for previous involvements by the Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the
CIA. George H.W. Bush was the head of the CIA. We do not
fully know what the CIA does, and that gives opportunities for corruption, of
which we get small glimpses now and then. We have seen examples in the
past of individuals in the CIA allowing, enabling or even running drug
smuggling because they get huge private payoffs. Because their dealings
can be kept hush-hush, they are not known of or talked of much in the public.
5 The Saudi Arabian Bin Laden family made many oil deals in
the U.S. and were tight with the Bush family. Osama was
trained to be a terrorist by the CIA and turned renegade. That's why he
is both so dangerous and so hated. His family knew the "CIA
family" (the Bushes), and his training was no doubt a little favor,
bestowed as though letting him come over to swim in the family's swimming
pool.
6 Saddam was enabled to be funded to gas the Kurds due to US deals involving Don Rumsfeld. But Bush,
Sr., Rumsfeld and the US media had no problem with Saddam as long as he was
fighting Iran in our proxy. So all this "shocked"
camouflage talk about how "he gassed his own people" is, to me,
bogus, coming from Rumsfeld. (In my book, we probably should have an
independent Kurdistan but we won't allow this because it scares Turkey. The country should probably be broken up
amongst the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis.)
7 Saddam invaded Kuwait, provoked because they laid pipes into his oil
stores diagonally and they sucked out his oil, and would not stop. He
therefore brutally annexed them. Since this disturbed US oil deals, we defended Kuwait. The US actually doesn't normally care about brutal takeovers
and incursions, especially when they involved people of non-white races.
You see, for example, what we are doing to stop the genocide in Sudan right now. Zip. [This has somewhat
changed since this was written, but not by much.] The US takes opportunistic petro-positions around the world
and then cloaks them as missionary projects. I think what's really
going on is that the oil business runs America. This is why I did not want Bush, Jr., to get
elected and supported Gore.
8 Now, the Bush family involvement with oil and the Saudis is
not small. I believe that 15 years ago the Bushes were worth $10-$40
million. But because of deals with the Bin Laden oil company, their
family net worth exploded to $1.4 BILLION in a short time, and
did so since Bush, Sr., left office. Even though the Bin Laden family was
chagrined about Osama, their dealings with the US weren't affected. They had, effectively,
neutralized and bought off the Kingpins.
9 Right after 9/11, while all US flights were grounded,
and VERY important people were not allowed to travel, the Bin Laden family that
was in the US was solely given clearance and flown out of the country "to
spare them ill treatment". They were not even interrogated by US
marshals or anyone else about where Osama may have been. Some of the Bin
Ladens had recently attended a wedding of one of Osama's sons and likely
had information about Osama. But they were given this special
protectionunique and special--and it is pretty hard to explain why, except to
note their close personal relationship with the Bush family. The Bush family
was not going to rock its own financial boat, even with U.S. security at stake.
10 A conservative member of Congress has a book out about this relationship
between the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. It is
American
Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips. This is not a
conservative/liberal issue. I believe it is a corruption issue and that
we likely have corruption in the Oval office and in many senior positions in
the government now. I believe that oil deals resulting from Afghanistan's takeover lined
Cheney's pockets, too.
11 I am glad Saddam is out of power. However, I do not want oil money at
the top any more in this country. I do not want my nephew, Drew, sent
into a war whose driving force is to enrich US oil interests, especially with
the U.S. being such an oil
waster. I have no doubt that business profit motives can drive
wars. An example was shown on a program I saw on the History
Channel. If I remember correctly, during the 50s, there was a bogus
"banana war"-- I believe with Costa Rica--trumped up by Henry
Cabot Lodge (I believe secretary of state at the time), who had banana
plantation interests. Costa Rica had nationalized the
banana growers. Lodge wanted the money flowing again. The war was a
sham, supposedly "to liberate Costa Rica from Communism", a
motive that wouldn't be questioned during the 50s, and it achieved the
objective intended, and Lodge profited.
12 Regarding Islam: I believe the terrorists are not truly Islamic, but
are a class of deranged sociopaths who use Islam as their rationale and
cover. Because they kill everyone, including mainly Muslims, they
are more nihilistic than Islamic. I don't believe that moderate world
Islam is an aggressive force, partly because it stands to lose more than gain
by being so.
13 Islam does have holy war in its teaching. But the Christian nations of
Europe have warred as much or more than Islamic states,
and nobody around here seems to chalk it up to their religion.
14 I do support the profiling of young Middle Eastern men. We in Chicago had news of Islamic
charities on the south side being busted as covers for Al Qaeda
fundraising. This is one area where I have enjoyed Bill O'Reilly, when he
goes after this type of cover group.
15 I thought from the beginning, and still think, that Bush's focus on Iraq is partly
diversionary. What we really need to know is the quantification of
the Al Qaeda (and, now, related organizations) threat, and the percentage of it
that has been neutralized, and whether the danger is growing or receding.
There should be a MUCH bigger effort put into thwarting Osama and Al
Qaeda. Although we've had no attacks on the U.S. for a while, I do find
it a bit suspicious that Osama has not been captured, especially with so many
close calls. It may come out some day that he was deliberately given a
soft touch because of the Bin Laden family. Even now, you hear Bush
rationalizing that "he is not himself so much the point
anymore". I think you can't be too cynical about this kind of thing,
and can't be surprised when news of intelligence corruption comes out
later. The powers that be know there is
a lag between the timing of what they do and when we hear about it, and a HUGE
lag in people’s being able to galvanize coherent responses.
16 Although I think Bush basically tries to defend the US, I believe he is
compromised, and corrupt, and has a built-in, automatic drive to protect his
private interests first. Politicians are great actors and can hide their
ambivalences masterfully. And, like OJ, they can get themselves convinced
that their misdeeds are actually nonexistent, or somehow good. Politicians
are different from the rest of us. Look at Gary Condit. Their
win-at-all-costs mentality should be chilling to us. I've heard that an
end to the Vietnam War was privately offered by North Viet Nam but was rejected by
either Nixon or LBJ because of what they wanted the public to focus on for the
election. In other words, somebody kept us in that war solely because of
his campaign goals. A problem with this is that the public is led around
by the nose of sensation, and has a short memory. An example: twenty
years later, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, promoted upwardly from
the U.S. Government to the World Bank "cracked", and went
around blubbering about his Vietnam War miscalculations, politically-motivated
misdeeds and sins, and he even wrote a book confessional. And, even
after all the campus riots of the 60s, the teach-ins, and everything else,
nobody seems to remember who this guy was. Personally, I wouldn't stand
in anybody's way who would put a 2-cent bullet into that guy's brain stem for
the death and maiming of dozens of boys my age from Lima, whose families I used
to hear literally weeping and grieving on the radio on Sunday afternoons,
making them tape recordings to be sent to Vietnam.
17 I supported Saddam's removal and I'm also for any WWII-type
self-defense war. But wars can be trumped up for private gain, and the
patriots and sloganeers in the hinterlands go to bat, loyally, for people they
don’t fully know to be scoundrels. Of this we must beware. The really big
liars in high places are never punished.
18 I don't believe that the Iraqi prison scandal was "just"
about humiliating pictures and sodomizing. I believe 5-10 of these
prisoners were actually killed during the abuse. The notion, stated in
the letter, that all these prisoners had just prior to their arrest been
killing others appears to be completely untrue. The prisoners were, 70%
or so, just bystanders who were grabbed up in wide sweeps of areas where
fighting had happened. From moment one, when Rumsfeld said that the
investigations would go "as high as they lead", I knew this was
ridiculous. The little guy is going to be the fall guy--always--and this
thing will never go very high. By the time it could get there, the public
will have forgotten, anyway, and gone on to some other bauble put before them
by the News Business, which is paid to deliver an audience, and which does so
by spiking adrenaline.
19 On a related note, I believe that the US may actually have sold Saddam
either some of his deadly gasses, or sold him the raw materials. This is
why we could insist that he had the WMDs. Blix had counts from 1992, I
believe. And I think we had the receipts.
20 I am confirmed in not trusting the UN for governance of import.
Kofe Anan has 3 genocides on his hands, about which he has done zip. What
a great man. He was personally to have handled the Iraqi oil-for-food
program that ended up landing hundreds of millions of dollars of US cash
into the hands of Saddam and his circle, and they re-armed Iraq. I believe the U.N. under his
"leadership" also wrote another tale of shame in sponsoring
"humanitarian food dispersals" in Africa. The
drivers pull up to the starving people and say, "Here's the food.
Want some?" Yes, of course. "Well, then, I and my buddies
here are going to have sex with your wife, daughter, or even you, if we’re in
the mood, and you can forget about the
condoms cause we like it skin to skin. Or else you can just
starve." And hundreds of girls and women have gotten pregnant and
been given AIDS by these trashy elements.
21 Though Saddam is definitely Tyrant #1 who deserves the same happy,
“feel good” injection of joy that finished off John Belushi, he is probably
going to make some true charges against the US during his trial.
I believe that agents of the US do more dirt than our
poor flag-waving public has any clue of.
22 I believe that the charges that the US is "arrogant"
have partly to do with little-spoken-of acts that the mass public has,
literally, no memory of. But there are also other problems, such as when
the US refuses to allow a
count of Iraqi civilian deaths. I think this is because, while posing as
"their friends", none of these deaths and maimings really matter to
the US, and are not brought
home to us in their reality. For one thing, these victims are not
white.
23 As All Quiet on the Western Front portrayed about WWI, the
vainglorious propaganda about war put forth during the heat of anger is a
deception. The sacrifices of the little guy are hellish. We should
ensure that a country that has been thus sacrificed for is a worthy one.
24 As far as the next president goes, I don't think it's going to matter
who's elected as far as Iraq goes. The
military can run itself. I think we could probably do with a president
who will give a higher priority to showing progress on the war on
terrorism. Some people say that no state has ever been able to withstand
this kind of asynchronous warfare (systematic, anti-civilian terrorism), and
that terrorism is what established Israel in the 40s. If
this is true, our top priority must be to stop the jihad factories and not to
just try to stamp out the graduates, but to remove the conditions that make the
suicide recruitment attractive. I can't specify what all of these are,
but I don’t think they are mainly about "economic privation and
marginalization", but there are those who have studied the psychology of
bombers whose bombs didn't go off and who were captured. Their minds have
indeed been plumbed.
25 I am quite wary of sloganeering politicians. When Bush and
others say that "they hate us for our freedom", they are shortcutting
the story. I'm not saying "blame America first" or make the
aggressors right. I am saying let's keep our eyes open and ignore
politicians' bombast and instead pay attention to what they do, especially in
private. Samuel Johnson said that patriotism is "the last
refuge of a scoundrel", and I'm sure it's true. A parallel
phenomenon: a lot of the corporate people who give lip service to the
glory and value of competitive markets do everything they can to buy special
favors from the government and to drive towards monopoly as fast as they
can. I think of conservative Newt Gingrich, always one of my favorite
speechmakers, and of his district's being the #1 recipient of Federal
money. Actions speak louder than words.
26 So in summary, I believe that a lot of dirt was done in our name that
the cronyistic press doesn't talk about. If you look at the pass they
gave to Clinton, not only for his hundreds of addictive dalliances but more importantly for lying under oath to court officials repeatedly, time after time, you
can bet that they do the same to the other side of the aisle if it suits their
self-interests.
27 I'm not fond of Kerry’s ties to Jane Fonda. When she visited and
castigated the US prisoners in North Vietnam, and they secretly handed her
little slips of paper with their social security numbers on them, trying to get
word back to their families as to their whereabouts, she walked over to the
presiding Viet Cong and handed them the slips. The result was severe
beatings and torture of these Americans and several of the U.S. prisoners died over the
next couple of days from this. There's also dirt on Kerry from his first
marriage. His wife was suicidally depressed because of his absences and
many high-profile celebrity dalliances. So he brings a lot of problems with
him. As usual, we are choosing between
the least of the evils this election.
28 I may end up voting for Nader, as my "none of the above"
statement. Kerry is a shoe-in to
carry Illinois anyway; Gore carried
it. I am getting worried about the earth.
The coming extinction of the rhinos really bothers me.
--Robb
More
info on the book about the Bush family, which I haven’t yet seen, from a very
good speech I
heard on NPR last winter, by David Korten:
“ Many of you heard political commentator Kevin Phillips speak in Town Hall
about his new book forthrightly titled the American Dynasty: Aristocracy,
Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. Phillips is not a
Democrat. He is not a liberal. He is a conservative Republican insider who
served as a highly celebrated political strategist for Republican Presidents
Nixon and Reagan. In his book he lays out how George W. Bush assumed the office
of U.S. president as current heir to a family dynasty that has been building
its power over four generations based on its connections to the oil, military,
and intelligence industries. According to Phillips, the Bush dynasty has brought
to these involvements an unbroken record of ruthless profiteering from many of
the worst political and economic scandals of the 20th century with a stunning
lack of moral
principle.
Phillips quoted the famous warning of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower
in his 1961 farewell address that the growing power of a military-industrial
complex endangers America’s liberties and
democratic institutions. Phillips concludes that the Bush dynasty — which built
its power on oil, military procurement, and covert intelligence operations —
has come to personify that endangerment. It’s spelled out chapter and verse in
conservative Republican Kevin Phillips’ book.
Phillips’ insights into the Bush dynasty bring new clarity to our understanding
of the priorities of the Bush II administration. The deeper purpose of
virtually its every action from its tax cuts for the rich — including abolition
of the estate tax — to its energy policy, the invasion of Iraq, the contracting
of Iraq’s reconstruction, and the sale of Iraqi assets to U.S. private
interests can be explained by its relentless use of the power of the presidency
to increase the wealth, power, and reach of the Bush dynasty.”
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