Leaders of the fantasy war

Cheney, Rumsfeld take swings in friendly VFW & Legion confines


An important podium for Cheney

Back on August 26, 2002, the Vice President delivered before this same organization the most important paragraph in the run-up to the Iraq invasion:

Vice President Cheney: Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.

After that, there should have been ``no doubt'' that the US military would be shocking and awing while it dug itself and our country good and deep into the Iraqi quagmire where we now find ourselves.

Cheney's credibility ought to be zero, even amongst people whose outlook is decidedly military. But he and his bouncing buddy, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, both had full loads to shoot into seemingly-receptive faces.

For his part, Cheney expertly pushed the right buttons on POW/MIAs, flag respect, and vet's health care as he greased the way for Terror War fantasies. As if he needs to remind anyone, ``In just two weeks the calendar will read again September 11th, and our minds will go back to that day five years ago,'' when our enemies used ``stealth and murder'' and their bad ``nature'' in order to fulfil the ``ambitions they seek to achieve.''

Cheney goes on with the usual domino theory of creeping, insideous Islamic ``dictatorship of fear'' that ``rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of our society.''

The goal of the enemy is to impose by ``force and intimidation'' a ``totalitarian empire that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia.''

And here's what Cheney says they're gonna use to do it:

They have made clear, as well, their ultimate ambitions: to arm themselves with chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, to destroy Israel, to intimidate all western countries, and to cause mass death in the United States.

WMD again... he didn't have to say ``Iran,'' evidently the next target for preventive war against its infrastructure and population. And what about Iraq? Well, only the worst could happen if the US withdrew its occupation force:

Cheney: And they believe they can frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat.

I realize, as well, that some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone. But the exact opposite is true.

Cheney seems not to have noticed that Iraq has already devolved into hysterical violence and hatred of America unimaginable even three years ago after a dozen years of brutal US-imposed sanctions.

The next day (Tuesday), Rumsfeld went to the American Legion convention in Salt Lake to fire some more shot. A mood uglier than normal seemed to possess him as he railed against his opposition while playing the Hitler card:

Rumsfeld: Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated -- or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace -- even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

There was a strange innocence in views of the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. Senator’s reaction in September 1939, upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II.

He exclaimed, ``Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.''

Think of that! I recount this history because once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism. Today, another enemy -- a different kind of enemy -- has also made clear its intentions -- in places like New York, Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, and Moscow. But it is apparent that many have still not learned history’s lessons. We need to face the following questions:

With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?

Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

Can we truly afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply ``law enforcement'' problems, rather than fundamentally different threats, requiring fundamentally different approaches?

And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America -- not the enemy -- is the real source of the world’s trouble?

These are central questions of our time. And we must face them.

Scoldings over the ''lessons of history'' from Rumsfeld's vaporous mind and grandiose notions of centrality should engender great skepticism in his listeners. He simply can't be serious that the destructive potential of a very few tiny cadres of stateless actors who ``wear no uniforms'' are even comparable to the state-sourced violence and real fascism of the last century. All this talk of a ``new enemy'' and a ``different war'' should be seen as comical when compared to the threat of superpower nuclear exchange that characterized the Cold War we experienced (and in essential respects continue to experience) for the last five decades.

Saying this does not minimize the tradgedy of the attacks that have occured, including the outrageous murderous spectacle of September 11, 2001. But even this very significant level of realized terrorism can in no way compare to total war in Europe and the Pacific during WWII, or the potential for global destruction of the Cold War -- or even some state massacres, like the perhaps two million people killed by the US-supported Indonesian regime of General Suharto beginning in 1965 and including a brutal blockade and attack on East Timor that killed 500,000.

More examples continue to this day. The period of US attack, invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq under the state direction of Cheney and Rumsfeld have resulted in an unknown number of casualties, at least 100 innocent civilians per day averaged over three years for a total of more than 100,000 dead. Just today, over 100 were killed in a pitched battle at Diwaniyah.

That's more than 30 September 11s in a country the size of California. Somehow for Cheney and Rumsfeld that is a different kind of killing, a justified kind. There is no looking in the mirror. Doing that means you have failed history's lessons and blame America first.

I suspect that Rumsfeld & Cheney's brand of killing does something quite opposite from the stated intentions of quelling terrorism. It breeds the hatred, indeed creates the enemies to whom Cheney ascribes this hatred. The only strong suit of the American Terror War is in the dropping of bombs on people's heads and waging war on what amounts to entire populations of countries. No scorn from Rumsfeld and Cheney can fix the morality of that.

At one point, Cheney spent a bit of time defending warrantless wiretapping and surveillance. His assurances about legality and civil liberties sound like bald-faced lies to me. Communication surveillance is utterly useless in tracking down the very rare genuine, committed, sophisticated terrorist Cheney puffs up so much. The extraordinarily rare persons who plot such attacks (not the ridiculous airplane scare of the last month, or the shlubs who were rounded up in Miami a couple of months ago) can easily disguise communication so that the NSA would never in a million years be able to decrypt it. Tools freely available on the internet can do that for anyone. The only purpose of such surveillance is the restriction of civil liberties and the right to dissent from the deadly policies Cheney and Rumsfeld execute.

Meanwhile, the Terror War is an utter failure at removing terrorists from their holes, and it has united disparate swaths of the globe against us. Often the very people we need to have as friends and allies if we are serious about reducing the threat of attacks find themselves struggling for survival and resistance against the powerful artillery of America and its clients.

Rumsfeld and Cheney both dismiss the law enforcement model of eliminating terrorism. In doing that, they implicitly dismiss the rule of law. This means abuse, murder, rape, harsh imprisonment, rendition, secret prisons are open for free-for-all -- essentially throwing out nine centuries of enlightened human rights, criminal procedure, and laws of war.

The Cheney/Rumsfeld arguments mean perpetual war. If we will never ``let down our guard'' in the style of war these un-peaceful men have designed, we (or our clients) will be making and dropping bombs until someone decides to stop us. Cheney and Rumsfeld have led us into a much more dangerous destabilzed world -- a fiasco, an utter disaster. We have not ``been protected by sound policy decisions by the President'' or by ``decisive action at home and abroad.'' That's laughable. What seems to keep us safe for the moment is the initial though not permanently contining rarity of enemies with the means and desire to harm us. However, as America and its clients drop more bombs on people every day, that reality will one day catch up with us.