07/21/04 -- Said by some to be more dangerous than Osama bin-Laden, he has been condemned as a "war maniac," called a "moron" by the Canadian prime minister’s chief spokeswoman, ridiculed as "The English Patient" for his struggles with language, and likened to Adolf Hitler.
Of all the labels hung on George W. Bush, the hardest to shake may be the comparison with Hitler.
Perhaps the clearest likeness between the two men lies in their use of emotionally induced hypnosis to plant in the mass consciousness an image of themselves as protectors of their subjects from threats to national survival both inside and outside the fatherland.
In a June, 2003 article written for The Nation about Bush’s "mastery of emotional language, especially negatively charged emotional language," clinical psychologist Reanna Brooks observed that "Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners’ minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from hypnosis and advertising to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us [at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6529.htm and http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/130534_focusecond13.html ; my next post, a reply to this post]."
His subliminal messages to justify religious war against "evildoers" are right out of Madison Avenue. Writing in The New Yorker of July 12 & 19, David Greenberg tells how Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/07/12/040712crbo_books ], "himself an evangelical, laces the President’s addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: ‘whirlwind,’ ‘work of mercy,’ ‘safely home,’ ‘wonderworking power.’"
Aspiring political hypnotists would do well to study Hitler as an introduction to Bush.
"Without in any way straining language we can truthfully say that he (Hitler) was one of the great hypnotists of all time," says George H. Estabrooks in Hypnotism, the ne plus ultra of Hitler hypnosis books. Dr. Estabrooks was chairman of Colgate University’s psychology department, and taught at the school from 1927 to 1964.
Demonizing Saddam
"The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of the people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy." Hitler said that, in Mein Kampf.
Bush could just as easily have said it. Having lost public focus on Osama bin Laden by his inability to capture the wily 9/11 bomber, he found it not just convenient, but necessary, to replace bin Laden with Saddam Hussein as the new "single enemy," a stratagem inherited from the first President Bush who damned Hussein as "worse than Hitler" in the run-up to Desert Storm, the first Iraq war. On the eve of war in early October, 1990, ex-president Ronald Reagan picked up the beat before a crowd of Houston Republicans, denouncing his former Iraqi ally as "the reincarnation of Hitler."
"Depicting Saddam Hussein as an evil man made it easier to justify U. S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Psychology is an important part of any war strategy." from Introduction to Psychology, a textbook by Mark Garrison, Kentucky State University. If demonizing Saddam was effective strategy in the first Gulf war, the current administration worked wonders with it, with a little help from people like 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney and Bill Clinton who, on the David Letterman show, September 11, 2002, called Saddam "a threat, a murderer and thug..." while endorsing his removal.
Fear Hypnosis
In search of support for shaky WMD charges against Saddam, Bush found the torture issue and put it on the front burner in his January 2003 State of the Union address: "This dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape."
Bush went on to urge Americans to come together in an orgy of fear induced self hypnosis by mentally imaging the dreadful prospect of Iraqi sponsored terrorists attacking the U. S., and tried again to link the Iraqi leader to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam [ http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76915,00.html ]....We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes." If Saddam had not existed, Bush would have invented him.
Press Supports War on Iraq
With skillful use of fear hypnosis, Bush not only gulled the public, but played a credulous press like a Steinway baby grand.
The establishment press fell in behind Bush almost to a man in endorsing his war aims against Iraq. This blind procession is amply documented by reporter Chris Mooney in the March/April 2004 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The L. A. Times and the N. Y. Times weakly dissented from war without UN approval but rolled over when Bush went ahead anyway. Even the usually skeptical The New Yorker saw merit in Bush’s war plans, warning that absent "Saddam’s abdication, or a military coup...a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all."
Hypnosis Contagion
The demonization of Saddam spread like germs.
"The mob leader will count on emotional contagion....Emotions are far more contagious than the measles. This fact of emotional contagion was very important to Hitler," says Estabrooks. Emotional statements by a hypnotic leader, he avers, are "burned" into receptive subconscious minds with the permanence of an image engraved on a photographic negative.
To be hypnotized by one such as Bush is to be branded with his ideology and to bend to his will as he so directs. This is true of anyone drawn uncritically to any leader or dominant figure. Be it Bush or Clinton, Hitler or Churchill, Reagan or FDR, the difference in the degree of hypnotically induced allegiance depends on the skill of the hypnotist and the suggestibility of the subject.
In The Group Mind, first published in 1920 by Putnam, author William McDougall says, "It is well recognized that almost any emotional excitement increases the suggestibility of the individual, though the explanation of the fact remains obscure."
By putting the horror mask on Saddam, by petrifying U. S. citizens with tales of Saddam’s gases and torture chambers and terrorist connections, Bush dusted off and refined an old Hitler trick.
"The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." Hitler, Mein Kampf.
Putting his own spin on Hitler’s formula, Bush induced fear-of-Saddam hypnosis in Americans to set them up for repetition hypnosis, to deepen and fix the fear. "Axis of evil" - "weapons of mass destruction" - "torture chambers" - "Iraqi terrorists" - "grave and gathering danger," all gained dominance in the thought patterns of Americans to lure them to Bush’s side against the evil Saddam.
"The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged." So said Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd, his seminal study of political hypnosis, published in 1897.
Bush Power Hypnosis
Why did Bush thus goad Americans to war by hypnotizing them? The answer seems to be that from day one, he intended the chaos of crisis and war to put in place a domestic agenda that he knew stood little chance of succeeding in peace.
He gambled that the electorate would be reluctant to change leaders in the crisis of war just as crewmen would hesitate to pull the captain from the bridge of their ship even as he sailed into a field of icebergs.
Bush’s incendiary bluster on taking office would seem to support this scenario. In turn, he dissed North Korean and Iranian leaders, sat by while the intafada exploded into the bloodiest, most enduring sequel of suicide bombings and Israeli retaliation in the history of the war, trashed the Kyoto treaty to reduce global air pollution, unilaterally revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia, and vetoed U. S. support of a world court to try war crimes.
The Republican ‘Pearl Harbor’
His actions appeared designed to escalate seething world resentment of America’s imperial transgressions to flash point, provoking an outbreak of hostilities that would draw the nation into armed conflict.
While Bush and his handlers may not have expected a reaction to their warmongering so costly as 9/11, when it came may well have regarded it as God-sent. The twin towers disaster has been called "the Republicans’ Pearl Harbor," because of the opportunity it presented to rally the electorate around Bush and continue him in power, as Pearl Harbor did for FDR.
In Bush’s Brain, by James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush advisor Karl Rove is seen as agitating for the Iraq invasion to keep war fever alive when the hunt for bin Laden faltered and as 9/11 receded in the public consciousness. Other administration figures stepped forward to beat the war drums.
A March 5, 2004 article in the New York Times said, "Mr. Bush and his aides have planned for more than a year to make the president’s response to terrorist attacks the centerpiece of his re-election effort."
"We are fighting a global war on terrorism," said National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on "Meet the Press," Sunday, March 14, 2004.
In early February on "Meet the Press," Bush referred to himself as a "war president" and said he had "war on my mind" when he made decisions in the Oval Office.
Verbal Confusion Hypnosis
While Bush may have led the nation into war with Hitler hypnosis he has kept it there with hypnosis of his own making, a technological tour de force of classical, textbook hypnosis that eclipses anything Hitler used and sets Bush apart as a political hypnosis stylist in his own right.
When it became apparent as time passed that Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was an illusion, Bush segued smoothly into verbal confusion hypnosis, which is discussed at some length in Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, by Jesse E. Gordon:
"The verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either to quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a hypnotic state."
Exactly. A review of the Bush hocus-pocus in his 2004 State of the Union address, for example, shows how nimbly he skipped through a maze of issues such as WMD - deftly changed to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" - no child left behind, "the sanctity of marriage," senior drug discount cards, invading Iraq in the interests of national survival and world peace, "foreign terrorists," permanent tax relief, jobs, and much, much more. Holding up one theme card after another for public review, before they could "quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them," Bush fanned the deck and flashed yet another card at his bewildered audience.
A "GOP strategist" complained to the Los Angeles Times, "He’s all over the map now, sending a lot of confused messages to the voters." Of course.
Many now openly wonder how so obvious a lie as WMD could have passed muster with such a large majority of Americans.
One answer is provided by Hitler in Mein Kampf: "In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people....will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one." Thus was born the concept of the "Big Lie," yet another Hitler crowd manipulation tool co-opted by Bush.
Even the most skeptical may succumb to hypnotic contagion but later find the resources to cast off the devil spell, says William McDougall. Among the most fervent Bush supporters have been people now coming forward to say that they are "uncomfortable" with reports that the reasons given for going to war may have been nothing more than a pack of Bush lies. Call them recovering Bush dupes.
War is Peace
Perhaps the biggest challenge he has given the public is asking them to think of his war making as, actually, peace making. Think of the Pentagon as the "Ministry of Peace," charged with making perpetual war in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Bush has been almost studious in application of the hypnotic word "peace" to sugarcoat his designs for war.
"Peace" has become his slogan.
"Slogans are both exciting and comforting, but they are also powerful opiates for the conscience....Some of mankind’s most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases," said Harvard University president James Bryant Conant in the Baccalaureate Address to Harvard College, June 17, 1934.
"How many people in the confusion of a defeat or crisis have been reassured by one word? Peace. Independence. Reconstruction. Without taking a closer look, they adopt the leader in whose name this ideal has been proposed. It is the ideal that unites them and leads them into the venture. If necessary, technicians will be responsible for conducting it from the inside so long as the figurehead maintains his prestige." Jean Dauven, The Powers of Hypnosis.
Nixon national security advisor Henry Kissinger intoned "Peace is at hand" as voters prepared to go to the polls in November, 1972 to choose between George McGovern and Richard Nixon as the candidate most likely to end the Vietnam War. In one of the most cynical betrayals of public trust on record, Kissinger the technician lied to a desperate nation about the prospects of peace in order to get the figurehead reelected.
After Nixon was safely reinstalled in the White House, saturation bombing to coerce North Vietnam to U. S. peace terms started again, with the unspeakable Christmas bombing of Hanoi as the main attraction.
Author, foreign correspondent and broadcaster William L. Shirer, who witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, commented in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on Hitler’s masterful use of the peace card.
"On the evening of May 21 (1935), he delivered another ‘peace’ speech....one of the cleverest and most misleading of his Reichstag orations.....He rejected the very idea of war, it was senseless, it was useless, as well as a horror."
But while the world was lulled by his peace offensive, the master of the Thousand Year Reich plotted the war he said he abhorred.
George W. Bush misses no chance to reaffirm his dedication to peace and to denounce those who he says threaten peace.
He mounted the pulpit of the United Nations, September 17, 2002 to bully the international body with his peace message: "The United Nations must act. It’s time to determine whether or not they’ll be a force for good and peace or an ineffective debating society."
He stood before Congress and the press, sent an emissary to the Orwellian sounding United States Institute of Peace, went on the radio, appeared at factories and military bases, hawking his peace message while putting U. S. forces in place to invade Iraq.
Sometimes, to justify keeping the country in a state of war, he combines "peace" with "freedom" and "security" as in his commencement address to the students of Concordia University, May 14 this year when he said, "America works for peace and freedom....For the sake of peace, for the sake of security, we stand for freedom." Administration spokespersons, notably Condoleezza Rice, repeat these buzz words in their own speeches.
Bush Radio Hypnosis
With his regular Saturday radio addresses, Bush works heroically on turning Americans into automatons of subservience to his goals. John Kerry, refusing to concede the airwaves to Bush, is using the medium to respond to Bush attack ads and launch attacks of his own, giving every indication that he will continue the tradition of Saturday presidential radio if elected.
Radio is the most hypnotic of the media as, in the words of Jean Dauven, "It is through the spoken word that the hypnotist exercises his power." The audio nature of broadcast fosters an illusion of privacy that allows the hypnotist to flatter the listener that he/she is being addressed exclusively, enhancing the listener’s suggestibility.
Hate-Talk Radio Hypnosis
Estabrooks witnessed the birth of political radio hypnosis and the advent of the craft’s earliest stars, FDR, Churchill, and Hitler. He predated Rush Limbaugh’s lobotomized rabble by decades, but was in on the beginnings of hate-talk radio when Father Charles Coughlin and the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith poisoned the airwaves in the 1930s.
Estabrooks would have been fascinated with the emergence of Ronald Reagan, radio hypnotism’s modern master. With his banal gipperisms, deeply imbedded fear of communism and Soviet nuclear threat obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder, all delivered in the polished tones of a professional broadcaster, Reagan robbed a generation of Americans of their capacity to think critically, a condition perpetuated by his disciples as witnessed in the transcontinental state funeral of early June, 2004, a seven-day binge of national hypnosis. Brain dead from Alzheimer’s for 10 years, Reagan was resurrected from the public media files to extend his hypnotic hold on Americans, all part of the Republican power keeping machinery which includes putting Reagan’s picture on money and carving his likeness either on Mt. Rushmore, or "our own mountain," as one of his adherents puts it.
Men of Action Don’t Apologize
The president, by the very nature of his position at the pinnacle of power, is hypnotic. Probably no president, with the possible exceptions of Nixon and Reagan, has marshaled so powerful an arsenal of hypnosis, or exercised it so energetically and effectively as George W. Bush.
Successful hypnosis of the electorate satisfies a demagogue’s dream - uncritical acceptance of the man and his policies by a majority. Bush has been good enough at it to acquire an aura of invincibility that predictably has led to an excess of hubris in his conduct.
As Reagan and the elder Bush did not apologize for Iran-Contra, do not expect George W. Bush to ever forswear his actions in Iraq. It is not in his nature to admit mistakes or reflect on his misdeeds, nor apparently is it in the nature of his closest aides and subordinates to do so either. Gustave Le Bon described the type in The Crowd.
"The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness...their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is lost on them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excite them more."
George Estabrooks spoke of such men possessing ".....an uncanny drive, a restless energy, as they push forward toward their own self-centered ideal, and they will be utterly ruthless in attaining their ends. The rights of others, even the lives of others, are simply of no consequence if they stand between the dictator and his determined goal....
The dictator really believes that he is God’s chosen instrument - or society’s chosen instrument if he does not believe in God - to lead his group, or possibly the entire world, into the promised land."
Bush apparently has long held the notion that God wants him to be president. On the occasion of his second inauguration as Texas governor, he "gathered a few trusted colleagues in his office to announce, ‘God wants me to be president [ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5402.htm ],’" according to Southern Baptist leader Richard Land as quoted in online Slate magazine, April 29, 2004.
Bush’s Hypnotized Supporters
Bush spinmeisters will continue to place their candidate in front of unsuspecting NASCAR dads, right wing religious fundamentalists, teenage soldiers, home owners, sports fans, snow mobilers and dirt bikers, loggers and roughnecks, teamsters and hard-hats, 2nd Amendment zealots, high school dropouts, Orange County developers, and field hands, where the president can work his inspirational way into their hearts and minds. This has been called targeting "the lowest common denominator," but Nazi propaganda chief Paul Joseph Goebbels had a better description, revealed in his diaries discovered in the rubble of the Propaganda Ministry at the end of World War II:
".....the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. In the long run only he will achieve basic results influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form despite the objections of the intellectuals."
Bush, the Elected Dictator
Will all of this lead to a New Thousand Year Reich in America?
George Estabrooks warned that such an outcome, while not inevitable, is not impossible.
"How can we guarantee that our choice at the polls will be a wise one?......on this matter of electing a potential dictator, you will make that mistake once only. From then on, he will take care that your mistakes are always in his favor......
"Sit down and think over that last spellbinder you heard on the platform, over the radio or on television.....Were you listening to a man of reason or to a hypnotist who aimed to limit your field of consciousness? You say you cannot be hypnotized against your will. Perhaps you were hypnotized last night as you listened to that political address over your TV.....The most dangerous hypnotist may be the man you listened to last week over the radio. You were his subject....As a matter of fact, you were a very excellent subject. Think it over....."
Hitler aide Albert Speer and newscaster William L. Shirer commented on a recent moment in history when a great people became the eager followers of a hypnotic leader who led them to ruin.
".....as I see it today, these politicians in particular were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and daydreams...Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s and Goebbel’s baton, yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme." - Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich.
"The Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves." William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Russell M. Drake is a freelance writer and photographer in Yucca Valley, California. He is a journalism graduate of the University of Texas, and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and The West Texas Livestock Weekly. He co-founded and later sold a Los Angeles company that produced self hypnosis-aided educational courses on audio cassette. He has contributed articles and pictures to newspapers in Southern California. Contact: russ33@msn.com
Copyright 2004 Russell M. Drake, P. O. Box 1213, Yucca Valley CA 92286
"The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for."
His question goes to the heart of the matter. Do we Americans have any honor, any humanity, any integrity, any awareness of the crimes our government is committing in our name? Do we have a moral conscience?
How can a moral conscience be reconciled with our continuing to tolerate our government which has invaded two countries on the basis of lies and deception, destroyed their civilian infrastructures and murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children?
The killing and occupation continue even though we now know that the invasions were based on lies and fabricated "evidence." The entire world knows this. Yet Americans continue to act as if the gratuitous invasions, the gratuitous killing, and the gratuitous destruction are justified. There is no end of it in sight.
If Americans have any honor, how can they betray their Founding Fathers, who gave them liberty, by tolerating a government that claims immunity to law and the Constitution and is erecting a police state in their midst?
Answers to these questions vary. Some reply that a fearful and deceived American public seeks safety from terrorists in government power.
Others answer that a majority of Americans finally understand the evil that Bush has set loose and tried to stop him by voting out the Republicans in November 2006 and putting the Democrats in control of Congress – all to no effect – and are now demoralized as neither party gives a hoot for public opinion or has a moral conscience.
The people ask over and over, "What can we do?"
Very little when the institutions put in place to protect the people from tyranny fail. In the U.S., the institutions have failed across the board.
The freedom and independence of the watchdog press was destroyed by the media concentration that was permitted by the Clinton administration and Congress. Americans who rely on traditional print and TV media simply have no idea what is afoot.
Political competition failed when the opposition party became a "me-too" party. The Democrats even confirmed as attorney general Michael Mukasey, an authoritarian who refuses to condemn torture and whose rulings as a federal judge undermined habeas corpus. Such a person is now the highest law enforcement officer in the United States.
The separation of powers failed when Congress acquiesced to the executive branch's claims of primary power and independence from statutory law and the Constitution.
It failed again when the Democrats refused to impeach Bush and Cheney, the two greatest criminals in American political history.
Without the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, America can never recover. The precedents for unaccountable government established by the Bush administration are too great, their damage too lasting. Without impeachment, America will continue to sink into dictatorship in which criticism of the government and appeals to the Constitution are criminalized. We are closer to executive rule than many people know.
Silber reminds us that America once had leaders, such as Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed and Sen. Robert M. LaFollette Sr., who valued the principles upon which America was based more than they valued their political careers. Perhaps Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are of this ilk, but America has fallen so low that people who stand on principle today are marginalized. They cannot become speaker of the House or a leader in the Senate.
Today Congress is almost as superfluous as the Roman Senate under the caesars. On Feb. 13 the U.S. Senate barely passed a bill banning torture, and the White House promptly announced that President Bush would veto it [ http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23217392-5005961,00.html ]. Torture is now the American way. The U.S. Senate was only able to muster 51 votes against torture, an indication that almost a majority of U.S. senators support torture.
Bush says that his administration does not torture. So why veto a bill prohibiting torture? Bush seems proud to present America to the world as a torturer.
After years of lying to Americans and the rest of the world that Guantanamo prison contained 774 of "the world's most dangerous terrorists," the Bush regime is bringing six of its victims to trial. The vast majority of the 774 detainees have been quietly released. The U.S. government stole years of life from hundreds of ordinary people who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were captured by warlords and sold to the stupid Americans as "terrorists." Needing terrorists to keep the farce going, the U.S. government dropped leaflets in Afghanistan offering $25,000 a head for "terrorists." Kidnappings ensued until the U.S. government had purchased enough "terrorists" to validate the "terrorist threat." [F6 note -- http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=6528497 -- and preceding and following]
The Taliban did not attack the U.S. The child soldiers were fighting in an Afghan civil war. The U.S. attacked the Taliban. How does that make Taliban soldiers terrorists who should be locked up and abused in Gitmo and brought before a kangaroo military tribunal? If a terrorist hires a driver or a taxi, does that make the driver a terrorist? What about the pilots of the airliners who brought the alleged 9/11 terrorists to the U.S.? Are they guilty, too?
The Gitmo trials are show trials. Their only purpose is to create the precedent that the executive branch can ignore the U.S. court system and try people in the same manner that innocent people were tried in Stalinist Russia and Gestapo Germany. If the Bush regime had any real evidence against the Gitmo detainees, it would have no need for its kangaroo military tribunal.
If any more proof is needed that Bush has no case against any of the Gitmo detainees, the following AP report [ http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=46644 ], Feb. 14, 2008, should suffice: "The Bush administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to limit judges' authority to scrutinize evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay."
The reason Bush doesn't want judges to see the evidence is that there is no evidence except a few confessions obtained by torture. In the American system of justice, confession obtained by torture is self-incrimination and is impermissible evidence under the U.S. Constitution.
Recently the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity issued a report that documents the fact that Bush administration officials made 935 false statements [ http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/Default.aspx?src=home&context=overview&id=945 ] about Iraq to the American people in order to deceive them into going along with Bush's invasion. In recent testimony before Congress, Bush's secretary of state and former national security adviser, Condi Rice, was asked by Rep. Robert Wexler about the 56 false statements she made.
Rice replied [ http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=44861 ]: "(I) take my integrity very seriously, and I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false." Rice blamed "the intelligence assessments" which "were wrong."
Another Rice lie, like those mushroom clouds that were going to go up over American cities if we didn't invade Iraq. The weapon inspectors told the Bush administration that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as Scott Ritter has reminded us over and over. Every knowledgeable person in the country knew there were no weapons. As the leaked Downing Street memo confirms, the head of British intelligence told the UK cabinet that the Bush administration had already decided to invade Iraq and was making up the intelligence to justify the invasion.
But let's assume that Rice was fooled by faulty intelligence. If she had any integrity she would have resigned. In the days when American government officials had integrity, they would have resigned in shame from such a disastrous war and terrible destruction based on their mistake. But Condi Rice, like all the Bush (and Clinton) operatives, is too full of American self-righteousness and ambition to have any remorse about her mistake. Condi can still look herself in the mirror despite one million Iraqis dying from her mistake and several million more being homeless refugees, just as Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, can still look herself in the mirror despite sharing responsibility for 500,000 dead Iraqi children.
There is no one in the Bush administration with enough integrity to resign. It is a government devoid of truth, morality, decency, and honor. The Bush administration is a blight upon America and upon the world.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.
Democracy is ill served by its self-appointed guardians
Our sonorous moralising lies behind so much bloodshed in the past 50 years. A sense of history surely counsels humility
Simon Jenkins The Guardian, Wednesday March 5 2008
This week's Russian elections were "limited" and "less than free and fair", according to western monitors. The last elections in Iraq, by contrast, were "a triumph for democracy". The forthcoming elections in Zimbabwe and Iran have been pre-emptively dismissed as a travesty. Those in Pakistan were, by general consent, an affirmation of freedom.
Democracies are like two-year-olds: adorable when they belong to you, but you never see them as others do. Downing Street had a problem with the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, since the procedure by which he was chosen was little short of feudal. Yet Gordon Brown could hardly slap him on the back as the victor in some great electoral tourney. Medvedev might hit back with a joke about western leaders also being slid into office by friends and predecessors - and at least he had an election of sorts. The British prime minister wisely muttered something noncommittal and put down the phone.
We are in the midst of an astonishing festival of elections in countries as diverse as Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Taiwan, Kenya, Georgia, Armenia, Cyprus, Thailand, Serbia, Zimbabwe, Spain and Italy. And then there is the daddy of them all, America's primaries. Only one generalisation can be made of them, that no generalisation applies.
Democracy is the new Christianity. It is the chosen faith of western civilisation, and carrying it abroad is the acceptable face of the Crusader spirit. In reinterpreting Tony Blair's interventionism, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, spoke recently of the west's "mission" to promote democracy, even by economic and military warfare. With his eyes fixed on Iraq and Afghanistan, Miliband contrived both to assert that "we cannot impose democratic norms" and then demand that we do just that.
The truth is that neither Blair nor Miliband, nor the rest of us, has any idea of what we are about. We expect far too much of democracy, and of others who claim to espouse it. We treat it as a rigid set of rules from which no wavering is tolerable. The ballot is a sacred rite and any contamination is blasphemy. We incant the Nicene creed when we should stick to the Sermon on the Mount.
Let us upend the customary analysis. At one extreme stands an ideal: democracy as the full table d'hôte of secret ballots, civil rights, a free press, freedom of assembly, balance of power and discretionary local government. It applies in pathetically few states, even in the supposedly democratic west. Menken reasonably dismissed it as "a dream, to be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus and Heaven".
At the other, more crowded extreme is a rough and ready electoral process exerting some form of restraint on a ruling elite. One of Africa's nastiest dictators, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, regards as a genuine threat the electoral challenge of his former finance minister, Simba Makoni, in an election Mugabe feels he cannot avoid. In Kenya what is significant is not that the leadership rigged an election but that the outcome was denied popular consent, and order collapsed as a result. The same happened in Serbia in 2000. Even Hugo Chávez, hero of Venezuela, had to concede defeat last autumn after a referendum denied his bid to rule for life.
Likewise Pakistan's military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, felt obliged to hold reasonably open elections, despite the likelihood that they would lead to his downfall. In Iran, thoroughly polluted elections still threaten to undermine the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is milking the popularity bonanza America has handed him in Iraq.
In all these cases some ideal of democracy is exerting its mystic force. Even where consent is presumed, as in Russia, the ballot is the ghost in the machine. It is the ultimate legitimiser, the point to which all power aspires and from which it measures its own backsliding.
Russia's elections were imperfect, their casual and crude corruption by Vladimir Putin yet another way of displaying his autocratic machismo. He may have failed to live up to the standards the west "expects". But he appears to have correctly read the mood of his people, who simply want a strong hand on the wheel for as long as possible.
I cannot see what purpose is therefore served by hurling abuse at these states. Russia's path to political emancipation is tentative, if not in reverse. That country has never ticked more than a handful of democracy's boxes, yet is still incomparably freer than under communism. Its pastiche of monopoly capitalism - Putin's "managed democracy" - so contrasts with the chaos of the 1990s that even sophisticated Russians tell western interviewers that they would happily buy stability and discipline at the expense of another such gamble. We can tell them they are wrong until the cows come home. But we did not live in Russia in the 1990s.
Western leaders, as they beat a cringing path to the door of China's dictators, buy this argument from Beijing. Why do they expect Moscow to behave differently? The famous "raising of human rights issues" by western visitors to China, before talking hard cash, now has the familiarity of a tea ceremony. It is these same leaders who, having destroyed order in Iraq and Afghanistan, hail them as democracies when in reality they are anarchies, failed states. To vote for a ruler in a fortress is not to participate in a democracy.
There is just no point in the sonorous moralising of western NGOs characterised by the (normally admirable) Human Rights Watch. It complains that "by allowing autocrats to pose as democrats, without demanding they uphold the civil and political rights that make democracy meaningful, influential democrats risk undermining human rights".
What are these words "allowing ... demanding ... undermining"? Their major premise is not just western superiority, to which I might subscribe, but western potency and, most extraordinary (and illegal), a western right to global sovereignty. The assumption behind "demand" has lain at the root of so much useless bloodshed over the past half century that a sense of history might surely counsel humility. And this from a Europe whose rulers in Brussels propose using opinion polls as the basis for their legislative legitimacy, without a peep of complaint from democracy's self-appointed guardians.
Democracy is an invitation to hypocrisy. Let us practise it ourselves and, if we must preach, preach by example.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
