RKMBs Forums .::Important::. off topic and offensive posts Welcome to the world of Amalgam! (the second wave)

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ZORG said:
ZORG am real Kryptonian gaylord!

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Ushimalman said:
Amalgamswerefuckingboringshitfuckingdogshitpudfucker!

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Brian A. Oakley said:
What's so funny about making fun of people? Everyone hurts in the end.

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I meant to say "in the ass."

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George W. Bush: Neocon Napoleon
He wants to 'change the world' – at gunpoint
by Justin Raimondo
George W. Bush wants to "change the world": he said so a few dozen times the other night in his Q&A with reporters. That was his ultimate answer to everything. When confronted at his recent press conference with the embarrassing paucity, in retrospect, of the case for war – the complete absence of WMD in Iraq, of links to Al Qaeda, of any sense that the Iraqis consider us their "liberators" – the President had a ready answer:

"A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure."

Uh, yes, Mr. President, but what about rising sentiment against the war?

"And as to whether or not I make decisions based upon polls, I don't. I just don't make decisions that way. I fully understand the consequences of what we're doing. We're changing the world…."

Yes, but, with all due respect, Mr. President – where's the beef? What happened to all those "weapons of mass destruction" that supposedly threatened not only Iraq's neighbors, but also the continental United States?

"And, of course, I want to know why we haven't found a weapon yet. But I still know Saddam Hussein was a threat, and the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. I don't think anybody can – maybe people can argue that. I know the Iraqi people don't believe that, that they're better off with Saddam Hussein – would be better off with Saddam Hussein in power. I also know that there's an historic opportunity here to change the world…."

But what about the rising rebellion in Iraq against the occupation – and not only from neo-Ba'athists but also Shi'ites, who were initially not our enemies, or at least were willing to give us the benefit of a doubt, and have now turned decisively against us? And our allies aren't exactly enthusiastic: in terms of troops on the ground, the "coalition" is mostly American. Shouldn't we get out while the going is good?

"That's what they want to do – they want us to leave. And we're not going to leave. We're going to do the job. And a free Iraq is going to be a major blow for terrorism. It will change the world."

The President stumbled through most of the Q&A, but there was one point where he waxed passionate, and became momentarily articulate, as if possessed by some neocon demon speaking through presidential lips:

"One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we're asking questions, is, can you ever win the war on terror? Of course, you can. That's why it's important for us to spread freedom throughout the Middle East….

"That's why I'm pressing the Greater Middle East Reform Initiative, to work to spread freedom. And we will continue on that. So long as I'm the President, I will press for freedom. I believe so strongly in the power of freedom."

This is the only moment in the whole painful event when the President didn't look as if he were undergoing the tortures of Hell. His voice ringing with certainty, he actually seemed to be enjoying himself:

"You know why I do? Because I've seen freedom work right here in our own country. I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."

He piously likened the spread of American power to the Christian obligation to feed the hungry, somehow forgetting those other commandments – something about not killing people, I believe. In any case, Bush's manner was smoothly messianic as he pointed out to the assembled press corps that just as "we have an obligation to lead the fight on AIDS, in Africa," so we also:

"Have an obligation to work toward a more free world. That's our obligation. That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned. And my job as the President is to lead this nation into making the world a better place. And that's exactly what we're doing. Weeks such as we've had in Iraq make some doubt whether or not we're making progress. I understand that. It was a tough, tough period. But we are making progress."

In this moment of spontaneity, unscripted by Karl Rove and completely unfiltered, Bush revealed the madness at the heart of his presidency, the corruption that eats away at the White House and infuses Washington, the Imperial City, like a dense hallucinogenic fog. He really does think his job is "to lead this nation into making the world a better place." Not defending the nation, not protecting our security, not getting out of the way of prosperity, but "changing the world."

Hey, bud, how about making America a better place?

Bush tries to argue that our own security is assured if only we'll fight endless wars overseas, but this is hardly convincing when anti-Americanism is on the rise worldwide. It is especially egregious as we watch "liberated" Iraqis put aside their ethnic and religious divisions – grudges that date back thousands of years, in some cases – in order to unite against a common enemy: the hated Americans.

But none of this phases our chief executive and Commander-in-Chief, who clearly fancies himself President, not merely of these United States, but of the World.

The radicalism of this administration is frightening to behold, and never more so than manifested, the other night, in the person of the man who stands at its head. George W. Bush morphed into Norman Podhoretz in a cowboy hat: stubborn, bellicose, grandiose, and inflexible. He clearly sees himself as an American Napoleon, destined to lead America to its enthronement as global hegemon.

Of course, there are plenty of would-be Napoleons out there, locked safely away in mental institutions, or else they have medicated their delusions into quiescence. But in the case of the President of the United States there isn't a whole lot we can do. Except, perhaps, have him declared incapacitated – but that would amount to jumping into the fire straight out of the frying pan. President Cheney would make Bush II look like Bush I.

In contemplating the actions of this administration, I am struck by something Richard Clarke said about the Iraq war in his eye-opening book:

"It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'Invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.'"

How else do we explain the President's endorsement of Israel's annexation of lands on the West Bank? Bin Laden himself couldn't have created a more favorable environment for terrorist recruitment. It must be mind control: that would explain the clueless glaze that clouds his eyes and furrows the presidential brow with a look of perpetual perplexity.

Yeah, but who's doing the controlling? That's what I want to know….

– Justin Raimondo

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Bush Administration Achieves Scientific Breakthrough: Time Travel Mastered!

by Karen Kwiatkowski


One of my husband’s favorite movies is the 1980 Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. The movie isn’t all that memorable, but with lovely music, settings and costume, it managed to combine desire and fantasy and time travel into solid entertainment.

I don’t know whether Somewhere in Time is one of George W. Bush’s favorite movies. The Bush Administration does, however, appear to know something about the idea of writing scripts that mix passionate desire, fantasy and time travel, entangling truth and fiction and emotion in a way inviting mass suspension of disbelief for a shared, if short-term, national thrill. While Reeve and Seymour didn’t get an Oscar, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld certainly deserve one.

Passionate desire was there. We have the Project for a New American Century’s letter to Bill Clinton in 1998, demanding a completion of what we started in 1991, and Richard Perle’s 1996 vision of a different Middle East, one where an "effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions." (He forgot to mention all that democracy and self-determination we wanted to bring to the long suffering and oppressed Iraqi people. A simple oversight, I’m sure.) After the signers of these missives were emplaced via political appointment into positions at the Pentagon and State and in the office of the Vice President, the desire was excited and inflamed by the very real and imminent possibility of the act itself.

Never mind that the invasion of Iraq reminded some of our Vietnam experience, the last big American adventure in overseas guerilla warfare and domestic political puppetry. Today’s comparisons of our future in Iraq to our Vietnam experience miss the point – we have already exceeded Vietnam in many ways. U.S. and British military enforcement of the no-fly zone and bombs over Iraq since 1991 have cost at least a billion a year, and at twelve sustained years, exceeds the duration of our primary military involvement in Vietnam. Today, routine costs (after the spike in American expenditures required for invasion and occupation) are running at $4 billion a month, according to recent congressional testimony by senior Pentagon officials. For comparison, by 1966, the taxpayers were spending about $2 billion a month on the Vietnam war. The debates over the lack of an exit plan and the use of napalm in Vietnam versus fire-bombs in Iraq are more decorative, but ultimately less substantial commonalities.

As for fantasy, we’ve had plenty provided by the mouthpieces of neo-conservative imperialism in the media and the administration, folks who haven’t known war, never wore military uniforms nor allowed their children to serve, yet seem to believe waging war using other people’s children for narrow political purposes is part of our collective American destiny. We’ve had presidential and vice presidential speeches filled with the imagery of imminent U.S. destruction at the hands of the evil Saddam, via mushroom clouds courtesy of Iraqi UAVs. We’ve even had a few Gulf of Tonkin-style fables broadcast, then retracted, to help motivate the public and Congress at key times. While Iraq was on a watch list of poorly led countries with potential to do harm (and had been for decades), it had never been the most serious or most imminent threat to the United States, and had limited potential to become that threat until we decided we needed to occupy it.

This is old news to those who follow the news. Passion and fantasy make good entertainment. But what strikes me today is the Bush administration’s discovery of the power of time travel. This goes beyond the Oscars, and is indeed Nobel Prize material! And to think our down-home president, who promised a foreign policy of humility during his campaign and in his early speeches as President, has taken a quiet vacation from Washington instead of taking full credit for his discovery!

I came across the discovery while reading in the Washington Post the updated summary of last autumn’s National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s real status as a nuclear, biological and chemical threat to the United States. George Tenet tells us that "We [in the intelligence community] encourage dissent and reflect it in alternative views." He even lists those views for our reading pleasure.

Earlier this week, I heard a hint of the discovery in what Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said to Laura Ingraham on national radio. In response to her question, "And when did you start to think that perhaps Iraq had something to do with it [9-11]?" Wolfowitz says disarmingly "I’m not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it." Laura herself should have flipped out, and expressed the kind of insightful incredulity she is known for, given that she was a major purveyor of neo-conservative talking points pushing for war in Iraq all last year.

Further evidence of this momentous discovery is seen daily as the NSC, CIA and other policy and intelligence bureaucracies frantically stumble over each other to take credit for the infamous "16 words" regarding yellowcake, and other out-of-context or dead wrong statements that filled presidential and vice presidential speeches last autumn in the run up to invasion and occupation of Iraq’s oil fields and major cities.

Where in the world were these qualifiers, these long-held opinions, these people who are happy to admit they made a mistake and allowed lies to be loudly and proudly uttered from the lips of our straight shooting Texan in the White House?

All I can think of to explain this sudden appearance of objective intelligence, reasoned and reasonable deputy secretaries of defense, and love of honesty is the Bush administration’s discovery of a mechanism for political time travel. Suddenly, the world that actually existed in the autumn and winter of 2002 has been projected forward to August 2003! It is bright, it is honest, it is rational.

What were we all doing ten months ago? It seems as if we, like Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time, were as a nation falling in love with a beautiful lie. A lovely vision of a world made safer for Americans if we could only stop – as soon as possible via decapitation of Baghdad and occupation of Iraq – the evil Saddam Hussein before he delivered his vast stockpiles of WMD to St. Louis and Chicago directly or via his treasured and rich alliance with Osama bin Laden.

As with other types of time travel, the vision we had before is now confusing to us as we see the reality of our current moment. It is even more confusing when the same people, the narrators of the story as it were, who pushed and justified a pre-emptive war in Iraq now say "Really, I never believed it, not at all."

I think a congressional investigation into the political time travel discoveries of the Bush Administration is overdue and worthwhile. A scientific breakthrough this spectacular should be shared with the rest of the country, and indeed the world.



August 11, 2003

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Why Bush Went to War

By Patrick Doherty, TomPaine.com. Posted August 5, 2004.


There were three reasons why the Bush administration went to war: oil, Israel, and military transformation.


As the nation begins debate on how to reform the intelligence community, it is essential to remember that the Iraq war was not driven by bad intelligence, per se. As Bush's former director of policy planning admitted, this was a "war of choice." Intelligence was not used to make a decision for war, it was manipulated to mislead Americans into backing a war already planned.

Publicly, President Bush offered four rationales to justify the invasion: the presence of WMD, Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda, the possibility of giving WMD to Al Qaeda, and bringing democracy to Iraq. Since the invasion, numerous commissions have shown the first three to be plainly false. The lack of post-war planning, the elevation of Iyad Allawi and the pervasive corruption among U.S.-funded contractors has put the lie to the fourth rationale.

So just why did Bush choose war?

From the evidence before us today, there is no one single reason. Rather, there are three converging and tightly interwoven reasons: oil, Israel and military transformation. The Cheney energy strategy required Iraqi oil; AIPAC and the Christian right wanted to weaken the Arab world to strengthen Israel; and Don Rumsfeld wanted to expedite the transformation of the U.S. military.

Reason #1: The Cheney Energy Policy


The first rationale underlying the Iraq invasion can be found in two recommendations from the vice president's task force on energy policy, delivered in May 2001: "The NEPD Group recommends that the President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy; The NEPD Group recommends the President support initiatives by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Qatar, the UAE, and other suppliers to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment."

America gets its oil from the global market, not from individual countries. But in the 1990s, oil-producing countries took a holiday from expanding production capacity, while demand grew steadily. With the supply/demand balance extremely tight, oil-producing states did not have the financial or engineering capacity to build the additional capacity, meaning the national oil companies in many OPEC states were faced with the need to open their fields to foreign investment. They resisted and prices rose.

In the post-Cold War era, the demand increase is coming from Asia. Chinese export success is raising the living standards of the 200 million Chinese consumers. That means elevated demand for energy, raising prices around the world. But unlike Cold War-era supply shocks, rising demand has the threefold effect of reducing American economic growth, creating price incentives for alternative energy sources and strengthening the political influence of the rising Asian consumers. Add OPEC's production quotas and the situation looked grim—at least to the task force.

That the U.S. government thinks about the security of global oil supplies is nothing new. America has had an explicit policy for the last 24 years—the "Carter Doctrine"—which states:


"An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Iraq, with the second-largest conventional oil reserves but lacking the capacity to exploit them, looked like the lynchpin in increasing oil production, countering rising Chinese influence and reducing OPEC's pricing power. But with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, the only option would be to seize and privatize Iraqi oil. That goal was conspicuously absent in the task force recommendations, but revealed in former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's memoir. O'Neill stated that in February 2001, the National Security Council staff was already drafting a document detailing how the U.S. government should divide up the Iraqi oilfields among the major western oil companies after a U.S. invasion.

This helps to illumintate why the Bush administration had declared early in its tenure that China was a strategic competitor. What most commentators did not realize, however, was that the theatre of that competition would be the Persian Gulf.

Reason #2: Strengthen Israel, Weaken Arabs


The Bush administration has a complex relationship with Israel. The president owes his election in large part to Christian conservatives. Christian Zionists, led by Tom DeLay in the House, want to see the State of Israel control all the biblical lands. President Bush is also indebted to AIPAC, the powerful Jewish lobby. AIPAC is staunchly backing the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who rejects the longstanding policy of "land-for-peace." In addition, the neoconservatives who dominate Bush's foreign policy architecture view negotiations with Arafat and the PLO to be morally equivalent to Chamberlain negotiating with Hitler in Munich.

Not surprisingly, this convergence of powerful interests forged an alternative Israel policy for the United States. Paul Wolfowitz, interviewed in May 2003, outlined this new policy:


"…While it undoubtedly was true that if we could make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue we would provide a better set of circumstances to deal with Saddam Hussein, …it was equally true the other way around that if we could deal with Saddam Hussein it would provide a better set of circumstances for dealing with the Arab-Israeli issue."

Those circumstances included the elimination of Saddam Hussein's support for Palestinian bombers' families, reduced oil prices weakening the political influence of Saudi Arabia and OPEC, and the existence of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, reducing our dependence on Saudi Arabia while allowing the United States to monitor Syria and Iran more intimately. Free of a credible threat of Arab invasion, Israel would enjoy a much stronger negotiating position.

Reason #3: Expedite Military Transformation


The neoconservatives came into power in 2001 with the intention of remaking America's armed forces so that they can dominate in the post-Cold War security environment. In practice, however, dominance is merely an extension of the Carter Doctrine, recognizing that our economy is dependent on inconveniently distributed sources of foreign oil. In sharp contrast to 20th century containment, 21st century dominance would require new bases, new doctrine and new weapons.

Iraq was sitting at the crossroads of all three components. An American client in Baghdad would allow us to permanently station forces, dominate the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus, and back up Israel. A major war against a conventional enemy would provide an opportunity to demonstrate new operational doctrine built around information dominance and precision strike. Finally, an extended occupation would in turn shake up the structure of the military, enabling more significant changes to Cold War-era traditions and structures.

The Project for a New American Century, the think tank Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz patronized before taking office, actually anticipated the opportunity that a 9/11 event would present to the task of transformation: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor."

Why The Deception?

The Bush administration appears to have chosen its course of action on the basis of two converging elements: necessity and opportunity. The necessity was created by America's addiction to oil and the unwillingness of our politicians to do anything about it. In America's first Gulf War, a clear application of the Carter Doctrine, it became clear that America was not willing to trade blood for oil. That put American policymakers in a bind—either lie to America or confront our addiction. When the principals from Bush 41 returned to office in Bush 43, the threat was different, but the economic stakes just as high. This time they decided to justify war on different grounds. They chose to lie.

Sept. 11, 2001 provided a unique opportunity. The overwhelming surge of patriotism and trust derived from the attacks on New York and Washington combined with a media narrative making Al Qaeda rhetorically comparable to the Soviet Union allowed the Bush administration the cover it needed to ram through the war without serious political resistance. It was a cynical stratagem to exploit American's weak understanding of Iraq, Al Qaeda, oil markets and international relations.

Unfortunately, oil, Israel and transformation will continue to drive U.S. policy in the Middle East until we get on a path to eliminate—not just reduce—our consumption of oil for energy. With both the 9/11 Commission and experts like Jessica Stern and the CIA analyst "Anonymous" saying terror is motivated by these very policies, America must ask its presidential candidates why they are choosing cheap gasoline over security.

With near consensus between Kerry and Bush on oil, Israel and transformation, odds are this reality will not change before November. We can only hope it changes before the next attack.

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ZORG said:
ZORG am not like this turn of event. Kneel before ZORG, for ZORG am only real man here!

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