Iraq War Is Just Another Step on the Road to a Very Dark Future
John Kaminski

"Popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies."
-- Lewis Mumford, 1966

How stupid are Americans -- and how false are their elected representatives -- to believe and actually repeat the thought that a far-off nation with the world's second-largest oil reserves, a battered and constrained nation that had already witnessed hundreds of thousands of its citizens killed by the United States, that this bedraggled and helpless nation is actually a threat deserving a full-scale invasion by American troops?

The shock of 9/11 and the butchery in Afghanistan have now largely been displaced from the headlines of the criminally sycophantic mainstream media as President Bush continues his ludicrous push for more death and destruction, constantly changing his rationale as one lie after another is exposed as vicious fiction. Make no mistake: the purpose of the illegal and unconscionable aggression against Iraq is meant to cover up the Bush administration's complicity in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

The mainstream media, a virtual interlocking directorate with the Bush cabinet and his behind-the-scenes moneymen, continue to ignore the central questions about 9/11: why did the air defense apparatus fail to respond to the hijackings, why haven't the stock market anomalies been investigated and identified, why did some people know not to fly that day, and why -- five weeks later -- was the World Trade Center demolition delayed because the steel in the holes left by the curious collapses of three major building was still molten --FIVE WEEKS LATER. No, you haven't read that in the New York Times, and you won't, and you know why...unless you're a stupid American.

The attack on Afghanistan, it is by now well known, was planned long before 9/11, yet carried out as if it were a search for someone named Osama bin Laden. 5,000 dead, Americans implicated in a horrific massacre, even some Canadians killed for no good reason. Now it turns out many of the Taliban were evacuated in U.S. planes. American military bosses declared the operation a success, and the newspapers didn't blink. It was a total failure. We didn't catch the alleged perpetrator, against whom, by the way, we had no hard evidence. Bush and Blair said they did, but never told us what it was, and still haven't.

All of this obfuscation can only mean one thing, as any cop or any lawyer will tell you. The people who cover up the facts are the ones who did the crime. You don't need a college degree to see that.

So now, all of this is erased in public consciousness by Iraq war talk. One lie after another. First they try to link al-Qaida to Saddam; they're still trying, in fact. Bush counts on the fact that most Americans don't realize that Saddam and al-Qaida are enemies, Saddam is an atheist, al-Qaida supposedly is made up of religious zealots. Plus, al-Qaida works FOR the U.S. in Macedonia and Bosnia. Which leads us to another thing that is never mentioned in the New York Times, the long history of the relationship between the Bush and bin Laden families (like why did all the bin Ladens get flown out of the country when everybody else was grounded right after 9/11?)

You don't read in the New York Times that the president's father is a key player with the Carlyle Group, one of the nation's biggest defense brokers. AND the Carlyle Group just bought the company that makes anthrax and smallpox vaccines, which leads to all sorts of interesting questions about who actually ordered the anthrax attacks.

Some people who don't believe the pap they read in the New York Times think it's the same people who ordered 9/11.

OK, now that that's out of the way, let's look again at the red herring -- Iraq. Yes, it is a convenient distraction, but it's also more than that. It's the next chapter in the permanent "war against terror" -- get your bets down now on which war will follow: Iran, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia.

Nothing has substantially changed with Iraq in the last ten years. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter has eloquently testified that Bush is lying about Iraq's capability, and as a result, Bush has been reduced to castigating Saddam in a Spielbergian future crime sort of way: "Well, he might have nukes in a few years..." Why now?

Well, first, to cover up his crimes at home, which we have just covered. But there's more to it. As they say, it's the oil, stupid! Plus Iraq is not producing oil as rapidly as Saudi Arabia, and the Seven Sisters (or what's left of them) don't like that. America's intent in Iraq is to just take the oil. Face that fact. America will just take it. And once taken, the U.S. will realize that no one can stop them, and they'll take the oil in Saudi Arabia, in Venezuela and Colombia, and in Indonesia. It will all be the war against terror.

The recent words of Al-Qaida No. 2 man Ayman Al-Zawahri as recorded by the Muslim superstation Al-Jazeera on Tuesday that the U.S. has decided to split Saudi Arabia into separate entities, including an eastern region, which has the major oil field and which will be under direct U.S. control, is a better prediction of Bush plans than anything you'll read in the U.S. newspapers.

But of course there are other reasons that people point to for this resurgence in America's aggressive posture. First and foremost is that Israel is driving U.S. policy. The "axis of evil" is not America's enemies, but Israel's enemies. Iraq is no direct threat to the U.S., but it is, conceivably, to Israel. There are some who say that America's Christian Zionists are driving this new and vicious U.S. foreign policy, and that America is behaving as if Israel's needs were its own. There is no doubt a large degree of truth to this, but I don't believe it is the foremost motivator.

Does anybody out there remember James Watt? He was the government's Interior Secretary under Reagan back in the 1980s, and widely castigated (by some liberals) for his pro-business trashing of the environment. Comparing then and now almost casts those corporate plunderers as liberals, seeing what Bush and his transparently unqualified Cabinet members like Gayle Norton and Christie Whitman are doing now. Anyway, Watt, a prominent Pentecostal, publicly stated that we need not worry too much about exploiting our natural resources because "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." Sometimes here lately, with all this war talk flying around, I get to thinking there's an awful secret that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld know, but the rest of us don't, and it's making them want to just pile up as much largesse as they can before their expected apocalypse arrives--an apocalypse, by the way, that they are doing their level best to create.

But then I remember the words of Ben Bradlee during Watergate days: follow the money. When you look back through history, this is the far more reliable barometer of why wars are undertaken than any kind of evangelical gobbledygook.