Phase Three of the Bush Oil War is getting into gear, and as usual the mainstream media are backing it to the hilt. And too damned many Americans aren't even blinking at the lies and hypocrisy. In '90, Bush I set up Iraq to create an excuse for the US to get a permanent presence in the Mid-East; his ambassador told Hussein that the US wouldn't interfere when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Naturally, he was lying, and I spent seven months camping in the sand.

Now Führer Dubya is doing daddy one better. Not only did he use a terrorist attack by a bunch of Saudi Arabian nationals, and supposedly backed by another Saudi, as an excuse to invade Afghanistan (Phase Two) and overthrow its government - all the better to get that oil pipeline his portfolio needed - now he's lining up an invasion of...

Iraq again. First he made the bizarre claim that Iraq and Saddam Hussein backed the 9-11 attack. Then he began playing up Iraq's hypothetical program to develop "weapons of mass destruction". What weapons those might be depends on what's on the gullible public's collective mind on any given day. When people were still scared of the snail mail anthrax fiasco (yep; the Postal Disservice's gov-backed monoploy on snail mail delivery made it the single greatest vector for the disease in the country), it was biological weapons. Occasionally it's been chemical weapons. As I write this, there's been news that US Customs managed to miss a shipment of nuclear materials, so Dubya is pushing an Iraqi atom bomb scenario again. And somewhere in all this, most folks seem to have overlooked a couple of facts: Everything that Dubya is claiming Iraq might get... the US gov already has in its arsenal. And the administration has quietly dropped the original - and unbelievable - claim that Iraq was involved in 9-11.

Then again, they've managed to forget that Bush I's old Gulf War never did end. The US has been conducting an air war against Iraq since 1991. Depending on who's making the claim, the casualty estimates range from dozens to 10,000 (the Iraqi gov number) every month.

Where's Sam Adams when we need him?

This month's new feature: A privacy statement for Doing Freedom! magazine. An acquaintance on an email list was bitc... complaining about another site's excuse for a privacy policy; that spurred me to write one for DF!. I think you'll like it.

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If only I had a good stout on tap.