Iraq, Five Years In: They Really Don't Care (Updated, March 20)

Oh, lucky you! What a privilege you've been given by your Emperor, who so earnestly wishes he were young enough to join you on the front lines! (Or not. I'm betting on "not.")


The setting was the National Religious Broadcasters annual convention at Nashville's infelicitously named Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, and George W. Bush thought he would do a little trash-talking at the expense of the "Islamo-Fascists."


"Our enemies are ruthless, but they're going to be defeated," mock-drawled Bush to Pavlovian applause. "They've got the capacity to blow people up through suicide -- but you notice none of the leaders ever are the suicide bombers, however."


Yes, I'd noticed that.


I'd also noticed that the Idiot King who sent thousands of our men to die needlessly in his useless wars hasn't exactly led from the front, either.


Admittedly, that comparison is somewhat unfair. It's difficult to imagine the typical jihadist leader being so stupidly self-absorbed as to send off a corps of suicide bombers with the following benediction:


"I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here at Islamo-Fascist Central, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of building the new Global Caliphate. . .. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, to experience the blessings of martyrdom. You're really making history, and thanks."


Adapted ever-so-slightly (by the inserted red text), that is the statement Bush the Blessed made during a recent videoconference with U.S. military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan. While this made a poor pep talk, it makes a wonderful emetic, if you happen to need that kind of help.


Although the Idiot King treats the Afghan front of his eternal war as an afterthought, it is every bit the debacle that Iraq has become. And while Bush tries to enhance the morale of those stationed in Afghanistan by portraying that conflict as some kind of Outward Bound experience -- only with, you know, suicide bombers, and stuff -- the stolid wad of congealed evil who actually runs his administration has made it known just how little our rulers care about the views of those who bear the burdens of the wars they've inflicted on us.


"Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting," pointed out Martha Raddatz of Good Morning America during a recent interview with Cthulhu.


"So?" replied Cheney, his porcine eyes glinting with self-satisfied contempt.

"So? You don't care what the American people think?" pressed Raddatz.

"No," Cheney responded. "I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. "


While it's true that we shouldn't be governed by opinion polls, a finding of 67% in opposition to a policy doesn't reflect a "fluctuation" in public opinion; it represents a super-majority.


















Dick Cheney: He's even evil in the Mirror Universe.*


But this doesn't make a particle of difference to those who rule us. As Tony Snow once put it during his term as chief spokesliar for the White House, the Regime, having manipulated a terrified public and opportunistic Congress into supporting the war, has never been interested in "re-litigating" the issue -- no matter how many lives are wasted, how much damage is done to the economy, or how many times the rationales for the war have been revealed as conscious falsehoods.


Here's the division of labor, as our rulers see things:


They have the task of contriving foreign wars by cultivating, supporting, and subsidizing foreign thugs like Saddam, and then pivoting on an inflation-depleted dime to depict their sub-contractors as this year's Hitler. This permits them to mobilize the country for wars that result in long-term reconstruction projects that offer nearly unlimited opportunities for themselves and their cronies to cash in at taxpayer expense.

Oh, most fortunate Iraqi! Have you prostrated yourself today in humble gratitude to Bush the Benevolent for conferring the blessings of "liberation" on your unworthy family?



Our role is to provide, uncomplainingly, the blood and wealth to be devoured by the wars those people contrive; to believe the self-contradictory and palpably untrue pretexts our rulers supply for those wars; and to purge our minds of the accumulated knowledge and understanding that would make it difficult to repeat this experience as often as our rulers desire.


Our rulers frankly claim to create their own reality, but unlike other solipsists they insist on compelling us to live -- and, of course, to die -- within it, as well. When the facts prove intractable, they simply bury them and enlist the help of their media courtesans to mis-direct those few people who may have been paying attention.


Last week, for example, the Pentagon announced that a comprehensive review of tons of captured Iraqi documents, in addition to the interrogation of scores of top officials from the old regime, have made it clear that there was no operational connection between Saddam's junta and al-Qaeda. The Regime reacted to this disclosure in now-familiar fashion: It consigned the report to the memory hole and took refuge behind a barricade of belligerent denial.


At the conclusion of a press conference held Monday (March 17) during a fleeting visit to Iraq, Cheney engaged in a highly orchestrated piece of performance art to dismiss the significance of the Pentagon report. Calling on a reporter identified as "Steve Hayes," Cheney was asked the softest of softball questions about that Pentagon report.


Cheney replied by making reference to the report's executive summary and "an article in -- I think it was the Weekly Standard that dealt with the subject." On the basis of that review, Cheney confidently asserted that the really important question was not whether there was an "operational" link between Saddam and the 9-11 plotters, as the administration carefully led the public to believe, but rather the extent to which "he was a state sponsor of terror," a status he shared with, well, pretty much every ruler of consequence. But the links between Saddam and al-Qaeda would be made "clear" to anyone able "to dig into the report in depth," Cheney declared.


Oh. What a pity, then, that the White House has chosen not to make available, via "the internets," the very report that, Cheney insists, so completely validates their chief rationale for the war.


Oh sure, you might be able to get it via snail mail several weeks from now in the event the administration sees fit to let you have it. But one would think that the administration would disseminate it as widely and quickly as possible, given that it so thoroughly vindicates the administration. Or so Cheney said in Baghdad a couple of days ago.


At the end of that press conference, Cheney was asked directly: "So you think there was a direct link between al Qaeda...."


"You heard what I said," snapped Cheney. "I was very precise."


"Yes, you were," simpered the supposed journalist, who chose not to pursue the matter further.

Alleged journalist Stephen Hayes, Dick Cheney's "Jeff Gannon."



"Steve Hayes," the alleged reporter involved in that colloquy, was Stephen F. Hayes, author of the same Weekly Standard piece Cheney cited to deflect the conclusions of the Defense Intelligence Agency report.


Some reporters are mere stenographers, but where Cheney is concerned Hayes is a full-service sycophant, having been commissioned to write the Vice President's official biography. That's a chore that wouldn't be assigned to someone inclined to challenge Cheney's assertions.


So when Cheney needed someone with whom to carry out a circle-jerk of mutual self-validation, Hayes was the obvious choice -- just as "Jeff Gannon" was George W. Bush's go-to, uh, guy whenever he wanted to duck a question from a real journalist during a White House press conference.


Cheney was still in the region today. How did he choose to commemorate the fifth anniversary of an unnecessary, immoral, illegal war he did so much to bring about?


He borrowed the 60-foot royal yacht that belongs to the Sheik of Oman in order to do some deep-sea fishing. But Cheney wasn't too busy to continue his campaign to expand the war to Iran.


While there is little, if anything to commend the likes of Cheney as human beings, I will say this: He and his little simian front-man have helped me understand one largely under-appreciated blessing conferred by my Christian faith. Most of the time I take comfort and strength from the knowledge that heaven exists. But as I examine the misery, bloodshed, and horror wrought by Bush, Cheney, and their ilk, I find some consolation in the knowledge that there is also a hell.


Update: This really is a dictatorship....


In January 2005, after the incumbent secured a second term in an election that offered two almost entirely interchangeable candidates (right down to their shared affiliation in Yale's Skull & Bones society), the Bushling was asked if there would be any changes in policy toward Iraq.

His face falling into the contemptuous smirk that is its natural expression, Bush sneered that the 2004 election was an "accountability moment" that ratified ... well, everything he and his cabal had done: The demonstrable lies that led to the war, the evisceration of the Bill of Rights, the implementation of torture, wholesale violation of constitutional principles and criminal statutes -- all of that was made retroactively inconsequential because Bush had won (or stolen) an election.

Yesterday (March 19), Dana Perino, the current White House lie-flinger, was asked about Dick Cheney's "So?" response regarding the public's overwhelming opposition to continuing the Iraq war:

HELEN THOMAS: The American people are being asked to die and pay for this. And you’re saying they have no say in this war?

PERINO: No, I didn’t say that Helen. But Helen, this president was elected…

THOMAS: But it amounts to it. You’re saying we have no input at all.

PERINO: You had input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.

(See the video of this exchange here.)

As with so much that is done and said by the degenerate criminal junta ruling us, the statements above are the product of an idiot child's version of Leninism -- in this case, the concept of "democratic centralism." The idea here is that once consent is obtained by a ruler, it is irrevocable, and the decisions undertaken by him are to be supported without cavil or question.


Adolf Hitler, Lenin's largely disowned but very faithful disciple, refined that concept into the fuhrerprinzip (Leader Principle), in which the Fuhrer was seen as embodying the General Will.
Brought to power democratically, Hitler and his Party created a revolution within the form of the fatally flawed Weimar constitution (which permitted, inter alia, the executive to rule by decree in emergencies). They then decreed that there would be "no second revolution" -- because, you see, just like the Bushified GOP, they insisted that the election that had put Hitler into a position to become Germany's ruler had been the Nazi movement's "accountability moment."


Though milder in application than its Soviet and Nazi antecedents -- unless you have the misfortune of being an Iraqi, or someone at the mercy of the Homeland Security State -- the Bush Regime, and the Republican Party it leads, have embraced a Leninist/Hitlerian doctrine of executive power.


In contradiction to Perino's claim that the American "system" is set up to facilitate executive dictatorship, the Declaration of Independence explicitly acknowledges the unlimited right of the people to withdraw their consent, at any time, from any government that becomes "destructive" of the individual rights it was created to protect.

It's likely that I'll have more to say about this subject later....















Dum spiro, pugno!

________

*The line about Cheney being evil even in the Mirror Universe comes by way of William Wallace Grigg, age 10.