November 12, 2006

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


TREASON?

The Fresno Bee published another charming letter from a right-winger who suggests that criticism of George W. Bush by the media and by politicians is tantamount to treason. Right-wingers are hypocrites and ignorant when they make claims like this. They had no problems with criticizing Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter when they were president. I would point out that our loyalty is to the Constitution, not to the office of the presidency or to the occupant of that office. Treason is lying our country into war, squandering our military, wasting our resources. Right-wingers insist on supporting Bush even though his consistent lies are a clear matter of record. We will spend decades recovering from this truly awful administration, but I fully expect the right-wing revisionist historians to sugarcoat the entire disaster.

NEOCON SPIN: BLAME THE IRAQIS

I just saw the great movie Lawrence of Arabia the first time. It's about how British officer T. E. Lawrence led a coalition of Arabs against the Turkish Empire. Lawrence's dreams were ultimately betrayed because the British and the French were only too happy to enjoy the spoils of the fallen Turks. Western colonialists, who have long oppressed the Arabs so they can take their resources, put on the public face that they are bringing "civilization" to the Arab world. It was like the early Americans who claimed they were bringing Christianity to the slaves, or "civilizing" the Indians. The latest neocon spin on Iraq is that the Iraqis just don't appreciate what we've tried to do for them. They had this great "opportunity" for democracy, you see, but just aren't civilized enough to appreciate it. This article by Robert Fisk is at www.opednews.com:

But those pesky Iraqis, it now seems, "preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption". Peters' conclusion? "Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it." As a result, "it's their tragedy, not ours. Iraq was the Arab world's last chance to board the train to modernity, to give the region a future...". Incredibly, Peters finishes by believing that "if the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries" because Iraq will have "consumed" "terrorists" and the United States will "still be the greatest power on earth".

It's not the shamefulness of all this - do none of these men have any shame? - but the racist assumption that the hecatomb in Iraq is all the fault of the Iraqis, that their intrinsic backwardness, their viciousness, their failure to appreciate the fruits of our civilisation make them unworthy of our further attention. At no point does anyone question whether the fact that America is "the greatest power on earth" might not be part of the problem. Nor that Iraqis who endured among their worst years of dictatorship when Saddam was supported by the United States, who were sanctioned by the UN at a cost of a half a million children's lives and who were then brutally invaded by our armies, might not actually be terribly keen on all the good things we wished to offer them. Many Arabs, as I've written before, would like some of our democracy, but they would also like another kind of freedom - freedom from us.