To understand Bush and Cheney in Iraq, you need to understand the history of the area: The Royal Air force along with Churchill introduced poison gas in the 20’s when the Iraqi people resisted the British mandate as the spoils of war of World War I. In 1979 the US and British entrenched Saddam Hussein because he was anti-communist. We’d provide Saddam with communists and he’s slaughter them on demand. He was our brutal dictator. You don’t think the Iraqis know that? Of course, they do. In the 1980’s, the Dept. of Commerce under Reagan and Bush I allowed U.S. corporations licenses to sell raw materials for chemical and biological warfare - including anthrax. In 1983, as emissary for Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld witnessed the first attacks on Iranians with these deadly weapons. Rumsfeld saw it and stood on the side and said nothing. Amazing how history has obliterated contemporary events from our memory In the 90’s Saddam said to himself, “I've done so much for the US. I’ve done their bidding. Now I think I’m going to take over Kuwait.” Iraq always had claimed Kuwait. They have always been in conflict over the huge oil deposits under their borders. They think it was carved up by British in an artificial construct. Bush I drove Saddam back. (He was 24 hours away from toppling Saddam altogether). Bush I then told the Shiites and Kurds to rise up and overthrow the tyrant. So they did and controlled almost 70% of the country. Then Saddam got the OK from the US that our pilots would stand aside so he could use his helicopter gunships – which he did to slaughter the opposition. You don’t think the Iraqis remember that? Then sanctions came – most infamous in UN history at the behest of the U.S. Not just military sanctions but economic as well. A physicians task force estimated that a half million children died as a result. There are two points to make about this: how and why? The sanctions included a “dual use list”. For example a child catheter was prohibited from being exported to Iraq because it was deemed that it could be molded into weapon. There was also a ban on chlorine which is used to disinfect water. As a result dysentery and diarrhea [killed tens of thousands of children]. A half million children. They have parents, relatives, and neighbors. They have memories. In 1998, Clinton and Gore bombed Iraq in the no-fly zone. They got pushed through Congress that it was the policy of the U.S. government to engage in regime change in Iraq, which Bush II pointed to as one of the justifications for war. Then we come to Bush II. O’Neil [cabinet member in Bush administration] said that even before 9/11 they were pushing for us to go into Iraq. The whole neo-conservative dogma was being pushed in the highest levels in the Defense Department and White House. After 9/11, the pretext was there. Night after night on TV, un-rebutted by the cowardly Democrats, Bush began a series of fabrications, deception, lies, and fulminations to justify invasion. Before the inspectors could finish their work, Bush invaded the country without a constitutional declaration of war from Congress. The power to declare war lies with Congress. This is not just a technicality. But Congress said O.K.'d and told Bush, “You decide when to declare war.” A President who does that is engaging in criminal activity. He then plunges the nation into war under false pretenses. There was no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. They are mortal enemies. One is religious fundamentalist. The other secular. No WMDs were found. This was known by many people in the administration. They knew that they were destroyed or no longer useable. The stuff they are made from ages and deteriorates. High level Iraqi scientists who had defected were de-briefed in detail. But Bush went ahead anyway. They even invented a story about a drone plane that presumably could be launched from a ship a hundred miles off New York. A total fabrication. Impeachment proceedings based on high crimes and misdemeanors would include plunging our nation into war – an unconstitutional war that was also illegal under international law, and based on lies. And 1400 GIs have died. When a war is perpetrated by war criminals, every causality in that war, U.S. and Iraqi, is an individual war crime. The other fabrication was that Saddam was connected with 9/11. After 9/11, 60% of the American people thought this because Bush and Cheney gave that implication in everything that they said. What do you do when you have a rogue government? A government run by war criminals pursuing an illegal war, alienating most of world against us, draining the budget that could be used for life and death issues like health care, product protection, occupational safety, children’s issues, AIDS. The Iraq war killed 100K Iraqis according to a Johns Hopkins study. I wanted to ask Kerry, “You were hawkish on Iraq in your first debate with Bush. In fact, you said you wouldn’t back down from Fallujah to make that point. Safire thought you were more hawkish than Bush – to his delight. How are you going to ask the next 100K Iraqis to die for a mistake?” (Remember he [Kerry] used this phrase in his testimony 30 years ago about the Viet Nam war.) But it’s more than a mistake. It’s a crime, a massive crime. And when our government commits this kind of crime, we better stop looking at the third re-run of Cheers and go to work. The Bush fabrications and deceptions are all documented to the nth degree. Everyday there’s an inspector general’s report or other reports coming out. Richard Clark, who left the administration and wrote a book opposing the invasion as having nothing to do with the war on terrorism. He wrote “It is as if Osama Bin Laden on some mountain redoubt was saying to George W Bush, “Please Mr. President, invade Iraq. It’s hard to think of anything that George Bush has done regarding Iraq that Osama would not have ordered.” Now the U.S. government intelligence realizes that Iraq has become a recruitment realm for a lot of people training for future activity against us – just like the Mujahedeen that we trained in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. It’s all down hill for Bush and Cheney now in Iraq, because they have used it the way you would squeeze the last ounce from a lemon. The Iraq war was their reelection strategy; a way to stifle the Democratic party; to chill dissent; to distract attention to the necessities here that they don’t give hoot about anyhow like things effecting workers and everything else that is in need of attention. They only thought about the way to make their corporate buddies happy with luscious no-bid contracts - buddies, who then pumped $250 million into his campaign further concentrating power and media focus on the White House instead of on Congress and the courts. He got away with it because the Democratic Party let him get away with it. They are complicit. They are cowardly. They are cautious. But they are not cunning. And the Democrats got away with letting the Republicans get away with it because we let them get away with it. We, the people. We dropped out with few exceptions. The number of people who compose what we call “the attentive public”, who knew what the score was, knew about the fabrications, lies and criminality - they did not do their jobs. They sat around looking at various small party candidates who were trying to raise the banner against this war, and they were satisfied with the least/worse voting strategy. And when you go for the least/worst between Democrats and Republicans, this is what you’re going to get. When you lower your expectations for what the presidential candidates should be standing for, those candidates will accommodate your lower expectations. When you signal that you are going to vote for Kerry because you hate Bush so much, Kerry has your vote locked up, and allows himself to be pulled into a blurring situation between himself and George Bush. He can allow himself to be pulled in by the corporate interests and he allows corporate crime and corporate welfare and corporate corruption of our elections and the bloated wasteful military budget that is now taking half the federal government’s entire national budget and we have no major enemy in the world. The old Soviet Union and communist China want our industries. They are not interested in sending missiles over here. But all of this is now water under the dam. We have to learn from it. One way to learn is to ask, what kind of assets do we have to end this war, to end the occupation? And how do we go about doing it? One of the assets is the Truth. And it’s coming out: 58% of Americans don’t like the way Bush is managing the war. The majority want the troops back home. It can be said safely that despite the full war propaganda in the media, despite absence of a formidable [Democratic] opposition informing the public about what’s really going on, a majority of the public is against the war. This is a remarkable achievement of intuition by the public. That’s not like starting out with 20% of the people [the way opposition to the Viet Nam war started out]. The second asset we have is the military and veterans. We’ve got to stop stereotyping the military and veterans as being totally war hawks. This is the first war we’ve been plunged into that went against the considered judgment of retired military officials in this country - some of them hi profile, like retired marine general Anthony Zinni whose area of expertise was the Middle East. And Brent Skokroff, military advisor to Bush I. Admiral Shanahan, retired commander of the Pacific Fleet. These people represent large numbers of their colleagues of retired military personnel that goes through the Pentagon and the U.S. Army all the way up to four star generals - up to General Meyers, who is the mouthpiece of Rumsfeld. Why are all these people against the war? Because they knew the quagmire we were getting into it; the odds of a resistance supported by masses of Iraqi people. Because they knew that the main argument of the resistance was to get the U.S. military and oil companies out. But the air force and navy are push button now. They are not on the ground like infantry. Imagine a tiny clique at top of the White House and Pentagon supported by the military/industrial complex , the Lockheed Martins, Raytheons, General Dynamics, Boeings, Grummans. And all the consulting firms. And all the corporate executives now in high positions in the Pentagon. There’s big money in “thar” hills. How many have heard of Smedley Butler? His book was just reprinted by his family. He was a major general in the Marine Corps for the bulk for the first 3 or 4 decades of the 20th Century. He was the most decorated marine general during his lifetime – two Congressional Medals of Honor. He wrote “War Is a Racket”. In it he wrote, “I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of the time being a high class muscle man for the Wall St., Big Business, and the bankers. In short I was a racketeer for capitalism”. Looking at our history books in college and high school, the best you can say is that [Smedley Butler] was a mild footnote in history. His book is printed by Feral Press in LA. He was second to none in defending this country. But he did not want to engage in imperialism abroad. “I helped make Mexico, especially Tam Pico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of a half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall St. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the clearing house of Braun Bros from 1902 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In china I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went unmolested.“ Believe it or not, Readers Digest condensed this book into a supplement. Imagine Readers Digest doing that now. The book contains gruesome pictures of war with ironic subtitles, like a field with soldiers all slain with the subtitle, “Fields of Glory”. Every marine in this country should read this book. You want to galvanize opposition to this war? Get this book into the hands of every troop in Iraq. He, Butler, had a peculiar way for resolving this problem. 1.) He wanted to take the profits completely out of the war machine. 2.) He wanted to send the people who are of advanced age and who are pushing this war to the front lines. And, 3.) He wanted to put the decision into hands of young people to decide if they wanted to go to war or not. Take a look at the opposition here in the Congress. Congress is seething with resentment. They know that they were taken . They know that they were rolled. Even more and more conservative Republicans think it was a mistake. But they are all waiting for each other to step up first. John Conyers [Representative from Ohio] is still teetering as to whether to institute impeachment. I said to him the other day, “Do you know any President in the 20th or 21st Century who was more impeachable, more impeachment-worthy, than Bush? This is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind: to fire the President. A criminal war that was unconstitutional, brings back casualties, inflicts damage on innocent Iraqis.” He said (he’s right on the edge to bring something forward. He’s got a very safe seat in Detroit) he needs 20 people to go with him in order to go with this. But so far they are not going with him. You know why? Because they are not feeling the heat from the field. They are not hearing the rumble of the people. You know what the rumble of the people does to politicians? That’s where you get your optimism. Just the rumble gets them thinking. Never mind a takeover by the people. Never mind the assertion of popular sovereignty over corporate sovereignty in Washington. Just a rumble! Why do you think Nixon, of all people, signed into law with resounding rhetoric the EPA law, the OSHA law, the product safety law? And pushed forward a minimum income plan that was an assault on poverty? He pushed forward the health plan that was better than Clinton’s. It was rebuffed by Congress. Why did Nixon do this? He didn’t believe in these things. He heard the rumble of the people in the 60’s. He was the last Republican President who was afraid of liberals. Can you imagine Republicans now afraid of liberals? Clinton was impeached for lying under oath for lying about sex. We have a clearly impeachable President. We have an impeachment position on our website, Votenader.org. Check it out. Most of our liberal critics who were day after day hounding us about our campaign never went to the website. I asked, do you ever look at our website? No? Why not? Because their mind was made up. Their mind was shut down. They relied on the Democrats to defeat Bush. And look what happened. Ten years of defeat by Democrats by the most craven Republicans who have ever slithered into Capital Hill. And these people are saying to the Democrats, “Oh please try doing the same thing again for us.” The Congress needs to be revived. Each of the little networks of you around the country, you sign up ten, or twenty or fifty people and they take courage from one another. We have to do a better job at this. Everyone should begin hammering away at their member of Congress – by email, letter, phone call – demanding accountability sessions with them back home on the war. They always go back home to sweet talk to you. So bring them in on special accountability sessions. Develop a strategy where they can’t brush you off. You can write a letter to a Congressperson that is ten time more effective by knowing how to write such a letter [ Read “Who Runs Congress” by Mark Green]. That’s important to do. Because when Time magazine has a very serious caveat about the war, you know that Congress is getting worried. Just the way Time first signaled it was over for Nixon. The establishment is worried: the dollar is starting to drop. The trade deficit is increasing. The government deficit is a half trillion dollars a year now. It’s not sustainable. The want attention paid to it. They don’t want the bleeding of the Iraq war to tip the whole balance. And more and more you’re seeing the business community saying this war is a mistake - except ones making money off of it. But they aren’t the majority. Because of the shakiness of the economy, internationally and domestically, they don’t want the uncertainty that [comes with] Iraq Incorporated. There is another asset besides impeachment: the military families. Lately they are coming out against the war. They are seething with rage about what’s happening. A lot don’t want to admit that their sons and daughters have died in vain. A lot are being flattered by Bush right now. A lot of antennae are out from Washington to make sure they don’t get out of hand. I went and visited a soldier in Walter Reed Hospital last year and one of the soldiers in there and his mother told me that he did not want to receive the Purple Heart from anyone in the Bush administration. And that he was not alone. It’s important to get into this in a deep way – and just do our job where we live. And let the arithmetic add up around the country. Stop rationalizing the futility with “Well you do something and he does something but it’s not enough to accomplish anything.” If everybody does their part, they can begin to speed it up. There are certain constituencies that progressives can’t reach – like the military families. Those can be reached by the increasing opposition to the war by more conservative groups. They can be reached by retired veterans. Websites like veteransforpeace.org give you a read of what’s going on all over the country - WW II, Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War veterans - extremely militant. They want to close down recruitment avenues. Open up pathways to Canada. Tough people. This is not a modest version of some of the other veterans organizations. Another website to be aware of is unitedforpeace.org. It will be revived after its hibernation - [the hibernation done] out of deference to Kerry. These are a few of the issues and what we can do. If we don’t start this moving this year, we are going to find ourselves beyond the point of no return. Fascism is on the horizon. Fascism was defined by Roosevelt as “private economic power controlling the democratic state”. This was in a message to Congress in 1938 before he would be talking about Hitler and Mussolini. He was talking about corporate power controlling our government. Once the politicians can get to that tipping point [towards fascism], then dissent becomes treason. Dissent become subject to the Patriot Act. Dissent becomes an object of the police state. This is the crucial year. This is the year we’ve got to stand tall. Have our own self-respect and elevate the significance of our actions. And stop making excuses. Whenever you see people saying, “Well it’s not my business. I’ve got to tend to my work,” you tell them that if it is not their business now, they are going to pay a high price in the future for that business that they are attending to now – whatever it may be. We [the 2004 Nader Campaign] are in a deficit mode here. We are in a deficit mode not because we hired fancy consultants. We hired no consultants. We are in deficit mode not because we flew first class. We flew Southwest airlines - and like the honey roasted peanuts. We’re in deficit mode because the Democrats filed 21 lawsuits in 18 states to get us off the ballot, because they wanted to deny people like you an opportunity to vote for the candidates of your choice - not by trying to debate with you and entice you with their issues to get your vote, but by throwing us off the ballot and denying all of us our civil liberties, and our freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. This is a constitutional crime of the first order; but it is not viewed as such by our courts. Voting rights are considered big civil liberties issues. What about candidates rights to get on the ballot, to get in debates, to give you more voices and choices? That is the work for the future – the kind of electoral reform where the candidates have the right to get on the ballot in order to make voting meaningful rather than a contest between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Or only one dominant party due to redistricting that your state of California is inflicted with - either a Democrat or a Republican. Every legislator in your state legislature and every member of your Congressional delegation was re-elected in November. There is an alternative explanation for that: that they did such a fantastic job for the people. But I don’t think that’s very credible. We are down to a one party dictatorship bred by a two party electoral dictatorship, 250 years of a winner take all two party system. Redistricting is carving up the country [into uncontested districts] and saying we’re a two party system. We are the laughing stock of the world. Ireland has 11 parties, Chile 13, Norway 12 and there’s a half dozen in Canada. We’re down to one party [because of redistricting] for 95% of the voters in the House of Representatives. You can tell this to your friends and they won’t indicate an ounce of indignation. That’s how far behind the curve we are in this battle against losing our democracy. There’s no election without contest. There is no election if you don’t have choices. If you just have one choice, the incumbent party, it’s not an election, it’s a coronation. [True] election [process] is over. And the consequences on policy that affects your daily lives is immense. It’s not just some little political scientist’s hypothetical description. It’s real. So we need to raise funds. You can’t believe how much fun it is to raise money. I would like to re-introduce you to this joyful, gratifying exercise. I want to introduce you to a great lawyer who with two friends and 15 years of work shut down the Trojan nuclear plant outside of Portland. That’s not been done. They did it with threshold strategies, of initiatives, litigation, demonstration, leaks – you know, memo leaks. SMUD [the Sacramento Municipal Utility District] closed down a nuclear plant but that was agreed to [not fought over]. He’s the kind of lawyer you go to when no one else is interested in your case of injustice. He’s the kind of lawyer who says, “The forces of injustice never take a day off. Therefore the forces of justice must never take a day off.” From this least/worst mentality we are giving the least/worst a free ride. He’s going to say a few words so we can leave here with a good level of contribution. We have to wind down this campaign so that we can ramp up on this war issue and many of the issues that the two parties are vaingloriously ignoring. This was a free campaign. Nobody ever gave us money and told us that we want you to cut, we want you to shave, we want you to qualify or drop the issue that you are talking about. |
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Strategies to End this War and the Occupation FAIR USE NOTICE |