Gore Vidal, who's authored a new book, “Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson,” doesn't mince words:
“Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president…We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process…He’s made every error you can. He’s wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can’t find jobs. Poverty is up. It’s a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power…nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed…With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.” Go online to read the rest of the fairly short and pithy piece by Marc Cooper, in the “L.A. Weekly”: Uncensored Gore: The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule.
From Gore Vidal, you not only get an erudite laundry list of the ills of the day, but help with putting these times in a context of the history of this country — Vidal is asked in the interview Cooper did “to draw out the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.”
One of my favorite news magazines, The American Prospect,
has a special report, “Foreign Policy in Crisis,” in the November issue, that also contains contextualizing food for thought. This is from a piece in that report that I also recommend you read online in its entirety: Rumsfeld's Folly: The radical Bush doctrine for America's military was cooked up long before 9-11. Now, theory has become practice—and it doesn't work, by Laurence Korb, who was assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration:
The U.S. military campaign against Iraq shows just how foolish it was for the country to embrace the Bush and Rumsfeld doctrines and such a grandiose concept of the threat we faced. This can be demonstrated in at least eight ways.
First, the Iraq campaign has set a new and dangerous standard for the use of force in the international arena. To have any shred of legitimacy, preemptive military action should be based on accurate, precise intelligence. The Bush administration and its British allies claimed, based upon their intelligence, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that we knew where they were and that they could be launched against us with as little as 45 minutes warning. These claims have proved to be empty, as have those about cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Even if we give Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt and say that they were acting in good faith, the experience demonstrates how difficult it is to obtain the intelligence necessary to legitimately invade another country under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which permits the use of force only in self-defense. But how can we now tell India that it is illegal to take preemptive action against Pakistan?
Second, before the attack there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein, with or without weapons of mass destruction, was not being contained. In fact, the sanctions and inspections that were part of the containment regime since 1991 had proven remarkably effective. They prevented Iraq from rebuilding its conventional military forces or reconstructing its program for developing weapons of mass destruction. But even if Hussein had developed the ultimate weapon, a nuclear bomb, the United States could have deterred him from using it. As Condoleezza Rice pointed out in a Foreign Affairs article in early 2000, before Bush became president and appointed her national-security adviser, even if Hussein had managed to obtain nuclear weapons, any attempt to use them would have brought national obliteration.
Third, while the United States can militarily defeat just about any state in the world, without ongoing international cooperation we do not have the capacity to turn military victory into a stable peace or to fully remove the threat of terrorism. As the current phase of the Iraq War has demonstrated, the United States, despite spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined on its military, does not have sufficient forces to stabilize the situation on the ground without upsetting its standard rotation practices for active and reserve forces or drawing down its forces in other areas of potential conflict, such as the Korean peninsula. The U.S. Army now has two-thirds of its 33 combat brigades deployed — 16 in Iraq, two in Afghanistan, two in South Korea and one in the Balkans. In order to maintain a reasonable rotation policy, it should be deploying no more than half of its brigades at any one time.
The “Rumsfeld doctrine” is only exacerbating this situation. In order to pay for more sophisticated gear more quickly without increasing the defense budget more than projected, Rumsfeld would like to reduce the number of ground troops in the force. Never mind that the U.S. military is already the most technologically advanced in the world and doesn't need to undertake a crash program to upgrade further at the expense of its ground forces. Moreover, to avoid enlarging the active military, Rumsfeld has resisted calls to move peacekeeping forces such as military police and civil-affairs specialists from the reserves to the active force, even though the need for them, under the “Bush doctrine,” is active and long-term.
Fourth, in taking unilateral, preemptive military action against a state that does not pose an imminent threat, America has diverted its attention from more serious threats to national security. While the United States was focused on invading Iraq, it was forced to postpone dealing with the crisis in North Korea, a rogue nation that, if it does not yet have them, is much closer to obtaining nuclear weapons than Iraq was. North Korea has already exported nuclear-weapons technology and ballistic missiles. While focusing on Iraq, the United States has also let nation building in Afghanistan drift and has not been able to play its proper role in implementing the “road map” in the Middle East.
Fifth, by claiming that its goal in the Iraq War was to promote democracy in the Middle East, the Bush administration exposed itself to charges of rampant hypocrisy. In order to remove Saddam Hussein, the United States had to rely on such authoritarian regimes as Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to provide military staging areas. Had those nations allowed a popularly elected legislature to vote on the matter, as Turkey did, there is no doubt that they, too, would have been unable to support the war.
In fact, the administration has undermined the president's goal of promoting democracy and free enterprise by giving a pass to regimes that rarely hold free elections and routinely trample on the human rights of their citizens — for example, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China — in return for their support of Bush's overall war against terrorism.
Sixth, by refusing to wait either for a second resolution from the United Nations authorizing an attack or for the inspection process to proceed, the Bush administration has made it more difficult for the UN and its inspectors to help deal with North Korea and Iran, two countries that pose far greater risks to international peace and security than Iraq.
Seventh, by committing itself to making Iraq a democracy, the United States has committed itself to a long and costly engagement in an unstable part of the globe. To create a democracy in a nation without much of a history of liberal constitutionalism will require a generation of involvement, as the administration should have known. It was warned by the outgoing Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, and by the first head of the president's economic council, Lawrence Lindsey, that it would take several hundred thousand military people and hundreds of billions of dollars to win the peace in Iraq. And without much international support, the United States will have to bear most of that burden itself. But to admit this before the war, Bush might have undermined public support, and it certainly would have called into question Rumsfeld's plan to reduce the Pentagon's reliance on ground forces. Now, as casualties mount and costs rise, there is a real danger that Americans will grow unwilling to support the necessary expenditures on the military, not to mention such other components of national security as diplomacy and homeland security.
Eighth, preemption of terrorists is actually achieved much more effectively by nonmilitary means. Over the past two years, the United States and its allies have arrested more than 3,000 potential terrorists and dried up more than $125 million of their assets. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration has undone much of this progress, rallying more people and more money to the cause of global terrorism.
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