[Peace-discuss] The Thing We Don't Talk About By William Rivers
Pitt
Ricky Baldwin
baldwinricky at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 2 10:06:42 CDT 2005
Well, some of us talk about it, occasionally...
--- Chuck Minne <mincam2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The Thing We Don't Talk About
> By William Rivers Pitt
> t r u t h o u t | Perspective
> Thursday 23 June 2005
>
> With the revelation of the secret Downing Street
> Minutes, which exposed the fact
> that George Bush and Tony Blair had decided to
> invade Iraq in April of 2002, a
> heated debate has blown through media, congressional
> and activist circles. The decision
> to go to war in Iraq was made before any public
> debate was initiated, before the
> United Nations was brought into the conversation,
> confirming that Bush's blather about
> wanting peace and leaving war as the last resort was
> just that: blather.
>
> So why did we go?
>
> It had been suspected, and has now been
> confirmed by the Minutes, that Bush took
> us to war on false pretenses and by way of a whole
> constellation of lies and
> exaggerations. First it was the weapons of mass
> destruction that were not there. Then it
> was connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda
> that did not exist. Finally, it
> became about bringing freedom and democracy to the
> region, which has emphatically not
> happened.
>
> Threaded through the discussion was the belief
> that Bush and his
> petroleum-company allies lusted after Iraq's oil.
> There was also the idea that Bush wanted Saddam's
> head because of the "unfinished business" left by
> his father in 1991. Some whispered
> that Iraq had intended to change the monetary basis
> of its petroleum dealings from
> the dollar to the Euro, an action that would have
> spelled financial disaster for the
> boys in Houston. Finally, many believed Bush ramped
> up a war push in order to give
> Republicans a flag-waving platform to run on in the
> 2002 midterms.
>
> All of these were on the table as reasons for an
> invasion, though most of them
> were not included in public debate. Yet the real
> reasons behind this war, the real
> reasons for many of our military actions over the
> years, were never discussed. As with
> almost everything we deal with today in the foreign
> policy realm, the real reasons
> we invaded Iraq harken back to World War II and the
> Cold War.
>
> When the United States jumped into World War II,
> President Roosevelt ordered the
> American economy be put on a wartime footing. This
> was a sound decision: the country
> had to speed its industrial capabilities up to a
> sprint in order to manufacture a
> huge fighting army out of whole cloth. The action
> was successful beyond measure. The
> economy was invigorated, the war was won, and in the
> process the military/industrial
> complex, so named by President Eisenhower, was
> established as a power player in the
> American economy.
>
> In 1947, President Harry Truman put forth the
> Truman Doctrine, a broad policy of
> foreign intervention to combat the feared spread of
> Communism around the world. The
> Doctrine was essentially created by a small band of
> men like Paul Nitze, who were
> the precursors of what we now call
> neo-conservatives. Nitze, it should be noted, was
> the mentor of Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to be the
> mentor of Donald Rumsfeld and
> Dick Cheney.
>
> The establishment of the Truman Doctrine, the
> establishment of the "permanent
> crisis" that was the Cold War, required that the
> American economy remain on a wartime
> footing. There it has remained to this day, despite
> the fall of the Soviet Union and
> the collapse of the threat of a global communist
> takeover. Ten thousand books have
> been written on this subject, on the impact of our
> wartime economic footing upon
> domestic policy, the environment, global affairs and
> politics. In the end, however, the
> fact that our economy is set on a wartime footing
> means one simple thing.
>
> We need wars.
>
> Without wars, the economy flakes and falls
> apart. Without wars, the trillions of
> dollars spent on weapons systems, military
> preparedness and a planetary army would
> dry up, dealing a death blow to the economy as
> currently constituted. Without wars or
> the threat of wars, the populace is not so easily
> controlled and manipulated.
>
> Let us be clear, however. When I say "we," I do
> not refer to your average
> working man and woman on the street. The man running
> the shoe store or the woman managing
> the bar does not need war to remain economically
> viable. The "we" I speak of is that
> overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful few who have
> wired their fortunes into the
> manufacture of weapons, the plumbing of oil, and the
> collection of spoils through
> political largesse.
>
> These are the people who need war. They need it
> to pile up the contracts from
> the Pentagon, to enrich the banking institutions
> that protect them, to pay the lawyers
> who defend them, to pay the lobbyists who sustain
> them, to purchase the politicians
> who champion them, and to buy up the media that
> hides them from sight.
>
> Yet though this group is small in number, they
> are "we," for they are our
> leaders and our myth-makers. They have convinced the
> majority of this population that war
> is a necessity. They create the premises for combat
> and invasion, they convince and
> cajole and, when necessary, frighten us into line.
> All too often, almost every time,
> we buy into the fictions they manufacture, thus
> sustaining the "permanent crisis"
> mentality and the need for war after war after war.
>
> The economic need for war creates the required
> excuses for war. The "permanent
> crisis" of the Cold War motivated the United States
> to support the Shah in Iran, a
> decision that led to the Islamic Revolution and the
> establishment of Iran as a
> permanent enemy. The Cold War motivated us to
> support Saddam Hussein financially and
> militarily as a bulwark against Iran. The Cold War
> motivated us to establish the House of
> Saud in Saudi Arabia to ensure a steady supply of
> oil. The Cold War motivated us to
> support Osama bin Laden and the so-called
> "Jihadists" in Afghanistan in their fight
> against the Soviet invaders.
>
> Now, we prepare to invade Iran. We have invaded
> Iraq for the second time in 15
> years. We will never invade Saudi Arabia, despite
> the fact that this nation's vast
> wealth and Wahabbist extremists make it the birthing
> bed of international terrorism.
> We lost two towers in New York City at the hands of
> a group that we created in the
> 1980s to fight the Soviets. Put plainly, the
> "permanent crisis" of the Cold War
> created a cycle of military self-justification. We
> build enemies with arms and money, and
> then we destroy them with arms and money, thus
> keeping our wartime economy afloat.
>
> The Cold War ended more than ten years ago, but
> we still need war, and we need
> that "permanent crisis" to continue the cycle of
> military self-justification. If a
> legitimate war is not available, we will create one
> because we have to. We have our
> new "permanent crisis," which we call the War on
> Terror, another turn of the cycle
> created by an attack that our foreign policy and
> war-justifications of the last 50
> years made almost inevitable.
>
> We need wars. That's why we are in Iraq. This
> invasion and occupation of that
> nation has given our economy the war it needs, and
> has also created the justification
> for future wars by creating legions of enemies in
> the Mideast and around the world.
> Our wartime economy will tolerate no less.
>
> Talking about Bush's lies regarding weapons of
> mass destruction, or about
> bringing democracy to the region, or about the
> dollar-to-Euro transfer, or about the
> midterm elections, is window-dressing. We invaded
> Iraq because we had to. This is the
> elephant in the room, the foreign policy reality
> nobody talks about.
>
> If you want peace, work to change the
> underpinnings of our economy. Until that
> change is made, there will always be wars,
> invasions, and lies to brings such things
> about. It is what it is.
>
>
>
> http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062305X.shtml
>
>
>
> “The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for
> deflecting criticism of Israel
For Alexander, the
> uniqueness of The Holocaust is ‘moral capital’; Jews
> must ‘claim sovereignty’ over this ‘valuable
> property.’” -- The Holocaust Industry by Norman
> Finkelstein ..
>
> “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the
> populace alarmed by menacing it with and endless
> series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H. L.
> Mencken
>
> My Web Site Click Me Too
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! Sports
> Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy
Football>
_______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>
http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
More information about the Peace-discuss
mailing list