things only get worse. Yesterday, as I was driving in to work, I saw
a pickup truck with a "proud to be American" sticker and a McCain
sticker on it. The man driving it had a military cap and was at least
as old as I am(64) The pickup truck he was driving was a Toyota. That,
given the state of the U.S. economy, weak dollar, trade deficit,
energy prices, rising unemployment, and declining living standards and
double digit trillion dollar deficit as a good place to begin to look
at the Bush administration's 7 years after 9/11
Seven years and trillions of dollars after George W. Bush proclaimed a
"war against terrorism," Osama bin Laden is still around, Al Qaeda is
not only still around but in Iraq where it wasn't in 2001, the Bush
administration is trying to fight Al Qaeda-Taliban forces by attacking
the Pakistani border areas where they were originally created in the
1980s by the CIA and the Pakistani ISI without the permission of the
Pakistani government, thus on paper violating its "sovereignty," and
the situation inside Afghanistan, where there is a really sinister
enemy, deteriorates while Bush talks of a "surge" in Afghanistan.
This can only end and a rationale policy to deal with groups like Al
Qaeda come into existence when the Bush administration and the right
Republicans are decisively defeated. Then, hopefully, we can begin to
look seriously at this ugly history, investigate the Bush family
relationship with the Saudi oil barons and the bin Ladens, the
disastrous intelligence failure that made the attacks possible, the
complete failure of national leadership on September 11 which made
possible the second tower attack, the administration's and its pliant
media's handling of the anthrax letters which gave the Al Qaeda group
exactly what it wanted, attention and the spread of fear. Then we can
begin as part of a policy of ending the Iraq occupation investigate
the Cheney-Rumsfeld led campaign to silence and or buy off the
established intelligence agencies of the U.S. government in order to
create a scenario to justify an invasion of Iraq.
Serious observers of politics through the world have wondered why the
Bush administration was not defeated decisively in the 2002 off year
elections, given its disastrous policies? Why it was not voted out of
office in 2004? This would have happened pretty much anywhere else,
including many nations with democratic electoral systems where
conservative parties are in power. Why the electorate who are
citizens of a nation forget about their civic responsibilities and
rally behind the government that had created this disaster. This has
fostered an cynical view of Americans in many places--that they are
know nothings who blindly follow political propaganda, selfish people
who wear the flag on their tee shirts and lapels and associate that
with patriotism.All they are about is themselves, their families and
isolated communities, not their fellow citizens, or the people of the
world. That in effect, those who have accepted what the Bush
administration is and has done for so long deserve what they have
gotten.
I don't think that on any level, but I come across it a good deal.
Along with so much else what created the September 11 attacks and
what it led to should rally all progressive activists to defeat the
McCain-Palin ticket, whose promises of "change" and especially
"reform" are as trustworthy as Bush's 2000 promise of "compassionate
conservatism. We must do it, as some old fashioned real
conservatives(of which I find very few) might say, for the national
honor of the American people.
Norman Markowitz
