MB Civic

By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams
Tuesday 11 April 2006
George W. Bush is at it again. This time,
reports Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, it’ll be
Iran. (Those of us who guessed it would have been
Syria first apparently underestimated his
hubris.) And this time he wants to be able to use
nukes.
In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the way a
seemingly democratic president kept his nation in
a continual state of repression was by keeping
the nation in a constant state of war. Cynics
suggest the lesson wasn’t lost on Lyndon Johnson
or Richard Nixon, who both, they say, extended
the Vietnam war so it coincidentally ran over
election cycles, knowing that a wartime
President’s party is more likely to be reelected
and has more power than a President in peacetime.
This wasn’t a new lesson, however, and Orwell
was not the first to note that a democracy at war
was weakened and at risk.
On April 20, 1795, James Madison, who had
just helped shepherd through the Constitution and
Bill of Rights, and would become President of the
United States in the following decade, wrote, “Of
all the enemies to public liberty war is,
perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it
comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
Reflecting on war’s impact on the Executive
Branch of government Madison continued his letter
about the dangerous and intoxicating power of war
for a president.
“In war, too, the discretionary power of the
Executive [President] is extended,” he wrote.
“Its [his] influence in dealing out offices,
honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the
means of seducing the minds, are added to those
of subduing the force of the people. The same
malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced
in the inequality of fortunes, and the
opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of
war…and in the degeneracy of manners and
morals, engendered by both.
“No nation,” he concluded, “could preserve
its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
But it’s not just Madison who warned us. More
recent presidents have also noted the danger of a
craven political usurpation of democracy,
particularly when fed by the bloody meat of war.
As he was leaving office, the old warrior
President Dwight D. Eisenhower had looked back
over his years as President and as a General and
Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe
during World War II, and noted exactly what
Madison had warned against.
“Our military organization today bears little
relation to that known by any of my predecessors
in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of
World War II or Korea,” Eisenhower said in
sobering tones in a nationally televised speech.
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the
United States had no armaments industry. American
makers of plowshares could, with time and as
required, make swords as well. But now we can no
longer risk emergency improvisation of national
defense; we have been compelled to create a
permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
Added to this, three and a half million men and
women are directly engaged in the defense
establishment. We annually spend on military
security more than the net income of all United
States corporations.” Nonetheless, Eisenhower
added, “This conjunction of an immense military
establishment and a large arms industry is new in
the American experience. The total influence,
economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in
every city, every State house, every office of
the Federal government. We recognize the
imperative need for this development. Yet we must
not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
Our toil, resources and livelihood are all
involved; so is the very structure of our
society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for
the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist.”
He concluded with a very specific warning to
us, the generation that would follow. “We must
never let the weight of this combination endanger
our liberties or democratic processes,” he said.
“We should take nothing for granted. Only an
alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and
military machinery of defense with our peaceful
methods and goals, so that security and liberty
may prosper together.”
But Americans have been terrified by the
prospect of terrorism, endlessly hyped by the
Republican majority, and the warnings of Madison
and Eisenhower are forgotten by many – and
unknown to most of the current generation that
now studies “to the test” instead of delving into
the deeper lines of American history.
Citizens of other nations, however,
immediately recognize what the Republicans are up
to.
In October of 2002 – nearly four years ago –
I wrote on these pages the following summary of a
trip I’d just taken to Buenos Aires:
I just returned from Argentina. People there
understand Machiavelli, I discovered; when he
wrote his instructions to The Prince, that,
“Every one sees what you appear to be, few really
know what you are, and those few dare not oppose’
it would make perfect sense to anybody who’d
lived through Argentina’s past half-century. And,
while they don’t so often read James Madison
there, I think they’d agree with the letters he
left to his countrymen, that I was reading as I
traveled, warning us about war as the greatest
danger to the democracy he’d just helped birth.
As I walked about, talking with all sorts of
people, I kept feeling Madison’s ghost tapping on
my shoulder. But more about that in a moment;
first the questions I encountered in Argentina:
Is Bush just manipulating the press and
really planning to wait until 2004 to have his
war, thus guaranteeing his own re-election? Or is
it going to happen faster to begin pumping oil
and thus repay the oil industry campaign donors
who brought him to power? Or is it all about
something even more insidious: the end of
democracy itself, carefully planned by a small
group of cynical intellectuals who truly believe
that democracy is cute and quaint but that only
an all-powerful government can guarantee
stability in a dangerous world?
For example, last weekend in the Buenos Aires
airport I was sitting next to a gregarious a man
while waiting to board our flight. When he saw my
American passport, he said, “You know, this
Saddam thing has little to do with trying to
throw the 2002 elections, like all you Americans
think. Of course, that’s a nice side-benefit,
keeping everything else out of the news. But it’s
really about 2004 and setting up the Republicans
for a half-century of one-party rule like
Roosevelt did. Bush will pull back from his war
rhetoric after the elections and let in the UN
inspectors, and all the world, even his
opponents, will hail him as a man of peace. And
then, just before the 2004 elections, there will
be problems with the inspectors, they’ll find
some excuse, and the war will start in time for
November 2004.” He smiled and wagged a finger at
me. “We know about one-party rule here. You’ll
soon learn.”
Two days earlier, in a pleasant middle-class
home, I sat across the table from a woman who had
been tortured and electro-shocked by the police
for protesting, exactly 20 years earlier, the war
between Great Britain and Argentina over the
Malvinas or Falkland Islands. I never would have
guessed; she was soft-spoken, middle-class, and
fashionably dressed. But she was one of “the
disappeared” for a brief moment, and among one of
the lucky ones who were released. Indeed, the
Argentineans knew about one-party rule.
“The war covered up the dark side of the
government and the corruption of the politicians
of the time,” another woman in a Buenos Aires
restaurant told me. “It was a good way of putting
the attention of the people somewhere else, like
when you’re with a little child, and you want to
distract him, and you say, ‘Come here and have
some sweets.’ And we bought that immediately.
There was dancing in the streets. ‘We’re going to
win a war – oh, boy, oh, boy!’ We went with flags
to the streets, singing the national songs to
celebrate the possibility of winning this war.”
The Falklands/Malvinas war was over quickly,
though, in part, because each side had an enemy:
a nation. Terrorism, on the other hand, is not an
enemy: it’s a tactic. Unless you want to have a
perpetual war, you must declare war against an
enemy, not a behavior.
But what if a perpetual war is just what the
Bush administration wants, as another man in a
restaurant in Buenos Aires suggested? The man
said in his Latin accent, “He has learn from
mistakes of his poppa: don’t end the war too
quickly before an election. Keep the talk going,
but make sure the war itself happens in 2004.”
Others thought it would happen sooner, to get
Iraq’s oil, seize control of the Middle East and
neutralize OPEC, and to start the profits flowing
to the oil corporations who got Bush elected.
Or maybe it’s all a plan to drive a stake
into the heart of democracy, another suggested,
using war as the excuse.
Four years later, there can be no doubt that
Bush/Cheney/Rove and the Republican cabal lied us
into invading Iraq. Ginning it up just before the
2002 midterm elections was largely done so
Republicans could take back the Senate in 2002
after losing it because of Jim Jeffords’
defection. The 2003 attack was timed, we now can
see, so Bush would improve his chances to win the
White House in the election of 2004.
So, too, it appears that Bush is now ginning
up a new war just in time for the 2006 midterm
elections, and Karl Rove probably has a 2007
continuing war in mind to help swing the 2008
elections (or postpone them).
Much of the evidence now available suggests
both the 2003 Republican Iraq War and the
possible upcoming Republican Iran War are just
that simple, just that banal, and ultimately just
that traitorous to the traditional ideals of
America.
As Governor George W. Bush told Mickey
Herskowitz – the man the Bush family hired to
ghost-write Bush’s autobiography A Charge To Keep
– in 1999:
“One of the keys to being seen as a great
leader is to be seen as commander in chief. My
father had all this political capital built up
when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he
wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had
that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m
going to get everything passed that I want to get
passed and I’m going to have a successful
presidency.”
Bush’s determination to invade Iraq to gain
“political capital” even before he was appointed
to the Presidency in 2001 was first laid out in
an article by Russ Baker, who extensively
interviewed Herskowitz. Baker noted:
“Herskowitz said that Bush expressed
frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in
the shadow of an accomplished father. In
aggressive military action, he saw the
opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow.
The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of
the September 11 attacks. ‘Suddenly, he’s at 91
percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out
of the bunker.'” Oil, to the Republicans, would
be a nice bonus. And let’s not forget those
profits for Halliburton and other big Republican
contributors.
But the main reason Bush invaded Iraq, it
turns out, was so Republicans could take back the
US Senate in the election of 2002, and in the
hopes that Bush could finally win an election in
2004.
Apparently Bush is now prepared to do the
same with Iran – or at least rattle the sabers
loudly enough to convince the world he intends to
– for the same purpose. Political capital. Hold
on to the Republican majority. Prevent
investigations of the many crimes of his
administration by denying Democrats the power of
the subpoena that comes with a majority in the
House or Senate.
And – unless Democrats in Congress and the
American people stand up and speak out – in the
process Bush and his Republican enablers may just
bring about the end of the great American
experiment in democracy.
——–
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a
daily progressive talk show nationally syndicated
by Air America Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio.
His most recent books are The Last Hours of
Ancient Sunlight, Unequal Protection, We The
People, What Would Jefferson Do?, and Screwed:
The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class. His
website is www.thomhartmann.com.
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“A war of aggression is the supreme international crime.” — Robert Jackson,
former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor