Posted by pancho (204.120.48.3) on December 23, 2001 at 10:41:24:
Now what was that famous battleship doing in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietneam in 1964 or thereabouts? It was waiting to get attacked, much as the USS Cole was hanging its ass out there in the Gulf years later. Only trouble was the Vietnamese wouldn't attack, no matter what the provocation, so President Johnson did it for them...told the American people in a breathless tone that we had been attacked by a Commie gunboat..that our Way of Life had been threatened, that slant eyed Gooks were jealous of our toys...that they WANTED a war with the largest Duper Power on earth ever, for all time etc.
The sailors on board that poor ship were sworn to secrecy and the good folks back home raised a howl amplified by the baby corporate media, back then, demanding that Congress vote the War Powers Act Johnson wanted so we could DEFEND FREEDOM!!! Congress was skeptical when they didn't believe the old coot was out and out lying and the measure passed by one or two votes.
Years later we find out there was no attack on that ship, that it sat there and waited and waited and waited till Johnson had enough...so eager was to "protect our way of life". We also learn from the Secretary for War that he knew all along the War couldn't be won...as if winning that damn war was the point all along.
To those of you who would find it difficult to believe that President Shrub and the Frat house full of Oilly people he is surrounded by could give a rat's ass about the people killed in the Trade Towers and elsewhere, just refer yourselves back to the Vietnam War...I know, you studied that yesterday...and remember how often politicians were told to end the slaughter of American boys, not to mention all those innocent Vietnamese who'd been fighting for autonomy for 40 years already...and the reply that came back was..."What, leave now and admit that five thousand American soldiers died in vain?"...and then it was..."What leave now, when ten thousand American soldiers have died in vain?"...and on to ten thousand and fifteen thousand and twenty thousand and and twenty five and thrity and forty and forty five and fifty and not till the count reached fifty five thousand American soldiers, "dead in vain"...did the United States just leave...that's right, just leave... with that big bad Commie Threat still looming large and emboldened by victory etc. And today you can eat Vietnamese food on any street corner on Main Street and we trade the hell with our former dreaded enemies.
What's a mere three thousand when you consider the benefits to the Unites States...what did fifty five thousand matter to these same politicians whose pals line up at the Public Tax Trough to feed their fill...while making jobs for you and me of course...well, you gotta EAT don't ya?
There is nothing so good for business as an insecure and ignorant and patriotic American...not a thing as good. The only question is, how do you make them that way? With the Commies no longer around, you create another Evil Force...and what fills the bill better than those hooded A-rab extremists. All you have to do is rape their land for several administrations, kill their children and starve their parents...all you have to do is terrorize them, and not with a bomb or two but a whole armada of gunships and jets and flame throwers and tanks...flying their friendly skies daily with them never knowing just when or why you might decide to drop a load on them and their families.
The United States NEEDS Saddam and Osama...the heads of any number of corporations who will get fatter and richer protecting YOU...NEED Oasama and Saddam and Khadafi and Arafat et al. If they didn't get them, they'd have to invent them...like the aspirin plant in the Sudan, like the weapons of mass destruction Saddam DOESN'T have cause they gave him only enough and if he had 'em he would have used them by now...the only weapons they have are their own emaciated bodies and determined wills that figure out how to use your own means of transport against you. You think people that determined wouldn't have used sarin and nuclear bombs by now...if they had them???
But you don't think...and you can thank years of public education for that...and your own prejudices which the white man has learned to play like a foul instrument...to your own detriment. Fly the firendly skies...in one piece or bits and pieces...your own leaders have brought you to this pass. Islamic Terrorism is what you get when you brutalize a people, marginalizing one component among them. The American Revolution produced fanatics and terrorists too...any people are capable of such acts...they learned it from us...WE taught them that it's okay to kill THEIR babies and bomb their buildings and kill the innocents who weren't even born when all this began and had nothing to do with it. We taught them...they're just returning the favor.
Bush, both of them, have been laboring mightily for years to create Islamic Terrorism. You watch the market rise...as personal freedom falls, and judges and politicians "soft" on Terrorism are voted out of office...and you watch as their Patriotic replacements, ready to get tough on Terrorism to protect YOU from the Evil Devils...proceed to place laws in effect curtailing your freedoms and you wont mind till that friend of yours, or your kid, gets busted and they haul YOU off as well cause the protections in the Fourth Amenedement have been abbrogated in order to make YOU safe from some poor slob in the Mideast...who wont harm you half as much as this new wave of Security minded laws and politicians will. Just wait till the laws protecting the forests and waters and air, and your kids from faulty merchandise and oil spills are repealed...and all under cover of protecting you from man made terrors...made by the same people who will now offer you protection at cost...the cost will be that the ONE document this nation produced like no other ever in the world, will be "modified"...the US Constitution is what these people are really aiming at...you just wont know it yet, and maybe never...you might never know what you lost, are losing daily.
The Religious Fundamentalism you see in those A-rab countires that has you all a tremble, is the mirror image of what these politicians really want over here. How many of these guys believe that MORE Christian virtues are what this country needs. They talk about security and our great way of life...but foiled in every attempt to impose their own Christian Fundamentalist views and make them the Law for all of us...such as rolling back education and installing Creationism as a CURRICULUM topic for all schools...they come at us from another angle...never mind Roe vs Wade...that didn't work and they can't shoot doctors as easily any longer, so they will get us by protecting us, by planting the ten commandments in every classrooom and by any number of seemingly benign acts YOU WILL BEG THEM to install. ..until it will be too late for the very mechanisms you'll need to change the law...will have become illegal by then. The Nazi Party never seized power, they were voted in by a grateful populace...only to see their own country dismembered a few years later. Think it will never happen here? How many Empires thought that.
Thank God another bomber was caught, thank god for Shrub and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest...here come more of those bills some in Congress were able to forestall the first time round...not now..."We want to be SAFE"...the people cry...and so they'll place themselves in even deeper jeopardy. Politicians have already shown you that fifty five thousand dead for nothing except corporate profits didn't bother them at all...how many more of you do you think they're willing to sacrifice? Plenty.