"The State of Our Union-Perpetual War" ... from 2003!

(more at site)

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2005/02/03/weve-been-warnedthe-state-of-our-unionperpetual-war/



The State of the Union was, in many ways, a reiteration of the president’s second inaugural address: the look on that chimpy little face as he repeated “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world” was at once self-satisfied and defiant, as if he were telling Peggy Noonan, Mark Helprin, and all the other conservative skeptics to stuff it. Laced with explicit threats, pumped up with hubris, shameless in its exploitation of the American war dead, this speech was a warning to us all – get ready for more wars, more death, more neocon lies in the service of a foreign policy founded on madness.

“Our third responsibility to future generations is to leave them an America that is safe from danger, and protected by peace. We will pass along to our children all the freedoms we enjoy – and chief among them is freedom from fear.”

Fear has been this administration’s leitmotif, its stock-in-trade, its signature theme. Remember this gem from Dick Cheney?:

“It’s absolutely essential …on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”

If you don’t elect us, you’re going to get nuked: what could be clearer? There won’t be any freedom from fear as long as this crew of ghouls is in the White House. The foreign policy part of the president’s speech was permeated with the fear his policies have done nothing to allay, and everything to exacerbate:

“In the three and a half years since September 11th, 2001, we have taken unprecedented actions to protect Americans. We have created a new department of government to defend our homeland, focused the FBI on preventing terrorism, begun to reform our intelligence agencies, broken up terror cells across the country, expanded research on defenses against biological and chemical attack, improved border security, and trained more than a half million first responders. Police and firefighters, air marshals, researchers, and so many others are working every day to make our homeland safer, and we thank them all.”

Is the creation of yet another government agency really “unprecedented”? Hyperbole comes naturally to this hopped-up White House, drunk as it is on self-regard instead of alcohol. We haven’t reformed our intelligence agencies: instead, we’ve purged them of every honest analyst. If you resisted the neocons and debunked the phony intelligence they planted in collusion with Ahmed Chalabi that falsely pointed to nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, then you’re outta there.

(Oh, but I forgot: in Washington these days, when you say you’re going to “reform” this or that agency or institution, it means you’re going to kick out all contrarians and eliminate any independent voices in the government. The vow to “reform,” in today’s parlance, is equivalent to what the Stalinists meant when they used to refer to “the liquidation of the kulaks.”)

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0628-03.htm

GENEVA The United States is at war. This has been repeated by President George W. Bush and members of his administration on several occasions. What has not been made clear is the nature of the war. There has been no formal declaration that clearly sets out goals and objectives.

Why is this so worrying? In 1987, the Yale University historian Paul Kennedy described the rise and fall of empires. He analyzed how all imperial powers arrived at a point of overreach that eventually destroyed the empire. Too much concern for security and disproportionate spending on defense were endemic to the fall of all previous empires he studied. The United States appears at this time to be marching into a situation that fits Kennedy's description of imperial decline.

The march begins with the overextension of the mission beyond reprisals against the immediate perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. In his "axis of evil" speech, the president argued that the war against terrorism would be extended to countries building weapons of mass destruction that eventually could be used against the United States. In other words, the war against terrorism could be extended to not only those directly responsible for Sept. 11 but also to those who might be future aggressors.

Concern with future attacks is being presented as open-ended in time and place. There is no longer a clear necessity to link an enemy to specific events nor to say when the war can be declared over. If, in the future, one person gets on an airplane with explosives in his shoes, is the war against terrorism still on? It is difficult to imagine the limits of the war and to see how the heightened sense of national security could be diminished. The United States appears to be entering a situation of hypersensitivity wherein any threat to its national security justifies enormous sacrifices of resources and eventually civil liberties.

Kennedy's book set off an important reaction in the United States in the late 1980s. It laid out the consequences of the superpower contest with the Soviet Union in terms of mutual imperial overstretch instead of mutual assured destruction.

What is so intriguing and worrying about the war on terrorism is that following the implosion of the Soviet Union due to its imperial overreach the United States seems to be embarking on a war that may have similar effects.

The most obvious war being fought is the campaign against the perpetrators of Sept. 11. The search for Osama bin Laden and the members of the Qaeda network is an act of self-defense legitimatized by the United Nations and NATO. The United States was attacked and has the right to seek out and punish the attackers as well as to prevent future attacks by the same group as long as its reaction is proportional and within the overall framework of the laws of war.

What is more difficult to justify is the enlargement of the war to other groups. Is punishment for Al Qaeda the same as punishing governments for harboring or encouraging the terrorists? The overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan was generally welcomed internationally, but the responsibilities of the Taliban are not the same as that of Al Qaeda. In the name of fighting terrorism, excesses can easily be committed when one moves further and further away from punishing those with direct responsibility. This is what makes fighting terrorism so frustrating and dangerous. To root out particular terrorists is not the same as destroying terrorism in general.

The war on terror succeeded the Cold War. The peace dividend from the collapse of the Soviet Union has not appeared. Instead, there has been a new confrontation with rogue states, states of concern and the axis of evil.