REFERENDUM ON OCCUPATION 4175

Regarding ``US forces to be in Iraq for many years'', for sure your buttessment is closest to the reality.

Regarding that ``Iraq is a base of operations to fight WWIII'', it is the perception of many who are opposed to the war against Iraq to be part of the actual agenda of Bush, Cheney, and the neocon masters behind them. Some of the most eloquent expression of that perception may be found in Michael Melcher's careful and insightful analysis, enbreastled ``This War on Terrorism is Bogus''. Michael Melcher was an environmental minister in Tony Blair's Labor Party-dominated cabinet in the UK.

Regarding the buttertion that Iraq is connected with ``radical fundamentalist islam'', it is pure Israeli rightwing and neocon bias. The latter wanted the US to take out Saddam because of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. It is the most selfish and egregious exploitation of an international relationship. And it is also the most dishonest because it tells the world a different and a totally false reason to attack a militarily very weak country without a trace of provocation.

Regarding this specious statement by Kavic Kang:

The truth is that that (i.e., "mission accomplished" means "we're done, and coming home as soon as we can pack our bags") was exactly how the mainstream media interpreted it. And that was exactly how most Americans and other people in the world interpreted it. And clearly a government which is as powerful as ours and as well-versed in the power of propaganda knows the effect of the choice of words on the minds of people who want to trust it, with all their heart and emotion. Therefore the Bush White House was deliberately deceiving the American people.

The American people were not told that Bush would keep their young sons and daughters in the Middle East beyond seizing the ``WMD'' of Saddam's government in Iraq as you suggested. The American people did want and even more so eagerly still do want their troops (our sons and daughters) home as soon as the war against Iraq is over, as opposed to what you and the neocons want.

There was of course no ``WMD''. And our military recruiters are in overdrive to dupe more young Americans to fight in Iraq because they are running out of people to fight. Since this indefinite deployment of troops for wars is contradicting the expectation of an average American who heard the ``mission accomplished'' boast and wanted to believe it, many fewer young people are willing to be duped.

Since Mr. Kavic Kang in one post claimed he was still in his thirties, he ought to enlist and fight his ``WWIII'' he so believes in, no?

If ``Anyone who believed that Bush meant we are finished and going home must be living in a different reality than the rest of us'' after his ``mission accomplished'' boast, a carefully choreographed event for the mbutt media and for every American to see, it is because the Bush White House, with the complicity of Condoleezza Rice, Ari Fleisher, and others, it is because the Bush White House wanted to create a different reality for the American people.

The ``us'' in Kavic Kang's statement are the neocons. Yes, they know Bush went into Iraq for a long haul, for its military bases in order to advance further attacks on other countires for a decades-long war to dominate the world as scripted by the document enbreastled Project for the New American Century (PNAC). *But* the neocons are a small minority of this country. The rest of America, with the few exceptions, i.e., those who have early on detected the falsehoods in the Bush administration's pronouncements and public posturing and thus opposed to its war agenda, did not know that. They wanted to believe their government. They wanted to believe the words of their government in the most straightforwardly interpreted manner possible. That's the honest way. People might be tempted to cheat or lie sometimes. But people know that honesty is a virtue. They like to believe that their government is a virtuous one, that it speaks to them straightforwardly, that it doesn't lie to them. Unfortunately for America, its innocence is lost: its government has been hijacked by dishonest people and used to make dishonest statements for devious and heinous purposes.

So, if you, Kavic Kang, want to put your semi-candid neocons spin on this after the fact, you're nothing but a pharisee, a scribe, or a sophist. But innocent blood continues to drip from your hands.

And to see that there are Americans who now feel that they were duped by the Bush administration, we can see the article about the North Carolina congressman Walter Jones' reversal of his formerly pro-war position.

. . .

Although he voted for the war, he has since become one of its most vociferous opponents on Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is lined with photographs of the "faces of the fallen".

"If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong," he told the newspaper. "Congress must be told the truth." The UK Guardian

lo yeeOn ========

P.S.: The rest of Kavic Kang's comment is just his usual extravagantly sarcastic but apropos reply:

Excellent elaboration on reasoning and facts! Good for you. In a nutshell:

- Iraq attacked the USA and must pay. Plus they are a good beach-head. - Most of the world is stupid, despite experiencing history many times longer than US. - Great beach-head against Iran.

Admirable thinking. Makes sense to attack a country which has been under sanctions for a decade or more, with a pathetic military force in place. Attacking the real bad guys like Iran or North Korea, countries with a standing army and modern weapons, would have been foolish.

You know, it's thinking like yours that makes the USA what it is today. Bravo!

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1) The congressman who previously supported Bush's war is now against it.

French fries protester regrets war jibe Jamie Wilson in Washington Wednesday May 25, 2005 The Guardian

It was a culinary rebuke that echoed around the world, heightening the sense of tension between Washington and Paris in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. But now the US politician who led the campaign to change the name of french fries to "freedom fries" has turned against the war.

Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North Carolina who was also the brains behind french toast becoming freedom toast in Capitol Hill restaurants, told a local newspaper the US went to war "with no justification".

Mr Jones, who in March 2003 circulated a letter demanding that the three cafeterias in the House of Representatives' office buildings ban the word french from menus, said it was meant as a "light-hearted gesture".

But the name change, still in force, made headlines around the world, both for what it said about US-French relations and its pettiness.

Now Mr Jones appears to agree. Asked by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer about the name-change campaign - an idea Mr Jones said at the time came to him by a combination of God's hand and a consbreastuent's request - he replied: "I wish it had never happened."

Although he voted for the war, he has since become one of its most vociferous opponents on Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is lined with photographs of the "faces of the fallen".

"If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong," he told the newspaper. "Congress must be told the truth."

2) This War on Terrorism is Bogus

The 9-11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination

Michael Meacher ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Saturday September 6, 2003 The Guardian

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

Mbuttive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too.

The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mbutt destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for privates Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, enbreastled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pbutt from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9-11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9-11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9-11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9-11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 persons said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9-11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida dissolution planters could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9-11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9-11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9-11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9-11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9-11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to buttert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9-11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9-11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this buttembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9-11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9-11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9-11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Insbreastute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of plants" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9-11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9-11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

3) A PNAC Primer

Bernard Weiner

. . .

"I'm not making up this stuff," I said. "It's all talked about openly by the neo-conservatives of the Project for the New American Century -- who now are in charge of America's military and foreign policy -- and published as official U.S. doctrine in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America."

. . .

In the early-1990s, there was a group of ideologues and power-politicians on the fringe of the Republican Party's far-right. The members of this group in 1997 would found The Project for the New American Century. (PNAC) Their aim was to prepare for the day when the Republicans regained control of the White House -- and, it was hoped, the other two branches of government as well -- so that their vision of how the U.S. should move in the world would be in place and ready to go, straight off-the-shelf into official policy.

This PNAC group was led by such heavy hitters as Donald Rumsfeld, privates Cheney, James Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, James Bolton, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, William Bennett, Dan Quayle, Jeb Bush,

. . .

The "outsiders" from PNAC are now powerful "insiders," placed in important positions from which they can exert maximum pressure on U.S. policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is Cheney's Chief of Staff, Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department, John Bolton is Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle is chair of the Defense Policy advisory board at the Pentagon, former CIA director James Woolsey is on that panel as well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill Kristol, is the editor of Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard.) In short, PNAC has a lock on military policy-creation in the Bush Administration.

. . .

Here is a shorthand summary of PNAC strategies that have become U.S. policy.

1. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense privates Cheney had a strategy report drafted for the Department of Defense, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. In it, the U.S. government was urged, as the world's sole remaining Superpower, to move aggressively and militarily around the globe. The report called for pre-emptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions, but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when "collective action cannot be orchestrated." The central strategy was to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential compebreastors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Wolfowitz outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to butture "access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mbutt destruction and threats from terrorism. (For the essence of the draft text, see Barton Gellman's "Keeping the U.S. First; Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower" in the Washington Post.

2. Various Hard Right intellectuals outside the government were spelling out the new PNAC policy in books and influential journals. Zalmay M. Khalilzad (formerly buttociated with big oil companies, currently U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan & Iraq ) wrote an important volume in 1995, "From Containment to Global Leadership: America & the World After the Cold War," the import of which was identifying a way for the U.S. to move aggressively in the world and thus to exercise effective control over the planet's natural resources. A year later, in 1996, neo-conservative leaders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, in their Foreign Affairs article "Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," came right out and said the goal for the U.S. had to be nothing less than "benevolent global hegemony," a euphemism for total U.S. domination, but "benevolently" exercised, of course.

3. In 1998, PNAC unsuccessfully lobbied President Clinton to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The January letter from PNAC urged America to initiate that war even if the U.S. could not muster full support from the Security Council at the United Nations. Sound familiar? (President Clinton replied that he was focusing on dealing with al-Qaida person cells.)

4. In September of 2000, PNAC, sensing a GOP victory in the upcoming presidential election, issued its white paper on "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy,Forces and Resources for the New Century." The PNAC report was quite frank about why the U.S. would want to move toward imperialist militarism, a Pax Americana, because with the Soviet Union out of the picture, now is the time most "conducive to American interests and ideals...The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this `American peace'." And how to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? The answer is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major-theater wars."

In serving as world "constable," the PNAC report went on, no other countervailing forces will be permitted to get in the way. Such actions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations," for example. No country will be permitted to get close to parity with the U.S. when it comes to weaponry or influence; therefore, more U.S. military bases will be established in the various regions of the globe. (A post-Saddam Iraq may well serve as one of those advance military bases.)

5. George W. Bush moved into the White House in January of 2001. Shortly thereafter, a report by the Administration-friendly Council on Foreign Relations was prepared, "Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," that advocated a more aggressive U.S. posture in the world and called for a "rebuttessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy," with access to oil repeatedly cited as a "security imperative." (It's possible that inside Cheney's energy-policy papers -- which he refuses to release to Congress or the American people -- are references to foreign-policy plans for how to gain military control of oilfields abroad.)

6. Mere hours after the 9-11 person mbutt-liquidates, PNACer Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his aides to begin planning for an attack on Iraq, even though his intelligence officials told him it was an al-Qaida operation and there was no connection between Iraq and the attacks. "Go mbuttive," the aides' notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Rumsfeld leaned heavily on the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence linking the Iraq government to 9-11, but they weren't able to. So he set up his own fact-finding group in the Pentagon that would provide him with whatever shaky connections it could find or surmise.

7. Feeling confident that all plans were on track for moving aggressively in the world, the Bush Administration in September of 2002 published its "National Security Strategy of the United States of America." The official policy of the U.S. government, as proudly proclaimed in this major document, is virtually identical to the policy proposals in the various white papers of the Project for the New American Century and others like it over the past decade. Chief among them are:

1. the policy of "pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks a country may be ambutting too much power and-or could provide some sort of compebreastion in the "benevolent hegemony" region, it can be attacked, without provocation. (A later corollary would rethink the country's atomic policy: nuclear weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political-economic ends; so-called "mini-nukes" could be employed in these regional wars.)

2. international treaties and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals.

3. The new policies "will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia."

In short, the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S., admiringly, as a New Rome, an empire with its foreign legions (and threat of "shock and awe" attacks, including with nuclear weapons) keeping the outlying colonies, and potential compebreastors, in line. Those who aren't fully in accord with these goals better get out of the way; "you're either with us or against us."

. . .

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