Tag Archives ⇒ president bush

Webb on SOTU: We owe them loyalty, we owe them sound judgment

January 24, 2007
· Martin Kelley

I must be hon­est and admit that I’ve always found Pres­i­dent Bush’s State of the Union speech­es unbear­able. The dis­tor­tions and half-truths are infu­ri­at­ing and the unearned con­fi­dence of a draft-dodging rich kid turned failed mil­i­tary adven­tur­er just sends my blood pres­sure through the roof. I wish I could be detached enough to lis­ten at least to the art of fine speech-writing but the mes­sage gets in the way.

Bet­ter then to lis­ten to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic response, giv­en by Sen­a­tor James Web. The tran­script is over on the NYTimes and the video is over on YouTube. Here’s a taste.

Like so many oth­er Amer­i­cans, today and through­out our his­to­ry, we serve and have served, not for polit­i­cal rea­sons, but because we love our coun­try. On the polit­i­cal issues ­ those mat­ters of war and peace, and in some cas­es of life and death ­ we trust­ed the judg­ment of our nation­al lead­ers. We hoped that they would be right, that they would mea­sure with accu­ra­cy the val­ue of our lives against the enor­mi­ty of the nation­al inter­est that might call upon us to go into har­m’s way. We owed them our loy­al­ty, as Amer­i­cans, and we gave it. But they owed us ­ sound judg­ment, clear think­ing, con­cern for our wel­fare, a guar­an­tee that the threat to our coun­try was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defend­ing it.

Worth a look: Josh Mar­shall over at Talk​ing​PointsMemo​.com had the neat idea to set up a YouTube group for peo­ple to give their own video respons­es to the State of the Union. 

Military Intervention — For the Flu?

October 8, 2005
· Martin Kelley

h3. By Johann Christoph Arnold
“If we had an out­break some­where in the Unit­ed States, do we not then quar­an­tine that part of the coun­try? And how do you, then, enforce a quar­an­tine? …One option is the use of the mil­i­tary… I think the pres­i­dent ought to have all…assets on the table to be able to deal with some­thing this sig­nif­i­cant.” — Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, news con­fer­ence, Octo­ber 4, 2005
For years, health offi­cials have warned that a vir­u­lent strain of avian influen­za could rapid­ly spread the globe, killing mil­lions. Head­lines about such an out­break now seem to pop up dai­ly, and there is rea­son for increas­ing con­cern. But Pres­i­dent Bush’s recent request to Con­gress, ask­ing for the author­i­ty to call in the mil­i­tary as part of the gov­ern­men­t’s response to such a dis­as­ter, is wrong.
To start with, call­ing in the troops would set a wor­ry­ing prece­dent, and not only because it would be yet one more step to a ful­ly mil­i­ta­rized state.
We already have pub­lic health sys­tems at both the state and fed­er­al lev­els, which, though weak­ened by years of under­fund­ing, could still be quick­ly strength­ened and expand­ed by an infu­sion of con­gres­sion­al aid. These agen­cies have been oper­a­tive for years, and the peo­ple who direct them are trained and expe­ri­enced in deal­ing with infec­tious disease.
This is more than a med­ical issue. Have we learned noth­ing from the recent spate of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters that has wracked our shores? Have we not con­sid­ered that in the end, dis­ease, pesti­lence, and floods might be an inescapable part of life?
I am not sug­gest­ing that we should stand idly by. I myself have chil­dren and grand­chil­dren and friends whom I dear­ly love, and would be the first to call for pro­fes­sion­al med­ical assis­tance should such a dis­as­ter strike my fam­i­ly or com­mu­ni­ty. But aren’t we a lit­tle auda­cious in think­ing, in the after­math of two ter­ri­ble hur­ri­canes, that we can some­how avert or pre­vent such a tragedy?
Quar­an­tine and iso­la­tion may indeed be a nec­es­sary part of our response, but let us not for­get that fam­i­lies and pas­toral care­givers must also be part of the equa­tion when many peo­ple are dying. Does our gov­ern­ment real­ly care for human beings, or does it wor­ry more about the dev­as­ta­tion such a pan­dem­ic could wreak on the glob­al economy?
If wide­spread death is tru­ly immi­nent (some sources sug­gest that 150 mil­lion peo­ple could die of avian flu) would­n’t it be bet­ter to pre­pare our­selves by pay­ing at least some atten­tion to the fact that we all must die one day, and that dying is going to be ter­ri­bly lone­ly, and fright­en­ing, if we are quar­an­tined? We need to con­cern our­selves with this issue because one day death will claim each one of us.
If we die alone, under the con­trol of the mil­i­tary, who will pro­vide the last ser­vices of love for us, and who will com­fort the loved ones we leave behind? Are we going to sit back while we are denied the chance to lay down our lives for each oth­er, which Jesus says is the great­est act of love we can ever per­form? A mil­i­tary response will not bring out the best in peo­ple, but only mag­ni­fy the fear and anx­i­ety we already have about death.
Why are we so ter­ri­bly afraid of dying? Only when we are ready to suf­fer – only when we are ready to die – will we expe­ri­ence true peace of heart. Dying always involves a hard strug­gle, because we fear the uncer­tain­ty of an unknown and unknow­able future. We all feel the pain of unmet oblig­a­tions, and we all want to be relieved of past regrets and feel­ings of guilt. But it is just here that we can reach out and help one anoth­er to die peacefully.
Once we rec­og­nize this, the specter of a world­wide flu epi­dem­ic will not make us fear death, but give us pause to con­sid­er how we can use our lives to show love, while there is still time.
Again, enforced iso­la­tion is wrong: sick and dying peo­ple are often lone­ly as it is, even in sit­u­a­tions where they have a fam­i­ly and friends. How will they feel when the gov­ern­ment forces us to treat them like lep­ers? How will they find com­fort, if they are not even allowed to talk about what is hap­pen­ing to them?
We should see it as a priv­i­lege to stand at their bed­sides at the hour of death, not a dan­ger – even if this means that we are even­tu­al­ly tak­en by the same plague. That is why I feel mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion would be such a tragedy.

Johann Christoph Arnold (“www.ChristophArnold.com”:www.ChristophArnold.com) is an author and a pastor with the Bruderhof Communities (“www.bruderhof.com”:www.bruderhof.com).

Google can’t be wrong

December 7, 2003
· Martin Kelley

I usu­al­ly think cyber-pranks are just sil­ly. But I have to laugh at this one: Enough blog­gers have linked to Pres­i­dent Bush’s offi­cial bio with the words “mis­er­able fail­ure” that if you now type that phrase into Google our Pres­i­dent comes up as the very first return. More on this “Google­bomb” from this News­day arti­cle. And just to help the results along, I’ll con­cur that I think he’s a mis­er­able fail­ure.

Scandal du Jour: Vice President leaking CIA Names

October 2, 2003
· Martin Kelley

In the last year scan­dals seem to fol­low a curi­ous pat­tern: they rise up, get a lot of talk in Wash­ing­ton but lit­tle else­where and then dis­ap­pear, only to come back three months lat­er as mas­sive pub­lic news.

Back in July, we post­ed a num­ber of entries about White House dirty tricks against a whistleblower’s wife. For those who missed the sto­ry, diplo­mat Joseph Wil­son had trav­eled to the African nation of Niger to inves­ti­gate the sto­ry that that Iraq had tried to buy ura­ni­um from it. Wil­son eas­i­ly deter­mined that the sto­ry was a hoax and report­ed this infor­ma­tion back to Wash­ing­ton. Despite the debunk­ing, Pres­i­dent Bush used the alle­ga­tion in his State of the Union address and Wil­son lat­er came out and told reporters the Pres­i­dent knew the infor­ma­tion was false. A short time lat­er some­one in the White House let a con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nist know that Wil­son was mar­ried to an oper­a­tive for the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, expos­ing her name and endan­ger­ing both her mis­sion and the lives of those help­ing her.

We called this a trea­son­able offense but the news blew over and few peo­ple out­side Wash­ing­ton seemed to fol­low the sto­ry. Last week it blew up big again and it’s been cre­at­ing head­lines. Rumor has it that the White House leak came from very high up in the Vice President’s office and the ques­tions have mounted:

  • who leaked the information?
  • what did the Vice Pres­i­dent know?
  • what did the Pres­i­dent know?
  • did the Pres­i­dent and his advi­sors know the Niger sto­ry was false when he addressed the nation and use it to call for war in Iraq?

The in’s and out’s of the renewed scan­dal are being ably tal­lied by Joshua Michal Marshall’s Talk­ing Points Memo. He’s sit­u­at­ing the leak in the back­drop of an ongo­ing war between the Vice President’s office and the CIA. As we’ve been doc­u­ment­ing for a year now, the Vice Pres­i­dent has been pres­sur­ing the CIA to skew their find­ings to suit the polit­i­cal needs of Admin­is­tra­tion. Most of the pre-war reports from the CIA found no evi­dence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruc­tion, for exam­ple, which made Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney furi­ous and he was some­what sucess­ful in get­ting them to rewrite their sto­ry. Now of course we know the CIA was right, and that Sad­dam Hus­sein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction.

We have inde­pen­dent intel­li­gence ser­vices pre­cise­ly so we will have the best infor­ma­tion pos­si­ble when mak­ing deci­sions of nation­al secu­ri­ty. To politi­cize these ser­vices to serve the agen­das of a pro-war Admin­is­tra­tion (who sali­vat­ed over an Iraq inva­sion long before the 9/11 bomb­ings) is wrong. It’s the kind of thing a banana repub­lic dic­ta­tor does. It’s not some­thing that the Amer­i­can peo­ple can afford.

North Korean nukes and cowboy politics

July 16, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Yes­ter­day North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plu­to­ni­um to make six nuclear weapons. I’ve often argued that wars don’t begin when the shoot­ing actu­al­ly begins, that we need to look at the mil­i­taris­tic deci­sions made years before to see how they plant­ed the seeds for war. After the First World War, the vic­to­ri­ous allies con­struct­ed a peace treaty designed to humil­i­ate Ger­many and keep its econ­o­my stag­nant. With the onslaught of the Great Depres­sion, the coun­try was ripe for a mad dem­a­gogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.
In his Jan­u­ary 2002 State of the Union address, Pres­i­dent Bush’s team added North Korea to the “axis of evil” that need­ed to be chal­lenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addi­tion. The speech­writ­ing team nev­er both­ered to con­sult with the State Depart­men­t’s east Asia experts. In all like­li­hood North Korea was added so that the evil three coun­tries would­n’t all be Mus­lim (the oth­er two were Iraq and Iran) and the “War on Ter­ror” would­n’t be seen as a war against Islam.
North Korea saw a bull­dog pres­i­dent in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dan­ger­ous to con­tem­plate. It’s a sound strat­e­gy, real­ly only a vari­a­tion on the Cold War’s “Mutu­al­ly Assured Destruc­tion” doc­trine. When faced with a hos­tile and militaristically-strong coun­try that wants to over­throw your gov­ern­ment, you make your­self too dan­ger­ous to take on. Let’s call it the Rat­tlesnake Defense.
Mil­i­tarism rein­forces itself when coun­tries beef up their mil­i­taries to stave off the mil­i­taries of oth­er coun­tries. With North Korea going nuclear, pres­sure will now build on South Korea, Chi­na and Japan to defend them­selves against pos­si­ble threat. We might be in for a new east Asian arms race, per­haps an east Asian Cold War. Being a paci­fist means stop­ping not only the cur­rent war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speak­ing out against the bru­tal regime of Sad­dam Hus­sein, an Amer­i­can friend who was gassing his own peo­ple. Now we need to speak out against the cow­boy pol­i­tics that is feed­ing insta­bil­i­ty on the Kore­an Penin­su­la, to pre­vent the hor­ror and mass death that a Sec­ond Kore­an War would unleash.

Lots of Blame-Shifting on the Niger/Iraq Forgery

July 11, 2003
· Martin Kelley

The CIA asked Britain to drop it’s Iraq claim while Pres­i­dent Bush said that the CIA “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intel­li­gence ser­vices.”
    Remem­ber that Bush’s State of the Union address did­n’t claim that the US believed that Iraq was buy­ing nuclear mate­r­i­al from Niger or oth­er African coun­tries. It said that British intel­li­gence thought Iraq was. Shift­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for the claim gave the Bush team the wig­gle room to include an alle­ga­tion they knew was prob­a­bly not true. It’s the tri­umph of pol­i­tics over truth.
    As I’ve writ­ten before, there is a polit­i­cal bril­lance to the Bush Pres­i­den­cy. The Admin­is­tra­tion knows that it can sway large por­tions of the Amer­i­can pub­lic just by mak­ing claims. It does­n’t mat­ter if the claims are wrong –even obvi­ous­ly wrong– as long as they feed into some deep psy­chic nar­ra­tive. It’s been awhile since we saw a Pres­i­dent that could bul­ly through real­i­ty as long as the sto­ry sound­ed good. Ronald Rea­gan, the ex-actor, was good at it but I’m sus­pect­ing our cur­rent Pres­i­dent is even bet­ter. The ques­tion is whether enough peo­ple will start insist­ing on the truth and demand inves­ti­ga­tions into the lies. There were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and Pres­i­dent Bush knew it. The Amer­i­can peo­ple would not have gone to war if we had known that Iraq was­n’t a threat and this too Pres­i­dent Bush knew.

Who Lied About Weapons of Mass Destruction?

May 31, 2003
· Martin Kelley

It’s time to state the obvi­ous: there weren’t any “weapons of mass destruc­tion” in Iraq. The stat­ed ratio­nale for this war was “sim­ply wrong” (see below). Either U.S. Intel­li­gence agen­cies made the biggest mis­take of the new cen­tu­ry or there’s been sys­tem­at­ic, pre­med­i­tat­ed lying at the high­est lev­els of the U.S. gov­ern­ment. Mid-level intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary com­man­ders are start­ing to duck and weave to avoid the fall­out: U.S. Insid­ers Say Iraq Intel Delib­er­ate­ly Skewed and Did Iraq real­ly have weapons of mass destruc­tion? and Was the Intel­li­gence Cooked?

Pres­i­dent Bush and his insid­ers will sure­ly con­tin­ue to deny the obvi­ous and bul­ly on with more lies and mis­for­ma­tion. Will the Amer­i­can pub­lic stop believ­ing? Or have we entered a phase in Amer­i­can his­to­ry in which the Big Lie can jus­ti­fy out­right impe­ri­al­ism and per­pet­u­al war? Post­ed 5/31/2003

Dick Cheney’s Rambo Complex

March 12, 2002
· Martin Kelley

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney is tour­ing Eng­land this week, try­ing to find co-producers on Gulf War II, the sequel to the dis­ap­point­ing minor hit of 1991. You remem­ber the orig­i­nal: it was briefly pop­u­lar until Bill Clin­ton’s “Peace and Proper­i­ty” broke all pre­vi­ous records for an unprece­dent­ed run.
In Gulf War II, Dick Cheney is play­ing Ram­bo. It’s twelve years lat­er and he and his side­kick George Bush Jr. are going to re-fight the war against Iraq sin­gle­hand­ed­ly. No oth­er coun­tries will join them this time in their fight for justice.

Like all shot-em-up movies, this one needs a con­vinc­ing vil­lain. There’s no con­nec­tion between Iraq’s Sad­dam Hus­sein and Osama bin Laden but so what? They’re both shifty Arabs with facial hair. Throw in a spicy sub­plot if you want – “Dash­ing Amer­i­can pilots secret­ly held pris­on­er since 1991.” Amer­i­cans bare­ly notice plot and moti­va­tions. After 9/11 the White House is bet­ting that the audi­ence wants more war and retribution.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this isn’t a Hol­ly­wood movie. Dick Cheney and the sec­ond Pres­i­dent Bush are indeed try­ing to start a sec­ond war against Iraq. There’s no new provo­ca­tion from Sad­dam Hus­sein. There’s no con­nec­tion between him and Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks. None of our allies from the first Gulf War want to join us in a second.

But Cheney and Bush want a fight any­way. It’s hard not to con­clude this is some sort of “Ram­bo Com­plex.” The U.S. is led by two men fight­ing lega­cies that won’t let them put 1991 behind them. One is the son of the pres­i­dent accused of pre­ma­ture­ly stop­ping the 1991 war before U.S. troops got to Bagh­dad. The oth­er is the dying aide to both father and son, who has wait­ed almost twelve years for a chance to prove he was right.

This week rumors of an Amer­i­can pilot sup­pos­ed­ly held for eleven years have appeared out of nowhere. Pres­i­dent Bush has been divert­ing atten­tion to Sad­dam Hus­sein even while Osama bin Laden runs free. And Dick Cheney is indeed in Eng­land try­ing to drum up sup­port for a new Gulf War.

While the Vice Pres­i­dent is off wan­der­ing the mar­gins of stage right, real tragedy and dra­ma are hold­ing the world’s atten­tion cen­ter stage. Pales­tine and Israel are close to an all-out war. The mount­ing vio­lence has wor­ried impor­tant coun­tries like Sau­di Ara­bia and Syr­ia so much that they’re propos­ing new peace plans. So much of the Mideast­’s anger against the U.S. revolves around the Pales­tin­ian ques­tion. A war there could top­ple friend­ly Mus­lim gov­ern­ments and rip apart our cur­rent alliances.

This is where the world’s atten­tion is focused. But Pres­i­dent Bush and Cheney are ignor­ing the sit­u­a­tion. They have not fol­lowed past Pres­i­dents’ lead in lead­ing peace nego­ti­a­tions. Amer­i­can pres­sure and involve­ment is cer­tain­ly need­ed to craft real peace between Pales­tine and Israel.

But Bush and Cheney are snor­ing in the bleach­er seats when it comes to the world’s most press­ing and intractable con­flict. They’re dream­ing of cin­e­mat­ic glo­ry. It’s 2002 and two lone G.I.‘s are para­troop­ing into Iraq, knives clenched in teeth, machine guns at the ready. One dreams of aveng­ing the cow­ardice and fail­ure of his father. The oth­er of win­ning just one more war before the cur­tains close in on him.