From an article1:
This week, there will be plenty of soft-focus, warm, fuzzy human interest stories recalling the heroism of 9/11. That's fine and well, but some hard questions also need to be asked -- questions that should have been asked of the Bush Administration continuously for the last two years. Instead, Bush has been allowed to fundamentally remake what America stands for as a country. And he's pimped the memory of 9/11's victims at every turn in order to do it.
That exploitation of 9/11's victims is truly repellant. So is the remaking of America as a country not much interested in freedom or civil liberties. George W. Bush has no shame. The best way to minimize the chances of a future 9/11 is to get him out of office. (
link)
Bush's record is a sorry catalog, all right.
Complete text of the article,
Two years, still no answers, by Geov Parrish
Sunday night, President Bush went before the nation to announce that even though the U.S. occupation of Iraq is going wonderfully, with its conversion to a modern western democracy right on schedule, it'll cost a lot more than we expected, and it'll take a long time. Some $87 billion more, in fact, and as for the time, well, it'll be a long road. Don't ask so many questions.
It'll be a much shorter road, of course, if Bush and the thick-headed ideologues surrounding him are out of jobs come next November. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
One of the reasons Bush and his cabal have mostly continued to enjoy a bizarre exemption from accountability is their unparalleled ability to bury bad news. Bill Clinton was a master at this, and early in Dubya's career on the national stage, in his "compassionate conservative" days, George tried the Slick Willie approach: if we really think our Fearless Leader cares, we're less likely to notice that we're getting screwed.
But say this for Karl Rove and Bush's other strategists and spinmeisters: they're good. Really, really good. Better than Clinton, even.
Bush's folksy charm is still a variation on Clinton's caring approach, and Republicans are also still infatuated with the Reagan trick of blaming everything, no matter how implausibly, on the last (Democratic) administration. But Bush has invented whole new realms of sugarcoating bad news. Given how much of it he's delivered, he's had to. Announcements get buried at the end of the weekly news cycle, late on Fridays, when the watchdog media (sic) have mostly gone home or to their lakeside cabins for the weekend. Or, news gets buried just before a major event that will supersede it. Or, the administration simply lies. Constantly.
All three techniques were on display with Bush's weekend speech. Sane observers inside and outside the Pentagon have been warning for two years that White House estimates of the costs of invading, occupying, and rebuilding Iraq were grossly lowballed, by hundreds of billions of dollars. And that was in the best-case scenario, which nobody outside the administration expected.
Instead, America's annexation of Iraq has been very close to a worst-case scenario. Five months in, and, among many other things, there's a full-scale guerilla war afoot, extremely basic services are still unavailable or erratic for most Iraqis, soldiers are underfunded, undertrained, underequipped, and overworked, Bush's corporate cronies are looting the country's resources, and the Americans running the show are hunkered down in Saddam's old palaces, keeping themselves far away from the people they rule, who just want the Americans and their parasitic exile puppets gone. It's been a disaster. And it will get only more and more expensive, and more and more bloody, over time.
And there's no money for any of it. Bush somehow expects the U.N., Europe, Japan, Arab states, and the rest of the world to share the cost of running and rebuilding Iraq while leaving all the decisions to the very team of Americans that have made such a mess already -- as the result of an invasion the world almost without exception considered ill-advised and illegitimate. The U.S. exhausted the Iraqi treasury in four months, and Iraq's oilfields are not only largely destroyed, but at the mercy of guerillas determined to keep them dysfunctional. The money must now come from you and I. And our kids and grandkids.
But never mind that. This week is the anniversary of 9/11.
It was no coincidence that Bush finally owned up to the long-obvious need for more money only four days before the second anniversary of 9/11. Within hours of the tragedy Bush and his people were exploiting it for their own political and ideological purposes, and they've never stopped. With his re-nomination scheduled next year for -- you guessed it -- New York City, just before next year's anniversary, it's not about to stop now.
Countless radical neocon visions for remaking America that had been circulating for years have suddenly come to life in the last two years, always justified by 9/11 and rarely having any actual connection to either the attacks or the need to prevent more of them. Iraq itself, of course, is the prime example: despite fervent (and largely successful) White House attempts to link the two in the public's mind, Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda despised each other and never worked together. Yet that bogus association, and the wholly fictional notion that Iraq was already capable (or nearly so) of attacking America with "weapons of mass destruction," was the rationale for the quagmire we now face there.
But that's just the tip of Bush's new post-9/11 all guns, no butter America, an approach that along with enormous tax cuts for the wealthy have transformed a huge federal surplus into the largest debt in history in only two years. The immediate, knee-jerk Bush decision to cast America's response to 9/11 as an unending war has informed everything since. On the military side, within days Bush announced an entirely new doctrine in war: that a country could and should be invaded if its government "harbored" criminal suspects. That was the flimsy rationale for invading Afghanistan -- our other, largely forgotten quagmire -- and displacing the Taliban. And there are other quagmires in the making, too: dozens of new military bases hosted by thuggish regimes in places like Georgia and Kyrgystan. Even as veterans' benefits were cut, money for military contractors like Boeing, and the weapons systems they make, suddenly became bottomless. The notion that America could or should rule the world, considered lunacy before 9/11, became Beltway orthodoxy as a result of an attack largely prompted by our global meddling in the first place. Meanwhile, at home, thousands of people were questioned or "detained" in 9/11's aftermath, and the now-notorious PATRIOT Act, a host of less-publicized executive orders and administrative moves, and more new money for the FBI and intelligence agencies have turned America into a police state for immigrants.
None of this would have prevented 9/11 from happening. Meanwhile, as these groundbreaking policies are constantly justified by 9/11, there has been a near-total lack of fundamental questions as to why 9/11 happened -- why the attackers acted, and why America didn't anticipate it or stop them.
Al-Qaeda and its now-notorious leader, Osama bin Laden, are religious zealots -- that much is obvious. But they were also more than willing to share their political reasons for targeting America and Americans. There were three major ones: our endless support for Israel's repression of Palestine; the brutal economic sanctions that killed over a million Iraqis since the Gulf War; and the desecration of holy land in Saudi Arabia by U.S. military troops and facilities during and after that war.
On every point, post-9/11 U.S. actions inflamed, rather than reduced, the motivations for future waves of fundamentalist terror. More to the point, any effort to end terror cannot be based on a military response. The attacks of two years ago were not an act of war, but a monstrous crime by a gang of international criminals who had vowed to strike repeatedly. They needed to be stopped not with heavy-handed (and horrifically expensive) invasions of nation-states, but with international cooperation, especially in police and intelligence work. And political work -- ensuring that the bin Laden brand of extremism appealed to dozens of people, not millions.
On this score, the Bush Administration's response to 9/11 has been a spectacular failure, counterproductive in the extreme. It's hard to imagine a time in its history when America has been so universally reviled in the world -- less than two years after it had the world's near-complete sympathy and pledges of support in the wake of a horrific attack. Bush's responses to 9/11 have fundamentally changed how America is seen by billions of people. We are now an arrogant bully, not a beacon of freedom and democracy. It's a recipe for much more future terrorism, not less.
Meanwhile, the hard questions about how the original attack could have been prevented have largely been buried. The joint congressional committee investigation, recently completed, faced repeated stonewalling in its efforts to get information from the Bush Administration. The very agencies whose incompetence led us to that tragic point -- the FBI, CIA, and a bellicose military establishment -- were given more money to do much more of the bullying that has in the past alienated the world's bin Ladens. Nobody was fired, anywhere. And while the Taliban and Iraq were scapegoated, the country which produced bin Laden, most of the hijackers, and much of the money for Al-Qaeda's terror networks, Saudi Arabia, has been treated with kid gloves by the Bush Administration. As with that request for another $87 billion for Iraq -- much of which will wind up in the pockets of companies like Halliburton -- Bush has never been shy about remembering his oil industry friends. Even at the expense of bringing 9/11's perpetrators to justice, and preventing similar (or worse) attacks in the future.
This week, there will be plenty of soft-focus, warm, fuzzy human interest stories recalling the heroism of 9/11. That's fine and well, but some hard questions also need to be asked -- questions that should have been asked of the Bush Administration continuously for the last two years. Instead, Bush has been allowed to fundamentally remake what America stands for as a country. And he's pimped the memory of 9/11's victims at every turn in order to do it.
That exploitation of 9/11's victims is truly repellant. So is the remaking of America as a country not much interested in freedom or civil liberties. George W. Bush has no shame. The best way to minimize the chances of a future 9/11 is to get him out of office.
reference=http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15596
The Clipboard: Two years, still no answers