Middle East: the suffering, and the bluster, continue

1. In Israel, Nothing Changes But the Past
When Napoleon Won at Waterloo
By URI AVNERY

NAPOLEON WON the battle of Waterloo. The German Wehrmacht won World War II. The United States won in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Zealots won against the Romans, and Ehud Olmert won the Second Lebanon War.

You didn't know that? Well, during the last few days the Israeli media has paraded a long series of experts, who did not leave any room for doubt: the war has brought us huge achievements, Hizbullah was routed, Olmert is the great victor.

The TV talk-show hosts and anchormen put their microphones at the service of professors, publicity experts, "security personnel" and "strategists" (a title not denoting generals, but advisers of politicians). All of them agreed on the outcome: an honest-to-goodness victory.

Yesterday I switched on the TV and saw a person radiating self-assurance and explaining how our victory in Lebanon opens the way for the inevitable war with Iran. The analysis, composed almost entirely of clichés, was worthy of a high-school pupil. I was shocked to learn that the man was a former chief of the Mossad. Anyway, we won this war and we are going to win the next one.

So there is no need at all for a commission of inquiry. What is there to inquire into? All we need is a few committees to clear up the minor slips that occurred here and there.

Resignations are absolutely out. Why, what happened? Victors do not resign! Did Napoleon resign after Waterloo? Did Presidents Johnson and Nixon resign after what happened in Vietnam? Did the Zealots resign after the destruction of the Temple?

* * *

JOKING ASIDE, the parade of Olmert's stooges on TV, on the radio and in the newspapers tells us something. Not about the achievements of Olmert as a statesman and strategist, but about the integrity of the media.

When the war broke out, the media people fell into line and and marched in step as a propaganda battalion. All the media, without exception, became organs of the war effort, fawning on Olmert, Peretz and Halutz, waxing enthusiastic at the sight of the devastation in Lebanon and singing the praises of the "steadfastness of the civilian population" in the north of Israel. The public was exposed to an incessant rain of victory reports, going on (literally) from early in the morning to late at night.

The government and army spokespersons, together with Olmert's spin team, decided what to publish and when, and, more importantly, what to suppress.

That found its expression in the "word laundry". Instead of accurate words came misleading expressions: when heavy battles were raging in Lebanon, the media spoke about "exchanges of fire". The cowardly Hassan Nasrallah was "hiding" in his bunker, while our brave Chief-of-Staff was directing operations from his underground command post (nicknamed "the hole").

The chicken-hearted "terrorists" of Hizbullah were hiding behind women and children and operating from within villages, quite unlike our Ministry of Defense and General Staff which are located in the heart of the most densely populated area in Israel. Our soldiers were not captured in a military action, but "abducted" like the victims of gangsters, while our army "arrests" the leaders of Hamas. Hizbullah, as is well known, is "financed" by Iran and Syria, quite unlike Israel, which "receives generous support" from our great friend and ally, the United States.

There was, of course, a difference of night and day between Hizbullah and us. How can one compare? After all, Hizbullah launched rockets at us with the express intent of killing civilians, and did indeed kill some thirty of them. While our military, "the most moral army in the world", took great care not to hurt civilians, and therefore only about 800 Lebanese civilians, half of them children, lost their lives in the bombardments which were all directed at purely military targets.

No general could compare with the military correspondents and commentators, who appeared daily on TV, striking impressive military poses, who reported on the fighting and demanded a deeper advance into Lebanon. Only very observant viewers noticed that they did not accompany the fighters at all and did not share the dangers and pains of battle, something that is essential for honest reporting in war. During the entire war I saw only two correspondent's reports that really reflected the spirit of the soldiers - one by Itay Angel and the other by Nahum Barnea.

The deaths of soldiers were generally announced only after midnight, when most people were asleep. During the day the media spoke only about soldiers being "hurt". The official pretext was that the army had first to inform the families. That's true - but only for announcing the names of the fallen soldiers. It does not apply at all to the number of the dead. (The public quickly caught on and realized that "hurt" meant "killed'.)

* * *

OF COURSE, among the almost one thousand people invited to the TV studios during the war to air their views, there were next to no voices criticizing the war itself. Two or three, who were invited for alibi purposes, were shown up as ridiculous weirdos. Two or three Arab citizens were also invited, but the talk-masters fell on them like hounds on their prey.

For weeks, the media suppressed the fact that hundreds of thousands of Israelis had abandoned the bombarded North, leaving only the poorest behind. That would have shaken the legend of the "steadfastness of the rear".

All the media (except the internet sites) completely suppressed the news about the demonstrations against the war that took place almost daily and that grew rapidly from dozens to hundreds, and from hundreds to thousands. (Channel 1 alone devoted several seconds to the small demonstration of Meretz and Peace Now that took place just before the end of the war. Both had supported the war enthusiastically almost to the finish.)

I don't say these things as a professor for communications or a disgruntled politician. I am a media-person from head to foot. Since the age of 17 I have been a working journalist, reporter, columnist and editor, and I know very well how media with integrity should behave. (The only prize I ever got in my own country was awarded by the Journalists' Association for my "life work in journalism".)

I do not think, by the way, that the behavior of our media was worse than that of their American colleagues at the start of the Iraq war, or the British media during the ridiculous Falklands/Malvinas war. But the scandals of others are no consolation for our own.

Against the background of this pervasive brainwashing, one has to salute the few - who can be counted on the fingers of both hands - who did not join the general chorus and did indeed voice criticism in the written media, as much as they were allowed to. The names are well-known, and I shall not list them here, for fear of overlooking somebody and committing an unforgivable sin. They can hold their head high. The trouble is that their comments appeared only in the op-ed pages, which have a limited impact, and were completely absent from the news pages and news programs, which shape public opinion on a daily basis.

When the media people now passionately debate the need for all kinds of inquiry commissions and examination committees, perhaps they should set a personal example and establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the actions of the media themselves at the time of supreme test.

* * *

IN GOETHE'S "Faust", the devil presents himself as the "force that always strives for the bad and always produces the good." I do not wish, God forbid, to compare the media to the devil, but the result is the same: by its enthusiastic support for the war, the media deepened the feeling of failure that came afterwards and which may in the end have a beneficial impact.

The media called Hizbullah a "terror organization", evoking the image of a small group of "terrorists" with negligible capabilities. When it became clear that this is an efficient and well-trained military force with brave and determined fighters, effective missiles and other weapons, that could hold out against our huge military machine for 33 days without breaking, the disappointment was even more bitter.

After the media had glorified our military commanders as supermen and treated every one of their boasts with adulation, almost as if they were divine revelations, the disappointment was even greater when severe failures in strategy, tactics, intelligence and logistics showed up in all levels of the senior command.

That contributed to the profound change in public opinion that set in at the end of the war. As elevated as the self-confidence had been, so deep was the sense of failure. The Gods had failed. The intoxication of war was replaced by the hangover of the morning after.

And who is that running in front of the mob clamoring for revenge, all the way to the Place de la Guillotine? The media, of course.

I don't know of a single talk-show host, anchorman. commentator, reporter or editor, who has confessed his guilt and begged for forgiveness for his part in the brainwashing. Everything that was said, written or photographed has been wiped off the slate. It just never happened.

Now, when the damage cannot be repaired anymore, the media are pushing to the head of those who demand the truth and clamor for punishment for all the scandalous decisions that were taken by the government and the general staff: prolonging the war unnecessarily after the first six days, abandoning the rear, neglecting the reserves, not sending the land army into Lebanon on day X and sending them into Lebanon on day Y, not accepting G8's call for a cease-fire, and so on.

But, just a moment ---

During the last few days, the wheel may be turning again. What? We did not lose the war after all? Wait, wait, we did win? Nasrallah has apologized? (By strict orders from above, the full interview of Nasrallah was not broadcast at all, but the one passage in which he admitted to a mistake was broadcast over and over again.)

The sensitive nose of the media people has detected a change of the wind. Some of them have already altered course. If there is a new wave in public opinion, one should ride it, no?

* * *

WE CALL this the "Altalena Effect".

For those who don't know, or who have already forgotten: Altalena was a small ship that arrived off the coast of Israel in the middle of the 1948 war, carrying a group of Irgun men and quantities of weapons, it was not clear for whom. David Ben-Gurion was afraid of a putsch and ordered the shelling of the ship, off the coast of Tel-Aviv. Some of the men were killed, Menachem Begin, who had gone aboard, was pushed into the water and saved. The ship sank, the Irgun was dispersed and its members joined the new Israeli army.

29 years later Begin came to power. All the careerists joined him in haste. And then it appeared, retroactively, that practically everybody had been on board the Altalena. The little ship expanded into a huge aircraft carrier - until the Likud lost power and Altalena shrunk back to the size of a fishing boat.

The Second Lebanon War was a mighty Altalena. All the media crowded onto its deck. But the day after the war was over, we learned that this was an optical illusion: absolutely nobody had been there, except Captain Olmert, First Officer Peretz and Helmsman Halutz. However, that can change any minute now, if the trusting public can be convinced that we won the war after all.

As has been said before: in Israel nothing changes, except the past.

(Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal . He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism . He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org)


2. Gaza's darkness -- by Gideon Levy

Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately.

Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn't even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing is left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about "the end of the occupation" and "partitioning the land" now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied.

In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed the only power station in Gaza, and more than half the electricity supply will be cut off for at least another year. There's hardly any water. Since there is no electricity, supplying homes with water is nearly impossible. Gaza is filthier and smellier than ever: Because of the embargo Israel and the world have imposed on the elected authority, no salaries are being paid and the street cleaners have been on strike for the past few weeks. Piles of garbage and obnoxious clouds of stink strangle the coastal strip, turning it into Calcutta.

More than ever, Gaza is also like a prison. The Erez crossing is empty, the Karni crossing has been open only a few days over the last two months, and the same is true for the Rafah crossing. Some 15,000 people waited for two months to enter Egypt, some are still waiting, including many ailing and wounded people. Another 5,000 waited on the other side to return to their homes. Some died during the wait. One must see the scenes at Rafah to understand how profound a human tragedy is taking place. A crossing that was not supposed to have an Israeli presence continues to be Israel's means to pressure 1.5 million inhabitants. This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment. The U.S. and Europe, whose police are at the Rafah crossing, also bear responsibility for the situation.

Gaza is also poorer and hungrier than ever before. There is nearly no merchandise moving in and out, fishing is banned, the tens of thousands of PA workers receive no salaries, and the possibility of working in Israel is out of the question.

And we still haven't mentioned the death, destruction and horror. In the last two months, Israel killed 224 Palestinians, 62 of them children and 25 of them women. It bombed and assassinated, destroyed and shelled, and no one stopped it. No Qassam cell or smuggling tunnel justifies such wide-scale killing. A day doesn't go by without deaths, most of them innocent civilians.

Where are the days when there was still a debate inside Israel about the assassinations? Today, Israel drops innumerable missiles, shells and bombs on houses and kills entire families on its way to another assassination. Hospitals are collapsing with more than 900 people undergoing treatment. At Shifa Hospital, the only such facility in Gaza that might be worthy of being called a hospital, I saw heartrending scenes last week. Children who lost limbs, on respirators, paralyzed, crippled for the rest of their lives.

Families have been killed in their sleep, while riding on donkeys or working in fields. Frightened children, traumatized by what they have seen, huddle in their homes with a horror in their eyes that is difficult to describe in words. A journalist from Spain who spent time in Gaza recently, a veteran of war and disaster zones around the world, said he had never been exposed to scenes as horrific as the ones he saw and documented over the last two months.

It is difficult to determine who decided on all this. It is doubtful the ministers are aware of the reality in Gaza. They are responsible for it, starting with the bad decision on the embargo, through the bombing of Gaza's bridges and power station and the mass assassinations. Israel is responsible now once again for all that happens in Gaza.

The events in Gaza expose the great fraud of Kadima: It came to power on the coattails of the virtual success of the disengagement, which is now going up in flames, and it promised convergence, a promise that the prime minister has already rescinded. Those who think Kadima is a centrist party should now know it is nothing other than another rightist occupation party. The same is true of Labor. Defense Minister Amir Peretz is responsible for what is happening in Gaza no less than the prime minister, and Peretz's hands are as blood-soaked as Olmert's. He can never present himself as a 'man of peace' again. The ground invasions every week, each time somewhere else, the kill and destroy operations from the sea, air and land are all dubbed with names to whitewash the reality, like 'Summer Rains' or 'Locked Kindergarten.' No security excuse can explain the cycle of madness, and no civic argument can excuse the outrageous silence of us all. Gilad Shalit will not be released and the Qassams will not cease. On the contrary, there is a horror taking place in Gaza, and while it might prevent a few terror attacks in the short run, it is bound to give birth to much more murderous terror. Israel will then say with its self-righteousness: 'But we returned Gaza to them.'


3. Reporting Lebanon: Look who's fair and balanced -- by Lawrence Pintak

The summer of 2006 marked an important milestone for Arab media. Israel and Hizbullah were locked in a bitter conflict that would claim the lives of more than 150 Israelis and over 1,000 Lebanese - a third of them children. Each day brought brutal new images of civilian casualties.

On American television, leading journalists, such as CNN's star presenters Anderson Cooper and John Roberts, regularly referred to Hizbullah as "terrorists" or a "terrorist militia," without bothering to attribute the label to Israeli or US sources. But on the news broadcasts of the Arab world's dominant all-news channels, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya, such polarizing language was rarely heard.

The irony, of course, is that Al-Jazeera was condemned by the Bush administration for using terms like "martyr," "aggression" and "terrorism" in describing the US invasion of Iraq. Arab journalists should be "unbiased" like their colleagues in America, was the constant refrain from Washington.

"The words 'terror' and 'terrorist' are not in our dictionary," Ahmed Sheikh, Al-Jazeera's chief editor, told me in late summer, as a shaky cease-fire took hold in Southern Lebanon. "We only use them when we are quoting someone."

Nor was a dead civilian or fighter referred to as shaheed, Arabic for "martyr." Such terms are still bandied about on Al-Jazeera's talk shows, which tend to resemble the cable shout-fests in the US, but they have been officially exiled from news reports.

At Al-Arabiyya, the story was much the same. "We use Hizbullah 'fighters' and sometimes 'militants,' but we don't use 'fighters for freedom,' executive editor Nabil Khatib told me. "We agreed we would not take a clear position supporting Hizbullah. We are covering this war as a war."

Al-Arabiyya went a step further, imposing an almost complete ban on showing dead bodies, a radical move in an Arab media culture in which the camera often zooms into open wounds.

Khatib recalled a report on the aftermath of an Israeli bombing raid on a building in the town of Baalbek in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. The hour of raw footage received at the channel's Dubai headquarters was all "parts of bodies and relatives taking the body parts in their hands and showing them to the camera. It was a crazy situation. Some colleagues were very angry about what happened and felt we should show the pictures."

In the end, on Khatib's orders, the channel used just one "three-second-long shot of a body with no details visible."

Both Al-Arabiyya and Al-Jazeera have been vigorously criticized for this new approach by viewers and colleagues in the Arab media, where sensationalism, distortion and misinformation often are rampant. "We have received hundreds of calls from viewers asking, 'Why are we not calling the dead civilians in Lebanon 'martyrs?'" says Sheikh, himself a Palestinian. "It was very difficult for me personally to explain, but that is the policy."
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

Of course, Arab politics cannot be discounted in any explanation of this more "responsible" approach. Al-Jazeera is funded by the emir of Qatar, and Al-Arabiyya, which seemed to downplay the conflict in its early stages, is part of a media empire owned by a member of the Saudi royal family. Both countries are overwhelmingly Sunni , while Hizbullah is Shiite. Sunni heads of state across the region initially condemned Hizbullah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, the spark that touched off this war, because it was seen as part of Shiite Iran's strategy to strengthen its position in the region at the expense of Sunni countries like Egypt, Jordan and the royal families of the Gulf.

Arab public opinion - driven by media coverage of the conflict - eventually forced the Sunni leaders to backtrack, condemn the Israeli invasion and give tacit support to Hizbullah.

But the degree to which the policy changes at Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya also represent a new chapter in the evolution of Arab journalism cannot be dismissed. Until Al-Jazeera was launched 10 years ago, the term "television journalism" was an oxymoron in the Arab world. All stations were government-owned. Now there is a new spirit of - or at least aspiration for - independence and professionalism.

When I visited Al-Jazeera's headquarters in June, Sheikh and his counterparts from Al-Jazeera's soon-to-be-launched English-language sister channel, Al-Jazeera International, were busy drafting a new set of standards and practices, which included a glossary of neutral terms journalists on both channels should use to describe the region's constant violence.

When it is ready, the US channels might want to request a copy.

(Lawrence Pintak is the director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at the American University in Cairo and co-editor/publisher of TBS Journal/Arab Media & Society. His most recent book is Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas. He can be reached at lpintak@aucegypt.edu)


4. Better Not Meet Me at the Casbah
Hatred of Americans and Brits Soars across Middle East
By PATRICK COCKBURN

Jerusalem.
Britons were killed across the Middle East yesterday as the region was engulfed by waves of violence. They died in Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan but British citizens are increasingly at risk everywhere in the area because Britain is seen as the closest political and military ally of the US.

“I want to kill Bush and Blair because of what they have done to us,” said a middle aged Palestinian man called Abdul Rahman Imran whom I met in the street in Nablus on the West Bank yesterday. “They are against Islam whether it is in Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan.”

A group of tourists were looking at the remains of a Roman amphitheatre in the heart of Amman, the capital of Jordan, yesterday morning when a lone gunman approached them. He shouted “Allahu Akbar – God is Great” and opened fire killing one Briton and wounding five other people including two Britons. A Jordanian man was later arrested for the shooting.

Hundreds of miles away across the great stony desert dividing Jordan from Iraq a British military unit came under attack at Ad Dayr north of Basra. A roadside bomb tore apart their vehicle killing two British soldiers and severely wounding a third. The deaths bring the total number of British dead in Iraq to 117.

Still further east in Afghanistan in Kabul a suicide bomber in a car blew himself up beside a British convoy killing one British soldier and wounding three others, one of them seriously. Four Afghans were also killed in the blast.

Here I write only of British dead. They are but a small percentage of the casualties in the multiple crises which are now cross-infecting each other in the Middle East. For instance Mr Imran in Nablus was particularly angry because, without the rest of the world paying any attention, 251 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army in July and August. Half of them were civilians including women, children and the Elderly, according the Israeli daily Haaretz.

It may soon become uncommon for a day to pass without a Briton, military or civilian, to be killed somewhere in the Middle East. It is dangerous to be a foreigner in any part of Iraq but I noticed last year that my Iraqi translator had started stressing to anybody we met that I was Irish rather than British. He claimed that ‘The Independent’ was a well-known Scandinavian publication.

To Tony Blair, due to visit Israel next week-end, the problem is very simple. Speaking in Los Angeles last month he produced a terrifyingly over-simple view of the Middle East saying “the Iraqi and Afghan fight for democracy is our fight. Same values. Same enemy.” He claimed that “we have to empower Moderate, Mainstream Islam to defeat Reactionary Islam.” The American and British governments will apparently decide in future just who belongs to the latter strand of Islam and go to war with them.

They will have their work cut out. The Britons who were killed yesterday in attacks across the Middle East died at the hands of very different people. The suicide bomber in Kabul was almost certainly sent on his mission by the Taliban who are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims. The Taliban might not even recognize as Muslim the men, almost certainly Shia in the south of Iraq, who planted the roadside bomb that killed two British soldiers north of Basra.

I have spent most of my time since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq. The reason for the rise of radical Islam is foreign occupation. Iraq had a secular tradition. Fanatical Islamic groups made little headway under Saddam Hussein not only because he persecuted them but because they had little popular support. But the five million-strong Sunni community in Iraq almost entirely supported armed resistance to the US occupation. Fanatical Islamic groups were for the first time operating in a friendly environment.

At one moment in the last year the many Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq debated whether they should try to hammer out a common platform. They eventually decided that their differences were too deep for unity on most issues but they were all agreed on opposition to the occupation and they concluded this was sufficient to hold them togethor.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of Tony Blair’s analysis of militant Islam is his blindness to the extent to which foreign invasion and occupation has radicalized the region and legitimized militant Islam. For instance this week-end a group of Palestinian students in Jerusalem were debating the impact of the war in Lebanon on Palestinian fortunes. The issue was which most interested them was the reason why Hezbullah was able to withstand Israeli attack compared to the failure of secular nationalist movements like Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat for so many years.

Across the Middle East secularist and nationalist regimes are being discredited by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. Most governments in the region are corrupt patronage machines backed by brutal security services. They are close to the US but have little influence over it. All are becoming unstable in a way not seen since the 1960s.

The attack by a lone gunman in Jordan holds another dangerous message. At the end of 2001 I was able to stroll through the streets of Kabul and Kandahar without fear of being attacked. I drove between the two cities in a taxi. The same was true in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein and during the first months of the occupation. In 2003 I drove down to Basra in southern Iraq and up to Mosul in the far north without incident. If I tried to repeat any of these journeys in Afghanistan or Iraq today I would certainly be killed. The rest of the Middle East is becoming more dangerous by the day. The American and British embassies this week warned foreigners with good reason from going to Gaza where two American journalists were recently kidnapped.

The real reason of the increasing violence in the Middle East is the return to imperial control and foreign occupation half a century after the European colonial empires were broken up. This is the fuel for Islamic militancy. This is why fanatical but isolated Islamic groups can suddenly win broader support. Governments allied to the US and Britain have no legitimacy. The very attempts by America and Britain to crush Islamic militancy across the Middle East are making sure that it will become stronger.

(Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent of London and CounterPunch. He is the author of the Broken Boy , and next month Verso will be publishing his new book, The Occupation. War and Resistance in Iraq)


5. Pentagon to Congress: Bush Is Wrong
The War Is Lost
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The Pentagon’s latest quarterly “progress” report to Congress on Iraq is a grim tale of a lost war. The Pentagon told Congress what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and propaganda organs such as Fox “News” never tell the American public, namely:

(1) The Sunni-based insurgency remains “potent and viable” despite spiraling Sunni-Shiite violence and beefed up US forces.

(2) Since the last report three months ago, Iraqi casualties from “sectarian clashes”--the Pentagon’s euphemism for civil war--have soared by more than 50 percent.

(3) From May when the new Iraqi government was established until August, the average number of weekly attacks increased sharply to 800.

(4) Since the previous report, Iraqi daily casualties have jumped by 50 per cent from 80 per day to 120 per day. Currently, Iraqis are dying at the rate of 43,800 per year from violence.

The Iraqi government cowers behind the fortified walls of the “Green Zone.” On August 31, the Kurds in the north took down the Iraqi flag and replaced it with the Kurdish one. Most of Iraq is ruled by Shiite and Sunni militias. Conflict between them has forced 160,000 Iraqis to flee their homes.

Who is going to tell Bush that the war is lost?

Is Rumsfeld going to tell him?

Is Cheney going to tell him?

How can they tell him after all the bravado and false reports?

This is a delusional administration. Confronted with three major polls showing that two-thirds of Americans oppose the Iraq war, Bush declared that he is staying the course, demonstrating yet again his disdain for common sense and the will of the American people.

If Bush and his neoconservative cabal were judged by their performance they would be ridden out of town on a rail. If a court of law judged their actions, they would walk the plank.

Everything this moronic regime promised about a “cakewalk” war and the ease of pacifying Iraq and turning it into an American puppet democracy has turned to ashes in President Bush’s mouth.

Having lost the Iraq war, the neoconservatives are determined to initiate war with Iran.

National security expert John Prados says, “The pattern of manipulation and misuse of intelligence that served the Bush administration in the drive to start a war with Iraq is being repeated today for its neighbor Iran.”

It is now established beyond a reasonable doubt that the neocons intentionally cooked up false intelligence in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, an invasion that has resulted in tens of thousands of Iraqi and American casualties, both dead and maimed.

Aggressive wars are themselves war crimes. To intentionally create a false basis for an aggressive war is an act of high treason.

Alarmed by the neoconservative drive to start a war with Iran before the US can extricate itself from the Iraq catastrophe, the CIA firmly declared that any Iranian nuclear weapon is a decade away. This undermines the neoconservatives’ urgency to attack Iran now.

Neoconservative fanatics tried to discredit the CIA with a recent report by the House Intelligence Committee Republican staff written by neoconservative Frederick Fleitz, a protege of neocon heavyweight John Bolton, a person active in concocting the false case for war against Iraq. Fleitz alleges that the CIA is a know-nothing agency that lacks the ability to assess Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons.

Neocons also dismiss the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which issued a report on August 31 reaffirming that there is no tangible proof that Iran’s nuclear energy program has a military aspect.

The neoconservatives plan to plunge America into war with Iran before they can be held accountable for the lost war in Iraq.

This neoconservative conspiracy against the United States and Iran must be stopped. Neocons must be removed from the government that they have betrayed and held accountable for their crimes.

Before America can preach democracy to the world, we must first rescue American democracy from the Bush regime and re-establish government accountability to the people.

(Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com)