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It Can't Happen Here? It Has Happened Here
by Michael Nolan
by Michael Nolan
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Our fellow citizens have been led hoodwinked from their
principles by a most extraordinary combination of circumstances. But the band
is removed, and they now see for themselves."
~ Thomas Jefferson
Today's citizens, lately aware of the crimes of those who rule them
from the White House, have removed the band (the blindfold) from their eyes.
The huge majority of average Americans are dead set against "the surge" in
Iraq, seeing it for what it is: the senseless slaughter of American sons and
daughters on a mission which has nothing to do with US security.
The question is, what are the people going to do about it?
It should be noted that the US Congress, charged by the US
Constitution with deciding when and if the nation goes to war, has been
neutered. In the alternate universe of the Republican noise machine, anyone
standing in the way of the mindless dispatch of US troops to the slaughterhouse
doesn't - somehow - "support the troops," and no media-obsessed congressman
wants to get hung with that accusation. Given a choice between securing their
own careers or truly serving God and country (to put it in Red State terms),
today's US lawmakers overwhelmingly choose the former. To be sure, National
Security Adviser Stephen Hadley appeared on Meet the Press a few weeks ago to
celebrate a neocon alchemy by which justifications for war funding can be
conjured up forever whence none exists: "I think once they get in harm's way,
congress's tradition is to support those troops," Mr. Hadley said with fatherly
pride, fitting at the birth of the Perpetual War Machine.
The next country in the neocon gunsights is, of course, Iran. That
Iran is somehow a nuclear threat to the American people surpasses in bunk and
risibility the whopper that Saddam Hussein had something to do with bringing
down the Twin Towers. The latter lie (with others) was good enough to start the
war in Iraq and it's a virtual certainty that the former lie will serve to
start the war in Iran despite the fact that experts, including those at our own
CIA, put Iran several years away from the development of a nuclear weapon. And,
as former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski reminded Congress
recently, "[t]o argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider
Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling
prophecy." That America needs to attack Iran is a conceit seen sensible by few
- save neocons, the White House and opportunists like former Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh has predicted that retaliatory
Iranian disruptions to the oil flow in the Middle East could push prices up
over one a hundred dollars a barrel. It's well known, and well predicted, that
in the event of an American attack, Shiite Iran will send its 650,000 strong
army into Iraq to wreak vengeance on US troops. With a pre-emptive attack,
America will be begging Iran or Iranian sympathizers to launch a terrorist
attack on US soil. And, as Pentagon Papers author Daniel Ellsberg pointed out
recently, "[i]f there's another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East
involving a U.S. attack on Iran there will be, the day after or within days an
equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in
this country, detention camps for middle-easterners and their.sympathizers,
critics of the President's policy and essentially the wiping-out of the Bill of
Rights."
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has dictated to those voters who
put her in power that impeachment is "off the table." Three days after the
November elections, John Conyers, the new House Judiciary Chairman and, until
then, hero of the pro-impeachment movement, betrayed (as did Pelosi) his
constituents and the spirit of the Constitution when he said, "I am in total
agreement with her [Pelosi] on this issue: Impeachment is off the table."
Pelosi is given to sweeping, dismissive statements, judged by a
speech she made at the 2005 AIPAC convention in Washington, DC. "[T]he history
of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict is not over occupation, and never has
been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist." A congressional
leader who says with a straight face that Israel is wholly without blame for
the bloodshed in Palestine (and the resultant anti-American bias in the Middle
East) is a sure bet to ignore the sage counsel of the Baker-Hamilton Report,
which prescribes, as an imperative for Mideast peace, adherence to UN Security
Council Resolution 242, which mandates a return of Palestinian land held
illegally by Israel since 1967.
Expect nothing from the United States Congress to make the Bush
Administration even mildly uncomfortable in its role as knee-jerk defender,
enabler and funder of all things Likud, despite the threat that such support
carries for US prestige, sovereignty and security.
Congress could defund the Iraq war but as Senator Russell Feingold
points out, it "doesn't have the will." It could, for that matter, threaten, in
the clearest of terms, impeachment, removal from office and - if it comes to it
- war crimes trials for those who would lead us into a war in Iran (with
consequent conflagration through the whole Middle East), that could bring down
the US economy and the US Constitution and lead to violent civil disorder and
repression at home. But, unruffled, US Congressional Quislings seem willing to
let the whole thing go with a couple of non-binding resolutions.
Rather than listen to Congress, the Administration prefers the
bellicose, anti-American counsel of neocon think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute (where, Bush avers, he gets his "finest minds"). In 2005,
I wrote a LewRockwell.com piece, "Martial Law," expanding on General Tommy
Franks' worry that, in the event of a terrorist attack on our shores democracy
might well not survive. In that piece I wrote:
Michael Ledeen, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute,
and close and trusted White House adviser, has this to say on p. 173 of his
book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As
Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago: "Paradoxically, preserving
liberty may require the rule of a single leader - a dictator - willing to use
those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing, to
employ."
Don't wonder if "it" (a fascist takeover of the United States
government) can happen here. It has happened here. This administration can wage
war when, where and how it pleases, for as long as it pleases, for whatever
reason it wants and - under current conditions - there is nobody in America,
within or without the government, who can stop it. The US Government is
effectively a dictatorship in all matters of war and peace.
If, at any point, this dictatorship felt itself in real, impending
danger from Congress or the people, it might react like a wounded animal. What
if, despite the best efforts of the Republican and Democratic establishment,
talk of a real impeachment movement (even a credible whisper thereof) were
heard in the halls of congress? Considering the character of those in the White
House, and their history of desperate and murderous political solutions (the
"surge" comes to mind), the notion that the US Government could attack its own
citizens in a false-flag terrorist operation (to force lockstep, "wartime"
obedience) is no longer a fringe conspiracy theory.
If waves of Americans eventually show up on the streets in
sustained, don't-take-no-for-an-answer demonstrations, so forceful as to cause
civil disruptions and an actual threat to the existence of the Administration,
it will draw government troops, whether those troops be police, National Guard,
the US Army (posse comitatus be damned) or contractors like those from
Blackwater Security, dispatched fresh from their war crimes against the people
of Iraq to deal as they see fit with the people of the United States.
There's an iconic photo from the 1960's: at an antiwar protest
outside the Pentagon, a flower child places her eponymous flower into the
barrel of the bayoneted rifle of one of the soldiers lined up to contain the
demonstration. Sixties protests had an element of theater to them and the
flower child knew that the bayonets were for show. Americans were aware, in
those days, of their right to free speech and peaceable assembly and, despite
the aberration at Kent State, those who massed together to forcefully and
effectively demand an end to the war, were secure in doing so. But if bayonets
are drawn this time around, resultant photos will likely lack that whimsical
sixties theatricality, and American parents will shudder to think of a daughter
standing up to troops acting under the orders of a weakened, wounded Dick
Cheney
Cheney personifies the Dictatorship, morally, legally - hell, even
physiognomically. His favorability ratings are disastrously low, but it's
unlikely to bother him. Cheney is a coward and a dictator, with no regard for
human life, American or foreign. A dictator lives to inspire fear and obeisance
and if he thrills with the stranglehold he exerts on the (currently) impotent
eighty percent or so of Americans who hate his guts, think how much bigger the
thrill might be at ninety or ninety-five percent. Dick Cheney said our troops
would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq. Well, it turns out they weren't and to
that vast majority of citizens who recognize the war in Iraq (and the next one
in Iran) for the constitutional, military and national security disaster that
it is, Mr. Cheney might likely ask, "what are you going to do about it?"
Interesting question.
February 8, 2007
Michael Nolan [send him mail] is a freelance writer. His work has
appeared in LewRockwell.com, Common Dreams.org, OpEdNews.com and the Vermont
Guardian.
Copyright © 2007 Michael Nolan
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