Bully goes to war â blames God
By Saul Landau
âMissed you at Bible study.â â Bush to White House speechwriter David Frum (Jack
Beatty, âIn the Name of God,â Atlantic March 5, 2003)
The bully on the block always had guys who did the fighting for him. He would falsely
accuse a weaker kid of planning some horrible conspiracy and then unleash the tough
guys â as a pre-emptive move, of course. On my block, the bullies had the same MO.
But not one of them got into an actual fight with anyone who might inflict pain on
them. They picked on kids who would not fight back.
When a possible retaliator appeared, the bully would summon his surrogates to
administer the beating â in his name. I recall several Irish Catholic bullies, egged
on by a bigoted parish priest, invoking Godâs name to justify the beatings they
inflicted on me and other Jewish victims. âWeâre kicking your ass cause you killed
our Lord.â
Now the born-again bully occupies the White House. He picks on weak targets, taunts
them â âbring âem on â gets others to fight for him and then serves turkey to
his proxy warriors on Thanksgiving. But worse than his addiction for playing dress up
for photo ops, he has made bullying into official U.S. policy. As president, you have
the forum to conjure up threats, report them as certainties and then order the armed
forces to fight them.
Go back to January 29, 2002, when George W. Bush in his State of the Union address
vowed, âWe will not permit the worldâs most dangerous regimes to threaten us with
the worldâs most destructive weapons.â No, Bush did not plan a pre-emptive strike
against Russian, Chinese or even Israeli nuclear arsenals. He clarified his intentions
by identifying North Korea, Iran and Iraq as âthe axis of evilâ â weak states.
And he had no intention of doing the fighting himself. He never has.
Given his religious âforces of good and evilâ fervor innuendo combined with the
ignorance of the world â âI may not know where Bosnia is, butââ â that
informs the Presidentâs policy decisions, I think Bush might very well âhearâ
voices from above. He doesnât feel compelled to read, or listen for long to those
with knowledge in order to establish a firm basis for his judgments. He simply makes
decisions. Thatâs what leaders do, he told biographer Bob Woodward (Bush at War).
Rather, the supposedly wise counselors whose jobs consist of imparting sound
information and advice to the commander in chief simply twist information and analysis
to suit his âreligiousâ whims â like invading Iraq. Actually, some of the
National Security Magi â Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his Department
colleagues Richard Perle, Douglas Feith â thought that such a move would establish
the basis for remaking the Middle East â maybe the whole world.
Some of them even have rather strong financial motives for such worldly renovation (I
mention Vice President Cheneyâs connections to Halliburton, National Security
Adviser Riceâs links to Chevron and of course Perleâs multiple involvements with
defense companies that allowed him to âdo well by doing goodâ).
For Bush, the spiritual advisers may well have mattered more. The Rev. Billy Graham
and the theocratic leaders of the Christian soldiers, Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell,
take seriously the idea that God looks with special care at U.S. politics. After all,
Falwell divined, He may have chosen Clinton to warn us against sin, just as he picked
Bush to lead us out of temptation and into war in the Middle East.
Graham, one of the self-anointed celestial surveyors, as Eduardo Galeano calls him,
understands that âparadise is none too roomy â no more than fifteen hundred square
miles. The chosen will be few. Now guess which country has bought up all the entrance
tickets?â (Galeano La Jornada, March 19, 2003).
God has made his entrance in U.S. politics on earlier occasions as well. In 1898, He
allegedly told President William McKinley to seize the Philippines â in order to
spread His religion there. McKinley told White House reporters that after spending a
sleepless night pondering a decision over whether or not to invade the Philippines,
God intervened and helped him make the decision to go to war.
Bush has intimated that God chose him to be President â whether or not he won the
election. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence General William Boykin
repeated that assertion and declared in June in an Oregon speech, âThe enemy is a
guy named Satan.â
If only the majority in the civilized world would understand that war in Iraq meant
more than conquering a country with lots of oil, run by a serious black hat! Do good
Christians around the world not recall â at least through reading â the story of
the crusades, Godâs unfinished business in converting Muslims to Christianity? The
tens of millions who took to the streets to demonstrate against the war did not
understand that Bush made war for Godâs peace, not just for a piece of Iraq.
Only by appealing to the apocalyptic of Biblical prophecy could the Bushies have
justified a pre-emptive war. One of the most ardent war hawks, Richard Perle, who
resigned on March 27, 2003 as chair of the Defense Policy Board but remained a member,
finally admitted in public that the Administration had no casus belli, no legal
recourse to wage war, while dismissing legalities as inapplicable.
In the November 20 Guardian, Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger quoted Perle telling an
Institute of Contemporary Arts audience in London: âI think in this case
international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.â Perleâs belated
honesty flies in the face of official White House statements â prepared by the legal
staff â that avers that existing UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq justified
the intervention.
Article 51 of the UN Charter allows for an act of âindividual or collective
self-defense, if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.â For
Perle and his neo-conservative allies, such a formula under âinternational law ...
would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone.â
Indeed, such a legalistic course would have proven âmorally unacceptable,â
according to Perle. The problems the Bushies faced in making war on Iraq, Perle
insisted, came down to the non-existence of a âpractical mechanism consistent with
the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein.â Since international law proved
defective as an excuse to invade Iraq, the old weapons of mass destruction and links
to Al-Qaeda ploys served the cause. Bushâs legal beagles resorted to the old
âsovereign authority to use forceâ notion to âdefendâ the United States from
the threat posed by mighty Iraq. Hitler and Tojo used preventive war as Germany and
Japanâs justification to launch World War II. Prior to the start of the Nuremberg
trials in the post war period, Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, speaking at
the International Conference on Military Trials, August 12, 1945, underlined the
fallacy of pre-emptive war.
âWe must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are
on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not
allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is
that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly
renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.â
Adding to such dicta about preventive war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 said
that Hitler invented âpreventive war.â Ike dismissively said: âFrankly, I
wouldnât even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a
thing.â
Iraq did disobey some UN resolutions. But the Bush-Blair war against Iraq literally
shreds the international legal system. It amazes me how the media ignore the fact that
Israel has disavowed more UN resolutions than any other country â with U.S. backing.
The faithful do not look for consistency, for to do so would be to question Godâs
will. So, the fact that Israel has grabbed Palestinian land for the last thirty-six
years and possesses a nuclear weapon stockpile does not concern those to whom God has
instructed to dispatch the evil Saddam.
In the 21st Century, a President came to power â he was not really elected â with
a mission that most literate political types thought had vanished in the volumes of
law and experience. As the concept of imperialism became anachronistic, an imperial
bully took advantage of the bully pulpit.
Bush told James Robinson, according to Paul Harris in the November 2, 2003 New York
Observer: âI feel like God wants me to run for President. I canât explain it, but
I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it
wonât be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.â
So, with God as Bushâs key adviser, where does that leave Karl Rove â and the rest
of us?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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