Kirwan Articles 

Consequences and Reality

Part of the problem seems to be that Bush II has never had to live in reality. This is someone who has led a sheltered and extremely protected life. Where most leaders can cite a long list of successes that impelled them to high office - Dubya can only give excuses for his list of failures and exemptions from personal responsibility. Consequently, having experienced neither privation nor any real accomplishments by his efforts - Bush comes to the job as irredeemably damaged goods. A leader in name only who lacks compassion, understanding, and even the ability to clearly speak about ideas. In an effort to come to grips with the dimensions of this dilemma - perhaps an overview of some flashpoints may offer a glimpse into how we came to be where we are now - and why this president and his cabinet needs to be impeached now.

IRAQ

This country and our involvement with Saddam Hussein go back almost to the beginning of Saddam. The connections of George Bush the 1st, set up this confrontation now led by Bullyboy the son. The secret business dealings between Bush 1, (also Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney) and Saddam Hussein - in the manufacture and distribution of Weapons of Mass Destruction using Iraq as our proxy for war with Iran in the 1980s, is at the core of this crisis. When Bush senior had a similar problem with Manuel Noriega in Panama: daddy simply attacked that country, seized his unpleasant and politically embarrassing foe, and imprisoned him for life. That was necessary to Bush 1, to cover-up drug and arms arrangements between the US and Noriega, Iraq however is not Panama. And Saddam Hussein is much brighter than Noriega.

But the bottom line is that in Iraq the United States is fighting for our own economic survival. Yes Iraq has phenomenally valuable oil fields, and yes we'd like to take them for ourselves - but the real issue is over which currency will be used within the global oil industry to purchase oil in the future. Will it be the Euro, which Saddam switched to in November of 2002, or will it be the US dollar that was always the currency of choice before 11-02? It's interesting to note that the only two major nations currently demanding that the war on Iraq, begin now, are the two nations who are not subscribers to the Euro, as their currency of choice. Those two nations are the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

Bush cannot cite this as the reason for the need to attack Iraq - because of the attention that might be drawn to his father's complete mismanagement of the entire situation-as well as his own. It was to cover up the misdeeds of his father that Bullyboy issued his executive order just after 9-11 to keep secret the official papers of not only Ronal Reagan, but for the first time in history, a US president was allowed to protect the papers of his own father who was Reagan's vice-president, at the time.

Dubya also sought to use Saddam to obscure the US slight of hand in Afghanistan. That 'War on Terror,' created much sound and fury to cover the much maligned and often frustrated signing of an oil pipeline deal for Unocal. http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.30A.afgh.pipe.htm. After that, except for continuing to protect the coming pipeline, we've lost all interest in that region. Hence, George the 2nd chose to transfer the world's attention to Iraq, by trying to accuse Saddam of ties to Al-Qaeda. But the world is not buying the Bush party line, and by attacking Iraq, Dubya will go down in history as one of the world's most despicable tyrants.

The reasons are three fold. The populations of Europe are roughly 70 to 80% opposed to the war. Their governments have economic interests in Iraq, which will evaporate if we are allowed to steal Iraqi oil. And finally, but perhaps most important the leadership of the world's currency markets is what is actually at stake in Iraq. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html 

Aside from geo-political concerns, there are humanitarian questions about both the need to go to war and the true costs in human life that must be accounted for. All who will die, if there is an American attack, will have died in the name of the people of the United States. Bush will be held responsible for the war, by history and by the world: but he should be primarily accountable to people of the USA for his actions, in our name.

How many men, women and children will die needlessly because of the greed, the ineptitude, and the colossal rage of that small group who want nothing more than to steal the planet? If Americans had the guts to demand that the United States find another way to deal with this decades long scandal between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein - then perhaps hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives might be saved. In the life of any nation there is a time and place when wars are sometimes necessary. This is not such a time for the US and Iraq is not such a place.

The Korean Peninsula

When the Bush administration began life in 2000, one of their first acts was to isolate and nullify the terms of long worked for agreements with North Korea. Those agreements were undertaken to begin an end to North Korea's threat to the world as a nuclear power, and to begin the actual process of re-unification of the North with the South on that troubled peninsula. Dubya with his loose slang and outrageous manner put a swift end to any diplomacy there. This Bush followed by breaking the terms of the 1994 agreements that were made to keep the peninsula calm and relatively free from nuclear threats. His reasoning for this singularly strange act - has never been clarified.

What is clear now is that Bullyboy has now managed to turn our formerly close ally, South Korea, against us. This is happening because many there now see the problem to be our name-calling (Axis of Evil), and our unwillingness to even talk with the North Koreans. With the recent assignment of long-range bombers, instead of simple conversation - many more Koreans have become convinced that the US wants to provoke war on the peninsula. It's another case of barbarity, by a cowboy that is increasingly being seen as - "all hat - no cattle" - by more countries in the world that have become increasingly exposed to his pompous and wrathful demeanor. Bush is first and foremost our problem and he needs to be impeached.

There are other flashpoints as well. Israel, that nation who is: "in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council resolutions and has been protected from 29 more by U.S. veto's." How is it that Iraq is targeted for punishment (for ignoring UN resolutions) - while Israel's transgressions have been far worse and cover a much longer time period?

There is also the matter of Iraq "being a threat to its neighbors" over the last 12 years. During that time, the last twelve years, Iraq has not attacked any country beyond its borders. While at the same time the USA has been involved in how many attacks on how many different countries around the planet? Central and South America come to mind, not to mention US military action in the middle east, and Asia. And at the moment we've had troops inside Iraq now for several months, "preparing the way" for our own full scale attack upon a nation that has not attacked the US, or any of its neighbors in the last twelve years. So if the criteria for attacking Iraq are that this impoverished nation is guilty of crimes against its neighbors - then the USA should be dragged before the world court for our actions against other sovereign nations over the last twelve years.

The world knows the truth, and it's one reason that so many people around the planet are against this war on Iraq. The other major reason so many oppose this 'action' is that many see this as the opening round in a war upon the freedom and commerce of the world - the beginning of which might all too easily become World War III.

And why has all this happened? Dubya and his cohorts are failed men and women. These are people who have not had to suffer the consequences of their own private failures, because the losses they've incurred have always been passed on to others. There is no compassion because there's never been any real life present in any of these creatures. Read the body language, read the smirking, skulking deception in their manner. The arrogance and petty anger, the personal pique that is allowed to color national dialogue between nations.

There will be major consequences for what we are about to do in Iraq. This is not "just the latest in a succession of military actions" that have been necessitated in order to protect America and our way of life. This goes way beyond our 'national interests' - this is about re-shaping the global balance of power, and propping up our Imperial desire to finally come to own the world. No nation and no people will be left untouched by this outrageous attack upon the stability and the civil arrangements between nations - which this 'war' is designed to destroy.

The United States of America is about to join that long list of rogue nations that have tried to steal the world. In reality there will definitely be consequences for what this country is about to do - consequences that will far exceed what the militarily immature in the basements of the White House and Congress have thought that they were doing. There will be a war-because no doubt Bush will get his petulant way again! But it won't be the war these outlaws were planning to fight - no. This will be something far larger, far more insidious, far more difficult to contain than any we have ever faced before.

And the People's Representatives

Perhaps Senator Robert Byrd said it best, in all its various layers: http://truthout.org/docs_02/021403A.htm