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Leaders lead by example. Real leaders
have clear convictions, and can spell out exactly what they mean, in both words
and deeds. Most of all leaders always have a plan. No one in this White House
could be ever be accused of having had any kind of plan, since 911, at all!
Beyond their lack of planning, there were also goals to be achieved, and larger
purposes to be accomplished - yet none of that appears to those who question.
Bush told a veteran's group in
Tennessee: "I don't think you can win" the war on terror. One day
later he said: "We are winning and we will win." This is our leader?
According to Bush himself: he has never wavered, never made a single mistake,
and always been completely clear about his mission and his goals: which is all a
pack of lies.
His campaign says that what Bush should
have said was: "That unlike a conventional war, the current conflict is
unlikely to end with a climatic surrender or an easily defined conclusion."
So, if he's the leader, why didn't he just say that! John McCain said:
"What he meant was, we're never going to have a peace signing on the
Missouri, we're never going to have a signing at Panmunjom," referring to
the cease-fire in Korea. What no one has yet mentioned is the way we left Viet
Nam, in pandemonium from the rooftop of the US Embassy, we ran away under fire,
and we lost that war.
The last US president to claim title to
"War President" was Lyndon Johnson. And although he inherited that one
from JFK, Viet Nam became his war. LBJ also maintained that the USA could have
both guns and butter. He too used the National Guard (not the troops but their
equipment), to hide the real losses we were suffering over there. He too tried
to divert attention from his war by draining the treasury. He tried to use The
War on Poverty to hide the War on Viet Nam - he failed at both.
The parallels between Iraq and Viet Nam
are staggering in their similarities - yet no one in the DOD, the Pentagon or
the White House seems to be aware of the obvious comparisons. Both wars began
with lies. Neither directly involved the security interests of the United States
or contained any real value when measured against the true price that would need
to be paid to win either conflict.
Militarily the two wars are virtually
identical, except in terms of troop commitments. In Viet Nam we sent over
500,000 troops, our full and intense application of major Air Power, with combat
air support, Sea Power with Naval and Marine aircraft as well as the best of the
Army and Marine ground forces throughout - not to mention the CIA, our secretive
elite forces, along with heaps of intelligence types as well as black ops, and
psy-ops agents.
The Vietnamese had a lot of small arms,
millions of people, a thorough knowledge of the jungle and as a people they were
imbued with the determination to be rid of us. They had no air force of their
own, no sophisticated missiles, and a small navy of little consequence
militarily. They lost millions of people, yet they won their war against the
USA.
Iraq similarly has no air force, no
navy to speak of, no missiles of consequence, no weapons of mass destruction,
yet they have re-ignited this war for their country. They know the desert that
is their world, just as the Vietnamese knew their jungles. They have hundreds of
thousands of fighters and millions of people - and thanks to our actions they
have now become determined to be rid of us: but they are not giving up, they're
digging in and beginning to take back their country.
In both cases the USA went to war based
on a narrow definition of how everyone else should live. This misbegotten notion
is a leftover from the Cold War that was, at least in part a war over ideology.
The War in Viet Nam was fought to benefit the military-industrial complex, which
it did - just as the War in Iraq was intended to change the fortunes of several
major players which it has, except that it was so poorly thought out, they may
yet lose it all in the end. The Viet Nam War was over thirty-five years ago-it
appears that we have learned nothing in all that time. We lost 57,000 plus
people. The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Laotians lost millions upon
millions of people. We used Agent Orange to clear the jungles and left hundreds
of thousands of our surviving troops damaged by that tactic-just as we're now
using Depleted Uranium throughout the Middle East, and leaving a wasteland
behind us that will never heal.
www.sfbayview.com/
War is supposed to be a last resort
against an attack upon this nation. In neither case was the USA attacked by Viet
Nam, or Iraq-yet our troops are still dying in Iraq in ever-increasing numbers,
and security is now a joke instead of a reality. Worst of all there is still no
plan. We committed the gravest crime of all, we did not learn from history.
Where is Rumsfeld? Where is that cynical barbarian who thinks that war is GREAT
and why isn't he running his foul mouth about how gloriously successful we are
now? Was it the trials of Abu Ghraib that silenced him, or just the loss of his
unplanned war that's got his tongue?
Cheney-Bush is now running for
election, as it appears that a second "appointment" by the Supreme
Court is now out of the question. What will this steadfast leadership of the
Sharon-Bush Brigades bring us in the next four years, if they can manage to hold
on?
On August 11, 04 Agence France-Presse
wrote: "The Pentagon has urged Congress to authorize 500 million dollars
for building a network of friendly militias around the world to purge terrorists
from "ungoverned areas" -- and warned Muslim clerics against providing
"ideological sanctuary" to radicals." And the article continued:
"Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, told the House Armed Services
Committee Tuesday the money would be used "for training and equipping local
security forces - not just armies - to counter terrorism and insurgencies."
Is this "the plan" to create
terrorists of our own around the world? $500 million more, to further
destabilize what's left of normalcy around the planet. Let's go back to Viet
Nam.
The thinking then was that if we lost
in Viet Nam a "Domino Effect" would instantly sweep through all of
Southeast Asia, and a red tide of communist governments would soon threaten the
free world, and ultimately life in these United States. Did that happen? Of
course not, because the only word we had for that came from the questionable
ravings of the CIA at that time. Today that same agency has been even further
degraded by all the lies surrounding the War in Iraq, even before we launched
it.
What is being sought here and now is
one world government, by the multinational corporations, for themselves alone.
To do this, those who might oppose their dictatorial ways will need to be
marginalized or eliminated - that is the purpose of this War upon the World. The
War on Terrorism is as phony as was the war on Viet Nam. How many more of our
sons and daughters will need to die to prove this simple point?
The so-called election is supposed to
be about "leadership and the direction this nation will take in the future,
both at home and abroad. Bush claims to be a take-no-prisoners tough guy. He's
about as tough as a West Texas tumbleweed in a sandstorm. Bush claims
'toughness" without ever having achieved anything at all. That tends to
happen whenever one has no life experience beyond the platinum spoon. However,
whenever Ariel Sharon speaks Bush does exactly as he's told: despite all his
Texas tough talk, and all the theater he creates around the idea of American
independence. Israeli policy will be written with American blood before this is
all over! Consider this from William Pfaff in which he discusses our coming
October Surprise.
www.iht.com/articles/
Why does this continue to happen? The
powers that be, the elites that own the companies and the resources that are key
to both war and government policies worldwide, are the same people who own the
media. Because of their extensive reach though conglomerate ownership of so many
areas of business and enterprise, they have been able to direct the public's
interests, guide public discussion, and control future funding as well as the
public's agenda. They are the ones who want these wars to continue because it's
great for their businesses. That's not an agenda that most people in the world
can share in.
www.mediachannel.org/
Because of the above collusions, when
the Warlords of America speak, their will is what gets done, and we shall have
nothing to say about that, so long as no changes are made to this far too cozy
arrangement.
www.lewrockwell.com/
If this process is to ever be
interrupted or forced to yield to a different outcome, then Americans need to
get beyond the slogans and the simple-minded dialogue. We need to question
everything - so that when that time comes, we can change what needs to change,
for all of us.
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