Bush Responds
To Political Crisis With Lies And New War Threats
By Bill Van Auken
08 October 2005
World
Socialist Web
President
George W. Bushs speech Thursday on the war on terror
constitutes a sobering measure of both his governments desperate
political crisis and the threat that it will try to extricate itself
from this crisis through escalating militarism.
The speech was a
compendium of lies delivered with the aim of terrorizing the American
people and rallying his extreme right-wing base. In remarks that at
times bordered on lunacy, he invoked the unlikely bogeyman of an Al
Qaeda terrorist network poised to establish a radical Islamic
empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.
Bush delivered his
remarks to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the agency created
by the Reagan administration in the 1980s to conduct political propaganda
and subversion operations overseas previously carried out covertly by
the CIA.
It was to this same
audience that the US president proclaimed nearly two years ago a forward
strategy of freedom in the Middle East. Then he was predicting
that the successful US imposition of democracy in Iraq would
lead to a global democratic revolution that would topple
regimes throughout the region.
In Thursdays
address, Bush advanced the reverse of this domino theory, warning that
unless the US military achieves unconditional victory, the result will
be Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, and the spread
of radical Islamist regimes internationally.
This latest assertion
has no more credibility than the one advanced in 2003. It is indicative,
however, of the growing desperation within US ruling circles over the
debacle in Iraq and of the administrations decision to rely on
fear as its main means of coercing the American people into submitting
to its policies.
As if on cue Thursday,
the authorities in New York City issued a terror alert for the citys
subways, only hours after Bushs speech and just in time for the
evening television news and scare headlines in the next days papers.
Almost as soon as the alert was announced, however, intelligence officials
acknowledged that the threat was of doubtful credibility.
Friday saw Pennsylvania Station shut down because of the discovery of
a suspicious soda bottle.
The aim of such
alerts, like Bushs speech itself, is to instill fear, thereby
keeping the public off balance and suppressing the growth of political
opposition and social unrest.
The Bush administration
has returned to the mantra of terrorism that it utilized in paving the
way to the invasion of Iraq, when it claimed that Baghdad was developing
weapons of mass destruction and preparing to hand them over to Al Qaeda
terrorists.
It was lying then,
and it is lying now, but under changed political conditions. The New
York Times quoted an unnamed White House official as saying that Bush
had given his speech to remind Americans after a lot of
distractions in recent months, that the country was still under
threat and had no choice but to remain in Iraq...
What are these distractions?
Opposition to the Bush government has never been greater, with polls
showing barely 37 percent of the population supporting the administration
and majorities believing that the war in Iraq was a mistake and that
US troops should be withdrawn.
Moreover, the Hurricane
Katrina catastrophe has exposed before millions the profound social
crisis and class polarization that exist in the United States and the
breakdown of governmental and social institutions under the impact of
policies designed solely to advance the accumulation of wealth by the
financial elite.
After all of the
hysteria over terrorism and homeland security in the wake
of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the response to this natural disaster
demonstrated that the US government is even less prepared to deal with
a catastrophe than it was four years ago. It did not take its own terror
warnings seriously, except as a means of politically terrorizing the
American people.
Meanwhile, there
are signs of growing disaffection and outright opposition within the
military itself.
Seven more American
soldiers were killed in Iraq on the day that Bush delivered his speech,
bringing the US military death toll to over 1,950. There are over 100
armed attacks daily, and the country remains in a state of economic
and social paralysis. Many of those knowledgeable about Iraq warn that
it is either on the brink of an ethno-religious civil war, or one has
already begun. The upcoming referendum on a draft constitutiontouted
by Washington as another step toward democracyis emerging as yet
more fuel for this fire.
Bush disputed the
obvious fact that the US occupation of Iraq has fed support for armed
resistance and acts of terrorism both there and throughout the region.
US commanders are not so sanguine, however, and have publicly suggested
the need to reduce a US military presence that is seen by Iraqis as
an oppressive occupation.
Bushs invocation
of a supposedly ubiquitous terrorist threat is aimed at quashing such
internal dissension and intimidating popular opposition. The tone of
the speech echoed the kind of red scare hysteria of McCarthyism,
though his arguments made even less sense than those of the fanatical
anti-communists 50 years ago.
The speech equated
the global war on terror with the Cold War against the Soviet
Union and World War II, likening Osama bin Laden to Joseph Stalin and
Adolf Hitler. Such assertions are absurd on their face.
The Soviet Union
was a superpower armed with nuclear weapons and covering one-sixth of
the earths surface.
Al Qaeda consists
of at most a couple of thousand fanatics. Osama bin Laden controls no
state and his movement has no credible chance of coming to power anywhere
in the worldincluding Iraq. By toppling that countrys government
and destabilizing its society, Washington has provided Al Qaeda with
a new, previously inaccessible field of operations as well as a source
of recruits drawn from among the masses of Arabs outraged by the US
invasion and occupation.
In prosecuting the
war on terror and the struggle for freedom Bush
declares that the enemy extremists want to end American and Western
influence in the broader Middle East.... Their tactic to meet this goal
has been consistent for a quarter century: They hit us and expect us
to run.
Why stop at a quarter
century? Wasnt the struggle to end Western influence in
the broader Middle East what the anti-colonial movement that emerged
in the region in the aftermath of World War II was all about? Were not
those the goals and tactics of the nationalist movements that drove
the French out of Algeria and ejected the British from Egypt?
The US war in Iraq
has nothing to do with democracy or terrorism; it is an attempt to recolonize
the region in order to seize control of its oil resources and establish
the strategic hegemony of US imperialism.
In making his case
for the terror war, Bush strung together a series of disparate movements
and presented them as all part of a global Islamic radical
movement that the US military is supposedly confronting in Iraq.
He claimed that
the US is threatened by paramilitary insurgencies and separatist
movements in places like Somalia, and the Philippines, and Pakistan,
and Chechnya, and Kashmir, and Algeria.
Lumped together
are clan warfare in Somalia, a small local gang in the Philippines,
the more than half-century dispute over Kashmir and an Islamist political
movement in Algeria that has been brutally repressed, at the cost of
150,000 lives. None of these movementswith widely different social
bases and political objectiveshave been linked to any acts of
international terrorism.
To the extent Islamist
fundamentalism has grown, it is largely with the support of the US government,
which provided billions of dollars in arms and aid to Osama bin Laden
and his Mujahedin allies to overthrow the Soviet-backed government in
Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Washington likewise
backed Islamist elements in Indonesia, where they led anticommunist
pogroms that claimed one million lives in 1965, as well as in Chechnya
and Bosnia, where they were seen as counterbalances to Russian and Serbian
influence. Wherever such movements could be used as instruments in the
pursuit of US strategic aims, they have gotten either overt or covert
US support.
Bushs speech
was characterized by his usual messianic tone, referring to the war
on terror as a calling and declaring, We will
confront this mortal danger to all humanity. This type of language
is directed to the administrations base among the evangelical
Christian right and is part and parcel of an attempt to sell the war
in Iraq as some kind of new crusade against Islam.
The great bulk of
humanity, however, sees US imperialism itself as the greatest danger.
After the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis, the words that Bush used to
describe those the US is supposedly fighting would widely be accepted
as applying to the American president himself: Throughout history,
tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified
to serve their grand vision. And they end up alienating decent people
across the globe.
Among the more ominous
and seemingly irrational sections of Bushs speech was an open
threat against Syria and Iran, which he described as terrorisms
allies of convenience.
State sponsors
like Syria and Iran have a long history of collaboration with terrorists
and they deserve no patience from the victims of terror, declared
Bush. The United States makes no distinction between those who
commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them, because
theyre equally guilty of murder.
This is an open
justification for launching military attacks on both countries. Indeed,
it is the same phony pretext used in the invasion of Iraq two-and-a-half
years ago.
The regime in Damascus
is secular and has ruthlessly repressed Syrias Islamic movement.
It provided substantial intelligence assistance to Washington in the
wake of September 11, and US intelligence agencies have sent suspects
to be tortured in Syria under Washingtons so-called extraordinary
rendition program.
As for Iran, the
government there has established close political ties with the Shia
majority which dominates the Iraqi regime that the US is supporting.
Teheran has backed the elections in Iraq as well as the draft constitution
and is virulently opposed to the Al Qaeda movement, which has conducted
sectarian terrorist attacks on the Iraqi Shia population.
Why the saber-rattling
now against these two regimes? First of all, it makes clear that the
US war in Iraq has nothing to do with combating terrorism. It is an
attempt to impose US neo-colonial control. Leading elements within the
administration and the ruling establishment have concluded from the
deepening debacle in Iraq that this will prove impossible without widening
the war.
Intensified militarism
is, in the final analysis, the product of the deep crisis of American
society itself, characterized by vast social inequality and an increasingly
corrupt and parasitic corporate ruling stratum.
Bushs speech
is a warning that this ruling elite is preparing even greater crimes
and bloodshed. His diatribe provoked little critical analysis either
from the Democratic Party or the mass media, neither of which provide
any political expression to the growing popular opposition to the war
and the administrations domestic policies.