NOAM CHOMSKY PUTS IT TOGETHER

In a new essay, Chomsky does a fantastic job of cracking the puzzle of how US foreign and domestic policy under Bush interact:

For the political leadership, mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush Senior administrations, the global wave of hatred is not a particular problem. They want to be feared, not loved. It is natural for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to quote the words of Chicago gangster Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." They understand just as well as their establishment critics that their actions increase the risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror. But that too is not a major problem. Far higher in the scale of their priorities are the goals of establishing global hegemony and implementing their domestic agenda, which is to dismantle the progressive achievements that have been won by popular struggle over the past century, and to institutionalise their radical changes so that recovering the achievements will be no easy task.

And

The Wall Street Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged aircraft carrier extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election campaign" which the White House hopes "will be built as much as possible around national-security themes". The electoral campaign will focus on "the battle of Iraq, not the war", chief Republican political strategist Karl Rove explained : the war must continue, if only to control the population at home.

Before the 2002 elections Rove had instructed party activists to stress security issues, diverting attention from unpopular Republican domestic policies. All of this is second-nature to the recycled Reaganites now in office. That is how they held on to political power during their first tenure in office. They regularly pushed the panic button to avoid public opposition to the policies that had left Reagan as the most disliked living president by 1992, by which time he may have ranked even lower than Richard Nixon.

(Emphasis added by me.)

For more, click here.

It's all like a bad dream, a nightmare from which there is no waking. They knowingly stole the White House. They may very well have allowed 9/11 to happen in order to create a pretext for their insane agenda. They lied repeatedly to the nation in order to justify their criminal invasion of a relatively defenseless country: now, our soldiers are dying, day by day; now, the risk of radical Islamic terrorism is much greater than it was before; now, our diplomatic relations with the world are at their lowest point in history. Meanwhile, their absurd and evil neo-liberal economic philosophy is slowly turning the US into a third world country. Somehow, they still have a great deal of popular support.

We're in big, big, big trouble. At what point do we pronounce the United States of America dead?

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