TWO FROM ZNET

War Is A Racket

More soldiers have died since Bush staged his aircraft carrier photo op than died during the so-called war itself. What this demonstrates is that the anti-war protestors were right. Iraqis did not welcome Americans with open arms. The war did provoke more anti-Western terror. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were never the issue and might not even exist. The U.S. military is stuck in the proverbial quagmire. Bush-friendly corporations are getting richer on taxpayer-funded contracts. War is a racket for sure.

But, as Marine Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler wrote in the 1930s, war has been a racket for a long, long time (go back and check the date on his opening quote). Writing mostly about World War I in "War is a Racket," Butler explains that war is "possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, sure the most vicious" racket of all. "It is the only [racket] in which profits are reckoned in dollars and losses in lives," he declares.

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"Systematic Distortion"
Non-Random Material Falsification
And The White House Agenda

Bush's defenders will argue that the president's false statements are not technically illegal he did not "knowingly and willfully" make his false claims. The president of theUnited States, we are informed by the White House, cannot be expected to be a "fact-checker." He relies on the information his "experts" dig up and some of that data is inevitably and unfortunately bad. At the same time, some of his supporters admit, the president himself is, well, not the sharpest person to ever hold the nation's highest office. He is especially prone to "regular guy" confusion when it comes to handling the countless facts that cross his desk. This is part of his appeal and popularity.

But do we really want a man of such apparent limitations at the head of the most powerful assemblage of military force in history? And why, moreover, do the president's supposed "mistakes," "exaggerations," and "overstatements" always serve empire abroad and inequality at home? And how bad is the intelligence these days? Why, for example, did the White House never seem to "err" in the direction of the considerable number of respectable intelligence experts who - taking seriously their professional responsibility to discover and report on what's actually going on in the world, without primary consideration to political concerns - questioned the claims made by the War Hawks like Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz, for whom facts are little more than Orwellian playthings.

As Noam Chomsky noted more than thirty years ago in a book that dissected the delusional mindset of the people who brought us the Vietnam War, "mere ignorance or foolishness" on the part of US policymakers "would lead to random error, not to a regular and systematic distortion" that always favors military action. Now, as during the Vietnam era, reports illustrating the truth beneath official deceptions go essentially unchallenged by the White House because the government "does not really hope to convince anyone by its arguments, but only to sow confusion, relying on the natural tendency to trust authority and avoid complicated and disturbing issues. The confused citizen turns to other pursuits, and gradually, as government lies are reiterated day after day, year after year, falsehood becomes truth." The citizen is "whipped into line by fear that we will be overwhelmed by an external enemy if we let down our guard."

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