Freelance Writer
23/02/2004
There is a trend toward autocratic takeovers of imperial republics -- especially after they reach a certain stage of growth. Even now this process is underway in the U.S.A.-the President, like the first Roman emperors, decides when and where to wage war, and his Senate rubber stamps and extorts the funding for his imperial adventures, just as the original came to do in the time of Caesar and Octavian.Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrow of Empire, Metropolitan Books
548 American soldiers have died since March 20, 2004, as of February 24, 2004 |
Bush, like all good, upstanding
autocratic imperial heads of empire cares about one thing and one thing
only - power and expansion. God help anything or anyone that has the nerve
to get in the way! After all, his "majesty" must make the world safe for
"democracy." He must "civilize" the uncivilized. It is such a short
mental leap for people superior in power to infer that they were (are)
superior in intellect, morality and civilization as well.
Achievement of an end is all that matters and the
means of achieving that end are irrelevant.
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No matter the cost economically, socially, politically, the end is all-important. No matter the cost in human life, the end is all-important. English political economist John Hobson sums it up rather nicely: "[I]mperialists are parasites upon patriotism. They are the people who anticipate profitable business and lucrative employment in the course of creating and exporting an empire.2 (Currently this country operates over 725 permanent military bases everywhere but Antarctica with more being built.) And the dead keep piling up. A grotesque monument to his 3Imperial Majesty's" empire expansion.
Does Bush or anyone in his cabal care about the mounting death toll? I think not! After all, as we keep being told, we are at war and people die in wars. And the dead keep growing in numbers. True to form as head of the 3American Empire,2 Bush ignores the mounting death toll and the enormous number of wounded and medical evacuations (534 dead, 26,000 evacuatedS this is all in the public domain and all over my web site). His mouthpiece, in the form of corporate media, has taken instructions well: no footage or photos of returning coffins. Out of sight, out of mindS this in and of itself is disrespectful, an outrage and a betrayal of the fallen! Bush could care less how many of our young people are killed or wounded. Twice he has been asked about the mounting death toll and both times he glibly dismissed the question.
When Tim Russert interviewed Bush on Meet the Press he asked him, 3Now looking back, in your mind, is it worth the loss of 530 American lives and 3,000 injuries and woundings simply to remove Saddam Hussein, even though there were no weapons of mass destruction? Did Bush show any signs of understanding, compassion, sympathy or loss about the dead and dying? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, he went into one of the most obscene diatribes, an instruction for the families of the fallen, about Saddam being a 3bad2 man. So What?! We knew he was a bad man; the entire 20-plus years he was our bad man - it didn't seem to matter much when Rumsfeld was having tea with him back in the '80s and giving him the things necessary to manufacture bio/chem weapons. Or when Cheney's Halliburton was doing business with him in 1998!
As an American, a former Marine (if there is such an animal... former that is), as a disabled Vietnam veteran, I am outraged over the glib, cavalier and dismissive attitude of Bush and his cabal when it comes to the wholesale slaughter of our young men and women, which is being done only to further their quest for empire. Bush talks of the sacrifices that we must make. After all we are at war, he tells us. D**m it! The only people doing the sacrificing are the poor, people of color, and what is left of an ever decreasing middle class. He does not care! If he did, even just a little, he would show some sign of respect for the dead, the wounded and their families. Instead, he goes into a ten-minute lecture, attempting to convince us and the families of the fallen that he, Bush, is making the world a safer place; after all didn't he get rid of that bad man Saddam? And the dead keep growing in numbers.
To Bush and his cabal we are just numbers on paper, pieces on a chessboard to be moved around at his pleasure. In the meantime, the dead keep growing in numbers.
Bush stated he is a war president, that his policy decisions are made with war in mind. Welcome to militarism and the American Empire. And the dead keep piling up. Empire and its accompanying 3might makes right dogma, by any of the Orwellian double-speak terms or the euphemisms currently in vogue, is still empire.
While Bush keeps beating his chest about being
a war president, the pile of bodies, arms, legs and other assorted body
parts of our young people in uniform keeps getting larger and larger. While
he tells us the American people have got to know they got a president who
sees the world the way it is, I wonder how much of what he sees is left-over
brain rot from the years of cocaine and alcohol abuse. And the number of
dead keeps growing.