from paul craig roberts my new conservative pal :
“In his June 18 weekly radio address last Saturday, Bush again lied to the American people when he told them that the US was forced into invading Iraq because of the September 11 attack on the WTC. Bush, the greatest disgrace that America has ever had to suffer, actually repeated at this late date the monstrous lie for which he is infamous throughout the world:
“We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens.”
Whoever the “people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens” might be, they were not Iraqis, at least not until Bush invaded their country, killed tens of thousands and maimed tens of thousands more, detained tens of thousands others, destroyed entire cities, destroyed the country’s infrastructure, and created mass unemployment, poverty, pollution and disease.
The only reason Iraqis want to harm the US is because George W. Bush inflicted, and continues to inflict, tremendous harm on Iraqis.
If the Bush administration has its way, the Iraqi insurgents will be joined by the Iranians, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Jordanians and Palestinians. The “people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens” will increase exponentially.”

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 21 2005 23:49 utc | 4

Atrios and E.J. Dionne believe that noone will stand up for those who criticize the empire.

Posted by: citizen | Jun 22 2005 0:21 utc | 6

As long as we’re belly-bumping and chest-beating about abstract truth and knowing the truth, yet lying anyway, then you need to address why the Senate voted 100-0 with no abstentions to grift BushCo **another** $82B for Iraq until October, when the GAO has been shrieking the audits don’t pencil out, and anyone with a fly’s brain can do the math: it’s utterly impossible for a 150,000- man occupation peace-keeping force with standard issue mechanized divisions driving or flying gear that was depreciated to zero in the last century, to spend $82,000,000,000 in six months, much less in six years. You only have to pencil out Bosnia.
So why did our Dem Senators vote to grease the pole, when BushCo turned right around and asked for $42B more this week? Are they uninformed?
Did they get bad mil cost data from the CIA?
It’s because they’re all in on the deal! Let’s tell the truth about the Beltway and US senators.
They are all in on the greeaze, the baaksheesh,
the defense contracts, the military bases, the silk shirts and $100 lunches, their kids in line for cushy jobs after fancy colleges, the campaign slush contributions to get re-elected; instead of pumping gas-oil down at the local quicky-mart, if you’re old enough to remember station attendants, or when they used to call it gas-oil.
It’s every man for himself, baby! Follow the M3!

Posted by: tante aime | Jun 22 2005 4:14 utc | 8

Digby:

Clearly, they didn’t really believe that Saddam had any WMD capability. The governments of the US and Britain would have leveled Iraq before they put over a hundred thousand soldiers out in the open on the Kuwait border if they had. They knew.

Nope

Posted by: Fran | Jun 22 2005 6:35 utc | 10

“if he did believe it and told his people so, it’s much worse than if he just would have lied”
The question is whether the authors here intend ‘bad’ to mean ‘evil’ or ‘disastrous’.
Morally, it’s worse if he lied than if he was delusional. Preparing the insanity defence for the war crimes trial, perhaps ?
In terms of a policy that should benefit the US, it is arguably worse if they are delusional. Any actions that are not reality-based will fail at some point.

Posted by: khr | Jun 22 2005 7:08 utc | 12

Then what does it mean that the administration did everything in their power to prevent the emergence of hard facts into public discourse? I cite three examples:
First, Iraq submitted a full accounting of weapons activities to the United Nations. Twelve thousand pages worth. And the Americans made sure everybody else was kept in ignorance by taking it upon themselves to gut the submission. Even other UNSC members were not allowed to know the Iraqi position.
Second, it was the coalition that pulled out hans Blix and his inspectors before their work was complete.
Third, it was Bolton that had Bustano fired for seeking the truth about Iraqi chemical and biological weapons.
If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck and looks like a duck – it’s a duck.

Posted by: John | Jun 22 2005 9:08 utc | 14

kudos bill,
I agree completely.

Posted by: patience | Jun 22 2005 12:17 utc | 16

There is no one as smart as we
our thoughts are ideologically
supreme
With marxist words we can puree
those bourgeois critics every day
They lack our saavy class based view
that we apply without a clue
to everyone else.

Posted by: citizen k | Jun 22 2005 12:59 utc | 18

I agree with DoDo. That is the most reasonable explenation to why they both lied and yet appeared convinced to Hans Blix to believe their own lies.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jun 22 2005 14:55 utc | 20

Above by Russ Baker (June 20, 2005) at Peter Hansen.

Posted by: beq | Jun 22 2005 15:24 utc | 22

“We” did a good job, as Jefferson often put it, to “civilize” native americans. Jefferson surely favored cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. I’m not nyah-nyahing you, outraged. Just pointing out what you no doubt know as the obvious contradiction in Jefferson’s “Enlightenment.”

Posted by: slothrop | Jun 22 2005 16:19 utc | 24

Slothrop, dude: While I am impressed to see the use of “apodictic” in a sentence, your logic is not. If we discard slaveholders and sexists, imperialists, and criminals, there’s not much human cultural left. I’m not sure if we can even speak. We’ll maybe you have a point after all.
On the other hand, here are a few timely words from Tom Paine. Maybe not the high flying and graceful rhetoric you have become inured to, but not bad for an dead old white guy.
———–
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and, in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?

Posted by: citizen k | Jun 22 2005 16:58 utc | 26

@citizen k
You criticized slothrop’s logic but don’t seem to have any problem with the “any longer” part of his statement (the only place I disagree – so I don’t accept the premise).
What else, exactly, might be illogical in the sentence?

Posted by: citizen | Jun 22 2005 17:08 utc | 28

There’s too much “belief.” Not enough critique. Too much bourgeois idealism, not enough concrete analysis.
I look at the Constitution, and I can only say: really, not that great. Dim light for the world’s one beacon of hope. Protection from government, not private property. Pretty half-assed.
Paine was critical about the constitution. But, I can’t remember exactly why.

Posted by: slothrop | Jun 22 2005 17:25 utc | 30

@slothrop
Look, I gather you do actually care about organizing people rather than leaving them at the mercy of sold out ‘representatives’, but these latest posts don’t display that.
And about the Tom Paine quote, I don’t think Adorno would disagree with the idea:
Infidelity consists in professing to believe what one does not.
So whaddya mean not enough critique?

Posted by: citizen | Jun 22 2005 18:05 utc | 32

i don’t know how it is for other people on the left – from the very first moment – like mayakovsky – i understood that anti imperialism – that my desire for communism was as ordinary as my breath
it arrived as it should by a necessity to understand the suffering around me. & unfortunately, slothrop it was my heart that was the motor & remains so. all the reading i have done has been filtered by that heart :accepted or rejected by my instincts & transformed ta conceptual level which itself has been filtered by practice, concrete practice
in the late 60’s early seventies i knew clearly who the enemy was – it was not speculative. it was borne by historical understanding
so i possess non of the ‘faiths’ that other people see in the political process. even in socialist countries that i witnessed.
for me the congress & senate have been a laughing stock. they are not serious institutions. like so much of what pretends to be democratic in the post war period – it is a degeneration of culture itself. the tweedledum/tweedledee aspect does not even make it comic because this farce has brought with it tragedy, great tragedy
the beneficiaries (who also are the main public for mr murdoch) in most contemporay ‘democracies’ have been the middle class & while that class was feeding from the trough & i include left academics in that – everything was o k & people really fundamentally didn’t give a flying fuck about what was happening in indonesia, phillipines, kashmir, honduras etc as long as it did not interrupt their public & ‘private’ lives – they simply fetishised that suffering
when that suffering became cultural product, they were envious, sexually envious because finally the slaves speak – the slave says what cannot come out of your mouth but what threatens to explode in your skull
but it is that middle class today who can see – finally – that they are as expendable as the slaves – the lives of working hard for the man mean nothing – the brilliant future is proving to be troublesome. some of us will have to work till we are 80 ti have any form of retirement – whatever that means under the circumstance.
because now retirement from this catastrophe is not an option & i understand that lupin is no frther from the crisis than in l a but simply he & his family are able to respect & protect themselves – whivch under the circumstances is not nothing & i understand like others here he is condemened to fighting this out
at some time or other we will have to fight this out
i feel it every day in defence of my communities. mr sarkozy has just sd he wants to ‘cleanse’ france – his vichyist demagoguery – will have practical consequences on my communities & they will require even more defence
the premier defence is that these people are human, have rights, have interiorities which are every bit as rich as the technocrat who types tômes somewhere for saints of superstructure & capital
this left – this community has always understood the violence that lies deep in the heart & nature of america – they have been the direct victims of it – it is not so surprising – they have no illussions nor need explanations. they know exactly whay america attacked iraq & will continue to attack the sovereignty of others
in fact, the sovereignty america has over itself is peripheral – as peripheral as a thousand year reich, as peripheral as a light on the hill
some nights i am worried about what they have done & what they will do but for the oppressed they have already suffered from the worst of it before, neglect & contempt
& yes that contempt & neglect is on a wor footing but i am sure & certain that the empire in establising that warfooting has guaranteed like other empires its own burial

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jun 22 2005 18:35 utc | 34

@slothrop
but the word is not “fidelity” but “infidelity”. It is a term by which to know what to organize against, critical as can be and entirely practical.
For example, say someone names himself a socialist. Say some country names itself communist. The question of infidelity is how different are these professions from actions. Very practical.
The U.S. is drunk on calling itself the home of the free and the brave. Have our leaders been brave? No they have dodged the same wars they professed even then to support. This idea is a guide to the perplexed, and deserves as good treatment as you would give if it were dressed up in the name of “negative dialectics” or the like.
And it is perfectly good for grasping what is wrong with the pieties you despise. Founding Fathers, ‘fundamentalist’ Christians and all. Best of all it links to shame when one betrays one’s own humanity. The shame of it demands action. And it reveals those who feel no shame, reveals their promise to betray you too when the time comes.

Posted by: citizen | Jun 22 2005 18:51 utc | 36

citizen
now I see I sort of read that wrong. thanks.

Posted by: slothrop | Jun 22 2005 18:57 utc | 38

Speaking of professing things one doesn’t believe, Alternet has an article on how Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones grew a conscience.

Jones’ district is one of the most militarized in the country, if not the most. Sixty thousand veterans live in the 17 counties that make up his constituency, which on average voted at a mid-60s percentage level for Bush last November. There are three Marine bases that house thousands of active servicemen and their families; about 43,000 military and 5,000 civilians at Camp Lejeune in Onslow County; Cherry Point, the world’s largest Marine Corp air station and Craven County’s largest employer, which pumps $500 million annually into the economy; and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base which employs around 4,000 military and 500 civilians in Wayne County.

What happened? According to the article, it wasn’t political pressure since support for the war and the President is still strong there.

For most of us, Iraq is at worst an unpleasant reality TV show. Even for most politicians in Washington, it’s a problem they’ve so far been able to throw public funds at with the hope it will go away or improve, muttering out the sides of their mouths in public about the “lack of progress,” and in private, despairing like the rest of us.
But it’s become too much for Jones. Iraq has subsumed Jones’ political and private life on the Hill and in his district, a consequence of the ubiquitous military presence there. Perhaps more than any other politician in Washington, Jones has witnessed exactly what the Iraq policy he helped shape has done to the lives of the people he’s supposed to represent.
A congressional staffer who works closely with Walter Jones’ office right now told me that Jones changed his mind about Iraq after some “difficult soul searching,” and that the “growing gap” between the truth about Iraq that plays out in his district and the Republican party line he’s supposed to toe in committee hearings has taken a “terrible toll on him.” When I asked Jones’ press secretary what led to the shift, she told me it was a combination of “the top-secret briefings, researching the issues, and talking to families.”
In every single direction, Iraq is staring at Walter Jones in the face, and it’s turned him into an emotional wreck. Jones hangs photographs of the fallen soldiers from his district at the entrance to his congressional offices, and their eyes meet his every time he enters the offices. More than 100 Marines from Camp Lejeune have lost their lives; Jones has written letters to the 1,300 family members who survive them. Mix in the closed-door sessions he attends with generals and intelligence experts telling him every single thing is going wrong, the despair of wives and children on the bases who have seen tours of duty extended, and the disquiet, misery and injuries of the returned combat veterans. Jones still talks about the funeral he attended two years ago of Sgt. Michael Bitz, who never saw the birth of his twin sons.
….
This isn’t about politics; it’s personal, and utterly emotional. Walter Jones can’t lie about Iraq anymore. He’s worked in the beating heart of this rotten American war effort for almost three years, and he’s complicit in all of it. It’s enough to make a congressman cry.

He may not be able to cry yet about the 10’s of thousands of Iraqis who have died and the millions who have suffered because of the war he supported, but compassion has to start somewhere. I hope we have a few more in Congress with enough humanity left to feel for those they have been hurting.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Jun 22 2005 20:24 utc | 40

Thanks for calling a spade a spade. They knew there were no WMD and LIED. I’m so sick of the “incompetence” or “they believed their own lies” excuses given for the neocons behavior. They lied and they knew they lied or they wouldn’t have attempted to conceal the lie. That’s one of the ways we determine if someone is sane enough to stand trial for a crime and aware that what they did was wrong. If they try to conceal it – they knew it was a crime.

Posted by: Gabby | Jun 22 2005 22:33 utc | 42

Slothrop: stop reading with an eye to categorization. Labeling Paine as a petit-bourgeois imperialist or whatever does not add to knowledge. Dosteyevsky certainly was a upper class anti-semitic looney tunes, but that’s not a very useful precis of The Inquisitor.
Citizen: Pericles funeral oration, Aristotles Politics, and Tom Watson’s populism are all incisive and illuminating as well as timelessly eloquent even though they were all below the modern Harvard Yard PC standards. We are all limited by our personal, cultural, biological, and other failings, but lacking a belief in some infallible and irreproachable God or, even worse, Leader, I am forced to take my flawed moral demonstrations where I find ’em in fucked up contradictory and hypocritical human beings.
There is a great line by Jefferson where he begins with some utterly moronic and transparent excuse for slavery in the supposed lack of comprehension among the people he kidnapped – and then segues without skipping a beat into a brilliant comment about the paradoxical nature of life balanced on a knife edge between unevadable misery and glorious beauty. How can someone be so slimy and so brilliant in a single paragraph?

Posted by: citizen k | Jun 23 2005 3:38 utc | 44

Was STS by the water cooler with some guy from work, who has served in the Gulf as a civie. We were talking about work opportunities over there, and I was telling him about this Saudi I know and how much work there is right now in the region.
He responds, “Yeah, this guy I know just got back from Iraq, and he says it’s not like the media portrays it at all. We’re really doing great things over there!”
I kinda backed up a little, so I wouldn’t catch his malaise, still shaking my head in agreement.
Then he rolled off this bullet list of supposed accomplishments, and the whole time he’s talking, I wanted to scream this is the exact same bullet list I read six months ago, sent by a rabid Repug friend of a friend, how why the Left should just shut-up, shut-up, shut-up … or move to Iran.
Then he wraps up with the patented mil, “So we should stay the course until Iran is rebuilt.”
I looked at him a second, and said, “Really?!”
Just as he was about to re-ibid, I said, “This Saudi guy tells me the whole place is going to hell. The American civies are running around, staying in 5-star hotels and spending money like bathwater since it’s all cost-plus, but nothing is getting on the ground for the Iraqis. This Saudi says the CPA’s have tons of money to run deals, (baaksheesh where that money came from), but they can’t get out to make the deals, since the Americans are running all the action.”
(Read Heller, “Catch-22” and Solzenitzen,
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”)
Then our chief commander came out of his office, heading down the hall, and we scurried back to our cube farm cubby holes. Nothing to see here.
I didn’t have the heart to tell this guy that his friend just back from Iraq was reading a script written in some CIA HUMINT propaganda unit, and that unknown lieutenant or captain or whoever the letter writer was supposed to be, doesn’t exist.
Every returning soldier tells exactly that story.
Have I got a deal for you! And what do I have to do to get you into this car, right now, today?!
Tokyo Rose, meet Rosie the Riveter.

Posted by: tante aime | Jun 23 2005 4:57 utc | 46

Gabby: “they believed their own lies” excuses
No, that one is not an excuse.

Posted by: DoDo | Jun 23 2005 7:46 utc | 48

I have started responding that I think the insanity defense is bullshit and people who commit crimes because they wanted to believe in delusions should not think they can escape punishment.
History is something to learn from, so it is very sad to see so many moderates (even Jon Stewart) who think Hitler references automatically devalue anything you say – let’s call this the Godwin’s Law Syndrome. In the above, a reference to the Nuremburg Trials would be entirely on point – but with GLS, probably counterproductive.

Posted by: DoDo | Jun 23 2005 8:22 utc | 50

the fuckers claimed that the arms race caused the collapse of communist regimes
.. but I think this meme is already well entrenched in the “history books”. You may be right about the collapse of the USSR, but it’s kinda hard to learn from history if they just make shit up.

Posted by: DM | Jun 23 2005 8:55 utc | 52

I am so enraged now I can barely stand it.
The RAF has been taking part this June 2005 in Operation Spear on the Iraqi border with Syria. Bliar’s housing policy in action – he won’t build social housing in the UK, and is happy to bomb the fuck out homes in Karbilah.
We in the UK were told in 2003 that the commitment to this illegal war would be £3bn. Our tax money.
I read on UPI (OK, yes, Moonie I know, but it quoted Rep. Waxman) yesterday that the US has shipped US$13bn IN CASH to Iraq. How many shipfuls is that? It is beyond comprehension.
Today my neighbour, who has had MS for years and this year received an additional diagnosis of leukaemia, told me that this week the local social services have cut her cleaning allowance.
That’s it, abolished it.
This is a disabled woman who is very courageously bringing up two young sons, and whose husband has to work all hours to keep his family (London is currently one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in). And the paltry 3 hours/week free cleaning that she got from social services, which allowed her to run her household with dignity during a period when she is taking all kinds of medication to treat her illness, she has now been told is finished, cannot be paid for.
All the while Bliar simpers on with his ‘faux’ Christianity. May he rot in hell.

Posted by: Dismal Science | Jun 23 2005 12:25 utc | 54

citizen k
How can someone be so slimy and so brilliant in a single paragraph?
Because he’s a hypocrite.
Don’t believe for one millisecond a devotion to polysemicity/sliding signifiers/discursive plethora/rhizome-wandering etc. is not also a “category mistake.”

Posted by: slothrop | Jun 23 2005 16:24 utc | 56

Sloth: The delusion that naming is understanding is deep in the Western tradition and very much congruent with Harvard, so go to it.
——- from Desert Solitaire by Ed Abbey:
What shall we name those four unnamed formations standing erect above this end of The Maze? From our vantage point they are the most striking landmarks in the middle ground of the scene before us. We discuss the matter. In a far-fetched way they resemble tombstones, or altars, or chimney stacks, or stone tablets set on end. The waning moon rises in the east, lagging far behind the vanished sun. Altars of the Moon? That sounds grand and dramatic – but then why not Tablets of the Sun, equally so? How about Tombs of Ishtar? Gilgamesh? Vishnu? Shiva the Destroyer?
Why call them anything at all? asks Waterman; why not let them alone? And to that suggestion I instantly agree; of course – why name them? Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone – they’ll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us.
But at once another disturbing thought comes to mind: if we don’t name them somebody else surely will. Then, says Waterman in effect, let the shame be on their heads. True, I agree, and yet – and yet Rilke said that things don’t truly exist until the poet gives them names. Who was Rilke? he asks. Rainer Maria Rilke, I explain, was a German poet who lived off countesses. I thought so, he says; that explains it. Yes, I agree once more, maybe it does; still – we might properly consider the question strictly on its merits. If any, says Waterman. It has some, I insist.
Through naming comes knowing; we grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name – hension, prehension, apprehension. And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains – those unique, particular, incorrigibly individual junipers and sandstone monoliths – and it is we who are lost. Again. Round and round, through the endless labyrinth of thought – the maze.

Posted by: citizen k | Jun 23 2005 16:42 utc | 58

Well, that was beautiful. I cannot tell you how much what Abbey always says is what I always inarticulably feel about what are basically my stomping grounds.
But, as you know, this “naming” function is also not merely the creation of the overlording “concept.” As benjamin said, naming is also “mimesis”: what in naming alienates humanity from nature is also the source of reconciliation:

. Truth is not an intent which takes its determinations and characteristics from empirical reality; rather truth consists in the power that stamps its essence on that empirical reality in the first place. The state of being, beyond all phenomenality, to which alone this power belongs, is that of the name.

–Benjamin
Stamping becoming with being, as Nietzsche says.
I don’t pretend to know this astonishingly difficult philosophy. Only to point out “truth” is possible because interpretations of objectivity are limited…This turn toward objectivity is important because it rescues the subject from the promise of endless signification and “identity” validated by postmodernism. Also rescues us from the catastrophe that everybody’s dumbass opinion is equally true: hallmark of our fascism.

Posted by: slothrop | Jun 23 2005 17:00 utc | 60

everything i see, i give it all the meaning it has for me.
there are no neutral thoughts
both from the course of miracles
no matter how much man strives to define reality we cannot divorce ourselves from our perception. validating our perception thru justification or naming only flies if we believe it, or convince others to believe it. creating reality is as simple as believing, doesn’t make it so. truth is existence. yet non existence exists. symbolized in evil. no thought is the source of truth. the closer one is to no thought the more one is able to perceive truth.
ok this is just IMHO

Posted by: annie | Jun 23 2005 20:44 utc | 62