by Shant Minas
Daily Trojan (U. Southern California)
(U-WIRE) LOS ANGELES - Have no problem with the Bush administration? Let me take this opportunity to open your eyes.
An obscene number of the Bush administration's top unelected officials have held powerful positions in oil, gas and industrial companies involved in both destroying and rebuilding Iraq.
At the forefront of these cronies is Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton, which once had Cheney as its CEO, stands to make untold profits from rebuilding destroyed Iraqi oil fields and wells.
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Most such contracts were handed out to selected companies without outside offers from other suppliers - a violation of standard procedure for government contracts. In some cases, such companies (including Halliburton) had secured rebuilding contracts before the war began, while U.N. inspectors were still inspecting in Iraq. This is not an exposition of the free markets President Bush proposed to introduce to Iraq; it is a shameless demonstration of wholesale Soviet-style corruption and cronyism.
Before the war, policy hawks had not discounted the possibility of using nuclear weapons in Iraq. It is downright outrageous that this administration invaded a sovereign country to supposedly rid it of weapons of mass destruction, and to accomplish this it considered using the biggest WMDs of all, nukes. U.S. warplanes dropped several 5,000 lb. "bunker busters" that are not considered WMDs but killed and maimed thousands; yet, U.S. generals were concerned about Iraqi use of mere poison gas, used widely in all wars since World War I, technically a chemical weapon, therefore a WMD, and reason enough - according to deluded hawks - to nuke Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has propagated anti-American hate across the globe for the foreseeable future by going to war against the will of a clear majority of the world's people and heads of state.
Bush may have been somewhat in his element as governor of Texas, but with no foreign policy, war or overseas experience of any sort and barely a superficial knowledge of international political developments since World War II, this pompous charade of a world leader risks running our country into the ground with his unjustified war, economic policy favoring the super-wealthy, simultaneously increased likelihood of terror attacks at home, meanwhile having benefited a corrupt few with war contracts, not least the dishonorable Dick Cheney.
The economy has taken an unprecedented plunge; markets are at decade lows; thousands of jobs have been lost; and Bush, wary of reelection season around the corner, has promised massive tax cuts for the rich to consolidate his conservative base.
The national budget deficit has reached astronomical levels just months after the healthy surpluses of the Clinton term; states and municipalities have had to endure painful budget cuts that directly affect the well-being of the citizenry. Yet, Bush has $80 billion or more of taxpayer money to spare to wage an unprovoked war in Iraq and has threatened to spread the hate to other notoriously named "rogue" nations Iran and Syria, further exacerbating the anger and animosity felt in the Muslim world toward the United States.
At the same time, hard-right Christian fundamentalist Richard Ashcroft has been busily stripping U.S. citizens of personal rights and individual liberties formerly guaranteed us by the Bill of Rights.
His "Patriot Act" is a moniker for one of the largest infringements on individual constitutional rights this country has ever seen. The government now has unparalleled legal access to every aspect of your private life, with or without your consent, under the vicious guises of "national security" and "homeland defense."
Maintaining balance in dealings with Middle East (mainly Muslim) nations such as Iran and Syria need not be a zero sum game. In particular, while pressuring those states to stop financing terrorists it is imperative that U.S. policy put as much pressure on Israel to reform its behavior toward the Palestinians.
Condoning the bulldozing of civilian Palestinian homes or turning blind eyes to the creation of permanent settlements in Palestinian areas is a dangerous message the United States has implicitly sent Muslim nations, that Muslims are expendable. Within the ranks of the Bush administration there are just such individuals, beginning with Paul Wolfowitz and not ending with Richard Perle, who see nothing wrong with this lopsided policy. They are among the most vocal and influential proponents for war in Iraq and "regime change" elsewhere in the Middle East, without a penny's worth of thought or a whimper of criticism about how Israel's excesses toward Palestinians have fueled anger, hate and Islamic fundamentalism for decades.
Amid loud, visible protests by Americans against war in general and unprovoked war in particular, Bush has done little but utter platitudes that such free speech protest privileges exercised by Americans are just the values he'd like to restore in Iraq. Oil fields in Iraq were the first to be secured by U.S. forces, while the national museum was left unprotected from looters and thieves for days, resulting in the wholesale theft and/or destruction of priceless cultural treasures.
The Bush administration's perennial negligence of the museums and urgency toward securing oil and gas fields unambiguously shows where this administration's prerogatives and priorities lie and the real purpose of this war.
Under this administration, criticism of official government policy has become synonymous with treason, unpatriotic and un-American. In some cases vocal criticism can attract Soviet-style scrutiny. (Bring it on, Ashcroft.)
The big-money media outlets have become de facto voices and puppets for the administration and its policies instead of offering objective coverage and analysis of the consequences of war.
I urge Americans concerned about the direction our country is heading to take a stand against this deeply corrupt administration and begin a mass movement to get Bush to resign office.
Barring that, we can begin work on the most important campaign in the history of American politics: "Anybody But Bush" 2004.
