Well, it’s good to know that the war fervor in last night’s “state of the (dis)union” speech caused a little fervor in return (although the front page headline in today’s San Francisco Chronicle called Bush… sigh… “resolute”). In today’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd was on fire in her column, “The Empire Strikes First.” In New York’s “other” paper, the Village Voice, veteran political columnist Jim Ridgeway offered a striking analysis of how the speech returns us to Dickensian England, replete with poorhouses and alms.
Finally, though it was written before last night’s extravaganza (how many times, by the way, did we have to see Hilary Clinton clapping?), Jim Lobe’s most recent piece for the Foreign Policy in Focus website reminds us that the next war, the Iraqi one, is seen by Bush and his coterie as but the first punitive war of a new imperial age. Of course, there’s no money left for the rest of us, but it turns out that the fondest wish of the hawks close to this administration is handing another $100 billion (not a misprint) to the Pentagon. Sigh, yet again. So many wars to come, so many dreams, so many dead, so much rubble. Someday, if we all survive, this will look like the rankest madness, and our children or their children will simply refuse to believe that any of this could have passed for normality. Tom
The Empire Strikes First
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
January 29, 2003WASHINGTON
There was no smoking gun last night. There was merely a smoky allusion.President Bush tried to sell skittish Americans on a war with Iraq by alluding to the possibility of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
Outlaw regimes seeking bad weapons, Mr. Bush said, “could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.”
The axis of evil has shrunk to Saddam, evil incarnate. Iran and North Korea were put aside with the dismissive comment: “Different threats require different strategies.”
The state of the union is skeptical.
WASHINGTON
There was no smoking gun last night. There was merely a smoky allusion.
President Bush tried to sell skittish Americans on a war with Iraq by alluding to the possibility of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
Outlaw regimes seeking bad weapons, Mr. Bush said, “could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.”
The axis of evil has shrunk to Saddam, evil incarnate. Iran and North Korea were put aside with the dismissive comment: “Different threats require different strategies.”
The state of the union is skeptical.
At a moment when Americans were hungry for reassurance that the monomaniacal focus on Iraq makes sense when the economy is sputtering, Mr. Bush offered a rousing closing argument for war, but no convincing bill of particulars.
Forget Your Problems, We’re Preparing for a War
It’s 1850 in America
By James Ridgeway
The Village Voice
January 29, 2003WASHINGTON — Brave words from George Bush last night, with the distant thunder of war planes in the night sky over the Capitol and with Attorney General Ashcroft hiding out in a secure location, set the tone for the president’s buildup for the war against Iraq.
The model Bush laid out in his State of the Union address is that of Charles Dickens’s England. Sweeping social ills into the closet, re-creating the utilitarian poorhouse mentality, and spending one afternoon a month at your favorite charity have again been deemed the best ways to enter the future.
Choice is out. Good manners are in. If you are pregnant, please try to wear nice clothes and don’t talk about your problems. Nobody said life was fair. Go to church. Remember, there are always handouts for the poor and distressed at Christmastime.
To read more Ridgeway click here
Pump Up the Pentagon, Hawks Tell Bush
By Jim Lobe
January 28, 2003
The Project Against the Present DangerWhile public opinion polls show that most of the U.S. public is concerned about the economy, hawks in the Bush administration see another problem as more urgent: the Pentagon is poor. Last week a group of influential right-wing figures close to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney complained that the current military budget of almost $400 billion–already greater than the world’s 15 next-biggest military establishments combined–is not enough to sustain U.S. strategy abroad.
In a letter to the president released on the eve of his State of the Union Address, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose alumni include both Rumsfeld and Cheney, as well as most of their top aides, called for increasing the defense budget by as much as $100 billion next year.
(Jim Lobe <[email protected]> is a political analyst Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)