The Hidden Unseen War: The Reality of Bush's Iraq

Axisoflogic Editor's Note: Originally Released in November/December 2003, this three-part series conveys with clarity the situation in present-day Iraq. It is as relevant today as it was a few months ago, if not more so. We re-post this article due to its clear understanding of events such as those in Fallujah and the continuing quagmire that is Iraq. This article covers the Dead and Wounded, the Resistance and Failed Policy.

PART I

The Dead and Wounded

Autumn leaves continue to fall inconspicuously throughout the United States just like our cannon fodder troops fall dead, maimed and scarred in the Mesopotamian deserts of Iraq. Throughout our nation, lawns surrounded by white-picket fences and small blotches of green in concrete jungles are covered by dry and dead brown leaves signaling the change in the seasons, as warmth and comfort gives way to the dreaded doldrums of winter. As each day passes, more leaves fall to the ground, leaving bare the skeletons of wood around and above us, a stark reminder of the hibernation of life in the natural world.

In similar ways, the loss of life and limb of our soldiers in Iraq continues unabatedly in a far away land. Like our leaves, soldiers continue to fall and die, their bodies devoid of a life once so full of energy. More than 440 have died, and the number of injured is many more times that, conveniently hidden from Americans’ view, lest we see the horrors that our little war for oil has spawned. They might be called lucky to have escaped the claws of explosives, flying shrapnel or bullets whizzing by their heads were it not true that many will have to continue living without hands, arms, legs and feet or with severe burns, scars, brain damage and handicaps that will forever traumatize their lives.

Of course the hidden and much more dehabilitating scars, the psychological, emotional and mental ones will linger perpetually in the minds of thousands who will never be able to escape the terror of war. These demons will haunt them for the rest of their lives. And, lest not we forget, thousands of these brave and young men and women will carry with them back to their homes the pulverized remnants of depleted uranium from our bombs, missiles, ordinances and munitions, creating in them diseases and sicknesses that act like a timebomb, ready to afflict and decimate over the course of time.

Much like Gulf War I, where anywhere from 8000 to 9000 of its veterans have already died from mysterious illnesses including numerous cancers, and where hundreds of babies have been born dead or deformed in ways never seen before, today’s troops may suffer similar fates. One need only look inside Iraq, where thousands upon thousands of civilians alive in the early 1990’s have died from cancers and other diseases, and where thousands of babies have suffered the same fate as those born to those of our own soldiers. Knowing that tens of thousands of tons of bombs, ordinances, munitions and missiles made of depleted uranium have been used on Iraq in Gulf War II, it is a good bet that many more thousands of Iraqi civilians and American troops will suffer the same fate. The remains of depleted uranium are literally scattered throughout Iraq, – and lets not forget Afghanistan as well – contaminating land, air, water and humans. And we can’t seem to find WMD’s. I know where these WMD’s are: stockpiled in our bases, right inside our country. Right in front of our noses, and we attack Iraq with them. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Iraq. Fertile Crescent no more. Are we such hypocrites?

Over 9000 soldiers already injured in some way, shape or form, but how quickly they are forgotten by an administration that will not dare go to funerals or hospitals for fear of awakening the presently placid storm called the American public. Men and women of the underclass, from rural and urban homes, their families supporting this adventure in empire building with their hard earned wages, fight for the interests of the upper class. What a dishonor to these fallen heroes to sweep them away into a dark closet, without mention or acknowledgement, used as nothing more than expendable pawns in Bush’s war. The United Corporations of America and the Military Industrial Complex are at it again, lying and manipulating, warmongering and profiteering, once more terrorizing the planet.

The administration bans cameras from showing dead soldiers returning in their flag-draped coffins. It uses its powers to hinder the media from showing armless and legless privates. This is done for the sake of brushing clean the horrors of war and anesthetizing a Hollywood conditioned citizenry into believing that this is just another PG-13 movie or violent video game where the good guys always win and never suffer anything but cuts and bruises. Quite simply, it is yet another fantasy that gets absorbed into our psyche. This is called the art of sanitized warfare, a good news-only policy of selling death and destruction to American citizens. Everything is airbrushed to give the illusion that Iraq is a nation on the brink of a renaissance, that what combat does exists is insignificant, that it is under control and that a few “terrorists” are nothing more than bothersome pests. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is politics at its worst, cynically gone mad, a way to keep Bush’s poll numbers up in light of his re-election campaign, a way to keep citizens supportive of the war and designed to maintain the country ignorant to a reality that is the wickedness of war.

If we cannot see the reality of war, and are only allowed to see a fictional delusion of it then we will never empathize with the dead or wounded, we will never see death, blood and gore, its violent sounds or putrid smells nor the inextricable agony and suffering of a dying soldier or a maimed Iraqi child crying out in terror for her mother. In short, we will never see war, thus becoming immune to the all too real, chilling and sobering effects of man killing man with the most violent of weapons. War is made an abstract mirage, allowing the war machine to ravage foreign lands and innocent civilians with impunity and with little care for accountability. Meanwhile, the American public, unaware of what is being done in their name thanks to government propaganda and corporate media filtering, remains dangerously incurious and passive while their loved ones in Iraq are subjected to a cruel game of Russian roulette. Congratulations George, you and your shadowy cast of characters have succeeded in curtailing outrage and furor by conditioning us through television shows, movies, video games, media lies, charades and delusion.

The thousands of physically wounded and mentally scarred survivors that return to our safe shores from the oil-filled deserts half a world away are swept under the rug of apathy by an administration concerned more for the President’s image than the sacrifices of those who left blood and limb in the sands of Mesopotamia. Stealthfully brought back into the country, mostly in the black envelope of night when we lay asleep so as to sneak in below the radar of attention, these men and women, along with their dead brethren, are quickly wished away, becoming not returning heroes but discarded statistics that are for the President more a liability than a symbol of what makes America great.

There is something rather perverse when a sitting President gives more importance to attending almost-daily $2000 a plate fund raising dinners around the country than to reassuring, sympathizing and helping to put at ease the thousands of walking wounded and hundreds of families of those whose spirit was unexpectedly taken away. Raising $200 million for his campaign from the wealthiest Americans seems to be of much more importance than showing compassion to middle and lower income citizens sacrificing both wages and loved ones to a war whose purpose and reason are not yet fully understood.

In these cold and dark days our dead citizen soldiers return home with eyes closed, never again to breathe the sweet crisp autumn air emanating from coast to coast. For these brave sons and daughters of our nation, America’s splendors, from its highest peaks to its magnificent valleys, will never be seen again as their once splendid energy, having been so deceitfully taken from them, exits the parameters of this great Earth in their journey to the unknown.

Meanwhile, our Commander in Chief, following not his heart but rather self-serving political decision-making interests, nonchalantly, purposefully and unapologetically forfeits a leader’s duty to help strengthen those who mourn and ail, comfort those children left without a parent and stand proudly next to the flag-draped coffins of the men and women he sent to die as they are forever laid to rest. This man should be forced to witness the sad tears and incredible pain and sorrow of those who have seen their loved ones for the last time. He should be forced to touch the frigid coffins of those whose bright lights have been extinguished. Perhaps then he will finally realize that the consequences of his actions come not in wrapping himself up victoriously in the flag but in seeing it draped over a coffin on a cold wet day and having it slowly folded up and handed to a bereaved wife or daughter as trumpets wail and thundering rifles roar homage to those whose ultimate sacrifices lie at his feet.

PART II

The Resistance

Contrary to White House, Pentagon and corporate media propaganda, Iraq today is an amalgam of Saddam loyalists, a few foreign fighters and an ever-growing number of ordinary civilians joining what Bush calls “terrorists” but that in reality are nationalists and insurgents fighting a resistance against our Iraqipation. To Iraqis and the rest of the world, they would be called “freedom fighters,” much like the ones clandestinely trained, supplied and supported by the United States in their resistance against the Soviets in 1980’s Afghanistan.

They are modern day Iraqi mujahedeen, similar to the Afghan resistance fighters we at one time thought so highly enough of that we romanticized them in movies, books and in Beltway conversation. Among those freedom fighters, it must be remembered, was included one Osama bin Laden. From CIA trained freedom fighter to evildoer terrorist, all thanks to our government and all thanks to our jihad-inciting Middle East policies.

Today we are the new version of the Soviets, a new breed of Crusader invading Arab land, bringing not the cross and the sword but smart bombs and crony capitalism. The neoconartist Pax Americana dream of world domination through bogus democracy and destructive capitalism has been unleashed, pointing missiles and guns at the Mideast, marching us to war, making both us and the world a much more dangerous place, where the only “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” will come as a result of our own chest-beating cause and effect actions.

Today one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. For the Bush administration, fighting against it, its allies or its interests will automatically get you labeled with the former, while among your people, fighting against US foreign policy and for freedom from its omnipresent tentacles will designate you a heroic patriot, a valiant martyr and a champion warrior. To Bush, it is patriotic for American revolutionaries to throw tea into the sea, revolt, kill and start guerilla war against their oppressors, but if Iraqis or anyone else tries the same, the now old, saturated and fear engendering-word “terrorist” is recycled and used yet again to brainwash the masses. This is nothing but a marketing ploy designed by those in power so that the American people cringe in fear and alarm at the sound of the word “terrorist,” which has been implanted over and over in their minds and which immediately conveys images of “evildoers” and 9/11. Like Pavlovian dogs, we have been trained well to respond to our masters’ wishes. Fear is thus used to acquire submission, passivity, ignorance and acquiescence from us all. Iraq, it must be remembered, had nothing to do with Al Qeada. Their struggle against us has nothing to do with 9/11 or bin Laden and everything to do with resistance to occupation.

What the Bush administration cannot seem to grasp is that our Iraqipation is reviled in the country and throughout the Arab world. Perhaps the first obvious hint of this is the fact that Iraqis did not welcome us with arms extended as liberators, showering us with perfumed flowers and manna from heaven as the neoconartists, in their delusion of grandeur expected, but rather as an extension and indeed a mechanism of all those conquering entities that had come before, most notably the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the English of the last century.

Ordinary Iraqis are not stupid, ignorant fools like those in the administration who concocted this failed experiment with “diraqcracy” seem to think. They smartly noticed that as American troops stormed Iraq, out of the dozens of Ministry buildings in Baghdad only the Ministry of Oil was protected by soldiers during the famous looting that took place during the first weeks of the war. Also, only the vast oil fields scattered throughout the country were secured while all that was sacred in the vast history of the Fertile Crescent was left to looting, pillage and destruction. It was pretty obvious what the conquering invaders were after.

Iraq’s citizens also remember Saddam as an American puppet in the 70’s and 80’s, shaking hands and meeting with non other than Donald Rumsfeld in a friendly exchange of ideas and products, oil for WMDs. These are the same WMD’s Bush can’t seem to find twenty years later and whose use our government gave the thumbs up to in Iraq’s war against Iran. Iraqis no doubt still recollect America’s willingness to abandon and sacrifice the Iraqi insurrection against Saddam in the immediate aftermath of Gulf War I, even after we wholeheartedly supported and encouraged it. That failed attempt at toppling Saddam led to the mass graves of 200,000 to 300,000 cadavers that today the Bush administration points to as reason for invading and occupying Iraq.

Of course we shouldn’t forget the decade of harsh collective punishment and economic genocide called UN sanctions, meticulously blessed, endorsed, supported and safeguarded by our government, that led to an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children deaths and to the deaths of countless tens of thousands more whose only crime was to be Iraqi. The Iraqis, it can be assured, have not forgotten. To many of them, Saddam was no doubt a murdering tyrant but we are much worse; we are evildoers, the real “terrorists,” interested not in saving Iraqis but in securing both rich oil fields to quench our monstrous addiction for fuel and strategic locations from which to conduct perpetual warfare and impose American supremacy both in the Mideast and Central Asia. To many in the Arab world, we are the “Evil Empire,” the “Great Satan,” and many of our actions and policies give credence to this belief. To deny this truth is to deny reality.

Presently, the occupation, with its harsh treatment, numerous innocent civilian deaths, unevenhandedness and cultural insensitivities of Iraqis is creating more enemies than friends. The flowers our leaders blissfully and naively expected upon our triumphant entry as liberators have turned into clenched fists, RPGs and AK-47s, where only dead and wounded soldiers land at our feet. We have imported into the desert dunes cookie-cutter factories of resentment, hatred, animosity and revenge. This war to “liberate” has already resulted in more than 10,000 civilian deaths, each converting once peace-loving families and tribes into calculating seekers of revenge.

Every innocent dead Iraqi at the hands of our soldiers and our bombs, every home destroyed, crop razed, or humiliating act done against the populace is spawning a web of resistance that is growing and getting stronger, uniting against the occupiers who are building permanent bases for strategic interests, sucking Iraq’s precious natural resource out of the desert sands and making rich American corporations at the expense of every Iraqi man, woman and child. The battle for securing the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people is over, and “our side” has been soundly defeated, all thanks to the Bush administration’s incompetence and yearning for profiteering.

Let’s not live in our little escapist Hollywood world anymore folks. What we are seeing is the inevitable movement common to all occupations throughout history, namely the urge by the native population to resist an invading alien force intent on conquering man, resources and land. It is the drive for freedom all native peoples yearn for when they are confronted by a more powerful nation and army. Like many before, the Iraqi people are now dominated by a force alien to their beliefs, culture, religion and interests. They feel like prisoners in their own land, subject to American rule, humiliated and oppressed, and, already having experienced occupation and colonization by foreign powers, do not like being subjugated and having their collective destinies decided by Washington and its puppet collaborators. Think about it, if the US was suddenly and militarily occupied by an invading force many of us would resist and fight to expel it from our land. It is human nature; no population throughout time holds a monopoly on it.

In the natural progression of an occupation, the resistance continues to grow as more and more people become aware of what is being done to them and their land. The resistance knows it cannot defeat the monstrously powerful American army head on, but it can chip away at it little by little until its will and that of its people dwindles, until pressure is so intense on the leadership that it cracks. Like a growing storm, the Iraqi resistance, well armed, knowing the terrain, the people, its culture and language, and, more aware of what the lessons of history teach than its adversary, is becoming more powerful, more dangerous and more committed than ever. Its numbers continue to swell and its fighting spirit continues to skyrocket. This is the reality Bush does not want you to know, and the reason we can see his panic in the hastily decided new policies being implemented today. Iraqification equals desperation, especially in a re-election year and when the administration’s fantasy gives way to a neocon bubble-bursting reality that is the Iraqi quagmire today.

The United States is dealing with a resistance that knew all along it could not compete technologically, militarily nor economically on the desert planes or in urban warfare. Instead, it decided to play by its own rules, and today full-blown guerilla warfare is upon our men and women, striking them down one by one. The resistance is shadows, everyone and no one at the same time. It is as present as Mesopotamian sand and as unseen as its winds. It is as deadly as desert scorpions crawling through the night. It is under rocks, inside flora and in numerous homes and streets, ready to strike and fight stealthily and without warning. It will soon be everywhere, transforming itself into night and again back to day. Sadly, our troops will continue to fall, their energy swept away by sandstorms of explosives and bullets.

Our so-called leaders cry foul because they do not play by our rules, because this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. But the resistance plays with what it has, and, in the span of three months, has inflicted more death and injury unto American forces than at any time since Vietnam. It has neutralized the strongest and most powerful army in the world, rendering it susceptible to attack on a daily basis, not knowing who or what the enemy is or where it hides. No made-for-Americans, Hollywood-produced Iron Hammer production can change that. Our leaders were duped. Their arrogance and ignorance have created a monument to inefficiency that will lead to their demise. Mr. Bait-And-Switch Bush, meet Mr. Rope-A-Dope Iraq.

PART III

FAILED POLICY

As Americans everywhere sit on their couches absorbed by the circus that is the daily corporate-media-driven soap opera of Joe millionaire, Survivor and the mutant called Michael, half a world away, lost among dunes and ancient rivers, our soldiers struggle to understand a populace that is slowly but surely turning against them. The significance and symbolism of two soldiers being shot while inside their vehicle, dragged out and beaten to a pulp with concrete bricks by gangs of young Iraqi adults must not be ignored. Neither must the brutal death of seven Spanish soldiers in circumstances eerily similar to that of the two Americans. It is a most ominous sign of a coming chaos, of a failed Bush policy that threatens to tear Iraq apart at the seams.

Visions of Somalia reverberate, mutilated bodies being witness to the growing frustration of the populace with the US occupation and its “nation building” policies. Every month there seems to be a steeper escalation in the resistance fighters’ hatred of American soldiers, and this is manifested in their highly meticulous planning and the tenacity and savagery of their attacks. So frustrated is the population, it seems, that a growing number of Iraqis nostalgically desire for the return of the now captured savage dictator if for no other reason that he at least provided security, stability, jobs and a reasonable semblance of normalcy. Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, a strong advocate of the Iraq invasion, recently said that "There is a serious security problem" in Iraq…"Daily life, above all in Baghdad, is in worse condition than during Saddam Hussein's time.” Without jobs, wages, electricity, water, self-government and, above all, security, Iraqis are growing increasingly impatient with the Americans. It seems promises that were once made have become nothing but lies.

Paul Bremer and the occupation government live behind a fantasy world of concrete blast walls and razor sharp wire, in designated safe-zones protected by hundreds of soldiers and far removed from the daily life of average Iraqis. Saddam’s luxurious palaces and hotels have become a bubble for the occupiers and the profiteers who live inside them, most of whom are unable or unwilling to venture out into cities and streets. This is due to the crippling mist of all-encompassing insecurity and the all-too-real fear – or respect – of the resistance. Because of this, Bremer and company are out of tune with normal Iraqis and out of tune with a nation simmering in growing anger and frustration.

From concrete-brick-mashing mobs to rocket-spewing-donkey-carts, from roadside bombs to Blackhawk-ravaging missiles, the Iraq insurgency is an enigma to an administration that won’t publicly admit that the resistance is spreading, that it is nationalistic and that it is disrupting the occupation in its attempts at nation-building. In short, they do not want to admit that they were wrong in their presumptions about the invaded nation in their quest to keep the peace. They gloated and cheered at the fall of Saddam, at the relatively easy victory over the Iraqi army. Yet the fantasy bubble they believed and the harsh reality we now live in collided like two supernovas, creating a bursting energy of panic, chicanery and suppression of truth.

Today, their mistakes and the reality of Iraq are hidden from us in their belief that we are but gullible, believe-anything, attention deficit disorder drones addicted to the many fantasy television shows that enable us to escape our little real world circumstances. They have gotten away with so much lies and deceit, however, that one wonders whether they are correct. It is said that the first casualty of war is the truth. The second casualty, it may be added, is the American people. Propaganda and conditioning, worker bees we have become, relying on what they tell us, self-thinking minds we have none.

Back home, the neoconartists and Bush were delusional in their beliefs that they knew the Arab world, and Iraq in particular. In fact, they failed to grasp everything about this growing quagmire, from the Iraqi way of life to the importance of honorable revenge among families to the real attitudes towards the United States to the interwoven intricacies of tribal and Muslim culture. Forgetting the importance of cultural sensitivity in the training of soldiers, they have unleashed rabid resentment among the citizenry due to daily humiliations of men, women and children. These have not gone unnoticed. In their overzealous thrust to impose ideology they seemed to forget exactly where in the world they had invaded. Discarding history like yesterday’s trash, they now seem content in forgetting the old saying that “those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.”

Again and again bestowing the virtue of democracy throughout the entire Arab world, the administration fails to grasp just how historically different and culturally heterogeneous these peoples are to us. Iraqis and Arabs have a deep history rooted in thousands of years, not just a few hundred. Their systems have been in place since the dawn of time, their way of life based on rules different than our own. Bush and his Eurocentric, Western-style, Judeo-Christian gang of zealots have not attempted to dust off the pages of history nor of civilization in their attempt to impose American style systems of government on peoples who are not ready for it. Without the rule of law, an educated populace, a middle class and a viable state order democracy cannot be born. Replacing a system that has endured for millennia, under completely different conditions, beliefs and philosophies with a creation based on Western experience and thought will not be achieved in one year, one decade or perhaps even one century, especially under the threatening and watchful eye of tanks and smart bombs.

Bush talks democracy but what he means is democracy only if it benefits the United States. True democracy in the Arab world, if allowed to prosper, would be anything but good to Bush as fundamentalist Islam and anti-Americanism would reign supreme, thus washing away Bush’s neocon vision for the region. What Bush and his right-wing, Likud Party-puppet neoconartists naively wish for is a stable Iraq that will be subservient to Israel and that will act as a domino catalyst for the region, while at the same time acting as a staging point for American strategic imperial aspirations. Naivete, it seems, is a neocon prerequisite, as their Jacobian daydream as influencers of the world runs in direct contradiction with Middle East reality and history. This reality is exactly the reason why our government supports dictators and inept monarchs throughout the region, if not the world. They are our puppets, serving our interests, not those of the native populations.

Democracy, after all, is the will of the people, not the design of the delusional. And right now, in the Arab world, anti-Americanism is at an all time high, thanks to Bush and his mentally-challenged foreign policy. “Diraqcracy” will not work, and, as such, will not be granted to the Iraqi people because of the inherent danger to Bush if it is allowed to prosper. With Shi’a, Sunni and Kurd groups comprising Iraq’s populace, each vying for power and autonomy, democracy will only lead to civil war. Besides, before preaching democracy for the world from his hypocritical pulpit perhaps Bush would be better served restoring it at home first, beginning with an introspection of himself and a careful look at his lack of honor and integrity in blatantly usurping the will of the people and the election of 2000.

If Bush really sought democracy and a better life for billions of world citizens, we would have already invaded, for the sake of bringing “freedom, liberation and democracy” to oppressed peoples, dozens of nations, all full of leaders representing the scum of the Earth. There are dozens of Iraq’s, dozens of Saddam’s, but not all with black gold or strategic locations from which to impose imperial aspirations. If you free one people from a tyrant you must do it for all, if not, Bush’s moral crusade becomes but a façade. Altruism is not George Jr.’s strength or motive because if it was, then Africa, rotting for decades in war and disease and continuing its steep fall to the bowels of despair would have already been anointed with Bush’s magic wand of democracy and salvation.

If democracy was of such importance to Bush, then the dictators and monarchs of Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and many other nations in Central Asia and the Middle East would be eliminated, instead of being politically, militarily and financially supported by the administration. In truth, democracy is only a viable option if it fits the Bush agenda of strategic power allocation and resource exploitation. For an empire such as ours, the game of geopolitics brings hardship for millions of world citizens who will suffer from the support by America of ruthless dictators and inept monarchs who preach democracy and freedom but instill only illusions of both while subjugating and exploiting their citizens for the benefit of themselves and of the hand that feeds them.

Diracracy is of such importance in Iraq that already freedoms of the press and of speech have been curtailed when acting against occupation interests. Arab news organizations have been threatened and shut down, international journalists have been harassed and Iraqi citizens critical of the occupation have received harsh treatment by soldiers. Government propaganda spews like hot geysers erupting many times a day as the attempt to brainwash and assimilate the masses to the occupier’s line continues unabated. In Iraq, democracy means profiteering by US companies and Bush/neoconartist allies, in essence pilfering entire sectors of Iraq’s economy by privatizing and selling most national institutions. Crony capitalism and destructive democracy have been imported to the cradle of civilization; greed mongering now flows through the Tigris and Euphrates, making fertile the soils of the profiteer occupiers. It seems that Iraqis were not the only ones looting and pillaging Iraq’s treasures. To the victors go the spoils, after all. Democracy, it seems, is evolving the same in Iraq as it is in the United States.

Under Bush, the United States has meddled into an occupation that is leading to strangulation in an aridly sandy version of Vietnam, led by fervid hallucinators of deception that have knowingly created a jihad-awakening struggle that has no end in sight. Under the guise of “terrorism” and through Bush and his Minority Report-like, precognition-style, oracle-predicting, psychic-preaching doctrine of pre-emption, America can go to war with whomever, whenever and for whatever reasons it sees fit. The neoconartist magic crystal ball of fortune telling, it appears, can predict the future but not its consequences. It can apparently predict who will be an enemy – a threat – and who will one day have plans to do us harm. In the game of empire building, no challenger must be allowed to stand or compete with the great United Corporations of America.

This attempt at reproducing Dark-Ages style magic by the neoconartist wizards of naivete has led to an armament escalation by nations that see themselves in the crosshairs of Bush’s Texas Ranger six shooters. A new arms race has begun, and the world’s peoples are its losers. The administration has alienated most of our allies, and most of the people in the world. Today we stand alone, caught in a quagmire, with no offer of help by those we so arrogantly shunned. Our support for Israel, in the obviousness of such callous and inhumane treatment of Palestinians that can be seen as apartheid at its best and ethnic cleansing at its worst, is separating us further from a world that sees the injustice, dehumanization, suffering and the blatant endorsement for such by our unevenhanded policies.

It is time we Americans wake up to the harsh reality that what puppet Bush and his cronies have done has been to alienate the world against us by arrogantly ignoring the collective will of the planet. The world today is much more dangerous than ever before; indeed, the United States is a much more dangerous place today than before 9/11. The neoconartists and Bush, blinded by pro-Likud, pro empire and pro Christian fundamentalist interests, have endangered us all. Bush has not only lost 3 million jobs here; he has created 3 million more jihadists as well, all eyeing their holy war at the United States George W. Bush has created. Through his actions and policies he has given Osama bin Laden exactly what he most wanted: a perfect jihad-building recruiting tool that is helping to mobilize tens of thousands of anti-American warriors. He has unleashed a vicious circle of violence that will not soon stop. In fact, it will get worse before it gets better.

What Bush does not see is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The entire globe sees how dangerous this administration is, why can’t we? It is time we begin questioning authority, stop being brainwashed and manipulated by the corporate media and start learning about this administration, Iraq, and, most importantly, the world. We are not alone on this planet. The garbage and lies we are fed by television is making fools of us all, and our democracy is disappearing as a result. We are neither informed nor curious, and the robbery of the American soul continues unabated. And so, as winter glues us to our couches and we sit fused watching the tube, obediently following the 24-hour coverage of the exploits of Michael, Kobe or J.Lo or any other of the corporate-media-created superstar heroes, keep in mind the brewing storm of resentment and animosity that Bush’s failed foreign policies are setting free. Blizzards of snow will be the least of our problems.

Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, activist, writer and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel to be published in Spring of 2004. His articles appear weekly on axisoflogic.com where he is also contributing editor. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net

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