October 2, 2004, We are marching to Praetoria
This week's visit to our friends at Pravda gives us this from Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey on why a vote for George W. Bush is a vote for armageddon. The thesis is simple, and you can read it in this column several times a week. Out chicken-hawk led Faux Macho Schmuck government, by bringing death, destruction and horror the Middle East, does not make the world safer. No, they have revivified a moribund Al Qaeda and Islamist terrorist movement that was running out of steam, until its horrific plans came together unusually well on September 11th. Now, since the American reaction, it is clear, really IS to declare war on Islam (note that we are even less of an honest broker in Israel/Palestine, we chose to invade the most secular of Arab countries, and we plan to STAY THERE), terrorist recruiting is doing a land office business.
Bush's absurd proposition that "we have captured or killed 2/3 or 3/4 of A.Q. leadership" is like a doctor saying "we killed 2/3 of the cancer cells". The problem is, the other 1/3 are still out there... and they can multiply. This is NOT a zero sum game. There are more terrorists out there as a result, and we have helped coalesce them into a unified force. Who hates us.
For our purposes, we are moving rapidly toward a "Praetorian State"-- i.e., the military industrial complex (Halliburton and Bechtel have taken over from what was once dominated by General Dynamics, Rockwell and the like) benefits from a perma-war; they help buy office for sympathetic candidates (Dick Cheney or Tom de Lay, for example) who then use government to prop up their coffers via tax dollars... to fund the perma-war.
Is a state where we are permanently pissing in the cornflakes of people with the money and will to kill us something that makes us "safer"? Sadly, millions of Americans may think so.