This week is the 15th anniversary of the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq. The nation has not recovered from the calamities that war inflicted at home and abroad. Here are some of my epigrams in response to the Iraq war and the war on terrorism in general, pulled from Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil and my later books and articles. At the bottom of this post are a couple pieces USA Today published before and after the start of that war. As I commented in August 2003, “Whether Bush and his appointees will be held personally liable for their falsehoods is a grave test for American democracy.”
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There are no harmless political lies about a war. The more lies citizens tolerate, the more wars they will get.
A desire to spread freedom does not confer a license to kill.
Nothing happened on 9/11 that made the federal government more trustworthy.
Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans.
When people blindly assume that their leaders are trustworthy, the biggest liars win.
In the long run, people have more to fear from governments than from terrorists. Terrorists come and go, but power-hungry politicians will always be with us.
The worse government fails, the more gullible millions of people become.
Most of the homeland security successes in the war on terrorism have been farces or frauds.
Citizens should distrust politicians who distrust freedom.
A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.
As long as American presidents praise freedom, they are permitted to seize as much power as they please.
The Patriot Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel.
The more information government gathers on people, the more power it has over them. The more government surveillance, the more intimidated Americans become
Perpetual war inevitably means perpetual repression. When Bush attacked foreign nations, he also struck against American freedoms.
Lies regarding the use of government power are almost never harmless errors. The more power a politician seeks, the more dangerous his lies become.
The worse government fails, the less privacy citizens supposedly deserve.
Rather than a democracy, we increasingly have an elective dictatorship. People are merely permitted to choose who will violate the laws and the Constitution.
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USA TODAY October 9, 2002
Moral high ground not won on battlefield
BYLINE: James Bovard
As the Bush administration raises prospects of war with Iraq, USA TODAY asked writers to explore critical military, diplomatic and political factors involved and the possible consequences. This is part of that occasional series.
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Freedom is one of President Bush’s favorite reasons for going to war. In his September speech to the United Nations, Bush proclaimed: “Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause and a great strategic goal.” A day earlier, in his 9/11 anniversary speech from New York, Bush announced: “We fight, not to impose our will, but to defend ourselves and extend the blessings of freedom.” On Monday night, he promised that the USA would “create the institutions of liberty in a unified Iraq.”
Bush justifies a military invasion of Iraq based on his assertion that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the freedom of the world. But a desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill.
The USA should not pre-emptively attack Iraq unless it wants to inspire similar attacks in the coming years by other governments on alleged threats far from their borders. Wars are far more likely to liberate governments to use unlimited force than to free citizens from oppression.
As much or more than any previous president, Bush glorifies American military power. On June 18, he informed Congress that the “Department of Defense has become the most powerful force for freedom the world has ever seen.” In a speech a few weeks earlier at West Point, Bush proclaimed: “Wherever we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for power but for freedom.”
He talks as if freedom is personified by American military dominance. In a Fourth of July speech, Bush announced: “Once again, history has called America to use our overwhelming power in the defense of freedom. And we’ll do just that.” After bragging about American victories in Afghanistan during his January State of the Union address, Bush proclaimed: “We have shown freedom’s power.”
Bush’s own words indicate that he sees the conflict between the United States and the terrorists and/or Saddam as a simple question of evil vs. the greatest force for goodness in the history of the world. This dogmatic attitude, combined with his rosy-colored view of military force, encourages Bush to believe that only good things happen when he orders the U.S. military to kill bad guys.
Historically, U.S. bombs have not always been a wonderful fertilizer for freedom. Few recent U.S. interventions have been followed by the blessings of liberty.
* Operation Desert Storm in 1991 pulverized Iraq but did nothing to free the Iraqi people. At the war’s end, the first Bush administration effectively blessed Saddam’s crushing of revolts by the Kurds in the country’s north and the Shiite Muslims in its south.
* Operation Restore Hope in 1992-93 resulted in U.S. troops battling the forces of a Somali warlord — killing hundreds of Somalis but suffering 18 high-profile casualties that devastated the Clinton administration’s image. After the USA withdrew, Somalia reverted to chaos, and its misery is unabated.
* The 1994 Operation Restore Democracy invasion of Haiti sent 20,000 U.S. troops to tidy up one of this hemisphere’s most repressive countries. After they left, the old political violence resurfaced, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the U.S. government put back in power, is now being compared to “Papa Doc” Duvalier by Haitians bitter about oppression and corruption.
* Operation Deliberate Force in 1995 featured heavy U.S. and NATO bombing of Serbian forces in Bosnia. After the bombing ended, a fragile peace agreement was crafted, and U.S. troops remain in the area. But the situation continues to be a powder keg and, once foreign troops leave, the locals will likely begin butchering each other with all of the enthusiasm they showed in the early 1990s.
* Operation Allied Force in 1999 bombed Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into submission purportedly to liberate Kosovo. Though Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic raised the white flag, ethnic cleansing continued — with the minority Serbs being slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground in the same way the Serbs previously oppressed the ethnic Albanians.
Now, Bush’s claim of “liberating” Afghanistan is premature at best. The Afghan puppet government is one assassin’s bullet away from collapse. Most of the country remains either lawless or under the control of warlords, some of them brutal and bloodthirsty.
Bush declared last month that “there is a line in our time . . . between the defenders of human liberty and those who seek to master the minds and souls of others.” But if the USA attacks the people of any foreign regime that refuses to swear allegiance to the latest U.S. definition of liberty, then the world will see America as the aggressor shackling the minds and wills of people around the world. The more nations America attacks in the name of liberty, the more millions around the globe will perceive America as the greatest threat to both their peace and their ability to run their own lives.
At an Aug. 5 Republican fundraiser, Bush declared: “We’re fighting the first war of the 21st century. I say ‘the first war’ — there’s no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland.”
Perpetual war will inevitably mean perpetual repression. When Bush attacks foreign nations, his administration will also be striking against American freedoms.
On the homefront, the Bush administration “defends” freedom by destroying the power of judges to release innocent detainees, by refusing to inform Congress of how new federal powers are being used and by seeking to impose an iron curtain of secrecy around federal agencies. Not so long ago, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed that “those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty . . . give ammunition to America’s enemies.”
The USA will betray the cause of freedom if it attacks every tinhorn despot and group of malcontents who disparage American ideals. Rather than seek to whip the world into an anti-Saddam frenzy prior to launching a new war, the Bush administration should admit that dropping 15,000-pound “Daisy Cutter” bombs on foreign lands does not automatically create political utopias. The United States’ military superiority does not confer a magic wand on its presidents to solve all of the problems in every corner of the globe.
***James Bovard, the author of Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, is finishing a book on the war on terrorism.
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USA TODAY August 14, 2003, Thursday
By accident or design, Bush hyped case for war
BYLINE: James Bovard
President Bush, in his July 30 press conference, declared: “I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course. Absolutely.” Bush made this declaration in response to a question about wrong information regarding Iraq’s attempt to purchase uranium in Niger. He hoped it would end a controversy that is eating away like an acid drip on his administration’s credibility. But the “16 words” — as Bush defenders characterize his reference to the attempted uranium purchases in his State of the Union address — were not the most brazen example of trampling the truth on the road to war.
From January onward, Bush constantly portrayed the United States as an innocent victim of Saddam Hussein’s imminent aggression. His repeated claims that war was being “forced upon us” was the biggest, most consistent scam Bush used to convince the American people that their government had no alternative but to invade another nation. Examples:
* Jan. 28, in his State of the Union address: “If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means, sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military, and we will prevail.”
* Feb. 10, in a speech to the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville: “If war is forced upon us — and I say ‘forced upon us’ because use of the military is not my first choice — I hug the mothers and the widows of those who may have lost their life in the name of peace and freedom.”
* Feb. 20, at a Kennesaw, Ga., school: “If war is forced upon us, we will liberate the people of Iraq from a cruel and violent dictator.”
* Feb. 26, at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington: “If war is forced upon us by Iraq’s refusal to disarm, we will meet an enemy who . . . is capable of any crime.”
The longer Bush continues warring, the more vital it is for Americans to learn the lessons of the Iraq war. Simply because Saddam was evil did not purify this war against Iraq. Certainly, a military victory does not automatically absolve the Bush administration of the falsehoods it told prior to launching an unprovoked and unnecessary war. If victory is justice’s only measure, then the U.S. government could lie about almost any other government and — after the U.S. military assaulted the country into submission — it would be another triumph for “the American way.”
Shortly after his inauguration, Bush joked to a crowd of Washington insiders: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.” It would be naive to assume that all of Bush’s false statements are accidents or oversights. White House senior policy adviser Karl Rove explained to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward how the war on terrorism would be judged by the American public: “Everything will be measured by results. The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities that may or may not actually have been there. And similarly to the defeated.”
Lies regarding the use of government power are almost never harmless errors. The more lies officials are allowed to tell, the less chance citizens have of controlling the government. And the more power a politician seeks, the more dangerous his lies become.
The fact that Bush went to war against Iraq based on false charges and a deceptive strategy is the key to knowing what to expect from the remainder of the Bush presidency. There is no reason to presume that Bush was more deceptive and manipulative on the war on Iraq than he is on the war on terrorism or other subjects. Whether Bush and his appointees will be held personally liable for their falsehoods is a grave test for American democracy.
***James Bovard is the author of the forthcoming Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil.
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